Stuart Murray

Comments

Singin' in the Rain

Sumptuous. Gorgeous musical and best film about filmmaking ever made.

Alien

Visually spectacular and conceptually so complex - bodies, feminism, cross-species etc. Also great ensemble acting.

The Wizard of Oz

Brilliantly surreal. Takes the excessiveness of the novel and screens out the childishness. Songs are incredible and whole is stunningly imaginative and original.

Metropolis

Spectacular - all other filmic visions of the future (Blade Runner etc) are sourced in the aesthetics of Metropolis. It's design is simply amazing. The film's politics are simplistic and naive, but so many scenes (especially of the workers and their machines) are breathtaking.

Bicycle Thieves

So brilliantly stripped down. The aesthetics are stunning - the starkness of the cinematography - and the story so beautifully simple. It emits a power few films can match.

Ngati

A hugely important intervention in the history of filmmaking - the first fiction film solely directed by an Indigenous filmmaker. Follows a rural Maori community's articulation of its values in 1940s New Zealand, but what makes it special is how it embraced its topic in its own making - Barclay and producers made the whole shoot a communal activity and saw its production as a process of giving back to the community the stories it offered to the director. The first screening was in the small coastal location in which it was filmed (Barclay believed that filmmakers should show their films for free to the people who inspired them, even pay audiences to attend). Such aesthetics and processes are increasingly common now, but Barclay set the precedent.

The Bourne Supremacy

Simply the best action film I know. The plot is sophisticated, the acting (especially Matt Damon) excellent and the psychology nicely complex, but the truly amazingly elements are the cinematography and editing. Each shot is perfectly constructed, meaning the overall tone and look of the film are consistent in a way that few can match. The way it avoids predictable sentimentality is equally rare. I never tire of watching it.

Jaws

Studies in masculinity aren't much in vogue these days, but this is wonderful for so many other reasons. The dialogue is brilliant and the ensemble acting, in the domestic scenes especially, is wonderful.

Wild Strawberries

The ultimate study of introspection. Beautifully paced and shot, it builds its subjects into its form perfectly. And the acting is sublime.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

This could be in any top ten for the score alone, but the sublime cinematography is wonderful and the understated yet totally excessive acting is brilliant. And there's simply no other film like it.