Greetings friends, if you’re like yours truly then these last few weeks have provided a unique opportunity to absolutely binge on the wonders of cinema, to watch a bunch of those movies you always wanted to but never quite got around to before. Filling in a few gaps, you know? Well, short story kept short, here are a few of the gems that I’ve watched for the first time during levels three and four.

The Last Detail (1973)

Good old Hal Ashby directing good old Jack Nicholson. Jacko is one of a pair of navy fellas told to escort a young recruit to prison a few states over after the young fella got caught thieving forty bucks. Young fella’s gotta do eight years and Jack and his mate feel sorry for him so over the course of their detail they decide to at least show him a good time before he’s locked up. With Jack’s manic energy and Ashby’s humanistic touch it ends up hilarious, heartwarming, and also kinda tragic. A lovely film. Definitely gonna try chanting now too.

Jackie Brown (1997)

Quentin Tarantino meets Elmore Leonard. This is the only non-original Tarantino script in his back catalogue and he could not have picked a more perfect novelist to work from, so much of that agnostic ultraviolence and super coolness that QT dines off feels like it could’ve come straight from a Leonard crime story... and in this case it did. Sam Jackson and Robert De Niro have outstanding supporting roles while Pam Grier and Robert Forster lead the way magnificently – Tarantino paying tribute (and also getting some street cred) by offering career resurgences to a couple gritty 70s faves. Working off a book keeps Tarantino about as tight as he’s ever gonna get, Jackie Brown is non-stop action but still with that Tarantino directorial flamboyance. If you’re not a fan of his usual indulgence then this is the one for you. It’s in my top three Tarantinos for sure.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

They needed to do more than just talk about Kevin, lemme tell ya. Talking is the bare minimum they needed to do about Kevin. But then that’s kind of the point of this terrifying Lynn Ramsay film, in which we follow tortured mother Tilda Swinton through a couple different timelines (the haircut is the giveaway) both before and after her teenage son takes a weapon into school and does something atrocious. Mercifully they work around the actual event itself... but that’s about the only thing this movie spares you from. It’s gruelling and intense and by the end of it I felt like the molecules of my body had been rearranged, like I was a slightly different person now for having seen it, and this film has continued to haunt me ever since. The power of cinema right there, friends.

True History Of The Kelly Gang (2019)

Australia’s most famous outlaw gets the punk rock treatment from director Justin Kurzel (who previously made that gorgeously dark version of Macbeth with Fassbender and Cotillard). George Mackay is delightfully unhinged in the lead role, an extremely physical performance. Russell Crowe has a killer cameo in the first third of things. Kiwis Thomasin McKenzie and Marlon Williams both have important roles. At times it feels like a fable, at other times a disastrous acid trip... all the while it remains distinctly Australian. I don’t quite know how to explain that deeper other than that this is one of the most Aussie movies I’ve ever seen and you’ll know what I mean when you see it. Visually striking and violent, with an underlying theme about how stories are told, who gets to tell them, and the subjectivity of truth (note the title). Come to think of it, THOTKG has a lot in common with Joker... only with originality in all the places that Joker was derivative.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Robert Altman’s so-called anti-western in which Warren Beatty plays a good old American huckster, building himself up as top dog in an emerging frontier town on the back of his tall tales but eventually he gets a bit too clever for his own good and trouble finds him. Altman was basically taking the piss with how much he inverted from your typical western movie traditions, from the freezing snow to the shoot-out at the end to the doomed love story between the title characters. It’s a cynical film... but also a beautiful film. Altman always had his ways and means of keeping himself at the focus however the big winner of McC&MrsM is old mate Leonard Cohen whose poignantly poetic tunes are scattered throughout.

Mean Streets (1973)

It took me a while to get around to this one. It’s early Marty Scorsese and for some reason Mean Streets just got buried behind Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Goodfellas, etc. on my To Watch list over the years. It took me all of about ten minutes to realise my mistake. This wasn’t Marty’s first feature but it was his breakthrough and with Mean Streets he emerged fully formed. All the Scorsese tricks, the freeze frames, the long tracking shots, the popular music soundtracks (yes, there’s a Rolling Stones tune), they’re all here to admire. Plus this was also a breakthrough role for the formerly unknown Robert De Niro – leading directly to his casting in Godfather II. Mean Streets is clearly a very personal film for Scorsese with the push and pull of familial honour and the criminal underworld and catholic guilt and a bit of romance on the side all driving the story onwards towards it’s brutal conclusion. But I’ll say no more than that, you can watch it for yourself.

The Assistant (2020)

Julia Garner plays a college grad trying to get into the film industry, a few months into a dream gig at a massive production company but being driven into the ground by the workload and the sacrifices the job demands. The film takes place over the course of a single day in which the little indignities that she has to deal with along the way (people dumping extra work on her, cheeky sexism, emotional abuse, general condescension, etc.) begin to pile up and then reach a very subtle breaking point as she realises that her boss is a creeper of Weinstein proportions... and that all the people around her are basically enabling him. The Assistant, directed by Aussie’s Kitty Green in her first narrative feature after a few acclaimed docos (that doco touch is crucial to the feel of this one), isn’t a preachy film. It doesn’t deal in black and white moralities. It presents an extremely complicated situation in which corruption is insidiously allowed to thrive. Main character Jane can’t do anything without risking her career, others have begrudgingly accepted that this is the way it is, some are genuinely complicit, others live in ignorance... all the while power is being consolidated and exploited. Powerful and eye-opening stuff. I mean, the Weinstein parallels are one thing but jeezus would it kill these bastards to say thank you even once?

Dogtooth (2009)

Still not sure what to make of the final shot of Yorgos Lanthimos’ film here but I know for damn sure that it was brilliantly written, constantly captivating, and utterly bonkers. Two oppressive parents (led by a manipulative father, although motivations are ambiguous) keep their adult children locked up in their isolated compound of a house, having raised them to believe that they cannot survive outside the estate gates... amongst many other mistruths they’ve been implanted with over the years (one of the funniest parts is how the mother creates fake meanings for words she doesn’t want them to know). The three of them, who don’t even seem to have names, have a perpetual immaturity about them which leads to a lot of the comedy (David Lynch called it his favourite comedy of 2009 although coming from him maybe that means something else) but it’s also the source of plenty of the most disturbing stuff from this extremely unsettling movie. The way Lanthimos frames his shots also keeps you on edge. Dogtooth is one of those ‘how did they even think of that’ films. Watching this and We Need To Talk About Kevin on back to back nights was a double bill that almost put me in the nut house.

In A Lonely Place (1950)

The book was better but Nicholas Ray’s adaptation goes off in a different direction anyway. In the book, written by the legendary Dorothy B. Hughes aka the queen of the noir, we know from the first chapter that the narrator is a heinous serial killer. In the movie Humphrey Bogart plays the main dude, now a Hollywood screenwriter, and it’s left up in the air whether or not he committed the murder at the beginning. That festering doubt is just enough to add some extra tension to the destructively passionate affair between Bogart’s character and Gloria Grahame’s and it’s that star-crossed-lovers thing between them which the film is ultimately about (that and a scathing look at Hollywood insiders and celebrities from within the studio system). The leads are wonderful. The ending is fantastic. I’ve got a massive soft spot for film noirs. The Big Sleep, The Third Man, Touch Of Evil, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady From Shanghai, Gilda, The Killing, and all them. This one’s up there too.

1917 (2019)

I’ll be honest that 1917 didn’t entice me at first. Another technically groundbreaking war film and all that entails. Nah man, too soon after the excellent Dunkirk for that. Unnecessary. But eventually I got around to it and predictably enough it turned out to be pretty great. George Mackay is the real deal (absolutely INSANE that this is the same dude from Ned Kelly) and for a movie where most other characters are only around for a scene at a time the supporting cast is immense too. Obviously the movie is stunningly directed by Sam Mendes, the one-continuous-shot thing isn’t a distraction or a gimmick, and the cinematography is special. With this one I’ve now seen all but one of the Best Picture nominees from the Oscars a few months back, Ford vs Ferrari is the lone dog left on the sidelines, and goddamn was last year stacked for movies. My personal rankings: The Irishman, Parasite, Little Women, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Jojo Rabbit, 1917, Marriage Story, Joker. And the first five I’d all consider to be Great with a capital G.

Candyman (1992)

Jordan Peele’s just produced a remake of this semi-obscure horror classic. That was enough to nudge me in this direction and what a blessing. Candyman is a top tier slasher pic, with a sophisticated social conscience and just the most incredible and terrifying imagery. The premise is that if you say Candyman five times into the mirror then he’ll appear and kill you, Candyman himself being a prominent African-American artist from the 1800s who was lynched after an affair with a white woman. And he has a hook for a hand since they chopped it off when they murdered him. Also an affinity for bees. There’s heaps of great stuff in here about the way myths are perpetuated in society (not to mention cultural appropriation and racial inequality) but there are also plenty of genuine scares so you can appreciate it on that surface level too - something for everyone in other words. For real, Candyman is superb and needs instant reappraisal as a canonical horror classic, maybe it’ll get that soon with the extra attention. I cannot wait until the new version comes out later in the year.

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