Film Review: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

"Stella!"

It wouldn't be going too far to say that Jurassic Park was one of the most important films for me growing up. There were a lot of other contenders, most of them Disney animations, but Jurassic Park was the first film I remember being completely floored by. It helped that I was obsessed with dinosaurs, as most six year olds were at the time and, it seems, still are, but the way that Steven Spielberg blended special effects with a lean story to create a sense of wonder and magic really captivated my little, still-forming imagination. It probably didn't hurt that it was one of the first examples I had encountered of a film being everywhere thanks to a huge marketing campaign, so even if I hadn't loved it, I would not have been able to escape it. Watching it (not to mention rewatching it) was a formative experience, to say the least, and while I wouldn't put it as my favourite film ever now (I'm not sure if it would even crack the top 100, assuming that I was crazy enough to make one), its importance in shaping me as a film lover is immeasurable.

Film Review: Happy Together (1997)

The cinema of Wong Kar-wai tends towards the romantic, both in terms of its stories and visuals. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are about people falling in love and moving slowly, inexorably towards each other, and whether or not they end up together at the end is in some sense less important than the process itself. This is also true of his style, which replicates the sensory experience of modern life through its visual exuberance and, particularly in his earlier films, its kineticism and eclecticism. In his films, the images themselves tend to be as important - if not more so - than the events being depicted since they are key to getting across the atmosphere and texture of his world, which is one of love and the senses.

Film Review: The Wedding Banquet (1993)

Considering the mercurial nature of Ang Lee's career, which has seen him direct everything from costume dramas (Sense & Sensibility) to superhero movies (Hulk) by way of Oscar-winning dramas (Brokeback Mountain) and 3D extravaganzas (Life of Pi), it shouldn't be surprising that The Wedding Banquet, Lee's second film, also refuses to be pigeonholed. Its writer-director has refused to get stuck working in any single genre, so why should the film itself?

Film Review: Chungking Express (1994)

Chungking Express is, for my money, unquestionably a masterpiece, but one of the most delightful things about it is that it's something of an accidental masterpiece. The film was conceived as a distraction for director Kar-Wai Wong, who at the time was embroiled in the editing of another film, Ashes of Time. The latter was a big-budget historical epic that he was struggling to shape in the editing room, so he took a break for a couple of months and made a small, scrappy contemporary film as a way of working through whatever creative issues he was dealing with at the time. Once Chungking Express was completed, he was able to return to Ashes of Time with renewed vigour and energy. In the process he had someone made not only his best film, but also one of the best films of the 1990s, without even meaning to. It's probably the best argument in favour of procrastination in the history of art.