View image View image From: Andy Horbal, Mirror/Stage: "Army of Shadows" actually begins with an epigram: "Unhappy memories! Yet I welcome you… you are my long-lost youth… " Perhaps a French person would immediately recognize the film's subsequent opening shot…
A little beyond the first anniversary of the Opening Shots Project, I figured it was past time to compile a handy, one-page index to all the contributions. The Opening Shots category page takes forever to load, so now you can…
View image I can't think of another movie that makes me laugh and cry within the course of its opening shot. This is "The Big Animal" (2000), a feature directed by and starring Jerzy Stuhr, based on an early screenplay…
From Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Glendale, CA: The opening of Joe Dante’s cruelly misjudged and overlooked comedy "The ‘Burbs" begins with a vertiginous and hilarious parody of the God’s-eye view shot. Fade in on the…
From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX: When the release of "Eyes Wide Shut" drew near, a lot of the buzz was around it being a "sex film," and some (fools) went as far as to claim that its ambition was to…
View image Welcome back to the Opening Shots Project -- which has been on a bit of an unscheduled hiatus simply because I've had too much else going on. To get us back into the swing of things, I present…
View image Rise and shine... What do we have here? It's the opening shot of one of my favorite 1970s comedies, a dark absurdist urban paranoid masterpiece called "Little Murders" (1971) written by Jules Feiffer ("Carnal Knowledge") and directed by…
The public and the private, the personal and the political: Although this isn't precisely the opening shot of "Greetings" described here, it's part of it, showing the same TV, the same book and the same coffee pot in the same…
View image View image They don't grind 'em out like "Raw Meat" anymore. I don't know if horror movies will ever seem as seedy as they did in the first half of the 1970s, when even the emulsion itself seemed…
Here are some of the most popular choices we've published so far. The top vote-getters from this round will advance to the next! (I had to upgrade this thing -- it only gave me 100 "views" a day, which were…
Great Movies