On Compiling A Film Canon. December 2016 Update.

December brings with it the final instalment of the Hope Lies film canon for 2016. A strong month rounds out a very good year.

Headlining December is Marlon Brando’s lone directorial-outing One Eyed Jacks, a big piece on which is forthcoming shortly. It’s been said before and by folk far more impressive than I, but there really is no film quite like One Eyed Jacks, which somehow manages to balance several different tones (Old Hollywood spectacle, New Hollywood pathos) to perfection.

While the Brando picture is one of the most soaring piece of works of the 1960s, 10 Rillington Place might just be one of the most upsetting and disturbing movies of the 1970s. Richard Attenborough’s performance as Christie, one of the UK’s most infamous serial killers, is the strongest in the actors pantheon, and a rightly celebrated tour de force of the craft.

Rounding out the month, and indeed the year in the Hope Lies canon is Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love make for an apt diptych. The former is the soaring highlight of its maker’s career, while the latter owes a debt of gratitude to the off-kilter, esoteric shape of the thing. Anderson has acknowledged just how great an influence Demme’s work has been on his own movies, and that connection is no more clearer than when one takes in this pairing one after the other.

More information on the Hope Lies film canon can be found at our ongoing and regularly updated Letterboxd list.