I watch films and write a one paragraph review. I have been doing this for several years and have now started putting them on this site.
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Meet John Doe 1941
My favourite Frank Capra film is It Happened One Night, which perhaps shows I’m not a hard core Frank Capra fan. It Happened One Night is essentially a romantic comedy, but a large part of it follows a voyage across the United States, which gives it a feeling of a ‘state of the nation’ film. Capra followed it with a series of films that could be described as engagements with contemporary America. Two, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Meet…
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Cemetery of Splendor 2015
I’ve now seen three films made by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, two features and a short, and still haven’t found a way in. Alarmingly, the two features are Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendour, two of his most acclaimed works. If I had reacted that way to a film or film director when I was in my early twenties I would have angrily denounced it as an artistic travesty, but now, if not more modest, I…
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The Searchers 1956
This film had a big impact on me when I was a teenager. My response to films was still largely intuitive, but I was trying to figure out what directors did and while I was swept away by the epic narrative of The Searchers, I also became aware of the film’s epic style, the imposing landscape and, more importantly, the figures within it. There was a time in my late teens that I would have placed this as my favourite…
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The Conformist 1970
The Conformist shows why Bernardo Bertolucci was one of the most promising film directors of his generation and why he never lived up to this promise. Consider the scene in the dance hall: it’s a beautiful mix of contrasts, of movement and stasis. As the two men sit at the table the two women dance: the two couples contrast. But the two women contrast with the working class clientele of the dance hall: in the richness of their clothes and…