this week on 100 Films

This week on 100 Films in a Year sees November kick off, which means my review of October is here. Fascinating reading as ever.

You may remember from last week that I was re-posting all my old Saw reviews. Those continue below, but as part of it I wrote a new overview of the series. You can read that here.

And so to regular business: two new reviews were published to the blog this week, and they were...


Serpico (1973)

it certainly has a biographical feel. That came as a bit of a surprise, to me at least — I was expecting a thriller about a good cop exposing the corrupt ones, but instead got Frank Serpico’s life story from the time he left training on... More than a corrupt cop thriller, it’s a biopic about someone involved in that world.

Read more here.


The Beast Stalker (2008)

As a Hong Kong-produced thriller, you’d expect the focus here to actually be on the action sequences, but that’s not the case — there’s a real effort to look at the characters and the investigative side of the story. It’s by no means a procedural, and the character drama isn’t as deep as it might like to be, but the intentions are good.

Read more here.


And new to the new blog...


Saw IV (2007)

too complex, ultimately descending into the realms of incomprehensibility. There are around four different plot threads, at least two of them jumping around in time like a TARDIS with ADD. Goodness knows how many different time zones are included, how many progress in a linear fashion, and whether they have any bearing on each other. Even references to previous films are confused.

Read more here.


Saw V (2008)

Saw Part 5 might be a more apt moniker for this film: it picks up directly from the end of Saw IV — which, you may remember, took place concurrently with Saw III, ultimately appending about 30 seconds to that film’s climax. Even if you wanted to start your Saw viewing here, you wouldn’t have a hope of following what’s going on.

Read more here.


Saw VI (2009)

It doesn’t start well. The opening sequence is awful, sinking to torture porn levels again... And then, almost suddenly, it gets good. It’s probably the best Saw movie since the first.

Read more here.


Saw 3D (2010)

it isn’t so much stupid as disappointing. The problem is that there are some good ideas, but few are executed as well as they could be or paid off appropriately. The setting for the opening trap is a marvellous twist on the format [but] it’s a one off. It doesn’t even have any bearing on the rest of the plot.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.