Here we are, a first for Momentary Cinema: ranking movies of a director. Well, the thing is that I absolutely adore the work of Hayao Miyazaki - the legendary artist, animator, writer and director from Japan - so it is not an easy task to rank his 12 feature films from worst to best. Anyway, … Continue reading Hayao Miyazaki’s Movies Ranked
I think it is safe to say that the seventies bore witness to the greatest decade for cinema. The fifties saw a post-war stagnation, the sixties saw experimentation and a liberation of ideas, and the seventies saw expansion and, as was often the case, a reach for excess. The Hollywood elite lost all semblance of … Continue reading Travelling Through Time: The Best Films of the 1970s
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Annapurna Pictures) Directed by Barry Jenkins. Featuring KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Colman Domingo and Diego Luna. If Beale Street Cold Talk, based on the novel of the same name by James Baldwin, is a romantic drama set within a backdrop of early 1970s racial relations in New … Continue reading The Two Reviews: If Beale Street Could Talk and Alita: Battle Angel
Venom (2018 Marvel Entertainment, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures) Directed by Ruben Fleischer, featuring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed. This recent addition to the Marvel superhero/monster-menace series of films is a great box office success, but critics are harder to please. First of all, there is no doubt that Venom contains a comic-book … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Venom and Early Man
‘I like cooking up extra ideas to add to the sets and costumes, and inventing an imaginary world. But what I'm more inspired by is something that happened to me or someone in my life who had a strong effect on me, or a novel, short story, play, or a movie where the characters moved … Continue reading Appraising the Art of Anderson. Wesley Wales Anderson
Murder on the Orient Express (Director, Kenneth Branagh. Featuring Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley, Penelope Cruz, Lesley Odom, Derek Jacobi and Sergei Polunin) Everyone is on the same train i.e. The Orient Express. There is a murder most hideous and everyone is a suspect. I enjoyed this movie … Continue reading The Two Reviews: Murder on the Orient Express and Loving Vincent
With Asghar Fashidi's recent (and second) triumph at the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film with The Salesman (which I have yet to watch), I thought it would be a nicety nice idea to check out some of the great movies that have come out from that troubled land - The Middle East (and no, … Continue reading Films from The Middle East: A Short Selection
In an increasingly bewildering modern world, where any means of engagement with it likely leads to further bewilderment and short-term depression (possibly long-term too), the populist fervor for escape could not be greater. Whether that escape may be to sit by a babbling brook and read Fifty Shades of Grey, or to climb to the … Continue reading Escaping This World Through Film
Momentary Cinema 