Benjamin Judge's judgements

These are the films that just missed out on my top 100. They are all good films. If there is one thing that connects them all it is the feeling that while I liked them, I won’t be rushing to watch them again any time soon. Think of it like eating yoghurt with a fork. It’s still good yoghurt, but.. no… that’s a terrible metaphor. I’m not sure I even needed a metaphor. Think of it like watching a film that you thought was good but you didn’t feel the need to rewatch any time soon. Yes. Just think of that. Forget the yoghurt.

125: Highest 2 Lowest

I’m not sure I totally understood what Spike Lee was doing with Highest 2 Lowest. The acting styles seemed to change subtly between some scenes and some parts of the film that were bad seemed to be bad on purpose. Eventually I just hung on for the ride and got out of it what I could, which, to be fair, was quite a lot.

124: G20

A pretty dumb straight-to-streaming US-president-beats-up-a-load-of-terrorists premise, but the president is played by Viola Davis, so it’s good.

123: 2073

2073 is a science fiction/documentary from Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy) which splits its run time between an imagined dystopian future and real footage of the worst stuff happening in the world at the moment.

122: The Housemaid

It’s hard to pinpoint why I didn’t the last third of this movie without spoilers, so I won’t, but I didn’t like the last third. Ask me if you see me.

121: Nosferatu

While there are clear themes and ideas running through all of Robert Eggers’ work, The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman are so different in style that it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise that eventually he would make something that I didn’t get on with. Nevertheless, it still came as a surprise when I didn’t get on with Nosferatu.

I blame the source material. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was an unauthorised tribute to/rip-off of Dracula which, thanks to brilliant direction, a great central performance, and an air of extreme creepiness became a classic equal to its inspiration. It is a perfect example of how silence, and black and white film, aren’t necessarily hindrances to cinematic genius. What the film doesn’t have, is internal logic. Transferring the action from England to Germany may give you a certain amount of legal distance from Dracula, but it also provides problems. For example, travelling from Transylvania to England by boat makes a sort of sense; you’ve got to cross the channel at some point. Transylvania to Germany? Less so. Just hire a carriage. Things like this feel irrelevant to the original, because story is quite far down its list of priorities. In the remake they were markedly more noticeable.

The logical way to approach Nosferatu would be to reimagine it for a modern audience but you can’t because anything that is a version of a version of Dracula is actually just a version of Dracula. The second you change anything in Nosferatu you aren’t remaking Nosferatu. Does that make sense? If not, to put it more clearly, You have to cleave to the original copy of the original or you risk cleaving your original copy of the copy of the original from the original. In a nutshell, you need to do a straight remake or acknowledge you are making a Dracula rip-off. 

I can’t think of anyone better suited to remaking Nosferatu than Eggers, and if somebody showed you ten random frames from his version you would assume he had succeeded. Castles are spooky, doorways intimidate, rooms and hallways are tall and eerie. It looks great. The problem is that at no point in the film is a door just a door, or a castle just a castle. Everything is spooky all the time. Frequently the film seems so spooky that it lurches toward being a parody of itself. Scenes that were supposed to be creepy were just funny. Which isn’t to say something can’t be both. The Lighthouse, my favourite Eggers film, is very much both and great because of it. 

I’m enormously glad that Nosferatu was a huge financial (and critical) success because I think Eggers is a great film maker and I want him to have as much artistic freedom as possible in whatever he does in the future. I’m really looking forward to Werwulf. I’d go as far as saying that you should dislike some of a great filmmaker’s output. Nobody would question Hitchcock or Spielberg’s right to be listed among the greatest directors of all time, but how many people, honestly, love every film they made? And that’s ok. That’s good. The fact that we don’t just illustrates that they were trying different things in different movies. Nosferatu just wasn’t for me. That’s ok too.

120: K.O.

Silly French action movie but one with a performance by Cyril Gane that showed he could become a big name in action films.

119: F1: The Movie

Is this the best advert ever made? No. That would be the ITV Digital/PG Tips adverts Johnny Vegas did with Monkey. But definitely top ten. Brad Pitt and Damson Idris lining up against real racing drivers, driving for real teams, real cars covered in real sponsors, driving past real adverts for real products available now in real countries that host real races.

What I enjoyed most about F1: The Movie were the moments when this attempt to use a film to sell a sport started to unravel. Narrative decisions and lines in the script that were clearly put there by lawyers representing the drivers. Pitt and Idris are constantly telling their team how good Hamilton or Ocon are, how impossible they are to overtake. The story has to be about the team trying to win a point, not a race, because at all times the product must be seen as superior. It’s ridiculous, but strangely endearing.

118: How to Train Your Dragon

Pretty much a scene for scene remake of the cartoon but one that features Gerard Butler headbutting a dragon, so well worth the entrance fee.

117: Sisu: Road to Revenge

Not as good as the original, but still quite enjoyable. An old man singlehandedly destroying an army. What’s not to love?

116: Day of the Fight

A film of two halves. The first half is great. A ex-champion boxer fresh out of jail, who has somehow managed to get another shot at the belt, walks around his community settling his affairs. A flash back at the start of the film has told us that he is carrying an injury that should prevent him from boxing again. One punch in the wrong place could kill him. I really enjoyed this half of the film. It’s littered with fun cameos (Ron Perlman, Joe Pesci, John Magaro, Anatol Yusef, Steve Buscemi) and really nicely sets up the possibility that he could win, but he’ll probably lose, and he’ll possibly die.

And that’s where the film should have ended. With him entering the building, or entering the ring. Instead we get the fight and the aftermath. Too much is explained. Nothing is left to imagine. It’s a shame.

The first half is superb though.

115: A Minecraft Movie

A lot more fun than I was expecting.

114: Eleanor the Great

A really good character piece with really good performances.

113: Train Dreams

I would have got rid of the voice over, and let the images speak for themselves, and I’m always a bit wary of those films that ask us to question whether a life that leaves no traces of its existence after it is gone is worth living (answer, of course it is you daft bastard, not everyone can grasp immortality by writing the fucking Crazy Frog ringtone can they?) but this is an undeniably beautiful film and Joel Edgerton is great in it.

112: We Live in Time

Bit of a weepy one, maybe with one eye on the awards season, but Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are very charming in it.

111: The Gorge

I really liked the first half/two thirds of this. The set up is nice. The relationship between the leads growing via messages and miming across a ravine. All very cute.

110: Dragon

Dragon has a long, and quite convoluted, plot but in a nutshell a high school student reinvents himself as ‘Dragon’ at university because female students like bad boys, skips loads of classes, gets expelled then later in life, having been found using a fake diploma, has to pass all his exams in a really short period of time. Think Billy Madison but with extended fight scenes, a couple of weddings and several song and dance numbers.

109: Mars Express

It’s odd, given how close France is geographically, how hard it is to see French animation in the UK. [btw if you ever get the chance to see Long Way North or April and the Extraordinary World jump at it]

Mars Express is a futuristic murder mystery/intelligence vs artificial intelligence/what is sentience, what is life/ science fiction. It’s good. Would recommend.

108: Den of Thieves: Pantera

Gerard Butler again, but this time instead of headbutting a dragon he is headbutting the system, making friends with gangsters and learning how to pronounce croissant. Pleasantly homoerotic.

107: All of You

Set in a near future where a company can find your soul mate for you, All of You is a romantic comedy that picks away at what a soul mate actually is. It’s funny, and the chemistry between Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots is really good. You almost don’t realise that you might be rooting for the bad guys.

106: Eddington

Eddington is a heavily flawed depiction of the culture wars that just puts any nonsense spouted on the internet, by either side, up on the screen as if it were fact in a sort of kill-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out way. It’s a mess. I dunno though. I didn’t hate it.

105: Blue Moon

Fresh from seeing the incredibly successful Broadway debut of his former writing partner’s new musical, Lorenz Hart sits in a bar in New York, creating popular culture like Michael J Fox inventing rock and roll in Back to the Future. It’s an incredibly artificial set up that at first you put up with because Ethan Hawke is so much fun in the lead and then quickly embrace as you realise that, sure, Hart didn’t inspire Stuart Little and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the same evening but he would have told you he did, printing the legend in real time, and would later kid himself he actually had, the booze taking the edge off reality. Lovely stuff.

104: Caught Stealing

A comedy, but a really dark one. I had quibbles with one or two plot points, one in particular, but no issues with Matt Smith’s mohican.

103: Retro

Absolutely bonkers action movie about a death cult and the power of laughter.

102: Magic Farm

A film crew sent to the wrong village to film a local music craze decide to invent their own. I really liked this one. The interactions between the crew members and between the crew and the locals were both dealt with really well. The film is sweet and defiant and angry and funny.

101: All (or at least some) of the horror films I bottled this year

Look. I know my chicken bones meant I missed something good this year. This is me acknowledging that. I will try to be less scared in future.