The Deep Focus

The new programme for the HOME cinema is out and there’s some interesting films being shown, as ever. I’m particularly looking forward to the season of films about the class struggle, which includes a screening of Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) – a film I’ve never seen at the cinema – and Kuhle Wampe (To Whom Does The World Belong?) (1932) (Germany), and Salt of the Earth (1954). Interestingly, the playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote the script for Kuhle Wampe.

Other highlights are a season of medievalist films which includes screening the earliest animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988).

A re-release of The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) is also to look forward to. And I haven’t even started on the new releases……

I have now added further information to the listed films. Click on the menu link at the top of the page.

coming soon…..

NB Top ten favourite new films are listed in a different colour font. Films I consider to be masterpieces have the letter M written after the title in red.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Romania)

No Country For Old Men

All About Eve (1953) M

The Savages

Before the Devil Knows Your Dead

Cloverfield

El Violin (Mexico)

There Will Be Blood M

Juno

Black Water (Australia)

In the Shadow of the Moon (Documentary)

Margot At The Wedding

Diary of the Dead

The King of the Hill (Spain)

The Waiting Room

The Conformist (Italy) (1970) M

Great Expectations (1946) M

Brief Encounter (1945)

The Orphanage

Lars and the Real Girl

Funny Games (NB Haneke’s US re-make of his own film)

Rec (Spain)

Shine a Light (Documentary)

Son of Rambo

Persepolis (Animation) (Iran)

Under the Bombs (Lebanon)

Mongol (Russia)

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

Gone Baby Gone

Female Agents (France)

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures (Documentary)

Standard Operating Procedure (Documentary)

Donkey Punch

La Antena (Spain)

The Dark Knight

My Winnipeg (Canada)

Man On Wire (Documentary)

Hellboy 2

The Strangers

The Passionate Friends (1949)

Ikiru (Japan) (1952)

Eden Lake

Jar City (Iceland)

Blithe Spirit (1946)

I’ve Loved You So Long (France)

Badlands (1973)

Gomorrah (Italy)

Alexandra (Russia)

The Wave

Burn After Reading

The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Germany)

Waltz With Bashir (Animation) (Documentary) (Israel) M

The Changeling

Lakeview Terrace

To me, a cinematice masterpiece is that rare film in which everything comes together – acting, casting, script, direction, photography, music, plot etc, so that the film is elevated to become something more than it is on paper. Take Casablanca – on paper, this was just another B movie. On the screen, through some alchemical process it became one of cinema’s great love stories. In other words, it transcended its genre. There are many other examples of this throughout film history. The Lord of the Rings trilogy transcended the “sword and sorcery” genre to become something greater. The Godfather (at least films 1 and 2) transcended the gangster film genre to become something greater. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan transcended the war film genre. Bresson’s A Man Escaped trancended the prison escape film genre. There is an element of artistic inspiration which cannot be explained logically in which all elements of the film cohere into a unified whole.

I think Carol Reed’s The Third Man is about as close to perfect as a film can get. What was it that enabled Reed to create this masterpiece? Was it the influence of Orson Welles? Or Grahame Greene? Who knows? Because none of Reed’s other films achieved this level of perfection (although Odd Man Out was probably the closest in tone to The Third Man, it doesn’t have that extra indefinable quality that a masterpiece has).

Having said that, there are of course technical masterpieces which may not be perfect. Example: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is technically a masterpiece for when it was made in 1919 but is primitive in some other areas such as acting. And then there are masterpieces which are of their time but can seem dated now in their attitudes. A prime example of this being David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Great film, yes, but when I saw it at the cinema a few years ago I was struck by how old-fashioned a lot of its views were. The script was showing its age. But I think it is still a masterpiece of epic cinema.

And then we have masterpieces of specific types of films: of surrealism (Bunuel’s Belle de Jour); of propaganda (Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will); of politics (Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers); of science fiction (Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey); of comedy (Keaton’s the General); of satire (Wilder’s Ace in the Hole); of film noir (Hawk’s The Big Sleep) etc. All these films are perfect examples of their genre. They all deserve the term “masterpiece” even though they may not be perfect every aspect (The Big Sleep has many plot-holes, for example).

I was worried. Worried that my experience of seeing Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) for the first time in a long time would tarnish how it existed in my memory. And worried that Allen’s subsequent inconsistency as a film-maker would also colour how I viewed Manhattan this time around. As if some of his later films were dragging Manhattan down off its lofty pedestal.

But I needn’t have worried. From the opening montage of stunning black and white shots of New York over a Gershwin soundtrack, I loved the film all over again. And was even more impressed by its precision and economy of storytelling, right from the intro when every shot is held for just the right length of time so that we can take in what it’s showing, before cutting to the next New York vista.

And I was struck by how fresh and funny Allen’s one-liners still were, they just reel off his tongue so naturally in this film. To paraphrase one, this is what Allen says to Diane Keaton in a taxi: “you look so wonderful I can hardly keep my eye on the meter”. Brilliant. And there also great visual gags, like when he puts his hand in the water during a romantic rowing boat ride, only for his hand to……well, you have to see it.

It’s a film that demands to be seen at the cinema, in all its widescreen glory. Never has Allen composed shots so artfully as in this film. And it has one of his finest endings, indeed one of the great ambiguous endings in all cinema.

Yes, this film – I quite liked it.

I have now added the number 10 after the titles of all films (new and old) that I consider to be masterpieces.

My first film list is posted. Click on “Films I Have Seen” in the menu above and then click on “2015”. I know the suspense is incredible. This is a work in progress so I will also be providing further information on the best films at some point.

NB Top ten favourite new films are listed in a different colour font. Films I consider to be masterpieces have the number 10 written after the title.

Enemy

Birdman 10

Whiplash

Ex Machina

Kingsman

It Follows

Inherent Vice 10

The Duke of Burgundy

Duck Soup (1933) 10

The Theory of Everything

White God (Hungary)

Vampyr (Germany) (1932)

Mommy (France)

Wild Tales (Spain)

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (Japan)

A Pigeon Sat On a Branch Reflecting On Existence (Sweden)

Force Majeure (France)

81/2 (Italy) (1963) 10

Songs From the Second Floor (Sweden) (2000)

Phoenix (Germany)

The Immortal Story (France) (1968)

The Falling

A Girl Walked Home Alone At Night (Iran)

The Lady From Shanghai (1948) 10

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Mad Max: Fury Road 10

The Look of Silence (Documentary) (Indonesia)*

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Documentary)

White Dog (1982)

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (Documentary)

Touch of Evil (1958) 10

Love and Mercy

Salt of the Earth (Documentary)

Chimes At Midnight (1965)

Man With a Movie Camera (Documentary) (Russia) (1929) 10

Inside Out (Animation) 10

Hard To Be a God (Russia) 10

Marshland (Spain)

Precinct Seven Five (Documentary)

Ashes and Diamonds (Poland) (1958)

The Dance of Reality (Chile)

L’Eclisse (Italy) (1962)

The Saragossa Manuscript (Poland) (1965) 10

The Gift

The Hourglass Sanatorium (Poland) (1973) 10

In Cold Blood (1967)

Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)

Tangerines (Georgia-Estonia)

99 Homes

Seconds (1966)

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Germany) (1919) 10

Macbeth

Sicario

Crimson Peak

Diary of a Lost Girl (Germany) (1929)

The Program

Tehran Taxi (Iran)

Felices 140 (Spain)

Black Souls (Italy)

Steve Jobs

Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

Persona (Sweden) (1966) 10

Tangerine

Dr Zhivago (1965)

The Silence of the Sea (France) (1949)

The Assassin (China/Taiwan)

The Forbidden Room

Bridge of Spies

A couple of bleak films this weekend at the cinema: The new film Harmonium and Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends (1975). If you want laughs, go somewhere else. I had no idea that I would be seeing two bleak films in succession this weekend but there you go, life’s full of surprises. So to focus on Harmonium, directed by Koji Fukada, this is a quietly engrossing film which I can best describe as an arthouse version of The Guest. Or The Guest with more subtlety. A man from the past with a mysterious history inveigles his way into the lives of a quiet family. And that’s all I should say, but what I liked about it was the way it’s a story told through the build-up of little details that gradually create a picture that is less than pleasant. It’s the gaps in the story that imply so much, so that the viewer is left to put the pieces together.