Letterboxd — Your life in film

A documentary which gives a fascinating insight into the ten week goodwill tour of South America made by Walt Disney and a group of his artists in 1941. Great production values and I couldn’t get enough of the archival footage. However the back stories of the family members giving their recollections of the time did not add anything. I felt like there was so much more to be gained and as such it’s really only of value to Disney fans.

Bravo Almodovar! Five stars on your scorecard. Oh the sweet twisted insanity. Antonio Banderas in a whole new dimension. No synopsis here for fear of spoilers. This is precisely why I love Almodovar so much - he creates a whole world around his characters. He has fun with it, applies his own distinct dark style and finds the human story amongst the tragedy. Locked in as my #1 of 2011 - I can’t wait for a repeat viewing.

If you’ve spanned as much time as I have watching Vincent Gallo then you’ll know his acting style is frequently constructed of minimal dialogue and authentic anguish. In Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest film these talents are well suited as Gallo plays a man on the run who is taken to the physical limits in order to survive. It’s only a minor plot point that he plays a Taliban terrorist fighter, the real story is about instinct, isolation and one man’s struggle in uninhabitable surroundings.

A remarkable documentary from Chile which juxtaposes three different threads of the country’s history - pre-Columbian shepherds, the struggle of people exposing the brutality of the Pinochet regime, and astronomy in the Atacama desert. Each of the stories has a haunting tone and each presented with the kind of passion for the material and search for truth you’ll find in a Herzog or Errol Morris documentary. In addition, the interwoven stories are beautifully shot by Patricio Guzmán, who also also directed the excellent Allende documentary from 2004.

Director Ruben Fleischer demonstrates that Zombieland was little more than a fluke by producing this mind numbingly terrible comedy about a pizza delivery guy who is forced to rob a bank. To quote a review from Time’s Richard Corliss: “For a soul-sucking 83 minutes, you’re trapped inside the film’s tiny, ugly mind”. Just awful. It’s rubbish like this that is driving people away from the theaters.

A French comic-tragedy about a group of friends who gather at beach house near Bordeaux, and the pressures that break down their relationships over the course of a week. It puts forward a good case for the two-and-a-half hour runtime providing more interesting character development. Even though things don't really feel like they go anywhere new, it's still entertaining viewing. An eclectic selection of music also makes the time more enjoyable - including an unmissable placement of Moonage Daydream.

I love a good Cold War thriller so I had high hopes for this film set in East Germany about an Israeli mission to bring a Nazi war criminal to trial. There's a lot of potential here, it captures the mood very well, but is let down by a plot that is laden with implausibly ridiculous decisions and motivations by the characters.

Set inside a New York apartment, two couples meet over a schoolyard tussle involving their sons. This is classic Polanski material as he analyses what lurks beneath and the characters primal motives. It's a cynical take on liberalism and the hypocrisy in contemporary society. Good performances from Foster, Waltz and Reilly - not so great from Winslet.

Out of Chile comes the best relationship film I've seen in a very long time. A man returns home to the friends of his youth after ten years of living overseas as a travel writer. Over the course of a single night the emotions of the past are brought to the surface with painful realism. The acting is superb and convincing, but the writing is where this film shines - it's sublime and mature, giving the viewer only what they need and holding back on the histrionics. Winner of the Goya for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film.

Jose Padilha's ambitious followup is once again a brutal and intense mix of action and political thrills on the streets of Rio. Thirteen years has passed and in this time a new form of corruption far worse than gangs threatens society. Seemingly on a crusade to expose the real world injustices, Padilha portrays everyone as corrupt or corruptible and the mechanisms that protect this state. Domestically it was a box office smash, taking the record for a locally produced film in Brazil.