The General is the only silent film that I've seen twice-- and I actually enjoyed it just as much, if not more, the second time. I would describe it as possibly the greatest stunt movie ever made.
At its center is not just one prolonged train chase, but two. The trains involved hurl and shoot all manner of projectiles at one another, they stop and go with an inconceivable rapidity in order to catch each other, and finally, they crash spectacularly (or at least one of them does). I have not felt such exhuberance in speed and destruction since I was a six year old playing with my own train set.

9/10

8/10

I saw this with my little brother at the Toronto Cinemathique, which I was happy to visit for the first time. (One of the Buffalo newspapers lists what is showing there every week, and for the last three and a half years I have been reading their lineup in envy.) It is not Fritz Lang's best work, but it still held our attention pretty well, no small feat for a silent film that is 175 minutes long. The best sequences involved the death of the Japanese ambassador and the train crash. But by far the most memorable part of the afternoon was the piano accompanist they had there, who played along with the film for almost three hours without stopping once.

6/10

If Martin Scorcese made a movie about NASA, its tag line would be "America's space program was born in the streets." So you can guess that if he makes a movie about Irish cops in Boston, he is going to lay on the grittiness pretty thick.

And so it goes in the entertaining, ultraviolent, and uneven The Departed. Scorcese adds his own tendency to overly mythologize to the plot of the Hong Kong movie "Infernal Affairs." The latter worked because it was just having fun with a preposterous plot, about a cop and a criminal who infiltrate each other's organizations at the same time, and then try to catch each other. Scorcese drags this out to incorporate his own increasingly banal vision of America; his film is 50 minutes longer than the original.

There are definitely good things about the movie. It has some killer lines, and the first hour or so zips along wonderfully. The acting is for the most part excellent: Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg especially are excellent; Jack Nicholson plays himself (this is a good thing); Martin Sheen is decent though I can't figure out what accent he is trying to pull off.

The thesis of The Departed is that we are all rats, and that those who are more obviously so are at least being honest about it. The "we" here includes priests and nuns and even apparently participants in the American civil rights movement. Even if this thesis were registered with more subtlety (as it is, Scorcese just has one of his characters say it, and then bludgeons home the point by having a rat crawl in front of the Boston skyline as the film closes) it would still be nonsense.

5/10

7/10