Two hundred and fifty-seventh film: In The Year Of The Pig, a 1968 documentary about the Vietnam War. I really like this kind of documentary when it works — as this one does — with no commentary, just carefully edited-together and juxtaposed footage. The points made with this style are…

Two hundred and fifty-sixth film: In The Loop, the pumped-up movie version of British series The Thick of It, featuring Peter Capaldi as the Prime f*cking minister’s director of f*cking communications. Directed by Armando Iannucci, the same guy who directed Veep, it has the expected amount of farce and chaos…

Two hundred and fifty-fifth film: In The Heat of the Night, a movie about a Mississippi murder, racism, and Sidney Poitier looking pissed off. Look, this is a crime film with a Quincy Jones/Ray Charles soundtrack, I could like it blindfolded in a soundproof box. A hardened, paunchy Southern police…

Two hundred and fifty-fourth film: In A Lonely Place, a good, moody, short noir film from 1950 that’s part doomed romance and part murder mystery. A decent way to spend an hour and a half, and an extremely good way to spend the first twenty minutes, where all the good…

Two hundred and fifty-third film: Il Gattopardo, or ‘The Leopard’ in its native Italian. Impolitely long and undeniably gorgeous, this is an epic three-hour movie about the 19th-Century Italian unification, which I had to pause so I could look up the history of, which director Visconti definitely assumes viewers have…

Two hundred and fifty-first film: Il Conformista (The Conformist). As far as film reviews I’ve read are concerned, apparently this movie is about the adventures of a semi-reluctant fascist assassin under Mussolini. As far as I’m concerned, this is about architecture and moods and dresses and Paris and cinematography and…

Two hundred and fiftieth (!) film: If…, a 1968 anti-establishment bit set in an English boarding school that blurs the line between reality and Malcolm McDowell’s imagination. With lots and lots of British class tradition almost indistinguishable from the school part of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the premise…