Small Town Murder Songs

The Best Films I Saw in 2013

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The cast of You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Here they are, the best films I saw in 2013. It’s a Top Ten job with the best in no particular order, followed by a list of films that made the top ten at some point in the year, then got bounced. This is not a Best of 2013, let me quickly point out, just the best films I’ve seen this year. So a film everyone else has seen but I haven’t won’t be here (I’ve not seen American Hustle yet, f’rinstance). And there might be stragglers from 2012 in here which I caught up with late. It really is “the best films I have seen this year”. If you’re wondering what to … Read more

11 March 2013-03-11

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Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master

Out in the UK this week The Master (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Paul Thomas Anderson’s interesting rather than great follow-up to There Will Be Blood follows shell-shocked war veteran Joaquin Phoenix into the ranks of what looks like Scientology in its early days. Like his films Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, The Master deals with fakery and the narratives people live by, Philip Seymour Hoffman giving it lots of Orson Welles orotundity as the cult’s charismatic leader, while PTA lays on the period detail with a cultural anthropologist’s precision, demonstrating how you went about building a new religion from nothing in the mid 20th century – a cooky mix of patrician … Read more