The Story of Film: A New Generation

Being new to Mark Cousins, I was a little thrown off by how thick his Irish accent is. It doesn't help that he kind of just meanders on in a stream of consciousness fashion while cycling through various film clips.

The nominal subject of this documentary is movies from the 21st century, but he spends ample - too much really - time trying to tie things back to previous films from long ago. This adds significantly to the run time which hits 2 hours and 40 minutes.

If the whole affair was more engaging, I could see it as a piece of film school curriculum or a means of motivating the young to go back and check out what's already been done - because a lot has been done that's fading from the collective memory as time goes on.

Unfortunately, and I am pretty forgiving with films, especially documentaries, the combination of the above put me off to this director and his style and therefore cannot highly recommend this film.

His 2011 Story of Film: An Odyssey was broken up into 15 1-hour episodes and I think a similar approach would have accomplished two things here: 1) Way more films could have been discussed and 2) Audience attention would be easier to maintain.

All in all, 5 out of 10.

Watched a little while before the eyelids became heavy, it's not the content, but the monotonous drone of a voice...explains things as if he should be heard, the expert, but when the life-force is that of a deadweight glutton after a Christmas meal, the best thing you can do is switch off the film and go for a sleep. Worst narration I've heard, despite the obvious knowledge it holds. Maybe he's listened to too many voiceovers by Morgan freeman and assumed he could emulate. Freeman's voice wouldn't do it justice either. Maybe Mark Kermode could have been approached, or someone with a bit of life and doesn't need a de-esser to eliminate more hisses than the snake from disneys Robin Hood.

I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary. It had a dream-like quality to it. Musing on films which have changed the way we look at movies. The presentation was beautifully executed and interspersed with some thougtful imagery. It has given me a long list of films to watch and reminded me of some to rewatch. I am a little puzzled by the other reviews of this as I really enjoyed the narration.

This is an interesting documentary about modern film from around the world.

There are a lot of films mentioned here that I had not heard of and are now added to my list on IMDb, so it was worth watching just to find some films you may not have discovered otherwise.

However due to the narrator having the most monotone voice I have heard I had to watch this in three parts, I'm sure he knows his stuff but he sounds very uninterested in his on own project which makes it hard to concentrate.

Perhaps this would have been better as a three part series rather then a 165 minute documentary to make it more digestible?

I was excited when I discovered the existence of this sequel to "The Story of Film: An Odyssey" at the library. Unfortunately, it comes nowhere near the greatness of the original series, as it's a thinly connected mess of little coherence. I was excited to see the last decade of cinema summed up and have lines and threads I might not have thought about before drawn up for me, but unfortunately there are few big lines to see throughout the film. Cousin's just rambles on from one thing to the next, connecting the films only by his own stream of consciousness. For the most part, he just narrates what's going on onscreen in a single scene he's decided to feature, without telling you why this film is of any interest at all. There are some parts that connect more than others, and after talking about "The Look of Silence" and "The Act of Killing", he keeps his act together for a while, before the film starts rambling again. Unlike the original series, I haven't gotten the urge to watch a lot of the films I hadn't seen before, because the film gives me too little insight into what's good about the films, or why they're important.