Sunday 2 August 2015

this week on 100 Films

August started yesterday, so it's time for the 100 Films in a Year monthly update, looking back at July:




Also this week, two brand-new reviews were published. They were...


Gone Girl (2014)
“Horrible people do horrible things to each other” is the Post-it Note summary of this dark drama-thriller from director David Fincher, adapted by screenwriter Gillian Flynn from her own novel, which is short on heroes and overloaded with villains. An alternative brief summation is, “modern society is shit.”
Read more here.


Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
With Bond going “real world” and gadget free in the Daniel Craig era, and the Bourne series having blazed a trail of “we shot it all handheld and shaky and grainy so it must be real” veracity, it seems the task of providing audiences with a contemporary version of the spy action, just-ahead-of-reality gadgets, and larger-than-life spectacle that the Bond movies specialised in during the ’60s and ’70s, has fallen upon the Mission: Impossible franchise. For my money, it’s taken the baton with aplomb.
Read more here.


Finally, three archive reviews were reposted...


1945-1998 (2003)
Is 1945-1998 actually a film? Or is it a piece of video Art? Or just another online video? Its setup is quite simple: it charts every nuclear explosion between the titular years; the total, by-the-way, is 2,053. These explosions play out as flashing dots on a world map; different colours indicate which country was responsible for the explosion, accompanied by running totals.
Read more here.


Easy Virtue (2008)
it’s frequently hilariously funny. You’d expect nothing less from a work taken from Noel Coward, I suppose... There’s a decidedly wicked streak to the humour at times (a subplot about the fate of the family Chihuahua; lots of double entendres), which is welcome. The overall tone is light, largely, but not light in the head.
Read more here.


Fargo (1996)
the latest film to have been inducted into the United States National Film Registry, donchaknow. It’s also 105th on the IMDb Top 250 [it’s now 153rd], and the 21st film from the 1990s. So it’s pretty much a modern classic then.
Read more here.


More next Sunday.

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