Ambition is the engine under most character arcs and the flaw in most tragedies. This tag collects reviews of films and fiction driven by ambition, and what the pursuit costs the character holding it.
1950sGiant (1956) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three hours and twenty-one minutes of Texas across roughly twenty-five years, James Dean's last completed performance, and a film that starts as a marriage drama and ends as an…
2010sThe King's Speech (2010) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A well-made two-hander about a man with a stammer and the unqualified Australian who treated him, which beat The Social Network for Best Picture and Best Director…
1980sOrdinary People (1980) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Robert Redford's first film as director is a carefully observed drama about a family that cannot discuss a death, and it won Best Picture and Director over Raging…
2000sLittle Miss Sunshine (2006) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Six people in a failing Volkswagen driving from Albuquerque to a children's beauty pageant in California. Every one of them has a private humiliation, and the film's…
1960sCleopatra (1963) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It was budgeted at around two million dollars and cost forty-four, was the highest grossing film of its year and still did not break even, and Fox sold off…
2000sAlexander (2004) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Oliver Stone spent a hundred and fifty-five million dollars on a life that has no shape, released it, and then recut it three separate times across ten years trying…
2010sGods of Egypt (2016) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A hundred and forty million dollars of genuine visual ambition attached to a script nobody appears to have argued with. Gerard Butler is the only person on…
AmbitionAll About Eve (1950) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The best script ever written about ambition, in a film where everybody is intelligent and nobody has to be dim for the schemer to win. Fourteen nominations,…
2020sRyan Coogler's Jim Crow-era vampire film uses the genre to explore Black art and cultural memory. It establishes the stakes of everything that follows.
1990s1999 Michael Apted Bond film with Brosnan. Denise Richards as nuclear physicist.
2010s2012 Christopher Nolan finale to his Batman trilogy. Christian Bale, Tom Hardy as Bane, Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.
1970sThe Swarm is Irwin Allen's 1978 American disaster film. Allen's disaster filmography had included The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) that operated at substantially higher register.
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