Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Like a failed first draft of Blue Jasmine, this middling Woody Allen movie (one also helmed by an Australian actress) splices together the same story told twice, once as a comedy and once as a tragedy, except the comedy is almost entirely laugh-free, the tragedy just a dreary tale of woe, and really, it is just a Sliding Doors movie about wishes made on magic lamps, not a movie about the cruel theatre of life and so it can be hard to remember at times which of the two versions of Melinda's life you are watching they are both so similar.

★★★☆☆

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A Star Is Born (2018)

I lose interest after the early episodes of The Voice and American Idol too once the 'dreams come true' talent-discovery moments have passed, and it doesn't help that the electric first encounter and romance between Gaga's Ally and Cooper's Jackson in the first half of the very long movie descends in the second half into a boring highlight reel of "the sorts of things that happen" to celebrity couples.

★★★☆☆

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