Review of Great Directors (2009) by Mike M — 21 Aug 2011

One flaw is that Ismailos herself is not a particularly great director, and she takes a while to decide upon an editing strategy: the first half-hour is frustratingly piecemeal, and only when the film begins to bring its subjects into dialogue with one another does "Great Directors" come to spark.

.. Ismailos at least knows when she has valuable textual analysis on her hands - Bertolucci is mercifully self-aware on the overriding glumness of "Last Tango in Paris", and John Sayles nails in under a minute of screen time everything that was wrong with Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" - and she busily stitches in clips from works someone badly needs to get back into general circulation: Breillat's "A Real Young Girl" and "36 Fillette", Loach's mid-80s documentary output (presumably set to form a part of the BFI's autumn retrospective), Sayles' "Matewan" and "City of Hope".

It'll make a useful primer for students in noteworthy filmmakers, and why one should watch their output, even if it suffers from trying to cram too much into too short a space of time - Mark Cousins would once have been able to give us a considered hour with each one of these directors.