The Gladiators (AKA Peace Game, 1969)
Peter Watkins's cold war satire posits the interesting idea of world leaders staving off the hunger for armed conflict by instead staging an international, live-fire combat game that coincidentally becomes a reality tv hit. Although pleasingly shot with the same documentary style immediacy that typifies much of the director's other work, the film is sadly somehow both laughably broad in its clownish depiction of world leaders and also weirdly obstuse about what it's actually trying to say, lacking the brutal shock immediacy of both The War Game and Punishment Park. It's fitfully amusing and did hold my attention (despite the dodgy copy I watched missing English subtitles for the many scenes in Swedish and French), but I think much of what might once have played as absurdist humour is now undermined by the fact that a corporate sponsored, reality tv war just doesn't seem that implausible anymore.
Cruising (1980)
Without trying to unpick the controversy surrounding William Friedkin's thriller about the hunt for a serial killer targeting gay men in NYC, I was a little struck by how ordinary the film actually feels now. The broodingly noirish cinematography is still great; even in the height of summer, everything about the city is stark, pale and washed out, but aside from the fleeting last glimpse of hedonistic pre-AIDS nightlife and some occasional unintended hilarity (if Al Pacino was on poppers, would we really know the difference?), it feels like a fairly rote murder mystery with little to distinguish it from the cycle of similarly voyeuristic slasher films released around the same time. There are hints of a far more interesting film happening on the sidelines (a cynical trans sex worker arguably steals the show, for example), but the main story plays out as much as you'd expect, and even the ambiguous ending just struck me as a bit lazy, by the time it rolled around