The Story of Film: A New Generation

It's always nice seeing montages of film clips, if only to discover new treats. I watched a third of this on 1.5x speed, which made Cousins' monotonous, slow narration sound vaguely more normal. But then the clips were too fast. Cousins really is a pompous dousche. He describes the opening credits of Deadpool as if we need to be told that they're somehow edgy or different. He explains that they 'pushed the boundaries of comedy' or something. And on it goes. He seems to think he's some appointed superiority on the real poetry of cinema, here to hold your hand through stuff that never would have occured to you before. Even explaining how 'passion' drives cinema. Yet his own narration is so passionless, so pretentiously lofty in its delivery, he commits a huge sin in boring you rather than exciting you about cinema. I prefer Scorsese or Tarantino riffing on their observations anyday. Cousins should really be making hypnotherapy CDs.

I found this documentary interesting, BUT as others have said it's touted as " a new generation 21 century " but he spends far too much time relating stuff back 50-60 years ago.

Also this guy's narration and style would put even a Crystal meth doper to sleep.

It's a constant droll monotone with no punctuation, no gap, pause , breath nothing.

I watched 30 minutes or so and turned it off.

I think he was trying to be too clever or art for arts sake.

Just film a documentary and get Mark Kermode to narrate ! At leader he has some enthusiasm.

This was read with a style as weak as dish water . 5/5 for program 1/5 for narration and that for turning up zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz !!!

The material presented in this marathon documentary is good enough, but it takes herculean effort and patience to endure narrator Cousin's astonishingly and consistently annoying manner of speaking, hour after hour.

Each sentence of narration is delivered the same monotonous way: lifelessly and sleepily, with every last syllable of every sentence ending with an identical upward inflection, giving a sense of questioning uncertainty like a helpless dying whimper.

A charming Irish lilt is one thing, but there is nothing charming about Cousins' style of narration. Any director with any sense at all would have chosen a different narrator to make this a far more compelling documentary.

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.