Very nice pick with JC Chandor. I love 3 of those movies, and I keep meaning to see A Most Violent Year, I’ve heard great things about it through co-workers. All is Lost is one of my favorites of all time.
It’s a silly game, the rules are arbitrary. Again, saying a movie is your favorite doesn’t mean it needs to be unimpeachably a great film. But I think you are pretty flagrantly going against the spirit of it if you’re just outright acknowledging that to pick four sequential films for your director of choice, you’re including one “you think isn’t good”. It’s not fine, that’s the (silly) point of this challenge! Directors you love, making movies you love, making lots of movies you love, may still not have actually made four consecutive films that are among your favorites. Vexing!
Eh, if the other films are good enough I don’t think so. Consider it a weighted average. If a filmmaker has 4 films that are 10,10,5,10, and a second filmmaker has 9,8,8,9 could you not view them as equivalent? I mean one director may have made more consistent great films, but the other had higher highs in this completely arbitrary numbering.
How good do those highs need to be to offset a mediocre film is an exercise left to the reader. But if a director makes 3 of your personal top 10 films all time, that can go a long way to offsetting a lesser movie.
Granted if you put any Speilberg 4 set against the Cameron one, it’s an easy choice for me. That Cameron set is shockingly great across the board. I don’t know any director in action movies can, or ever will, top that. As someone who only discovered those films post Titantic, which annoyed the crap out of teenage me, it was shocking to me the guy who I thought of as blue aliens and overlong historical romance had such chops.
I can legitimately see how you could interpret the original prompt as something like “Among any four consecutive films from a director, what quartet brings you the most overall joy”, so I’m just clarifying it wasn’t my intent that it be read that way. The intent was that we try to find runs of four films where all four are good enough to rank among your favorites. Still very subjective, but it is a distinction from how you’re grouping them; it’s more restrictive this way and to my mind, a more interesting experiment as a result.
Fair, and why ultimately I didn’t make my own Speilberg list, the great films weren’t so great as to offset the weaker link included. The Jaws to Temple of Doom run almost gets there. And had 1941 been Lost World quality (I like the film still, even though it is objectively not nearly as good), I might get there.
Decent run here by Kathryn Bigelow:
K19
The Hurt Locker
Zero Dark Thirty
Detroit
Kelly Reichart is very consistently very good:
Meek’s Cutoff
Night Moves
Certain Women
First Cow
It’s (not so) shocking how hard it is to find women to put on this list. Many very notable and excellent films are directed by women, but they mostly don’t have the same number of film credits to their name. Heckerling, Ephron, Streisand, Campion, Duvernay, Julie Taymor, Mimi Leder, Niki Caro, Debra Granik, Lulu Wang, etc etc all have amazing films in their oeuvre. One wonders (not really) why their oeuvres are so short.
In 2012 I made it a project of mine to read only books written by women. I’d been keeping track and books I read to that point were something like 95% authored by men. Reading women for a year changed my reading habits permanently–it’s more 50/50 now–and I got exposed to really good content, and content of types I never would have read otherwise. I’m starting to think a similar project might be due for me for film (made easier by Hollywood’s shift toward increasing access for women directors over the past few years.)
Neither have I, though I’d imagine you could do it considering how good the films I have seen are. Though he was another one of those guys who was so relentlessly creative, there’s probably a lot of lesser material sprinkled throughout his filmography.
Just thought of Robert Bresson, too. This 4-film run is, uh, pretty good.
A Man Escaped
Pickpocket
The Trial of Joan of Arc
Au Hasard Balthazar
I think it will be much, much easier to read only books by women rather than watch only films directed by women. Women have been strongly represented in literature (English-language literature, anyway) for over 200 years. Women directors are, as you note, shockingly (or perhaps “depressingly” is a better word) under-represented and it’s only since around the 1990s that things have begun to slowly change on that front.
