My favorite best picture Oscar winner winner / The Lost Weekend

My favorite best picture Oscar winner: The Lost Weekend

Concluding our series of Guardian writers’ all-time Academy picks, Benjamin Lee explains why this harrowing 1946 winner is still one of the most vital films about alcoholism ever made

Benjamin Lee

Fri 24 Feb 2017 

W

hen the Academy chooses to reward a film that revolves around an “issue”, it’s usually one that takes said issue, smooths out any jagged edges and then uses it to bludgeon the audience into exhausted submission. Subtlety and even a vague awareness of reality are concepts that get ignored in favor of an after-school special full of simplistic preaching (*coughs* Crash *ends cough*).

 

My favourite film: In the Mood for Love

Peter Walker continues our writers' favourite film series with Wong Kar-Wai's melancholy tale of love and loneliness

Did this review get you in the mood? Write your own reflections here or whisper them in the comments below

Peter Walker

Monday 19 December 2011

In the Mood for Love was released when I was living in Hong Kong, albeit a very different city to that of the film's 1962 setting. Like Tony Leung's Chow Mo-wan, I was also working there as a journalist. Sadly, that's where my resemblance to his almost absurdly handsome, mournfully dapper character begins and ends.

My favourite film: Raging Bull

Peter Bradshaw rings the opening bell on our writers' favourite films series by championing Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull

Peter Bradshaw
Monday 24 October 2011

When I first saw it, I was 19 years old; it was at the Screen on the Hill cinema in North London, now renamed the Everyman Belsize Park. When it was all over, I felt exhausted, but also possessed of a strange need to scream, or laugh, or run all the way home, or pick up parked cars and flip them over. The film was Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull – or, to give it the title that appeared on screen, RagingBull; it was run together, like GoodFellas.