ehuisman

There's a lot to love here. The violent realism brings to mind Quintin Tarantino, but it is combined with a comic absurdity and aesthetic surrealism that make the entire thing feel like a dream sequence, a bizarre journey through a weirdly recognizable near future. A Clockwork Orange also makes for great social commentary, both at its surface as well as its layers underneath, in which this future's most intense characteristics are to be read as metaphors for a current society. Ultimately, the film's weakness - or wickedness if you will - lies not in the questions that it asks but in the answers that it seems to provide.

Enjoyable at best, the Accidental Tourist misses too many of its marks to hold up. Its problematic ideas on gender can be forgiven in 1988, although they were growing out of fashion even then. Its romantic touches are too light to pass for serious commentary, but too heavy to qualify as comedic. Hurt's character is original, but played too thickly. John Williams sounds like Mozart is leading band camp; it's good but in the wrong context. The female leads keep the film from falling apart, but even they are not strong enough to make the experience anything close to memorable.

Spielberg is careful to show the Israeli perspective without glorifying it, but for all his proven capacity to gracefully handle uncomfortable topics, this one still feels overly sensational for such a delicate subject. Even one year before Craig made the jump from Mossad to MI6, this spy action thriller has too little emotional depth and too much of James Bond.

Sat for ten minutes trying to think of any weaknesses. Other than the baby's performance being overly melodramatic, I couldn't find any. This film is flawlessly uneasy.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Honest in its intentions, but poor in execution, The Laundromat lets a lot of **** go to waste. The extravagant portrayal of tax evasion undercuts the seriousness of this problem, turning both perpetrators and victims into caricatures. What sticks is how eager its makers are to push their unsubtle ideology onto their audience, climaxing into Streep's finale rant on campaign financing laws - which has very little to do with the problem at hand. Because these views are so aggressively communicated, they are ultimately not communicated at all.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly reminds us to never judge a book by the genre from which it was produced. Iconic in every facet, Leone transcends the discriminating image of 'spaghetti westerns' that society projected on his work. The film does have its problems: Eastwood is flat even for his standards, and the multilingual lip-syncing makes the film seem embarrassingly amateuristic at times. But the only thing that sticks is the grandiose imagery, lifted out of mortality by Morricone's masterful score that put him on shortlists beside classical composers. This film is a stylistic masterpiece.

It's easy to see how this film turned to be a classic, with Kingsley's mesmerizing performance being just one of its laudable aspects. But what really strikes in retrospect, is how eager its makers were to elevate Gandhi's mythical status, leaving his personal journey and intimate relationships clouded in mystery, if not ignored. This is telling for how fresh the wounds of the world's departure from colonialism still were around that time. The debates were ongoing, the controversy so vivid that this film could not afford to portray Gandhi as anything short of a semi-god hero. It succeeds, but there lies also its weakness.

While certainly entertaining, A Few Good Men has its limitations. Both the legal mechanics and the military ethics are overplayed to the extent that they are no longer believable, making the film susceptible to sentamentalism. Cruise's persona, however charismatic, doesn't help. Moore's character is useless. Nicholson - by contrast - is strong, so strong in fact that it backfires, leaving Cruise's eventual triumph emptied like a surreal twist, despite having been preordained from the first scene.

Few films are both comfortably watchable as well as strikingly original, but Atonement is one of them. Its unlikely plot, which explores guilt and coming-of-age, sets the tone for an unpredictable ending, which is both devastating and satisfying at once. Seeing Ronan excel even as a child actress is a bonus.

Impossible to watch objectively after knowing what Tarentino went on to create. Reservoir Dogs' raw, graphic, anti-stylistic approach seems so familiar to viewers who have embraced his oeuvre, that the film almost feels cliché in retrospect. Only when you remember its release year, you realize what precedent it set for future decades to come.