Movie Journal: April

Owing to a combination of work and family, this was a comparatively light month for me when it came to movie watching. I only watched 20 films that were new to me, though they all were of a pretty high quality so it balances out. Even the worst film I watched this month - Dheeraj Akolkar's Liv & Ingmar - wasn't bad per se, it was just a fairly middling documentary about two great artists that I hoped would be better. It did make me want to watch (or rewatch) a bunch of Ingmar Bergman films in the near future, so that's one positive to come out of an otherwise not especially enlightening experience.

Maybe my most significant viewing this month (aside from the ten listed below) was my rewatch (well, rewatches, since I watched it twice in one day) of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Everything I loved the first time - its energy, the new characters, the fact that everyone involved seems so excited to be making a Star Wars movie - was still present and correct, while the stuff that bothered me - the way the film stops dead every time an old character appears, the entire third act - didn't bother me as much. Its place as my third favourite Star Wars film is increasingly secure.

Right, to the business at hand. Here are the ten best films that I watched for the first time in April, 2016.

Movie Journal: April

This month was another documentary-heavy one, though that was mainly because I wanted to rewatch a bunch of Nick Broomfield documentaries in advance of the HBO premiere of his latest, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, which I will write more about in a moment. I've something of a love-hate relationship with Broomfield's work, in that I think that he tends to find really interesting subjects and shoots them with an empathy that can make them very powerful, while at the same time finding him to be something of a disingenuous scumbag who plays the naif in order to inveigle his way into peoples' lives, then exploits them mercilessly. Other documentary filmmakers, particularly ones who place themselves in front of the camera, do a similar thing because it gets good results, but there's something about Broomfield's shamelessness that has always made me very uncomfortable.

The worst film I watched for the first time in April was Danny Boyle's Trance, which manages to be a pretty slick and exciting thriller for the first hour, then devolves into twist upon twist, dream upon reality upon fantasy nonsense that I found pretty much impossible to care about. It does boast a pretty great performance from Rosario Dawson, though, who makes the most out of what could be a pretty thankless role.

The best film I rewatched was Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, an old favourite  which I decided to revisit having just finished reading James Ellroy's novel. I came away from it respecting Hanson and his co-writer Brian Helgeland even more since I could see how they had condensed a book overbrimming with plot points - there are something like eight or nine ongoing plot threads in the novel, including one involving a serial killer and another revolving around Ed Exley's father and a Walt Disney analogue - into a fairly lean thriller without losing the sense of place, or the book's central dichotomy between dark, awful things happening in such a bright, sunny locale. However, I did come away disappointed that the character of Inez Soto, who has maybe two or three scenes in the film but is a major part of the book, was so shortchanged, even if I can understand why they had to collapse her role in the story with that of Kim Basinger's character.

Anyway, here are the best films that I watched for the first time in April.