Matthew Asprey Gear
Writer
UK
Voted for
| Film | Year | Director |
|---|---|---|
| Citizen Kane | 1941 | Orson Welles |
| Touch of Evil | 1958 | Orson Welles |
| Shoah | 1985 | Claude Lanzmann |
| Chinatown | 1974 | Roman Polanski |
| Where Is the Friend's House? | 1987 | Abbas Kiarostami |
| La dolce vita | 1960 | Federico Fellini |
| Casablanca | 1942 | Michael Curtiz |
| Céline and Julie Go Boating | 1974 | Jacques Rivette |
| Lawrence of Arabia | 1962 | David Lean |
| Cría cuervos | 1975 | Carlos Saura |
Comments
Touch of Evil
The 1998 reconstruction edited by Walter Murch (from Welles's extensive notes) transformed an enormously entertaining pulpy B-film into a perfectly balanced baroque art film. Perhaps the greatest film noir of all time, 'Touch of Evil' is Welles's most mature dramatisation of fascism in the US context, moving beyond his earlier Nazi infiltration plots (eg. 'The Stranger') to a stunning examination of how the institutions of American power (the police, the border with Mexico) enable fascism to thrive at home. And in Hank Quinlan, Welles creates one of his greatest villains.
Chinatown
'Chinatown' initially suggests another installment in the retro- or nostalgia-noir films popular at the time (venetian blinds, fedoras, etc). It briskly transcends those generic gestures to become greater than even the best private detective movies of the original noir cycle.
Further remarks
An attempt to find a balance between movies which seem a perfect realisation of their type (Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia), those which transcend their type (Chinatown), and experimental movies which exhilaratingly reinvent the form (Citizen Kane, Celine and Julie Go Boating).