FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

[Jerky]

Love Del Toro and Pan's Labyrinth, but it's not Kubrickean, and Del Toro is not a Kubrickean director.

I did miss one Spanish guy - Alfonso Cuaron, whose Children of Men is the most Kubrickean non-Kubrick film ever made, quite possibly.

Jerky

PS - Lots of doings over at KubrickU.blogspot.com, including an ongoing explication of my life-long love-afair with Stan the Man's flicks!

[JackRiddler]

Lars von Trier is not Kubrickean. But some of the Dogma 95 movies made a try. I wish Kubrick had done a Dogma.

[OuishAgain]

To digress from Kubrick for a second, I was surfing YouTube and came across this, which I've never heard of, from 1979. The video is in French with Spanish subtitles, neither of which I understand, but every RI reader will know the story. (I don't know about cinematic quality, but it does have a kind of Alphaville vibe that I liked. Blank skyscrapers are a real motif in '70s conspiracy films, aren't they?)

[Jerky]

You say your post is a digression from Kubrick, but damn if K's visual stamp isn't all over I as in Icarus. A wonderful, underappreciated, essentially lost (for the English speaking world) work of 70s conspiracy cinema.

YOPJ

[conniption]

The Mystery Of The Leaping Fish: 1916 Film (Cocaine Using "Scientific Detective" Named Coke Ennyday)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZETMXchAViY

[Belligerent Savant]

...But you've forgotten P.T. Anderson. (Dear god, it was such a shock when I realized that this Anderson guy of such incredibly diverse range and tenor was actually two different directors. Ha.) There Will Be Blood and The Master stylistically doing decent facsimiles of Kubrick, and get some of the way in the substance.

Agreed. Still haven't seen The Master in its entirety, but have been a fan of all of P.T. Anderson's films (he managed to elicit arguably the best ever performance out of Cruise in Magnolia -- perhaps because it was closest to his -- Cruise's -- true mindset).

Gaspar Noe (arguable)
Enter the Void is epic, epic stuff. Give him his own category. Not Kubrick.

I watched Noe's Enter the Void (after being impressed/disturbed by one of his prior films, Irreversible) not too long ago and was similarly impressed with some of the imagery/innovation/stylistic cues, but felt he really could have taken that concept farther, gone into more depth.

No denying his ability, however.

Not sure if anyone posted this one yet:

[DrEvil]

I have a weak spot for low budget horror of the creepy kind, so here's a few rigint-ish movies off the top of my head:

Banshee Chapter
No idea what the title refers to, but the movie involves MK-Ultra, number stations, super DMT and Ted Levine as an awesome gonzo author.

The Objective
Soldiers in middle east run into.. something in the desert.

Noroi - the Curse
Japanese fake documentary. Highly recommended. Here's the full movie with English subs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilHmpETJgZ0

The Borderlands
Vatican investigators checking out a supposed miracle in a remote English church. Great actors and a great ending.

V/H/S 2
Several short movies. Most of them suck, but the one taking place at a religious compound is great and really freaky.

Wer and Afflicted
Shaky-cam werewolf and vampire movies respectively. Both are pretty good (Wer is seriously brutal, so be warned).

The Dyatlov Pass Incident (Devil's Pass)
Remote Russian location. Mysterious door in mountainside. Directed by Renny Harlin.

[guruilla]

Locke (2013)

[streeb]

Locke is great.

Phase IV, a film which is probably well known round here. But now you can watch at home and restore the crazy studio-trashed ending all by yourself.

[brekin]

OK, file this under a good bad movie. It really needs to be reedited to be a 40 minute episode instead of full length feature.
The trailer below is better than the film and is a testament to how you can really over complicate a simple premise.
But there is about 20-25 minutes in the film that is worth wading through the plot holes, really rusty acting transitions and over pretentious cinematography.

I never heard about this film, because it flopped and deservedly so. But the subject matter and style is very R.I. and the film has some dark charm to it. I'd post the Wikipedia plot summary, but even that is confusing as fuck. Basically, <SPOILER ALERT> the F.B.I. had a remote viewing program they used to track serial killers which kind of went awry. The only reason I tell you that is because it will keep you interested/informed as the film plods through the deserts of kitsch to the little isles of interesting material. If you actually have a life, I suggest you just watch the trailer.

Suspect Zero

[stefano]

Nightcrawler is outstanding. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a Lou Bloom, a very strange self-taught loner making a success as a freelance video journalist in LA. He has all the MBA buzzwords down pat, is driven and thinks two moves ahead. The contrast to him is provided by his partner in the business, Rick (played by Riz Ahmed, doing a pretty good American accent), who cannot understand how Bloom's head works, and the other main character is Nina (Rene Russo), a showrunner at a TV station, who understands him all too well.

I think it'll appeal to most here - Bloom is the typical shark, using and discarding people around him. It's a good story, but what makes it a quality film is Gyllenhaal's acting - he puts exactly the right mix of controlled menace and baffled awkwardness in the role - and the clever use of screens to tell the story - we only see the climactic scene on the little video viewfinders of Bloom and Rick's cameras, or else on the TV banks in the studio. Good comment on business, and the media business in particular. I really liked it.

[Luther Blissett]

It Follows is going to be one of my favorite films of the year, I can just feel it. This is coming highly recommended. I love atmospheric films that say more with their implicit nature than with their explicit formal qualities (see Kubrick) and this one doesn't disappoint. I'm going to have to give it multiple viewings to try to analyze some of the background and settings.

One of the most interesting things about this movie is that it takes place in a parallel universe, though it's subtle. Near the beginning the characters are watching a black and white flying saucer film on a tube television (a motif repeated throughout) even though they're wearing contemporary clothes; there does not seem to be "an internet" or "social media" though one character carries a sufficiently technologically advanced device in the form of a seashell makeup compact, with which she reads books (Dostoevsky) and poetry; Detroit is already collapsed; cars and signage are all disjointed and out-of-time; college coursework appears as giant folded paper charts and tables (in a class on Prufrock). I loved this about the movie and it's totally separate from the horror on-screen, the performances and the score (all of which are great).

I'm not going to post the trailer because I don't think it does the film justice. But if you like atmospheric, dreamy, well-crafted horror, I implore you to go see it.

If you worry that this is some kind of morality play, it definitely isn't.

http://io9.com/it-follows-proves-that-h ... 1691019297
http://www.avclub.com/review/it-follows ... ge--216311

[zangtang]

Its on my list.
- and how could it not be? - I haven't been implored for a long time !

world udbe a better place if we all did a bit more imploreing.

sans doubte. Pub.

[Nordic]

A lot of buzz about "Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter". I keep hearing that it's great.

[Hugo Farnsworth]

Radio Free Albemuth, screenplay by John Alan Simon, based on PK Dick's book of the same name, sort of the Valis world.

No idea how i missed this, since it came out in 2010, and it's been mentioned here in a few threads. Anyway, it's playing on Netflix.