An epic Swedish family story seen through the eyes two siblings - Fanny & Alexander, from Ingmar Bergman. The film starts off slow, set on a Christmas Eve, gets entertaining as it progresses. I'd not call this Bergman's best among what I have seen of his, though this film did win four Oscars including the Best Foreign Language Film(1983).
If this was a Hindi movie, they could have quashed the Vols 1 & 2 in to a single movie 3 to 3.5 hours long, but Hollywood is more intelligent. It makes you pay twice for what you should not even have paid once and thus the two volumes. Kill Bills are definitely not Tarantino's best, as far as I am concerned, and the volume 2 is worse that vol 1. Well, the bride is happy, Tarantino is happy, lots of viewers are happy to have Killed Bill, I wish we had some more of that pulp fiction.
In America, the film by Jim Sheridan did create a lot of Oscar flutter. It reminds me of the emotional, goody goody Malayalam movies, where the successful run of the movie depends on how much tears the director is able to jerk out of the audience and in the end everything ends with a happy family union. 
An edgy grainy thriller with Jamie Foxx as the cabbie and Tom Cruise as his passenger with some dangerous plans. It has a different role for Cruise, but it is Foxx who outshines him with his acting. Its not the usual Hollywood thriller, good for a night"in" with friends.
It is a bit confusing, a bit slow for all the suspense it has and follows the French filmdom's rule of not ending happily - the end is always a compromise, not too sad but not a fairytale ending either.
I can forgive Tarantino(not that it matters) for Kill Bill series just because he made Pulp Fiction. The movie is a classic, one of the all time greatest movies to come out of Hollywood ever - the man certainly deserves some respect. John Travolta and Samuel.L.Jackson are amazing in their roles, truly deserve the boost the film gave to their careers later on. But the coup de grace of this film is its dialog - a dream come true of a script writer. 
A love story set in the background of civil war. The coup de grace of the movie is not exactly the lovers - played by Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, but Rene Zellweiger who plays a supporting character named Ruby.
"They say we all lose 21 grams... at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. And how much fits into 21 grams?" - the final thoughts of Paul Rivers played by Sean Penn in the film 21 Grams. And I had thought 21 Grams was a movie about drugs! Well, it is not. 
A true story of two journalists from the war torn Cambodia of the mid seventies. One is an American covering the vietnam war and its Cambodian aftermath for the New York Times, the other is a Cambodian journalist who acts as his interpretor.
Or did he see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and think that only thing that movie lacked was Uma Thurman, so I better make one with her in it?!! Kill Bill, for me, is a Tarantino comedy in the guise of a video game(if you have played Dead or Alive you'd know what I am talking about). Almost all scenes were funny, like computer games you went thru' levels, first you got your transportations(yep you have to fight for it too), then you went thru' different levels of enemies with increasing sophistication - first you fought off dwarfs and gnomes, then teeming midgets, then the devil's advocate and finally the devil him/herself - thats exactly what Tarantino does in this movie, except you don't have the joystick with you, he has it and he makes sure that you win this automated game.
So British. There are no cool computer graphic ghosts or whiz ghost busters and the humor is so so British. In a way the whole movie has an effect of a play because there is no computer animation here and with zombies and ghosts and fights against ghosts shot in the old fashioned way, without the behind the screen gimmicks it is more earthy and appears less ghostly. All for a few laughs.
It is a film from the eyes of a budding photo-journalist, a young boy(Rocket) from the favela who wants to break free from the drug world and wants to reveal to the world what it means to live in the favelas and why young kids end up as drug dealers. The cinematography is slick, fast cuts in tune with the fast paced life - you have to live a lifetime before you die with a bullethole in your chest at the age of fifteen or nineteen. 
The central concept of the movie might seem so alien to Hollywood viewers - a policeman loses his gun, almost loses his job, go nuts about it and is considered as a social outcaste. Here in US, were you can simply walk in to a store and buy the firearm of your choice the whole premise of this movie might seem pathetic. But thats how things sometimes happen in 'the rest of the world'. 
After long Bollywood makes a commercial movie that is up to the current standards of world cinema - thank you Ashutosh Gawarikar! A Hindi movie cannot do without its quintessential songs and melodrama - that is what makes it a Bollywood movie. It is an artform by itself, but how can you make it a competitive film appealing to world audience, Swades is the answer. 
It is a summer of sexual awakenings and boyish innocence. They go chasing after the girls at the same time are deeply devoted to one another. It is a movie about teenage experimentation with a backdrop of sunny Spain. 
The last orders of a dead man to scatter his ashes at the seaside resort where he spent his honeymoon fifty years ago, is carried out by his friends. The movie progresses through conversations of the characters in a typical English pub - The Coach and through the flashbacks of memory of everyone involved which forms the well knit montage from which the film evolves.
The first ever movie to come out of the Merchant-Ivory collaboration. The director-producer-writer trio of James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabhwala make their first film based on the story of a newly married couple in New Delhi in the early sixties. 
A heist movie - this time its French for a change. Although after watching heist after heist movies - the Italian job, Mamet's Heist, Reservoir Dogs and the like, I think I arrived a bit late at the Red Circle. But it has a quality that Hollywood films lack - it lacks coolness, it is more real, more gritty and more human like. The scheming thieves lack the super hero genes so common in the Hollywood kind. But all said and done I like the Hollywood ending better, when the thieves win!
The opening sequence,mid air tanking of a B-52 bomber was scavenged by the film's photographers from old stock footage from one of the studios in Hollywood and was used in the film, thus the start itself alerts the viewer of the out-of-the-box nature of the movie. Peter Sellers plays three different roles in the movie, each one better than the other. The War Room in Oval Office, is an interesting set so is the cockpit and controls of the B-52 bomber which the set technicians had to create all by themselves because the US navy refused to let them show any B-52 bombers. The War Room is equally famous, so much so that when Reagen became the President he asked his aide to be shown the War Room, to which the aide replied there was no War Room in the Oval Office, then Reagen said, "I thought there was one, they showed it in the film Dr.Strangelove!"
This 1956 movie is the first movie to have a feature length behind the scene documentary because John Ford kept a camera behind the camera shooting the real film so as to have video record of all the activities which went to the making of the film. But the DVD I saw didn't have this Behind the Scenes documentary, it'd have thrown light in to some more stuff.
The contrasting characters of the two soldiers are well developed, the mountain village and its unique lifestyle is something not seen everyday. I think this movie paved a way for lot of films which came later in a similar vein - like the Oscar winning No Man's Land and Kukushka. And in a way these later movies bettered the defects this one had, but still it is worth a watch.
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Watched Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks(Hana-Bi) yesterday. That was quite a movie. Takeshi Kitano the director himself stars as police detec...
