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John Carpenter  Ranked   For anyone’s whose formative film viewing experience took place during the 1980s, certain directors held undeniable, persuasive genre (SF/fantasy/horror genre) cachet. James Cameron. Ridley Scott (when he was tackling genre). Joe Dante. David Cronenberg. John Carpenter. Thanks to Halloween, Carpenter’s name became synonymous with horror, but he made relatively few undiluted movies in that vein (the aforementioned, The Fog, Christine, Prince of Darkness – although, it has an SF/fantasy streak – In the Mouth of Madness, The Ward). Certainly, the pictures that cemented my appreciation for his work – Dark Star, The Thing – had only a foot or not at all in that mode. Carpenter flirted

Alfred Hitchcock  Ranked: 26-1   The master’s top tier ranked from worst to best. You can find 52-27 here.  The Lodger (1927) The first real sign of the director’s signature style, and by some distance, the best film of his silent period. The Lodger finds a – yes – innocent man under suspicion of being a murderer, a ripper-in-their-midst idea Hitch would still find appealing as much as 45 years later with Frenzy. Rather like Grant in Suspicion – well, in spite of the director’s intentions – the titular lodger couldn’t be the killer because he’s played by Ivor Novello. The first of his movies that could

2020-21 Bests-of, Worsts-of and Everything Else Besides   As one, year-end lists and retrospectives are keen to see the back of 2020, doubtless under the blithe illusion – or brazen fabrication – that what’s coming next will be any kind of improvement. The good news is, if you’re into ramped-up New World Orders, you’re in clover. Otherwise, the outlook is far less rosy. My take on such matters comes via an ostensibly filmic blog, which may at least temper the veneer of doom mongering beneath a slick, or sick, auteurish sheen. Or perhaps not. I did manage to see a

Star Wars The Saga Ranked   This is an update of an earlier ranking (not ported over from Now in Full Color to Knowledgeable Cabbages), with the addition of highly-acclaimed The Rise of Skywalker, along with revisits to the two preceding parts of the trilogy. If you want to be generous and call it that, since the term it makes it sound a whole lot more coherent than it plays.  Rogue One (2016) (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) I’m well aware Rogue One has its staunch admirers, many crowning it the best of Lucasfilm’s post-Disney purchase output. Unfortunately, it’s just the opposite: an

The MCU Ranked Worst to Best   This is an update of earlier rankings.* I’d intended to post it months ago, but these things get side-tracked. You can find the additions of Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home and a revised assessment of Ant-Man and the Wasp. There are also a few tweaks here and there.  The First Avenger: Captain America (2011) Some fans place The First Avenger in their top tier, or even anoint it their favourite – heaven forfend – of the MCU. Which is fine and all, each to their own, but I simply cannot see it. My Cap 1 experience was largely dull

Quentin Tarantino  Ranked   The debate continues, particularly with the typically divisive Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, over whether Quentin Tarantino deserves all the attention lavished on him. Is he a true talent with a deceptive amount to say? Or a showy, shallow pretender to the auteur crown, who gets the press he does because he’s pretty much alone in an arid desert of popular original filmmaking, one where cinema is all-but suffocated by franchise overload. And a foot fetishist to boot (fine if the recipient of his attentions is a consenting adult, but if not…) Of course, Tarantino created his

And the Oscar Should Have Gone to… The 1999 Contenders Ranked   For a year commonly cited – in my view, seemingly at random – as the best year ever for movies, it’s notable that 72nd Academy Awards’ vanguard Best Picture Oscar nominees have either fallen from grace (American Beauty, The Green Mile, even The Sixth Sense is less feted after two decades of M Night Shyamalan repeatedly using the same template) or been forgotten (The Cider House Rules, The Insider). I’d argue that rather reflects a not-quite-vintage year generally. Still, there’s only one picture there that had absolutely no business even being within

And the Oscar Should Have Gone to… The 1994 Contenders Ranked   It isn’t every year you can say the Oscars at least had an interesting selection of nominees, but 1994 managed not only that, but it also included two unassailable classics among the five Best Picture contenders. Also unlike most years, there isn’t an enormously misjudged dud in the ranks, and at least three of the pictures represented something different to the usual Academy fare. Four Weddings and a Funeral Four Weddings’ success represented one of those periodic resurgences for British cinema (usually followed by a precipitous plummet), not that Merchant Ivory

Ridley Scott  Ridders Ranked   During the ’80s, I anticipated few filmmakers’ movies more than Ridley Scott’s: those of his fellow xenomorph wrangler James Cameron, perhaps. In both cases, that eagerness for something equalling their early efforts receded as they studiously managed to avoid the heights they had once reached. Cameron’s output dropped off a cliff after he won an Oscar. Contrastingly, Scott’s surged like never before when his film took home gold. Which at least meant he occasionally delivered something interesting. But sadly, it was mostly quantity over quality. Here are the movies Scott has directed in his career

Star Trek The Movies Ranked – Worst to Best    Star Trek: Generations (1994) A grand send-off for Captain James T Kirk, and a stunning translation to the big screen for The Next Generation crew, just that year finishing up their TV voyages. What could possibly go wrong? It was Rick Berman’s idea to pass the baton, which might have seemed like it was soundly underpinning an untested new arena for Picard’s crew but ends up looking eggy for all involved. The only ones who emerge from this disaster with any credit are Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelly, who passed (Nimoy’s put-down

“Predalien” The Alien-Predator-verse ranked   Fox got in there with the shared-universe thing long before the current trend. Fortunately for us, once they had their taste of it, they concluded it wasn’t for them. But still, the Predator and Alien franchises are now forever interconnected, and it better justifies a ranking if you have more than six entries on it. So please, enjoy this rundown of the “Predalien”-verse.  Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007) An almost wilfully wrongheaded desecration of both series’ legacies that attempts to make up for AVP’s relative prurience by being as transgressive as possible. Chestbursters explode from small children! Predaliens impregnate pregnant

1979 – Top 10 Films    Being There Truthfully, Being There is something of a one-joke movie, so something less than a razor-sharp satire in the final analysis: holy fool Chance the gardener is mistaken by the Washington social elite for a sage rather than a simpleton (or “dumb as a jackass”). And that’s it. Typically of Hal Ashby, the picture is invested with an air of immediacy and realism, such that it’s difficult to wholly embrace the heightened conceit (if it were accompanied by the manic buffoonery of The Party or The Pink Panther, the blithely dislocated Chance would seem right at home). Yet

James Cameron  Jimbo Ranked   The salient sense one takes away from a revisit (or, in some less essential cases, first visit) of James Cameron’s filmography is that less-is-more. Which isn’t only a judgement on his predilection for overdoing every element, least flatteringly when this exposes shortcomings in areas such as human relations (romance), philosophy and comedy, but the cumulative fatigue of a body of work that isn’t especially prolific, yet rapidly becomes repetitive in its only-to-himself fascinations and shamelessly cartoonish narratives and characters. After a while, Cameron’s great strengths (namely, as a master technician of action cinema) begin to pale

And the Oscar Should Have Gone to… 1982   Oscar doesn’t often get it right. It doesn’t often even pick the right nominees, let alone the right winner out of those nominees. I thought I might embark on an occasional revisit of those pictures up for the top prize in a given year, and see how they shake out. And, since The Verdict had been on my mind as unjustly missed (you can probably guess how this is going), 1982 felt like as good a year as any to start with. The full reviews can be found elsewhere, but here, in summary,

Joe Dante  Ranked   All of Joe Dante’s big screen outings appear here (barring the couple of scenes he contributed to Rock ‘n’ Roll High School), but only a limited selection of his TV work. You have to draw the line somewhere. Absent then, are his contributions to Amazing Stories, the ’80s Twilight Zone, Eerie, Indiana, Police Squad!, Picture Windows, Night Visions, Hawaii Five-O, Legends of Tomorrow, Salem, Witches of East End, Splatter, CSI: NY and The Greatest Show Ever. I haven’t included TV movie remake Runaway Daughters or pilot The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy either, mainly because I haven’t been able to track them down. If that changes, I may add them to the ranking. Dante’s movie

1978 – Top 10 Films    Dawn of the Dead   I ummed and ahhed several pictures for the 10 spot on this list: Alan Parker’s Midnight Express; Fred Schepsi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith; Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven; and Robert Altman’s A Wedding (which Pauline Kael, generally a big advocate of the director, called “a busted bag of marbles”). In the end, I decided to fill it with a horror movie, that least respected genre, and it was a toss-up between Halloween and Dawn of the Dead. While Carpenter is one of my favourite directors (most of his post-80s output aside), Halloween has never been in my top

David Bowie Top 10 Performances   The death of David Bowie has left a Ziggy-sized, Aladdin Sane-sized, Thin White Duke-sized hole in the world. As a musician, he was obviously peerless, but as an actor? As an actor, even a cracked one, Bowie seemed to get a continually frosty reception from critics, his performances frequently subjected to the common refrain that he, indeed, could not act. Of course, there was always the exception of The Man Who Fell to Earth, because he was just playing himself there. I’ve never understood the barb; I can see Bowie wasn’t necessarily preeminent in the

Top 10  Christmas Movies   Christmas movies, they tend to get a bit of a free pass. Most of them aren’t all that good, but if you’re in a compliant mood and somewhat soporific, they’re fairly inoffensive. As such, this list is perhaps not infinitely variable, but only the top half of it could withstand a battering at any other time of year. And, since the season’s wholesale sentimentality can be something of a turn-off, there’s a good sprinkling of the caustic in this Christmas countdown.   Scrooged (1988) If you can get past, or rather stop before, the indigestible ending,

1977 – Top 10 Films    A Bridge Too Far Not so much for the typically stodgy execution from (Sir) Dickie Attenborough as the masterful juggling of elements and faces courtesy of William Goldman’s screenplay and the casting department. A Bridge Too Far is a huge film telling of an Allied failure, yet it manages to be entirely engrossing, even if that’s as much to do with star spotting as it is taking in the string of mistakes that embodied Operation Market-Garden. I’m not a big fan of Gung-Ho war movies, unless they’re suitably irreverent (Where Eagles Dare, for example), but despite

1976 – Top 10 Films    Marathon Man John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man is little more than slick pulp, scribed by one of the best in the business (William Goldman, who also delivered the No.1 in this list). It rode the crest of a mini-wave of Nazi war criminal movies that included The Odessa File and saw Laurence Olivier go from villain in this to hero in the amusingly crackpot The Boys from Brazil. Hoffman’s dedication to his role – running and running, and staying up nights before a scene, leading to the famous “Why don’t you just try acting?” quote attributed to Olivier; used as

1975 Top 10 Films    Barry Lyndon There are those who will claim every one of Stanley Kubrick’s films is an unalloyed classic, and there is an undeniable, unassailably legendary quality to the director’s body of work. Each one yields a dense feast of possible readings and interpretations. The more straightforward a plot is on the surface (The Shining), the more unfathomable it may become upon further analysis, throwing the viewer in all manner of different directions, both in terms of what the narrative is saying and the director’s visual language and choices. Barry Lyndon is an easy film of his to admire, but

1973 – Top 10 Films    The Day of the Jackal Fred Zinneman was a choice example of the journeyman studio director. Reliable across a selection of genres, and trusted with prestige projects, he took home two Oscars for Best Director (From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons). Yet, you’d be hard pressed to identify stylistic trends across his work. The director had tackled suspense pictures before (High Noon) but nothing this taut and gritty. This is a very ’70s movie, with an unapologetic levels of sex and violence. It shows Zinneman, who had been through a spell without

1972 – Top 10 Films   Favourite films lists are inevitably slightly arbitrary. Even your best-est film ever can be revisited so many times that fatigue sets in, and it begins to lose its lustre. Or, a picture you once loved no longer seems all that. And vice versa. I thought I’d kick-off a run of annual Top 10s by beginning with the year I winked into existence. Of course, this means that most of those named from this decade will have been retrospectively seen. And the selection process will also rely on recall of a number of pictures I

Terry Gilliam Ranked (Updated)   I first fashioned this run down mid-2013, before The Zero Theorem had been released, and limited it to Gilliam’s solo, bona fide features. To justify this 2016 re-edit (Gilliam would never approve of a director’s cut), I’ve included not only his co-effort with Terry Jones, but the various, more notable shorts he has produced over the years; alas, there has recently been a feeling of taking whatever you can, however meagre, as his fully-fledged gigs have been increasingly thin on the ground. I’ve also adjusted the placings somewhat, such are fickleness and passing moods. Number 1 is