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Tillsammans (2000)
A masterpiece on vulnerability
When Göran pours a plate of dinner over his emotionally manipulative partner, it was difficult not to feel this as being my favourite cinematic moment of all time.
This film is littered with vulnerabilities, right down to the placement of camera, the use of zoom,-and the deeply focused sound design, with that sound of the door creaking from the child peering through to witness his father screaming at the mother, just tearing you apart, and honing on what another director might have struggled with handling. It belongs alongside the more delicate output of Bergman, like 'Fanny and Alexander'. Not to mention the (very endearing) tribulations of the socialist collective, which had me grinning throughout.
There is an honesty to this sort of film that I do think we are severely lacking nowadays, and should cement Moodysson as among the greatest directors of his generation, and as to which I'm adding the British director Alan Clarke here as a necessary reference.
Hardware (1990)
This is a film about Afghanistan
'In the late 1980s Stanley traveled to Afghanistan to document the Soviet-Afghan War. Stanley and his crew witnessed the Soviet Army's withdrawal and the country's slide into the civil war that would bring the Taliban to power...'
There's not really any room on here, but this great feature by Richard Stanley is drenched in the political and cultural currents of its time... late 80s capitalism, looming US interventionist policies (Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria), and their (what we now know) unintended consequences - like a sum-of-its-parts machine being made sentient.
Severely underrated.
Keetje Tippel (1975)
Deeply frustrating but not awful
This film is weighed down by its deeply inadequate ending which does not seem to want to connect itself with the themes of greed and hunger relayed throughout. Tonally, it's incomplete.
Whilst the record indicates that Rob Houwer is part of the problem as to why the ending is the way it is - it's frustrating to think that this can't be ranked alongside Verhoeven's more accomplished works like Starship Troopers, from what it could have been...