You know, there’s such a thing as having wide-ranging taste in movies, and not just limiting yourself to tiny little niblets of caviar from France or Japan. There are a lot of movies, books, records. There are a lot of points of view, a lot of ways of escape, a lot of ways of looking at life and examining it and presenting it.There’s a lot to discover. From the dawn of time, most of any art form has been commercial trash — and a lot of trash can be enlightening, entertaining, moving, and even suddenly transcendent.
This might be a kind of contradictory topic, depending on the rule for great. Roger Ebert recently approvingly quoted another critic’s definition: a movie you cannot imagine never seeing again.
But, I see what you’re saying: movies you know are well-done but which aren’t ones you want to sit through again. For a long time, I would have said “Crumb,” which I thought was just brilliant, and the best imaginable portrait of a unique American artist. At the same time, it depressed me. Crumb’s whole family (by which I mean his parents and brothers) just seemed so sad and pathetic and hopeless, and they made life seem that way too. I thought I never wanted to look at them again.
Then, a few years ago, I was in a hotel and that was all that was on. I watched it again, and the bad or sad parts didn’t stick with me quite as hard. I felt a little more comfortable with it the second go-round.
Interesting thoughts there about “The Thin Red Line,” Noel. I thought it was a monumental bore, and I kind of generally assumed that actual war veterans would like it even less. Roger Ebert put it well, I thought: “My guess is that any veteran of the actual battle of Guadalcanal would describe this movie with an eight-letter word much beloved in the Army.” Obviously, though, it captured the feel of combat for you, which is something.
Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s sad, just kind of a fact of life. A lot of critics are either better at what they do than the people they write about are, or in Kael’s case, more interesting.
Well, let me put it this way: I. personally, as stated, think her essay was superior to “Weekend.” I don’t necessarily think that’s true film for film. I like a lot of Godard, with or without what the critical community thinks. “Breathless,” “Band of Outsiders,” “My Life to Live,” “First Name: Carmen,” for example, are all terrific films. A lot of people absolutely hated “Hail, Mary,” but I liked that too.
As far as critics becoming filmmakers — well, that’s certainly what Godard, Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette all did. In this country, there was a guy named Frank S. Nugent, who was a New York Times film critic before he turned to writing scripts for John Ford, among others. James Agee, who wrote for Time and The Nation, wrote the scripts for “The African Queen” and “Night of the Hunter.” Paul Schraeder was a critic before he became a screenwriter and later a writer-director. Through the 1970s, the main critic at Time was Jay Cocks, who went on to write some terrific screenplays for Martin Scorsese and others. Susan Sontag made some films. Roger Ebert famously wrote the script for Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” So, it’s not an unusual long or short-term career progression. At the same time, I respect those critics who know that their talent is for expressing their opinion, and have no desire to get into the biz at all.
As for, where’s the bar — well, as in any kind of critical writing, some are simply better than others; smarter, wittier, more interesting, more penetrating. Some can write very well and have a broad background not just in film but in the arts in general, and some have none of those virtues: idiot fan-boys, copycats, fulltime composers of blurbs.
No, that’s not correct at all. Surrealism does NOT mean incoherent; it means following a dream logic. Dreams are not incoherent. They draw in a lot of disparate elements to form a narrative.
I just finished watching Kurosawa’s “Stray Dog,” which has a really effective title sequence of a dog panting. The dog’s head fills the screen, and he’s just panting and panting, looking completely worn-out and desperate and about to die from heat, not to mention possibly rabid.
Interestingly, according to one of a featurette on the disc, an American SPCA representative was so positive that the dog had been injected with rabies that Kurosawa literally had to go to court and state that the dog had simply been heavily exercised in the summer heat. (He later said this court case marked the only time when he was sorry the Americans had won the war,)
Anyway, this poor dog provides a very simple yet stark image for the rest of the film, which involves the pursuit of a killer on the run.
The surrealists wanted to make a different kind of sense, and there was a definite method to their madness. The artistic process was both random and selective. It was a matter of juxtaposing not just any contrasting objects, but the right ones. Not just any umbrella, not just any sewing machine. They weren’t just trying to confuse people. They were trying to liberate the mind and the heart. Godard was no doubt influenced by Surrealism, but my point was that what he came up with was not — in the case of “Weekend” — consistently dream-like or interesting so much as it was confusing. I’m not real sure he knew what he was trying to say.
Last word I’m going to offer on this subject: incoherence is a negative word. It’s an artistic fault. To be said to be incoherent means you screwed up, you failed, your work does not hold together, does not cohere. There is an enormous difference between incoherence and random free association in which there is a sense of design, however obscure. It may be said there are works by Surrealists that are incoherent, but incoherence and Surrealism are not interchangeable. Dali’s paintings, Man Ray’s photos, Max Ernst’s paintings, Breton’s poetry, Bunuel’s films; strange, surreal, dream-like, etc., yes, but not incoherent — at least, not unless you mean they suck, which some people do.
As requested, Santa brought the Criterion Eclipse boxes of Late Ozu and Postwar Kurosawa: ten movies altogether, and in Friday’s mail from Blockbuster there will be The Pornographers, Drunken Angel, and Gate of Flesh, so that’s 13. My idea of a binge. Good thing I took the week off. Merry Christmas, one and all…
I just don’t get people saying “The Dark Knight” is a bad film — unless, perhaps, they say it because it’s enormously expensive and popular and a superior example of its genre, the kind of things that really get on the tits of the indy crowd. Try taking the long view for once in your life. Ask yourself how it will look in, say, 20 years, when people will still be talking about it and you may not be able to remember why you hated it or what you thought was so much better.
And so-called “stewards of serious film criticism” see a LOT of films, even the ones they’re NOT paid to see, because they like films, they want to know what’s out there, and they don’t want to stay holed up in the Criterion Collection tower, which can turn into a real ghetto if you don’t get out of the house once in a fucking while.
I think you really limit the discussion when you strike the words “boring” and “pretentious,” but like all words they should simply be used with more care. The word I really can’t stand is “overrated,” which unfairly blames the film for its reaction. It’s not the film’s fault if someone liked it more than you did.
One Criterion release, Seijun Suzuki’s “Gate of Flesh,” is an unashamed exploitation film — and if you miss this fact about it after watching 90 minutes of guns, gore and naked women being whipped, Suzuki totally owns up to the fact in an accompanying extra. Surely not the only example in the Criterion canon.
Also, it’s a superbly designed and very imaginative film, B-movie or not.
Some time ago, I saw a fascinating documentary by Zoe Cassavetes titled “Channel Z,” about the famous cable station. It had a lot of clips familiar to every film fan, except one I had never heard of: L’Important c’est d’aimer, or “The Important Thing is to Love,” a 1975 French film directed by Poland’s Andrzej Zulawski, and starring Romy Schneider (for which she won her first César Award for Best Actress, according to Wikipedia) and Klaus Kinski. So far as I know, it has never had a home video release in this country and I’m not real sure it ever had a domestic film release. I know it has a Region 2 release. Any idea as to why this “hallucinatory psychological romance” (according to allmovie.com), which seems to have become a favorite among certain cultists, has never showed up in America? Criterion seems like the appropriate home for this orphan.
Personally, I think “Eyes Wide Shut” is a bad film because of Kubrick. But, let’s not get into that can of worms again.
I echo the comments of Tom Wilson and David; I saw “An Autumn Afternoon” recently and totally agree it is a great film. Just this very evening, I saw Ozu’s “Early Spring,” which is also great; an elegiac epic of middle-class boredom, adultery, despair and, maybe, hope. Ozu reminds me of the Ramones: everything he did was just like the last thing he did, but it’s still great in its own way.
Another one no one has mentioned: Bunuel, who not only had a great final film with “That Obscure Object of Desire,” but two great decades, as the last 20 or so years of his life were his most artistically fertile.
I agree “Family Plot” isn’t much. Some years ago, I saw William Devane being interviewed and he said Hitchcock would literally doze off between “Action!” and Cut!" Granted, he is quite famously a director who plotted out ever shot well in advance, but clearly this movie lacked the master’s cleverness, wit and, I suspect, alertness.
This is probably as good a place as any to mention one very confusing scene from “Once Upon a Time in the West.” If you’ve seen it, you may know what I’m talking about — comes about half way through the movie, when there is some sort of non-sequential, late afternoon scene with Henry Fonda. I was watching the movie and thought “What the….? Where are we?” I thought maybe I hadn’t been paying attention and ran the movie back a few minutes, to no avail. I was still confused.
I felt better a lot after watching the commentary with Alex Cox. I can’t quote him directly, but he said something like, “What in the world is going on here? Is it a flashback? What’s it a flashback to? And now the scene’s over and we cut to the middle of the day! You know, I think somewhere in the making of this movie they just lost all track of time. Doesn’t really matter in the end, though.”
And it’s true, it doesn’t. Like a lot of movies, certain stray details may be confusing but the larger picture is never less than clear.
’
I wouldn’t call either “Five Easy Pieces” or “M*A*S*H” a great film; the latter, especially, does not hold up all that well, as what once seemed liberating and fresh now looks just a little sophomoric. The whole shower scene with Hot Lips suggests a juvenile, sniggering, “Playboy Party Jokes” approach to sex. I like “Patton,” but it wouldn’t be impossible to write a really negative review of it, what with George C. Scott’s scenery-chewing and the film’s rather rightward political tilt.
It’s quite possible to be a cinephile and love “Love Story” and “Airport” and hate the other three. Real cinephiles love whatever they wish to love and do not ask permission. No one will ever doubt that Jacques Rivette is a cinephile. One of his favorite American films is “Show Girls.”
I, too, am always surprised by the films which film students have either never seen or never heard of. But film students aren’t necessarily film nuts, I guess, are they? Sometimes people are attracted to the craft, I think, more than anything. I know people who can go on and on about lenses and cables and sound mixing and who know a lot about animation — things that don’t require knowing who Fellini is. Most of what is below is extremely familiar to film-lovers, and I hope more film students:
I Fidanzati, Il Posto, The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi)
I Vitelloni, La Dolce Vita, 8 and a Half (Federico Fellini)
Film critics over 4 years ago
You know, there’s such a thing as having wide-ranging taste in movies, and not just limiting yourself to tiny little niblets of caviar from France or Japan. There are a lot of movies, books, records. There are a lot of points of view, a lot of ways of escape, a lot of ways of looking at life and examining it and presenting it.There’s a lot to discover. From the dawn of time, most of any art form has been commercial trash — and a lot of trash can be enlightening, entertaining, moving, and even suddenly transcendent.
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Great movies that you never want to see again over 4 years ago
This might be a kind of contradictory topic, depending on the rule for great. Roger Ebert recently approvingly quoted another critic’s definition: a movie you cannot imagine never seeing again.
But, I see what you’re saying: movies you know are well-done but which aren’t ones you want to sit through again. For a long time, I would have said “Crumb,” which I thought was just brilliant, and the best imaginable portrait of a unique American artist. At the same time, it depressed me. Crumb’s whole family (by which I mean his parents and brothers) just seemed so sad and pathetic and hopeless, and they made life seem that way too. I thought I never wanted to look at them again.
Then, a few years ago, I was in a hotel and that was all that was on. I watched it again, and the bad or sad parts didn’t stick with me quite as hard. I felt a little more comfortable with it the second go-round.
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Great movies that you never want to see again over 4 years ago
Interesting thoughts there about “The Thin Red Line,” Noel. I thought it was a monumental bore, and I kind of generally assumed that actual war veterans would like it even less. Roger Ebert put it well, I thought: “My guess is that any veteran of the actual battle of Guadalcanal would describe this movie with an eight-letter word much beloved in the Army.” Obviously, though, it captured the feel of combat for you, which is something.
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Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" over 4 years ago
Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s sad, just kind of a fact of life. A lot of critics are either better at what they do than the people they write about are, or in Kael’s case, more interesting.
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Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" over 4 years ago
Bunuel knew the difference between surreal and incoherent.
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Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" over 4 years ago
Well, let me put it this way: I. personally, as stated, think her essay was superior to “Weekend.” I don’t necessarily think that’s true film for film. I like a lot of Godard, with or without what the critical community thinks. “Breathless,” “Band of Outsiders,” “My Life to Live,” “First Name: Carmen,” for example, are all terrific films. A lot of people absolutely hated “Hail, Mary,” but I liked that too.
As far as critics becoming filmmakers — well, that’s certainly what Godard, Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette all did. In this country, there was a guy named Frank S. Nugent, who was a New York Times film critic before he turned to writing scripts for John Ford, among others. James Agee, who wrote for Time and The Nation, wrote the scripts for “The African Queen” and “Night of the Hunter.” Paul Schraeder was a critic before he became a screenwriter and later a writer-director. Through the 1970s, the main critic at Time was Jay Cocks, who went on to write some terrific screenplays for Martin Scorsese and others. Susan Sontag made some films. Roger Ebert famously wrote the script for Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” So, it’s not an unusual long or short-term career progression. At the same time, I respect those critics who know that their talent is for expressing their opinion, and have no desire to get into the biz at all.
As for, where’s the bar — well, as in any kind of critical writing, some are simply better than others; smarter, wittier, more interesting, more penetrating. Some can write very well and have a broad background not just in film but in the arts in general, and some have none of those virtues: idiot fan-boys, copycats, fulltime composers of blurbs.
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Favorite use of a song in a film. over 4 years ago
Don’t you mean Lawrence Kasdan?
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Great movies that you never want to see again over 4 years ago
God, but you are cranky.
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Great movies that you never want to see again over 4 years ago
Do your thoughts matter?
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Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" over 4 years ago
No, that’s not correct at all. Surrealism does NOT mean incoherent; it means following a dream logic. Dreams are not incoherent. They draw in a lot of disparate elements to form a narrative.
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Your favorite title sequence over 4 years ago
I just finished watching Kurosawa’s “Stray Dog,” which has a really effective title sequence of a dog panting. The dog’s head fills the screen, and he’s just panting and panting, looking completely worn-out and desperate and about to die from heat, not to mention possibly rabid.
Interestingly, according to one of a featurette on the disc, an American SPCA representative was so positive that the dog had been injected with rabies that Kurosawa literally had to go to court and state that the dog had simply been heavily exercised in the summer heat. (He later said this court case marked the only time when he was sorry the Americans had won the war,)
Anyway, this poor dog provides a very simple yet stark image for the rest of the film, which involves the pursuit of a killer on the run.
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Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" over 4 years ago
The surrealists wanted to make a different kind of sense, and there was a definite method to their madness. The artistic process was both random and selective. It was a matter of juxtaposing not just any contrasting objects, but the right ones. Not just any umbrella, not just any sewing machine. They weren’t just trying to confuse people. They were trying to liberate the mind and the heart. Godard was no doubt influenced by Surrealism, but my point was that what he came up with was not — in the case of “Weekend” — consistently dream-like or interesting so much as it was confusing. I’m not real sure he knew what he was trying to say.
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Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" over 4 years ago
“Norbit.” Greatest fucking film ever made.
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Jean-Luc Godard's "Weekend" over 4 years ago
Last word I’m going to offer on this subject: incoherence is a negative word. It’s an artistic fault. To be said to be incoherent means you screwed up, you failed, your work does not hold together, does not cohere. There is an enormous difference between incoherence and random free association in which there is a sense of design, however obscure. It may be said there are works by Surrealists that are incoherent, but incoherence and Surrealism are not interchangeable. Dali’s paintings, Man Ray’s photos, Max Ernst’s paintings, Breton’s poetry, Bunuel’s films; strange, surreal, dream-like, etc., yes, but not incoherent — at least, not unless you mean they suck, which some people do.
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Books on Film History over 4 years ago
My copy of Cook’s classic test has been falling apart for years, and I bought it brand new. There aren’t many books I’ve turned to more.
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merry christmas over 4 years ago
As requested, Santa brought the Criterion Eclipse boxes of Late Ozu and Postwar Kurosawa: ten movies altogether, and in Friday’s mail from Blockbuster there will be The Pornographers, Drunken Angel, and Gate of Flesh, so that’s 13. My idea of a binge. Good thing I took the week off. Merry Christmas, one and all…
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The Worst Films of 2008 over 4 years ago
I just don’t get people saying “The Dark Knight” is a bad film — unless, perhaps, they say it because it’s enormously expensive and popular and a superior example of its genre, the kind of things that really get on the tits of the indy crowd. Try taking the long view for once in your life. Ask yourself how it will look in, say, 20 years, when people will still be talking about it and you may not be able to remember why you hated it or what you thought was so much better.
And so-called “stewards of serious film criticism” see a LOT of films, even the ones they’re NOT paid to see, because they like films, they want to know what’s out there, and they don’t want to stay holed up in the Criterion Collection tower, which can turn into a real ghetto if you don’t get out of the house once in a fucking while.
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Can Objective Criticism Exist? over 4 years ago
I think you really limit the discussion when you strike the words “boring” and “pretentious,” but like all words they should simply be used with more care. The word I really can’t stand is “overrated,” which unfairly blames the film for its reaction. It’s not the film’s fault if someone liked it more than you did.
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Do exploitation films have value? over 4 years ago
One Criterion release, Seijun Suzuki’s “Gate of Flesh,” is an unashamed exploitation film — and if you miss this fact about it after watching 90 minutes of guns, gore and naked women being whipped, Suzuki totally owns up to the fact in an accompanying extra. Surely not the only example in the Criterion canon.
Also, it’s a superbly designed and very imaginative film, B-movie or not.
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Will Criterion Ever Release "The Important Thing is To Love"? over 4 years ago
Some time ago, I saw a fascinating documentary by Zoe Cassavetes titled “Channel Z,” about the famous cable station. It had a lot of clips familiar to every film fan, except one I had never heard of: L’Important c’est d’aimer, or “The Important Thing is to Love,” a 1975 French film directed by Poland’s Andrzej Zulawski, and starring Romy Schneider (for which she won her first César Award for Best Actress, according to Wikipedia) and Klaus Kinski. So far as I know, it has never had a home video release in this country and I’m not real sure it ever had a domestic film release. I know it has a Region 2 release. Any idea as to why this “hallucinatory psychological romance” (according to allmovie.com), which seems to have become a favorite among certain cultists, has never showed up in America? Criterion seems like the appropriate home for this orphan.
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Final Films by Master Filmmakers over 4 years ago
Personally, I think “Eyes Wide Shut” is a bad film because of Kubrick. But, let’s not get into that can of worms again.
I echo the comments of Tom Wilson and David; I saw “An Autumn Afternoon” recently and totally agree it is a great film. Just this very evening, I saw Ozu’s “Early Spring,” which is also great; an elegiac epic of middle-class boredom, adultery, despair and, maybe, hope. Ozu reminds me of the Ramones: everything he did was just like the last thing he did, but it’s still great in its own way.
Another one no one has mentioned: Bunuel, who not only had a great final film with “That Obscure Object of Desire,” but two great decades, as the last 20 or so years of his life were his most artistically fertile.
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Final Films by Master Filmmakers over 4 years ago
I agree “Family Plot” isn’t much. Some years ago, I saw William Devane being interviewed and he said Hitchcock would literally doze off between “Action!” and Cut!" Granted, he is quite famously a director who plotted out ever shot well in advance, but clearly this movie lacked the master’s cleverness, wit and, I suspect, alertness.
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What irritates you most about your favorite films? over 4 years ago
This is probably as good a place as any to mention one very confusing scene from “Once Upon a Time in the West.” If you’ve seen it, you may know what I’m talking about — comes about half way through the movie, when there is some sort of non-sequential, late afternoon scene with Henry Fonda. I was watching the movie and thought “What the….? Where are we?” I thought maybe I hadn’t been paying attention and ran the movie back a few minutes, to no avail. I was still confused.
I felt better a lot after watching the commentary with Alex Cox. I can’t quote him directly, but he said something like, “What in the world is going on here? Is it a flashback? What’s it a flashback to? And now the scene’s over and we cut to the middle of the day! You know, I think somewhere in the making of this movie they just lost all track of time. Doesn’t really matter in the end, though.”
And it’s true, it doesn’t. Like a lot of movies, certain stray details may be confusing but the larger picture is never less than clear.
’
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What great films do you violently hate for no other reason than because you're a total idiot? over 4 years ago
Who’s gonna be first?
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A GOOD TEST over 4 years ago
I wouldn’t call either “Five Easy Pieces” or “M*A*S*H” a great film; the latter, especially, does not hold up all that well, as what once seemed liberating and fresh now looks just a little sophomoric. The whole shower scene with Hot Lips suggests a juvenile, sniggering, “Playboy Party Jokes” approach to sex. I like “Patton,” but it wouldn’t be impossible to write a really negative review of it, what with George C. Scott’s scenery-chewing and the film’s rather rightward political tilt.
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A GOOD TEST over 4 years ago
It’s quite possible to be a cinephile and love “Love Story” and “Airport” and hate the other three. Real cinephiles love whatever they wish to love and do not ask permission. No one will ever doubt that Jacques Rivette is a cinephile. One of his favorite American films is “Show Girls.”
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Has Anyone On This Site Worked On Any Films I May Have Seen? over 4 years ago
Serves you right for “Eyes Wide Shut.”
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GREAT MOVIES WITH BAD ENDINGS... over 4 years ago
Two Hitchcock films have notoriously terrible endings: “Suspicion” and “Stage Fright.”
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Greatest samurai film of all time? over 4 years ago
Try Kobayashi’s “Hara-Kiri” sometime. Masterpiece.
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FORGOTTEN, BUT NOT GONE over 4 years ago
I, too, am always surprised by the films which film students have either never seen or never heard of. But film students aren’t necessarily film nuts, I guess, are they? Sometimes people are attracted to the craft, I think, more than anything. I know people who can go on and on about lenses and cables and sound mixing and who know a lot about animation — things that don’t require knowing who Fellini is. Most of what is below is extremely familiar to film-lovers, and I hope more film students:
I Fidanzati, Il Posto, The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi)
I Vitelloni, La Dolce Vita, 8 and a Half (Federico Fellini)
L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)
The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, Persona, Shame (Ingmar Bergman)
The Seven Samurai, Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa)
Un Chien Andalou, Los Olvidados, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Veronika Voss, Lola, The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Tokyo Story and Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)
Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)
Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean)
Angels With Dirty Faces, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
The Public Enemy (William Wellman)
White Heat (Raoul Walsh)
The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Asphalt Jungle (John Huston)
The Red Shoes, Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May)
Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller)
Robert Altman’s best films of the 1970s: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville.
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