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The fight club. David Fincher. 1999.

“"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.

Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue.”

rogerebert.com

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Cria Cuervos. Carlos Saura. 1976.

“Childhood can be a most terrifying time. One must constantly observe the proscriptions of a primitive system of cause and effect that can be questioned only by the reckless or the ignorant. Squash a spider and it will rain. Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Sleep in the light of a new moon and you may never wake up. There is power in the knowledge of these things, as well as awful responsibility. One must be vigilant. One has to be alert for signs.”

The New York Times.

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Arrebato. 1979. Iván Zulueta. 

“With a voyeuristic streak akin to Norman Bates, Pedro pathologically captures time lapses of everything around his rural domain using a Super 8 camera. Meeting José, who he perceives as a real filmmaker from the capital, serves as a dose of inspiration for the perturbed adolescent trapped in a deceiving body. The “arrebato” (rapture) that he so vehemently references throughout refers to the trance-like state that overtakes him when filming people, places, and things he’s never seen before; when narcotics send him into similar ecstasy, or when he's near a tangible memory (a toy or a sticker from childhood) that preserves his juvenile capacity for wonderment.”

rogerebert.com

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The Fifth Element. 1997. Luc Besson. 

Besson gives us one great visual conceit after another. A concert, for example, starring a towering alien diva whose skin shines with a ghostly blue light, and who has weird ropes of sinew coming out of her skull. And a space station that seems to be a sort of intergalactic Las Vegas, in which a disc jockey (Chris Tucker) prances about hosting an endless TV show. And spaceship interiors that succeed in breaking the "Star Wars''/"Trek'' mold and imagining how an alien race might design its command deck.

Roger Ebert

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DAY FOR NIGHT.  La nuit américaine.  François Truffaut. 1973

“Movies about movies usually don’t quite get things right. The film business comes out looking more romantic and glamorous (or more corrupt and decadent) than it really is, and none of the human feeling of a movie set is communicated. That is not the case with Francois Truffaut’s funny and touching film, “Day for Night,” which is not only the best movie ever made about the movies but is also a great entertainment”.

Roger Ebert.com

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The Great Gatsby.  Baz Luhrmann. 2013

“DiCaprio's Gatsby is the movie's greatest and simplest special effect: an illusion conjured mainly through body language and voice. On the page, the character is so mysterious, so much a projection of the book's narrator, that you'd think he'd be as unplayable onscreen as Kurtz or John Galt; he eluded Alan Ladd and Robert Redford, the role's previous inhabitants. And yet DiCaprio makes him comprehensible and achingly real. The actor's choices drive home the idea that Gatsby is playing the man he wishes he were, and that others need him to be. We see the calculations behind his eyes, but we also believe that he could hide them from the other characters — most of them, anyway”.

RogerEbert.com 

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A Confederacy of Dunces. Huntington Avenue Theatre. 2015

“Adapting John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces into a play has been like wrestling Ignatius Reilly to the stage. The book is famously picaresque, episodic and digressive, but the digressions are often the point. What I think we've arrived at is a play that focuses on the characters – Ignatius, his mother Mrs. Reilly, Burma Jones, Myrna Minkoff – without losing any of the book's color and atmosphere and humor.”

Jeffrey Hatcher . Adapter

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The Deer Hunter. Michael Cimino. 1978.

“Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" is a three-hour movie in three major movements. It is a progression from a wedding to a funeral. It is the story of a group of friends. It is the record of how the war in Vietnam entered several lives and altered them terribly forever. It is not an anti-war film. It is not a pro-war film. It is one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made.”

Roger Ebert. rogerebert.com

Favourite Henry’s film. 

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The Double Life of Véronique.  Krzysztof Kieslowski . 1991

“It is a romance about those moments we all sometimes have when we think we see ourselves at a distance. Is there, we wonder, more than one me? Why haven’t I ever seen a portrait in a gallery that looks exactly like myself - or anyone I know? How would I feel if I did? The movie is about two young women, one named Veronique, one named Veronika, both played by Irene Jacob.”

Roger Ebert. Rogerebert,com 

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Easy Rider. Dennis Hooper. 1969

“Two not-so-young cyclists, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) who affects soft leather breeches and a Capt. America jacket, and Billy (Dennis Hopper), who looks like a perpetually stoned Buffalo Bill, are heading east from California toward New Orleans.They don't communicate with us, or each other, but after a while, it doesn't seem to matter.”

Vincent Canby. The New York Times  

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Spirited Away.  Hayao Miyazaki. 2001.

“With none of the sentimentality of Disney nor the computerised sheen of Pixar, this traditional animé even blows the brilliant Finding Nemo out of the water. It's epic story is more imaginative, rousing and luscious than anything American animation has produced since the halcyon days of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Jamie Russell . BBC1 Films.

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Joker.   Todd Phillips. 2019.

“The storyline in and of itself is not a total miss. But once the movie starts lifting shots from “A Clockwork Orange” (and yes, Phillips and company got Warners to let them use the Saul Bass studio logo for the opening credits, in white on red, yet) you know its priorities are less in entertainment than in generating self-importance." Glenn Kenny.  Rogert Ebert 

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The Disaster Artist. James Franco. 2017.

“Tommy Wiseau’s cult hit “The Room” leaves the audience with massive questions. Not just about pictures of spoons, strange dialogue, or the star’s penchant for smashing things, but curiosities of a more baffling nature: From what mind and soul did this entirely serious production come from? How could an artistic statement like this exist?”

Nick Allen.  rogerebert.com.

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Trainspotting.  Danny Boyle. 1996.

“The movie, based on a popular novel by Irvine Welsh, is about a crowd of heroin addicts who run together in Edinburgh. The story is narrated by Renton (Ewan McGregor), who will, and does, dive into “the filthiest toilet in Scotland” in search of mislaid drugs”.

Roger Ebert. rogerebert.com 

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"Do It Again" . Chemical Brothers. 2007.

Do It Again is a song by the British electronic music duo The Chemical Brothers and is the fifth track on their 2007 studio album We Are the Night.

The video is similar to that of Fatboy Slim's "Ya Mama" video,which includes a tape that causes uncontrollable dancing. It takes place in Morocco and is centred around a little boy and his older brother. The younger boy has a toothache and must have his tooth removed but he escapes with his brother, whom he begs not to let anyone take his tooth away. Whilst walking through the desert, a cassette tape falls from the sky.

Watch here.

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Fahrenheit 451. François Truffaut. 1966.

“ With a serious and even terrifying theme, this excursion into science fiction has been thoughtfully directed by Francois Truffaut and there is adequate evidence of light touches to bring welcome and needed relief to a sombre and scarifying subject. “

Rotten Tomatoes

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Good Bye Lenin!  Wolfgang Becker. 2003

  “ "Goodbye, Lenin!" is a movie that must have resonated loudly in Germany when it was released; it is no doubt filled with references and in-jokes we do not quite understand. But the central idea travels well: Imagine an American Rip Van Winkle who is told that President Gore has led a United Nations coalition in liberating Afghanistan while cutting taxes for working people, attacking polluters and forcing the drug companies to cut their bloated profits. Sorry, something came over me for a second ... “    

   Roger Ebert