Overwhelming seething&angry emotional power. Othon is introduced as Ford introduced Wayne in Stagecoach.

The greatest USSR propaganda film ever made. Made by a French director in an American B studio with a Russian ballerina. The cinema is a miracle and this miracle burns all the world's propaganda into ashes.

RR is given his one and only huge budget and shoots war from a complete and total distance. He loves war, he loves man, and he loves woman. Long live Italy.

If the commies could have made Marxist films this good, they would have won the Cold War.

Superior precursor to Ray's Bigger Than Life. The mechanics of the nuclear family break down into hysteria, but in this one the hysteria is provided cover not by drugs but by anti-commie propaganda. The melodrama is ravishing, damnably intelligent and heartbreaking. Proves Jean Renoir right: "Leo McCarey understands people - perhaps better than anyone else in Hollywood."

The idea of motherhood, as put forth by the all-American pappy of John Wayne, is one valued by an hysterical man.

Tourneur's masterpiece. So perfect, so complex, so achingly emotional...that after only one viewing, I would chew my tongue up and choke on it just trying to make sense of it. Vaya con dios.

I was surprised how different this was from the sublime horror film that is Spirit of the Beehive. Icíar Bollaín is probably the greatest teenaged actress I've ever seen in a film.

The best Bond, because it searches for its origination and finds Powell&Pressburger.

Yamanaka makes a screwball comedy! A complete 180 from Paper Balloons. What did this man accomplish? It's a goddamn shame we'll never know, as only three of his films still exist.

You could write a 1000 page interpretive essay on this film, so rich is it in sociology. I only have a stylistic observation: it uses Dreyer to impregnate every word and gesture with an existential sense of despair; and Vertigo to make it a dream. Steve McQeen's performance is awe-inspiring. I always believed he was a better actor than James Dean, and now that I've seen them play the same character, I know it.

Prostituion, child rape, lynching, alcoholism: these are the sins of our fathers and Ford turns the sun on it.

Olivier and Leigh at the height of their powers and in love, and together, they lay a rotten egg. Almsot startling in its awfulness.

Roger Corman understood that Price needed to be surrounded by real personalities. Price surrounded by cardboard cutouts, as here, just isn't as effective.

If Rossellini and Bresson had a butt baby, and he was forced to direct a script for a B-movie studio, it would come out looking something like this. A pure exercise in geometry and color and efficiency.

The first 45 minutes are masterpiece, as dazzling female flesh is set up to be strangled AND slashed at the precipice of domestic gentility. The final 30 minutes descend into painful psychobabble, but still a must-see.

Lisandro Alonso (Pedro Costa/1)=this crap

Victor Mature was a great presence and a horrible actor, but here he's just a horrible actor.

Hyper-intelligent mess

The first 30 minutes are up there with the best Ford. Then it descends into incomprehensible madness.

"The best relationship I ever had with my mom was when I was born." -Samoan gang banger.

A curious murder plot thriller filmed by then-blacklisted Hollywood Dmytryk in England. Interesting for its mix of cool British wit and American-angst existentialism (an upper-class Englishman plots murder against an American expatriot).

A perfectly-rendered analysis of warriors-past-by. Orwell's Homage to Catalonia in past tense celluloid. And a cockfight!

Roughly 10 years before Godard got there and 50 years before the birth of the Super PAC, Tourneur (hidden away in a B-studio back lot) documents sound + image as political oppressor.

Imagine the five seasons of The Wire condensed to 80 minutes and set in rural Kansas in the 1870s. Tourneur is the king of elliptical filmmaking, maybe even more so than Rossellini. And the cherry on top: there's the coolest thing you've ever seen in cinema...and then there's the two younger Earps' entrance into Wichita.

There was once a great director named Bruno Dumont...the first 30 minutes or so are about the best thing Dumont has ever done: incommunicable fucking in farm country...and then he slides off into territory he knows nothing about and films it badly: in L'Humante, it was the police procedural; in Twenty-nine Palms, it was the USA; and this time the war genre.

Spain filmed by a tourist. Nice bullfighting scenes, though.

Only The Archers could be so perverse as to make a WW2 propaganda film where we root for the Nazi. My favorite Tories!

A Bonnie & Clyde update...the dumb poetry of violent teens set against the sweetest Spanish pop. Only Godard shoehorns better music videos into his narratives.

A delightfully sexy teenage comedy engendered in degenerate Soviet socialist infrastructure, where every woman who appears on screen is begging to be made love to in her own special way. The appeals to Bresson and Tarr in the comments are completely off the mark: this is one part Bunuel and one part Nicholas Ray.