The Grand Budapest Hotel
As much as "The Grand Budapest Hotel" takes on the aspect of a cinematic confection, it does so to grapple with the very raw and,…
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Yojimbo
Almost the first thing the samurai sees when he arrives is a dog trotting down the main street with a human hand in its mouth. The town seems deserted until a nervous little busybody darts out and offers to act…
The Apartment
There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who
Breathless
When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other. -- Michel to Patricia
Inherit the Wind
History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
L'Avventura
Tell me you love me. I love you. Tell me you don't. I don't love
La Dolce Vita
I have heard theories that Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" catalogs the seven deadly sins, takes place on the seven hills of Rome, and involves seven nights and seven dawns, but I have never looked into them, because that would…
Peeping Tom
The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it.
Psycho
"It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance...they were aroused by pure film."
Rocco and His Brothers
Luchino Visconti was a man of many tempers, styles and beliefs, and you can see them all, fighting for space, on the epic canvas of his masterpiece, "Rocco and His Brothers" (1960). Visconti (1906-1976) was gay, an aristocrat, a Marxist,…
The 400 Blows
I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.--Francois Truffaut
The Apu Trilogy
The great, sad, gentle sweep of "The Apu Trilogy" remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another…
Floating Weeds
Sooner or later, everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu. He is
Pickpocket
One of the early images in Robert Bresson's “Pickpocket” (1959)shows the unfocused eyes of a man obsessed by excitement and fear. The man's name is Michel. He lives in Paris in a small room under the eaves, a garret almost…
Rio Bravo
Howard Hawks didn’t direct a film for four years after the failure of his "Land of the Pharaohs" in 1955. He thought maybe he had lost it. When he came back to work on "Rio Bravo" in 1958, he was…
Some Like It Hot
What a work of art and nature is Marilyn Monroe. She hasn't aged into an icon, some citizen of the past, but still seems to be inventing herself as we watch her. She has the gift of appearing to hit…
Ballad of Narayama
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens up between its origins in the kabuki style and its subject of starvation in a…
Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II
The two parts of Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are epic in scope, awesome in visuals, and nonsensical in story. It is one of those works that has proceeded directly to the status of Great Movie without going through the intermediate…
Mon Oncle
Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights. Consider a shot early in "Mon Oncle," where the camera regards the…
The Music Room
Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" (1958) has one of the most evocative opening scenes ever filmed. A middle-age man, his face set into deep weariness, sits on the wide, flat roof of his house in an upholstered chair that has…
Touch of Evil
Come on, read my future for me.You haven't got any.
Vertigo
“Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did
12 Angry Men
In form, "12 Angry Men" is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart…
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The last words in David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai" are "Madness! Madness ... madness!" Although the film's two most important characters are both mad, the hero more than the villain, we're not quite certain what is intended…
Nights of Cabiria
Cabiria's eyebrows are straight, black horizontal lines,
