One of the most memorable comments I’ve ever read about 8½ was by Broken Forum’s resident film geek. He noted that every great director eventually tries to make his or her own version of this film. The Wikipedia entry for it cites some examples, with even Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York being considered one such attempt. It’s Federico Fellini’s best known film and easily qualifies as one of the key films every fan of cinema must watch.
The Taking of Pelham 123 doesn’t quite qualify as one of the best films ever made and doesn’t even boast a director or any actors who would be household names today, though if you’re around my age you might recognize some faces from minor roles in a wide variety of films and television shows. But when Hollywood decides it’s worth remaking and it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, you know it’s something special.
If you’ve never heard of Edward Snowden before this you probably live under a rock or something. This documentary is obviously about him and was made by Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who was one of the first people to be anonymously contacted by Snowden offering his leaked information. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary last year though I don’t believe it was ever widely shown in cinemas in the US.
We’re back to working through the lists of the best films of all time and this time it’s The Third Man, a film that is often acknowledged as one of best noirs ever made. Noir is a genre that is usually seen as American so this film already differentiates itself by being a British film, albeit one with an American protagonist. It was directed by Carol Reed (who despite the first name is a man) but most critics note that it should really be seen as a close collaboration between Reed and the writer of the screenplay, novelist Graham Greene.
I hesitated a long time over whether or not to watch American Sniper. On the one hand, its cultural significance in the US cannot be overstated. On the other, I knew even without watching it that I would hate it. I only made up my mind when Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution called it the most important American film of 2014 though I still can’t decide if he was trolling when he called it one of the best anti-war films he’d ever seen.
With The Devil’s Backbone off the list, I find that I have now watched every single feature film directed by Guillermo del Toro, with the exception of last year’s Crimson Peak which I skipped over due to its middling reviews. I don’t even consider him to be one of my favorite directors but he does have a talent for making films that can do well commercially and yet possess considerable artistic merit. The Devil’s Backbone makes for a good example of this: it’s a pretty standard ghost story without so much as an interesting twist in its favor, yet in del Toro’s hands it is elevated to the status of a classic due to the craftsmanship shown here and the director’s knack for visual storytelling.
Zootopia was a film that came out of the left field for me. It wasn’t on my radar at all. Both my wife and myself were pretty big fans of the last two Kung Fu Panda films so we’d been looking forward to watching it. Unfortunately that one seems to have gotten only middling reviews but while looking at showtimes I couldn’t help but notice that this Disney release just happened to be in cinemas at around the same time but got stellar reviews. In fact even my cinephile friend and the members over on Broken Forum gave it a thumbs-up, making this a must watch for my wife.