In 1952, the British film journal Sight & Sound published the results of the first of its decennial lists of the greatest movies ever made, compiled from a survey of respected international critics. First place went to Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterwork The Bicycle Thieves (1948), but in second and third place came two Chaplin movies–City Lights (1931) and The Gold Rush (1925). Chaplin’s reputation as the cinema’s greatest artist, both as a filmmaker and performer, was at its apex. But…
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Safety Last! 1923
All the great silent comics confronted the problem of how to survive the modern world. Chaplin met modernity with consternation, while Keaton attempted, with measured success, to master it, but only Harold Lloyd greeted it on equal terms. Where both Chaplin and Keaton lived in the world as poignant anachronisms, Lloyd chose to be of his world and time, and for his troubles he always came out as a winner, the most perfect avatar of the American century the silent…
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Night Killer 1990
Belaboring of the pruriently obvious until it profitably arrives at a memorably 'bonkers' climax that's equal parts silly and genuinely upsetting. At any rate, lesser Bruno Mattei-affiliated mercenary madness, channeling the scant parts of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies that interest either him or credited director Claudio Fragasso, while star Tara Buckman delivers a courageous central performance exorcising terrors of sexual trauma and feminist rage that's simultaneously bracing and awful.
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Wonka 2023
Now I don't feel so odd for kinda liking the Tim Burton movie. Even the Depp performance, for all that's wrongheaded about it, has some edge. This is just pablum all the way down. But Hugh Grant did make me chuckle I couple of times, so not the worst movie ever made, but maybe the most soullessly mechanical.
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Circus of Books 2019
The fact this doc spends more time on how the woman who co-owned a major gay porn book store in Los Angeles and co-produced a bunch of gay adult movies in the 80s had trouble accepting the coming out of her son than it does on how the AIDS crisis affected her business and the community it catered to and employed is both inevitable and understandable given the subject's daughter made said doc. But that's also why someone other than…