Being new to Mark Cousins, I was a little thrown off by how thick his Irish accent is. It doesn't help that he kind of just meanders on in a stream of consciousness fashion while cycling through various film clips.
The nominal subject of this documentary is movies from the 21st century, but he spends ample - too much really - time trying to tie things back to previous films from long ago. This adds significantly to the run time which hits 2 hours and 40 minutes.
If the whole affair was more engaging, I could see it as a piece of film school curriculum or a means of motivating the young to go back and check out what's already been done - because a lot has been done that's fading from the collective memory as time goes on.
Unfortunately, and I am pretty forgiving with films, especially documentaries, the combination of the above put me off to this director and his style and therefore cannot highly recommend this film.
His 2011 Story of Film: An Odyssey was broken up into 15 1-hour episodes and I think a similar approach would have accomplished two things here: 1) Way more films could have been discussed and 2) Audience attention would be easier to maintain.
All in all, 5 out of 10.
The nominal subject of this documentary is movies from the 21st century, but he spends ample - too much really - time trying to tie things back to previous films from long ago. This adds significantly to the run time which hits 2 hours and 40 minutes.
If the whole affair was more engaging, I could see it as a piece of film school curriculum or a means of motivating the young to go back and check out what's already been done - because a lot has been done that's fading from the collective memory as time goes on.
Unfortunately, and I am pretty forgiving with films, especially documentaries, the combination of the above put me off to this director and his style and therefore cannot highly recommend this film.
His 2011 Story of Film: An Odyssey was broken up into 15 1-hour episodes and I think a similar approach would have accomplished two things here: 1) Way more films could have been discussed and 2) Audience attention would be easier to maintain.
All in all, 5 out of 10.