Mysteries of Lisbon is my first encounter with Raúl Ruiz, so I don't have the authority to say whether it’s a good entry point for his work. What I can say is that I absolutely loved it. It’s four-and-a-half hours long, and it’s not in much of a hurry either, yet it’s never once boring. It’s about as narratively, thematically and stylistically prodigious as a single film can be. It’s so abundant that you want to spend hours picking apart…
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PlayTime 1967
Is Jacques Tati’s PlayTime the best-directed film in existence? Impossible to say, of course, but it’s equally impossible to deny how few films bring together every aspect of the cinematic medium - photography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound and narrative - in as intricate and impeccably controlled a way as this one. That on its own would be more than enough justification for its regular presence on best of all time lists, but the film is always doing more than what’s on…
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Black Narcissus 1947
Of what I would consider the "Big Four" Powell and Pressburger films (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes being the others) I'd probably rank this one last - its oddly-shaped narrative and some weird formal choices mean it lacks the sense of total mastery that the Archers at their best were capable of. But we're talking about one of the finest bodies of work in cinema history, so it's…
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La Vie en Rose 2007
I don't know what kind of reputation Edith Piaf has in today's France, but this film would suggest that, at least as recently as the mid-2000s, she was still revered as an icon, because the film seems almost terrified of the thought of having an actual opinion about her. Lots of time is devoted to her struggles with morphine addiction, but even there it's skittish; the portrait we ultimately get is generally of a tragic figure, but thanks to the…
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Allen v. Farrow 2021
Why don't we all just forget about when Mia Farrow's legal team, which included one Alan Dershowitz, offered to make the molestation charges go away if Woody Allen would agree to a $5 million settlement? I don't know about you, but to me that doesn't exactly look like something a woman who feared "for years" that her boyfriend was a paedophile would do (see also: allowing him to co-adopt their children in 1991).
Oh, and another thing: if it doesn't…
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Chariots of Fire 1981
In winning the Best Picture Oscar, Chariots of Fire was condemned to an image of mediocrity, its most common context for discussion being that it stole the award from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's true that two films nominated that year - Raiders and Reds - were better than Chariots, but since the Academy isn't exactly known for its perceptiveness it's best to judge it on its own terms, and in that respect, it's an assured success.
I wasn't…