January 4, 2013

The Last Ten Movies I Saw

By michaelgloversmith

1. Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow)
2. The Yards (Gray)
3. Little Odessa (Gray)
4. Violette (Chabrol)
5. The Ascent (Shepitko)
6. The Portrait of a Lady (Campion)
7. The Fly (Cronenberg)
8. The Cranes are Flying (Kalatozov)
9. Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Eisenstein)
10. Ivan the Terrible, Part I (Eisenstein)

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About michaelgloversmith

Filmmaker, author and Film Studies instructor. View all posts by michaelgloversmith

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2013 at 4:22 pm and posted in The Last Ten Movies I Saw. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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10 responses to “The Last Ten Movies I Saw”

• Victor De Leon
  January 4th, 2013 at 4:25 pm

  Nice list, Micheal. I have yet to see The Yards and I need to revisit The Fly asap. I love that movie. Thanks and Happy New Year!

  Reply
  • michaelgloversmith
    January 4th, 2013 at 4:46 pm

    I don’t think I had seen The Fly since the 80s(!) but it’s one of Cronenberg’s best. The Yards is a must see if you like James Gray’s other films. I also couldn’t recommend Zero Dark Thirty more highly if you haven’t seen it yet. Happy New Year to you too!

    Reply
• david
  January 5th, 2013 at 12:17 am

  And the Oscar goes to … Zero Dark Thirty this year?

  I watched Shepitko’s THE WINGS a long time ago and loved it, is The Ascent a better film?

  Reply
  • michaelgloversmith
    January 5th, 2013 at 12:34 am

    The Ascent is Shepitko’s masterpiece.

    Zero Dark Thirty is Kathryn Bigelow’s best film but it’s too dark and too complex to win the Best Picture Oscar. Put your money on Lincoln instead.

    Reply
• Bherz
  January 5th, 2013 at 12:33 am

  My last ten:

  Fort Apache (Ford)
  Django Unchained (Tarentino)
  School of Rock (Linklater)
  The Amazing Spiderman (Webb)
  300 (Snyder)
  Trouble With The Curve (Lorenz)
  The Words (Klugman, Sternthal)
  Les Miserables (Hooper)
  Bad Santa (Zwigoff)
  Batman 2 (Nolan)

  I was underwhelmed by Django Unchained. School of Rock was awesome.

  What was your take on Django and Zero Dark?

  Reply
  • michaelgloversmith
    January 5th, 2013 at 12:44 am

    I agree Django was disappointing. There were some good performances and good scenes but it just didn’t cohere on the whole. One of the big problems I had was that Django and Broomhilda (whose love story should’ve been driving the whole plot) were, at best, the 4th and 5th most interesting characters in the film. For me, the movie died when Calvin Candie died.

    Zero Dark Thirty is my favorite American film of the past 5 years. Full review coming soon!

    Reply
• tetsuo
  January 11th, 2013 at 6:28 am

  i’m writing now an analytical review on Shepitko’s “The Wings” in my film study school. haven’t idea that foreigners watched her movies too.

  Reply
  • michaelgloversmith
    January 11th, 2013 at 8:17 am

    Do you live in Russia, Tetsuo? WINGS and THE ASCENT were both released on DVD by the prestige label “The Criterion Collection” here in the U.S.:

    http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/507-eclipse-series-11-larisa-shepitko

    This automatically means that a lot of people are going to see her films although she’s not as popular as someone like, say, Andrei Tarkovsky, who has a huge cult following. I liked THE ASCENT very much.

    Reply
• Mitchell
  January 15th, 2013 at 10:34 am

  I’ve been recently watching Paradjanov – look for a blog post in the near future- and seeing Ivan The Terrible on your list made me realize how the tableaux of Paradjanov might be indebted to the extreme stylization of Eisenstein, especially in Ivan part one. Need to think more about this. Somehow, this connection makes the Paradjanov films less strange/remote – which is a shame.

  Reply
  • michaelgloversmith
    January 15th, 2013 at 10:45 am

    I’ve got a “Sound Era Soviet Cinema Primer” in the works. I look forward to your post.

    Reply

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