Mini reviews of the 100 greatest films (according to Robert the List)

90. In the Mood for Love 2000 Hong Kong Wong Kar-Wai

Just a gorgeous film. Wong creates a different version of his sumptuous look and vibe, this time set to the rhythm of a recurring gentle and wistful musical refrain in the vein of a ballroom dance.

Wikipedia:
“In the Mood for Love (Chinese: 花樣年華; Chinese: Prime; lit. 'Flower-like period', 'the best years of one's youth') is a 2000 romantic drama film written, directed and produced by Wong Kar-wai. A co-production between Hong Kong and France, it portrays a man (Tony Leung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) in 1962 whose spouses have an affair together and who slowly develop feelings for each other. It forms the second part of an informal trilogy, alongside Days of Being Wild and 2046.
…Title
The film's original Chinese title, meaning "the age of blossoms" or "the flowery years" – a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love – derives from a song of the same name by Zhou Xuan from a 1946 film. The English title derives from the song "I'm in the Mood for Love". Director Wong had planned to name the film Secrets until listening to the song late in post-production.
Production
Development and pre-production
…By 1998, Wong had developed a concept for his next film Summer in Beijing. Although no script was finalized, he and cameraman Christopher Doyle had been to Tiananmen Square and other areas of the city to do a small amount of unauthorized shooting. Wong told journalists the film was to be a musical and a love story. Wong secured the participation of Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung to star, and with his background in graphic design, had even made posters for the film. He had begun work on script treatments, which since Days of Being Wild, he tended to treat as only a very loose basis for his work to secure financing, preferring to leave things open to change during the shoot.
…The story would slowly evolve into In the Mood for Love, after transposing its setting away from mainland China and back to 1960s Hong Kong.
…Wong had regarded Days of Being Wild upon its release in 1990 as an artistic success, and had planned a sequel to it. However, his producers had been disappointed by its box-office returns, particularly given that its shoot had been prolonged and expensive…Despite involving many of Hong Kong's top stars, the film's profits had been modest, so Wong was not given the opportunity to follow it up. Yet as he moved on to other films, he had always retained the dream of doing so. With the impossibility of the original idea of Summer in Beijing, he was now able to pursue it.
…The cast of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung….provided an opportunity to pick up a loose thread of Days of Being Wild, as the actors had appeared in that film, although never together. Leung's few scenes had been left incomplete, awaiting Wong's planned sequel that was never made. …
Filming
Wong's plan to make a film set primarily in Hong Kong did not simplify matters when it came to the shoot. The city's appearance was much changed since the 1960s, and Wong's personal nostalgia for the time added to his desire for historical accuracy. Wong had little taste for working in studio settings, let alone using special effects to imitate the look of past times. …While set in Hong Kong, a portion of the filming (like outdoor and hotel scenes) was shot in less modernized neighborhoods of Bangkok, Thailand. Further, a brief portion later in the film is set in Singapore…In its final sequences, the film also incorporates footage of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, where Leung's character is working as a journalist.
The film took 15 months to shoot. The actors found the process inspiring but demanding. They required a lot of work to understand the times, being slightly younger than Wong and having grown up in a rapidly changing Hong Kong or, in Maggie Cheung's case, partly in the United Kingdom.
…The cinematographer Christopher Doyle, for whom the film was the sixth collaboration with Wong Kar-wai, had to leave when production went over schedule and was replaced by Mark Lee Ping Bin, renowned for his work with Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Both DPs are credited equally for the final film. Some scenes in the final cut are thought to have been shot by each, with some critics noting differences between Doyle's more kinetic style as seen in earlier Wong movies, and the more subtle long shots of Lee framing key parts of In the Mood for Love….
Critic Tony Rayns, on the other hand, noted in a commentary on another Wong film that the differing styles of the two cinematographers were blended seamlessly by Wong's own fluid aesthetic. Like all of Wong's previous work, this one was shot on film, not digitally.
Doyle's departure did not result from major artistic arguments with Wong. However, despite his agreement with Wong's spontaneous approach to scripting, he found it frustrating to reshoot many of the key moments over and over in environments throughout Southeast Asia until they felt right to the director. He had to turn down many other projects due to the total commitment, without a clear time limit, required by Wong. Several years later Doyle initially signed on to work on the sequel 2046, but he also abandoned that project halfway through for similar reasons (being replaced by a range of DPs) and has not worked with Wong since. Tony Leung, on the other hand, returned to work on 2046, in which he starred without Maggie Cheung, who made only a brief appearance in already shot footage from In the Mood for Love….Cheung felt In the Mood for Love was the high point of her career, and she has worked much more infrequently since…
Post-production
The final months of production and post-production on In the Mood for Love, a submission to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000, were notorious for their confusion. The film was barely finished in time for the festival, as would occur again four years later when Wong submitted 2046. Wong continued shooting more and more of In the Mood for Love with the cast and crew as he worked furiously to edit the massive amounts of footage he had shot over the past year. He removed large chunks of the story to strip it down to its most basic element, the relationship between these characters in the 1960s, with brief allusions to earlier and later times. In the meantime, Wong screened brief segments before the festival for journalists and distributors. Despite the general lack of commercial interest in Chinese cinema at the time by North American media corporations, Wong was given a distribution deal for a limited theatrical release in North America on USA Films, based only on a few minutes of footage.
By early 2000, with the deadline for Cannes approaching, Wong was contacted by the director of Cannes, who encouraged him to quickly complete a final cut, and offered a constructive criticism about the title. Although the title in Cantonese and Mandarin is based on a Zhou Xuan song whose English title is translated "Age of Bloom", the international title proved more complex. After discarding Summer in Beijing and A Story of Food, Wong had provisionally settled on Secrets, but Cannes felt this title was not as distinctive as the film Wong was preparing and suggested he should change it.
Finally having completed the cut, but at a loss for titles, Wong was listening to a then-recent album by Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music titled Slave to Love: The Very Best of the Ballads, and noticed a resonance in the song "I'm in the Mood for Love", which shared its title with a popular jazz standard of the mid-20th century. Many of Wong's previous English-language titles had come from pop songs, so he found this title particularly appropriate….
…Critical response
…Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote that "in the hands of a hack, In the Mood for Love could have been a snickering sex farce. In the hands of Wong Kar-wai ... the film is alive with delicacy and feeling".
Peter Walker of The Guardian, describing it as his "favourite film", wrote that it provides "profound and moving reflections on life's fundamentals. It's a film about, yes, love; but also betrayal, loss, missed opportunities, memory, the brutality of time's passage, loneliness—the list goes on".
David Parkinson of Empire awarded the film five out of five stars, writing that "the performances are masterly, and the photography beautiful. It's a genuinely romantic romance and makes for sublime cinema".”

Runtime 1 hour 38 minutes
Budget $3m.
Trailer:

91. Mulholland Drive 2001 USA David Lynch ESSENTIAL

It is one of the great films. I watched in on the big screen recently, and almost every scene, every image individually screamed of iconic status. It’s a gorgeous film to look at. It has an atmosphere of suspense and mystery, and yet it’s interspersed with moments of humour, fear, romance, eroticism, heartbreak. Watts is sensational. I think of her scene in the rehearsal which becomes genuinely erotic. Her heartbreak on seeing her love kissing another woman full on the lips. Oh my god you can feel her pain to the extent that it’s almost comical how much she is hurting. And you see that partly from your own direct view of the girls showing off their lipstick smudged faces in order to deliberately rub Diane's face into the dirt, and party through Watts’ utterly shattered and agonised expression. It’s easy also to recall in detail the couples'' expressions when they are in the theatre. These are all images which are engrained in our brains, our memories, perhaps even more clearly than memories of our own lives.
The first time I watched it, I didn’t feel confused I felt excited. I was buzzing at what I’d just experienced. I didn’t even pick up the dream theory at that point, I just knew that what I’d watched was amazing. Thank you to the ABC exec who turned it down and pointed Lynch back towards the big screen.

Wikipedia:
“Mulholland Drive (stylized as Mulholland Dr.) is a 2001 surrealist neo-noir mystery horror film written and directed by David Lynch. Its plot follows an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) who arrives in Los Angeles, where she befriends a woman (Laura Harring) who is suffering from amnesia after a car accident. The film follows several other vignettes and characters, including a Hollywood director (Justin Theroux) who encounters mob interference while casting for his latest film. Lynch's tagline for the film is "a love story in the city of dreams".
The film was originally conceived as a television pilot for ABC, with footage shot and edited in 1999 as an open-ended mystery. After viewing Lynch's cut, however, television executives cancelled the proposed TV series. Lynch then secured funding from French production company StudioCanal to make the material into a feature film, writing an ending to the project and filming new material. The resulting surrealist narrative has left the film's events open to interpretation. Lynch declined to offer an explanation, leaving audiences, critics, and even the film's own cast to speculate on its meaning.
….Mulholland Drive is often regarded as Lynch's magnum opus as well as one of the greatest films of all time….
Plot
A woman is about to be shot by her chauffeur, but is saved when a car crashes into them at night on Mulholland Drive. The woman is the sole survivor. Dazed, she hides in a vacant apartment. The next morning, Betty Elms, an aspiring actress from Deep River, Ontario, arrives at the apartment, which her aunt has lent her. She finds the woman, who has amnesia but remembers she is in danger. For convenience, the woman adopts the name "Rita" from a Gilda poster featuring Rita Hayworth. Betty and Rita discover a large quantity of cash and a blue key in Rita's purse.
….(SPOILERS)
Betty and Rita visit Diane Selwyn's apartment, but the occupant recently swapped apartments with Diane. The two break into Diane's new apartment and discover a woman's decomposing corpse in the bed. Horrified, Rita tries to cut her hair off, but Betty persuades her to instead don a blonde wig similar to Betty's own hairstyle….
Diane Selwyn, a depressed and struggling actress who looks exactly like Betty, awakens in the apartment Betty and Rita investigated. Her neighbor visits to pick up her things and warns that detectives are looking for Diane. Diane daydreams about Camilla Rhodes, a successful actress who looks exactly like Rita. She cries after recalling that Camilla broke up with her.
Camilla invites Diane to a party at Adam's house on Mulholland Drive. There, Diane meets Adam's mother, who looks exactly like Betty's landlady. Diane explains that she moved to Los Angeles with money she inherited from her deceased aunt and that she met Camilla when they both auditioned for the lead in The Sylvia North Story…
Diane meets Joe Messing at Winkie's (where a waitress is named "Betty") and hires him to kill Camilla. He promises to leave Diane a blue key as a sign that the job is done. Later, a traumatized Diane stares at the blue key on her coffee table. Terrorized by hallucinations, she runs into her bedroom and shoots herself.
Themes and interpretations
Giving the film only the tagline "A love story in the city of dreams", David Lynch refused to comment on Mulholland Drive's meaning or symbolism, leading to much discussion and multiple interpretations….Justin Theroux said of Lynch's feelings on the multiple meanings people perceive in the film, "I think he's genuinely happy for it to mean anything you want. He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations. David works from his subconscious."
Dreams and alternative realities
An early interpretation of the film uses dream analysis to argue that the first part is a dream of the real Diane Selwyn, who has cast her dream-self as the innocent and hopeful "Betty Elms", reconstructing her history and persona into something like an old Hollywood film. In the dream, Betty is successful, charming, and lives the fantasy life of a soon-to-be-famous actress. The remainder of the film presents Diane's real life, in which she has failed both personally and professionally. She arranges for Camilla, an ex-lover, to be killed, and unable to cope with the guilt, re-imagines her as the dependent, pliable amnesiac Rita. Clues to her inevitable demise, however, continue to appear throughout her dream…
This interpretation was similar to what Naomi Watts construed, when she said in an interview, "I thought Diane was the real character and that Betty was the person she wanted to be and had dreamed up. Rita is the damsel in distress and she's in absolute need of Betty, and Betty controls her as if she were a doll. Rita is Betty's fantasy of who she wants Camilla to be."
…Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune found that "everything in Mulholland Drive is a nightmare. It's a portrayal of the Hollywood golden dream turning rancid, curdling into a poisonous stew of hatred, envy, sleazy compromise and soul-killing failure. This is the underbelly of our glamorous fantasies, and the area Lynch shows here is realistically portrayed.
The Guardian asked six well-known film critics for their own perceptions of the overall meaning in Mulholland Drive. Neil Roberts of The Sun and Tom Charity of Time Out subscribe to the theory that Betty is Diane's projection of a happier life. Roger Ebert and Jonathan Ross seem to accept this interpretation, but both hesitate to overanalyze the film.
…Media theorist Siobhan Lyons similarly disagrees with the dream theory, arguing that it is a "superficial interpretation [which] undermines the strength of the absurdity of reality that often takes place in Lynch's universe." Instead, Lyons posits that Betty and Diane are in fact two different people who happen to look similar, a common motif among Hollywood starlets.
… It was also suggested that the entire film takes place in a dream, yet the identity of the dreamer is unknown. (Phillip Lopate, "Welcome to L. A.” October 4, 2013)
…Repeated references to beds, bedrooms and sleeping represent the influence of dreams. Rita falls asleep several times; in between these episodes, disconnected scenes such as the men having a conversation at Winkie's, Betty's arrival in Los Angeles and the bungled hit take place, suggesting that Rita may be dreaming them.
The opening shot of the film zooms into a bed containing an unknown sleeper, instilling, according to film scholar Ruth Perlmutter, the necessity to question the reality of following events….
…Film theorist David Roche writes that Lynch films do not simply tell detective stories, but rather force the audience into the role of becoming detectives themselves to make sense of the narratives, and that Mulholland Drive, like other Lynch films, frustrates "the spectator's need for a rational diegesis by playing on the spectator's mistake that narration is synonymous with diegesis." In Lynch's films, the spectator is always "one step behind narration" …
…Romantic content
…Betty and Rita were chosen by the Independent Film Channel as the emblematic romantic couple of the 2000s….
…Characters
…Style
…Todd McGowan writes, "One cannot watch a Lynch film the way one watches a standard Hollywood film noir nor in the way that one watches most radical films."[72] Through Lynch's juxtaposition of cliché and surreal, nightmares and fantasies, nonlinear story lines, camera work, sound and lighting, he presents a film that challenges viewers to suspend belief of what they are experiencing.” (Vass, Michael (June 22, 2005). "Cinematic meaning in the work of David Lynch: Revisiting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive". CineAction (67): 12–25...).
…According to Stephen Dillon, Lynch's use of different camera positions throughout the film, such as hand-held points of view, makes the viewer "identify with the suspense of the character in his or her particular space", but that Lynch at moments also "disconnects the camera from any particular point of view, thereby ungrounding a single or even a human perspective" so that the multiple perspectives keep contexts from merging, significantly troubling "our sense of the individual and the human". (Dillon, Steven (2006). The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film. University of Texas Press)
…Scholar Curt Hersey recognizes several avant-garde techniques used in the film including lack of transitions, abrupt transitions, motion speed, nontraditional camera movement, computer-generated imagery, nondiegetic images, nonlinear narration and intertextuality. (Hersey, Curt (2002). "Diegetic Breaks and the Avant-Garde". The Journal of Moving Image Studies (1)
……Lynch moves between scenes in the first portion of the film by using panoramic shots of the mountains, palm trees and buildings in Los Angeles. In the darker part of the film, sound transitions to the next scene without a visual reference where it is taking place.
…Production
Development
Originally conceived as a television series, Mulholland Drive began as a 90-minute pilot produced for Touchstone Television and intended for the ABC television network. Tony Krantz, the agent who was responsible for the development of Twin Peaks, was "fired up" about doing another television series. Lynch sold the idea to ABC executives based only on the story of Rita emerging from the car accident with her purse containing $125,000 in cash and the blue key, and Betty trying to help her figure out who she is.
An ABC executive recalled, "…Obviously, we asked, 'What happens next?' And David said, 'You have to buy the pitch for me to tell you.'" Lynch showed ABC a rough cut of the pilot. The person who saw it, according to Lynch, was watching it at six in the morning and was having coffee and standing up. He hated the pilot, and ABC immediately cancelled it…Canal+ wanted to give Lynch money to make it into a feature and it took a year to negotiate. (Woods, Paul, ed. (2000). Weirdsville USA: The Obsessive Universe of David Lynch. Plexus Publishing)…
Casting
…Lynch cast Naomi Watts and Laura Harring by their photographs. He called them in separately for half-hour interviews and told them that he had not seen any of their previous works in film or television. Harring considered it fateful that she was involved in a minor car accident on the way to the first interview, only to learn her character would also be involved in a car accident in the film. (Newman, Bruce (October 10, 2001). "How pair got to intersection of Lynch and 'Mulholland'". U-T San Diego. p. F-6.)…
Filming
Filming for the television pilot began on location in Los Angeles in February 1999 and took six weeks. Ultimately, the network was unhappy with the pilot and decided not to place it on its schedule. Objections included the nonlinear storyline, the ages of Harring and Watts (whom they considered too old), cigarette smoking by Ann Miller's character and a close-frame shot of dog feces in one scene. Lynch remembered, "All I know is, I loved making it, ABC hated it, and I don't like the cut I turned in. I agreed with ABC that the longer cut was too slow, but I was forced to butcher it because we had a deadline…One night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything was seen from a different angle ... Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always wanted to be this way. It just took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it is.” David Lynch, 2001 (Macaulay, Scott (October 2001). "The dream factory". FilmMaker. 1 (10): 64–67.).
…Watts was relieved that the pilot was dropped by ABC. She found Betty too one-dimensional without the darker portion of the film that was put together afterward….
Theroux described approaching filming without entirely understanding the plot: "... David welcomes questions, but he won't answer any of them ... You work kind of half-blindfolded. If he were a first-time director and hadn't demonstrated any command of this method, I'd probably have reservations. But it obviously works for him." (Arnold, Gary (October 12, 2001). "Smoke and mirrors; Director Lynch keeps actor Theroux guessing". The Washington Times. p. B5.)
…Watts stated that she tried to bluff Lynch by pretending she had the plot figured out, and that he delighted in the cast's frustration. (David, Anna (November 2001). "Twin Piques". Premiere. 3 (15): 80–81.)…
Soundtrack
“The album progresses much like a typical Lynch film, opening with a quick, pleasant Jitterbug and then slowly delving into darker string passages, the twangy guitar sounds of '50s diner music and, finally, the layered, disturbing, often confusing underbelly of the score.” Neil Shurley, 2002
The soundtrack of Mulholland Drive was supervised by Angelo Badalamenti, who collaborated on previous Lynch projects Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks…
…At the hinge of the film is a scene in an unusual late night theater called Club Silencio where a performer announces "No hay banda (there is no band) ... but yet we hear a band", variated between English, Spanish and French. Described as "the most original and stunning sequence in an original and stunning film" (Nochimson, Martha (Autumn 2002). "Mulholland Drive by David Lynch". Film Quarterly. 1 (56): 37–45.)
…Del Rio, who popularized the Spanish version and who received her first recording contract on the basis of the song, stated that Lynch flew to Nashville where she was living, and she sang the song for him once and did not know he was recording her. Lynch wrote a part for her in the film and used the version she sang for him in Nashville.
The song tragically serenades the lovers Betty and Rita, who sit spellbound and weeping, moments before their relationship disappears and is replaced by Diane and Camilla's dysfunction. According to one film scholar, the song and the entire theater scene marks the disintegration of Betty's and Rita's personalities, as well as their relationship. (Nochimson)
…Release and reception
Mulholland Drive premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival in May to major critical acclaim…
..Since its release, Mulholland Drive has received "both some of the harshest epithets and some of the most lavish praise in recent cinematic history". (Lentzner, Jay R.; Ross, Donald R. (2005). "The Dreams That Blister Sleep: Latent Content and Cinematic Form in Mulholland Drive". American Imago. 62: 101–123.)
…Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who had often been dismissive of Lynch's work, awarded the film four stars out of four, writing, "David Lynch has been working toward Mulholland Drive all of his career, and now that he's arrived there I forgive him for Wild at Heart and even Lost Highway….The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can't stop watching it".
…Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle called it "exhilarating ... for its dreamlike images and fierce, frequently reckless imagination" and added, "there's a mesmerizing quality to its languid pace, its sense of foreboding and its lost-in-time atmosphere ... it holds us, spellbound and amused, for all of its loony and luscious, exasperating 146 minutes [and] proves that Lynch is in solid form—and still an expert at pricking our nerves".
…A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that, while some might consider the plot an "offense against narrative order", the film is "an intoxicating liberation from sense, with moments of feeling all the more powerful for seeming to emerge from the murky night world of the unconscious".
…Among detractors, Rex Reed of The New York Observer said that it was the worst film he has seen in 2001, calling it "a load of moronic and incoherent garbage".
….Film theorist Ray Carney notes, "You wouldn't need all the emotional back-flips and narrative trap doors if you had anything to say. You wouldn't need doppelgangers and shadow-figures if your characters had souls." (Carney, Ray (2004). "Mulholland Drive and "puzzle films"". Boston University.)”

Run time 2 hours 27 minutes
Trailer:

92. Donnie Darko 2001 USA Richard Kelly

This film splits opinions, but I absolutely love it. I just don’t understand how Kelly hasn’t had a bigger career since. As he wanted, it’s captivating from the first shot and the first sound. As a viewer I find myself transfixed from that moment. The cameras Kelly chose look great. The sound track’s great. Acting. The story hooks you. The 1988 setting just works. It’s a mystery, a comedy, a suspense. It’s just terrific.

Wikipedia:
“Donnie Darko is a 2001 American science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Richard Kelly, and produced by Flower Films. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Mary McDonnell, Katharine Ross, Patrick Swayze, and (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
Set in October 1988, the film follows Donnie Darko (J Gyllenhaal), an emotionally troubled teenager who inadvertently escapes a bizarre accident by sleepwalking. He has visions of Frank, a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume who informs him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.
Development began in late 1997 when Kelly had graduated from film school and started writing scripts. He took an early idea of a jet engine falling onto a house with no one knowing its origin and built the story around it. Kelly insisted on directing the film himself and struggled to secure backing from producers until 2000, when Pandora Cinema and Barrymore's Flower Films agreed to produce it on a $4.5 million budget. Filming took 28 days in the summer of 2000, mostly in California.
The soundtrack features a cover of "Mad World" by Tears for Fears...
Donnie Darko premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19, 2001, followed by a limited theatrical release on October 26. Because the film's advertising featured a crashing plane and the September 11 attacks had occurred a month and a half before, it was scarcely advertised.
This affected its box office performance and it grossed just $517,375 in its initial run. However, the film gained a cult following…It was listed No. 2 in Empire's "50 Greatest Independent Films of All Time"…
Plot
On October 2, 1988, troubled teenager Donald "Donnie" Darko sleepwalks outside, led by a mysterious voice. Once outside, he meets a figure named Frank in a monstrous rabbit costume. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in precisely 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Donnie wakes up the next morning on the green of a local golf course and returns home to discover a jet engine has crashed into his bedroom. His older sister Elizabeth tells him the FAA investigators do not know its origin.
Over the next several days, Donnie continues to have visions of Frank, and his parents, Eddie and Rose, send him to psychotherapist Dr. Thurman. Thurman believes Donnie is detached from reality and that his visions of Frank are "daylight hallucinations," symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia. Frank asks Donnie if he believes in time travel, and Donnie in turn asks his science teacher, Dr. Kenneth Monnitoff. Monnitoff gives Donnie The Philosophy of Time Travel, a book written by Roberta Sparrow, a former science teacher at the school who is now a seemingly senile old woman living outside of town, known to the local teenagers as Grandma Death. Donnie also starts dating Gretchen Ross, who has recently moved into town with her mother under a new identity to escape her violent stepfather.
Frank begins to influence Donnie's actions through his sleepwalking episodes, including causing him to flood his high school by breaking a water main.
Gym teacher Kitty Farmer…begins teaching "attitude lessons" taken from local motivational speaker Jim Cunningham, but Donnie rebels against these, leading to friction between Kitty and Rose.
Kitty arranges for Cunningham to speak at a school assembly, where Donnie insults him. He later finds Cunningham's wallet and address, and Frank suggests setting his house on fire. Firefighters discover a hoard of child pornography there. Cunningham is arrested, and Kitty, who wishes to testify in his defense, asks Rose to chaperone their daughters' dance troupe on its trip to Los Angeles.
With Rose in Los Angeles and Eddie away for business, Donnie and Elizabeth hold a Halloween costume party to celebrate Elizabeth's acceptance to Harvard. At the party, Gretchen…and Donnie have sex for the first time. When Donnie realizes that Frank's prophesied end of the world is only hours away, he takes Gretchen and two other friends to see Sparrow….an oncoming car runs over Gretchen, killing her. The driver turns out to be Elizabeth's boyfriend, Frank Anderson, wearing the same rabbit costume from Donnie's visions. Donnie shoots Frank in the eye with his father's gun and walks home carrying Gretchen's body.
Donnie returns home as a vortex forms over his house. He borrows one of his parents' cars, loads Gretchen's body into it, and drives to a nearby ridge that overlooks the town.
There, he watches as the plane carrying Rose and the dance troupe home from Los Angeles gets caught in the vortex's wake, violently ripping off one of its engines and sending it back in time.
Events of the previous 28 days unwind.
Donnie wakes up in his bedroom, recognizes the date is October 2, and laughs as the jet engine falls into his bedroom, crushing him.
Around town, those whose lives Donnie would have touched wake up from troubled dreams. Gretchen rides by the Darko home the following day and learns of Donnie's death. Gretchen asks the neighbor, "What was his name?" Gretchen and Rose exchange glances and wave as if they know each other but cannot remember from where.
Production
Writing
…in…October 1998…Kelly….wrote Donnie Darko in 28 days, the same time period as the film. The time of year influenced Kelly to set the film around Halloween.
Kelly set out to write something "ambitious, personal, and nostalgic" about the 1980s which "pushed the envelope by combining science fiction with a coming-of-age tale". (Korsner, Jason (October 25, 2002). "Movies – Richard Kelly – Donnie Darko". BBC News)
…Kelly summarized the script was to be "an amusing and poignant recollection of suburban America in the Reagan era". (Hoad, Phil (December 12, 2016). "How we made Donnie Darko". The Guardian.)
He recalled a news story that he had read as a child, which he later called an urban legend, about a large piece of ice falling from the wing of a plane and crashing through a boy's bedroom, who was not there at the time and thus escaped death.
Kelly used this to develop an initial idea of a jet engine falling onto a house and no one could determine its origin. He then built the rest of the script with the aim of resolving the mystery at the end while taking a "most interesting voyage" to get there, although at this point he knew the plane was to be one that Donnie's mother was on and was from a different dimension. (Kelly, Richard (2003). The Donnie Darko Book. Faber and Faber.)
He based the film's concept of time travel and alternate universes from reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking….
There are some autobiographical links with Kelly and the film…The word "****-ass", used in the Darko family dinner scene, was something that two of Kelly's film school friends used during their occasional exchange of insults….
Development
Kelly knew that the film's complicated story would be difficult to pitch to producers without a script, so he had producers read it first before discussing it with them further. While pitching the script, Kelly and McKittrick insisted that Kelly direct the film, which hindered its chances at being picked up. Kelly recalled 1999 being a year of "meeting after meeting", all of which ended in rejection, and at this point declared the film "dead". McKittrick said Donnie Darko was "the challenging script in town that everybody wanted to make, but was too afraid to shoot".(Piccalo, Gina (October 26, 2001). "'Darko' Hard to Sell, Quick to Shoot". Los Angeles Times.)
Drew Barrymore agreed to finance the film's production through her company, Flower Films.
A turning point arrived when agents John Campisi and Rob Paris at the Creative Artists Agency took an interest in the script and signed Kelly on.. This led to further meetings with several prominent individuals, including Francis Ford Coppola…Kelly's meeting with Coppola was particularly influential, as Coppola drew his attention to one of Karen's lines after she is fired—"The kids have to figure it all out these days, because the parents, they don't have a clue"—and Kelly recalled: "He slid the binder down the big table and very dramatically said: 'That's what your whole movie's about right there.'"
Early on Vince Vaughn was offered the role of Donnie, but he turned it down as he felt he was too old for the part. Mark Wahlberg was also approached, but he insisted that he should play Donnie with a lisp.
…Drew Barrymore…agreed to play as Karen, and (her) Flower Films agreed to increase the budget to $4.5 million…After securing enough financial backing, pre-production accelerated and filming was booked for the summer of 2000 and scheduled to accommodate Barrymore, who had just one week's availability.…Gyllenhaal, who was in Los Angeles auditioning for parts, was "mesmerised" by the script and recalled pulling over the side of the road to finish reading it….Gyllenhaal also had the idea to have his real-life sister Maggie star as Elizabeth Darko.
Design
…The film was publicized at the Sundance Film Festival as being the first to feature significant digital effects. Kelly wanted to use them only "when absolutely necessary" and have them relate to the story, such as the water barrier seen between Donnie and Frank in his bathroom…
Filming
…Filming was completed in 28 days, the same length of time as the film's events, in July and August 2000. Most of the film was shot in Long Beach, California; Kelly was uninterested in shooting elsewhere because he wanted to portray a strong suburban feel….The opening scene with Donnie waking up was the first to be filmed; it was shot at sunrise on the Angeles Crest Highway….
Production designer Alex Hammond bought the jet engine used in the film for $10,000. The scene where it falls onto Donnie's bedroom was done in one shot. The shell of it was rigged above the set and sent through using an air pressure gun.
…Kelly's goal was to "seduce the audience" from the film's opening shot.
…The film was shot with a Panavision Panastar camera and in anamorphic format, which involves filming in widescreen onto standard 35 mm film. Despite its setbacks and the need to have twice as much light, Kelly was adamant.
Soundtrack
…The film's opening sequence is set to "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen. The continuous shot of introduction of Donnie's high school prominently features the song "Head over Heels" by Tears for Fears. Samantha's dance group "Sparkle Motion" performs to "Notorious" by Duran Duran. When the scene was originally shot, the group danced to "West End Girls" by Pet Shop Boys. However, the rights to the song could not be obtained for the final release. …"Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division also appears in the film diegetically during the party and shots of Donnie and Gretchen upstairs. Despite the film being set in 1988, the version played was not released until 1995. In the director's cut, the music in the opening sequence is replaced by "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS… and "The Killing Moon" is played as Gretchen and Donnie return to the party from Donnie's parents' room.
The film's end sequence features a piano-driven cover of "Mad World" by English new wave group Tears for Fears, sung by American musician Gary Jules, a schoolfriend of Andrews.
Release…
…Kelly said it took around six months to secure a theatrical release…Donnie firing a gun became one of Kelly's biggest problems while finding a distributor, as the Columbine High School massacre from 1999 raised concerns of the film promoting teenage suicide…. The licensed songs in the film also presented problems as they had yet to be paid for, causing a risk of them being removed for a wide release. Kelly was also advised to cut 30 minutes from the film….
Donnie Darko was theatrically released from October 26, 2001, to its peak of 58 theaters across the United States…The film was released six weeks after the September 11 attacks and its trailer featured an accident involving an aircraft, which affected its chances of box office success….Despite its initial poor box office showing, the film attracted a devoted fan base and gained a cult following…
Director's cut
The idea to produce a director's cut of the film originated in late 2003, when Kelly and Berney attended the first-anniversary screening at the Pioneer Theatre in New York City. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut premiered on May 29, 2004, at the Seattle International Film Festival…This cut includes 20 minutes of extra footage and an altered soundtrack….”

Runtime: 1 hour 53 minutes (original theatrical) 2 hours 13 minutes (director’s cut)
Trailer


Full movie (director’s cut):

93. Uzak 2002 Turkiye Nuri Bilge Ceylan ESSENTIAL

It’s a slow cinema masterpiece. Very little happens, and much of it is one or both of the main characters just sitting around the flat watching telly or looking out of the window. Sometimes going for a walk. But it’s just absorbing. Some stunning camerawork.

Wikipedia:

“Uzak (…Distant in North America) is a 2002 Turkish drama film written, produced, shot and directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan….

Plot
Yusuf, a young factory worker who recently lost his job, travels to Istanbul to stay with Mahmut, one of his relatives, while looking for a job. Mahmut is a rather wealthy and intellectual photographer, whereas Yusuf is almost illiterate, uneducated, and unsophisticated. The two do not get along well. Yusuf assumes that he will easily find work as a sailor but there are no jobs, and he has no sense of direction or energy. Meanwhile, Mahmut, despite his wealth, is aimless too: his job, which consists of photographing tiles, is dull and inartistic; he can barely express emotions towards his ex-wife or his lover….Mahmut attempts to bond with Yusuf and recapture his love of art by taking him on a drive to photograph the beautiful Turkish countryside…
…Production
Ceylan made the film with a team of 5 people.
Uzak was the last film that the actor Mehmet Emin Toprak would be involved with, as he died in a car accident soon after filming was completed. He was 28 years old.
Reception
…Tom Dawson of BBC describes the film as "richly contemplative and languid filmmaking" and added "Few recent films have been so accomplished in capturing the way people drift through their lives, unable to communicate their emotions and feelings."
In 2019, director Andrew Haigh named it as the best film of the 21st century…”.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes
Trailer:

LIST ABANDONED DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST.

94. No Country for Old Men 2007 USA Joel and Ethan Cohen

Wikipedia:
“No Country for Old Men is a 2007 American neo-Western crime thriller film written, directed, produced and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin, the film is set in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. The film revisits the themes of fate, conscience, and circumstance…The film follows three main characters: Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), a Vietnam War veteran and welder who stumbles upon a large sum of money in the desert; Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a hitman who is sent to recover the money; and Ed Tom Bell (Jones), a sheriff investigating the crime. The film also stars Kelly Macdonald as Moss's wife, Carla Jean, and Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells, a bounty hunter seeking Moss and the return of the money, $2 million.
Cast
The role of Llewelyn Moss was originally offered to Heath Ledger, but he turned it down to spend time with his newborn daughter Matilda. Garret Dillahunt was also in the running for the role of Llewelyn Moss, auditioning five times for the role, but instead was offered the part of Wendell, Ed Tom Bell's deputy. Josh Brolin, who was not the Coens' first choice, enlisted the help of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to make an audition reel…His agent eventually secured a meeting with the Coens and he was given the part.
Javier Bardem nearly withdrew from the role of Anton Chigurh due to issues with scheduling….
Writing
The Coens' script was mostly faithful to the source material….The writing is…notable for its minimal use of dialogue.
Filming
The project was a co-production between Miramax Films and Paramount's classics-based division in a 50/50 partnership, and production was scheduled for May 2006 in New Mexico and Texas. With a total budget of $25 million (at least half spent in New Mexico), production was slated for the New Mexico cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas (which doubled as the border towns of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Texas), with other scenes shot around the West Texas towns of Sanderson and Marfa.
Coincidentally, Paul Thomas Anderson's film There Will Be Blood – another partnership between Miramax and Paramount which competed with No Country For Old Men at the Academy Awards – was being shot in Marfa simultaneously. The Coen brothers were actually forced to scrap an entire day of filming for No Country For Old Men when preparations for the oil derrick scene in There Will Be Blood nearby produced enough smoke to ruin all potential scenes.
…"Everything's storyboarded before we start shooting," Deakins said in Entertainment Weekly. "In No Country, there's maybe only a dozen shots that are not in the final film. It's that order of planning. And we only shot 250,000 feet, whereas most productions of that size might shoot 700,000 or a million feet of film. It's quite precise, the way they approach everything.”
“We never use a zoom," he said. "I don't even carry a zoom lens with me, unless it's for something very specific." The famous coin-tossing scene between Chigurh and the old gas station clerk is a good example; the camera tracks in so slowly that the audience isn't even aware of the move. "When the camera itself moves forward, the audience is moving, too. You're actually getting closer to somebody or something. It has, to me, a much more powerful effect, because it's a three-dimensional move. A zoom is more like a focusing of attention. You're just standing in the same place and concentrating on one smaller element in the frame. Emotionally, that's a very different effect." [Daly, Steve (January 3, 2008). "THE Q&A: Roger Deakins: Candid Camera Talk"]…
Directing
….They discuss choreographing and directing the film's violent scenes in the Sydney Morning Herald: "'That stuff is such fun to do', the brothers chime in at the mention of their penchant for blood-letting. 'Even Javier would come in by the end of the movie, rub his hands together and say, 'OK, who am I killing today?' adds Joel. 'It's fun to figure out', says Ethan. 'It's fun working out how to choreograph it, how to shoot it, how to engage audiences watching it.'"
…David Denby of The New Yorker criticized the way the Coens "disposed of" Llewelyn Moss. "The Coens, however faithful to the book", he said, "cannot be forgiven for disposing of Llewelyn so casually. After watching this foolhardy but physically gifted and decent guy escape so many traps, we have a great deal invested in him emotionally, and yet he's eliminated, off-camera, by some unknown Mexicans. He doesn't get the dignity of a death scene.”…
Musical score and sound
The Coens minimized the score used in the film, leaving large sections devoid of music….The movie contains a "mere" 16 minutes of music, with several of those in the end credits…
…Dennis Lim of The New York Times stressed that "there is virtually no music on the soundtrack of this tense, methodical thriller. Long passages are entirely wordless. In some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence." Skip Lievsay, the film's sound editor called this approach "quite a remarkable experiment," and added that "suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music. The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what's going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You're not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone." [Lim, Dennis (January 6, 2008). "Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence". New York Times.]
…Jeffrey Overstreet adds that "the scenes in which Chigurh stalks Moss are as suspenseful as anything the Coens have ever staged. And that has as much to do with what we hear as what we see. No Country for Old Men lacks a traditional soundtrack, but don't say it doesn't have music. The blip-blip-blip of a transponder becomes as frightening as the famous theme from Jaws. The sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors of a hotel hallway are as ominous as the drums of war. When the leather of a briefcase squeaks against the metal of a ventilation shaft, you'll cringe, and the distant echo of a telephone ringing in a hotel lobby will jangle your nerves." [Overstreet, Jeffrey (November 9, 2007). "No Country for Old Men: Movie review". Christianity Today.]
Style
…The novel's motifs of chance, free-will, and predestination are familiar territory for the Coen brothers, who presented similar threads and tapestries of "fate [and] circumstance" in earlier works… Numerous critics cited the importance of chance to both the novel and the film, focusing on Chigurh's fate-deciding coin flipping.
…Variety critic Todd McCarthy describes Chigurh's modus operandi: "Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise ... f everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. 'You don't have to do this,' the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor."…
…Themes and analysis
One of the themes in the story involves the tension between destiny and self-determination. According to Richard Gillmore, the main characters are torn between a sense of inevitability, "that the world goes on its way and that it does not have much to do with human desires and concerns", and the notion that our futures are inextricably connected to our own past actions. [Conard, Mark T. (2009), The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, Part 1, Chapter: "No Country for Old Men: The Coens' Tragic Western", by Gillmore, Richard.]…

Runtime: 2 hours 2 minutes
Budget $25m
Trailer:

95. Wall-E 2008 USA Andrew Stanton

Wikipedia:

"WALL-E…is a 2008 American animated romantic science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Andrew Stanton, produced by Jim Morris, and written by Stanton and Jim Reardon, based on a story by Stanton and Pete Docter….The film follows a solitary robot named WALL-E on a future, uninhabitable, deserted Earth in 2805, left to clean up garbage. He is visited by a robot called EVE sent from the starship Axiom, with whom he falls in love and pursues across the galaxy.
…WALL-E has minimal dialogue in its early sequences; many of the characters in the film do not have voices, but instead communicate with body language and robotic sounds that were designed by Burtt. The film incorporates various topics including consumerism, corporatocracy, nostalgia, waste management, human environmental impact and concerns, obesity/sedentary lifestyles, and global catastrophic risk.
…The film cost $180 million to produce, a record-breaking sum for an animated film at the time.
…In 2021, WALL-E became the second Pixar feature film (after Toy Story), as well as the fourth Pixar film overall, to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Production
Design
…Stanton wanted WALL-E to be a box and EVE to be like an egg. WALL-E's eyes were inspired by a pair of binoculars Stanton was given when watching the Oakland Athletics play against the Boston Red Sox. He "missed the entire inning" because he was distracted by them. (Peter Hartlaub June 25, 2008. "Planet WALL-E". San Francisco Chronicle).
…Pixar's studies of trash compactors during their visits to recycling stations inspired his body….The animators wanted him to have elbows, but realized this was unrealistic because he is only designed to pull garbage into his body.
…Stanton wanted EVE to be at the higher end of technology, and asked iPod designer Jonathan Ive to inspect her design. He was very impressed. (Bill Desowitz (April 7, 2008). "Stanton Powers Up WALL•E". Animation World Network.)
…To animate their robots, the film's story crew and animation crew watched a Keaton and a Charlie Chaplin film every day for almost a year, and occasionally a Harold Lloyd picture. Afterwards, the filmmakers knew all emotions could be conveyed silently. [Tasha Robinson (June 26, 2008). "Andrew Stanton". The A.V. Club.]…
…
Themes
The film is recognized as a social criticism. Katherine Ellison asserts that "Americans produce nearly 400 million tons of solid waste per year but recycle less than a third of it, according to a recent Columbia University study."
…
In "WALL-E: from environmental adaption to sentimental nostalgia," Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann explain the important theme of nostalgia in this film. Nostalgia is clearly represented by human artifacts, left behind, that WALL-E collects and cherishes, for example Zippo lighters, hubcaps, and plastic sporks. These modern items that are used out of necessity are made sentimental through the lens of the bleak future of Earth. …WALL-E expresses nostalgia also, by reflecting on romantic themes of older Disney and silent films.
Stanton describes the theme of the film as "irrational love defeats life's programming" [Steve Fritz (July 4, 2008). "How Andrew Stanton & Pixar Created WALL*E – Part II".]…
Technology
…Christian journalist Rod Dreher saw technology as the complicated villain of the film. The humans' artificial lifestyle on the Axiom has separated them from nature, making them "slaves of both technology and their own base appetites, and have lost what makes them human".
…Humans on the ship and on Earth have overused robots and the ultra-modern technology. During the end credits, humans and robots are shown working alongside each other to renew the Earth. "WALL-E is not a Luddite film," he said. "It doesn't demonize technology. It only argues that technology is properly used to help humans cultivate their true nature—that it must be subordinate to human flourishing, and help move that along.” [Rod Dreher (July 5, 2008). ""Wall-E": Aristotelian, crunchy con". Beliefnet]
Religion
The Axiom and EVE have been compared to the legend of Noah's Ark and the dove that Noah sets forth from the Ark.
Stanton, who is a Christian, named EVE after the Biblical figure because WALL-E's loneliness reminded him of Adam, before God created his wife…EVE uses the plant to tell humanity to return to Earth and move away from…the lazy lifestyle…. In cohesion with the classical Christian viewpoint, WALL-E shows that work is what makes humans human.

…Reception
…Critical response
…Richard Corliss of Time named WALL-E his favorite film of 2008 (and later of the decade)…Other critics who named WALL-E their favorite film of 2008 included Tom Charity of CNN, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, A. O. Scott of The New York Times, Christopher Orr of The New Republic, Ty Burr and Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe, Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal, and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker.
…Several conservative commentators criticized the film. Shannen W. Coffin of National Review said that WALL-E is "leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind"….Glenn Beck said that "I can't wait to teach my kids how we've destroyed the Earth … Pixar is teaching. I can't wait. You know if your kid has ever come home and said, 'Dad, how come we use so much styrofoam,' oh, this is the movie for you."


Run time 1 hour 37 minutes
Budget $80
Trailer:
Clip:

Francis Ha (2012) USA

96. Embrace of the Serpent 2015 Colombia Ciro Guerra

Wikipedia:
“Embrace of the Serpent (Spanish: El abrazo de la serpiente) is a 2015 internationally co-produced adventure drama film directed by Ciro Guerra, and written by Guerra and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal. Shot almost entirely in black and white…It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.
…It has received universal acclaim from critics, who praised the cinematography and the story's theme, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and way of life by white colonialism….
Plot
The film tells two stories thirty years apart, both featuring Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his tribe. He travels with two scientists, firstly with the German Theo von Martius in 1909 and then with an American named Evan in 1940, to look for the rare yakruna, a (fictional) sacred plant.
Theo, an ethnographer from Tübingen who has already been residing in the Amazon for several years, is very sick and is travelling by canoe with his field notes and a westernised local named Manduca whom he had saved from enslavement on a rubber plantation. Karamakate prolongs his life, blasting white powder called "the sun's semen”… up his nose, but is reluctant to become involved with a westerner and refuses his money. Theo is searching for yakruna as the only cure for his disease and the three set off in the canoe to search for it.
….Thirty years later an American botanist, Evan, paddles up to a much older Karamakate who has apparently forgotten the customs of his own people. Evan says he is hoping to complete Theo's quest and Karamakate does assist, again reluctantly, saying his knowledge is spent. Evan has a book of Theo's final trek, which his aide had sent back to Europe, as he did not survive the jungle. The book includes an image of Karamakate…
Karamakate agrees to help him only when Evan describes himself as someone who has devoted himself to plants, although Evan's real purpose is actually to secure disease-free rubber trees, since the United States' supplies of rubber from South East Asia had dwindled due to the Japanese wartime advance.
Both expeditions feature a Spanish Catholic Mission by the side of an Amazon tributary, run in 1909 by a sadistic, lone Spanish priest who beats orphan boys for any "pagan" behaviour, and in 1940 by a delusional Brazilian figure who believes he is the Messiah….By now the children of 1909 have grown into disturbed and violent acolytes.
Cast
…After his attempt in reaching out to a variety of indigenous people, it had come to his attention that the older generation were completely detached from the time depicted within the film. Through watching a film over 10 years ago in a workshop with Colombia's Ministry of Culture, Guerra was able to find the perfect actor, Antonio Bolívar. Bolívar's two minute presence in the short film had a great impact on Guerra, encouraging him to pursue appointing him the role of Karamakate as "There was nobody else that could play this guy. He's one of the last Ocaina people remaining. There's only about sixteen of them left."
…The film explores the representation of the first people nations of the Amazon. In the film multiple languages are spoken…The indigenous peoples are shown to have suffered at the hands of colonizers, and Colombian film critic and author Pedro Adrián Zuluaga states that Guerra highlights this by "shooting peripheric geographies... and bringing to the centre of the narrative an unavoidable contradiction between progress and tradition". [Zuluaga, Pedro Adrián; Munoz, Gabriella (December 2018). "Contemporary Colombian cinema: the splintered mirror of a country". Senses of Cinema]
Daniela Berghahn, professor of film studies at the Royal Holloway, University of London, notes how through time-lapse, Guerra highlights the pillaging of the Amazon rain forest by conquistadors, missionaries and rubber barons, and also the enslavement and degradation of the indigenous peoples, who were converted to Christianity — the character Manduca is both enslaved and Westernised — at the cost of their traditions and beliefs.
Similarly, Nicolás Cadena wrote for NACLA that Guerra's filmmaking illustrates how "the white man’s knowledge, expressed through symbols like the compass and the characters of Theo and Evans, extracts the spirit, tradition, and humanity of the indigenous inhabitants much like rubber is extracted from the Amazonian rubber trees". ["Embrace of the Serpent: Reframing the Colombian Amazon". NACLA.]
…
Production
Before production started, the director spent two and a half years researching the Colombian Amazon. They discovered a part of the jungle in the north west that had not yet been heavily affected by tourism or commerce and after gaining permission from the local community, they decided on the location. The pre-production and shooting took place over the course of three months with the help of around 40 people from outside the Amazon and 60 people from indigenous communities within the Amazon. The director extensively collaborated with the community and invited them to participate and collaborate both in front and behind the camera. To avoid any problems caused by the harsh environment, the indigenous people taught the crew how to work with the jungle and performed rituals for spiritual protection. There were no accidents or illnesses and the shooting ran smoothly. Additionally, to improve accuracy, indigenous individuals worked with Guerra to translate and rewrite parts of the script. [Berghahn, Daniela (Winter 2017). "Encounters with Cultural Difference: Cosmopolitanism and Exoticism in Tanna (Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, 2015)…Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (14): 16–40]
Embrace of the Serpent was filmed in the Amazonía region of Colombia. Seven weeks were spent filming in the Department of Vaupés, and one week in the Department of Guainía. Location details include:
Cerros de Mavicure – three mounds that form part of the westernmost part of the Guiana Shield in northern South America.
Fluvial Star Inírida – a Ramsar Wetland that includes part of the Inírida River.
Vaupés River – tributary of the Amazon River that forms part of the international border between Colombia and Brazil.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack…contains nine songs composed by Nascuy Linares. The film also features The Creation by Joseph Haydn and the participation of Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
Reception
Critical response
…Indiewire's Jessica Kiang…described the character of Karamakate as "an immaculate portrait of the unfathomable loneliness and crushing survivor's guilt that comes with being the last of one's kind".
Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter described the film as "a visually mesmerizing exploration of man, nature and the destructive powers of colonialism"…
Chang of Variety gave a positive review of the film. He wrote: "At once blistering and poetic, not just an ethnographic study but also a striking act of cinematic witness..."…
Response from the indigenous community
The film was well received by the Amazonian community featured in the film. A special screening was held in the jungles of Colombia, in a makeshift cinema. With tribal people from all over the area showing up, not everyone could be seated. After the film finished, they asked for it to be shown again. [Mathiesen, Karl (8 June 2016). "Embrace of the Serpent star: 'My tribe is nearly extinct'". The Guardian.]
Accolades
…The Governor of the Guainía Department decorated Ciro Guerra with the Order of the Inírida Flower for "exalting the respect and value of the indigenous populations, likewise giving the Department recognition for tourism and culture".”

Running time 2 hours 5 minutes
Budget $1.4m
Trailer:
Review:

I haven't checked them all, but hopefully the hyperlinks in the OP to each film should work OK.

I have also removed the dedication to Whitney Houston.

I can't do any more. I give you the greatest films list ever. And....tumbleweed.

None of those critics have come up with a list this good. Ebert. None of the directors. Kurosawa (although his is decent, I noticed we have several the same).

The Sight and Sound guys. The guy in Australia with his....1000 movies thing.

None of them. None of them are worth 10p to a pound against my list. And yet here we are. On a movie forum. Movie people. And, not an iota of interest.

You know why? I've said before. I've just strolled in. Some punk who 5 years ago didn't know a thing about classic movies. Who literally thought that there were no films prior to 1940. That's actually true. I started this exercise in the 2010s and worked backwards, and until I got to the 1960s, I assumed that was going to be the final decade on the basis that nothing of any significance had been made prior to that date.

And yet here we are. Just 3 or 4 years later.

Look who's got the list now.

Just feast your eyes on that beauty. Look at it. Look at those films. Cast your glance slowly down that list.

What do you think of that??

Let me know please when you see a bad one on there.

In fact, let me know, when you see one on there that isn't great. Even the ones you might not know, might not even have heard of.

I have. I've heard of them. I've watched them. I found them. Not discovered them, I'm not claiming that. But in my search for the greatest movies, I identified them. And if you doubt their greatness, check them out, Watch them. And judge for yourself. Take that benefit from my work, my research, my analysis. My investigation. And let me know, if you think I've picked out a dud, tell me.

But I think you'll find that I haven't. Every one of those films represents movie greatness. They have made it onto the greatest list of movies ever made.

It was actually the 60s I thought would be the first decade. Incredibly.

I also estimate that when I started my research around 4 years ago, I had heard of something like 34 of the films which are now on my top 100 list, and had watched I think 16 of them.

My reviews are mostly appalling.
I will rewatch the films and do proper reviews sometime.
I apologise again for the shockingly inept reviews.

film choices 100/100
film research info 85/100
reviews 15/100

97. La La Land 2016 USA Damien Chazelle

It’s not the film that I have as the number one of all time, but if my heart belongs to a film (perhaps even including The Bodyguard) then it belongs to La La Land. Its technical standards have been criticised, I think understandably; there are scenes where Gosling is with his band, that to me just look cheap and tacky. Perhaps this is reflected in the fact that the budget was not exactly astronomical, but it’s still disappointing. That said….who cares? It’s an emotional ride. The last scene…it gets me every time. I’d struggle to think of any movie seen that captures me quite as intently. It’s just magic, and that’s why people go to the movies.

Wikipedia
"La La Land is a 2016 American musical romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle. It stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a struggling jazz pianist and an aspiring actress who meet and fall in love while pursuing their dreams in Los Angeles…
Having been fond of musicals during his time as a drummer, Chazelle first conceptualized the film alongside Justin Hurwitz while attending Harvard University together. …After the success of his film Whiplash (2014), the project was picked up by Summit Entertainment….with the film's score composed by Hurwitz, who also wrote the film's songs with lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and the dance choreography by Mandy Moore.
…The film emerged as a major commercial success, grossing $472 million worldwide on a budget of $30 million, and received widespread critical acclaim, particularly for Chazelle's direction and screenplay, the performances of Gosling and Stone, the score, musical numbers, cinematography, visual style, costumes and production design…
…Pre-production
Chazelle first conceived the idea for the film while attending Harvard University with Justin Hurwitz, the film's composer.
…Chazelle…idea was "to take the old musical but ground it in real life where things don't always exactly work out," and to salute creative people who move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams
[Smith, Nigel M (September 8, 2016). "Damien Chazelle on La La Land: 'Los Angeles is full of people chasing dreams'". The Guardian]
…The style and tone of the film were inspired by Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort…also…Singin' in the Rain…An American in Paris….About An American in Paris, Chazelle commented…
"They're both about the struggle of being an artist and reconciling your dreams with the need to be human. La La Land is just much less angry about it."[ McGovern, Joe (August 30, 2016). "La La Land director on the 'timeless glamour' of Ryan Gosling & Emma Stone". Entertainment Weekly.]
…Casting
…Emma Stone plays Mia, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles. Stone has loved musicals since she saw Les Misérables when she was eight years old. She said "bursting into song has always been a real dream of mine"
…Ryan Gosling plays Sebastian, a jazz pianist…
Filming
From the beginning, Chazelle wanted the film's musical numbers to be filmed "head to toe" and performed in a single take, like those of the 1930s works of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He also wanted the film to emulate the widescreen, CinemaScope look of 1950s musicals such as It's Always Fair Weather. Consequently, the movie was shot on celluloid 4-perf Super 35mm film (not digitally) with Panavision anamorphic lenses in CinemaScope's 2.55:1 aspect ratio, but not in true CinemaScope as that technology is no longer available.
[Gay, Jason (October 14, 2016). "Emma Stone Takes the Biggest Leap of Her Career With La La Land". Vogue.] ["Shot in CinemaScope, La La Land vibrantly romances the olden days of Hollywood". Kodak]
Chazelle wanted Los Angeles to be the primary setting for his film, commenting that "there is something very poetic about the city I think, about a city that is built by people with these unrealistic dreams and people who kind of just put it all on the line for that."
[Anderson, Ariston (August 31, 2016). "'La La Land': Emma Stone, Director Damien Chazelle Talk Bringing Back Hope in Films". The Hollywood Reporter.]
…
Critical response
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone garnered widespread critical acclaim for their performances, earning them Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress, with Stone winning.
La La Land received widespread critical acclaim, with high praise directed towards Chazelle's direction and screenplay, cinematography, music, the performances of Gosling and Stone and their chemistry.
…Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale…
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave La La Land four stars out of four, describing it as "a hot miracle" and complimenting its musical numbers, particularly the opening scene. He went on to name it his favorite movie of the year…
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded the film five out of five stars, describing it as "a sun-drenched musical masterpiece."
…La La Land's competition for awards and critical attention with the African-American film Moonlight shortly after the election of Donald Trump sharpened the attention on questions of racial sensitivity and unexamined white privilege in the characters of film.
…Kelly Lawler of USA Today noted that Gosling's character has been referred to as a "white savior" by some critics, for "his quest (and eventual success) to save the traditionally black musical genre from extinction, seemingly the only person who can accomplish such a goal."
[Lawler, Kelly (January 11, 2017). "The Oscar race: The case against 'La La Land'". USA Today.]
…The South China Morning Post remarked that aside from its racial treatment of jazz, much of the public criticism was towards the film being "a little dull", the two leads' singing and dancing being considered unexceptional, and the lack of nuance in Stone's character, with Gosling's occasionally seen as insufferable.”

Runtime: 2 hours 8 minutes
Budget: $30m
Trailer:

98. The Lighthouse 2019 USA Robert Eggers

Stunning to look at, and has some really cool bits.

Wikipedia:

"The Lighthouse is a 2019 film directed and produced by Robert Eggers, from a screenplay he co-wrote with his brother Max Eggers. It stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers in turmoil after being marooned at a remote New England outpost by a wild storm. The film has defied categorization in media, and interpretations of it range among horror film, psychological thriller, or character study, among others.
The idea for the film first emerged from Max Eggers's re-envisioning of Edgar Allan Poe's unfinished short story of the same name. …The Lighthouse draws visually from photography of 1890s New England, maritime-themed French cinema from the 1930s, and symbolist art. Principal photography took place in Nova Scotia, Canada, beginning in April 2018 and lasting slightly over a month. It was shot in black-and-white, with a nearly-square 1.19:1 aspect ratio.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2019, and was theatrically released in the United States by A24 on October 18, 2019. It…received widespread critical acclaim, with particular praise for the direction, visuals, and performances of Dafoe and Pattinson. …
Production
Development
…One story that caught the director's attention in his initial research was a nineteenth-century myth of an incident at Smalls Lighthouse in Wales, wherein one of two wickies, both named Thomas, died while trapped at the outpost by a destructive storm. That both men were named Thomas, Robert recalled, compelled him to create a film with an underlying story of identity.[8]
…Robert immersed himself in photos of 1890s New England, 1930s maritime-themed French films, and symbolist art for visual reference.[6][8]The Eggers' study of literature with maritime and surrealist themes informed the speech of the characters in The Lighthouse.[9]
…Another force shaping The Lighthouse's creative direction was the Eggers' theater background. The two men sourced elements from playwrights that influenced their work as young teens, chiefly artists such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard whose writings examine male-centric perspectives of existential crises and psychosis.[6]
Casting
…Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred in Eggers's directorial debut The Witch, was eager to work with him again and asked if she could play the mermaid. Eggers replied that there was not a role for her and she "really should not be this particular mermaid". Taylor-Joy then jokingly suggested that she could play a seagull instead.[14]

Filming
A lighthouse
The Lighthouse film set, Nova Scotia, Canada
Because the filmmakers could not find a lighthouse suitable for the needs of the production, they constructed a 70-foot (20-meter) lighthouse set on Cape Forchu in Leif Erikson Park in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. Most of the interiors were filmed on sets constructed inside a hangar at Yarmouth Airport and in soundstages near Halifax. Principal photography…lasted approximately 35 days, which was slightly over schedule, as a result of unforeseen circumstances on set….
….Initially, Eggers wanted to use a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, believing it would sufficiently capture the confined sets and the lighthouse's vertical orientation, but he reconsidered when Blaschke suggested, as a joke, instead using the 1.19:1 aspect ratio that was used fleetingly during the film industry's transition to sound. After further analysis of period films for inspiration, chiefly the German thriller M (1931), Blaschke determined that the 1.19:1 format endowed footage with a greater sense of confinement, while amplifying the physical isolation of the characters in their environment, and the film was shot in that ratio.[17] The film was shot on 35mm film using Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2 cameras equipped with vintage Bausch and Lomb Baltar lenses. Occasionally, to capture flashback sequences or scenes of heightened conflict, specialized lenses refurbished by Panavision were used.[17]
The onscreen universe was given a highly saturated visual palette evocative of orthochromatic film. Creating the spectrum of textures with a sufficient antique quality was one of Blaschke's initial responsibilities during the pre-production. He developed a process to test the utility of digital footage in color negative film stock, first with Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 film, before selecting Eastman Double-X 5222 stock based on the composition produced.[23]
Blaschke resumed the testing after securing the Baltar lenses for the shoot, this time with an arrangement of shortpass filters—a class of scientific optical filters—and photographic filters most sensitive to blue-green and ultraviolet light.[23]
The specifications were so unusual that it required the manufacture of custom sets of filters by Schneider Kreuznach, which was a costly, month-long endeavor. Blaschke recalled, "I sketched a desired spectrograph on graph paper, indicating a complete elimination of all light beyond 570 nanometers [mid-yellow] while allowing all shorter wavelengths to pass freely. At that point, I was unsure of the true light loss and I was pretty nervous about it."[17]
Music and sound design
Main article: The Lighthouse (soundtrack)
Mark Korven provided the musical score for The Lighthouse. He previously scored for Eggers's directorial debut The Witch which accompanied a string-based score. Eggers wanted to deviate from using strings throughout the score, and instead use horns, pipes, and conch shells,[26] evoking the mythology of the sea in an aleatoric manner through textures and instrumentation.[27][28] Eggers then sent a playlist that contained classic horror scores, ancient Greek conch shell music, and compositions of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi.[29][30]
Apart from the aforementioned instruments, the musical palette included cello, double bass, brass, percussion, woodwinds and instruments Korven had experimented, with an apprehension engine also being used as the score.[27]…
Analysis
Genre
The Lighthouse has been described as a horror film….and as a psychological thriller….
Psychoanalysis
Eggers said the film's subtext was influenced by Sigmund Freud and he hoped that "it's a movie where both Jung and Freud would be furiously eating their popcorn".[40][41]
Given his simultaneous fear and admiration of the senior lighthouse keeper, the younger keeper displays an Oedipal fixation. Pattinson commented on the father-son dynamic in the film by stating that "I was pretty conscious of how I wanted the relationship to come across. In a lot of ways, he sort of wants a daddy" and that, as the film progresses, his character is increasingly "looking for Willem [Dafoe]'s validation" as both a boss and a father-figure.[41][42]
The film also echoes the Jungian archetype of the shadow, the unknown "dark side" or blind spot of one's personality….
Mythology
In the film, the senior lighthouse keeper Thomas warns the younger keeper Ephraim of a maritime superstition that is bad luck to kill a seabird, specifically an Albatross. However, after getting irritated by one, Ephraim kills a seabird and brings on a storm that traps the two men on the island. At the end of the film, Ephraim is seen on the ground with seagulls plucking out his organs. This plot invokes the 1798 poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which a mariner kills an Albatross and brings disaster to his ship.[43]
The fate of the younger lighthouse keeper also invokes the myth of Prometheus, as, after finally reaching the light and learning what is in it, he falls down the stairs of the lighthouse and his organs are plucked out by seagulls. On the other hand, the older keeper was modeled on Proteus, a "prophecy-telling ocean god who serves Poseidon", as he "makes that uncannily accurate prediction for how Ephraim will die at the end of the movie"[40] and is even seen with tentacles and sea creatures stuck to his body in one of the younger man's hallucinations….
Box office
The film grossed $10.9 million in the United States and $7.5 million in other territories, for a worldwide box-office total of $18.3 million….
…Owen Gleiberman of Variety called the film "darkly exciting" and "made with extraordinary skill," …Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph gave the film a perfect score, calling Dafoe's performance "astounding" and comparing Pattinson's to that of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, saying, "that's no comparison to make lightly, but everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It's cinema to make your head and soul ring."[65]
….Dana Stevens of Slate concluded her review by stating that… by the end, she became "impatient" with Eggers' "reliance on atmosphere [...] to take the place of story" and found herself "identifying with the stranded seafarers: I desperately wanted to get out."[70]



[6] Fear, David (October 25, 2019). "Drunken Sailors and Movie Stars: Robert Eggers on Making 'The Lighthouse'". Rolling Stone.
[8] Wilkinson, Alissa (October 15, 2019). "The Witch director Robert Eggers spills his beans about The Lighthouse". Vox
[9] Bloomer, Jeffrey (October 22, 2019). "The Director of The Lighthouse Spills a Few Beans About His Movie's Puzzling Ending". Slate
[14] Starkey, Adam (April 14, 2022). "Anya Taylor-Joy asked to play The Lighthouse mermaid but the director said no". NME. Retrieved April 17, 2022.
[17] Thomson, Patricia (January 23, 2020). "Stormy Isle: The Lighthouse". American Cinematographer. Archived from the original on March 7, 2021. Retrieved May 23, 2022.
[23] "Kodak B&W; film delivers a unique visual signature to Robert Eggers' acclaimed fantasy horror 'The Lighthouse'". Kodak. May 16, 2019. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021. Retrieved May 23, 2022.
[26] Erbland, Kate (September 25, 2019). "'The Lighthouse' Exclusive: Try Staying Sane Listening to Mark Korven's Original Score". IndieWire. Archived from the original on June 8, 2023. Retrieved June 8, 2023.
[27] Macaulay, Scott (December 10, 2019). "Sonic Menace: Composer Mark Korven on Scoring Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse". Filmmaker Magazine. Archived from the original on July 6, 2022. Retrieved June 8, 2023.
[28] "Robert Eggers' of The Lighthouse Q+A | Motion Picture Soundtrack Release". Flaunt Magazine. January 18, 2017. Archived from the original on June 8, 2023. Retrieved June 8, 2023.
[29] "Mark Korven on horror, Robert Eggers and the brilliance of Bach". Far Out Magazine. January 31, 2023. Archived from the original on June 8, 2023. Retrieved June 8, 2023.
[30] Scorer, The Film (December 5, 2021). "An Interview with Mark Korven". The Film Scorer. Archived from the original on August 18, 2022. Retrieved June 8, 2023.
[40] Joho, Jess (October 20, 2019). "What the hell did 'The Lighthouse' even mean?". Mashable. Archived from the original on March 29, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
[41] Jacobs, Matthew (October 20, 2019). "'He Sort Of Wants A Daddy': Decoding The Homoeroticism In 'The Lighthouse'". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on June 25, 2021. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
[42] Fandango All Access (October 29, 2019). "Robert Pattinson & Robert Eggers Break Down a Scene from 'The Lighthouse'". Archived from the original on January 27, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020 – via Youtube.
[43] Fletcher, Rosie (February 1, 2020). "The Lighthouse: the myths and archetypes behind the movie explained". Den of Geek. Retrieved June 18, 2023.
[65] Collin, Robbie (May 19, 2019). "The Lighthouse, review: 'A film that will make your head and soul ring'". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on June 10, 2019. Retrieved September 15, 2019.
[70] Stevens, Dana (October 16, 2019). "The Lighthouse Is Both Artsy and Fartsy". Slate. Archived from the original on February 25, 2021. Retrieved June 24, 2021.

Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes
Budget $11m
Trailer:
Clip:

99. Apollo 11 (doc) 2019 USA Todd Douglas Miller

A fascinating insight into the incredible feat of making it to the moon against the odds. Equally fascinating look at 1960s America at a landmark moment in the history of humankind.

Wikipedia:
“Apollo 11 is a 2019 American documentary film edited, produced, and directed by Todd Douglas Miller. It focuses on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the first spaceflight to land humans on the Moon. The film consists solely of archival footage, including 70 mm film previously unreleased to the public, and does not feature narration, interviews, or modern recreations. The Saturn V rocket, Apollo 11 crew (consisting of Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins), and Apollo program Earth-based mission operations engineers are prominently featured in the film….
Production
Video from the National Archives
In late 2016, Todd Douglas Miller had recently completed work on The Last Steps, a documentary short about Apollo 17, when British archival producer and film editor Stephen Slater suggested making a similarly themed documentary for the upcoming 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. CNN Films subsequently became a partner in the project.
Miller's conception of the film was centered on a direct cinema approach. The final film contains no voice-over narration or interviews beyond what was available in the contemporary source material. Portions of the mission are illustrated by animated graphics depicting the parts of the Apollo spacecraft as line drawings, the designs of which are based on the cel-animated graphics in Theo Kamecke's 1971 documentary Moonwalk One. In addition, three wordless biographical sequences summarize the lives of Edwin Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins up to 1969 by means of family photographs and archive footage.
In May 2017, cooperation between Miller's production team, NASA, and the National Archives and Records Administration resulted in the discovery of unreleased 70 mm footage from the preparation, launch, mission control operations, recovery, and post flight activities of Apollo 11. The large-format footage includes scenes from Launch Complex 39, spectators present for the launch, the launch of the Saturn V rocket, the recovery of the astronauts and the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, and post-mission activities aboard the USS Hornet. The film incorporates this footage alongside 35 mm and 16 mm footage, still photography, and closed-circuit television footage.
Apollo 11: First Steps Edition, a 47-minute edit of the film for exhibition in museum IMAX theaters, includes extended large-format scenes that differ from the full-length documentary.
…
In addition to hundreds of hours of video, the production team sourced over 11,000 hours of audio recordings…
Accuracy
The film took a few liberties with the timeline of the mission. For example, an incident occurred during the return voyage—on day 8 of the mission—involving the disconnection of Michael Collins's biomedical sensor (his impedance pneumograph), which led him to wisecrack, "I promise to let you know if I stop breathing,"[14] but this event is depicted in the film as happening during the approach to the Moon before the separation of the command module Columbia and Lunar Module Eagle.

Reception
Box office
Its opening weekend in theaters, Apollo 11 grossed $1.6 million from 120 IMAX theaters (a per-venue gross of $13,392), finishing 15th at the box office.[21] The following weekend, the film gave up most of its IMAX venues to newcomer Captain Marvel, but played in a total of 405 traditional theaters, and made $1.3 million, finishing 10th at the box office.[22] The film continued to hold well its third weekend of release, grossing $1.2 million from 588 theaters (a drop of just 2% from the weekend before).[23]

Critical response
…David Ehrlich of IndieWire complimented Miller's ability to make the Moon landing sequence in the film feel unique and thrilling, and stated that the clarity of the footage "takes your breath away".[26]
…Glenn Kenny of The New York Times called the film "entirely awe-inspiring", and wrote, "Although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense. And it rekindles a crazy sense of wonder at, among other things, what one can do practically with trigonometry."[1][note 1]
Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film four-out-of-four stars, calling it "an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill. [...] Films this completely imagined and ecstatically realized are so rare that when one comes along, it makes most other movies, even the good ones, seem underachieving. Any information that you happen to absorb while viewing Apollo 11 is secondary to the visceral experience of looking at it and listening to it."[28]

Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Trailer:
Preview:


…References
[1]Kenny, Glenn (February 27, 2019). "'Apollo 11' Review: The 1969 Moon Mission Still Has the Power to Thrill". The New York Times. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
[14] "Apollo 11: Day 8, part 2: More Television and Stowage for Re-entry". NASA. August 6, 2019.
[21] D'Alessandro, Anthony (March 3, 2019). "'Dragon 3' Keeps The Fire Burning At No. 1 With $30M Second Weekend; 'Madea' Mints $27M". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved March 3, 2019.
[22] D'Alessandro, Anthony (March 11, 2019). "'Captain Marvel' Tramples Internet Trolls & Skyrockets To $160M Opening". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved March 11, 2019.
[23] D'Alessandro, Anthony (March 17, 2019). "'Captain Marvel' Rises To Second Best 2nd Weekend In March With $69M+ – Sunday AM Update". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved March 17, 2019.
[26] Ehrlich, David (January 25, 2019). "Apollo 11 Review: Astonishing NASA Doc Takes You Back in Time". IndieWire. Penske Business Media. Retrieved January 30, 2019.
[28] Seitz, Matt Zoller (March 1, 2019). "Apollo 11 Movie Review & Film Summary (2019)". RogerEbert.com. Ebert Digital LLC. Retrieved March 2, 2019.

100. Fire of Love (doc) 2022 France Sara Dosa

Wikipedia:
“Fire of Love
Fire of Love is a 2022 independent documentary film about the lives and careers of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. Directed, written, and produced by Sara Dosa, the film had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2022… It was released on July 6, 2022, by National Geographic Documentary Films and Neon….

Synopsis
The film tells the story of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, a daring couple bound by their love for each other and their shared obsession with volcanoes. Through rare archival footage and a poetic French New Wave-inspired narrative, the film chronicles their two-decade journey of capturing the Earth’s most explosive phenomena, standing perilously close to fiery eruptions in their quest for scientific discovery and breathtaking imagery. As their passion pushes the boundaries of safety, the documentary explores the philosophical and emotional depths of their commitment to understanding the planet’s volatile beauty, culminating in their tragic final expedition to Mount Unzen in 1991…

…Reception
Box office
In the United States and Canada, the film earned $22,416 from three theaters in its opening weekend….(total box office revenue) $1.8m…

Runtime 93 minutes
Trailer:

100. Whitney Houston: The Concert For a New South Africa (doc) 2024 USA Marty Caller

Sorry I was editing the OP and ticked include in member reviews inadvertently.

If you exclude documentaries and animations, there are only 4 films from the last 23 years make my top 100.
If you include them there's still only 7.
I have only 1 non-documentary in the last decade. That's pitiful.

Touch of Evil, and very likely Taxi Driver, will be integrated into this list at some point.

Not 100%, but the Color of Pomegranates will likely be removed unfortunately.
Astonished as I am to say it, Blade Runner is also on very thin ice.

The Master and owing to its reputation Vertigo, will shortly also be getting a shot at salvation.