All That Jazz (Fosse, 1979)|||||8.5
* Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002)|||||4.5
Hausu (Obayashi, 1977)|||||6.5
The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985)|||||5.5
The Prowler (Losey, 1951)|||||8
White Dog (Fuller, 1982)|||||7
Boom (Losey, 1968)|||||8
* The Man Who Wasn't There (Coen, 2001)|||||7
King & Country (Losey 64)|||||8
Modesty Blaise (Losey, 1966)|||||4.5
Has there ever been so unsuccessful a film as Modesty Blaise? It just keeps on failing and shooting itself in the foot. I think I'm a big Losey fan by this point - he's an artsy, pretentious guy with too many ideas in his head. In this film, though, it's like, ease the hell up with the cinematic pontification - this type of material needs some sense of commercial narrativity to work and indulging in incessant musical juxtoposition is not going to engage the viewer! And I can appreciate his playing Continental iconoclasm with another culture, but those were some of the worst Arabs ever put to film.
Blind Date (Losey, 1959)|||||7.5Blind Date was a textured, thinking-human's crime-mystery film, Losey's class-oriented concerns and stormy visual intensity figuring heavily into the subtext, but if it didn't have one of the most ludicrous premises ever. Losey's on his A-game, but again, the film shows his way of occasionally veering into very overripe melodrama.
