I think, after this one, I’m going to go back to pairing images and text; that said, I might group a couple of movies together every now and then (especially when I end up watching two in one night, like last night). This just gets a bit cumbersome. All that said:
Mission: Impossible II (2001)
Not as good as its predecessor, and a damn sight more misogynistic. One of the strange but great things about the first Mission: Impossible is the fact that the women, by and large, aren’t unnecessarily sexualised; nothing is made of the fact that one of the secondary antagonists is female, and even the love interest has layers of complexity. That’s all abandoned here in favor of a veneer of agency that’s stripped away (figuratively and literally) as soon as her introduction’s out of the way. The misogynist slurs also fly around pretty much constantly, and honestly, it’s distracting. This is a John Woo film, and the action scenes are magnificently bonkers in their vision, but the dialogue and characterisation could have used a lot of work.
Bad Turn Worse (2014)
There is an obvious joke, here, that I won’t make because I’m better than that. Needless to say, this film stank. It couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a comedy, a noir, or a horror film, and the script’s sheer contempt for women almost made me give up at one point. It’s very well-shot, and Mackenzie Davis gives a stellar performance that feels like it belongs in a different film, but altogether this was just terrible.
Hugo (2011)
I kept putting this one off, and now I feel like an idiot, because this film is beautiful. Sure, there are moments that feel like they were supposed to be seen in 3D, and the dialogue is occasionally clunky, but it’s a film for kids that lacks the cynicism you see in so many other films for young audiences, and it’s filled with wonder and a deep love for cinema and Chloë Moretz’s English accent is passable enough and Asa Butterfield is in this and whenever I see his face rather than Kodi Smit-McPhee’s weird potato head I can’t help but sigh with relief. It’s also really tight in the way it keeps things moving; I have a tendency to check to see how much long I have left when I watch films at home, and with this one I just allowed myself to be swept up.
The Overnighters (2014)
If you’re not familiar, this is a bleak but fascinating documentary about a local pastor’s beautiful but doomed scheme to house homeless oil workers from out of state at his church. What starts out as a simple one-man-versus-the-system tale soon morphs into something altogether more complex, and the film eventually becomes more of a portrait of the man in question, all of his flaws rubbing shoulders with his powerfully good intentions. See this if you can.
Coherence (2013)
Small-budget, high-concept sci-fi thriller about a bunch of strangers who encounter their parallel selves during a freak cosmic event. The film navigates the science fiction jargon without becoming too dense, and it’s largely improvised by the eight-person cast. I liked this a lot more than I expected to - it has all the quiet amazement of Primer and Upstream Color, while remaining a damn sight more accessible than either.
20,000 Days on Earth (2014)
Exactly what you’d expect of a documentary about Nick Cave - this is poetic, and experimental, and seethingly brilliant. It spends as much time on one-to-one psychoanalytic interviews as it does on the recording of his latest album. It’s also a film that’s aware it’s about a musician, while making no apologies; Cave is an enormously talented performer, and it comes across that he’s aware of his talent without constantly stroking his ego. Maybe not a film for people new to the man, but for casual admirers and up, it’s a wonderful insight.
The Usual Suspects (1995)
This is a great film if you’re watching in 1995 and Kevin Spacey is Just Another Actor, but if you’re watching this film after Se7en and House of Cards and American Beauty and everything else, it’s painfully obvious from the outset that he’s the true villain of the piece, even if you can’t quite work out how he did it. Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe it doesn’t help that Gabriel Byrne isn’t a great actor. All of this is to say that The Usual Suspects is a great film, if you don’t know who Kevin Spacey is, are watching this in 1995, and haven’t yet read this paragraph.
We Are The Best! (2013)
This is a Swedish movie about three young teenage girls who start a punk band and try to figure out who they are, with the kind of mixed results you’d expect of 13-year-olds. It is utterly fantastic. It portrays girls in a light you almost never see on film - as complex, multi-faceted beings who yet remain teenagers, not a weird nostalgic conception of what teenagers are like or as vehicles for the minds of the adults writing them.
Fury (2014)
I don’t have any qualms with the extreme levels of violence in this film - better to get the brutality of war right, rather than paint in broad strokes - but by the end it devolved into war movie cliché, right down to the last man standing and the embattled father figure. It’s a film that never quite becomes more than the sum of its parts, and that’s okay, because the parts are great; Logan Lerman is harrowing to watch as the rookie soldier, everything is perfectly-framed, the music knows exactly when to come in, and the setpieces are stunning. It’s just that the whole thing doesn’t quite gel properly.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Every now and then you pause while watching this film and think wait, isn’t this a basic, rote storyline, and then you see Andy Serkis and Toby Kebbell doing some incredible performance capture and you forget what you were thinking. This is a film with VFX credits that stretch into three minutes and three columns, and you can see why - everything is hyper-real, to the point where the apes on-screen look more realistic than actual apes. If that’s possible. The story is very much “oh, look at the folly of man”, but that’s okay, because it’s more about the ride. I’m also now sustaining the notion that the apes’ conception of humanity is based around the graphic novel Black Hole, which for some reason features prominently a couple of times. My chief complaint is that Kodi Smit-McPhee is in this. With his weird potato face.