Full Metal Jacket
(1987)
The first half is a masterpiece, as good a short film as has ever been made. The second half is merely brilliant. It lost me only at the end, where Kubrick surprised me by indulging in that most-abused filming technique: slomo. What, did Brian de Palma, the awful king of slomo, take over production for a week? I simply did not believe that, when the soldiers discovered that the sniper who had turned half their platoon into cranberry sauce, was a 13-year-old girl, they would have spent even three seconds debating whether or not it was right to finish her off, much less the three or four minutes of screen time they did take.