Michaelangelo Antonioni is apparently one of the great Italian directors and it’s on me that I have neither heard of him nor watched any of his films. This one regularly makes it onto lists of the world’s greatest films so it was an obvious choice to get to get to know this director. Unfortunately it was very wrong of me to expect something similar to Federico Fellini. While it isn’t difficult to tell what’s going on in this film, it is often impossible to figure the why of it or what to expect next. This made L’Avventura a very frustrating watch for me.
My wife and I no longer climb much for recreation as I’m too lazy to train for the level of fitness required but I still retain a interest for what goes on in that milieu. Combine this with the fascination that most people have for the goings-on at Everest, and you have the explanation for why I wanted to watch this documentary by Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom.
The MCU films are the only franchise that can reliably draw me to the cinemas and Doctor Strange is only proving that my faith is well founded. Bringing this to the screen was always going to be problematic as this is a character that was difficult to portray even in the pages of comic books. As many writers have noted, magic in theory can do anything, so how you do define meaningful constraints on what Strange can do in a way that the audience can understand? This film chooses to solve this in an interesting way: magic is visually spectacular but in the end magicians seem to mostly fight in melee like the rest of the MCU characters.
Akira Kurosawa made this in 1980, at the age of 70. The legendary director would go on making films nearly until he died in 1998 but this together with Ran in 1985 are considered the last two films that are truly great. Apparently after a string of commercial failures, Kurosawa had such difficulty raising money to make new films that he attempted to commit suicide in the 1970s. Kagemusha was made possible only when Hollywood directors who are great fans of his work helped him raise funds for the film.
Brian De Palma is an American filmmaker of the same generation as such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Cuppola but this is the first time a film of his has been featured here. His most respected film is probably the 1983 remake of Scarface. We probably should get around to watching it but I’ve always put it off because we’ve watched the 1932 original twice and liked it so much. This one seems to be only slightly less well known but I’ve found its quality to be all over the map.
There once was a time when I paid enough attention to Disney films that each of their releases was a major event on the calendar. The Hunchback of Notre Dame came at the tail end of this period for me, arriving as it did when I was busy in university. This meant that I never watched it and was barely aware that it existed. Apparently the same held true for my wife as she had never watched it as well, which was why she asked for it to be added to our list.
This one is another of those entries in the list of the most notable films of last year and won a whole bunch of awards as well. It was also at the center of some controversy due to a perceived snub at the Academy Awards due to its LGBT content and that its two leads are both women. The most surprising thing that I learned about it however is that it’s based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, who is best known for her Tom Ripley novels and other thrillers.
