Mickey Rooney is an electrifying dynamo in this foot-tapping, often astonishing musical which helps cement for me why the pre-war period was the absolute creative peak of Hollywood. This Rooney/Garland vehicle, the second of many musical pairings charts the journey of the young teenage pair to make something of their fledgling big band. The magic of the Busby Berkeley choreography matched with Rooney’s electrifying performance, as singer/dancer/actor /musician and Judy Garland’s youthful energy gives this film a pulse rarely seen in movies today.
Showing posts with label ****. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ****. Show all posts
Thursday, 21 April 2016
Monday, 4 August 2014
Pickpocket
The Bresson brand of neo-realism is perhaps exemplified best with this unconventional character study of a Parisian thief desperately in need to self-fulfillment. Remarkably Bresson's seemingly simple approach uncluttered by the elements of traditional cinematic narrative allows the master filmmaker to create as much uncompromising tension as anything in Alfred Hitchcocks's filmography.
Friday, 9 May 2014
Breaking the Waves
Von Trier’s extravagantly conceived neo-realist fable seems now like a monumentally significant film in the cinema of the new millennium. Laying out Von Trier’s grandiosly tragic and melodramatic journey of her golden heart heroine under the handheld griminess of Von Trier’s shaky documentary style creates a strange but inspired cinematic experience unlike anything that came before it. Not only did it jump start the Dogme movement but legitimized the lo-fi aesthetic for all filmmakers to come.
Thursday, 20 March 2014
George Washington
David Gordon Green’s dreamy feature debut renowned for its swath of Terrence Malick affectations feels even more warm and inviting fourteen years later. The consciously lazy narrative of a group of rural Texan kids, black and white, co-habitating happily, and growing up impervious to the pretty bleak squalor around them, is the functional foundation for Green’s lush tonal aesthetic. Essentially the film is made up of small moments of infectious and hypnotising beauty, moments and scenes which don’t always coalesce together fluidly, but collectively whet our palette through its nostalgic filter of childlike naivete.
Friday, 31 January 2014
The Long Day Closes
Monday, 23 December 2013
Inside Llewyn Davis
Like the unflashy 'Fargo' the greatness of 'Inside Llewyn Davis', the Coen Bros’ story of a struggling folk singer in the 60’s, sneaks up on you, only to realize long after the picture is over you've just watched a masterpiece which you need to watch again and again.
Friday, 6 December 2013
The Hunt for Red October
In the era of the great Hollywood thrillers (the 90’s) this first Tom Clancy novel out of the gate is a superlative franchise vehicle. Clancy’s sprawling narrative is executed with precision with John McTiernan’s superb directorial flare, and remains one of the best Cold War era spy thrillers.
Friday, 22 November 2013
True Romance
What a collaboration! The muscular cinematic brauniness of Tony Scott, matched up with the idiosyncratic voice of Quentin Tarantino. Tony Scott masterfully pumps up Tarantino’s Godard-influenced lovers-turned-criminals road movie into a (pun not intended) breathless action picture full of wit, pathos and that bold Tony Scott panache.
Thursday, 14 November 2013
Born on the Fourth of July
With the exception of JFK’s stunning cinematic bravura, arguably Born on the Fourth of July is Oliver Stone’s most accomplished film. The remarkably told story of Ron Kovic, all American boy turned war activist, exemplifies Stone’s ability to create American period nostaglia with impeccable tonal accuracy and also eviserate it with bold uncompromising cinematic force. With expert help from other giants of cinema Robert Richardson, John Williams and editors Joe Hutshing/David Brenner Born on the Fourth of July resounds, argubaly, as the foremost film on the subject of Vietnam.
Thursday, 7 November 2013
Persona
Bergman's strange psychological headscratcher fits in well with the 60's European trend of loopy existential pictures of Roman Polanski, Antonioni and later David Lynch and even late career of Stanley Kubrick (who famously wrote a fan letter to Bergman in 1960 calling him the greatest filmmaker of the day).
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
Eyes Without a Face
Before the era of the slasher film, horror films didn’t get any sicker or more twisted than this early 60’s French gem which tracks the devilish attempts of a plastic surgeon to kidnap, drug and steal the faces of innocent women to graft onto his facially-deformed daughter.
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
Gravity
Alfonso Cuaron’s desire to tell a largely single person survivalist film in space adhering to the laws of real-world physics is inspirational, but his ability to execute the impossibly complex conceptual challenge with perfection and panache makes for a rip-roaring adventure picture for the ages.
Monday, 30 September 2013
The Fly
It’s easy to see why David Cronenberg was interested in remaking this semi-classic picture. Under the guise of a b-movie James Clavell’s screenplay from George Langelaan’s story of a scientist who turns himself into a half-man/half-fly is remarkably poignant and emotionally-affecting atomic age cautionary tale of science-gone-wrong.
Thursday, 5 September 2013
Charulata
Thursday, 25 July 2013
Night Train to Munich
Carol Reed’s WWII espionage pot boiler confidently stands as tall as any of the celebrated Hitchcock war thrillers of the era. While this picture predates his more acclaimed post war pictures, The Third Man and Odd Man Out, it sizzles with the same kind of high stakes urgency.
Friday, 19 July 2013
The Elephant Man
The Elephant Man endears as one of my favourite films of all time because it exemplifies what makes a great film – taking traditional stories, themes and genres told in unconventional ways. Here David Lynch’s marriage of his avant garde peculiarness with the weepy triumph of the human spirit story of John Merrick, the physically deformed circus performer who went from circus freak to Victorian celebrity, is as an inspired cinematic concoction as there ever has been.
Thursday, 11 July 2013
Shoah
The masterful comprehensive examination of the Holocaust never fails to mesmerize on all levels of cinema, history and humanity. Though never having seen Claude Lanzmann’s lauded and landmark 9-hr film on the Holocaust until now, the effect of watching it today is probably more powerful than it was first released, and likely will become more revelant and revelatory with each passing year.
Friday, 14 June 2013
Band of Outsiders
Even after six films following his celebrated Nouvelle-Vague debut 'Band of Outsiders' finds Godard at his hippest, frolickiest, cool, witty and irreverent – a postmodernness which bleeds formally into the seminal early work of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
A Man Escaped
Robert Bresson fetishizes the minute details of a French man’s escape from a Nazi prison during WWII, assembled together with clockwork like efficiency and rigor. A benchmark in the procedural genre, A Man Escaped exemplifies the enemcumbered and remarkably focused cinematic style of Robert Bresson.
Monday, 1 April 2013
Sansho the Baliff
The monumentally powerful Japanese ‘jidai-geki’ classic which explores passionately the lifelong journey of a son and daughter of an exiled feudal governer from a life of privalege to slavery and finally salvation is realized by Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi with immense emotional power and mythological thematic resonance.
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