Summary Judgements #2

Open City (1945) A landmark film, the meaning of which goes beyond the immediate drama of the story and its historical genesis, where the struggle of daily existence and life's tragedies are related unadorned and with supreme empathy and authenticity, of its time and beyond time, grounded in real lives played out in real homes and real streets. Open City opened up the horizon not only of a freedom so harshly won, but of a new cinema beyond the 'illusion of reality'. Vittoria de Sica in his introduction to the published script for Miracle in Milan, wrote the neo-realists "offered a transformed reality from which they drew forth the inner, human, and therefore universal meaning: it is reality transposed to the realm of poetry". When Francesco speaks to Pina on the eve of their wedding, he speaks of aspirations that are timeless: "We're fighting for something that has to be, that can't help coming. Maybe the way is hard, it may take a long time, but we'll get there, and we'll see a better world. And our kids will see it. Marcello and - him, the baby that coming". [From my review of The Grapes of Wrath]

Bicycle Thieves (1948) Visual poetry; a truth beyond artifice; a transfiguration of the everyday to the realm of the sublime; the love, the sorrow, and the pity of real lives lived in earnest and without ego, artifice, affectation or ambition. Art for the people of the people and for all time.

Casino Royale (2006) Banal and boring. The new Bond is a fascist. Innocent bodies drop like flies as Bond establishes his hero persona with his macho daring-do and his elongated gun-cum-phallus. The body count is only necessary ‘collateral damage’ in the greater ‘just cause’.

The Air I Breathe (2007) A very unusual Hollywood movie that goes beyond genre and episodically explores dark and mystical motifs: memory, love, violence, criminality, ambition, alienation, urban ennui, existential angst, causality, serendipity, and even the butterfly effect cum six degrees of separation.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) An ugly urban fable, that by it’s end leaves you stunned as to why this film should have been made at all. A family of psychotics in a killing frenzy like the sharks in Orson Well’s 'The Lady From Shanghai': "Then the beasts took to eating each other. In their frenzy… they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes. And you could smell the death reeking up out of the sea".

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) Not perfect but a quirky engaging celebration of true freedom in all it’s darkness and richness. The film is weakest when it tries to analyze the reasons for the journey, and in the banal interlude at the nunnery. We don’t need a reason for living… or for dying.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) A strange violent story of nostalgia and social mis-critique. Working-class Boston is portrayed in a pseudo-realist opening sequence of urban ennui and alienation as some 'lost' place, where an urban flatfoot and his girl-friend get to play judge, jury, and executioner, with a climax where the gumshoe executes an un-armed and deranged psychopath in a squalid tenement. Fascist violence as urban justice - rollover Tarantino.

There Will be Blood (2008) A rambling confusing epic with no soul.