Shaun de Waal spends a decade at the movies so you don’t have to.
Best
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
A heartbreaking, beautifully realised tale of love gone awry, with extremely powerful performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Faith’s Corner (Darrell Roodt, 2005)
For me, this zero-budget tale of a homeless woman and her children pips Tsotsi and Jerusalema to the post (good though they are) for its bravery and emotional punch. Also, Leleti Khumalo gives a searing performance.
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
Set in 1960s Hong Kong, a ravishingly gorgeous meditation on love, loss and oblique human interactions.
Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)
Altman takes on the English country-house murder mystery and produces a dark, swirling, multilevel masterpiece of twisted human passions.
Gozu (Takashi Miike, 2003)
A gangster flick, ghost story and road movie that morphs into sex-horror, shot like an art film with very black humour, Miike’s umpteenth film is a work of genius like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Beneath the world of the Spanish Civil War and family conflict lies a magical, dangerous underworld; a beautifully realised vision of a child dealing with adult pain and trauma.
Persepolis (Vincent Parronaud and
Marjane Satrapi, 2007)
Satrapi’s monochrome animation (based on her own graphic novel) tells the delightful and subversive story of growing up in Tehran under the Shah — and then the Ayatollah.
Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)
Real live sex comes to the big screen, along with real human feelings, a compelling story, and a highly enjoyable sense of off-beat humour.
Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006)
In yet another triumph, Almodóvar glosses melodrama with irony to create a ‘woman’s picture” bursting with life, colour and tears — and gives Pénelope Cruz the role of a lifetime.
Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
Two dissolute young men and an older woman go on a road trip across Mexico, and on the road they encounter laughter, sadness, passion and the unexpected.
Worst
Basic Instinct II (Michael Caton-Jones, 2006)
Sequel to the vulgar thriller that’s even more vulgar and even less thrilling. Sharon Stone proves to no one how terminally sexy she can be. And she plays a writer — oh, how we laughed.
Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000)
If producer/actor John Travolta’s intention was to turn a work by his dead Scientology guru into a film that is risibly ridiculous when it’s not bafflingly dull, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)
You want to watch Tarantino have a sloppy wank all over some piffling material about women being tortured and killed? Be my guest.
Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001)
Bay spends a fortune on a huge, shiny war epic packed till it squeaks with every old narrative cliché he could find — plus oozing sentimentality like icing on the cake.
Pinocchio (Roberto Benigni, 2002)
Director and lead actor Roberto Benigni gurns, capers and shrieks his way through an adaptation of the classic Italian fairytale — and drives the audience screaming from the cinema.
Poena Is Koning (Willie Esterhuizen, 2007)
How to out-Schuster Leon Schuster: make a cheap, crass overgrown-schoolboy farce with enough fart jokes to suffocate a rhino.
Sex and the City (Michael Patrick King, 2008)
Four overdressed New York women and their endless wittering about their utterly uninteresting romantic problems add up to two and a half hours of intense irritation.
Tears of the Sun (Antoine Fuqua, 2003)
Bruce Willis goes into Darkest Africa to rescue an airhead chick — and, on the way, saves the poor benighted natives from themselves.
300 (Zack Snyder, 2006)
Between manicures, a bunch of identical-bodied Los Angeles gym bunnies in leather mini-skirts heroically battle a horde of masked Ninja warriors led by an S&M queen with more bling than a dead rapper. History was never this preposterous.
World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006)
Stone, with the help of Nicolas Cage, manages to turn the human tragedy of 9/11 into a self-indulgent and quasi-religious heap of twaddle that makes you feel like you’ve been buried alive for days.