870 Apocalypto Mel Gibson, 2006
A pretty good effort from Mr Gibson. You have to hand it to the guy, he paid for Passion of the Christ himself and reaped the massive rewards, then when he could get a studio to pick up the tab again he got them to fund a movie no one else (not named 'Werner Herzog') would have made and that only Gibson could have gotten made, with only native Central-American Indian actors, and them only speaking ancient native languages.
On the one hand the film is incredibly immersive and intense (and, somewhat contrary to its reputation, no sicker or gorier than, say, Last of The Mohicans) and a great achievement in production design and sheer shooting-on-location chutzpah. On the other hand it's got a crumby digital look some of the time (digital cameras needed a few more years development before there wasn't a serious price to be paid for using them), the plot relies on some of the hoariest plot points imaginable, e.g., our hero is saved from being routinely sacrificed at the top of an Aztec temple by a full solar eclipse. One of the very first adventure stories I read as a kid, Enid Blyton's
The Secret Mountain
uses this plot-point and even at age 6 or 7 I knew it was the sort of ultra-fanciful billion-to-one coincidence that a story should never rely on. Gibson used another super-duper coincidence for the final plot-point which I won't spoil here. And this is to say that despite the film's stunning efforts at something like immersive realism the plot architecture here is creakiest old adventure-Hollywood that Douglas Fairbanks Senior would have roared with laughter at. Reading around a bit too, it's allegedly the case that Gibson's doesn't have his Central-American history and culture at all right - blurring the difference between Aztecs and Mayans for example. I don't know enough about that stuff to be troubled by the license that Gibson tookbut the experts were appalled Gibson seems to have wanted the film to be a big statement about how empires fall - see the epigraph with which the film opens - but that whole side of the film is rendered suspect by the Hollywood-plotting and completely vitiated by getting the basic history and culture stuff so wrong.
Not to worry: Apocalypto succeeds as an immersive action movie and as an update of The Naked Prey (with the slight oddity that a days-long chase through a dense jungle is rather less plausibly linear than a chase across relatively lightly forested plains in The Naked Prey). That's evidently enough for Wright. For me, however, A is a good, occasionally very good film rather than any sort of great one. 2006 films that Wright doesn't select that I'd rate ahead of A include The Lives of Others, Volver, Paprika, The Prestige, Friedkin's Bug, Away From Her, Wind That Shakes The Barley.

There is a writer of Science Fiction books, TV episodes(The Outer Limits) and film reviews named Harlan Ellison. I don't even know if he is still alive, I think so. Pretty old now, but always a rebellious, angry, curmudgeon.
Anyway, I bought a book of Ellison's reviews and articles a few years back and I reached his 1984 screed(SEVERAL articles) about how sick and putrid and awful he thought the original "Gremlins" was. He didn't like Spielberg(the producer; Joe Dante was the director) and felt this movie used a "children's movie" framework to invoke all sorts of horrific material that would pollute the minds of old and young alike.
Curmudgeon is right. He sued James Cameron for The Terminator's supposed infringement on Ellison's Outer Limits's episode about a soldier travelling through time. I watched the ep. and didn't really see that anythign substantial had been stolen . Still Cameron caved, handed over some money and the closing credits are now led by an acknowledgement to Harlan Ellison.
I've been looking for this post for weeks. You're rolling out so many great film capsule reviews here that I get lost in the search.
I just wanted to elaborate a bit on this Harlan Ellison guy.
I bought his book because it was cheap, very large, filled with reviews(I like to read reviews) and because what encounters I had with him in the 70's(on TV talk shows and just one time, in person when he did a book signing in LA) evidenceda yeah .. a REAL curmudgeon.
And one of those guys who, given that he is usually ranting and screeching about how stupid everybody else's work iswell, it creates "glass house" issues.
Ellison seems to have a "for real" Science Fiction novel writing career(he rants against calling it "SciFi"); he DID write for The Outer Limits, and sometimes my favorite old 60's show, Burke's Law. (In his book, Ellison writes about arriving in LA with a dime in his pocket, going to a writer's cattle call for Burke's Law in an auditorium filled with writersand pitching/selling his whodunit idea on the spot.) I think there are Star Trek scripts in there and other episodic TV over the 80's and maybe 90's. There are any number of scripts not sold, or deals that fell apart and, well, that's Hollywood.
Anyway, his book of 80's movie reviews is worth a skim if only to read a man in full screaming screed mode. Its interesting reading, both about the movies and the man.
And some of the reviews are from the 70's and 60s. One 1968 review of Rosemary's Baby is a positive rave and Ellison called it on that one: "This movie will be remembered decades from now."
Anyhow, I'm surprised that someone as dyspeptic as Ellison would be so upset by Gremlins bringing a little subversive nastiness to kids Xmas movies.
Hoo boy, you can't imagine.
Gremlins was a hard PG-13 (in the year that Temple of Doom was a similarly hard, gory PG-13). And things like Poltergeist had been pretty scary for kids before that.
Interestingly, Ellison speaks well of Poltergeist, I guess because its director Tobe Hooper, was a personal friend(and Ellision swears Spielberg did NOT realy direct it.)
It was up to people to educate themselves before taking their kids to such movies - the warnings were all there just as they were there later for The Dark Knight and Man Of Steel or even The Force Awakens. People need to take those rating and age-recommendations more seriously than they do. These really aren't films for very young kids under full loss-of-control movie-conditions. Watching at home with full parental supervision and finger on the pause button if things get to intense or even have to be skipped is the way to go.
Its funny to me. I grew up in the 60's with Psycho in the air and eventually, Bonnie and Clyde, Wait Until Dark, and The Wild Bunch (to name three) to "negotiate to see." I braced for the violence, but it didn't much affect me when it came. Still, these all felt like movies made for ADULTS that I, as a kid or pre-teen, had to navigate carefully.
I think the issue with Gremlins and Poltergeist (and Indy Jones and the Temple of Doom, too) is that these movies with "kiddie surfaces" went for the gore and/or nastiness a bit too much. It didn't bother me, I was plenty old by then. But these films seemed "stuck" between something as adult as "Psycho" and something as childish (but scary) as "101 Dalmations"(with Cruella DeVille out to make a coat out of puppy skins.)
MY issue with Gremlins and Poltergeist (and Innerspace and Indy/Temple of Doom) is that I think they are missing the adult characterization and lines of better movies like those made by Hitchcock. And how about The Goonies? Is that not ONLY for kids? I thought so when I saw it. And I ain't liking no movie called "Goonies," anyway.
Remember when Mark Wahlberg was on SNL a few years back talking to an adult Josh Brolin, and Wahlberg said "Yeah, you're Josh Brolin"..(beat, disgusted look.) "Goonies."
And walked away.

WellJennifer Connolly back then. WOW. So curvaceous and busty. These daysso skinny and emaciated. Oscar will do that to ya.
I think she became ultra-skinny (and actual breast-reduction surgery was part of that I believe) well-before Oscar. It's evidently the look Connolly herself wants - I wonder though whether she thought she needed to make herself less canonically sexy to be taken seriously as an actress?
At any rate, I tend to think that ultra-skinny looks start to lose whatever appeal they have when people get into their 30s and 40s - actors who stay on that path are constantly in danger of losing a few more pounds and then starting to trigger that refugee/concentration camp survivor memory in the audience; we instinctively start to fear for them. Connolly doesn't seem to work much any more perhaps because of this phenomenon.
Sometimes one sees a movie and sees the BETTER movie that wasn't made. NYC is expensive to film in, maybe budget considerations got them.
Yes, that occurred to me too. Reading around, people who like Gremlins 2 a lot really like all the Loony Tune references in the film and all of the insider jokes about the first movie, e.g., Phoebe Cates's big macabre speech in the first movie about her Dad dying stuck in the chimney pretending to be Santa gets lampooned here by having Cates make another speech about another Holiday's memories.and nobody is the slightest bit interested.
There is a writer of Science Fiction books, TV episodes(The Outer Limits) and film reviews named Harlan Ellison. I don't even know if he is still alive, I think so. Pretty old now, but always a rebellious, angry, curmudgeon.
Anyway, I bought a book of Ellison's reviews and articles a few years back and I reached his 1984 screed(SEVERAL articles) about how sick and putrid and awful he thought the original "Gremlins" was. He didn't like Spielberg(the producer; Joe Dante was the director) and felt this movie used a "children's movie" framework to invoke all sorts of horrific material that would pollute the minds of old and young alike.
Curmudgeon is right. He sued James Cameron for The Terminator's supposed infringement on Ellison's Outer Limits's episode about a soldier travelling through time. I watched the ep. and didn't really see that anythign substantial had been stolen . Still Cameron caved, handed over some money and the closing credits are now led by an acknowledgement to Harlan Ellison.
Anyhow, I'm surprised that someone as dyspeptic as Ellison would be so upset by Gremlins bringing a little subversive nastiness to kids Xmas movies. Gremlins was a hard PG-13 (in the year that Temple of Doom was a similarly hard, gory PG-13). And things like Poltergeist had been pretty scary for kids before that. It was up to people to educate themselves before taking their kids to such movies - the warnings were all there just as they were there later for The Dark Knight and Man Of Steel or even The Force Awakens. People need to take those rating and age-recommendations more seriously than they do. These really aren't films for very young kids under full loss-of-control movie-conditions. Watching at home with full parental supervision and finger on the pause button if things get to intense or even have to be skipped is the way to go.
From my perspective, though, Gremlins (1984) had some problems but it was quite a lot of fun, and first time through the basic premise of the Gremlins' development was fine. Having to do it all again only with additional genetic modification, however, was a bit painful.

Did Gremlins need a sequel? On this evidence, No.
But it got one. I guess I"ll give William Goldman's profane phrase a rest about what kind of movie it was.
Some of the weaknesses of the original reassert themselves - the dull as dishwater lead couple of Zach Gilligan and Phoebe Cates (such a beauty, never really learned to act
But she will always have her Fast Times at Ridgemont High swimming pool scene to live byand I think she is still married to the much-older Kevin Kline.

• Jennifer Connolly arrived about now with the same look and ate her lunch)
  WellJennifer Connolly back then. WOW. So curvaceous and busty. These daysso skinny and emaciated. Oscar will do that to ya.
  are back and no smarter except for devising the positively miraculous solution to the gremlin problem at the end; the gremlins are repetitive in the destructivness and in their movie-parodies. Gizmo still rules though, and there are quite a few good parodies and jokes - but most kids wouldn't have been able to spot the Marathon Man, and other refs. so there was an audience problem for this film (whereas the original had the sustained It's a Wonderful Life parody that most US kids at least would have).
  As I recall, Gremlins 2 got some good reviews but many of them felt the film had no real audiencetoo intense for kids, not enough for adults, "film buffs only."
  I recall putting Gremlins 2 into the VHS player for some young relatives..and I had to pull it out when they started crying in terror. I don't think I ever saw it all the way through.
  One semi-remarkable thing that kids-in-1990 probably wouldn't have gotten is that much of the film parodies Donald Trump. The whole film unfolds in the Clamp Center in NYC - a tower complex run by an eccentric, megalomaniacal billionaire developer and TV entrepreneur Daniel R. Clamp. This is possibly a little funnier now than it was in 1990.
  Its amazing to think that our current President's media profile goes back to 1990and before. Obama was "new and semi-unknown" when he got the Presidency. We've had Trump around a long time long enough for him to wear out his celebrity welcome. Still, the Presidency is often about "back to the future" people: Nixon, ReaganHillary?
  (Hillary? I mean, this recount business, anything can happenthese are the days of surprise.)
  Still, I wonder whether keeping the gremlins almost completely inside the one building was the right move. We did kind of want to see them rampage through Times Square, the subway system, the Met, MoMA the Guggenheim, the Dakota (where Rosemary's Baby was filmed and John Lennonon lived and died) and so on
  Sometimes one sees a movie and sees the BETTER movie that wasn't made. NYC is expensive to film in, maybe budget considerations got them.
  This: There is a writer of Science Fiction books, TV episodes(The Outer Limits) and film reviews named Harlan Ellison. I don't even know if he is still alive, I think so. Pretty old now, but always a rebellious, angry, curmudgeon.
  Anyway, I bought a book of Ellison's reviews and articles a few years back and I reached his 1984 screed(SEVERAL articles) about how sick and putrid and awful he thought the original "Gremlins" was. He didn't like Spielberg(the producer; Joe Dante was the director) and felt this movie used a "children's movie" framework to invoke all sorts of horrific material that would pollute the minds of old and young alike.
  I linger on this because after reading those essays, I now react like Pavlov's dog to mention of the original "Gremlins": "Oh, Gremlins? Harlan Ellison said that movie is Satan's Work!"
  Ha.

662 Gremlins 2: The New Batch Joe Dante, 1990
Did Gremlins need a sequel? On this evidence, No. Some of the weaknesses of the original reassert themselves - the dull as dishwater lead couple of Zach Gilligan and Phoebe Cates (such a beauty, never really learned to act - Jennifer Connolly arrived about now with the same look and ate her lunch) are back and no smarter except for devising the positively miraculous solution to the gremlin problem at the end; the gremlins are repetitive in the destructivness and in their movie-parodies. Gizmo still rules though, and there are quite a few good parodies and jokes - but most kids wouldn't have been able to spot the Marathon Man, and other refs. so there was an audience problem for this film (whereas the original had the sustained It's a Wonderful Life parody that most US kids at least would have).
One semi-remarkable thing that kids-in-1990 probably wouldn't have gotten is that much of the film parodies Donald Trump. The whole film unfolds in the Clamp Center in NYC - a tower complex run by an eccentric, megalomaniacal billionaire developer and TV entrepreneur Daniel R. Clamp. This is possibly a little funnier now than it was in 1990. Still, I wonder whether keeping the gremlins almost completely inside the one building was the right move. We did kind of want to see them rampage through Times Square, the subway system, the Met, MoMA the Guggenheim, the Dakota (where Rosemary's Baby was filmed and John Lennonon lived and died) and so on.
At any rate, I found Gremlins just OK and not really recommendable - it wouldn't be anywhere near my own list of best films of 1990. Mainstream Films from 1990 that didn't make Wright's list that I'd rate significantly higher than Gremlins 2 include Jacob's Ladder, Metropolitan, Total Recall, An Angel At My Table, Edward Scissorhands, Internal Affairs, and probably Pretty Woman and Ghost.

747 Freeway Matthew Bright, 1996
Outrageous, highly entertaining down-and-dirty-fest anchored by a powerhouse performance from Reese Witherspoon (Vanessa Lutz has to be up there with her Tracey Flick from Election as her finest creation). It's interesting that compelling super-flawed characters that dominate a whole movie are around for very young actresses but become much rarer as their careers progress. It's as if adult women characters mostly aren't allowed to be this flawed, this outrageous, and often, let's face it, they are nurturing roles of various sorts and are left effectively supporting the flawed male leads. Anyhow, it just is striking that young actress from Witherspoon to Christina Ricci to Ellen Page to Juliette Lewis often make huge impacts in disreputable roles in their teens then quickly settle down into less interesting work.
The writer-director here, Matthew Bright doesn't seem to have done much more of note. Too bad.
Interesting looking at the 1996 films that I'd rate very highly that didn't make Wright's list, e.g., Secrets and Lies, Lone Star, Cronenberg's Crash. Other omitted 1996 films I'd definitely take above Freeway, notwithstanding its pleasures, include Sling Blade, Emma, Shall We Dance?, and maybe Hard Eight.

499 Scum Alan Clarke, 1979
Impressive Juvenile Prison expose/drama. I vaguely remember the fuss about it at the time - it led to some institutional and legal change in the UK I believe. Great looking - a reminder of the clarity of properly lit (not overlit!) 35mm images with top equipment by the late '70s. I like the gritty social realist UK tradition in film and TV and I guess Scum (1979) is a deserved classic in that. Still, from 1979, Wright doesn't find room for Apocalypse Now, Tin Drum, Breaking Away, Hair, Nosferatu, Stalker. I'd probably take most of those over Scum (1979 was a great film year!).
682 The Last Boy Scout Tony Scott, 1991
The evil opposite of Scum (1979): a cretinous buddy-detective movie that's absurd from the get-go. I suppose the way its fans must view LBS is as a comedy about buddy-action films - no cliche-box goes unticked, everything's to excess. But I wasn't laughing. Terrible story, horrible dialogue, the worst overlit visuals and preposterous action this side of Michael Bay. Like Bay's films, LBS is one of those films that makes you want to burn Hollywood and the star system (for producers and writers as much as for actors) to the ground. Just awful.
Needless to say, I don't see how Wright could seriously have LBC make the cut for 1991 and yet have no room for things like Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, von Trier's Europa (a.k.a. Zentropa), even Thelma and Louise (the best Scott film of 1991 by miles!).

865 Domino Tony Scott, 2005
Half-way though D I'm seriously losing the will to live One of the worst-, stupidly hyperactively-directed movies I think I've ever seen (at any rate it's down in the same class as kindred things like Michael Bay's Transformers 2), with a terrible, inane script, led by Kiera Knightley at her most wooden (Ikea Knightley)may revisit this post if I muster the energy to finish D. It's a shocker (so far).
Update: No, sorry, not finishing this one. Life's too short. Never have I watched anything before that thinks it's being so edgy and yet has the most inane plotting, laborious dialogue, cringeworthy VO from Knightley's character, the worst on-the-nose sound design and editing. Truly this is a career low for everyone involved. I'm baffled that Wright rates
Domino
at all. I have a horrible feeling that QT might have liked Domino too. If so then I can only surmise that cocaine is a hell of a drug.

819 Shaolin Soccer Stephen Chow, 2001
Somewhere between Jerry Lewis and Adam Sandler (if Sandler directed his own pictures rather than having one of his buddies do it) lies Hong Kong/China's Stephen Chow. I've seen three of his pictures now including last year's mega-hit, The Mermaid, and he's not for me (Kung Fu Hustle (2004) is the best of the three I've seen). All of his pictures are broad, slapsticky comedies, most with a martial arts component, and all with an allegedly heartwarming 'triumph of the underdog' story woven through it. Shaolin Soccer (2011) is typical. It's occasionally funny and is fairly good-natured throughout (albeit with more literal pain and humiliation-type humor than most westerners are going to find amusing), but there's not much in it to interest anyone above the age of 14 tops (but I'd say the same thing about Sandler's hits).

867 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Shane Black, 2005
Shane Black gives Robert Downey Jr a first complete draft of the Tony Stark/Iron Man character that he'd take to the bank a couple of years after this.
Some "circularity" here:
Shane Black was somewhat of a "has been" by the time he made KKBB, and Robert Downey Jr had the bad-news drug problems background that was making it hard for him to find work.
Black had had Mel Gibson(Lethal Weapon) and Bruce Willis(The Last Boy Scout) to anchor his bigger hits (or with Scout, most overpaid-for flop), but as a has been director, fell back to near-unemployable RDJ and fading Val Kilmer for this one.
In any event, soon RDJ was employable and had found his big hit in Iron Man, and eventually RDJ could return favors to Shane Black. RDJ got Black hired to direct Iron Man 3, and when The Nice Guys came out last year, it was promoted as "from the director of Iron Man 3" (I guess the millennial generation has no memory of Lethal Weapon.)
Obviously RDJ was a trash-talking motor-mouth throughout the '90s but here his future fortune snaps into focus - he's gonna be a bruised hero/anti-hero after this.
I also think "Zodiac" sealed RDJ's star persona. He's one of the three over-the-title male stars in the film Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo are the other two but was the only one in the film with true "star charisma." RDJ's "trash talking motor mouth" was also a great line-delivery machine.
Take a look at RDJ as a late-teen actor in "Weird Science" (1985) and on SNL in the 80's and you'll see how he was always handsome, but needed the aging process and other life pressures to give him a true movie star face by the time of Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes. RDJ's face got more handsome with the lines and creases of middle age. The boy became a mana very cool man.
And the irony remains this: as I write this, pretty much the only acting RDJ DOES anymore is as Iron Man. Its a fulltime, billion-dollar job. And he's clean and sober. Still, I rather miss having RDJ as a star in other films.
I'd actually need to see the film at least one more time to be sure that the plot machinations all work but first time through it was pretty convincing. So quite a nice job by writer/director Black.
KKBB seems to have been inspired by Shane Black's "The Last Boy Scout" (1991; Bruce Willis/Damon Wayans) and to have in turn influenced Black's "The Nice Guys" (2016; Ryan Gosling/Russell Crowe.)
Val Kilmer is an excellent, quirky wing-man for RDJ
Kilmer's "gimmick" being that his character is gaybut the requisite macho cool guy who shoots, fights, kills.
Val Kilmer will get his place in screen history for one particular role and how he played it: Doc Holliday in Tombstone. As I have noted before, Doc Holiday is a "foolproof" role and yet Kilmeraided and abetted by great lines to deliverbeat 'em all (Victor Mature, Kirk Douglas, Jason Robards, Dennis QuaidCesar Romero?)
But Kilmer was good other times and other places. He's great in "Real Genius"(not to be confused with "Weird Science" of the same year) and he should have been the star of Top Gun, not support to Cruise.
Anyway, the years moved on and Val Kilmer became less of a star than he should have been. But "KKBB" shows how good he could be.
and Michelle Monagahan (her big break?) is a good not-quite-love interest.
She's irritating in that movieif beautiful. I thought she disappeared but there she was in Patriot's Day last week.
If I were them I'd be begging Shane Black and RDJ for a KKBB2 (KKKBBB?).
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was the title of a Pauline Kael review book, but also of some obscure movie, I think. Before the title ended up on Black's movie.
I do love how a bunch of other "dead or disappeared celebs" like Abe Lincoln and Elvis come walking into RDJ's hospital room at the end, and then are pushed out of the room. Kind of a "fantasy breaking of the fourth wall."
I can see why Wright in particular likes this one: KKBB feels influenced by Wright's way with transitions and flighty inserts and self-aware dialogue and voice-over.
So who saw who first?

867 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Shane Black, 2005
Shane Black gives Robert Downey Jr a first complete draft of the Tony Stark/Iron Man character that he'd take to the bank a couple of years after this. Obviously RDJ was a trash-talking motor-mouth throughout the '90s but here his future fortune snaps into focus - he's gonna be a bruised hero/anti-hero after this.
I'd actually need to see the film at least one more time to be sure that the plot machinations all work but first time through it was pretty convincing. So quite a nice job by writer/director Black. Val Kilmer is an excellent, quirky wing-man for RDJ and Michelle Monagahan (her big break?) is a good not-quite-love interest. If I were them I'd be begging Shane Black and RDJ for a KKBB2 (KKKBBB?).
I can see why Wright in particular likes this one: KKBB feels influenced by Wright's way with transitions and flighty inserts and self-aware dialogue and voice-over.

944 The Imposter Bart Layton, 2012
One of those mind-bending documentaries in which you continually learn new information but that new info always raises more questions than it answers so that after an hour and a half you're more confused and uncertain, further away from the truth than ever. I can't go into the story at all without spoiling a twistso let me just say that the case is genuinely interesting and that the doc. is worth seeing. Presumably another shoe will drop at some point in the future settling some of the outstanding questions in the underlying case. An Imposter 2 seems like a good bet for the 2020s at the latest.
I'd rate a bunch of 2012 things that Wright didn't find room for (Amour, The Master, Beasts of The Southern Wild, Frances Ha, Beyond the Hills) ahead of The Imposter, and Capturing The Friedmans which kind of invented this mind-frazzling sub-genre of doc. didn't make it onto Wright's list for 2003, which seems bizarre. Still, The Imposter (2012) is good and gripping alright.

947 Blue Ruin Jeremy Saulnier, 2013
Well-made, but by-the-numbers revenge drama/thriller that didn't have anything really new to say. The ending didn't quite work for me especially the lame-o final shot (the film seemed to pass up a better ending 60 seconds earlier). Of course, it's hard to have anything new to say about revenge when it (and how it tears both the avenger and the wider community apart) has been a key theme of drama since at least the Ancient Greeks but famously the South Koreans have consistently found new angles over the last decade+ so Blue Ruin can only be a second-tier achievement to me at best. Still director Saulnier definitely showed some chops with this film, and his recent Green Room is more proficient still. So he's definitely one to keep an eye on right now.
Wright picked a lot of good films for 2013 but still found no room for 3 of my faves that year: 12 Years A Slave, The Act Of Killing, Frances Ha. All of them are at least a class above Blue Ruin in my view.

881 Hot Rod Akiva Schaffer, 2007
Good grief, what a stinker. The Lonely Island's first movie doesn't have any Lonely Island songs in it which means that it's nothing special. (Reading around a bit about this movie it was written for Will Ferrell, and Andy Samberg and co. were only subbed in quite late in the piece, hence the lack of original songs.)
Hot Rod's not as funny as Will Ferrell's best stuff (Zoolander, Old School, Anchorman, Elf, Lego Movie), and I can see why he ended up passing on it. And Hot Rod's not nearly as good as this year's properly music-driven Lonely Island film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Not that any of these comparison cases (except possibly the Lego Movie) would get anywhere near most people's best-of-anything list!
Wright was too modest to pick any of his own movies for his list. Well, in my view, Wright's Hot Fuzz (2007) is vastly superior not just to Hot Rod (2007) but to anything Will Ferrell or Lonely Island has done or probably ever will do. While trend-surfing on things like Jack-ass that were big at the time, Hot Rod seems mainly driven by a desire to parody a certain sort of numbskull feel-good '80s film (esp. Karate Kid). Team America (2004) did the latter much better (and with fab songs - 'It's gonna take a montage!'). Hot Rod feels late. Compare with Hot Fuzz's razor sharp, surprising, even ingenious parodies of Michael Bay editing styles etc. as well as Midsommer Murder-type English mystery series (where small villages end up having Beirut-level death-rates if you keep track!). Hot Fuzz feels sharp and on-time.
In sum, Hot Rod is probably not worth watching unless you're prepared to get completely blasted and just wallow in its silliness while in that state. Yarp!

896 The Ruins Carter Smith, 2008
A bunch of US college kids on (I think) Spring Break in Mexico trek to an off-the-tourist-trail Mayan pyramid/ruin, where all hell breaks loose. Will any of them make it out alive?
The Ruins, while following a standard, simple horror formula (and there are probably at least half a dozen movies with this same formula on Wright's list), is above average production-wise especially for a novice director. Somehow the director, Carter Smith, who hasn't done much since, not only managed to wangle a descent budget, he also was able to get some ace help, e.g., Se7en's DP and The Lord of the Rings' Production Designer. And the kids in the horrific situation basically behave logically and the stresses that develop are believable. The two girls in the horrific situation stand out as better actors than the boys. Particularly good is Laura Ramsey (right before she played Don Draper's young and yummy Cali-babe, Joy, in Season 2 of Mad Men) whose character suffers an especially horrific fate (but maybe only second worst now I think about it - one character gets an ultra-gory operation en route to. musn't spoil!).
So, The Ruins is pretty good still, nothing quite makes it exceptional; it doesn't really leave you with anything much to think about (no subtexts) and no performances blow you away. (The Descent (2005) is an example of the same sort of premise but perfected; arguably Green Room (2015) is too.) And I'd rank it well below things like Martyrs, Two Lovers, In Bruges, Wall-E from 2008, none of which Wright mentions.

835 High Tension Alexandre Aja, 2003
The weakest example I've come across of what's often called 'New French Extreme Horror'. The film starts relatively well with some good ominous sound design and nifty shot-making. Once the film's main harrowing, relentless, slasher/home invasion tale gets going it's fine but undistinguished. Then 10 minutes from the end we get a big twist that's Psycho by way of Fight Club and The Sixth Sense. While the opening scenes of the movie did foreshadow the twist it's one of those twists that makes a nonsense of everything we've seen go on before. Whole settings - e.g., a van where a lot of the action takes place including the revelation of the twist itself - can't exist/ have to all be in the villain's imagination if the twist is accepted. And this is to say that High Tension spontaneously combusts before our eyes.
Update: Thinking a little more, the twist can be made to work (so that the place where the twist is revealed stays real), you just have to throw out the whole set-up of the movie where two girls are together driving out to one's family in the country (that never happened!) not just everything that happens when the killing starts. Are twists that require you to throw away essentially everything up to the twist (so that there's literally nothing left for the twist itself to potentially conflict with) any good? Not on the evidence of this stupid stupid movie.
Director and co-writer Aja leapt from High Tension to a very undistinguished career in Hollywood including a The Hills Have Eyes remake and Piranha 3D. Having finally seen his name-making-film High Tension, I can confirm that it's not going-to-Hollywood that's made Aja bad, rather he's always been terrible.

834 Good Bye Lenin! Wolfgang Becker, 2003
German Oscar bait? Warm sentimental tale about a young East German guy whose mother has a heart attack and goes into a coma for about a year starting mid-1989, thereby missing the collapse of the East German State to which she'd devoted her life. When she awakens from the coma still in a very fragile state, the son decides to perpetuate the illusion for her sake that nothing's changed. Hijinks ensue as the illusion gets harder and harder to maintain as the mother recovers enough (at least temporarily) to move around a bit.
I had a continuous feeling of deja vu while watching this film - something else I've seen before shares its type of premise but, frustratingly, I can't think of what I'm being reminded of.
Anyhow, aside from one very amusing, well-shot, well-set-up plot point in the final third of the film, for me Good Bye Lenin never rises above the merely adequate. But I accept that this is the sort of feel-good middle-brow movie (think Forrest Gump, As Good as It Gets, Intouchables, etc.) that's just not my sort of thing. I'm actually surprised that it's Wright's! I'm also bemused really that The Lives of Others (2006), Tin Drum (1979), Das Boot (1981), Wings of Desire (1987), Seventh Continent (1989), Kaspar Hausar (1975), Maria Braun (1972), and many other celebrated German-Language films didn't make Wright's list and this did.
Good Bye Lenin! was the breakthrough of Daniel Bruhl who has gone on to be a reliable presence in Hollywood movies starting with Inglourious Basterds (He's the Nazi sniper who kills Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) and continuing with the lead in Rush, the villain Zemo in Cap Amercia: Civil Wars. Bruhl is good as the slightly crazily dutiful son in GBL.

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821 The Devil's Backbone Guillermo del Toro, 2001
A stately (first hour a little slow for many viewers I suspect) ghost story set at the end of the Spanish Civil War (in the late '30s) in an Orphanage/School up on Spain's High Plains, TDB is a very nice, controlled piece of work by Del Toro. It suffers a little by comparison with other great Spanish Cvil War-inflected pieces, esp. De Toro's own later Pan's Labyrinth (for which TDB feels like a dry run) and Spirit of the Beehive, both of which are also on Wright's list. Those films strike me as a just a little more interesting than TDB overall - both richer and clearer and better paced from their beginnings and yet more mystery-preserving/inexhaustible/rewatchable by their ends. [Indeed, one slight problem I had with TDB is its final shot, which I initially misinterpreted - I won't explain the problem here because that would involve spoiling the shot of anyone here, but when I rewatched the shot to check, it did strike me that the confusion could and should have been forestalled by the director.]
My preferences here may be just a matter of taste I suppose, and maybe if I'd seen TDB first I wouldn't feel the way I do. At any rate, TDB is still a very good film, with a nice score, some of the best deep-focus color photography this side of VistaVision, some good monologues, and first-rate performances across the board. Certainly, if one is looking for a follow-up watch to Pan's Lab. this is the De Toro film to go for: none of his films in English (Pacific Rim, Mimic, Crimson Peak, Hellboy, Blade 2) are up to the standards of his Spanish-lang films.
240 Daisies Vera Chytilova, 1966
Experimental, surreal, highly episodic Czech film that's both exhausting and exhilirating to watch. Roughly half of the episodes involving our two doll-like leads are pretty memorable for both their content and technicals while the other half are experimental misfires that don't stick in the mind. Put another way, Daisies feels like a real 'film school' film - a film everyone probably should see at some point (esp. if they;re going to be making films themselves) regardless of whether it's strictly enjoyable to do so. Daisies has almost certainly been a good sources of idea for MTV promos and videos back in the day, and doubtless there rare advertising campaigns and fashions shoots as well as other films that have stolen bits and pieces (There's a famous/infamous Rivette film, Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) that I'm pretty sure references and emulates Daisies directly but I'd need to rewatch it to be sure.). Thus, I'm glad to have seen Daises even though it's not really my sort of thing and a tiring watch: no real plot, lots of hyperspeed montage, lots of different film-stocks used, lots of mixing of color with b/w and lots of tinting changes between shots.
Fair enough, then, that Daisies is on Wright's list. Interesting, however, that from 1966, Wright finds no room for Virginia Woolf, Au Hasard Balthazar, Alfie, all films I regard as essential viewing from that year. Film needs its experiments but VW, AHB and A are absolutely thrilling must-sees and as good as films get really. Wright's list is so weird when you get right down to it!

887 Timecrimes Nacho Vigalondo, 2007
Sweet Spanish Time-travel thriller (certain to be pointlessly remade in English I'd guess). Less convoluted than high-quality genre-peers like Primer (2004) and Predestination (2014) [neither of which makes Wright's list], Timecrimes may pack more of an emotional punch, be more satisfying than those films for most viewers I think. Ultimately Timecrimes feels a little more like Being John Malk and Eternal Sunshine than its time-travel peer-films do, which is probably a good thing for most people.
Since I see essentially all time-travel-themed films that come out, I was maybe a little ahead of the film watching it more than most people would be, which is not ideal. I was expecting a little more convolutedness than I got, so when
a central crime isn't undone or revealed as having been staged
I was surprised. Pleasantly as it happens, but not all genre-experts will feel the same way.
Anyhow, good film, and an impressive directorial debut for writer/director Vigalondo. He's got a very-Charlie-Kaufman-ish-sounding film starring Anne Hathaway coming out early next year called
Colossal
that should be his ticket to Nolan-, Cuaron-style studio-auteur status if it hits big. I'll be checking it out for sure (it got good, though bemused reviews at the Toronto Film Fest).

975 The Guest Adam Wingard, 2014
Complete garbage that's nonetheless quite enjoyable. The Guest entertainingly fuses the renegade vet. movie (First Blood) with the slasher (Halloween) with the Psycho-Inside movie (Internal Affairs, Fatal Attraction, Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Single White Female, etc.), and the whole thing's presented with a bit of a wink and the ending/final gag in particular gets a big laugh.
Not a movie I think anyone would need to see more than once (and there's lots of wrong with it technically - e.g., a lot of the action is flat-out unintelligible and much of the dialogue audio is buried by the blaring retro-techno score - some of which is used diegetically in party scenes that it's almost impossible to believe would be soundtracked by such stuff in the real world). Low-brow pop-corn movies for groups of teens have their place, but not on a top #### list in my view.
Update: One point I shoudl have made: the lead/villain is played by Dan Stevens, whom I previously only knew a little for playing a relatively effete character on Downton Abbey. He obviously really went for it in this film - he was magnetic, completely convincing as an American and as a buff special forces guys. He does look quite a lot like Paul Walker so I think there may be a real gap for him right on Hollywood just on pure looks alone too. In sum, this was a star-making performance: every Hollywood producer will have seen this film and seen $$. All the jobs he got off the back of this performace/film should be showing up about now. I'll be keeping an eye out for him.

932 Compliance Craig Zobel, 2012
Well-acted, -scored and -shot beyond-belief true crime story. Hard to discuss the content without spoilers, so I won't, but the fact that these events really happened (and were part of a large wave of similar crimes) is little short of staggering. The film probably wisely decides not to overstay its welcome (it's under 90 mins), and in its small way is an important film that needed to be made, and will always be worth watching.
Compliance is, however, not ultimately as interesting as it starts off threatening to be. After 30 minutes I was thinking it was in Lumet and Mike Leigh territory for tense drama rooted in some bit of the real world one normally takes for granted - here it's the world of fast food production and the folks on minimum wages who do those jobs. Somehow that analytical drive gets lost in the second half of the film as it works to wrap up its true-crime plot. Lumet or Leigh would have figured out a way to keep the analysis alive to the end.
633 The Hidden Jack Sholder, 1987
I know that this film has its fans but I thought it was pretty bad. It looks like a made-for-TV, SyFy channel movie. The plotting's inconsistent, the action's very unexciting, all the basics really are fluffed. A Cameron or Carpenter or Michael Mann or McTiernan or Friedkin or Verhoeven would have knocked this 'body-snatcher, serial-killer alien on the loose in LA' script into shape and then committed to specific casting and shooting ideas that would have brought the film to life. As it stands The Hidden feels like an empty vessel, as though every single creative decision on it has been exercised in the most lifeless way possible. In sum, The Hidden (1987) is one of the worst '80s movies I've ever seen.
Note that The Hidden is one of 20 films from 1987 that are on Wright's list. I really do find it hard to believe that he chooses it ahead of Predator in particular (same basic genre, vastly superior). And it's just weird to have so much stuff from 1987 and yet to have no room for any of Broadcast News, Dirty Dancing, Radio Days, Wings of Desire, Au Revoir Les Enfants, The Dead, etc..

Lethal Weapon of 1987 was a late-breaking "creative sequel" to the movie that I REALLY think started it all: "48 HRS" of 1982 with Nick Nolte (a favorite of mine at that time; hulking, gravel-voiced but boyish) and Eddie Murphy(exploding as the biggest star SNL ever gave us, yet separate from all the rest of them.) I think Joel Silver produced that , too. But it took the late 80's and Michael Kamen to really set the mold. Cop movies were all the rage for awhile: Tango and Cash(Stallone and Kurt Russell), Red Heat(Schwarzenegger and JAMES Belushi), Stakeout (a comebacking Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez) and ALL the Lethal Weapons, which edged us into the nineties with The Last Boy Scout(from Shane Black again; Bruce Willis and Damon Waynons) and Rush Hour(Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.) And then buddy cops burned out and comic book heroes came in.
Thanks for all this background ecarle. I didn't see (and still haven't seen) any, and it surely is against this background that LW's importance emerges.
I saw 'em all. Even as back then, I at least TRIED to keep up better with art films and Oscar bait, too. But to me, those movies were like "eating peanuts." I had a tough office workload back then, and I just enjoyed go seeing the shoot -em ups and the bad guys losing.
They were all "genre" but varations within a theme: for instance, "Stakeout" believably positioned Richard Dreyfuss as a tempermental, wiry "little man" kind of action cop who believably beat the hell out of the bad guys. I was really surprised. BUT Dreyfuss used his Best Actor "sensitivity chops" to romance the endangered female lead believably, too. Emilio Estevez was much more charming than his brother Charlie as the younger buddy.
"Stakeout" also used gorgeous Seattle/Northwest locales and climaxed amidst all the dangerous crushing-logs and dismembering sawmills of the lumber industry.
Tango and Cash worked for giving the ladies two extremely gorgeous male specimens in Stallone and Russell, when both men looked their best and both men had a charisma that far exceeded the material.
Red Heat posited Arnold as Russian cop paired in the US with an American cop and..well, not so good. But by the director of 48 HRS. In fact, in plot if not characters, it is kind of a remake of 48 HRS.
One I forgot was "Shoot to Kill" which brought Sidney Poitier out of semi-retirement to buddy up as an FBI agent paired with outdoorsman Tom Beringer. The plot was scary/nifty, set in the mountains of the Northwest again. Beringer's mountain guide girlfriend has taken five men on a mountain climb one of them is a psycho killer criminal mastermind. But which one? While Poitier and Beringer (the city boy and the country boy) try to catch up with the hikers, we get a pretty scary scene in which the killer among the five reveals himself by killing all of the other four in one fell swoop, except for the female guide. Its one of those scenes you just REMEMBER. No hiking climbs with strangers for me.
These movies poured out with EXACTLY the same rapidity that we are getting the comic book movies today, but I fear the comic book trend is immortal.
All that history is perhaps why "The Nice Guys" was a disproportionately nostalgic and emotional experience for me, this year. (Though Crowe and Gosling aren't cops.)
I thought of The Nice Guys after watching LW and much prefer it.
Well , same screenwriter, with two maybe three more Shane Blacks in between that are even more like The Nice Guys.
ONE: The Last Boy Scout: Willis and Waymans in LA. Great opening scene: a halfback being chased down an NFL field by the defense elects to get his touchdown by pulling a handgun and SHOOTING his pursuers. Then he shoots himself. THAT's a way to start a mystery.
TWO: The Long Kiss Goodnight: the novelty is a woman(Geena Davis) paired with a black private eye (Samuel L. Jackson, hilarious.) Oh, the woman is a happy housewife who slowly remembers that she's a top CIA martials arts expert and assassin.
THREE: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer(as a gay private eye) in LA. This one is the most LIKE The Nice Guys: offbeat, funny, a bit self-mocking.
These movies dragged on into the nineties, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was rather an "attempted Shane Black comeback" in the 00's. It didn't take.
And The Nice Guys just wasn't a big enough hit to bring it all back. I remain nonplussed that The Nice Guys was set in the SEVENTIES. You'd think Black would have set it in The Big Eighties to hook up with his prime era.
On Mel Gibson and Lethal Weapon: quite a career break and he almost didn't take it. He was offered two leads at the same time: The Untouchables(Elliott Ness) and Lethal Weapon. Gibson chose Lethal Weapon and got a franchise part; The Untouchables went to Kevin Costner and made HIM a star. In fact, if you tie in Bruce Willis("a TV star") getting Die Hard after Arnold, Sly, Clint andAl Pacino! andRichard Gere! turned it down, you can see that 1987-1988 mi

Lethal Weapon of 1987 was a late-breaking "creative sequel" to the movie that I REALLY think started it all: "48 HRS" of 1982 with Nick Nolte (a favorite of mine at that time; hulking, gravel-voiced but boyish) and Eddie Murphy(exploding as the biggest star SNL ever gave us, yet separate from all the rest of them.) I think Joel Silver produced that , too. But it took the late 80's and Michael Kamen to really set the mold. Cop movies were all the rage for awhile: Tango and Cash(Stallone and Kurt Russell), Red Heat(Schwarzenegger and JAMES Belushi), Stakeout (a comebacking Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez) and ALL the Lethal Weapons, which edged us into the nineties with The Last Boy Scout(from Shane Black again; Bruce Willis and Damon Waynons) and Rush Hour(Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.) And then buddy cops burned out and comic book heroes came in.
Thanks for all this background ecarle. I didn't see (and still haven't seen) any, and it surely is against this background that LW's importance emerges.
All that history is perhaps why "The Nice Guys" was a disproportionately nostalgic and emotional experience for me, this year. (Though Crowe and Gosling aren't cops.)
I thought of The Nice Guys after watching LW and much prefer it.
On Mel Gibson and Lethal Weapon: quite a career break and he almost didn't take it. He was offered two leads at the same time: The Untouchables(Elliott Ness) and Lethal Weapon. Gibson chose Lethal Weapon and got a franchise part; The Untouchables went to Kevin Costner and made HIM a star. In fact, if you tie in Bruce Willis("a TV star") getting Die Hard after Arnold, Sly, Clint andAl Pacino! andRichard Gere! turned it down, you can see that 1987-1988 minted three new male movie stars: Gibson, Costner, and Willis. All via cop action roles.
Interesting.
But Mel Gibson had been around a long time. "Mad Max" in 1979 launched him a little bit(it was a foreign indie) and "Mad Max The Road Warrior" in 1982 made him a star but..Gibson then floundered for five years in "prestige" movies like The Year of Living Dangerously, Mrs. Stoffel, The Bounty, and The River that did nothing for his box office profile. His simple choice of "Lethal Weapon" finally did it for Mel Gibson. Perhaps he chafed at that. All those prestige movies and a cop action film made him a superstar.
Much as I don't think that highly of LW, it does almost eeriely get elements of plot and character and feel to snap into place for the first time that were then picked up by others. And Gibson suddenly snapping into focus as a star with the Martin Riggs character is a really great example of this: I don't think Gibson had ever played 'crazy' before this, ditto I don't think he'd ever been tortured on screen before this (or, hang on, did that happen in the third Mad Max 'Beyond Thunderdome'?). well after LW this 'crazy quippy Mel who kinda digs being strung-up and tortured' was his star persona and what he mainly played on-screen. and haunted him as a director and off-screen too at least until he ended up flaming out at the end of the '00s from which he's finally come back much older and presumably wiser and calmed down recently.
It's all so fateful around LW isn't it? I really think Gibson would have been downright bad and miscast as Elliot Ness, and if Gibson doesn't do LW then he probably never really transcends his original stoic Aussie/Mad Max semi-stardom. Gibson was Martin Riggs, the audience knew it, and handsomely rewarded him for it. But as with Perkins as Norman there were costs for Gibson from revealing so much the role was a Faustian bargain for Gibson that I'm sure he's probably thought long and hard about in the last decade or so.
BTW, the AVClub has continued its review of the history of action movies. They're up to 1987 where they of course chose LW:
http://tinyurl.com/jexc96v