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Zadie Smith List of 10 Favorite Movies
Zadie Smith elaborates on her 10 favorite films in her usual, outspoken and eloquent manner.
Zadie Smith
Writer
Zadie Smith elaborates on her 10 favorite films in her usual, outspoken and eloquent manner.
Syriana
The Middle Eastern oil industry is the backdrop of this tense drama, which weaves together numerous story lines. Bennett Holiday is an American lawyer in charge of facilitating a dubious merger of oil companies, while Bryan Woodman, a Switzerland-based energy analyst, experiences both personal tragedy and opportunity during a visit with Arabian royalty. Meanwhile, veteran CIA agent Bob Barnes uncovers an assassination plot with unsettling origins.
Zadie Smith
Writer
Syriana is an American movie that reaches out beyond itself. Watching it made me feel hopeful -- a rare sensation in a cinema.
The Weather Man
A Chicago weather man, separated from his wife and children, debates whether professional and personal success are mutually exclusive.
Zadie Smith
Writer
It's a deeply honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past 10 years.
Brief Encounter
Returning home from a shopping trip to a nearby town, bored suburban housewife Laura Jesson is thrown by happenstance into an acquaintance with virtuous doctor Alec Harvey. Their casual friendship soon develops during their weekly visits into something more emotionally fulfilling than either expected, and they must wrestle with the potential havoc their deepening relationship would have on their lives and the lives of those they love.
Zadie Smith
Writer
The film is really about the dream life of the English, those secret parts of us that are most important and to which we have least access. It’s a shame to go to the cinema only to laugh (as modern audiences laugh at the supposed camp excess of another sincere movie, Now, Voyager). If you pass over the superficial culture shocks of 60 years passed (a lending library in Boots the chemist! a string quartet in a railway café!), it is as astute about the English character as it ever was.
Proof
Catherine is a woman in her late twenties who is strongly devoted to her father, Robert, a brilliant and well-known mathematician whose grip on reality is beginning to slip away. As Robert descends into madness, Catherine begins to wonder if she may have inherited her father’s mental illness along with his mathematical genius. When Robert’s work reveals a mathematical proof of potentially historic proportions, it sets off shock waves in more ways than one.
Zadie Smith
Writer
It's that breed of verbal swordplay that so impresses on stage while seeming so redundant and brittle on screen.
Shopgirl
Mirabelle is a disenchanted salesgirl and aspiring artist who sells gloves and accessories at a department store. She has two men in her life: wealthy divorcée Ray Porter and struggling musician Jeremy. Mirabelle falls in love with the glamorous Ray, and her life takes a magical turn, but eventually she realizes that she must empower herself and make a choice between them.
Zadie Smith
Writer
Steve Martin's script sneers at the vanity of fake LA girls and their plastic surgery. He is in no position to sneer.
Get Rich or Die Tryin'
A tale of an inner city drug dealer who turns away from crime to pursue his passion, rap music.
Zadie Smith
Writer
Tupac, you can sleep easy. Richard Pryor, watch out.
Munich
During the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes are taken hostage and murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September. In retaliation, the Israeli government recruits a group of Mossad agents to track down and execute those responsible for the attack.
Zadie Smith
Writer
Eric Bana gives a performance that deserves something more serious than an Oscar. It's a sublimely convincing portrayal of a man who is travelling far from who he is in order to defend who he is.
Good Night, and Good Luck
The story of journalist Edward R. Murrow's stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts in the early 1950s.
Zadie Smith
Writer
In terms of historical content, the film is neither quite honest nor quite true. That's a shame, because it's a great film.
Casanova
With a reputation for seducing members of the opposite sex, regardless of their marital status, a notorious womanizer discovers a beauty who seems impervious to his charms. However, as he continues to pursue the indifferent lady, he finds himself falling in love.
Zadie Smith
Writer
Casanova is a silly film. Half Carry On, half Shakespearean comedy, everyone in it is perfectly nice and should reassemble to make a great Twelfth Night.
The Clock
A 24-hour compendium of time-themed film clips, all synched to the time that appears on the clocks and watches within.
Zadie Smith
Writer
The Clock is so monumental in intention and design that even the simplest things you can say about it need qualification.
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