Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

The appeal of Wes Anderson movies continues to elude me even now I've watched Moonrise Kingdom, his 2012 - what? Adventure? Children's book come to life? - about a New England island community searching for a pair of child runaways, a story the director again presents in his trademark fastidious style with those elaborate, unwarranted visuals that stifle all else including the performances of innumerable Hollywood stars who are all forced to act like simpletons.

★★☆☆☆

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Taxi Driver (1976)

Martin Scorsese's masterpiece resonates powerfully even today, thirty years after its release, with its story of a war veteran taxi driver, a kind of grown-up Holden Caulfield, who over the course of on-the-job transactional exchanges with psychos, pimps, politicians and prostitutes grows increasingly alienated from and disdainful of NYC - it is hard to argue with De Niro's taxi driver, Travis Bickle's perception that this 1970s NYC is perverted, immoral, sick but it is the taxi driver who psychotically reacts to it.

★★★★★

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From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Director Robert Rodriguez and writer Quentin Tarantino display their penchant for talky, stylised violence and fun unconstrained by genre conventions with this road movie that halfway through suddenly changes into a vampire horror, a precursor to their later grindhouse collaborations.

★★★☆☆

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Pulp Fiction (1994)

A series of interconnected noir vignettes comes to life under Quentin Tarantino's direction, in this pulp fiction romp as compulsively watchable today as it was upon its release in 1994.

★★★★☆

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