Assault on Precinct 13 is a film that pops up from time to time in discussions of influential action movies in places like Broken Forum. This was only the second film made by John Carpenter and helped cement his reputation in Hollywood for being a director capable of making decent films on a very tight budget. I think it’s also remarkable that it stars a black man as the hero while being very much not a blaxploitation flick. Played by Austin Stoker, the character is a police officer who happens to be black, but his blackness isn’t emphasized by the film.
This is a follow up to The Act of Killing, one of the most hard hitting documentaries I’ve ever seen. Director Joshua Oppenheimer is joined this time by a middle-aged Indonesian collaborator who appears onscreen but will not reveal his name for the safety of himself and his family. If you stay around to read the credits at the end of the film, you’ll also notice that plenty of other contributors including researchers and even cameramen have similarly chosen to be anonymous, an indication of how dangerous these revelations still are even decades after the massacres.
The Lobster, by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, makes it onto my watch list not because it was highly praised or because it won many awards, but because most of the people who have watched it describes it as one of the weirdest films they’ve seen. One of the most surprising things about this is that for such a small and quirky film, it has some serious star power with the most famous names being Collin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux.
In line with our efforts to round out my film education by watching more films from China, this is the first film by Zhang Yimou to be covered in this blog. Appropriately enough this is also both Zhang’s directorial debut and the acting debut of Gong Li. I’ve never watched this before but my wife has many times, though she is happy to watch it again. I’ve simply never watched any of Zhang’s early films that made him famous.
The Revenant is way too high profile a release to miss watching. It won a slew of awards, it was directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu who deserves plenty of goodwill for Birdman and it has at least one scene that is now so iconic that its fame eclipses that of the film itself. Personally however I wasn’t too keen about the subject of the film which seemed to yet another survival in the wilderness story with an actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who doesn’t seem altogether together suited to the role.
Every time you see a truly old film being covered in this blog, you’d know that it must be because it’s one of the all time greats. This is especially true for Sunrise by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau which is usually considered as one of the top ten greatest films of all time. It also stars the extremely tiny Janet Gaynor who we’ve seen before in Street Angel.
This is the last of a series of recommendations of interesting European animated films from a Chinese television program that my wife caught a long while ago. This one is obviously French and unlike so many animated films we’ve seen is apparently an original creation instead of being based on another property. However as is appropriate it derives its art style from a variety of famous artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
