Cinema has several experimenters of time. Maya Deren, for example, who uses time and space to warp everyday objects into new cinematic realities. Or Christopher Nolan, who makes time a narrative trick. Or Andrei Tarkovsky, who prolongs time in scenes of slow long-takes for the sake of meditative immersion. Then there's Lav Diaz, who takes his cue from Tarkovsky, but then stretches the time experiment further by giving us stories that unfold on hours on end, prompting some critics to dub him a "maximalist in terms of time." You can call his films "endurance cinema," but that's reducing his work into a competition with the limits of our bodies, which takes away from the integrity of his cinema. I think he keeps this kind of length for his films, because his stories simply demand that kind of unfolding. His longest so far is
[2016] at 8 hours. My first experience with any of his films was the six-hour
[2011], in Dumaguete, in a screening I'd arranged with Diaz himself introducing the film sometime in 2012: we started in the late afternoon with about fifty people in attendance, and wrapped up near midnight, with 23 people left. We considered it a success, and had the requisite photo-op to commemorate the finish! Of course it got me thinking about the pure creative decision he has made in keeping long running-times, a quality of his films that are not without naysayers. But he is completely unbothered by it, once noting this: "What bothers me [instead] is the utter lack of openness or understanding that cinema is a great art and that they mustn’t confine or limit it to the imposed traditions. It bothers me more when some film scholars and critics offer limited understanding of the medium. My films are free. I’ve emancipated my cinema from the conventions. People must realize that the so-called average length that they’ve been accustomed to seeing is just market-imposed and that art is free. There is no cardinal rule." True. [Don't we readily binge Netflix shows?] The second time I watched a Lav Diaz film was this 2013 contemporary classic -- the idea of which actually germinated over beer with producer Moira Lang in Dumaguete the year before: truth to tell, I arranged the screening on the sly, by strict invitation only, because it wasn't out yet in local cinemas although it was beginning to reap awards internationally. What we saw that evening in Oriental Hall left our mouths gaping -- because the film was a powerful reworking of Dostoevsky's
that was as relentless as it was beautiful, we didn't feel the four hours and eleven minutes that demanded our full attention. I was so moved by it that I resolved to screen it for real for the rest of Dumaguete. With the help of Paul Benzi Florendo, we scheduled a one-night only screening at Robinsons Place's Movieworld. And we sold out all the tickets -- even if we warned everyone who bought that this was going to be a four-hour film! Best of all, everyone stayed until the film's crushing, despairing end. I still have no idea how we made that screening happen, but I've ascribed it all to the power of the film itself, which is the best gateway drug to the demanding but satisfying pleasures of Lav Diaz's cinema. What's the film?
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The strangest thing, at least for me, about this peculiar 1981 movie from Louis Malle is my recollection of it: I can remember seeing, on film, patches of a Polish forest and one of the protagonists being buried alive in a theatrical ritual, I can remember trips to the Sahara and a mystical English farm, I can remember limber monks who can lift themselves by their fingertips. Which I know are lies because none of these are ever captured on film. What there is instead are two grown men -- the theatre director Andre Gregory and the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn -- playing versions of themselves, meeting in a New York restaurant where for the next two hours we watch them dine and have a conversation. That's it. A movie with two men talking over fine food. On paper, it sounds utterly boring, although it was that very conceit that first attracted me to it, primarily of the belief that it could not possibly succeed. I have never been so happy with being mistaken. Because I love this film so much that when it got parodied in a gloriously unexpected episode of the TV sitcom Community, I got goosebumps. It felt like an affirmation from popular culture that this film is indeed worth remembering. But I've always loved talky movies, I enjoy elegantly staged extended conversations in them -- although a lot of them are composed in a kinetic way, always with the characters walking or interacting in some way to some other action, often with the scenery changing behind them, or bookended with extensive outside drama. This is what we get, for example, in John Hughes'
or in Quentin Tarantino non-action set pieces. But to make the most ordinary of conversation the main fare is very rare, with only Abbas Kiarostami's
coming close to Malle's singular effort -- but even those three have something else that makes them far less ordinary: Kiarostami's film meanders in Tuscany, Schenkman's film is speculative fiction of the sci-fi variety, and Lumet's film is the forced interaction of jury members contemplating a murder verdict. I list all these films because they are uniquely beguiling, without having to resort to fussy action that many moviegoers seem to prefer. Their powers may in fact be ancient: we celebrate the Bard in literature, and these films, especially Malle's, are echoes of that. They center on the primacy of the storyteller, and how worlds can be thoroughly made through the power of the spoken word. I think film critic Roger Ebert said it best: "What [Malle's film] exploits is the well-known ability of the mind to picture a story as it is being told. Both Shawn and Gregory are born storytellers, and as they talk we see their faces, but we picture much more." What's the film?
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Almost everyone who has been an avid reader has been through an Agatha Christie phase -- her whodunits a perfect test of our own incipient brainpower in ascertaining the guilty before all is revealed in the closing chapter. I enjoyed the worldliness of Hercule Poirot, as well as the more insular charms of Miss Marple. Years later, I would learn the intricate aesthetics of the murder mystery as a literary device divining a return to balance a world rocked by evil, and some such. But my fascination with Christie was truly rekindled in college when I discovered
[1979], Michael Apted's fictional speculation of the writer's real-life [and famous] 11-day disappearance in 1926. That movie led to me discovering a craze in Agatha Christie adaptations in the 1970s and early 1980s that began with this 1974 film. And then to sequels like
[1988] -- all of which, except the last one, were produced with lavish attention to detail by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, and made more remarkable by their insistence of the voodoo of location and the casting of formidable, well-known actors including Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, Angela Lansbury, Maggie Smith, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Vanessa Redgrave, Wendy Hiller, Diana Rigg, Mia Farrow, Anthony Perkins, Kim Novak, Rock Hudson, Carrie Fisher, Olivia Hussey, David Niven, Richard Widmark, Tony Curtis, John Gielgud, Jacqueline Bisset, Piper Laurie, George Kennedy, James Mason, Roddy McDowall, Sylvia Miles, Jack Warden, Michael York, Geraldine Chaplin, and Hayley Mills. That kind of gimmicky casting will always be joyful to behold -- especially when we get scenes like Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith camping up a marvelous, unexpected duet of Cole Porter's "You're the Top" in
. [Of late, Kenneth Branagh is trying to recapture the old magic of these extravaganzas to curious interest but diminishing powers. That said, I'm holding my breath for his upcoming remake of
.] A lot of these Brabourne and Goodwin production quirks soon became formula in further adaptations of Christie's works -- but the one that started it all, the Oscar-winning film by Sidney Lumet, retains a freshness and energy that have not been surpassed by the films that followed. I keep returning to it, perhaps because it is truly a unique mystery in the whole body of Christie's works: a murder set on a moving luxury train, of a despicable man who deserved what he got, surrounded by a cast of twelve suspects who [spoilers!] all took part in the murder in a kind of jury rendering justice to a past crime, and where the detective decides to solve the case in favour of the criminals. That twist remains the most singular of feats in Agatha Christie's arsenal of singular feats -- and the first time I saw the movie [without having read the book], the conclusion amazed and flummoxed me. But it was an elegant solution that truly earned its execution. I must have seen this film at least thirty times, always marveling at its controlled pace and exquisite unfolding every single time -- the last one being an almost simultaneous screening of it together with Branagh's 2017 remake, which it trounces considerably, even with the new film's attendant lushness and thematic depths. Lumet's film is a fine balance of the grandiose and the down-to-earth, generous with its sense of space and handling of its famous faces, but spare in its plot-making. It reminds me of the muscular dexterity Lumet first demonstrated in
[1957], which like this Christie adaptation is also about a jury finding justice in a tight murder mystery. What's the film?
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Marilou Diaz Abaya's 1982 masterpiece feels both of its time and ahead of its time, and I find it odd that it's not as widely celebrated today as it should be, even with the recent restoration undertaken by ABS-CBN in 2017. It is very much a slice of life culled from the last years of the Marcos regime, brave in its depiction of a restive Manila and the growing turbulence of the country. But in its pursuit of a story that heralded the Filipina sans the lie of the Maria Clara stereotype, the film courted controversy, earning a lackluster audience response that might be attributed in part to
, which came out at the same time and which probably sucked out most of the oxygen in the room. Bernal's film, starring the incandescent Nora Aunor, demanded to be seen and to be discussed, leaving Diaz-Abaya's film -- which was also written by
scribe Ricky Lee -- as the critical bridesmaid. I first saw this film in shadowy third generation video copy during one of those classic Filipino movie marathons Cinema One used to do during the doldrums of Holy Week, and even in its compromised form, something about it felt immediate to me. Perhaps it was because I had never seen a Filipino film before that was so knowingly pre-occupied with its feminist themes. Later, I would learn it was the second in a loose trilogy of movies that Diaz-Abaya churned out in quick succession in the early 1980s, which quickly cemented her reputation as a director willing to take on stories with uncompromising women's themes: there was
[1980], which tells the story of a traumatized woman who has murdered her husband and two of his male friends, soon revealing her sexual humiliation that led to the crime; and there was
[1983], which chronicles the travails of a city-bred wife relocated by her new husband to his deep-country barrio, where she has to contend with the local gossip and the advances of her father-in-law. Between these two landmark movies is Diaz-Abaya's ode to female friendship, tested by social norms and social upheavals, spanning three years of their lives, pre- and post-college graduation. Lorna Tolentino's Joey, Gina Alajar's Kathy, Sandy Andolong's Sylvia, and Anna Marin's Maritess are college classmates, a close-knit barkada with different sensibilities and outlooks, which allowed screenwriter Ricky Lee some leeway in his exploration of the different facets of the Filipino woman of the time. Joey dresses slovenly, does drugs, keeps no permanent address, and sleeps around when she is not busy pursuing the affections of an activist classmate [turned NPA] who clearly has no interest in her. Kathy is an ambitious singer of no discernable talent, who nevertheless sleeps her way to get to the top of a recording career she does not deserve. Sylvia is a lawyer who convinces herself that she is the epitome of freethinking liberalism, but cannot shake off her connection to an ex-husband who is now living in with another man, who happens to be a macho dancer. Maritess is a frustrated poet turned conventional housewife who has been reduced to being a baby-making machine by a husband who insists they live with his mother in their sprawling compound filled with kin and thousands of children. The film works because it tells its interwoven story without having to hold itself to the confines of a conventional narrative structure -- no inciting incidents, no rising action, no climax -- just following the organic unfolding in the lives of our four main characters, each reacting in specific ways to ensuing circumstances, each trying to find either peace or escape from the desperations that define their life decisions. I found the free-floating quality of the film beguiling, like a perfect demonstration of Helene Cixous'
. As a study of the Filipino woman in all her moral and societal complexities, this film is a vanguard and must be widely seen, even today. In 2003, Diaz-Abaya attempted a sequel titled
, which did not retain any of the original actors save two -- Joey's conflicted mother played in both films by Laurice Guillen, and Sylvia's rival in the affections of her ex-husband, played by Lito Pimentel. In the latter film, we find suitable conclusions to each of these women's dreams, shattered or otherwise; it also finds a resonating theme about reconciling with the past. I actually liked it, but it would have been more powerful with Tolentino, Alajar, Andolong, and Marin reprising their roles. What's the film?
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[2016] is more accomplished, but his freshman effort, part of the cohort that defined American independent filmmaking in the early 1990s, is the most compelling, and more than 25 years after its premiere in 1990, it has remained the landmark title in his filmography. It is also pretty much a miracle. Because it shouldn't exist the way it is. A comedic exploration of class triumphs and tragedies, it investigates, coddles, and skewers, all in equal measure, the comforts and malaise of a very particular class of the American 1%, the young and idle rich, which the movie lovingly dubs as the "urban haute bourgeoisie." We follow them closely -- this group which calls itself the Sally Fowler Rat Pack -- as they spend one Christmas season attending debutante balls in New York City and spending company in extensive after-parties, and admitting into their rarified ranks a young man named Tom Townsend, an outsider from the Upper West Side, essentially New York's version of the wrong side of the tracks. Tom becomes the audience's surrogate into this strange, closed up world, and we succumbed to it as much as Tom finds himself equally seduced. This look into the moneyed class was the reason why the Sundance Film Festival rejected it in the first place, because its focus on the rich made it stand out too much in a festival populated with regional titles and films about minority voices -- to which Stillman gave a counter-argument: that the film, ironically, is about a minority. Sundance reversed its decision, and the film became an unlikely hit, earning millions upon its budget of about $200,000. It shouldn't be a hit since its largely defined by its academic dialogue, its young stars -- all of them new to film -- hanging around in posh living rooms in their gowns and tuxedos, talking in a hyper-articulate way about deep topics such as public transportation snobbery, opposition to conventional society, the appeal of Jane Austen, the phenomenology of religion, the illusion of popular imagination, the supremacy of literary criticism over fiction, and economic theory. They drop names such as Thorstein Veblen, Charles Fourier, Averell Harriman, and Lionel Trilling with nary a sweat, or missed beats by those listening, and they drop conversational witticisms such as in this exchange: "The titled aristocracy are the scum of the earth." "You always say 'titled' aristocrats. What about 'untitled' aristocrats?" "Well, I could hardly despise them, could I? That would be self-hatred." And yet not a single scene feels forced or contrived, a quality I responded to when I first saw it in the mid-1990s, my great epoch of discovering movies. You actually feel as if you're in the company of authentic upper-class denizens who just happen to be too intellectual for people their age, very much like the teenagers in
did. [Hyper-articulate, hyper-aware teenagers in pop culture is very much a 90s thing.] You soon feel however that they are using language both as a weapon and a mask because they really cannot bring themselves to articulate their real feelings and intentions. Questions like: Will I make something of myself or am I destined to be a failure? How do I tell someone I like them? Will we still be friends after this whole season is over? How do I get over someone? In their earnest debates standing in for unsaid existential dilemmas, I found myself drawn in. What's the film?
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The avant-garde or experimental film, very much like performance art in the fine arts, is the trickiest thing to appreciate in the realm of cinematic arts. This is largely because they are nebulous in form and technique when compared to the two other traditions of film, namely narrative cinema and documentary cinema. As cinema that's completely sprung from flux, it can be compelling and profound, or it can be eye-rolling and silly -- and the thing is, you often can't define the difference. The easiest way would be to ascertain the extent or the newness of its experimentations on the medium beyond the aesthetics of the narrative or the documentary, as a pure film that tries to do with film what only film can do. Some of the avant-gardists, for example, have taken to painting or drawing or scratching or making physical impressions on the film material itself; some try out new camera angles or new editing techniques or new types of content. Relentlessly on the front rank of development, a lot of them defy our requirement for the "logical," which compounds the confusion. So I often make judgment calls by deferring to the most unreliable of standards: the gut feel -- because sometimes you just can tell if what you're watching is bullshit or the real deal. But I think one's "gut feel" can be sharpened by years of watching the tradition of the avant-garde, and developing an intuition for the truly experimental and innovative, separate from mere film school freshman posturing. And yet, if one looks at the history of film, the avant garde is arguably the oldest of the traditions. All those efforts at arriving at the motion picture as we know it now -- from Eadweard Muybridge's running horses to Thomas Alva Edison's Kinetoscope studio snippets, from Auguste and Louis Lumière's actualities to Georges Méliès's illusions, from Edwin S. Porter's continuity editing to D.W. Griffith's parallel editing and development of the various kinds of shots -- were experiments that brought incremental development to the medium. That history also tells us why the avant garde is a tradition in flux: what is experimental can easily become the norm, mainstreamed so to speak, and it can be hard to distinguish the audacity of the original in the light of its copycats. [The filmmakers behind
, for example, invented the "bullet time" effect, which they had to abandon in the sequels because of the plethora of films that came after which aped or parodied the technique.] Still, some experimental films have withstood the changing responses to the medium, retaining much of their strangeness, from René Clair's
(1933) -- a lot of them conceived with a fine taste for the surreal. Some of my favourites include Maya Deren's
(2007). The ones people talk about more are Andy Warhol's
(1963) -- which is a half-hour close-up of a man's face as he is pleasured by fellatio, and
(1964) -- which is an experiment in endurance, an 8-hour shot of the Empire State Building static in the slowly changing skies over New York. There are also Stan Brakhage's
(1981), where he eschews actual filmming and opts instead to make impressions on the physical film using moth wings and leaves and flowers, creating a kaleidoscopic effect that mesmerizes. But the one experimental film I return to with the most frequency is Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied's ode to dreams and doubles, where the mundane objects of life create an atmosphere of pure dread, immersing us in a story that recalls gothic horror meeting film noir. The less said about the particulars of the short film, the better -- but it pays to note that Deren makes films as practical realizations of her philosophical essays on cinema, which calls for inventive editing and a creative manipulation of time and space. Laura Ivins, in her superb video essay on the philosophical bent of Deren's filmmaking, identifies three tenets with which Deren operates, and which this 1943 film perfectly encapsulates: [1] amateurism, which, as a practice of invention, industriousness, and a love of craft, allows the filmmaker freedom to pursue the artistic possibilities of cinema because they are not bound to profit; [2] an interest in the human body, which recognizes that "movement" and "time" are the very specificities of film that make it different from other art forms, hence Deren's camera focusing intimately on the body in time, usually in a dance; and [3] the manipulation of reality, recognizing that cinema "has a unique ability to construct new realities -- not abstraction but just the every day world as ingredient for manipulation," but "not advocating for realism" either, only an interest in how objects of our everyday reality -- a loaf of bread, a key, a record player -- can be manipulated to "create a reality that could only exist onscreen." All these can be frustrating ciphers to the ordinary moviegoer, but the beauty of avant garde films is that, like poetry, you don't have to force yourself to "get it" all at once. This is where gut reaction is helpful, trusting our eyes and our brains to soak in the sensation that comes from seeing certain images come together, plumbing our own emotional responses to the color or movement or cut we are beholding. In the long run, however, it's also proper to know that many of our avant garde filmmakers make films with theoretical underpinnings, like Deren, with their works as fruits of an intellectual exercise. To quote Deren: "The techniques which I have described would have been of no interest at all, if they were not conceived for the purpose of conveying meaning." Meaning is important in the avant garde. Deren considered the mind "the most powerful tool at a filmmaker's disposal," Ivins reports, "encouraging other amateur filmmakers to plan their films thoughtfully and creatively, and to always keep in mind the things that makes cinema a unique form of art." What's the film?
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There is a reason why my favorite genre of film is the disaster movie, and not just the kind where people are in peril in enclosed spaces, like
. I prefer the cataclysmic kind, where disaster is Armageddon in its reach: 2012,
. Showy in their epic destruction of the world, their appeal for me lies in this paradox: they give me comfort. And this has a lot to do, admittedly, with my mental health. The jagged edges of mental health have no lack for cinematic representation. Madness is the landscape of terror in
. With more nuanced takes, we have depictions of bipolar disorder in
, and others. We make good subjects for film, especially of the Oscar-bait variety. Well and good. Then there's depression. A lot of movies have as characters depressed people of all sorts -- but for me, the cinematic epic of depression has got to be this 2011 film from Lars von Trier. He has plumbed into the depravities of humans in such polarizing films as
, and pursuing their unraveling in formalistic experiments of such audacity. It is only fitting that he would be the one to inject humanity into the numbing reality of depression. The film rings so true; the first time I saw it, it was disturbing but it felt very much like my own biography. I felt seen, and most of all, I felt understood. I've been battling depression and anxiety for most of my adult life: the condition exists as a dark cloud that has made permanent residence in my head, a hovering presence that gets dispelled only once in a while, when I'm lucky, and only for a few minutes or so, usually in my waking moments when the waking world has yet to unleash its tentacles. I've learned to live with it, notwithstanding the days of paranoia and paralysis it can sometimes demand. ["This tastes like ash," she sobs as she tries to eat something.] But I have gone through life functioning like I'm the very figure of stability when in reality I'd much rather stab a fork into my hand or retreat to the refuge of bed. And we don't tell anyone, of course, because we know too well the unhelpful advise we'd be getting: "Just snap out of it. Happiness is a choice." In the film, our depressed heroine gets exactly that advise in the beginning. Part 1 of the film follows Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, who in the course of her wedding day, succumbs to the worst of her melancholy, despite the measured ministrations of her sister Claire. Justine's ensuing breakdown becomes a searing disruption to her family, and renders her incapacitated. Part 2 follows Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, the happily-settled mentally stable one of the duo, who is slowly reduced to frantic nerves at the prospect of Earth colliding with a rogue planet named Melancholia. Claire's frantic end comes in contrast with Justine who now embodies a strange calmness as she gathers her sister and nephew together to await the fiery end of the world. This is what the movie ultimately gifts us as insight to our condition: for a lot of depressives, our melancholy springs from knowing a world which cannot see the dark jumble in our heads. But when the world staggers towards disaster, we may be the most prepared to take in that reality, simply because it's just the world aligning to our mental chaos. ["The earth is evil," Justine tells Claire at the apex of their reversal, "We don't need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it."] Affirmed, we settle to calmness, not necessarily resolved, but nonetheless resigned to the sweet inevitability of it all -- and perhaps, like Claire, bathe naked, in supplication, to the glow of a deadly planet. Then we make do, perhaps to Wagner's
. This film is the ultimate disaster movie, and it's a comfort. What's the film?
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You can tell that Joel Schumacher [1939-2020] started off his filmmaking career as a set designer [he did
, one of my favorite Woody Allen films] by the meticulousness of his films' set designs -- from the gilded opulence of
. Most of the time, as a director, he never rises above his origins, giving us pictures that are pretty nice to look at, but there's not much there unfortunately. Many of them you enjoy, many became huge hits, and some might even be memorable, but ... but ... [Sigh.] I still have not forgiven him for the travesty of
, a film so bad he found himself apologizing for making it years later. It remains my prime example of Hollywood at its worst. But rest in peace.
When I think of the magic of Technicolor, the first thing I think about is this 1944 paean by Vincente Minnelli to the seasons of an American family's life, which brings out with unshy lushness the brightness of summer, the charms of autumn, the depths of winter, and the gaiety of spring as they happen to the Smiths of St. Louis, Missouri, all in the months prior to the opening of the famed World's Fair in 1904. The colours simply pop in this film, fantastical to the core, but the result is uncanny because it underscores both the fairy tale quality of the story and the groundedness with which we relate to it. It is both artifice and realness in equal measure, which is an impossible tightrope to navigate indeed. Perhaps the realness comes from the seeming relatability of this family -- Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their four daughters and one son -- that comes despite their obvious privileges. I think it's the performances. Judy Garland, for example, brings a singular charm to her role as Esther, the spirited second daughter in love with the boy next door, which is removed from the neurosis she'd display come later roles. When she sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in the winter section of this movie musical, for example, she gives it the right dose of pathos, which would make the song an iconic holiday tune. [It is my favorite Christmas song bar none.] We feel the movie right in our guts, and this is the very quality I have come to find real, and warm. Every December, I do a marathon of Christmas movies, which has become my ritual, and it includes personal holiday favorites such as
. This film, however, is always the last that I screen, ending with the best to get me into the right mood of the often difficult season. It never ceases to not work. What's the film?
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This piece of confection shouldn't be as memorable as it has become in the cumulative. A teen movie should be of the moment, break the box office on the strength of its recognizable teen stars, and then be quickly forgotten as a footnote in film history. But sometimes a teen movie -- of the kind that traffics in American high school tropes and cliques, reflective of contemporaneous music and fashion and bywords, and marinated in candy-colored whimsy -- becomes emblematic of its generation and then simply resists becoming a footnote. The teen movie really is a phenomenon that came to full form in the 1980s, but it has its precursors. In the 1960s, we had
movies. In the 1970s, we had
. In the 1980s, we had the real beginnings of the teen movie as we know them with
. In the 1990s, we had
. In the 2000s, in the glut of teen movies that defined that decade, we had
, and finally this: Mark Waters' superbly crafted ode to cliques, plastic personalities, and navigating the jungles of high school life. When I saw it in 2004, I knew I was watching a classic, something meant to be chewed on for years and years to come. Perhaps what made this film worked is its anthropological stance. Borrowing the techniques and roots of
[which Cameron Crowe wrote based on his reportage going undercover in a high school], co-star and screenwriter Tina Fey drew on the nonfiction book,
by Rosalind Wiseman, and elevated the material to a scintillatingly comic drama, as we follow a homeschooled girl reintegrate herself to the whimsies of American high school life, and find it as complex and dangerous as the African jungles she just left behind. Fey, Waters, and their formidable cast managed to make what may be the most effective teen movie of them all. So effective in fact that since the movie's premiere in 2004, no other teen movie in the 2000s has effectively inherited the torch of generational touchstone, not
. In the 2010s, you have contenders in
. But we can be very comprehensive in our list-making and we will still feel that this 2004 movie stands above all in a class all its own. I know people who know every quotable line ["Four for you, Glen Coco! You go, Glen Coco!"]. I know people who celebrate its rituals ["On Wednesdays, we wear pink"]. I know people who gauge parenthood by it [ "I'm not like a regular mom, I'm a cool mom!"]. I know people who keep calendar to its notions [“On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was”]. I know people who judge vocabulary by it ["Stop making fetch happen!"]. I know people who understand the notion of the pariah by its demands ["You can't sit with us!"]. Quote-wise, it is the teen equivalent of The Godfather. I love the movie because it's joyful, because it's endlessly quotable, and because it's surprisingly deep: it understands, in its heightened, comical ways, the fraught world of adolescence, and alas, also the hapless adults that they become. What's the film?
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There is no denying the place of this film -- the first in a trilogy -- from Lana and Lilly Wachowski in the history of film, in popular culture, and in our collective consciousness. The film cannot be denied its influence. When it came out in 1999, it felt like a stealth bomb, establishing its directors as visionaries, redefining the appeal of its star, and most of all, reinventing the action genre [and the sci-fi genre] -- its signature moves, its patent cool, its ballet of acton have since been endlessly parodied and replicated. Today, it has become a pop cultural favorite in interpretative discourse: a literary reinterpretation of
, the mythological weight of The One, a philosophical touchstone on the notion of reality, a Marxist read on the dehumanization of labor and the culpability of capitalism, a cautionary tale of technology and consumerism, an examination of spirituality in a media-saturated world, an allegory on gender and transsexuality, and so many others. It lends itself to many interpretations, becoming the ultimate Rorschach inkblot test. There's the famous red pill/blue pill scene, for example, where Morpheus engages Neo to make a choice between accepting the world as it is [blue pill], or ripping the illusion of it to see the reality [red pill]. Last May, in the midst of the pandemic, the controversial technology entrepreneur Elon Musk recently cryptically tweeted: "Take the red pill," to which Ivanka Trump replied: “Taken!” This prompted co-director and co-creator Lilly Wachowski to respond with, “F— both of you.” I knew from the get-go, and I think everyone else also did, that the film was going to be important; it announced itself so, captured the popular imagination, launched raging philosophical debates, and has not lost its edge or relevance even after twenty years [or even the dilution of its less inspired sequels]. I still use the film in various humanities classes as a kind of parable easily digestible for students trying to make sense of various concepts, and its malleability as discourse fodder remains amazing. What's the film?
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Today, June 21, is the International Day of the Celebration of the Solstice! Why don't we read the classic Filipino text celebrating its passions in "The Summer Solstice" by National Artist for Literature
The conceit of this sprawling 1980 masterpiece from Ishmael Bernal is that the whole film completely takes place under the shadow of night, hence the title, save for the punctuating sunrise at the end that provides a metaphor of relief and reprieve for its beleaguered characters. In the darkness and bright artificial lights of early 1980s Manila, they constitute the teeming multitudes of the metropolis, the buzzy amorality of their lives foregrounded by the jazzy music of Vanishing Tribe, which overlays the opening titles. We encounter the assorted comings and goings of these denizens: an uptight housewife and mother obsessed with cleaning and who has a secret past [Charito Solis]; her carefree lounge singer of a son who hustles on the side [William Martinez]; his demanding and high-living classmate and girlfriend [Gina Alajar]; a gay fashion designer whose mothering nature allows others to take advantage of him [Bernardo Bernardo]; a tomboy pickpocket and drug dealer constantly on the run from the police [Cherie Gil]; the blind but sassy masseuse she is in love with who dreams of being saved by her Saudi-based beau [Rio Locsin]; a hapless waitress in a restaurant [Lorna Tolentino] too naive to question the amorous attentions of a taxi driver [Orestes Ojeda] who actually keeps another woman [Alma Moreno] at home, a prostitute he thinks works as a nurse. [Mitch Valdez provides a fantastic and comic cameo as a social climbing customer of the fashion designer, commanding her scenes with her potty mouth, and pottier stories. Her scenes are to die for, but all too brief.] What links them are their desperations and deep wells of dishonesty, carefully laying out their individual formula for survival in an uncaring city. Their small but momentous lives intersect in one way or another, giving us a symphony of Manila lives brutalized in small and big ways by the corruption of a Philippines under Marcos. It scandalised Imelda Marcos so much -- at the time she was making a sweeping rebranding of Manila as The City of Man, a place that's boisterous but still beautiful -- that she insisted to the producers they take away the "Manila" in the title, hence the film's retitling in its first run as
. Bernal works from his usual perch of witty raconteur, observant of the foibles of Filipinos, and depicting them on screen as sharp social commentaries, delving into the dirt without sacrificing his characters' humanity. But not without some of them collapsing into the hopelessness of it all, as exemplified by Bernardo Bernardo's Manay Sharon breaking down near the end and shouting, "Ayoko na! Ayoko na!" Bernal works his huge cast like how Robert Altman fiddles with his in Nashville and other films, minus the overlapping dialogues, and allowing their interactions to provide a cumulative portrait of the place. It's not a glamorous Manila we see -- and for the longest time, for a non-Manileño like me, the film provided the template with which to imagine my country's capital city as a place filled with curiosity and terror -- but watching it again, I can also see this as Bernal's unlikely love letter to his city. We understand that from the very start when Cherie Gil's Kano, upon beholding the nighttime skyline of Manila from a perch off the bay, is moved to shout: "I love you Manila,
." By the film's midpoint, we are in Luneta where a drunk man [played by Krip Yuson!] unexpectedly but poetically slurs: "There is no city but this city / This is the landscape of your life / Whenever you turn, black / Ruins of your loves come into view / You wish for other harbors and other places / But only an echo of this city / The self-same city / Shimmers in the hearing glass / There is no city but this city..." Truth to tell, I have never seen this film in pristine print, but I could still behold Bernal's genius in the blotchy, overly dark versions I've seen it in. When will this get a restoration? It deserves to be seen in its intended gritty glory. What's the film?
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There is no one New York. Anthony Burgess once wrote that New York City is a metropolis completely made up of one's personal take on it: "The time came when New York displayed itself to me through literature, but a time later still showed how inadequate that literature was. No writer I know of has succeeded in exhibiting the whole panorama. Most writers on New York have found it easier to create a city of their own than to produce the reality." The first time I saw New York -- this was in 2010 -- my first impression disappointed me, although that was quickly reversed a day later and I fell in love with Broadway, with Fifth Avenue, with Central Park, with Washington Square, with Brooklyn, with the museums, with the crazy subways, with the easy to navigate grids of its streets. It was a beautiful autumn, and I walked everywhere. I wrote an entire short story ["All Blocks in New York Take a Minute,"
, 2012] of my brief flaneuring existence there. I'm glad that happened because my initial disappointment was startling, but it quickly made me realize that our conception of New York, sight unseen, borders on the mythical. For me, my own myth-making of this great, sleepless city more or less began with this Woody Allen 1979 classic. The movie burned into the retina of my brain, and since then I had carried that romantic expectations -- until I disembarked from my train into the stark, underwhelming realities of Penn Station. I laugh now at my naïveté -- but I get why the film holds such an allure. Filmmed in gorgeous black and white by Gordon Willis, the resulting cinemascape gives the film the immediacy and sheen of truth of an old documentary, and a sizeable dose of romantic myth-making because our minds fill in for us the colors they cannot behold, thus personalizing the experience of this celluloid New York. Plus, the film begins with three shrewdly placed devices: [1] an overture consisting of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," which is the most New York of themes; [2] a comical voice-over narration by what we presume to be a writer writing and revising his troublesome opening chapter of a book set in New York, each revision a unique take on the place -- a great example of Burgess' thesis; and [3] overlaying all of that with black-and-white clips of New York in the stark glory of all its boroughs, but primarily Manhattan, giving us a kind of map of the place. And ending this magnificent opening sequence with Gershwin's crescendo partnered with fireworks exploding above the outlines of the city. It's all so grand -- and already we're hooked. What follows are the mundane lives of a bunch of New York intellectuals as they hop from theatre to cafe to museum to each other's beds as they search for love and life's meaning. This was all so heady for me when I first caught the film in Betamax sometime in the 1990s. The patter of conversation [I loved the tit-for-tat between Allen and Diane Keaton as they assess the various artworks at the MoMA] was what I imagined real grown-up life to be, and when it did show grown-up problems, I imagined I could survive all of that by just taking a humorous take on things, like the film does. [Haha.] And the romance of the city, of course! That iconic early morning shot of the bench overlooking the Queensboro Bridge as it slowly lights up -- that's one for the ages. Allen famously hated this film, calls it a wretched work of subpar filmmaking -- which gives me the ultimate reason to divorce art from the artist. What does he know? For me, the film meant something. Once it is "out there," a work of art does not really belong to its author anymore. It becomes ours. And just like the city itself, the film becomes a construction of our personal dreams reflected on a magic mirror. And it's mine. What's the film?
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is now on YouTube! The film follows a female impersonator who supports his family by performing in Manila's gay bars during the Marcos dictatorship.
Saw this in my film class in the late 1990s, and I've always wanted a copy -- because it gives new meaning to the word "Spider-Man." [Note: NSFW]
Every time I watch Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's magnificent work of high fantasy, I only have vocabulary for the superlatives all three films demand: Epic. Awesome. Ambitious. These impressions have not diminished since the last of them was released in 2003. Each viewing since then still gives me the same satisfaction, with the added amazement that this cinematic undertaking was pretty much lightning caught in a bottle, a singular herculean effort never to be repeated with the same level of success [although Jackson himself tried his damnest with The Hobbit trilogy]. That's what I call "ambitious," because the trilogy's existence -- they were all filmed back-to-back in an almost continuous flow -- strikes me as magical. Who gave the crazy pitch that started it all the green light in the first place? No one today would do the same. Because the logistics on paper shouldn't even work. It required faith and commitment, and the wherewithal to manage a huge cast, to scale the mountains and rivers of New Zealand [a convincing stand-in for Middle Earth], to conjure the tricky [and then non-existent] special effects to make a fantastical world believable, and to trust that all can be achieved way beyond the usual timetable for film production. I would probably have ulcers -- but Jackson said yes to all these, and slayed a dragon. What resulted from his chutzpah is the embodiment of "awesome," from the pitch perfect composition of key battle scenes to the well-constructed spread of dread of Mordor, from the believability of Smeagol's craven physique to the perfectly realized dark caverns of the Mines of Moria with its assorted threats. Above all, there is Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens' unalterable adaptation of Tolkien's sizeable story, which knows its arc, its beats, its throbbing heart, giving us what I mean by "epic," and truly in keeping with that overused word: it feels grounded in the sureness of its narrative, and breathless with its sheer handling of what should be unwieldy material. The adventure of Frodo and Sam as they go about their difficult task of journeying through the dangerous landscape of Middle Earth to destroy a pernicious, traitorous ring in order to stop the dark forces of Lord Sauron from taking over the world easily becomes our own journey. We root for all the good people of Middle Earth in their fraught mission to stop a seemingly unstoppable evil -- and then, seen now in the light of current events, the story also becomes instructive on not losing hope, on persevering, on being reminded that in the long arc of the moral universe, good always triumphs and justice ultimately prevails. What're the films?
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When we become adventurous enough in our scholarship of Philippine cinema, and when the archives are finally available, someone will become our own Vito Russo who authored
in 1981 [which then spawned an equally pathbreaking 1995 documentary]. In that book of patient cinematic historiography, Russo traced the development of the homosexual theme and depiction in [mostly] American movies, from the silent period to the 1970s. [The movie expands the scope a bit to the early 1990s, but somewhat loses steam in its contemporaneous consideration, understandably.] In both book and documentary, we get a clear arc of historical queerness on American film -- something I've always wished could be done for Philippine movies, and something I wish someone like Nick Deocampo would do. It would be an interesting look at our cinema. What was the first Filipino film to depict a gay character? Kevin Leo Clidoro, in his unpublished thesis on the evolution of gay portrayals in Philippine cinema, writes that it's Tony Cayado's
in 1962 [unseen by me], where we encounter an American transsexual woman played by Christine Jorgensen. But an earlier one could be Mar S. Torres'
(1954), where Lolita Rodriguez's Benita and Dolphy's Gorio, siblings, play a twist on gender roles: she drives a jeepney and brawls with men, while he does all the household chores and answers to the name "Glory." Coming of age in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to see the more spirited [and very serious] pushing of the envelope being done by Filipino directors in tackling the gay theme, from Mel Chionglo's
(1999), from Maryo J. de Los Reyes'
(1998). The 1990s was the seminal decade, giving us nuanced gay films that were vast improvements from the homophobic bents of Danny Zialcita's
(1982). [Albeit they were enjoyable misfires.] Or the shrill sissy caricatures of Luciano B. Carlos'
(1987) -- all either with Dolphy, who largely became a phenomenon because of these gay roles, or his comic heir[ess] Roderick Paulate. There's also Leroy Salvador's remake of
(1987), complete with a gender twist once the right heterosexual ideal for Sharon Cuneta's tomboy character comes along. [It proved so popular, it spawned a sequel,
, in 1988.) Granted, there were also beautifully realized films with complex gay characterisations in the 1970s and 80s, such as Lino Brocka's
(1978, where Dolphy deepens his popular gay persona from all those Luciano B. Carlos films), and Ishmael Bernal's
(1980). The sincerity of the 1990s led to the dam bursting in the 2000s, signaled by Dolphy giving a last go with his gay persona as an ageing queen recollecting a painful past in Gil Portes'
(2000). The avalanche that followed, which also saw the subsequent rise in independent filmmaking, contained the good -- such as Joel Lamangan's
(2008) -- as well as the very, very bad, a lot of them skin flicks with a pretense of drama, trying to capitalize on a suddenly vigorous pink market, most of them forgettable misses. Out of this gay swarm rose two filmmakers that would go on to shape with vigor gay Filipino cinema as we know it now, although of opposing sensibilities. One is Crisaldo Pablo, whose gritty "no-budget erotistatements" [Jade Castro's words] are surprisingly sweet between the hot takes and are often well-made despite the DIY aesthetics. Pablo gives us a picture of Filipino gayhood from the viewpoint of the less privileged, from
(2009), the last of which many critics consider his masterpiece. The other one is Joselito Altarejos, whose more polished take often centers on gays of the burgis class dealing with the assorted upheavals in their lives, from
(2009). Altarejos begins to tackle more serious-minded themes done in the beat of found cinema in
(2010, where he first turns a critical stance on his brand of queer filmmaking),
(2014), which is Altarejos dismantling and then reassembling his legacy as a filmmaker in the guise of charting the rise and fall of a gay couple's relationship. But the movie that perhaps started it all is this 2008 film, which is a rush of adrenaline and a shock to queer filmmaking when it first came out. Following on the heels of the supreme success of
the year before, Altarejos lures us into the movie's world by giving us what seems to be a typical coming-of-age story: we follow a teenager named Antonio as he goes about his small world in Marikina, acquiescent to the cares of a single mother, and navigating the landmines of adolescence, especially his burgeoning gay sexuality, which he keeps a secret. Into the mix comes his paternal uncle in his 20s, who has come to live with them. Tito Jonbert is ruggedly handsome, streetwise, and attuned to his nephew's sexual awakening. The stir the film created among the gay community in 2008 was dynamite, a response to its frank sexuality and unhesitating depiction of a taboo, but a taboo that is well-known in the secret histories of so many gay men in the Philippines. Needless to say, it was galvanising for me, something its violent finale underlines as a kind of corrective. "I wanted to end it with my own version of the grand guignol," Jay told me once -- here giving the audience who were familiar with the titillations of
what they had come to expect, but also snatching that away by injecting a final dose of horror. Because this incestuous fantasy should be taken as nothing else but a horror story. I agree with him. What's the film?
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Wow, just like that. Two new Pinoy BL series, one from Idea First and another one from Black Sheep. I guess
s local popularity worked. And don't mention
to me. That travesty doesn't exist in my world.
I'm sure people will not see this coming: why am I including in this list a romantic comedy directed by John Radnor, famously Ted Mosby of
, of all people? But why not? This 2012 gem remains a pleasant surprise, it's it's philosophical with the warm feels, and it's my idea of a little film that could. But first a preamble: to quote the late great film critic Roger Ebert, "The movies that last, the ones we return to, don't always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart." And boy, does this one have a sure aim straight to mine. Why do you suppose that is? In all honesty, it serves as a romanticized confirmation of my own neuroses, of my own questions about living. But also this: have you ever met someone you fall into a long and engaged conversation with, often defying the hours, and you are surprised to have found a kindred spirit? This film feels like that. Our protagonist Jesse [played by Radnor himself] is in a rut, having settled into a largely unimaginative job as an admissions officer in a prestigious New York university. You can tell that he is an existential zombie from the way he's listless or distracted, or clearly divorced from his environment, or in the unconvincing way he tells an incoming freshman as soon as the movie begins: "You know how high school to college, it can be a big transition, especially if you're not from a big city, so we try to help out in that transition in a number of ways." He lies -- his eyes and his voice betray what he knows: there are no transitions, and help cannot be found. At least as far as he is concerned. So at the outset this is basically a tale of a man in arrested development. Then he gets a call from an old professor in college inviting him to attend his retirement party -- and something sparks in Jesse's tired life upon his arrival on campus. Perhaps this is just his fantasy of escape? Here he is reminiscing and running about his old haunts in college, remembering how it was to be young. At this juncture, we realize this: the past for us is mostly happy in our present consideration simply because we were younger then. It feels that way at first with Jesse on the loose in his old campus, drowning happily in nostalgia, his body memory activated by signifiers of his glory days when he was ... well, younger. But it's not enough for the film. It refuses to have that narrative as its focus. It insists on grappling with the exigencies of the now, and not the recollection of the past. And then we meet Zibby [played with such grounded winsomeness by Elizabeth Olsen]. You could make a case for her being a manic pixie dream girl, but I don't care. She's a freshman on campus, and she's into improv and classical music ... and
. Her temperament and openness to possibilities stirs something in Jesse, and makes him start refusing the givens in his life as a dead-end. What follows immediately is
territory: a series of conversations in various [photogenic] parts of campus, while girl and guy delve into music, and books, and philosophising over age and youth and maturity, expectations and disillusionments. They soon start corresponding. And those letters become the heart of the movie. In one marvellous sequence of this correspondence, they write about the beauty of surrendering to classical music, which allows the film to do a montage of assorted classical tunes which also allows Jesse to see his world anew. It's a beautiful epistolary sequence set to fine music, and it's unforgettable. The movie does not give us our expected ending, which is for the best. But what a trip! The movie is just an exhortation to stop once in a while in the impossible dervish of our lives to smell the roses. It doesn't present "smelling the roses" as easy -- and realistically, it's not -- but it offers it as a possibility we can try with one foot behind us. I like that; it's romantic, and it's somewhat practical at the same time. There is much to admire in the simplicity of this message, and the way it embraces its articulations of joy. Surviving contemporary life has proven difficult enough of late, and I think we need the reminders such as this to take it easy, when we can. But the film is also kind of a morality tale of old, with Jesse as our Everyman meeting assorted characters as aspects of life in various stages of flowering or withering: there's Zibby of course as the bright-eyed but down-to-earth optimism of youth. Then there's Zibby's opposite in John Magaro's Dean, a perpetually unhappy sophomore who likes to read David Foster Wallace [uh-oh], and who Jesse feels the need to connect with. Then there's Zac Efron's Nat, a gypsy of life whose stoned existence makes him both wise man and clown. Then there's Richard Jenkins's Professor Hoberg, whose pessimism about life has not rendered him immune from its disappointments. And finally there's Allison Janney's fantastic Professor Fairfield, who teaches Romantic poetry with gusto, but ironically retains a sardonic take on life itself. Asked how she could be the epitome of detached disappointment without self-pity when she's surrounded by Romantic poetry, she lets out this diatribe: "[The Romantic poets] were miserable men who were granted a few moments of transcendence, and they had the talent and foresight to grab pen and paper to write them down. Byron was probably the happiest of the lot, only because he put his dick in everything. My advise to you is this: put some armour around that gooey heart of yours." Ouch, but also hahaha. They offer different pathways for Jesse to take in his reawakening -- and the film offers us the same as well. So it's a film about growth finally. "I'm finally starting to act my age," Jesse writes Zibby in the end. "A wise man in a red hat once told me, 'Everything is okay.' I didn't believe him then, but for some reason, I'm starting to." Consider this film as your wise man in a red hat. Everything is okay. What's the film?
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“The dual substance of Christ–the yearning so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God…has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh… and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.” So an epigraph goes quoting Nikos Kazantzakis at the beginning of this 1988 film by Martin Scorsese. (Kazantzakis is also the author of the controversial novel on which this equally controversial film is based on.) As far as I'm concerned the film fulfills the promise of that epigraph, and demonstrates what many might find hard to believe: that this is arguably the most spiritual film ever made of the Jesus story. I've seen most of them, and while there are some I admire for one thing or another, they often reduce the life of Jesus into a conceit that feels more or less cosmetic, or even incidental: as mystical focus in beautiful pageantry [George Stevens'
or Cecil B. DeMille’s
]. Most of these films are understandably reverent, and so they work as totems while falling flat as movies of discerning spirituality. Jesus films for the longest time did not engage in a deeper way, until Scorsese came along daring to make an adaptation of Kazantzakis' work. And it's no surprise that a man who was supposed to become a priest, and who has dealt with the themes of sin, guilt, and redemption in many of his films would dare take on dangerous material. And needless to say he was publicly crucified for it, with screenings of his film attended to with threats of boycotts and bombs from the religious right. The angry panic stemmed from the story's departure from the Jesus canon: First, its sympathetic depiction of Judas as Jesus' concerned best friend and right hand man who wants a Messiah as a smiter of Rome. Second, its depiction of Jesus as a self-doubting man forever resisting God's call to the point of doing carpentry work as maker of crucifixes to use against Rome's enemies. And third, its depiction of Jesus' chaste but still romantic connection with the prostitute Mary Magdalene, which ends in a near-death fantasy of him possibly succumbing to Satan's titular temptation: give up the burden of the cross and all that it entails, and have a happy future as a married man -- a temptation he ultimately rejects of course, thus ushering in the promise of John 3:16. With my descriptions, I do no justice to the subtle nuances these plot points are actually executed in the film; on paper they do sound scandalous, and that was what drove the religious right to near hysteria in 1988, the film largely unseen by them. If they had only seen it with their own eyes, they would probably marvel at how elegantly draped in faith the film actually is. It's philosophical underpinnings, summed up by that epigraph I've given above, is one for deep contemplation: If Christ is at once fully God and fully man but only one person, then that person is full of doubt, of questioning and uncertainty. Scorsese was able to portray this oscillation and questioning by showing the inner life of Jesus in this film. For me, the film remains an influence because it gave voice to my idea of what it means to be Christian. I use the metaphor of Jacob wrestling with God, in Genesis 32:22-32, in my pursuit of a Christian life. To wrestle, to consider carefully each Christian tenet, to be a good Christian is to weigh everything, especially the spiritual significance of the utterances of “prophets”—because there are too many false ones, alas. [I still remember a pastor advocating that the place women should be relegated to is the bedroom and the kitchen -- and I was horrified to witness the congregation nodding in assent to his sexist sermon. I've since abandoned that church.] To know God is to struggle in the pursuit of knowing. The irony is truth: to have a strong faith, one must question. What's the film?
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There are many things in life that refuse to bend to our want for clarity and explanation, and it is often tempting to be dismissive of these things, labelling them as an "incoherent mess" and other similar windshield smears. To succumb to dismissiveness, I've learned, can be a disservice, and sometimes the questions that arise are often better than the answers we hope to get. This 1960 masterpiece from Michelangelo Antonioni is a perfect example. I had a friend once when I was in college, an American photographer who had retired in Dumaguete who found out I wanted to see film noir but found the opportunity to screen them wanting [this was in the pre-Internet days when the only way to enjoy classic movies was through cable television or through meticulously hoarded VHS tapes]. He had an enviable library of films in cassette, and I was hooked. He'd regularly screen them for me on weekends in his beachside house somewhere in Banilad -- and then one day he decided to introduce me to Antonioni. I've heard of the film, of course, and knew it was hailed in Cannes as a film that "introduced a new cinematic language," although it was equally booed by those who found it a bore and a cipher. From the get-go then, the film was polarizing: you either loved it or hated it with equal passion. Me, I didn't know what to make of it. First we follow a sour-faced woman named Anna and her disaffected boyfriend named Sandro [and a best friend named Claudia who spends the first part of the film passive and in the background], then we follow these obviously bourgeois people as they go on a sailing adventure in the Aeolian Islands in the Mediterranean, then Anna disappears, then her friends make a show of looking for her, then the film now follows Claudio who has since taken up with Sandro without misgivings, then they gradually forget about looking for Anna who never appears again, then the film ends. What was going on? Why was this film refusing to follow my narrative expectations? Why would this film abandon its ostensible lead only to follow another? What makes of the shallowness and existential emptiness of these people? These very challenges are what makes the film a head-scratcher -- and I could have gone the route of dismissal, but something about it percolated in my subconsciousness in an impressionistic way, and I couldn't help but return now and then to its enigmatic unfolding, buoyed for the most part by its stunning images. [Because if there is one thing you couldn't fault the film to be, it is its beautiful cinematography by Aldo Scavarda.] And I've long realized this is the very soul of the movie, its refusal to be understood -- and I think there is beauty in that. We could read it as a devastating commentary on the exhausted ennui among the rich and the well-dressed, and it is easy to see it that way, given the trickle of similarly constructed films that came after 1960 -- Antonioni's
, films that Pauline Kael called "Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties." Much much later, I would get to know postmodernism's challenges to storytelling, and learn about Alain Robbe-Grillet [who wrote
] and his insistence that a novel or film is not meant to inform us about reality but to constitute reality -- in other words to create an aesthetic world which exists separately from the real world and does not necessarily correspond to it. I think of the challenging films of the early 1960s this way and understand what they are trying to do, which does not diminish their puzzles, but why insist that they must? I prefer the dervish of not knowing. What's the film?
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Parties are interesting artifice, but in the movies they're often allegories of human connection, a filmmaker's way of providing their audience a shorthand in how the characters relate to each other. Think of the contrasting parties that bookend Peque Gallaga's
, or the one that occupies almost the entire length of Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont's
Parties introduce us to a vast array of characters at once, and allow us to nimbly extrapolate how each one regard the other with a choice glance, or word, or action; to deduce the pecking order at play; and to see the unsaid drama that's bubbling beneath the surface of things. Parties are a great, almost unfailing narrative device. When used sharply, the dividends in meaning are fantastic. When used just as well in black comedy, the result is farce of the highest order -- but here the guffaws often cannot happen because we're too busy minding the boundaries between the laughter and the hurt. This is exactly the case for Jean Renoir's 1939 classic, which was booed by audiences when it premiered, flopped spectacularly at the box office, and cut into lesser and lesser running time to salvage the loss. Decades later, its rehabilitation proved spectacular. It is now considered to be of the most important films ever made, and audiences can finally laugh with its barbed humour. It is now a film that was clearly ahead of its time. But I can understand its initial failures. Its theme, after all, was hypocrisy, and it wielded that as a mirror to audiences in 1939. People saw themselves, and hated what they beheld -- and the film was punished for making comedy out of people's foibles. The movie begins by laying out the finer strands of relationships of a handful of people, those of the privileged class, their hangers-on, and their servants. We become privy to their lies and fears and aspirations and desperations, compounded by infidelities and jealousies. And all comes to fore in the exclusive annual hunting party that unfolds in the Chateau de la Colinière in the French countryside. As the party unfolds, hijinks and pratfalls ensue, complete with situations of mistaken identities -- leading to a tragedy that nonetheless does not move most of the principals of this story. Heightened above all is the notion that everyone is shallow, has no moral center, and all just go about the business of living in utter heedless uncaring. The best line in the movie has one character telling another this unlikely summation of human existence: "The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has their reasons." Try making that the answer to your perplexed questions. Why did so-and-so hurt me? "Who knows? Everyone has their reasons." Why did this happen to so-and-so? "Who knows? Everyone has their reasons." Why did 16 million people vote for Duterte? "Who knows? Everyone has their reasons." It's grim philosophy indeed. To make that the engine of a comedy is harsh; but if only we could just laugh away all the sad connotations. What's the film?
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You must attribute this list to summer boredom or to the impending certainty of 2012, but I've listed down below the films checklisted by Steven Jay Schneider in his book
(2003), and I have decided to devote time in the foreseeable future to see the titles on this list ... before I die.
I like this list. And like any list, it necessarily leaves out personal favorites ("The Lion King" but no "Little Mermaid"?), and takes in too many things I suspect to be the result of editorial bias (there's too much Paul Verhoeven here than is necessary). But I like this list nonetheless, because it is generous with what it includes and becomes a virtual cineast feast. It includes celebrated short films and not just full-length features, and strange experimental films (it has Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's "Meshes in the Afternoon"!), and strange independent films (it has Ken Jacob's "Blonde Cobra"!), and strange horror films (it has Dario Argento's "Suspiria"!), and strange documentaries (it has Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb"!), and avant-garde or risque films you don't think will make such a list (it has Kenneth Anger's very gay "Scorpio Rising"!), and films representative of major world cinemas (it even has Lino Brocka's "Manila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag"!).
I must take note, however, I've been watching movies my whole life -- and studying them as well -- and so there are titles here that feel like I've seen them, but I'm not exactly so sure of the fact, simply because their legend has made them so familiar my memory now plays tricks on me. So then I've decided to check only those titles I'm really sure I've seen.
So, how many films have you seen from this list?
☑ A Trip to the Moon (Georges Melies, 1902)
☑ The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
☑ The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)
☐ Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)
☑ Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)
☑ The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919)
☐ Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919)
☐ Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920)
☐ Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)
☐ The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)
☐ Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921)
☐ The Smiling Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1922)
☐ Dr. Mabuse, Parts 1 and 2 (Fritz Lang, 1922)
☑ Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)
☑ Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
☐ Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1923)
☐ Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)
☐ Our Hospitality (John G. Blystone, 1923)
☐ La Roue [The Wheel] (Abel Gance, 1923)
☐ The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)
☑ Strike (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1924)
☐ Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
☑ Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
☐ The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924)
☐ Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925)
☐ The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925)
☑ The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)
☑ The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)
☐ The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925)
☑ Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
☐ Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
☐ The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1927)
☐ The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)
☐ October (Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1927)
☑ The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)
☐ Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927)
☐ The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, 1927)
☐ The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)
☐ The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)
☑ Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928)
☑ The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
☐ Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Charles Reisner, 1928)
☐ Potomok Chingis-Khana [Storm Over Asia] (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928)
☐ Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)
☑ The Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
☐ Pandora's Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929)
☐ The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
☐ L'Age D'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)
☐ Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)
☐ Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930)
☑ All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
☐ À Nous la Liberté [Freedom For Us] (René Clair, 1931)
☐ Le Million (René Clair, 1931)
☐ Tabu (F.W. Murnau, 1931)
☐ Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)
☑ Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)
☑ City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
☐ The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)
☐ M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
☐ La Chienne [The Bitch] (Jean Renoir, 1931)
☐ Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
☐ Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932)
☐ Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)
☐ I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)
☐ Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
☐ Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1932)
☐ Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
☑ Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
☐ Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)
☐ Zero de Conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933)
☐ 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)
☐ Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)
☐ Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)
☑ She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933)
☑ Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
☑ Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)
☐ Land Without Bread (Luis Buñuel, 1933)
☑ King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)
☐ The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933)
☐ Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter, 1933)
☐ It's a Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934)
☑ Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1934)
☐ L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
☐ The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
☐ Judge Priest (John Ford, 1934)
☑ It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
☐ The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)
☐ Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935)
☐ Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935)
☑ A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935)
☑ The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
☑ Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)
☑ Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)
☐ A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
☑ Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
☑ Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)
☑ My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936)
☐ Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936)
☐ Camille (George Cukor, 1936)
☑ Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)
☐ Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)
☐ Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)
☐ The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936)
☐ Captains Courageous (Victor Fleming, 1937)
☐ Song at Midnight (Weibang Ma-Xu, 1937)
☐ Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
☑ Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)
☑ The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, 1937)
☑ Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
☑ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (William Cottrell and David Hand, 1937)
☑ The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)
☐ Pepe le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
☑ Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938)
☐ The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938)
☐ Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938)
☑ Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938)
☐ The Baker's Wife (Marcel Pagnol, 1938)
☑ Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
☐ Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
☐ The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
☑ Babes in Arms (Busby Berkeley, 1939)
☑ Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)
☑ The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
☐ Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939)
☐ Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)
☑ Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
☐ Le Jour Se Lève [Daybreak] (Marcel Carné, 1939)
☐ Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939)
☑ Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
☑ La Règle du Jeu [The Rules of the Game] (Jean Renoir, 1939)
☑ Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939)
☑ His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
☑ Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
☑ Fantasia (James Algar and Samuel Armstrong, 1940)
☑ The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
☐ The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
☐ Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)
☑ Pinocchio (Norman Ferguson and T. Hee, 1940)
☐ The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940)
☐ The Bank Dick (Edward F. Cline, 1940)
☑ Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
☑ The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
☐ The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)
☑ The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
☐ Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)
☑ Dumbo (Samuel Armstrong and Norman Ferguson, 1941)
☐ High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941)
☑ Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)
☑ How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)
☑ The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)
☑ Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)
☑ Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
☑ To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
☑ Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
☑ The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
☐ Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
☑ Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943)
☐ Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings, 1943)
☐ The Man in Grey (Leslie Arliss, 1943)
☐ The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
☑ I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
☐ The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)
☐ The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943)
☑ Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
☐ Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943)
☑ Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
☐ To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)
☐ Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
☑ Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)
☐ Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944)
☐ Ivan the Terrible, Parts One and Two (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1944)
☑ Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
☐ Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)
☐ The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston and Mark W. Clark, 1945)
☑ Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)
☑ Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
☐ Les Enfants du Paradis [The Children of Paradise] (Marcel Carné, 1945)
☐ Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
☑ The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)
☐ Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)
☐ I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945)
☑ The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
☑ Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1946)
☐ Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
☐ The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)
☐ My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
☐ The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946)
☐ Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
☑ The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
☐ The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
☐ A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
☐ Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)
☑ Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
☑ Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
☑ It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
☑ Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946)
☑ Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)
☐ Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
☑ The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
☐ Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)
☑ The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
☐ Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
☐ Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948)
☐ Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)
☐ Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948)
☑ Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
☑ Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)
☐ The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak, 1948)
☐ The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948)
☐ The Paleface (Norman Z. McLeod, 1948)
☑ The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
☐ The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)
☐ Louisiana Story (Robert J. Flaherty, 1948)
☑ The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)
☑ Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
☐ Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
☑ Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949)
☐ Whiskey Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)
☐ White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)
☐ The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949)
☑ The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
☑ On the Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949)
☐ Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1949)
☐ The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)
☑ Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
☐ Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)
☐ Rio Grande (John Ford, 1950)
☑ All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
☑ Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
☐ Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)
☑ In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
☐ The Big Carnival [Ace in the Hole] (Billy Wilder, 1951)
☑ A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)
☑ Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)
☐ The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951)
☐ Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)
☑ The African Queen (John Huston, 1951)
☑ Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951)
☑ An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)
☑ A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)
☐ The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)
☐ The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)
☐ Jeux Interdits [Forbidden Games] (René Clément, 1952)
☐ Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1952)
☑ Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
☑ Ikiru [To Live] (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
☐ Europa '51 [The Greatest Love] (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)
☑ The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952)
☐ The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952)
☑ High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
☐ Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
☐ Le Carrosse D'Or [The Golden Coach] (Jean Renoir, 1952)
☐ The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)
☐ The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953)
☑ The Earrings of Madame De… (Max Ophüls, 1953)
☑ From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953)
☑ Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)
☑ Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953)
☑ Le Salaire de la Peur [The Wages of Fear] (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
☐ The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)
☐ Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
☑ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
☑ The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
☑ Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)
☑ Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1953)
☐ Tales of Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
☑ Shane (George Stevens, 1953)
☐ Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953)
☑ Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
☑ On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
☐ Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954)
☑ Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1954)
☐ Animal Farm (Joy Batchelor and John Halas, 1954)
☑ Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
☑ A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)
☑ The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954)
☐ La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
☑ The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
☐ Senso [The Wanton Countess] (Luchino Visconti, 1954)
☐ Silver Lode (Allan Dwan, 1954)
☑ Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)
☐ Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
☐ Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954)
☐ Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955)
☐ Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955)
☑ Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
☐ Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955)
☐ Les Maîtres Fous [The Mad Masters] (Jean Rouch, 1955)
☐ Giv'a 24 Eina Ona [Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer] (Thorold Dickinson, 1955)
☐ The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955)
☐ Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955)
☐ Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
☐ Bob Le Flambeur [Bob the Gambler] (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1955)
☐ Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
☐ The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955)
☑ Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
☐ The Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson, 1955)
☐ Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)
☑ Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
☑ The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
☐ The Sins of Lola Montes (Max Ophüls, 1955)
☐ Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)
☐ The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
☑ The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
☐ A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
☑ Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
☑ The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
☑ Giant (George Stevens, 1956)
☑ All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
☑ Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
☑ The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
☐ Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
☑ High Society (Charles Walters, 1956)
☑ The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)
☑ 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
☐ The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
☑ An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957)
☐ Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
☑ Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
☑ Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
☐ The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957)
☐ Aparajito [The Unvanquished] (Satyajit Ray, 1957)
☐ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957)
☑ The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)
☐ Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957)
☐ The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
☑ Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
☑ Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
☐ Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)
☑ Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
☐ Bab el Hadid [The Iron Gate/Cairo Station] (Youssef Chahine, 1958)
☑ Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
☐ The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958)
☑ Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
☐ Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
☐ Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)
☑ Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)
☐ The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1958)
☑ The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
☑ North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
☑ Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
☐ Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)
☐ Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1959)
☐ Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959)
☐ Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959)
☐ Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)
☑ The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959)
☑ Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
☑ Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959)
☐ Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
☑ Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
☐ Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
☐ The Hole (Frank Capra, 1959)
☑ Floating Weeds (Yasujirô Ozu, 1959)
☐ Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)
☑ La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
☑ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960)
☐ Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)
☑ L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
☐ The Young One (Luis Buñuel, 1960)
☐ Meghe Dhaka Tara [The Cloud-Capped Star] (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960)
☐ Hanyeo [The Housemaid] (Ki-young Kim, 1960)
☑ Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
☐ Revenge of the Vampire/Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)
☑ Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
☑ The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
☑ Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)
☐ Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)
☑ Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
☑ La Jetee [The Pier] (Chris Marker, 1961)
☐ One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando, 1961)
☐ Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961)
☑ Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards, 1961)
☐ La Notte [The Night] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)
☑ Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1961)
☐ Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)
☑ The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
☐ Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961)
☐ Chronique d'un Eté [Chronicle of a Summer] (Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, 1961)
☐ The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)
☑ West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961)
☑ Mondo Cane [A Dog's Life] (Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti, 1962)
☐ Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
☐ Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1962)
☑ El Ángel Exterminador [The Exterminating Angel] (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
☐ An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujirô Ozu, 1962)
☐ L'eclisse [The Eclipse] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
☑ Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
☑ To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962)
☑ The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
☑ Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)
☐ O Pagador de Promessas [Keeper of Promises] (Anselmo Duarte, 1962)
☐ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
☑ What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
☐ Vivre sa Vie [My Life to Live] (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
☐ Heaven and Earth Magic (Harry Smith, 1962)
☑ The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
☑ The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis, 1963)
☐ Blonde Cobra (Ken Jacobs, 1963)
☐ The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963)
☑ 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
☐ Passenger (Andrzej Munk and Witold Lesiewicz, 1963)
☐ Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
☐ Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)
☐ Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)
☐ Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)
☑ The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)
☐ Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)
☑ Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
☐ Vidas Secas [Barren Lives] (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963)
☐ Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet and Volker Schlöndorff, 1963)
☐ Khaneh Siah Ast [The House is Black] (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)
☑ The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)
☐ An Actor's Revenge/Revenge of a Kabuki Actor (Kon Ichikawa, 1963)
☐ The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
☑ Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964)
☑ Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)
☑ Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg] (Jacques Demy, 1964)
☑ Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)
☑ My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)
☑ Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
☑ Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
☑ A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964)
☐ Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
☐ Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov, 1964)
☐ The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964)
☐ Before the Revolution (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964)
☐ Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)
☑ The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
☐ Deus e O Diabo Na Terra Do Sol [Black God, White Devil] (Glauber Rocha, 1964)
☐ Onibaba [The Demon] (Kaneto Shindô, 1964)
☐ Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
☐ Obch o Na Korze [The Shop on Main Street] (Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1965)
☑ Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965)
☐ The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965)
☐ Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa, 1965)
☑ The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)
☑ The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)
☐ Rękopis Znaleziony w Saragossie [The Saragossa Manuscript] (Wojciech Has, 1965)
☐ Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
☐ Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)
☑ Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
☑ Giulietta Degli Spiriti [Juliet of the Spirits] (Federico Fellini, 1965)
☐ Pierrot le Fou [Pierrot Goes Wild] (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
☐ Faster, Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965)
☐ Subarnarekha [The Golden River/The Golden Thread] (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965)
☐ De Man Die Zijn Haar Kort Liet Knippen [The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short] (André Delvaux, 1965)
☐ Hold Me While I'm Naked (George Kuchar, 1966)
☑ Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
☑ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
☐ Sedmikrásky [Daisies] (Vera Chytilová, 1966)
☐ 大醉俠 [Come Drink With Me] (King Hu, 1966)
☐ Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966)
☑ Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966)
☑ Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
☐ Masculin Féminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
☐ Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
☑ In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967)
☐ Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
☑ The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)
☑ Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
☐ Report (Bruce Conner, 1967)
☐ Hombre (Martin Ritt, 1967)
☑ Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
☐ Les Demoiselles de Rochefort [The Young Girls of Rochefort] (Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, 1967)
☐ Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
☑ Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
☐ Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)
☐ Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)
☑ Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)
☑ Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
☐ Csillagosok, Katonák [The Red and the White] (Miklós Jancsó, 1967)
☐ Marketa Lazarova (Frantisek Vlácil, 1967)
☑ The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967)
☐ The Fireman's Ball (Milos Forman, 1967)
☐ Terra em Transe [Earth Entranced] (Glauber Rocha, 1967)
☐ Ostře Sledované Vlaky [Closely Watched Trains] (Jiri Menzel, 1967)
☐ Vij [Spirit of Evil] (Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, 1967)
☐ The Cow/Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1968)
☐ Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
☑ Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968)
☐ Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968)
☑ Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
☐ If… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)
☐ Memorias del Subdesarrollo [Memories of Underdevelopment] (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)
☑ The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968)
☐ David Holzman's Diary (Jim McBride, 1968)
☐ Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
☑ 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
☐ Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
☐ Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)
☑ Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
☑ My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
☐ Lucia (Humberto Solás, 1969)
☐ A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1969)
☑ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)
☑ Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
☐ Satyricon (Federico Fellini, 1969)
☐ Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)
☐ The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1969)
☑ Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)
☐ High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1969)
☐ In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1969)
☑ The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
☐ Andrei Rublev (Andrey Tarkovsky, 1969)
☐ Le Boucher [The Butcher] (Claude Chabrol, 1969)
☑ The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969)
☐ Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)
☐ Tristana (Luis Buñuel, 1970)
☑ Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
☐ El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)
☑ Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
☐ Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)
☐ Strategia del Ragno [The Spider's Stratagem] (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
☐ Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970)
☐ Ucho [The Ear] (Karel Kachyna, 1970)
☐ Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970)
☑ M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)
☐ Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
☐ Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles and David Maysles, 1970)
☐ Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)
☐ The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970)
☐ The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Vittorio De Sica, 1970)
☐ Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1971)
☐ W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)
☑ A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
☑ The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophüls, 1971)
☑ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971)
☑ McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
☐ Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)
☑ Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971)
☑ Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
☐ Még Kér a Nép [Red Psalm] (Miklos Jancso, 1971)
☐ Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971)
☑ The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
☐ Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971)
☑ Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)
☑ Le Souffle au Cœur [Murmur of the Heart] (Louis Malle, 1971)
☐ Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)
☑ The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
☐ Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
☐ Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)
☑ The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)
☑ Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
☑ Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)
☑ Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
☐ High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1972)
☑ Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1972)
☑ Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)
☑ Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
☑ The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
☑ Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
☐ Fat City (John Huston, 1972)
☑ Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie [The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie] (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
☐ Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant [The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)
☐ Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)
☑ Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972)
☐ Superfly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)
☑ The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973)
☐ La Maman et la Putain [The Mother and the Whore] (Jean Eustache, 1973)
☐ Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
☑ American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)
☐ Papillon (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)
☑ Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)
☑ Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
☐ The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
☑ The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
☑ La Nuit Américaine [Day for Night] (François Truffaut, 1973)
☑ Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
☑ Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973)
☐ Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973)
☑ The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
☐ Turks Fruit [Turkish Delight] (Paul Verhoeven, 1973)
☐ El Espíritu de la Colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive] (Víctor Erice, 1973)
☑ La Planète Sauvage [Fantastic Planet] (René Laloux, 1973)
☑ Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
☐ The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1973)
☐ Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
☐ Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1974)
☑ The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
☑ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
☑ Zerkalo [The Mirror] (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
☑ A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)
☑ Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)
☑ Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
☐ Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau [Celine and Julie Go Boating] (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
☑ Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974)
☑ The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
☐ Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
☐ Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974)
☑ Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)
☑ One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
☑ Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
☑ The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)
☐ Deewaar [The Wall] (Yash Chopra, 1975)
☑ Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975)
☑ Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
☐ Faustrecht der Freiheit [Fox and His Friends] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)
☐ India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)
☑ Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
☑ Manila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag [Manila in the Claws of Brightness] (Lino Brocka, 1975)
☑ Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)
☑ Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
☐ Cria! (Carlos Saura, 1975)
☐ O Thiassos [The Travelling Players] (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1975)
☑ Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
☐ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)
☑ Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
☐ The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)
☑ All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)
☑ Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976)
☑ Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
☑ Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)
☐ Voskhozhdeniye [The Ascent] (Larisa Shepitko, 1976)
☑ In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Ôshima, 1976)
☐ 1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)
☐ The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
☑ Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
☑ Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)
☐ The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977)
☑ Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
☐ Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Jon Jost, 1977)
☐ Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)
☐ Człowiek z Marmuru [Man of Marble] (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)
☑ Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977)
☑ Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
☐ Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
☐ Ceddo (Ousmane Sembene, 1977)
☐ Der Amerikanische Freund [The American Friend] (Wim Wenders, 1977)
☐ The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977)
☐ Soldaat van Oranje [Soldier of Orange] (Paul Verhoeven, 1977)
☑ Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
☐ The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978)
☐ 五毒 [Five Deadly Venoms] (Cheh Chang, 1978)
☐ L'Albero Degli Zoccoli [The Tree of Wooden Clogs] (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)
☑ The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
☑ Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)
☑ Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
☑ Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)
☐ Shaolin Master Killer/The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Chia-Liang Liu, 1978)
☐ Up in Smoke (Lou Adler, 1978)
☑ Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
☐ The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)
☐ Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)
☐ My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)
☐ Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
☑ Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
☐ Breaking Away (Peter Yates, 1979)
☐ Die Blechtrommel [The Tin Drum] (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)
☑ All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
☑ Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)
☑ Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979)
☑ Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)
☑ Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
☑ The Jerk (Carl Reiner, 1979)
☐ The Muppet Movie (James Frawley, 1979)
☑ Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)
☑ Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)
☑ Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night (Werner Herzog, 1979)
☑ Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980)
☑ Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)
☐ The Last Metro (François Truffaut, 1980)
☑ The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
☑ Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
☑ The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
☐ The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, 1980)
☐ Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)
☑ Airplane! (Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, 1980)
☑ Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
☑ Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
☐ Das Boot [The Boat] (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981)
☐ Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981)
☑ Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981)
☑ Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981)
☑ Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981)
☑ An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)
☐ Tre Fratelli [Three Brothers] (Francesco Rosi, 1981)
☐ Człowiek z Zelaza [Man of Iron] (Andrzej Wajda, 1981)
☐ Trop Tôt, Trop Tard [Too Early, Too Late] (Daniele Huillet and Jean Marie Straub, 1981)
☑ Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Cameron Crowe, 1981)
☑ E.T.: The Extra-Terestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)
☑ The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
☑ Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)
☑ Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
☑ The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1982)
☑ Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
☐ Yol [The Way] (Serif Gören, 1982)
☐ Diner (Barry Levinson, 1982)
☑ Fitzcaraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)
☑ Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982)
☐ La Notte di San Lorenzo [The Night of the Shooting Stars] (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, 1982)
☐ De Stilte Rond Christine M. [A Question of Silence] (Marleen Gorris, 1982)
☑ Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
☑ A Christmas Story (Bob Clark, 1983)
☐ El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983)
☑ Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)
☑ Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983)
☑ The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983)
☐ Sans Soleil [Sunless] (Chris Marker, 1983)
☐ Le Dernier Combat [The Last Battle] (Luc Besson, 1983)
☐ L'Argent [Money] (Robert Bresson, 1983)
☐ Utu (Geoff Murphy, 1983)
☑ Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983)
☐ De Vierde Man [The Fourth Man] (Paul Verhoeven, 1983)
☑ The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983)
☑ The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)
☑ Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983)
☑ Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1983)
☑ Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983)
☐ The Ballad of Narayama (Shôhei Imamura, 1983)
☑ Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984)
☑ The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)
☑ Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)
☑ A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
☑ This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
☑ Beverly Hills Cop (Martin Brest, 1984)
☑ Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984)
☑ A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984)
☐ Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)
☑ The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984)
☑ The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984)
☑ The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)
☑ Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
☐ Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
☐ La Historia Oficial [The Official Story] (Luis Puenzo, 1985)
☑ Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985)
☑ The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985)
☑ Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
☐ 童年往事 [The Time to Live and the Time to Die] (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 1985)
☑ Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
☑ Kiss of the Spider Woman (Hector Babenco, 1985)
☐ The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985)
☑ Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)
☑ Prizzi's Honor (John Huston, 1985)
☐ Sans Toit ni Loi [Vagabond] (Agnès Varda, 1985)
☑ Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
☑ The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985)
☑ Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986)
☑ Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)
☑ Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
☑ Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)
☐ She's Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)
☐ Le Déclin de L'Empire Américain [The Decline of the American Empire] (Denys Arcand, 1986)
☑ The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)
☑ Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
☑ Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)
☐ Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)
☑ A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1986)
☑ Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines, 1986)
☑ Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
☑ Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986)
☑ Tampopo (Jûzô Itami, 1986)
☐ 刀馬旦 [Peking Opera Blues] (Hark Tsui, 1986)
☑ Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986)
☑ Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986)
☐ Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
☐ 盗马贼 [The Horse Thief] (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1986)
☐ Yeelen [Brightness] (Souleymane Cissé, 1987)
☐ Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (Wim Wenders, 1987)
☐ Project A, Part II (Jackie Chan, 1987)
☑ Babettes Gæstebud [Babette's Feast] (Gabriel Axel, 1987)
☑ Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987)
☑ Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
☑ Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
☑ Good Morning, Vietnam (Barry Levinson, 1987)
☑ Au Revoir Les Enfants [Goodbye, Children] (Louis Malle, 1987)
☑ Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)
☐ Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987)
☑ The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
☑ Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987)
☑ The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987)
☐ 红高粱 [Red Sorghum] (Yimou Zhang, 1987)
☑ The Dead (John Huston, 1987)
☑ Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987)
☐ 倩女幽魂 [A Chinese Ghost Story] (Siu-Tung Ching, 1987)
☑ Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)
☑ Spoorloos [The Vanishing] (George Sluizer, 1988)
☑ Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988)
☐ Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988)
☐ The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
☑ Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988)
☑ Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
☐ Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls, 1988)
☑ A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)
☑ The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (David Zucker, 1988)
☑ Big (Penny Marshall, 1988)
☑ Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988)
☑ Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988)
☐ Topio Stin Omichli [Landscape in the Mist] (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1988)
☑ Dekalog [The Decalogue] (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1988)
☑ Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
☐ Une Histoire de Vent [A Tale of the Wind] (Joris Ivens, 1988)
☑ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)
☑ Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988)
☐ Une Affaire de Femmes [The Story of Women] (Claude Chabrol, 1988)
☑ The Accidental Tourist (Lawrence Kasdan, 1988)
☑ Alice (Woody Allen, 1988)
☑ Batman (Tim Burton, 1989)
☑ When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989)
☑ Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)
☐ The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)
☑ Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989)
☑ My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989)
☑ 喋血雙雄 [The Killer] (John Woo, 1989)
☑ Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
☑ Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989)
☑ Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989)
☐ Astenicheskiy Sindrom [The Asthenic Syndrome] (Kira Muratova, 1989)
☑ sex, lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989)
☑ Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989)
☐ The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)
☐ 悲情城市 [A City of Sadness] (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 1989)
☐ S'en Fout la Mort [No Fear, No Die] (Claire Denis, 1990)
☑ Reversal of Fortune (Barbet Schroeder, 1990)
☑ Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
☐ Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990)
☐ King of New York (Abel Ferrara, 1990)
☑ Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990)
☑ Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990)
☑ Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990)
☐ Archangel (Guy Maddin, 1990)
☐ Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990)
☐ Nema-ye Nazdik [Close-Up] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
☑ Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990)
☐ Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1990)
☑ Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
☑ 黃飛鴻 [Once Upon a Time in China] (Hark Tsui, 1991)
☑ Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
☑ 大红灯笼高高挂 [Raise the Red Lantern] (Yimou Zhang, 1991)
☐ Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
☐ 牯嶺街少年殺人事件 [A Brighter Summer Day] (Edward Yang, 1991)
☐ Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)
☐ La Belle Noiseuse [The Beautiful Troublemaker] (Jacques Rivette, 1991)
☑ The Rapture (Michael Tolkin, 1991)
☑ My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)
☑ Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)
☑ Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)
☑ The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
☑ JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)
☑ Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991)
☐ Tongues Untied (Marlon T. Riggs, 1991)
☑ Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, 1991)
☑ The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
☑ Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992)
☑ The Player (Robert Altman, 1992)
☑ Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)
☐ Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)
☑ Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)
☑ Unforgiven (Cint Eastwood, 1992)
☑ Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
☑ Candy Man (Bernard Rose, 1992)
☐ A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992)
☑ Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1992)
☑ The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)
☐ C'est Arrivé Près de Chez Vous [Man Bites Dog] (Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel, 1992)
☐ The Actress (Stanley Kwan, 1992)
☑ 霸王別姬 [Farewell My Concubine] (Chen Kaige, 1993)
☑ Thirty-Two Films about Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1993)
☑ Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
☑ Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993)
☑ Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993)
☑ Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
☑ The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)
☐ 戲夢人生 [The Puppetmaster] (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 1993)
☑ Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
☑ Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)
☑ The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
☐ 蓝风筝 [The Blue Kite] ( Zhuangzhuang Tian, 1993)
☑ 喜宴 [The Wedding Banquet] (Ang Lee, 1993)
☑ Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994)
☑ Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
☑ Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)
☑ Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994)
☑ Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994)
☑ The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994)
☐ Satantango [Satan's Tango] (Béla Tarr, 1994)
☑ Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)
☑ The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994)
☑ Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
☑ The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)
☑ Les Roseaux Sauvages [Wild Reeds] (André Téchiné, 1994)
☑ 重庆森林 [Chungking Express] (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)
☑ Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994)
☑ Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
☐ Zire Darakhatan Zeyton [Through the Olive Trees] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)
☐ Riget [The Kingdom] (Lars Von Trier, 1994)
☐ Caro Diario [Dear Diary] (Nanni Moretti, 1994)
☑ Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995)
☐ Deseret (James Benning, 1995)
☑ Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995)
☑ Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)
☑ Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)
☑ Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)
☑ Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
☑ Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
☑ Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
☐ Zero Kelvin (Hans Petter Moland, 1995)
☑ Seven (David Fincher, 1995)
☑ Smoke (Wayne Wang, 1995)
☑ Badkonake Sefid [The White Balloon] (Jafar Panahi, 1995)
☐ Cyclo (Anh Hung Tran, 1995)
☐ Podzemlje [Underground] (Emir Kusturica, 1995)
☐ Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge [The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride] (Aditya Chopra, 1995)
☐ Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
☑ The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995)
☑ The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway, 1996)
☐ Trois Vies et Une Seule Mort [Three Lives and Only One Death] (Raoul Ruiz, 1996)
☑ Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
☑ Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996)
☑ Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996)
☐ Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier, 1996)
☑ The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996)
☐ Gabbeh (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)
☐ Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)
☑ Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)
☑ Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)
☑ Deconstructing Harry (Woody Allen, 1997)
☑ L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
☑ Happy Together (Wong Kar Wai, 1997)
☑ Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
☐ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (Errol Morris, 1997)
☐ The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)
☑ The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)
☑ Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
☑ Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997)
☑ The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)
☐ Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)
☐ Ta'm-e Gīlās [Taste of Cherry] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
☑ Abre Los Ojos [Open Your Eyes] (Alejandro Amenábar, 1997)
☐ Mat i Syn [Mother and Son] (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)
☑ Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)
☐ Tetsuo [The Iron Man] (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)
☐ Festen [The Celebration] (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)
☑ Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
☐ Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998)
☑ Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998)
☐ Lola Rennt [Run Lola Run] (Tom Tykwer, 1998)
☑ Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
☑ Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998)
☑ Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998)
☑ The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)
☐ Idioterne [The Idiots] (Lars Von Trier, 1998)
☐ Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux, 1998)
☑ Ringu [Ring] (Hideo Nakata, 1998)
☑ There's Something About Mary (Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly, 1998)
☑ Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
☐ Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
☑ The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
☐ Gohatto [Taboo] (Nagisa Ôshima, 1999)
☐ Rosetta (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 1999)
☑ Todo Sobre Mi Madre [All About My Mother] (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
☑ Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
☐ Bād Mā Rā Khāhad Bord [The Wind Will Carry Us] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
☑ Ōdishon [Audition] (Takashi Miike, 1999)
☐ Le Temps Retrouvé [Time Regained] (Raoul Ruiz, 1999)
☑ Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
☑ Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
☑ American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)
☐ Juyuso Seubgyuksageun [Attack the Gas Station!] (Sang-Jin Kim, 1999)
☑ Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
☑ The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
☑ The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999)
☐ Nueve Reinas [Nine Queens] (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000)
☐ La Captive [The Captive] (Chantal Akerman, 2000)
☑ In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
☐ Ali Zaoua, Prince de la Rue [Ali Zaoua, Prince of the Streets] (Nabil Ayouch, 2000)
☑ Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
☐ Kippur (Amos Gitai, 2000)
☑ Yi Yi [A One and a Two] (Edward Yang, 2000)
☑ Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)
☑ Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)
☑ Meet the Parents (Jay Roach, 2000)
☐ Signs and Wonders (Jonathan Nossiter, 2000)
☑ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
☑ Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000)
☐ The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
☑ Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
☑ Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000)
☑ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen, 2000)
☑ Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
☑ Ni Neibian Jidian [What Time Is It There?] (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
☑ Y Tu Mamá También [And Your Mother, Too] (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
☐ Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001)
☑ Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
☑ La Pianiste [The Piano Teacher] (Michael Haneke, 2001)
☑ La Stanza del Figlio [The Son's Room] (Nanni Moretti, 2001)
☑ Ničija Zemlja [No Man's Land] (Danis Tanovic, 2001)
☑ Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
☑ Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001)
☑ Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
☑ Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
☑ The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
☑ The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)
☑ A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
☑ Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002)
☑ The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
☑ Hable Con Ella [Talk to Her] (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
☑ Cidade de Deus [City of God] (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
☑ Russkij Kovcheg [Russian Ark] (Alexandr Sokurov, 2002)
☑ Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002)
☑ Les Invasions Barbares [The Barbarian Invasions] (Denys Arcand, 2003)
☑ Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 66
