CFB's Top 20 Obscure Films of 1935 (2009)

1. Composition in Blue (1935)
2. Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (1935)
3. If You Could Only Cook (1935)
4. Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935)
5. Dangerous (1935)
6. Ah, Wilderness! (1935)
7. Annie Oakley (1935)
8. The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935)
9. The Call of the Wild (1935)
10. Bordertown (1935)
11. Music Land (1935)
12. The Ghost Goes West (1935)
13. Star of Midnight (1935)
    China Seas (1935)
    The Little Colonel (1935)
14. The Tunnel (1935)
15. The Wedding Night (1935)
16. She (1935)
17. The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935)
18. Boys Will Be Boys (1935)

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The Out of Towners (1970)

Recommended

USA

Feature Film

Director: Arthur Hiller

Writer: Neil Simon

Cinematographer: Andrew Laszlo

Composer: Quincy Jones

Cast: Jack Lemmon, Sandy Dennis

Although it runs out of steam a little towards the end, this painfully funny farce – in which the Kellermans, a young couple from Ohio, travel to New York City for a potentially life-changing job interview, but find that the travelling gods are against them, as everything that can go wrong does go wrong – brilliantly taps into provincial, bourgeois fears of big city life, re-creating Manhattan as a kind of hell on Earth. Iain.Stott

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Zombieland (2009)

Recommended

USA

Feature Film

Director: Ruben Fleischer

Writers: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick

Cinematographer: Michael Bonvillain

Composer: David Sardy

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Amber Heard, Bill Murray, Mike White

After the zombie apocalypse, four survivors – who initially are somewhat distrusting of each other – head west towards a theme park in Los Angeles, getting into various comic scrapes along the way, in this consistently funny, imaginatively shot, and deftly performed road movie, which is never anything less than thoroughly entertaining. Iain.Stott

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Lady Chatterley (2006)

Highly Recommended

France/Belgium

Feature Film

Director: Pascale Ferran

Writers: Roger Bohbot, Pascale Ferran, Pierre Trividic, D.H. Lawrence

Cinematographer: Julien Hirsch

Composer: Béatrice Thiriet

Cast: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coullo'ch, Hippolyte Girardot, Hélène Alexandridis, Hélène Fillières

A beautiful young woman, married to a crippled aristocrat, begins a passionate and tender affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, in Ferran’s beautifully acted, swooningly romantic, sensually erotic, and understatedly moving adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s John Thomas and Lady Jane, the second draft of the English author’s Lady Chatterley's lover. Iain.Stott

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The Horse Boy (2009)

Recommended

USA/UK

Feature Documentary

Director/Cinematographer: Michel Orion Scott

Writer: Rupert Isaacson

Composers: Lili Haydn, Kim Carroll

Featuring: Rupert Isaacson, Kristin Neff, Rowan Isaacson, Simon Baron-Cohen, Temple Grandin, Roy Richard Grinker, Tulga, Ghoste

Michel Orion Scott chronicles the seemingly foolish, slightly disturbing, but ultimately rather miraculous journey taken by Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff with their autistic son Rowan to Mongolia in search of the healing powers of the country’s renowned shamans, in this eye-opening and somewhat troubling yet decidedly uplifting documentary. Iain.Stott

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The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008)

Essential Viewing

USA

Feature Film

Director: Joshua Safdie

Writers: Eleonore Hendricks, Joshua Safdie, Andy Spade, Anthony Sperduti

Cinematographers: Brett Jutkiewicz, Joshua Safdie

Composers: The Beets, Alex Billig, Noah Britton, Tiny Seas

Cast: Eleonore Hendricks, Joshua Safdie, Jerry Damons, Jordan Zaldez, Batman

A mischievous, child-like young woman (the excellent Hendricks) spends her days and nights wandering the streets of Manhattan, stealing from the bags of random passers-by, and stumbling into various low-key adventures, though she seems to do it more out of curiosity than financial need or want, in Safdie’s alluringly sensual, quietly funny, and delightfully enigmatic feature debut. Iain.Stott

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Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (2009)

Recommended

UK

Feature Film

Director: Shane Meadows

Writer: Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows

Cinematographers: Shane Meadows, Dean Rogers

Cast: Paddy Considine, Dean Palinczuk, Olivia Colman, Richard Graham, Seamus O’Neil, Nigel Reeks, The Arctic Monkeys, Shane Meadows, Mark Herbert, Dean Rogers, Clare Slessor, Alex Collins, Dan Crowley, Scott Gillies

Shane Meadows follows Le Donk, an aspiring music impresario/roadie, to Manchester for an Arctic Monkeys gig, which he is working at and at which he hopes to introduce an aspiring rapper, Scorzayzee, to various musical bigwigs, in this thoroughly entertaining if feather-light faux documentary, which distinguishes itself from other similar works by being decidedly more loving in its portrait of those on the fringes of society than has become the mocking norm. Iain.Stott

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