Films I Watched This Week — Dec 2–8, 2024
The Strange Ones (1950)
A fascinating collaboration between two of French cinema's great talents. It's a compelling story with dreamy atmosphere, poetic dialogue and a creepy incestuous tone.
Honeyland (2019)
Honeyland is an extraordinary documentary film that transports us to a place made of patience, care, diligence, and love.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
A marvelous fairy tale epic that explores the end of a man’s life, asking questions about whether truth matters more than imagination. Terry Gilliam paints a glorious visual treat, giving us a children's fantasy adventure with all his wondrous imagination, humor, and creativity that Gilliam is famously known for.
Not a Pretty Picture (1976)
Even today, Martha Coolidge’s autobiographical pseudo-documentary Not a Pretty Picture raises provocative questions about sexual violence. At 16 years old, in 1962, director Martha Coolidge was sexually assaulted by an older schoolmate. Her 1976 movie restages the rape and analyzes it. In the film, it’s 1962 again, and the actress playing Martha (who was also raped as a teen) innocently takes a trip with three boys and another girl to New York City. She winds up isolated in a loft, where she is bullied and ultimately sexually assaulted by her date, who separates her from her friends. Coolidge also interviews the performers onscreen between directing and encouraging them to improvise. The sexual assault is the movie’s central scene and as compelling as it is to watch the two actors improvise various different takes for the scene, what is even more compelling is witnessing Coolidge watching the struggle. What we are witnessing is more than just a movie being made, but trauma survivors find a kind of cathartic release through the passion of their art.
The Lost City of Z (2016)
James Gray's The Lost City of Z has moments that take you back to the old Hollywood epics, like Laurence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. And yet themes such as madness, obsession, and chasing ones dreams also bring to mind Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Fitzcarraldo. The Lost City of Z is not at all in the league with David Lean and Werner Herzog, but it is still a glorious adventure tale, almost in the vein of "Indiana Jones" without the humor.
My Favorite Wife (1940)
A fun charming screwball comedy. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne have such great chemistry but the final 10 minutes was unnecessary and dragged the picture out.
Hoosiers (1986)
One of my favorite sports films with crowd cheering performances by Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper!
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Do the Right Thing is one of the most provocative courageous films of the 80s, and an essential one. A film which offers no solutions and doesn't attempt to answer the complicated questions of racism, misunderstanding and simmering anger. Yet it provokes thought-provoking discussions among its viewers that most films could only wish.
Do the Right Thing is on my TOP 3OO FILMS LIST
The Long Good Friday (1980)
I'm setting up the biggest deal in Europe with the hardest organization since Hitler stuck a swastika on his jockstrap.”
This is the social backdrop for one of the best British movies ever made, The Long Good Friday, which pits the financial motivations of London’s gangsters against the political actions of the IRA in the early 1980s. It would introduce the world to Bob Hoskins for whom it would launch a career in Hollywood. Bob Hoskins gives an iconic performance as the London Kingpin Harold Shand, who controls a crime syndicate centered in East London, which reaches as far as New York. Shand is a bullish, sadistic, explosive man, a Napoleon complex of immense proportions with a touch of Cagney. There is sentimentality to the character when he attends to his wife's needs with the promise of violence bubbling away underneath the surface. Hoskins and Mirren make a formidable pair; their emotional tension matches the physical violence around them, which makes The Long Good Friday into a true powder keg of a gangster melodrama. The simple, almost Shakespearean moral in the Long Good Friday is that of retribution, in that delusions of grandier become one mans self destruction, all the while his future and the world he has built goes crumbling before his very eyes.
Mangrove (2020)
Mangrove shows the racial prejudice in the Metropolitan Police and that racial oppression does not define communuties or countries, whether its in the United States or in England.
Lovers Rock (2020)
Director Steve McQueen should be commended for all five of the Small Axe films, but Lovers Rock is his best. It's a moving, hypnotic celebration of the London’s West Indian communities from the late ’60s to the mid-’80s. Grooving it up at a reggie house party, Lovers Rock is all about mood, being part of a community, and just letting go.
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