this week on 100 Films

3 brand-new reviews were published to 100 Films in a Year this week, and they were...


Ghosts of Mars (2001)

There are a good number of well-regarded John Carpenter films I’ve not seen that I could spend my time on, but I chose to expend it on this critically-mauled sci-fi-horror-Western from the first year of the current millennium. But sometimes watching poorly-regarded films pays off, because while Ghosts of Mars is no classic, it is actually pretty entertaining.

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Grand Piano (2013)

Running under 80 minutes before the credits roll, Grand Piano is a brisk thriller that barely has time to be anything less than engrossing. It relies on keeping you entertained with its series of quick reveals, twists, and sequences of tension

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Pillow Talk (1959)

The “they hate each other, will they get together?” storyline is, of course, obvious, but that’s beside the point. The leads spark off each other wonderfully, director Michael Gordon finds enjoyably inventive uses for split-screen and voiceover, and the Eastmancolor cinematography looks gorgeous in HD.

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Also, my 100 Favourites series continued with 2 more posts...


The Lion King (1994)

Big romantic number Can You Feel the Love Tonight won the Oscar, and there were nominations for epic opener Circle of Life and quotable comedy hit Hakuna Matata, and you shouldn’t overlook the fun and impressive choreography of I Just Can’t Wait to Be King, but for me the best number is Scar’s Be Prepared. I do love a good villain’s song.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Now that it’s fêted as one of the greatest film trilogies ever made, it’s easy to forget what a gamble a three-film, $300 million adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfilmable novel seemed back when production started in the late ’90s; especially as it was to be made by a director whose track record was low-budget horror films, with a cast mostly without star names, filmed on the other side of the planet, where little news leaked out to the wider world, and with all three films shot at once... [But] the quality of the work is unquestionable: this is exciting, funny, emotional, transportive, epic filmmaking of the highest order.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.