Sort by
Listing Movies
Display Movies
Chungking Express (1994)
What a difference a day makes.
Filmmaker(s): Wong Kar-wai

Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant.

Discontinuous experiments in this film, and I took some trouble in sorting them out. The first thing you'll notice is the discontinuous camerawork, accentuated by low (never high) angles and strobeflashframes. This element by itself is sophomoric filmschoolism. Then you have the plot tags and storyline. The...


Published June 17, 2025
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, New Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , , ,
8 1/2 Women (1999)
If every man thinks of sex once every nine minutes, what does he think of the other eight?
Filmmaker(s): Peter Greenaway

Following the death of a mother, a father and son open up their very own harem in their Genevan estate after watching 8½.

Women: Types and Missteps master visual allegorist reaches farther and fails. But not for the reasons others claim here. Greenaway has never centred his films in the narrative — we'd always be frustrated to look for satisfaction there. (‘Drowning' which among his works most delivers...


Published December 30, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Othello (1951)
Orson Welles' magnificent screening of Shakespeare's immortal tragedy
Filmmaker(s): Orson Welles

When a secret marriage is planned between Othello, a Moorish general, and Desdemona, the daughter of Senator Brabantio, her old suitor Roderigo takes it hard. He allies himself with Iago, who has his own grudge against Othello, and the two conspire to bring Othello down. When their first plan, to have him accused of witchcraft, fails, they plant evidence intended to make him believe Desdemona is unfaithful.

Dimensional Filmmaking on Shakespeare films is rather like admiring Easter Eggs. First the inside: this was never a great play, relative to Shakespeare's other works. His great plays are about ideas, with characters as vectors to prod and activate them. This play is merely about characters,...


Published December 10, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
The Muppet Movie (1979)
More entertaining than humanly possible!
Filmmaker(s): James Frawley

A Hollywood agent persuades Kermit the Frog to leave the swamp to pursue a career in Hollywood. On his way there, he meets a bear, a pig, a whatever – his future muppet crew – while being chased by the desperate owner of a frog-leg restaurant!

Life is a Movie all lost something important when Jim Henson died. But his magic alone wasn't sufficient to do more than clever skits, both before and after this gem. Some fated match of director, writers, songwriters and puppeteers came together to create an under-appreciated...


Published December 10, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Earthmen on a fabulous, peril-journey into outer space!
Filmmaker(s): Fred M. Wilcox

Starship C57D travels to planet Altair 4 in search of the crew of spaceship "Bellerophon," a scientific expedition that has been missing for 20 years, only to find themselves unwelcome by the expedition's lone survivor and warned of destruction by an invisible force if they don't turn back immediately.

Parallel Futures creating my own list of favourites, I put this at the top of my SciFi category. But that was based on viewing a long time ago. So I rented it recently and was shocked. Times have changed, and science fiction depends so much...


Published December 10, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
She was lost from the moment she saw him.
Filmmaker(s): Karel Reisz

In this story-within-a-story, Anna is an actress starring opposite Mike in a period piece about the forbidden love between their respective characters, Sarah and Charles. Both actors are involved in serious relationships, but the passionate nature of the script leads to an off-camera love affair as well. While attempting to maintain their composure and professionalism, Anna and Mike struggle to come to terms with their infidelity.

Narrative Folding environments, two of the century's greatest film actors, one of the half-dozen or so best modern playwrights and Fowles' experiment in parallel narratives. Fowles' work was pale compared to Nabokov's "Pale Fire," for instance in building a convoluted, layered narrative, but is comparable...


Published December 9, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
Ran (1985)
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
Filmmaker(s): Akira Kurosawa

With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa's late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.

Noh Lear This is Noh Lear This is Noh Lear a wonderfully varied medium film can be! Here we have a film that is both truly great and in a different way a clumsy mistake. By now you know that this was made by a master...


Published December 9, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
Filmmaker(s): Tom Stoppard

Two minor characters from the play "Hamlet" stumble around unaware of their scripted lives and unable to deviate from them.

The Play Without the Play an architect, I am often asked what is the world's best building. The answer: a small chapel outside Barcelona started by Gaudi but never finished. We have the model (a bunch of strings) and the basement. But when one visits,...


Published December 9, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
Prospero’s Books (1991)
A magician's spell, the innocence of young love and a dream of revenge unite to create a tempest.
Filmmaker(s): Peter Greenaway

An exiled magician finds an opportunity for revenge against his enemies muted when his daughter and the son of his chief enemy fall in love in this uniquely structured retelling of the 'The Tempest'.

Amazing Scholarship is without peer, the man of whom Harold Bloom said he invented humanity. ‘The Tempest' is his richest and essentially his last play, clearly about himself and his career. John Gielgud is the finest Shakespearean actor of our age. Greenaway is the most...


Published December 6, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
The Pillow Book (1995)
Filmmaker(s): Peter Greenaway

A woman with a body writing fetish seeks to find a combined lover and calligrapher.

Stop Making Sense think Greenaway makes very smart films, and I'm really glad he's around. His intellect is always tuned to ideas about the visual, so we get a double measure: his images and his commentary on those same images. You should see this film...


Published December 4, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
preloader image