A picaresque decimation of religious myth and mythology, fanaticism and piety. Unleashing his characteristic blend of mordant wit and ribald humor, Buñuel strikes a fatal blow on behalf of skeptics, atheists, and so-called heretics everywhere, forever securing his place in the annals of rationality.
At once oblique and instinctively cogent, closing a defining decade in the great director's career––in fact, one of the greatest in any filmmaker's––and preluding what would be the next chapter in his fruitful oeuvre, his self-described trilogy in "the search for truth." The Milky Way––precise; exacting; casually and gleefully profane––is the work of a master in rare form, gallantly exposing the artifice of religious doctrine.
While superficially one of Buñuel's most lucid and orderly works, Diary Of A Chambermaid is regardlessly one of his most beguiling, inexplicable, and unsettling pictures, containing some of his most indelible and erotically-charged imagery––the snails slithering over Claire's corpse; Jeanne Moreau's lovely legs, footwear, and maid's uniform––amidst a tapestry of pastoral repression.
Every bit as inventive as the work of his Cahiers du Cinéma colleague, Jean-Luc Godard, while structurally akin to his cinematic idol, Jean Renoir, Truffaut's sublime third feature, Jules And Jim, is as near to a perfect film as is humanly possible. The considerable aspirations, and even greater accomplishments, of Truffaut's masterpiece are as astonishing now as they were in 1962.
While Hawks's preeminent western may not transcend its genre, it certainly defines it.
The culmination of a lifelong obsession with the carnal and the theatrical, Fellini Satyricon is a grand, garish epic of undiluted Fellini––that is, a masterpiece, though not for the uninitiated.
Malick's films are composed of the moments when we stop to appreciate the sublimity of the world around us, seeing past the chaos and complexity to revel in the grand design. That is, colloquially, to see the forest for the trees. This goes a long way in explaining the internal sense with which his films are imbued, if often they can seem superficially cryptic or abstruse.
Such was Godard's eminence in the 1960s that by his seventh feature, Band Of Outsiders (Bande À Part), he could conceivably, and with little embellishment, credit himself as 'Jean-Luc Cinéma Godard' within the introductory titles of his film, with nary a dissenting voice in the choir.
The single most astonishing character study ever committed to celluloid. Every aspect of the film displays a magnificent, chilling depth—Scorsese's direction, De Niro and Keitel's performances, Schrader's script, and Herrmann's score (completed just hours before he passed away in his sleep) all represent the pinnacle of the cinematic artform. What J.D. Salinger did for literature, Scorsese managed to do for cinema.
The reason why Easy Rider refuses to become a Sixties relic is because it was never about its own time so much as it was about freedom, in every sense of the word. As prescient now as it ever was.
The damndest thing you ever saw.
That moment at the end of the film, when Laurent walks back into his hotel room after a sordid evening to find his father and brothers sitting down for breakfast, and–maybe to cut the tension, maybe for lack of any appropriate response–they all begin to collapse in laughter with one another: that's cinema.
Absolutely visionary. Stunning.
The zither score by Anton Karas makes me so happy.
