Tag: YouTube

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: YouTube
Length: 90 minutes
Synopsis: Classic comic play
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: wordy, hammy, fun
What I don’t like about it: unimportant, problematic

Review:
The most popular and successful of Oscar Wilde’s plays, this bawdy farce finds two rakes assuming false identities to woo various ladies. Many quotable lines and fun farce with an unbearably syrupy ending.

Content notes (may contain spoilers):

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: YouTube (may not be the best copy)
Length: 100 minutes
Synopsis: Documentary on the Black Power movement
Recommendation rating: 5/5

What I like about it: great film, great subject
What I don’t like about it: it’s not narrative, more a meditation

Review:
Through the years featured in the title, a Swedish documentary crew toured the United States, interviewing figures involved in the Black Power movement – including Angela Davis, Kwame Ture and Huey Newton – for a sympathetic television documentary back home. Here, this footage is raided and assembled with modern-day voiceovers from Angela Davis, Talib Kweli and Questlove, among others. The intimate access gotten by the Swedes makes this unmissable – see an extended prison interview with Davis, Ture burning his draft card and a class of Black Panther children turning Wilson Pickett’s Land of a Thousand Dances into an anti-police resistance chant.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): racism, violence, guns

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: YouTube
Length: just over an hour
Synopsis: The Battle of Culloden, in the style of BBC documentaries of the time
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: a wonderfully didactic history lesson
What I don’t like about it: it’s no fun popcorn flick

Review:
Peter Watkins is a fascinating filmmaker, tending to favour an experimental documentary style over what he refers to as ‘the monoform’ of dramatic entertainment. Throughout his career, he filmed many fascinating and unflinchingly bleak documentaries on subjects like nuclear weapons and the Paris Commune, as well as satirical fiction such as Privilege, Punishment Park and the fantastic Gladiators. He would prove to be a formative influence on Adam Curtis, who is a formative influence on me.

In this, his first feature-length work, the Battle of Culloden is re-enacted by amateur actors as if a documentary crew were able to time-travel to the battlefield. The effect really works as unfolding developments build significant emotion for what seems, at first, like a dry history lesson.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): grim horrors of war, vividly described