The 100 Best Movies on The Criterion Channel (March 2024)

Movies Lists Criterion Channel
The 100 Best Movies on The Criterion Channel (March 2024)

If ever there was a streaming service that was delightfully difficult to pull highlights from, it’s The Criterion Channel. The streaming side of the Criterion Collection that rose after the death of FilmStruck, The Criterion Channel is the undisputed arthouse king. HBO Max and Amazon have massive libraries that include some cinephile delights, but you could throw a digital dart into Criterion’s catalog and hit something that’ll blow your mind—and a few supplemental special features to educate its remains. Unlike so many services, the best movies on The Criterion Channel are some of the best movies we’ve got in general.

Showcasing some of the biggest names in film history, pulling from masters that dominate our superlative lists of both country and decade-specific cinema, the streamer is a gold mine. Yasujiro Ozu, Agnés Varda, Chantal Akerman, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Federico Fellini, Charlie Chaplin—basically, if they turn up in a History of Film textbook, it’s more than likely you’ll find a way into their work here. Obviously the work of these filmmakers isn’t boxed into the quiet, black-and-white highbrow movie cliché that keeps some movie lovers at arm’s length from anything with subtitles, but the Channel’s modern filmmakers only disrupt this exclusionary, gatekeeping notion further. Turning to Steve McQueen, Kelly Reichardt, Paolo Sorrentino, Wong Kar-wai—heck, even Jackie Chan—there are movies in every era and every genre for those looking for a quality time.

The $10.99/month fee also includes guest curators (who contribute interviews alongside their picks), short films and built-in binge-ready collections, but there’s no getting around the main draw: A massive, essential collection of high-quality international cinema. While the films available shift from month to month (the hazard of any streamer), Criterion’s always offering new collections to help those of us that need a little push into watching something. We’ll keep this list updated with the latest and greatest classics and curios.

Here are the 100 best movies on Criterion Channel right now:


1. 8 1/2

Year: 1963
Director: Federico Fellini
Stars: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee
Rating: NR
Genre: Fantasy

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With Fellini we wander through a shadow of his psyche, wondering where his memories begin and where Guido’s (Marcello Mastroiani) psychoses end. Perhaps Fellini’s most impressive blending of dreams and fantasies, of moral truth and oneiric fallacy, of space and time, 8 1/2 tells its story in Möbius strips, wrapping realities into realities in order to leave audiences helplessly buried within its main character’s self-absorption. Guido’s obsession is so inward-looking he can’t help but destroy every single close relationship in his life, and yet, in hanging the film’s narrative on the struggle of one filmmaker to make his latest film—the title refers to the fact that this was Fellini’s eighth-and-a-half feature—the iconic Italian director seems to claim that artistic genius practically demands such solipsism. It’s a brazen statement for a film to make, but Fellini does so with such grace and vision, with such seamless intent, 8 1/2 becomes a bittersweet masterpiece: Clear, aching and steeped in nostalgia, it celebrates the kind of glorious life only cinema can offer. —Dom Sinacola

 


2. Cameraperson

Year: 2016
Director: Kirsten Johnson
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Kirsten Johnson’s title for her latest documentary feature could not be any more nondescript. And yet, the anonymity of that title points to perhaps the most remarkable aspect about this film: its maker’s sheer selflessness, her devotion to her craft and her subjects, her seemingly complete lack of ego. The film is pieced together from outtakes from the long-time documentary filmmaker/cinematographer’s extensive body of work, but beyond occasionally hearing her voice behind the camera (and one shot towards the end in which we finally see her face as she points the camera toward herself), Johnson forgoes the safety net of voiceover narration to tie all this footage together. The footage speaks for itself, and for her. Which is not to say that the film is just a compilation of clips strung together willy-nilly. Johnson breathes an animating intelligence into Cameraperson’s construction, employing a method that suggests a mind processing one’s life experiences, contemplating the sum total of her work, veering off into tangents whenever she happens upon a piece of footage that triggers broader reflections. It’s a measure of Johnson’s overall humility that she is willing to be as brutally honest about herself with the viewers in this way—and it’s that humility that ultimately makes Cameraperson such an inspiring experience. —K.F.

 


3. Stalker

Year: 1979
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Stars: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee
Rating: NR
Genre: Sci-Fi

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“Once, the future was only a continuation of the present. All its changes loomed somewhere beyond the horizon. But now the future’s a part of the present.” So says the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, somewhere deep in the Zone, contemplating the deeper trenches of his subconscious, of his fears and life and whatever “filth” exists within him. “Are they prepared for this?” he asks. In Tarkovsky’s last Soviet film, the director seems to be admitting that what he’s feared most has come to pass. What that means is of course nebulous for a viewer not steeped in the director’s life or in the history of the country that was both home and hostile to him and his work throughout most of his life. Based very loosely on Roadside Picnic, a novel by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay), Stalker imagines a dystopic future not far from our present—or Tarkovsky’s present, before the fall of the Berlin Wall or the devastation of Chernobyl—in which some sort of otherworldly force has deposited a place humans have called “the Zone” onto Earth. There, the laws of Nature don’t apply, time and space thwarted by the hidden desires and wills of all those who enter it. Of course, the government has set up cordons around the Zone, and entry is strictly prohibited. Guides/liaisons called “stalkers” head illegal expeditions into the Zone, taking clients (often intellectual elites who can afford the trip) into the heart of the restricted, alien area—in search of, as we learn as the film slowly moves on, the so-called “Room,” where a person’s deepest desires become reality. One such Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) is hired by the aforementioned Writer and a physicist (or something) known only as the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) to lead them into the Zone, spurred by vague ideas of what they’ll find when they reach the Room. The audience is as much in the dark, and through Tarkovsky’s (near-intolerably) patient shots, the three men come to discover, as do those watching their journey, what has really brought them to such an awful extreme as hiring a spiritual criminal to guide them into the almost certain doom of whatever the Zone has waiting for them. And yet, no context properly prepares a viewer for the harrowing, hypnotic experience of watching Stalker. Between the sepia wasteland outside the Zone (so detailed in its grime and suspended misery you may need to take a shower afterwards) and the oversaturated greens and blues of the wreckage inside, Tarkovsky moves almost imperceptibly, taking the rhythms of industry and the empty lulls of post-industrial life to the point of making the barely mystical overwhelmingly manifest. Throughout that push and pull, there is the mounting sense of escape—of Tarkovsky escaping the Soviet Union and its restrictions on his films, maybe—as equally as there is the sense that escape should never be attempted. Because some freedom, some knowledge, isn’t meant for us. —Dom Sinacola

 


4. Beau Travail

Year: 2000
Director: Claire Denis
Stars: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Where most iconic actors have faces akin to national parks and vast landscapes, French actor Denis Lavant’s is a booming metro, its spaces and cracks like the carefully sculpted facade of a city block. He’s gargoyle-like, and so when he plays the lead in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, he wears all his implicit machismo right there on his mug. As Chief Adjutant Galoup remembering his time in Djibouti, he snarls, lips twisting into a spiral staircase leading into his fractured psyche. His obsession with Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) manifests as competition, and underneath the heat of the beating sun, Galoup lets this fixation eat away at him until there is almost nothing left. The film moves back and forth between Galoup’s time in the army and his present, writing of his experiences, trying to grasp at what made him so hungry for Sentain, but the scars of queer repression are only one note that informs the hypnotic lyricism of Denis’ film. With blasting critiques of colonialism and masculinity, Denis plunges us into the rhythm of the night, however lonely it ultimately is. —Kyle Turner

 


5. Vampyr

Year: 1932
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Stars: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Jan Hieronimko, Sybille Schmitz, Henriette Gerard
Rating: NR
Genre: Horror

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While wandering the countryside, a naïve young man with a propensity for the occult stumbles upon a castle where he learns that the owner’s teenage daughter is slowly descending into vampirism. Upon seeing the village doctor trying to poison the girl, the boy intervenes and complications, naturally, ensue. Notable as being one of the few early vampire movies not even passingly based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Vampyr nonetheless brought very little joy to its creator, legendary Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (he of The Passion of Joan of Arc). Forced to shoot the production in three different languages (French, German and English), Dreyer’s first sound film experience was a proverbial trial by fire. To add salt to the infuriating production, the film was released only after some fairly heavy censoring. The reception was no less brutal, with critics delivering scathing reviews. As the years have passed by and an appreciation for Dreyer has grown, however, so has an appreciation for the film, with many modern critics citing its subversive take on sexuality to be years ahead of its time. Shot with the delicacy and elegance of a dream, Dreyer quickly plunges the viewer into an expressionistic hellscape of shadows and dread. Though it may be a bit slow for some audiences, even with a sparse 73-minute runtime, Vampyr is a intense mood piece that picked up where Nosferatu left off. —Mark Rozeman

 


6. The Samurai Trilogy

Years: 1954 -1956
Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Stars: Toshiro Mifune, Rentaro Mikuni, Kuroemon Onoe
Rating: NR
Genre: Action

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The Seven Samurai gets a lot of mainstream credit for being the samurai movie’s defining epic, but we should probably fix that and give equal kudos to Hiroshi Inagaki’s massive, three-chapter chronicle of the life and times of Miyamoto Musashi (Toshiro Mifune), a legendary swordsman and the author of The Book of the Five Rings, essentially a text devoted to the subject of kicking ass. Maybe the comparison to The Seven Samurai isn’t fair to The Seven Samurai: That’s a single three-hour movie in contrast to three movies each in the ballpark of 90 to 140 minutes in length. Simply put, The Samurai Trilogy is epic defined, wrought as cinema that helped shape the samurai film alongside Kurosawa’s watershed picture. (It’s worth noting that the first chapter of Inagaki’s trilogy, Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, opened in 1954, the same year as Seven Samurai. It’s only natural to stack the two against each other.) The Samurai Trilogy is a work of enduring maturity, capturing Musashi’s arc of growth as a fencer, and as a man, over the course of years spent dueling, studying and tending his very soul. The films alternate between mediation and action, both in context as individual movies and as parts of a greater whole; Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple in particular emphasizes action more than its siblings, ending with a massive battle between Musashi and a horde of bad guys in need of a few sword slashes apiece. But even so, that movie can’t help being about tenets of samurai discipline, and the search for self-improvement through marriage of mind and body. Combined, Inagaki’s films make up the most sweeping, romantic and rigorous production of its kind, bolstered by what’s arguably the most sophisticated and nuanced performance of Mifune’s career. —Andy Crump

 


7. Cléo from 5 to 7

Year: 1962
Director: Agnès Varda
Stars: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Halfway through Agnès Varda’s sophomore film, the titular Cléo (Corinne Marchand), a pop singer awaiting the potentially devastating results of some sort of medical test, looks directly into the camera, weeping as she sings a song during an otherwise typical practice session. It’s a revelatory moment: Varda addresses her audience directly through her character addressing her audience directly, all while on the precipice of total dissolution. Cléo, a beautiful, burgeoning celebrity, seems to understand that she may be empty without her looks, just as she rails against the forces that put her in such an untenable position. In other words, realizing in that moment of melodrama, of the heightened emotion she knows all too well is the stuff of pop music at its most marketably patronizing, that her attractiveness may be soon over, she’s driven to tears, unable to reconcile her talent with her face, or her fragility with her livelihood, leaving it to the audience to decide whether she deserves our sympathy or not. If not, Varda wonders, then why not? Shot practically in real time, Cléo from 5 to 7 waits along with our character as she waits for life-changing news, floating from coffee shop to home to park to wherever, not doing much of anything with the life she has, the life she may find out she’s losing soon enough. She watches a silent film featuring cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, meets a soldier on leave from the Algerian front (Antoine Bourseiller) who confesses he believes people are dying for nothing, drives past a murder scene and senses that the universe maybe has misdirected her bad luck towards another soul. One of the defining films of the Left Bank branch of the French New Wave (as opposed to those of the “Right Bank,” the more famous films of Truffaut and Godard, the movement’s more commercial, cosmopolitan cinephiles), Cléo from 5 to 7 is a fever dream of the ordinary, a meditation on the nothingness of everyday living, as existential as it is blissfully bereft of purpose. —Dom Sinacola

 


8. The Grandmaster

Year: 2013
Director: Wong Kar Wai
Stars: Tony Leung, Ziyi Zhang, Chen Chang, Cung Le, Hye-Kyo Song
Genre: Martial Arts, Drama
Rating: PG-13

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Wong Kar Wai will indefatigably make anything elegant, and so it’s a given that The Grandmaster is a gorgeously paced historical epic told in patient piecemeal. A loose chronicle of the nascent legend of Yip Man, the film skirts the line between noir-ish tragedy and chiaroscuro thriller, rarely leaving room to discern the difference. From an opening set-piece that will leave you wondering why any other director since would ever bother capturing rain droplets in slo-motion, to one masterfully orchestrated balsa-wood-tower of martial arts prowess after another, there is little left to say about Wong’s directing other than hyperbole: This is heartfelt and beautiful action filmmaking, but never so far removed from the savagery of the action at hand that it romanticizes the pummeling of so many hapless foes. There are penalties to these punches and consequences to these kicks—there should be little doubt that The Grandmaster is not just a masterpiece of its genre but one of Wong’s best. —Dom Sinacola

 


9. Black Narcissus

Year: 1947
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Stars: Deborah Kerr, Sabu, David Farrar
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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A melodrama set in a convent in British-ruled Himalayan India, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starring Deborah Kerr and David Farrar, Black Narcissus provides a recipe for … strangeness. And it’s a beautiful kind of strangeness. Five nuns are sent to establish a convent, school and hospital in a former harem. It’s difficult to adapt to the new surroundings, and the agent who’s on call to help them do it is, well, he’s a bit of a temptation. There are tragic consequences, naturally. The story’s compelling enough, but what really blows me away about this film is the otherworldly visual sensibility. Powell’s camerawork is mesmerizing and the film is steeped in supersaturated color, underlining the exoticism and confusion faced by the nuns, sending the viewer to another dimension. —Amy Glynn

 


10. Hiroshima Mon Amour

Year: 1959
Director: Alain Resnais
Stars: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Alain Resnais’s 1959 masterpiece begins like a documentary, one reminiscent of his harrowing 1955 nonfiction short Night and Fog, except focused on the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Instead of an omniscient voiceover narrator, however, we hear what we eventually discover are two lovers: a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) who, in the present day, have met in Hiroshima are both carrying on extramarital affairs with each other, even as they realize it can’t last. It sounds like pure Casablanca-like forbidden romance, but under Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour touches on broader ideas: chiefly, the potential impossibility of art to measure up to personal experience and memory. The man’s repeated incantations to the woman that “You saw nothing in Hiroshima” suggests a level of perspective on the horrific event that even she, starring in a well-meaning “movie about peace,” can’t possibly access. She can only try to identify through her own experience as a tormented outsider in the village in which she grew up—but really, how can even that possibly measure up to the devastation of such a horrific event? Even Hiroshima itself, as captured in black-and-white by cinematographers Sacha Vierny and Michio Takahashi, seems to want to try to forget its past, by covering it up in a preponderance of neon lights. Resnais aids Duras’s reflections on history and memory with a then-groundbreaking editing style that fluidly goes back and forth between past and present. The enduring miracle of Hiroshima Mon Amour, though, is that all its formal and philosophical ambition doesn’t obscure the poignance of its central romance, especially with Emmanuelle Riva’s indelible expressions of passion, anguish and regret. —Kenji Fujishima

 


11. The Great Beauty

Year: 2013
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Stars: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama/Comedy

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Move over Gatsby, the best movie of 2013 about rich people’s problems was Paolo Sorrentino’s gorgeous The Great Beauty. A dapper gentleman (Toni Servillo), in the truest of director Federico Fellini’s traditions, strays from exorbitant party to outlandish party with a circle of friends while musing on life, Rome and love. But on his 65th birthday, he’s thrown off his groove and begins to wonder about the limited worldview and superficial party culture he’s a part of. While maintaining a sense of the absurd, the movie is artfully composed to encapsulate the opulent lifestyle of the rich and aimless. Beauty is both a loving tribute and spiritual continuation of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and manages to pull off both feats in style.—Monica Castillo

 


12. I Knew Her Well

Year: 1965
Director: Antonio Pietrangeli
Stars: Stefania Sandrelli, Mario Adorf, Jean-Claude Brialy
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Ever wonder what La Dolce Vita would look like if Federico Fellini had shot it through a feminine perspective? Wonder no longer. I Knew Her Well, an unsung masterpiece from Commedia all’italiana director Antonio Pietrangeli, is essentially what the sweet life looks like from the point of view of a young woman, Adriana (portrayed in a stunning lead performance by Stefania Sandrelli, whose video interview is a must-watch among the Blu-ray’s supplemental features). Adriana’s a country girl who self-relocates to Rome in pursuit of fame, celebrity and all the spoils that notoriety afford those who are able to capture it; she has no greater aspirations than to bask in stardom’s scintillating warmth, or at least none that are articulated explicitly through text. Either unwittingly or not, I Knew Her Well—a title whose suggestion of familiarity reminds us that we’ve all read about a person like Stefanie in tabloids or seen her on television—flips the male gaze inhabited and critiqued in Fellini’s masterpiece on its head. Pietrangeli shows his audience what it is to be manipulated and used, rather than what it is to be the manipulator or the user. The results are equally as shocking as they are revelatory. —Andy Crump

 


13. Black Girl

Year: 1966
Director: Ousmane Sembène
Stars: Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Momar Nar Sene
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène grew up a French citizen in the final throes of his country’s centuries-long period of colonialism, almost 40 when Senegal joined French Sudan to gain independence. Made six years after France transferred power, Black Girl, Sembène’s first feature-length film as writer and director (based off of his own short story), aches with wounds still lifetimes away from healing, worsened by the shallowness of a people (French) who just want to move on and with the humiliation and resentment of a lot more people (Africans) who physically live everyday—in their language and social structures and economic lots—surrounded by the reminders that they for so long were not their own. Sembène makes this divide dreadfully clear, telling the story of quiet Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), hired by a French family to serve as their nanny in Dakar, until they move back to the Riviera and encourage (expect) Diouana to go and live with them. Of course, once she arrives, the bitter, malicious Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek) expects her to cook and clean, callously stretching the bounds of Diouana’s duties as nanny into a kind of indentured servitude, exacerbated by Diouana’s inability to read and lack of money. She is, literally, stuck in France. Meanwhile, Sembène cuts to memories of Diouana’s life before she left Senegal, in which she lived in relative poverty but had family and boyfriend (Momar Nar Sene) to support her, telling her not to leave but still needing the money she could potentially earn. Juxtaposing these two realities, Sembène slowly crafts a vision of post-colonial slavery in a post-war world, building a tension that gives Diouana no choice but to tragically get out the only way she knows how. Despite whatever the Madame and her family had in mind, Diouana’s story could have ended no other way. —Dom Sinacola

 


14. The Battle of Algiers

Year: 1966
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Stars: Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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A perfect meeting of story and style, Gillo Pontecorvo’s guerrilla warfare drama The Battle of Algiers reflects in its grainy docu-style the scrappy tactics of the combatants: the revolutionary Algerian National Liberation Front, executing police and civilians in cafes and in the streets, and the French governors and counter-insurgents, struggling to combat a threat to their existence in a land they rule but don’t fully understand. Like a great documentary would, The Battle of Algiers takes a coolly balanced and non-judgmental view of its subjects, coming down neither on the side of the radicals nor the colonialists, but in another way Pontecorvo’s raw newsreel design is deceptive: what appears improvisational is actually meticulously arranged. The director’s great achievement is that not a second of his film is without purpose, yet it unfolds as a constant surprise, almost as though the footage was not shot but discovered. —Brogan Morris

 


15. Rashomon

Year: 1950
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Stars: Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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What you get out of Rashomon likely reflects what you bring into it, but it might help to bring a basic grasp of cubism into it. You hear the word “cubist,” your brain probably goes right to Picasso and Braque, but in cinema it ought to head straight to Kurosawa, who in essence gave birth to the movie version of cubism with Rashomon by performing a feat as deceptively simple as filtering a single narrative through multiple character perspectives; the more Kurosawa filters that narrative, the more the narrative changes, until we can no longer determine which to trust and which to write off. In the trial that comprises the bulk of the film’s plot, who is telling the truth? The bandit, the man accused of murdering a samurai and raping his wife? The wife? The samurai himself, summoned to the trial via spirit medium? Even when Kurosawa generously reveals what actually happened when the bandit crossed paths with the samurai and his wife via the post-trial testimony of a humble woodcutter, we’re still left to wrestle with the question of who, and what, we should believe. Kurosawa’s technical mastery is always awesome to behold, but in Rashomon, it’s his gift for utterly blurring reality that dazzles most. —Andy Crump

 


16. The Gold Rush

Year: 1925
Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charles Chaplin, Georgia Hale
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy

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The Klondike gold rush made the perfect setting for Charles Chaplin’s tramp to run wild. Chaplin took all the motifs he could find from adventure novels, melodramas and other stories of the northern frontier, tossed them in a blender and served up a collection of what would become his most famous scenes. He finds humor in peril—with a suspenseful teetering cabin scene, as well as starvation (when he famously makes a meal of his boot) and of course finds time to show off with his dancing roll scene. However, no one has succeeded in finding any humor in the atrocious voiceover Chaplin added to the 1942 rerelease. Be sure to watch the original version. For a more serious take on the Klondike hardships, see Clarence Brown’s The Trail of ’98 (1928).

 


17. La Strada

Year: 1954
Director: Federico Fellini
Stars: Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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I like to imagine that if Fellini made La Strada today, we’d all be able to marvel at the depth of compassion he feels toward the film’s male lead, Anthony Quinn, playing the brutish traveling circus performer Zampano, a strong man who shatters chains with the might of his Herculean pecs. The reality is that asking your audience to pity an abusive, terrible human being at the near-literal last minute is asking a lot, but Fellini’s grace as an artist makes that pill easier to swallow. He heaps cruelties both physical and spiritual upon his two subjects, Zampano and the childlike Gelsomina (played by Fellini’s luminous and eminently talented wife, Giulietta Masina), reserving the brunt of the film’s suffering for her: Gelsomina labors under Zampano’s merciless direction and by consequence lives in a state of constant existential anxiety, ever pondering what her place is in the universal order. Maybe it’s just her lot in life to hurt. Maybe there is no universal order. Or maybe she was put on Earth to visit justice beyond the grace on Zampano as he collapses weeping on the beach, broken by the realization of his sins. La Strada is a deceptively simple picture layered with intricate, empathetic subtexts, and this, perhaps, is why it remains the most essential neorealist effort in Fellini’s body of work. —Andy Crump

 


18. Mikey and Nicky

Year: 1976
Director: Elaine May
Stars: Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, William Hickey
Rating: R
Genre: Drama

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Everyone’s got a friend like Nicky (John Cassavetes), though the Nickys of the world exist on a sliding scale. Not every Nicky works for the mob, or womanizes, or betrays the mob, or generally acts like a large diameter asshole at any provocation or under any amount of strain. But strip Mikey and Nicky of its genre particulars, its gangster trappings, and what remains is a recognizable story of two friends at loggerheads, joined by the history of their lifetimes, inseparable, and yet chemically volatile when standing in arm’s reach of each other. Mikey (Peter Falk) and Nicky go way back. They’ve been pals since always, since before they became small time crooks, since before their parents shuffled their mortal coils. Mikey’s the equanimous one, Nicky the hothead, though Mikey’s only cool and composed when stood next to Nicky. “You give me that in 30 seconds or I’ll kill you, you hear me?” he roars at a diner counterman, desperate for a cup of cream to help soothe Nicky’s ailing stomach. Neither is especially good to women, and both are in boiling water, though Mikey’s only up to his toes and Nicky’s waist-deep, having ripped off his boss and earned a hit on his forehead. The most honest move Mikey can make is to leave Nicky to the mob’s mercies, but he’s not an honest man and honestly, male relationships aren’t all that honest. Elaine May understands how quickly men oscillate between emotion and violence, rancor and play. One minute Mikey’s fretting over Nicky catching a cold. The next, they’re scrapping in the street, as if their friendship never mattered in the first place. Amazing how easily men can transgress from adults to boys, whether they’re trading blows or just gleefully racing one another down the sidewalk. Even when they’re all grown up, they’re still children at heart. Over 40 years later, Mikey and Nicky has aged better than both of them. —Andy Crump

 


19. Rome, Open City

Year: 1945
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Stars: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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When you think of Italian neorealist cinema, your mind probably zips straight right on over to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a beautifully made movie about the harsh realities of life in postwar Italy. Bicycle Thieves marries sober observations about its time and place with an abiding sense of optimism that’s fully realized in the film’s climax. By contrast, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City denies its viewers the admittedly mild succor granted us by Bicycle Thieves, offering instead a raw, righteous outrage that stems from Rosselini’s national pride. The film understands wartime trauma in ways most war films simply don’t; it captures Italy’s emotional, and sociopolitical fragility in the aftermath of World War II on celluloid like an insect trapped in amber, indulging in slight degrees of wish fulfillment while staging a credible representation of Italian resistance to German occupation in 1944. Rossellini contrasts Italian fear with Italian heroism, creating opportunities for the movie’s German characters to look inward and realize that force of arms isn’t the same thing as force of courage. It doesn’t take much to do violence upon others. It takes much more to show honest to goodness bravery on pain of death. —A.C.

 


20. The Seventh Seal

Year: 1957
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Stars: Max von Sydow, Inga Landgré, Gunnar Björnstrand
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Like any cultural touchstone, any ubiquitous landmark of the arts more mitotically absorbed than actually experienced, The Seventh Seal is bound to be misremembered. We know well the chess game with Death (Bengt Ekerot), as well as Death’s get-up—a sort of gothic mix between Musketeer and monk—etched into the firmament of our pop obsessions (for most my age, it was in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey that the bone-white face and cape were first encountered), even if we’ve never actually seen the film. We know well the name of director Ingmar Bergman or that of star Max von Sydow (recently in Force Awakens), even if we aren’t familiar with their work, so ingrained into any working conception of “international cinema” are they, much of which is due to The Seventh Seal. We know well the dour chiaroscuro of Swedish cinema, the arch-symbolic pretension of art house stuff that squeezes all mirth from every orifice of the viewer. But do we forget how little of this movie is the chess game—how dimwitted Death can be? How funny The Seventh Seal actually is? “Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses?” asks knight Antonius Block (von Sydow). “What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to?” With The Seventh Seal, a simple story about a jaded knight returning from the Crusades to find that the world he fought for has seemingly been abandoned by God, Bergman sought clarity in the problem of faith—he wanted to map the vast spiritual terrain between experiencing and knowing, between feeling and believing. The reason why today the film still resonates, why we know the movie without having to experience it, is because of that clarity in Bergman’s vision: The Seventh Seal is all symbol, metaphor, allusion—but what it’s symbolic of, a metaphor for or alluding to isn’t too hard for any of us to figure. When the knight asks a question, God answers with silence—and there’s little humans understand better than how that feels. —Dom Sinacola

 


21. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Year: 1975
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Belgian director Chantal Akerman built a formidable edifice of domesticity in order to pull it down piece by piece, habit by habit, hourly ritual by daily routine. The title of her second film, a name and a location, reflects a submission to a time and to a place, and over the course of nearly three and a half hours, Akerman defines that name, Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), through the ways in which Dielman—mother, single homemaker, occasional prostitute—fills that location, a small Brussels apartment of modest means, with the cooking and cleaning and mothering and fornication of a person trapped within the order and regiment of a society that doesn’t so much care for her as expect her to continue to uphold that order, all for the benefit of the men in her life, who make no attempt to understand the intricacies of what she’s accomplished. On the first day, Akerman establishes Jeanne Dielman’s quotidian, an architecture of perfectly calibrated chores, meals, joyless sex, vigorous bathing and thankless evenings spent with her aloof wad of a son (Jan Decorte), all of which she assembles seamlessly seemingly for him, and for no one else. On the second day, a few items go awry, Jeanne overcooks the potatoes and remainders begin to appear in the facade of her daily algorithm. On the third day, chasms open in the midst of her everyday pattern, Jeanne unable to fill that space with anything at all, because she has nothing save for that structure, no passion or personality besides the ways in which she coddles her progeny and basely satisfies her clients. In the midst of literal minutes’ worth of Jeanne sitting, staring, silent, Akerman introduces tension by default: When Jeanne Dielman can no longer be manifest through her methodical fulfilling of the mundane, does she even exist anymore? Akerman responds with violence, pointless and fatal—followed by more sitting, more staring and the bleak notion that the life lived within the walls of this film may not be anything more than a name, a place and a single act of humanity. —Dom Sinacola

 


22. EO

Release Date: February 21, 2023
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
Stars: Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Ko?ciukiewicz, Isabelle Huppert
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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On paper, an existential Polish remake of a 1960s French arthouse classic about a donkey’s journey might seem intimidating or uninteresting—flat, droll, inaccessible high art—but writer/director Jerzy Skolimowski is a filmmaking wizard, a Swiss army knife of style and technique that knows how to get your attention with creativity and empathy alone. His rate of constantly evolving expression, executed with the taste and tact of a living legend pushing 85, sucks you in. That, and the most loveable lead, EO. Skolimowski’s contemporary take on Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar stays true to the simple ass-centricity of the original. The plot summary is the same: We follow a donkey through good times and bad. But make no mistake, EO is the wildest donkey film of the fall. Heck, maybe even the whole year. Every second counts. Blink and you might miss a surprise throat cut, lasers bursting through the forest or Isabelle Huppert smashing plates. Where EO (think: Eeyore, or the sound a donkey makes) ends up is as sudden and bewildering to us as it is to him, a paragon in the psychic art of weathering change. EO is innocence incarnate, a pure, blameless, unsuspecting victim around every corner (something you can’t get out of a human character), but he’s not fragile. There’s a near-mechanical will to live, a steely, preternatural sense of survival inside him that won’t give up. EO endures. Skolimowski gets more out of a donkey than most filmmakers get out of a person. EO is experimental and surreal, but not in a brash, over-your-head, alienating kind of way. If anything, it’s just the opposite. Every moment is innovative or imaginative, as if Skolimowski is spinning a wheel of his favorite tricks and applying them to each section as it lands, the prospect of wedding such varied expressions a challenge in itself. Through EO, Skolimowski offers a fresh perspective on our own frailty, our own getting blown with the wind, through life, pain, death and rebirth in an endless cycle. Perhaps the most transfixing moment of EO is near the end: A single waterfall tracking shot reversed into a hypnotic natural rhythm, the water folding into itself as if to be reborn. EO seems to be getting at the rhythm of life—up, down, happy, sad, joyous, torturous, cyclical, always changing, never fully understood. That’s how we see ourselves most preciously in EO. We’re never in control, even when we think we are.—Luke Hicks

 


23. L’Avventura

Year: 1960
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Stars: Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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After honing his craft as a filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni arrived on the international scene in 1960 with a loose trilogy: L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, three films about privileged people so bored with their lives that they have little to do but wander the city and lament their failing relationships. But Antonioni—counter to expectations—watched those people with extreme precision. His camera moved as if it were choreographed down to the millimeter because, while the characters in the films may have been bored, the man watching them was not. He was riveted. And he transferred his fascination to the audience, not telling them tales or teaching them lessons, but raising questions, big ones about existence—why we move around the earth, why we interact with other people, and who we are.—Robert Davis

 


24. Drácula

Year: 1931
Director: George Melford
Stars: Carlos Villarías, Lupita Tovar, Barry Norton, Eduardo Arozamena
Rating: NR
Genre: Horror

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It’s crazy to imagine a film being shot multiple times, with different casts and in different languages, today but this was once common practice. Thus was born the Spanish version of Universal’s classic Dracula. It features an entirely different cast—no Bela Lugosi as Dracula or Dwight Frye as Renfield—but filmed on the exact same sets, with the same script. The Spanish crew was literally filming at night, after the English-language crew had gone home for the day. It’s remembered today because of the visual transformation it undergoes: Director George Melford ultimately proved much more active and experimental than Tod Browning, the director of the English-language version, which imbues the Drácula with significantly more interesting and challenging cinematography. Many shots that are simply static in the Browning Dracula (which is a bit of a stuffy movie, although extremely important historically) are given a new lease on life in the Spanish version. The performances are also solid, although unsurprisingly they’re nowhere near as iconic as Lugosi. Watching the Spanish version, you can’t help but wish for a third version of the 1931 Dracula—starring Lugosi and Frye, but directed by Melford. With that combination, perhaps it would be Dracula and not Frankenstein hailed as the crown jewel of the original Universal monster series.—Jim Vorel

 


25. Paris Is Burning

Year: 1991
Directors: Jennie Livingston
Rating: R
Genre: Documentary

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Madonna’s “voguing” phase has nothing on—that is, took everything from—the drag scene of 1980s New York City chronicled in this vibrant doc. Delving into the subculture of fierce, catwalk-styled posing and the clubs in which it thrived, Jennie Livingston depicts the less-than-glamorous realities of life as a drag queen before RuPaul was mainstream: issues of gender and sexual identity, race, bigotry and hate, HIV/AIDS, poverty, crime—theft is a commonplace means by which these would-be “Legends” seek a desired end: transformation. Named after one of the underground balls in which its subjects find a sense of family—in “houses,” no less—Paris is Burning is a joyous affair, and a curiously meta celebration of what it means “to be real.” —Amanda Schurr

 


26. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

Year: 1968
Director: William Greaves
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm meta-weaves three interconnected parts into one unnerving synthesis: 1) a documentary of the casting process for an unmade film called Over a Cliff; 2) a documentary of the documentary of the casting process for an unmade film called Over a Cliff; and 3) a documentary about the documentary of the documentary of the casting process for an unmade film called Over a Cliff, wherein the director of the first documentary also happens to be directing the third documentary to capture additional footage of people in Central Park that has something tangentially to do with “sexuality,” which may or may not be what Over a Cliff is about. That the first documentary seems to be only the repeated filming of different actors having the same offensively tone-deaf conversation is but one point of contention; that the crew can’t seem to possibly grasp what’s going on, let alone get any sort of coherent idea about what they’re supposed to be doing from director Bill Greaves, makes much of the film feel like an inchoate disaster. Which of course compels the crew to gather, apart from Greaves, in a sort of mutiny room to discuss whether they should continue with the production, filming that meeting with full intention of giving the footage to Greaves at the end of whatever it is they’re doing, whenever it is that will happen—all the while debating if, somehow, Greaves orchestrated the whole thing, because there’s no way the audience will know what’s staged and what’s not. And we don’t. So when later Greaves gathers the crew to hear their dissent and then—shutting them down like the genius badass he is—plainly tell them that he did orchestrate all of this, we immediately call into question how easily any kind of film, whether it’s fictional or not, can manipulate our experience of truth—no matter what side of the camera we happen to find ourselves on. —Dom Sinacola

 


27. A Hard Day’s Night

Year: 1964
Director: Richard Lester
Starring: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy

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That opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” is iconic on its own, but when it’s paired with scenes of the Fab Four gleefully outrunning a crowd of screaming fans? Forget about it. The first Beatles movie—a mockumentary filmed at the height of Beatlemania—also happens to be their best; it’s funny, silly, weirdly melancholy at times (it’s hard not to see the foreshadowing when Ringo temporarily quits the band after feeling unappreciated) and full of some fantastic early performances. It manages to poke fun at the fame machine from the inside, and we always get the sense that no one found it funnier than John, Paul, George and Ringo.—Bonnie Stiernberg

 


28. Throne of Blood

Year: 1957
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Minoru Chiaki
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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In adapting Macbeth from Scotland to feudal Japan, Akira Kurosawa visually inflected his version with an evocatively chilly ambience—especially with its preponderance of fog and that seemingly isolated castle in the mountains—that gives William Shakespeare’s tragedy of ambition run amok the feel of a horror movie. He also brought elements of Noh theater into the mix—seen in its ceremonial set designs, Masaru Sato’s use of flute and drum in his score, and especially in the deliberately affectless performance styles of Isuzu Yamada and Chieko Naniwa—that has the effect of giving Throne of Blood a ritualized feel, a sense of haunting inevitability. In Kurosawa’s hands, one hardly needs Shakespeare’s own language to experience the horrifying poetry of Washizu’s (Toshiro Mifune) inexorable path toward his own personal doom, imprisoned not just by greed, but also by fear, guilt and heavens-defying egotism. Here is one of cinema’s rare shining examples of a great director transforming a great play and making it indelibly his own. —Kenji Fujishima

 


29. In the Mood for Love

Year: 2000
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Stars: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance

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Wong’s most acclaimed movie, In the Mood for Love, details the forbidden romance between jilted individuals. In 1962, Chow Mo-wan (Leung) moved into an apartment complex with his wife. Meanwhile, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) has moved into an adjacent apartment with her husband. They spend their nights alone as both have spouses who work late and are often out. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan come to the conclusion that their spouses have been cheating on them. In the Mood for Love then focuses on the budding friendship between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan which began as a perverse game to discover how their spouses began their entanglement. The charade of make-believe entertains the couple for a while, but soon they begin falling for each other. There is an understanding between the two of them from the start, the idea that if they were to fall in love with each other, they would be no better than the spouses that have caused them so much pain and anguish. That sacred oath of marriage ties their hands. Had they met at some other time or with different circumstances, perhaps their love story would’ve been complete. There’s moments of weakness, where our protagonists are ready to follow through with their own desires of infidelity, only to miss each other due to some unfortunate happenstance. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan often passed each other on a set of stairs leading down to their favorite noodle shop. Before their relationship would begin in earnest, they would be like two ships passing in the night. While these moments seem to exist only for a brief second, Wong extends the sequence far beyond reason, perfecting his technique of step printing. Step printing is the process of shooting the movie in fast motion with a slow shutter speed and then slowing it down in post-process. Wong experiments with motion to make everyday life seem extraordinary.—Max Covill

 


30. Frances Ha

Year: 2012
Director: Noah Baumbach
Stars: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Michael Zegen, Adam Driver
Rating: R
Genre: Drama, Comedy

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In a single gesture from actor/writer/Baumbachian collaborator Greta Gerwig, there is an entire universe. She makes a sort of “trespassing” buzz when Lev (Adam Driver) reaches out to touch her shoulder, then, taking a deep sigh of resignation, her body once tense in obligatory “Am I into this guy?” reservation, she relaxes. They might as well be friends. Nothing really goes the way Frances plans; not when she’s asked to move in with her then-boyfriend at the start, not her prospects as a dancer, not her relationship with her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner). But she’s a dancer, right? Her body awkwardly tries to roll with the punches life throws her way—maybe not with the wherewithal of actually trying to figure out what the next thing should be. Even as she continually loses stability after effectively losing her constant (Sophie), Frances has an irrepressible exuberance, running all about Chinatown to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” scouring the Lower East Side for an ATM and hiding her whole body as she serves as university benefactor’s wine pourer/ward. There is a gracefulness to Gerwig’s gangly gracelessness, as if all of her warmth, fear, pain and joy cobbles itself together in beautiful unwieldy movements. It’s in these moments, and in the shared body language between Frances and Sophie, that Baumbach and Gerwig find the tenderest moments in their career. And in digital black and white, the movie shimmers, recalling not just the buoyancy of the French New Wave, but the economic and social uncertainty of young New Yorkers (perhaps of a particular social subset) who want everything—with the heart, body and soul—except to grow up. —Kyle Turner

 


31. Safety Last

Year: 1923
Directors: Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
Stars: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy

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“I shouldn’t have bothered scoring the last 15 minutes,” Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra told me after accompanying Safety Last at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. He said he and his ensemble couldn’t even hear themselves over the uproarious laughter in the Castro Theatre during Harold Lloyd’s famous building-scaling sequence. The scene, with its famous clock-hanging finale—is such a perfect mix of suspense and comedy that it doesn’t much matter that the rest of the film seems to exist merely as a lead-up to it. This film just entered the public domain recently. —Jeremy Mathews

 


32. Jules and Jim

Year: 1962
Director: François Truffaut
Stars: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Widely regarded as a French touchstone, François Truffaut’s classic WWI-era love triangle is based on a semi-autobiographical novel of the same title by Henri-Pierre Roche, which Truffaut stumbled across in a Paris bookstore in the 1950s. The adaptation tells the tragic story of Jim (Henri Serre), a French Bohemian, Jules (Oskar Werner), his Austrian friend, and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), Jules’ girlfriend/wife. The two men are besotted with Catherine, who bears an eerie resemblance to a statue they both love. She marries Jules. The war breaks out, and the two men, on opposing sides of the conflict, struggle with the fear that one might unwittingly kill the other in battle. (What actually happens is arguably worse.) Both survive, and later, Jim visits Jules and Catherine in their Black Forest cottage. Jules confides he’s miserable, that Catherine has constant affairs, has left him and their baby, Sabine, for months at a time, and that he lives in terror of losing her. Catherine tries to seduce Jim. The three try an experimental situation where Catherine is with both men, but tragedy only ensues from there. Perhaps a definitive example of the French New Wave, the film incorporates a vast lexicon of cinematic techniques—newsreel footage, stills, wipes, panning shots, freeze-frames, voiceover narration (by Michel Subor)—though shades of its towering influence in subsequent films, television and music are almost innumerable. —Amy Glynn

 


33. The Gleaners & I

Year: 2000
Director: Agnès Varda
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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There’s an argument that the explicit subject of The Gleaners & I—gleaners, their habits and practices—isn’t nearly as important as the woman at the center of it, director Agnès Varda. Her place in the film is deliberate—in telling the story of French gleaners, rural and urban scavengers protected by a series of hilariously specific but often debated French laws, Varda frames herself as a gleaner, a fellow traveler in a world of thrift-minded men and women who survive on what others throw away. As Varda follows gleaners who comb farmer’s fields for leftover produce and urban landscapes for food and other curiosities, the story mutates into a semi-autobiographical narrative about Varda herself, and the simple pleasures of finding. I love the film because it pings several intellectual currents in the late 1990s and early 2000s related to the sharing of information and memory thanks to the Internet. The Gleaners & I becomes a lo-fi take on memory, curating, nostalgia and the reframing of discarded cultural detritus, which itself becomes a metaphor for the film’s argument: that the world of poverty might also be reframed, because Varda’s exhaustive studies show the spirit of gleaning is strong among people of all walks of life. Her wonderful presence at the center of these discussions makes the film deeply personal and brimming with optimism, but also far more profound than its subject matter might suggest. —Mark Abraham

 


34. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Year: 1964
Director: Jacques Demy
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama, Musical

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Jacques Demy’s masterpiece is a soaring, vibrant, innately bittersweet story of love lost, found and forever disbanded, another wartime casualty in a country scarred by military conflict. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is lived-in, a story derived from Demy’s life experience, and that keyword—“experience”—is essential to making the film click. Take away its musical cues, and you’re left with a narrative about a young man (Nino Castelnuovo) and a young woman (Catherine Deneuve) who fall deeply in love with one another, only to be torn apart when he’s drafted to fight overseas. The story remains rooted in Demy’s pathos, and pathos gives Umbrellas’ gravity. The music, of course, is a critical part of its character, a dose of magic Demy uses to buttress the rigors of life in wartime with grandeur and meaning. It’s a film about people in love falling out of love, and then falling in love all over again with new partners and altered sentiments, a beautiful picture as likely to make you swoon as to crush your heart. —Andy Crump

 


35. The Passion of Joan of Arc

Year: 1928
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Stars: Renée Falconetti, Eugene Silvain, André Berley
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s face is in your brain, whether you’re aware of it there or not. Its contours and stipples, topped by hair shorn of substance or style—her head centered by two wide eyes rimmed with tears, always in some sort of superposition between ecstasy and misery—consumes boundless space in Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, seemingly suspended over the long course of history between now (whenever now happens to be) and when Dreyer first envisioned this immersive, expressionist experience. Dreyer wrote of his film, “What counted was getting the spectator absorbed in the past,” and then explained further, “A thorough study of the documents from the rehabilitation process was necessary; I did not study the clothes of the time, and things like that. The year of the event seemed as inessential to me as its distance from the present.” Though The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer based on the 1491 transcripts of its titular saint’s trial for heresy (the director welcomed by the Société Générale des Films to make a film in France, his choice of subject bolstered by France’s canonization of Joan of Arc after World War I), he provides little visual detail or historical context. Instead he submerges the viewer in Joan’s perspective, keeps his hand on our heads as we drown in the torment of what she’s subjected to, rarely releasing his weight except for in the film’s final moments, when Joan’s brutal execution at the stake unleashes violence throughout the citizenry. But mostly: that face, awestruck throughout time. Most notably, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie, the director watches as his protagonist, Nana (Anna Karina), watches Joan of Arc, lighting her tear-streaked face in close-up as she experiences something of the same images before her. Godard reflects Falconetti’s face in Karina’s, spanning more than three decades as if they’re nothing. There is perhaps no better ode to the power of what Dreyer achieved: Timelessness borne by the tragedy of our all too weak, all too human, flesh. —Dom Sinacola

 


36. Breathless

Year: 1960
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Godard is arguably the most prolific, impactful French director of all time, and Breathless is his first New Wave film: To some, it spawned a revolution, and even if you object to that narrative, its influence on his home country and the New Hollywood period in 1970s America is undeniable. Breathless stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as an incompetent criminal in love with an American student named Patricia (Jean Seberg) in Paris. When he murders a cop, the film turns from a light Parisian affair to a tense love story, and the question that hangs in the balance is whether Patricia will betray her criminal beau. —Shane Ryan

 


37. Welcome Mr. Marshall!

Year: 1953
Director: Luis García Berlanga
Stars: Lolita Sevilla, Manolo Morán, José Isbert
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy

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Besides the beach, sunshine and tortillas—what comes to mind when you think of Spain? Images of exotic women galore, dressed in polka-dotted flamenco dresses, might flood your brain, or you’ll suddenly remember your Grandma marveling over a typically Andalusian flower wall she saw on one of her first YouTube escapades. So what do the Spanish think of when they imagine the United States? In Luis García Berlanga’s Welcome Mr. Marshall!, we get a sense of the Spanish perception of the U.S. during Franco’s reign. When Villar del Río’s town crier (Joaquín Roa) announces the arrival of American diplomats in relation to the Marshall Plan, the residents light up like children on Christmas Day. The people of Villar del Río have probably never been outside of León, let alone Spain. And America? Well, you may as well ask whether they have visited the moon. Welcome Mr. Marshall! is proof that even during modern Spain’s darkest era, directors like Berlanga were able to defy Franco’s oppression much like the Monty Python crew and their “wink-winks” did decades ago, albeit on an entirely scarier level. A glimpse into the dreams the people of Villar del Río have about American ways and American life in general reveal sweetly innocent and partially fantastical images that only reinforce the grittier horrors of censorship Spain is now beginning to face, once again.—Roxanne Sancto

 


38. Raging Bull

Year: 1980
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci
Rating: R
Runtime: 129 minutes

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The best film of the 1980s contains one of the all-time-great feats of directing and one of the all-time-great feats of screen acting. The status that Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull has achieved in the years since its release is completely earned. Watching it is a fully felt experience. Over the years, much has been made of the weight Robert De Niro gained while filming Raging Bull to authentically capture the physical transformation of boxer Jake LaMotta. While it’s a great symbol of his commitment, the pounds don’t begin to explain the depths of the character portrait he and Martin Scorsese created. The film looks unforgivingly at a fragile, insecure man who communicates his need for love with jealousy, anger and violence. Scorsese’s shots convey the overly suspicious workings of LaMotta’s head, then back out to coldly observe the horrific violence that ensues. Then there are the boxing scenes. Scorsese deserves endless praise for finding such lively, inventive ways to capture the experience inside the ring. But what’s really amazing is that he goes beyond a great sports scene. Each fight serves as a window into LaMotta’s soul. The camera movement, the quick edits, the sudden shifts in speed all reflect his mental state, his need to damage himself or cause damage to others. Such expressive, visceral filmmaking has rarely been equaled. —Michael Burgin

 


39. Black Orpheus

Year: 1959
Director: Marcel Camus
Stars: Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Lourdes de Oliveira
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been the source of countless works of art over the centuries. Marcel Camus’ adaptation is set in a Rio de Janeiro favela and features a brilliant soundtrack by Tom Jobim and Luiz Bonfa. Brenno Melo plays Orfeu, a talented guitarist in a somewhat reluctant engagement to Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) who falls in love with Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn). Eurydice is taken from him by Death. Orfeu tries to get her back, fails, and is killed by the jilted Mira. It’s an ancient story and Camus does a marvelous job of making it new and fresh in its recontextualization. The samba and bossa nova music are befitting of mythology’s greatest singer-songwriter, and the production is stylish and colorful and full of heart. Visually lush and ebullient, this is a film to roll around in, not to be overly cerebral about. Lavishly sensuous, with stunning cinematography and a soundtrack to die for (and come back from Hades to hear all over again). —Amy Glynn

 


40. City Lights

Year: 1931
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Stars: Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Harry Myers
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy

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In his later years, Charlie Chaplin was known for bringing pathos into his comedy whenever he had the opportunity. City Lights is the movie where he earns every bit of it. While its structure resembles Chaplin’s usual picaresque format, there’s more of a deliberate purpose as the tramp tries to help a poor, blind flower girl, played adorably by Virginia Cherrill. Harry Myers also deserves a mention for his performance as the millionaire who’s generous when he’s drunk and can’t remember his good deeds when he’s sober.

 


41. Strike

Year: 1925
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Stars: Maksim Shtraukh, Grigori Aleksandrov, Aleksandr Antonov
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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While Sergei Eisenstein is best known for his theories on and use of montage, Strike is most engaging for its dazzling camera trickery. Eisenstein shoots reflections, brings still photos to life and dramatically captures the ill-fated attempt of workers to rise against their exploitative employers. Of course, he still gets in his trademark pointed editing, such as juxtaposing the strikers with the rich factory heads who are “considering” the workers’ demands.

 


42. Harlan County USA

Year: 1976
Director: Barbara Kopple
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Kentucky, 1974. Brookside coal miners have tried to unionize, and their company, fearing a domino effect, refuses to sign their contract with the union, setting a 10-month strike into motion. Barbara Kopple and her mostly female crew made their Oscar-winning documentary after spending years with the miners, bravely following them to the picket line in spite of threats from company “scabs.” As a result, the scenes Kopple and her crew are privy to are riveting; she is knocked sideways in a hail of bullets, and witness to the solidarity as well as the squabbles of the tough-minded coalition of miner’s wives. It seems prescient that so much of the focus in Harlan County, USA is on women; Kopple seems interested in the ways deeply traditional portions of the U.S. still contained powerful matriarchal figures—women with voices and real political agency. Combining plaintive protest song with displays of the miners’ abject poverty, Kopple underlines the need for Brookside mining company to improve its workers’ living conditions—or else. —Christina Newland

 


43. Taste of Cherry

Year: 1997
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Stars: Homayoun Ershadi
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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An existential tone poem of exasperating pace and deliberation, Taste of Cherry takes the long way in almost every conceivable fashion. Kiarostami stages a bare minimum of plot in his favorite setting—a moving vehicle—his middle-aged protagonist driving around the dusty roads of the Northern Iranian village of Koker. Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), a Range Rover-driving stoic, surveys stranger after stranger, inviting a few into his car to discuss a low-effort, high-paying job. He needs help committing suicide.

 


44. Close-Up

Year: 1990
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Stars: Hossein Sabzian, Abolfazi Ahankhah, Mahrokh Ahankhah
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Like the incident at the heart of Close-Up, the film itself is something of a well-intentioned con. Hoping only to clarify, and never exploit, Abbas Kiarostami hybridizes the documentary form, asking the people embroiled in an odd bit of tabloid fodder to play themselves. When we engage with art, Kiarostami asks—truly relate to it—aren’t we making it a part of ourselves? And so, through the story of how an impoverished film buff named Hossein Sabzian took on the identity of Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to ingratiate himself with the admiration and friendship of an upper-middle-class Tehran family, Kiarostami allows Sabzian to finally make the art he never thought he could. Cultivated via interviews, courtroom scenes and seamlessly integrated retellings in Kiarostami’s own words, Close-Up’s sense of truth and so-called “fraud” is hopelessly blurred. By the film’s conclusion, in which Sabzian’s story comes full circle and he finally meets the real Makhmalbaf, the intentions behind the impostor’s actions may still be unclear, yet the authenticity of his character feels calmly complete. —D.S.

 


45. Scanners

Year: 1981
Director: David Cronenberg
Stars: Michael Ironside, Jennifer O’Neill, Stephen Lack, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane
Rating: R
Genre: Sci-Fi

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Everything to love about David Cronenberg rests squishy and bulging in Scanners—but this is before The Fly, before VIdeodrome, before Dead Ringers, and long before Naked Lunch—and so everything we love about Cronenberg is in Scanners, squishy and bulging and also with the slight gleam of nascent dew. To be sure, the body horror is egregious, and its tension visceral, but the bonus of Scanners is that, still so early in his career, Cronenberg had an obviously dubious time trying to figure out what kind of films he wanted to make. Sci-fi thriller, old-timey cyberpunk, grody procedural—Cronenberg litters his typical themes of transformation and transmutation throughout a story that, at practically any moment, feels like it could turn completely on its head. A head which would then, in a firework of brains and bone, explode—nothing if a gratuitous sign of genius things to come.—Dom Sinacola

 


46. Amanda

Release Date: July 7, 2023
Director: Carolina Cavalli
Stars: Benedetta Porcaroli, Galatéa Bellugi, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Michele Bravi, Monica Nappo, Margherita Missoni
Rating: R
Runtime: 94 minutes

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What happens when a young woman doesn’t have the requisite female friendships and matriarchal connections to help her navigate the threshold that exists between girlish adolescence and feminine maturity? Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli (who previously wrote the screenplay for Sundance critical darling Fremont, whose director Babak Jalali now serves as her editor) provides such an example with absurdist levity and probing earnestness in Amanda, her directorial feature debut. The title character (rousingly played by Benedetta Porcaroli) is a socially adrift 24-year-old girl staying at her parent’s family home in suburban Italy. The true definition of a NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), she kills time during uneventful days by going to the local moviehouse and fostering one-sided crushes with lanky local alt boys. Despite being a thin, conventionally attractive woman, she can’t help but repel men and women alike, by possessing decidedly un-feminine traits: She’s brusque, boasts a lumbering gait and is prone to inelegant, expletive-laden outbursts (most often at her family’s dinner table). The film’s singular brand of humor is one of its most successful virtues, delivered with deadpan poise by all parties. Sparse but effective visual gags heighten certain interactions, especially one between Amanda and a local grocery clerk. Yet all of the film’s best laughs come from a place of wry observance. Amanda may be predicated on so-called “rich people problems,” but that doesn’t make the heart of the film any less compelling. Cavalli’s directorial eye is as strong as her writer’s wit, a combination that makes for an unusually assured debut. Lightly mocking the plight of the wealthy also offers genuine examinations of work, womanhood and mental crisis, particularly as it pertains to the film’s open-ended opening scene that offers a glimpse into Amanda’s childhood development.—Natalia Keogan

 


47. Pickpocket

Year: 1959
Director: Robert Bresson
Stars: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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The Crime and Punishment-inspired Pickpocket is of a piece with Bresson’s previous masterpiece, 1956’s A Man Escaped. Both hold a single-minded focus on the richly detailed world of the lead character, in this case an aspiring criminal who thinks he’s extraordinary enough to take money from others without any concern for morality or the law. That titular pickpocket, Michel (intentionally played with no emotion by first time actor Martin LaSalle), elevates his love of theft above any of his personal relationships, turning it into an almost euphoric act despite his stone-faced exterior, and one that ultimately leaves him alone. Driven primarily by LaSalle’s narration, Pickpocket is a hermetically sealed glimpse into one criminal’s life, and a dispassionate treatise on morality and responsibility. —Garrett Martin

 


48. The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Year: 1926
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Rating: NR
Genre: Animation, Fantasy

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Lotte Reiniger spent three years moving back-lit cardboard cutouts around to make this animated feature adaptation of the ancient Arabian Nights stories. The characters move with their own unique rhythms, taking on an otherworldly feel. The silhouette format naturally limited what could be communicated via facial details and the like, but that didn’t stop Reiniger from using her careful craftsmanship and design skills to create emotionally expressive body language.

 


49. Desert Hearts

Year: 1985
Director: Donna Deitch
Stars: Helen Shaver, Patricia Charbonneau
Rating: R
Genre: Drama

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Donna Deitch’s classic cowboy love story is in no way an obfuscated part of queer film history, and yet, it bears repeating that Desert Hearts holds up today as a lush, atmospheric and sweeping romance. Every rewatch of buttoned-up professor Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and reckless ranch hand Vivian’s (Helen Shaver) honest, clumsy meet-cute in dusty 1950s Reno yields a new detail to admire—from the lilt of its score, to the embroidered flourishes of its extensive period wardrobe. Though billed as the first major motion picture to portray lesbians in a positive light, it’s clear from Deitch’s need to do her own publicity (and the lukewarm critical reception that nearly buried it) that it’s still up to us to rediscover its legacy.—Shayna Maci Warner

 


50. Children of Paradise

Year: 1945
Director: Marcel Carné
Stars: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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This is the movie Francois Truffaut said he’d revoke his entire oeuvre to have directed. The very fact of its existence seems to contribute to its rather magical quality. (it was filmed in 1945 during the Nazi occupation of France, which of course created significant obstacles for director Marcel Carné.) A historical piece set in the 1820s Paris theater world, it centers on an enigmatic performer named Garence (Arletty) and four men who are drawn to her, each for slightly different reasons. Only one, a mime named Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), has pure intentions: Naturally, he’s the one who gets hurt. Les Enfants du Paradis is a tale of grand passion between men and women, between actors and audiences and between actors and the stages they inhabit—epic, lavish, tragic, enchanting, a film with enormous style. —Amy Glynn

 


51. La Ceremonie

Year: 1995
Director: Claude Chabrol
Stars: Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Director Claude Chabrol is often referred to as the French Hitchcock, but a film like the unsettling La Ceremonie reveals the distinct difference between the two filmmakers. Though Chabrol, like many French New Wave directors, is an admitted devotee of the suspense master (having authored a study of Hitchcock’s work with Eric Rohmer), he went on to develop his own, more understated style. While La Ceremonie is a tale of suspense and psychological drama, it also functions as a portrait of class warfare and a subtle character study. Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) hires Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) as a maid to her family’s estate outside a small French village. The family is initially pleased with Sophie’s hard work until her increasing isolation and clandestine illiteracy create a widening gap with her employers. When a nosy postal worker (Isabelle Huppert) befriends her, the tension begins to slowly rise, leading to a shocking climax. However, anyone seeking Hitchcockian thrills will likely be disappointed. Where Hitchcock built his suspense through mounting stakes in an inherently suspenseful situation (mistaken identity, the early introduction of a sociopath, etc.), Chabrol lets a languid pace and socially awkward interactions establish an unsettling tone. It’s the offhanded nature of the final violence that makes the film so effective. —Tim Sheridan

 


52. Beauty and the Beast

Year: 1946
Director: Jean Cocteau
Stars: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély
Rating: NR
Genre: Fantasy

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Before there were Jerry Orbach and Angela Lansbury voicing animated animate household items, there was Jean Cocteau. This story’s been with us since the 18th century and rendered in countless iterations, so I’ll forego the plot summary and just say: From the fourth-wall-breaking preamble, in which the director entreats the audience to approach the film with inner-child-forward faith in the magic of fairy tales, to the end, Beauty and the Beast remains a treasure of subtle imagery, mesmerizing music, baroque opulence, sexual intensity and total indulgence in fantasy, aided by Jean Marais (Beast) and Josette Day (Belle) delivering enchanting performances. The themes explored here are traditional fairy tale tropes: innocence and greed, the transformative power of love, the fear of the unknown, magic. Cocteau was a celebrated poet as well as a filmmaker, and this is a strong example of how the two crafts inform one another, in the way it harnesses imagery to create metaphorical connections. Weird and powerful filmmaking. —Amy Glynn

 


53. Chocolat

Year: 1988
Director: Claire Denis
Stars: Isaach De Bankolé, Giulia Boschi, François Cluzet
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Romance

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Praising Chocolat, Claire Denis’ first film and a semi-autobiographical story about a white French family living in colonial Africa, Roger Ebert wrote, “It is made with the complexity and subtlety of a great short story, and it assumes an audience that can understand what a strong flow of sex can exist between two people who barely even touch each other.” Such a statement might surprise those who’ve seen the movie, since it neither shows nor overtly discusses sex, but he’s right: The unsaid words in Chocolat could fill volumes. The movie compares that part of the world’s racial divide with the horizon, a steady line separating the sky from the earth. You walk toward it, and it continually moves back. Of all the characters in the movie, the family’s African servant Protée (Isaach De Bankole) best understands the social rules under which everyone lives, but the movie conveys his enormously complex outlook with very little dialogue. He’s a nearly silent presence in a house full of chatter. Chocolat is a movie for adults, in the very best sense. Such maturity might be expected from someone who made her first film at the age of 40, and then after she’d worked as an assistant director for such legendary filmmakers as Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. Denis is the co-writer of all her films, and a wide variety of resources provide inspiration—from Melville and Faulkner to her own experiences growing up in Africa and France. She combines all this in films that are both incredibly cohesive and truly cinematic. Where a novelist might describe what a character is thinking, Denis will convey something similar in a fleeting shot with a nuanced perspective. —Robert Davis

 


54. Three Colors: Blue

Year: 1993
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Stars: Juliette Binoche, Benoit Régent
Rating: R
Genre: Romance

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Using the colors blue, white and red as the focus of his “Trois Couleurs” trilogy, Krzysztof Kieslowski manifests the ideals of the French Republic—liberty, equality, fraternity—through zealous accuracy. The atmospheres presented in each film are highlighted by the scores written by Zbigniew Preisner, Blue probably being the most important of all, musically. In this first entry, the viewer is introduced to Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche), the sole survivor of a car crash in which her husband and daughter were killed. Her husband was the famous composer Oliver Benoit (Benoit Régent), who had been working on a score to celebrate the European unity at the end of the Cold War, and Oliver’s music accompanies Julie’s daily struggles, taking on different tones depending on the circumstances surrounding her. Following her family’s death, as an act of defiance, Julie destroys the score, rids herself of all her possessions and moves to Paris, avoiding all memories of the past—taking only her daughter’s blue chandelier. In each film of the trilogy, one object links them to the past: the blue chandelier, the bust of the protagonist’s lost love in White, and in Red a fountain pen which plays an important role. A recurring image seen throughout Blue is that of people falling, suggesting that of all of the films, Julie’s process of letting go, of finding the “freedom” of the trilogy’s three ideals, may be the most emotionally obliterating. —Roxanne Sancto

 


55. Fantastic Planet

Year: 1973
Director: René Laloux
Stars: Jennifer Drake, Eric Baugin, Jean Topart, Yves Barsacq
Rating: NR
Genre: Animation, Sci-Fi

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It doesn’t matter if you’re watching René Laloux’s excellent, eccentric Fantastic Planet for the first time or the fortieth, under the influence or stone sober: The film is such a one-of-a-kind oddity in cinema that each viewing feels like its own wholly unique experience. Put simply, there’s nothing quite like it. If you’ve yet to see this masterwork of 1970s psychedelia-meets-social-commentary, you’re missing out. If you have seen it, chances are you haven’t seen anything quite like it since, because there isn’t much in animated cinema to match it. The closest you’ll get is Terry Gilliam’s paper strip animation stylings in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or maybe the still painting approach of Eiji Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness. Neither of these equate with Fantastic Planet’s visual scheme, though, which just underscores its individuality. Where does a movie like Fantastic Planet come from? How does it even get made? Laloux has offered few answers over the years, though the documentary Laloux Sauvage holds some insight into how his mind works. Maybe the answers aren’t worth pursuing in the first place, and maybe the best way to understand Fantastic Planet is just to watch it, and then watch it again. —Andy Crump

 


56. Pigeons in the Square

Year: 1982
Director: Jean Painlevé
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Jean Painlevé’s art saw artistry and a distinct aesthetic as inseparable from documentation of animal life. This is exemplified best in Square, his final public film which, after years of voiceover-only appearances, at last featured the director on camera. Painlevé is repeatedly shown in a local park teaching children about the habits and history of the common pigeons who surround humanity. A scene of the children imitating the pigeons’ odd movements is simply delightful. Classic techniques like slow motion, reverse motion, and long close-ups are used to not only teach the viewer the history and features of the birds, but to change common perception of them. Pigeons are often stereotyped as dirty and mindless, but the film photographs them at play with a ball (complete with excited play-by-play commentary), mating and enduring lonely exile from the humans they once served. The final sequence of the birds flying is a classic Painlevé moment: Humans seeing a familiar part of the natural world transform before their eyes into something alien, and often quite beautiful.—C.M. Crockford

 


57. The Rules of the Game

Year: 1939
Director: Jean Renoir
Stars: Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy, Drama

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When Rules of the Game—Jean Renoir’s angry satire against the contempt the bourgeoisie displays for the working class—was first shown to an audience, a man who heard of the film’s supposed communist message tried to start a fire. In an interview that can be found on the film’s Criterion release, Renoir tells this story, adding that if someone is willing to burn down a theater to destroy your work, you must have done something right. Rules of the Game operates as an ensemble melodrama about the various secret and not-so-secret love affairs between a group of upper-crust stereotypes, but underneath this straight genre veneer lies a brutally honest takedown of ruling class apathy. Renoir meticulously and gradually exposes his characters’ narcissism, until the film’s climax presents us with a sociopathic choice made between supposed best friends. Yet, as much as he obviously sympathizes with the plight of the working class serving the rich, Renoir doesn’t let them off the hook either, portraying their impulsive and brutish behavior as potentially one of the reasons behind their station in life. Despite all of that, Rules of the Game is not a joyless experience, but a refreshingly honest take on romance between classes—as well as an early cinematic exploration and exposing of the intractable human nature behind income inequality and class warfare. —Oktay Ege Kozak

 


58. Godland

Year: 2022
Director: Hlynur Pálmason
Stars: Elliott Crosset Hove, Vic Carmen Sonne, Ingvar Sigurdsson
Rating: R
Genre: Drama

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A brutal battle between brittle doctrine and flexible conviction, Godland sees Hlynur Pálmason transplant a religious conflict of Scorsesian proportions to the majestic vistas of Iceland. Elliott Crosset Hove plays Lucas, a Danish priest traversing the island without any skills (including the language skills needed to speak to his prospective flock), who weathers all the conditions naturally occurring because of his spiritual-colonial hubris, running himself ragged on the long road to apostasy. Hove’s foil, gruff and capable guide Ragnar brilliantly played by Ingvar E. Sigurðsson, embodies the natural equilibrium of an undisturbed society (his physical feats matched beat-for-beat by montages of waterfalls, ice floes, and the changing of the seasons — all stunningly lensed by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff). As the friction mounts between this arrogant doofus (whose frailty and unwieldiness is symbolized by his photography hobby) and the world he’s stumbled into, Pálmason mostly avoids obvious conflict in favor of a lavish, lush, luxurious unraveling. Life moves forward, regardless of how we live it. We can hold fast to the strictness of scripture, or relax for once in our lives, embracing a warmer sense of community. Along the way, we can capture the beauty we see, care for the dogs we find, and show compassion to those around us. We can curse the ice we tread, or respect it. But our end, Godland assures us, is already written.—Jacob Oller


59. Claire’s Knee

Year: 1970
Director: Eric Rohmer
Stars: Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu, Béatrice Romand
Rating: NR
Genre: Romance

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Eric Rohmer’s 1970 Claire’s Knee—part New Wave, part standalone curiosity—has a bit of a strange plot: A diplomat vacationing in the French Alps (Jean-Claude Brialy) becomes obsessed with touching the knee of a local teenage girl (Laurence De Monaghan). I wish that description sounded less uncomfortable and borderline perverse, but I’d hasten to add that this desire does not represent the substance of the film. Instead, Rohmer’s produced an aching look at the passage of time, and the melancholy produced by the interplay between love and obsession. Though the protagonist here is not a monster of Humbert Humbert’s ilk, the way Rohner evokes these emotions is reminiscent of Lolita, in the sense that sexuality is only a subtext for something deeper. I’ve never seen a film with more beautiful pacing, that accomplishes such a modest plot turn with such patient, inexorable rhythm—it’s no surprise that the New York Times’ Vincent Canby called this “something close to a perfect film.” —Shane Ryan

 


60. Playtime

Year: 1967
Director: Jacques Tati
Stars: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Georges Montant
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy

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Excepting people with rural dispositions, we’ve all visited unfamiliar cities at one time or another, puttering about their streets in discombobulated states. That experience is the core of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, his fourth venture as his most famous character, the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, here taking a jaunt to Paris and finding it unrecognizable on his arrival. He understands Paris as an abstract idea and as a place in his memories, but he can’t get his head around the Paris of the film’s present tense. In Playtime, any metropolitan city in Europe could stand in for Paris. Only fleeting glimpses of La Ville-Lumière reminds us of Tati’s chosen backdrop, and in those instances we feel, as Hulot does, a deep melancholy, a wistfulness for a locus of culture and romanticism long sentimentalized by the movies, and utter despondency at the implications of its cold modernization in Playtime’s frames. If this can happen to Paris, it can happen to any city we hold dear in our hearts. Make no mistake, this is an uproarious comedy and a towering work of cinema, but it’s Tati’s embedded sense of loss that echoes the loudest. —Andy Crump

 


61. Pather Panchali

Year: 1955
Director: Satyajit Ray
Stars: Subir Banerjee, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali is, depending on who you ask, either the saddest movie ever made or one of the saddest, and if you don’t believe the former then you likely believe the latter (unless you are made of stone, but aside from rock golems and Republicans, people tend to be made of flesh and blood). But whether the film makes you weep more or less is, perhaps, besides the point. When we talk about the classics of cinema, we talk about influence, and one note worth making about influence is that it comes in all shapes and sizes: Some movies have impact on a micro scale, others on a macro scale. Pather Panchali’s influence may be best evinced on a micro scale, in specific relation to Indian cinema, presenting a watershed moment that sparked the Parallel Cinema movement and altered the texture of the country’s films forevermore. This, again, isn’t proof of Pather Panchali’s actual substance, though let’s be realistic here: Ray’s masterpiece doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It’s extraordinary on its authentic artistic merits, an aching, vital movie crafted to transmute the harshest rigors of a childhood lived in rural India into narrative. Maybe it’s presumptuous for an American critic with no frame of reference for Pather Panchali’s cultural context to describe the film as “true to life,” but Ray is so good at capturing life with his camera that we come to know, to understand, the life of young Apu, regardless of who we are or where we come from, and isn’t that just the absolute definition of cinema’s transporting power? —Andy Crump

 


62. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

Year: 1971
Director: Melvin Van Peebles
Stars: Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales
Rating: R
Genre: Thriller

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The genre that Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song reinvented was really that of independent filmmaking in general, even as it was at the same time the foundational film in establishing the idea of “blaxploitation.” It’s just a movie that no major studio of the day would have touched with a 10-foot pole—too scandalous, too sexual, too unorthodox and starring a predominantly black cast, it didn’t look like anything else one would see in theaters at the time. The film’s statement, as much as any of its social ones, was that a market did exist for these films. Despite being initially screened in only two theaters, it went on to make $4.1 million in its first theatrical release on a practically nonexistent budget, spurring a new generation of low-budget action films centered around black protagonists.—Jim Vorel

 


63. Tokyo Story

Year: 1953
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Stars: Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Tokyo Story could be described as a film about regrets. It could also be described as a film about disappointment, or the speed at which families drift apart, or modernity’s absolute indifference to custom and tradition and the old ways. But maybe just save yourself some time and some word count and describe it as a film about life, orchestrated by one of cinema’s most revered masters, Yasujiro Ozu, a director who spent his career making exquisitely calibrated but deceptively simple films. You don’t need to be an insufferable cinephile to enjoy an Ozu movie, especially Tokyo Story, undoubtedly his most accessible, though it does help; this makes him a great gateway filmmaker for anyone looking to increase their appreciation of cinema, and Tokyo Story his gateway film. Its aesthetics are pristine, its performances poignant and powerful, but the most impactful quality Ozu brings to his narrative of intergenerational divide is the passage of time, hours, days, weeks, months, years, all neatly articulated in two plus hours of running time. By the time it all ends, you’ll feel like you’ve lived a life with the Hirayama clan, too. —Andy Crump

 


64. Godzilla

Year: 1951
Director: Ishiro Honda
Stars: Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi, Akihiko Hirata
Rating: NR
Genre: Sci-Fi

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It’s amazing, isn’t it, how something so seemingly childish and flat-out dopey on paper could be as substantive, and as enduring, as Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla? Hire a couple of actors and have them alternate donning an unwieldy rubber monster suit, and then let them stomp all over a miniature Tokyo set, smashing buildings with wild abandon, and presto: Just like that, you’ve made unexpected movie history. However silly Godzilla sounds when broken down into its component parts, it remains every bit as meaningful today as it did back in 1954, less than a decade after the U.S. of A. dropped nuclear ordnance on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a colossal and nightmarish metaphor for the horrors of nuclear warfare. The King of the Monsters’ first major outing spawned legions of imitators and about as many sequels and spin-offs and reboots—we’re still making Godzilla movies, after all, and will continue to if Warner Bros. has anything to say about it – but there’s only one Godzilla movie that matters, Honda’s, a film awash in the fears of a nation and ablaze with radioactive nihilism. —Andy Crump

 


65. Stagecoach

Year: 1939
Director: John Ford
Stars: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine
Rating: NR
Genre: Western

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And just like that, with one swift zoom shot, John Ford gave John Wayne his breakthrough role and reintroduced American audiences to the man who would become one of their most lasting movie icons. Two Johns, making it happen. Stagecoach isn’t exactly a John Wayne movie despite the fact that John Wayne is in it; this was before the days of The Searchers, of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, of The Quiet Man, even of Hondo, movies that each helped shape Wayne’s persona and forge his screen legend bit by bit. In Stagecoach, he’s just a man with a rifle, a mission of vengeance and a soft spot for a prostitute named Dallas. Rather than the tradition of Wayne, the film belongs to the tradition of strangers on a journey; it’s about an unlikely and incongruous grouping of humans banding together to make it to a common destination. They ride a dangerous road, but Ford’s great gift as a filmmaker is his knack for making peril buoyant and entertaining, and in Stagecoach he does both effortlessly. —Andy Crump

 


66. Late Spring

Year: 1949
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Stars: Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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If you want to know what an artist’s critique of postwar censorship in Allied-occupied Japan looks like, just watch Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring and keep your eyes peeled for the Coca Cola sign. Late Spring isn’t about American control of Japanese territories in the 1940s; rather, it’s about a father and daughter going about their business within that world, a film that honors minutiae and celebrates the mundane with superlative grace. (It’s also the blueprint for an entire niche of movies, the shomin-geki, a genre in Japanese film, television and theater that favors realism and which portrays the lives of working class Japanese families.) But folded within the tale of Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu) and Noriko Somiya (Setsuko Hara) lie a handful of barbs aimed at censorship protocols imposed upon Ozu during Late Spring’s production, which is itself a nod to the kind of tension Japanese citizens had to live with every single day of the occupation. The truest mark of the film’s brilliance is its accessibility: Even if you know zip about postwar history, you’ll be dazzled by Ozu’s unparalleled discipline as a filmmaker, charmed by Hara’s wonderful performance, and moved by the themes present in the fabric of the narrative, especially its painful depiction of what it means to let go of the ones we love most. Such is Ozu’s skill as a director that he can devastate us just by filming a man peeling an apple, a perfect image that captures Late Spring’s compassion with heartbreaking clarity. —Andy Crump

 


67. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

Year: 1949
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Otto Wernicke, Oskar Beregi, Sr.
Rating: NR
Genre: Thriller

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Psychologist Stanley Milgram’s landmark study Obedience To Authority suggested human beings are easily led to do horrible things, especially when a domineering figure is calling the shots. Years earlier, director Fritz Lang came to a similar conclusion with his masterful The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), now available in a fine two-DVD set. By the time Lang made Testament he’d been incorporating the figure of evil authority into many of his films. He contributed to script development for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and went on to explore the theme in Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). But for Testament, Lang revived the figure of Mabuse, expanding the role of the twisted überman, whose mad genius and hypnotic power prove irresistible even to medical science. The film begins with Mabuse confined to an asylum, spending his days in a catatonic state and scribbling his plans for an “empire of crime.” As his blueprint for anarchy begins to come to life in a string of illegal acts, the dogged Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke reprising his colorful role from M) is called in to crack the case. Lang’s sly incorporation of elements from another great German commentary on totalitarianism, Dracula, makes his intentions all the clearer (including hypnotism and the clear parallel to the lunatic Renfield in the role of Hofmeister). It’s no surprise Joseph Goebbels immediately banned the film, causing Lang to flee Germany and the Third Reich. With impressive bonus material, such as filmed interviews with Lang, supporting actor Rudolf Schündler and Mabuse expert Michael Farin, the set offers a particularly enlightening view into one of the great fascist cautionary tales ever committed to film. It doesn’t hurt that it’s also an endlessly entertaining potboiler. —Tim Sheridan

 


68. Defending Your Life

Year: 1991
Director: Albert Brooks
Stars: Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant, and Buck Henry
Rating: PG
Runtime: 112 minutes

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Miller wakes up in a version of the afterlife, a place called Judgment City, where he has five days to defend his life in a court-like proceeding involving two judges, a prosecutor and his own defender, played to a tee by Rip Torn. 1991’s Defending Your Life, Brooks’ fourth directorial effort, gave a comforting picture of a regular man in the afterlife and sifted through the idea that we all live fear-plagued lives. Defending Your Life which only made around $16 million at the box office but garnered critical acclaim, features understood staples of Brooks’ earlier work and his films still to come: Opening scene speeches, plenty of cameos (or bit parts by known actors) and time spent driving, and a central relationship surrounding Brooks and a woman he (desperately) needs. As always, Brooks skewers a version of himself, exposing parts of his own psyche and personality that negatively impact him and others he loves. Defending Your Life remains Albert Brooks’ directorial peak, a signal that the filmmaker matured beyond the lighter satire of Modern Romance and his Esquire article, each with a decade of progress between them. It contains a sweet combination of relatability and story singularity that Brooks learned from his early projects yet struggled to capture again. His comedy was refined, not relying on physicality or manic energy to find a laugh, thanks in part to his own subtle performance. Defending Your Life becomes worthy of near-endless rewatches, packed with comfort, Brooksian wit, understated acting and an example of a filmmaker evolving in his ability to resonate with audiences. In a diverse career filled with peaks for Brooks as actor, director and writer–who else could pull off both Drive and Finding Nemo?–Defending Your Life becomes one for the three’s intersection, an endearing portrait of the afterlife by a man working at the height of his powers.

 


69. Battleship Potemkin

Year: 1925
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Stars: Aleksandr Antonov, Grigori Aleksandrov, Vladimir Barsky
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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It’s hard to say what Sergei Eisenstein’s most famous film influenced more: The Soviet spirit or film course syllabi. While the novelty of the film’s montage may be a bit overstated (Abel Gance—and he’s not the only one—played gleefully with rapid editing in La roué a couple years beforehand, and many U.S. films were cutting together exciting action sequences at the same time), there’s a genuine excitement and urgency in this workers’ rallying cry.

 


70. Paris, Texas

Year: 1984
Director: Wim Wenders
Stars: Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski
Rating: R
Genre: Drama

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In a career-redefining performance by Harry Dean Stanton, 1984’s epochal Palme d’Or-winning Paris, Texas also placed West German director Wim Wenders at the fore of the decade’s art-house cinema, a position later cemented by Wings of Desire. Harrowing yet nuanced, breath-catching and heart-rending, infused with a humanity rarely captured on celluloid, none of the film’s emotional power has dimmed in the last quarter-century. No wonder it was reportedly a favorite of everyone from Kurt Cobain to Elliott Smith, and an artistic touchstone for U2’s The Joshua Tree. Wenders’ bleak, unique vision of an emotionally estranged America is a cinematic masterpiece.—Andy Beta

 


71. Police Story

Year: 1985
Director: Jackie Chan
Stars: Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Action

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Remember that scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood drive the Bluesmobile through a mall and wreck it up good? That’s basically what Jackie Chan does to a shopping center in Police Story, except it’s with his own two hands. Seriously, there’s enough breakaway glass in that one, nine-minute fight scene for ten martial arts movies. Chan plays a cop (again) who goes after bad guys (again). Why complicate the plot synopsis any more than that? The only sensible way to rank Jackie Chan movies is simply to focus on the action and the death-defying stunts. Chan has called Police Story his greatest film, and who are we to argue? —Jim Vorel

 


72. Tampopo

Year: 1985
Director: Juzo Itami
Stars: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Koji Yakusho, Ken Watanabe
Rating: NR
Genre: Comedy

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Juzo Itami’s sensual, spiritual and all-around humorous 1985 film Tampopo has long since taken its rightful seat at the table with cinema’s great “food” movies. Like Babette’s Feast and Big Night, Itami’s film explores the consummate role of food—and of the cooking experience—in knitting together the human condition. In terms of story, Tampopo centers on the efforts of its title character (Nobuko Miyamoto) to become a top-notch ramen chef. Surrounding the main storyline are myriad vignettes, mostly unconnected in character and setting, depicting the many ways (sometimes subtle but usually not) the consumption of food is inescapably intertwined with all aspects of our lives. Not every vignette hits the mark, and to modern audiences, some will be more likely to trigger a raised eyebrow, or perhaps an “okay”—I couldn’t help but think of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in that regard. But as a whole, Itami’s film remains a uniquely joyous affair. You may not come away from the film yearning for soft-shell turtles or interested in the sensual reward of passing an egg yolk back and forth, but it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll discover a hankering for ramen. —Michael Burgin

 


73. The Times of Harvey Milk

Year: 1984
Director: Robert Epstein
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Rarely can one historical figure’s story so saliently capture a point of immense cultural transformation, yet director Rob Epstein’s account of Harvey Milk’s time as a San Francisco City supervisor—which, unbelievably, lasted less than a year before he was assassinated by ex-supervisor Dan White—is in itself a brilliant attempt to manifest Milk’s message, stretching the man’s advocacy for human rights into the sphere of documentary filmmaking with a hope and urgency that the gay rights movement had never experienced before. Paying little attention to Milk’s past, Epstein is frank about the ordinariness of Harvey Milk—so much so that his accomplishments sometimes come off like the work of a lucky man who was in the right place at the right time. Still, he was an incredible speaker with seemingly boundless empathy, a true man of the people, and so his story essentially speaks for itself, so much so that the tragedy of his death makes The Times of Harvey Milk as much a testament to his spirit as it is a compelling true crime dissection of why the United States even today seems so unable to escape the bigotry and hate that’s courted us since the beginning. —D.S.

 


74. Vernon, Florida

Year: 1981
Director: Errol Morris
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Errol Morris’s purpose in Vernon, Florida is to let his subjects speak for themselves. The residents of the titular town have a variety of obsessions—turkey hunting, policing, sand growing, philosophizing—and part of the appeal of the film is the way these snapshots of American life feed into one another. But the greater part, I think, is how these specific, precise stories suggest that every one of us, American or not, construct narratives to explain our interests and identities, and how our enthusiasms for specific things can end up sounding exotic and strange when explained in any detail. In other words, the point of the documentary isn’t that these specific people are strange; the point is to explore, depending on one’s perspective, how all human beings are strange. Mark Abraham

 


75. Down By Law

Year: 1986
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Stars: Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni, Ellen Barkin
Rating: R
Genre: Comedy

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What makes Down By Law the quintessential Jarmusch film is in the deliberate exclusion of a sequence most other directors would have turned into their calling card. Two innocent inmates (John Lurie and Tom Waits) are joined by a third prisoner (Roberto Benigni), who is guilty but has a pretty airtight argument for self-defense. While playing cards, they discuss various exciting prison break scenes in film history, which motivates Benigni’s character to mention that he has a foolproof plan of escape. After a scene that references such cinematic moments, Jarmusch directly cuts to the prisoners already running away from prison, having cut the escape sequence all together. Jarmusch succinctly demonstrates that he isn’t interested in action but is far more fascinated by the individual quirks and mannerisms of his characters, while the dialogue that references such other prison break films expresses how deeply American mainstream pop culture has defined a big part of his personality. —Oktay Ege Kozak

 


76. For All Mankind

Year: 1989
Director: Al Reinert
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Al Reinert did mankind a solid by poring over nearly six million feet of film and 80 hours of NASA interviews to piece together an immersive, elegant and above all awe-struck cinematic document of humankind’s first missions to the moon. Laying astronauts’ VO accounts over lunar vistas that even today ply the imagination, For All Mankind is really the only thing Reinert’s known for—though he did write the script for Apollo 13, because duh—and even then he acts more like an expert curator than a director. Yet, there is an intimate, intuitive grace to the voices he chooses, and the quotes he places delicately throughout, splicing the astronauts’ insightful testaments to wonder and the fragility of life with mundane descriptions of how to go pee in space. Plus, having Brian Eno compose an original score for the film was nothing less than a genius decision. More than a necessary historical record of our species finally pressing into the incomprehensible beyond, For All Mankind is a searching glimpse into what it’s like to be—on the simplest of levels—in the midst of an experience you desperately want to keep with you forever. Because, for all of the prestige and unbelievable luck attached to their being on such missions, the astronauts in this film are portrayed as uncomplicated, good-natured men—and really only that. In their ordinary lives aboard the shuttle, in the countless hours they spend spinning junk through zero gravity, in the way they pull some dumb fun out of playing the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey—in all of that Reinert finds a perfect way to portray both the immensity of their accomplishments and the insignificance of so-called “mankind” against the vastness of the universe we’ve only begun to explore. —D.S.

 


77. M

Year: 1931
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Gründgens
Rating: NR
Genre: Thriller

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It’s rather amazing to consider that M was the first sound film from German director Fritz Lang, who had already brought audiences one of the seminal silent epics in the form of Metropolis. Lang, a quick learner, immediately took advantage of the new technology by making sound core to M, and to the character of child serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), whose distinctive whistling of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is both an effectively ghoulish motif and a major plot point. It was the film that brought Peter Lorre to Hollywood’s attention, where he would eventually become a classic character actor: the big-eyed, soft-voiced heavy with an air of anxiety and menace. Lang cited M years later as his favorite film thanks to its open-minded social commentary, particularly in the classic scene in which Beckert is captured and brought before a kangaroo court of criminals. Rather than throwing in behind the accusers, Lang actually makes us feel for the child killer, who astutely reasons that his own inability to control his actions should garner more sympathy than those who have actively chosen a life of crime. “Who knows what it is like to be me?” he asks the viewer, and we are forced to concede our unfitness to truly judge. —Jim Vorel

 


78. The Thin Blue Line

Year: 1988
Director: Errol Morris
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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A little after midnight on Nov. 28, 1976, Dallas police officers Robert Wood and Teresa Turko made a routine traffic stop for a car driving without headlights. When Wood approached the vehicle, the driver pulled a handgun and shot him five times. The car sped off into the night while Turko fired hopelessly in its wake and Wood died at her feet. A cop killer was on the loose in Dallas. Turko’s recollections of the driver were meager, and 50 investigators worked through the sparse clues without a single witness. But less than a month later, on Dec. 21, Dallas police arrested Randall Dale Adams, a 28-year-old itinerant laborer from Ohio. Though Adams claimed his innocence, a jury found him guilty and the judge handed him the death sentence. The man once branded in court as “Charles Manson” was safely locked away. Dallas breathed again. Nine years later, in 1985, a documentarian named Errol Morris drifted into town from New York. Morris had never heard of Randall Dale Adams; he was in Dallas to speak to a doctor. By the time Morris left three years later, he had freed an innocent man, identified a murderer, uncovered widespread corruption and earned death threats, law suits and debt. He had also made one of the finest documentary films of all time—a nimbly stylized and obsessive pursuit of truth; a study in and a shrug to the pitfalls of myopia; the Serial podcast before podcasts ever existed; an epic story of life, death and the misuse of power that has repercussions to this day. He called it The Thin Blue Line. —Neil Forsyth

 


79. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Year: 1972
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Stars: Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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The austerity of German New Wave’s enfant terrible and ridiculously prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s emotionally sadomasochistic romance/character study is a bit of a joke. In the tormented relationship between Petra (Margit Carstensen), her muse Karin (Hanna Schygulla) and Petra’s silent and subservient assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann) is an air of deadpan terror and eroticism. Fassbinder distributes power unequally amongst the trio: Karin has her way with Petra, going hot to cold from one line to the next, while Petra regularly dismisses and disregards Marlene. The women around Petra von Kant—her mother, her friend, her daughter—all look back with varying amounts of awe and disgust as they recount their own interpersonal relationships and how those relationships are connected to Petra’s sense of self. For a fashion designer as haute as Petra, the archness of her affairs contrasts with her carefully designed looks, as each of Fassbinder’s characters bounce between the humanity of vulnerability and the artificiality of their cruelty. —Kyle Turner

 


80. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Year: 1992
Director: David Lynch
Stars: Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Moira Kelly, David Bowie, Kiefer Sutherland, Chris Isaac
Rating: R
Genre: Drama

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In retrospect, in light of The Return, David Lynch’s prequel to the Twin Peaks series emerges as an extraordinarily compassionate prayer in the midst of the director’s canon. If 25 years ago Fire Walk with Me bore a reputation for unnecessary brutality, nihilism even—booed at its Cannes premiere and a box office failure—today its brutality seems more necessary than ever, the depths of its bleakness matched only by just how deeply felt Lynch’s characters develop on screen. Everything, of course, feels weird, and somehow unsafe, though the horror we witness Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) survive and then succumb to is both rendered in all of its terrible boldness and tempered by Lynch’s inability to exploit the tragedy he unfolds. This last week in Laura Palmer’s life, before she’s killed and bound within plastic, an image which still seems strange making it onto network TV then—this last week in Laura’s life passes with ever creeping intensity, malignant energies converging upon a poor girl’s soul. We learn the identity of her killer, though we probably should have known all along, because this is a David Lynch film, and the graphic, upsetting shitty absurdity of reality is always hiding in plain sight. Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Isaac are there too, playing FBI agents just as quirky and inevitably lovable as Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan); Agent Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie) emerges from nowhere at a Philadelphia FBI building, then disappears as if ripped from our reality into another. Fire Walk with Mepretty much works that way: People—especially “women in trouble,” a Lynch favorite—cross over into the film from different worlds regularly, usually carried by pain and trauma, two powerful forces that Lynch uses against women at the hands of men, who are all pretty much vessels for evil, except for those in the FBI, who are damn good folks. Is it misogyny? Maybe, though Lynch seems to really hate men more than anyone else. —Dom Sinacola

 


81. The Brood

Year: 1979
Director: David Cronenberg
Stars: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle
Rating: R
Genre: Horror

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Even by the standards of David Cronenberg, The Brood is a particularly nasty piece of work. This is a meanspirited and misanthropic yarn that blends body horror and science fiction into a new-aged parable of revenge and repressed rage, erupting forth whether we want it to or not. The titular “brood” are a deformed band of what look like dwarf-like children, created not by mad science but new-age psychobabble—a woman turns her latent anger, fear and mental illness into a physical product, which becomes a series of small, psychically linked killer dwarves who are sent out to destroy those who caused her grief. Totally absurd? Oh, 100% accurate, but also just as deeply off putting as you’d expect the work of Cronenberg to be in so many cases. It’s a messed-up metaphor on the destructive power of pent-up bitterness, inspired by Cronenberg’s own rancorous divorce. —Jim Vorel

 


82. Kwaidan

Year: 1964
Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Stars: Rentaro Mikuni, Tatsuya Nakadai, Katsua Nakamura, Osamu Takizawa, Noboru Nakaya
Rating: NR
Genre: Horror

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Ghost stories don’t get much more gorgeous than the four in Masaki Kobayashi’s sprawling Kwaidan. Between two acerbically political and widely lauded samurai epics, Hara-kiri (1962) and Samurai Rebellion (1967), Kobayashi led what was then Japan’s most expensive cinematic production ever, an anthology film with its parts loosely connected by Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of Japanese folktales and Kobayashi’s intuitive penchant for surreal, sweepingly lush sets. In “The Black Hair,” a selfish, impoverished ronin (Rentaro Mikuni) abandons his wife to marry into wealth, only to realize he made a dire mistake, plunging him into a gothic nightmare of decay and regret. “The Woman of the Snow” follows a craftsman (the always welcome Tatsuya Nakadai) doomed to have everything he loves stolen from him by a patient bureaucratic specter. The movie-unto-itself, “Hoichi the Earless,” pits the titular blind monk musician (Katsua Nakamura) against a family of ghosts, forcing the bard to recite—in hushed, heartbreaking passages on the biwa—the story of their wartime demise. Rapt with indelible images (most well known, perhaps, is Hoichi’s skin completely covered in the script of The Heart Sutra to ward off the ghosts’ influence), “Hoichi the Earless” is both deeply unnerving and quietly tragic, wrung with the sadness of Kobayashi’s admission that only forces beyond our control hold the keys to our fates. The fourth, and by far the weirdest, entry, “In a Cup of Tea,” is a tale within a tale, purposely unfinished because the writer (Osamu Takizawa) who’s writing about a samurai (Noboru Nakaya) who keeps seeing an unfamiliar man (Kei Sato) in his cup of tea is in turn attacked by the malicious spirits he’s conjuring. From these disparate fairy tales, plenty of fodder for campfires, Kobayashi creates a mythos for his country’s haunted past: We are nothing if not the pawns of all those to come before. —Dom Sinacola

 


83. Burden of Dreams

Year: 1982
Director: Les Blank
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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Werner Herzog is no stranger to the ecstatic toil of movie-making, and so it comes as no surprise that one of the greatest films ever filmed about filmmaking is Les Blank’s The Burden of Dreams, a documentary ostensibly about the harrowed making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo in the jungles of South America, and really about, like Hearts of Darkness, what an artist is willing to do to wrench his or her vision free from the mind’s morass. Herzog, an experimental documentarian in his own right, seems to at times toy with Blank, posturing himself as a madman on the brink of a psychotic break, unleashing one bout of intimidating crazy talk after another; years later, Blank admitted as much on his end, claiming that he fussed with the film’s vérité style, asking Herzog, for example, to repeat rants the director once shared off-camera. Whether Herzog’s playacting or not, his horrific monologues only service the narrative Blank’s building: that sometimes an artistic vision must be seen through, no matter the cost. Whether Blank was instigating drama in the director’s reality or not, Herzog was on board: the audience must understand the seriousness of his vision.—D.S.

 


84. Persona

Year: 1966
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Stars: Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Ingmar Bergman didn’t seem to have any answers to the questions he raised in this film or those raised in many of his others. But he kept asking them, and he had a knack for bringing his stories to an appropriately dramatic conclusion without cauterizing all of his characters’ wounds. He was a smooth, precise director, but one who—unlike Antonioni—worked within the conventions of film grammar rather than pressing at the medium’s edges…most of the time. My favorite Bergman film, Persona, not only acknowledges this medium but rips it wide open. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson—two actresses who worked with Bergman many times—play a stage actress and a nurse, respectively. The actress has had a breakdown and been rendered mute in the middle of a performance, and she’s recuperating at a seaside cottage. This simple plot is the skeleton for a very complex examination of identity and psychology. The two women seem to merge at certain points—perhaps they’re two sides of the same woman—and their histories bleed into the present through a variety of cinematic techniques, from the first shot of a projector lighting up and being threaded with film, and the moment in the middle, when the film seems to burn and run in reverse, to the famous, dazzling montage that seems to unearth the unconscious. Persona doesn’t reveal its meaning easily, and it’s open to a number of interpretations. But it’s noteworthy that the actress in the film works on the stage. Bergman was forever balancing the world of the theater with the world of film; he was an artist with a split personality.—Robert Davis

 


85. Dos Estaciones

Release Date: September 9, 2022
Director: Juan Pablo González
Stars: Teresa Sánchez, Rafaela Fuentes, Tatín Vera, Manuel García-Rulfo
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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The lush, rolling hills of Western Mexico set the scene in Juan Pablo González’s Dos Estaciones, the director’s first foray into narrative filmmaking. More specifically, the rows of agave plants that speckle these highlands are what bring the film into sharp focus, as the succulent plant’s most prized byproduct—tequila, named after the town in Jalisco it was first distilled in—is the lifeblood of the film’s namesake, a tequila factory named Dos Estaciones. González takes his sweet time bringing characters and their motivations to the forefront, relishing in the details of the laborious process inherent to producing the coveted spirit coupled with the surrounding natural beauty of his home state. Having grown up in Atotonilco El Alto, Jalisco, across the street from a tequila factory owned by his grandfather, González imbues the film with intimate touches gleaned by a native to the state and its most lucrative industry—blending his sparse yet stirring narrative with the observational eye typical of his previous documentary work. The director’s personal history is also evident in the setting of the titular tequila factory, which is actually owned by González’s extended family. However, for the purposes of Dos Estaciones, the factory’s owner is María García (a superb, shattering performance by Teresa Sánchez). She oversees everyone—from the fieldhands to the women who hand-affix stickers on each bottle—with a brusque directness, yet is clearly respected and admired by her workers despite her inability to promise paychecks on time. Gruff demeanor and dwindling finances notwithstanding, María is a beloved pillar of her community: she loans out her own equipment to workers, regularly supports other local businesses, and even attends the birthday parties of her employee’s kids. Dos Estaciones is Mexican slow cinema that defies conceptions often projected onto the country by Americans, while simultaneously criticizing the role the U.S. has played in destabilizing a vital industry in its financial and cultural infrastructure. Whether a tequila factory is owned by American corporations or a local independent business, those responsible for the laborious process of actually making tequila will likely always be Mexicans. What was once a mode of production that sustained a community is now having its resources depleted, with all gains flowing into one corporation’s pocket instead of the land which cultivated it—certainly something to keep in mind before buying Kendall Jenner’s recently launched tequila brand.–Natalia Keogan

 


86. Carnival of Souls

Year: 1962
Director: Herk Harvey
Stars: Candace Hilligoss, Herk Harvey
Rating: NR
Genre: Horror

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Carnival of Souls is a film in the vein of Night of the Hunter: artistically ambitious, from a first-time director, but largely overlooked in its initial release until its rediscovery years later. Granted, it’s not the masterpiece of Night of the Hunter, but it’s a chilling, effective, impressive tale of ghouls, guilt and restless spirits. The story follows a woman (Candace Hilligoss) on the run from her past who is haunted by visions of a pale-faced man, beautifully shot (and played) by director Herk Harvey. As she seemingly begins to fade in and out of existence, the nature of her reality itself is questioned. Carnival of Souls is vintage psychological horror on a miniscule budget, and has since been cited as an influence in the fever dream visions of directors such as David Lynch. To me, it’s always felt something like a movie-length episode of The Twilight Zone, and I mean that in the most complimentary way I can. Rod Serling would no doubt have been a fan. —Jim Vorel

 


87. Dont Look Back

Year: 1967
Director: D.A. Pennebaker
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary

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“When I made Dont Look Back with Dylan, we just shook hands,” documentary icon D.A. Pennebaker said in 2011. “It was 50/50 … I think that bond means you will be fair about money, but it also means you’re not making the film just for yourself. You’re making it for the subject because it’s all he’ll ever have of that experience, and it should be as true for him as it is for you.” Far from a disposable fan item, Don’t Look Back is a bracing portrait of an artist colliding headlong with both his growing fame and the confusion of those in the press who don’t know how to approach this mercurial young man—or the generation he represented. Most famous for its iconic, much-parodied non sequitur opening—Dylan flipping white cards with lyrics from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—Dont Look Back somehow manages to capture the promise of the decade’s counterculture movement, all embodied in a willful little genius who loved tormenting reporters and Donovan with equally bratty gusto. Explaining the movie’s eternal appeal, Pennebaker used an analogy. “In the ’60s, every kid would buy certain records,” he once explained. “To their parents, the record covers were just pictures. But for [the kids] it was a whole secret symbolic language that told them what kind of dope to smoke, where things were hidden, where to go and all kinds of things they naturally needed to know. Film is one more way you can convey secret information. Dont Look Back provided coded information for people who didn’t want the other generation to know what they were really into. When the older generation looked at it, all they saw was out-of-focus, shaky pictures they weren’t used to.” —Tim Grierson

 


88. Night of the Living Dead

Year: 1968
Director: George A. Romero
Stars: Judith O’Dea, Duane Jones, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, Judith Ridley, Keith Wayne
Rating: NR
Genre: Horror

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What more can be said of Night of the Living Dead? It’s pretty obviously the most important zombie film ever made, and hugely influential as an independent film as well. George Romero’s cheap but momentous movie was a quantum leap forward in what the word “zombie” meant in pop culture, despite the fact that the word “zombie” is never actually uttered in it. More importantly, it established all of the genre rules: Zombies are reanimated corpses. Zombies are compelled to eat the flesh of the living. Zombies are unthinking, tireless and impervious to injury. The only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain. Those rules essentially categorize every single zombie movie from here on out—either the film features “Romero-style zombies,” or it tweaks with the formula and is ultimately noted for how it differs from the Romero standard. It’s essentially the horror equivalent of what Tolkien did for the idea of high fantasy “races.” After The Lord of the Rings, it became nearly impossible to write contrarian concepts of what elves, dwarves or orcs might be like. Romero’s impact on zombies is of that exact same caliber. There hasn’t been a zombie movie made in the last 50-plus years that hasn’t been influenced by it in some way, and you can barely hold a conversation on anything zombie-related if you haven’t seen it—so go out and watch it, if you haven’t. The film still holds up well, especially in its moody cinematography and stark, black-and-white images of zombie arms reaching through the windows of a rural farmhouse. Oh, and by the way—NOTLD is public domain, so don’t get tricked into buying it on a shoddy DVD. —Jim Vorel

 


89. Hausu

Year: 1977
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
Stars: Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Ai Matubara, Kumiko Oba, Mieko Sato, Eriko Tanaka
Rating: NR
Genre: Horror, Comedy

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Oh, how to describe Hausu? Anyone who has seen this crazed Japanese mishmash of horror, comedy and fantasy knows this is no easy task—it’s simultaneously as simple as saying “It’s about some girls who go to a haunted house,” and much more complicated. Hausu has often been described as being “like Jaws, but with a house,” but the comparison isn’t exactly accurate—where Spielberg’s film is classic adventure, Obayashi’s is like a bad acid trip, sporting trippy, day-glo color schemes and mind-bending visuals. Animated cats, disembodied flying heads and stop-motion monsters are all par for the course as Hausu goes for the jugular, seemingly trying to overwhelm the viewer with an all-out assault on the senses. As a piece of modern camp spectacle it’s top tier, but it would be a shame to overlook the genuinely imaginative visual effects and how they would seem to presage the likes of Evil Dead 2 in the years to come. If there’s another film where a woman is eaten by a living, evil piano, I haven’t yet seen it. —Jim Vorel

 


90. Hoop Dreams

Year: 1994
Director: Steve James
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Documentary

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The documentary labeled by none other than Roger Ebert as the single best film of the 1990s alternates often between beautiful and crushing, an intense profile of life in inner city Chicago pitted against dreams of escape—through basketball of all things. The story of two young men recruited by a wealthy, predominantly white high school to play basketball, Steve James’ Hoop Dreams, his first feature, obviously raises serious questions about how modern education exploits race and socioeconomic status, but shot over the course of five years and condensed from 250 hours of footage, the film’s true accomplishment is its sprawl, leaving out seemingly absolutely nothing in its portrayal of multiple families. Yet, that it was snubbed from a nomination in the Academy’s best documentary category, leading to public and critical outcry? It doesn’t get more illuminating, more heartbreakingly real than this. Both of the young Illinois men profiled—William Gates and Arthur Agee—had older brothers gunned down in Chicago street violence in the years that followed the film’s release, one in 1994 and another in 200: The film is never far from the reminder of just how life-saving these dreams can be. —Jim Vorel

 


91. Chungking Express

Year: 1994
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Stars: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung, Faye Wong
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Romance

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Loneliness and the search for connection. Fabrication and the search for authenticity. Despair and the search for meaning. It’s almost as if we’re in 1920s Paris. Instead we’re in 1990’s Hong Kong, though Wong Kar-Wai is less an existential master than a Hemingway or Gertrude Stein. He largely abandons traditional narrative here in service to a more impressionistic study of four characters. We keep expecting for things to happen, waiting for the story to begin, and it never does. It’s as if we as viewers are drawn into the same dilemma as Vladimir and Estragon—or of Wong’s characters.—Michael Dunaway

 


92. Cronos

Year: 1993
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Stars: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook
Rating: R
Genre: Horror

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Even working with a small budget in his first feature film, the vitality of Guillermo Del Toro’s imagination was immediately on full display in Cronos, his Mexican vampire horror drama. Reflecting themes and visual elements that the director has continued to refine in The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak, Cronos is a simply told but visually striking story about an antique shop owner who is slowly and unwittingly transformed into a vampire-like creature after a 450-year-old mechanical device clamps onto his arm and refuses to let go. At first he enjoys the new vitality of the transformation, before other parties come hunting for the device, turning the movie into almost a vampire crime story, as it were. Regardless, Cronos features a very sympathetic vampire at its core, an old man who is simply thrilled by what at first appears to be a new lease on life but eventually requires deadly sacrifices. It’s certainly not Del Toro’s most spellbinding feature, but it was an excellent debut. —Jim Vorel

 


93. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Year: 1990
Director: Pedro Almodovar
Stars: Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril
Rating: NC-17
Genre: Comedy, Romance

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Porn, junk, obsession, madness, coercion and Antonio Banderas? It must be Pedro Almodovar. Critically and popularly successful in Spain, Almodovar’s excursion into the heart of Stockholm syndrome was controversial on its U.S. release, which came around the time the NC-17 rating was established. The story of a mentally ill young man in love with a porn star gone legit, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! uses a fusion of rom-com and horror conventions to explore the metaphorical potential of restraint. Ricky (Banderas) abducts Marina (Victoria Abril) so that he can establish himself as a devoted partner, which obviously requires her being tied up in an apartment so she can give him her undivided attention. And it works; she falls in love with him. Making that dynamic believable is no small feat. Marina, who is acting in a horror film within the film, remarks to her director that it’s “more of a love story than a horror story,” to which the director quips, “Sometimes they’re indistinguishable.” For Almodovar they nearly always are; he’s a master of dark obsessive impulses and desires that defy the conventions of society. —Amy Glynn

 


94. The Player

Year: 1992
Director: Robert Altman
Stars: Tim Robbins, Greta Scaachi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg
Rating: R
Genre: Comedy

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Robert Altman’s cameo-heavy Hollywood satire was rapturously received in 1992, and along with the next year’s Short Cuts it represents his late-career peak. Structured a bit like a film noir, albeit in the shallow, pampered world of movie executives, The Player’s mockery of the business gradually grows warmer until it seems to embrace the schmaltz and insincerity of Hollywood. It’s smart satire with a wicked bite and a couple of great performances from Robbins and Goldberg, and a bonus Burt Reynolds cameo for all you Gator fans.—Garrett Martin

 


95. Metropolitan

Year: 1990
Director: Whit Stillman
Stars: Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, Chris Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, Allison Parisi, Dylan Hundley
Rating: R
Genre: Comedy

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There have been nearly as many “next Woody Allens” in film as there have been “next Michael Jordans” in basketball or “next Bob Dylans” in music, but sometimes the moniker fits. In Whit Stillman’s debut, he staked his claim as the Woody of the upper-class WASPy NYC set and won a whole army of loyal followers. For good reason, too—seldom has any director, regardless of experience, so deftly juggled dialogue that could so easily have delved into too-clever-by-half-isms, or trained such a sympathetic eye on a sometimes questionable nostalgia for the end of an age. Most of all, though, seeing Metropolitan just makes you feel smart and witty and somehow elevated. Not bad for the price of a movie ticket.—Michael Dunaway

 


96. Zodiac

Year: 2007
Director: David Fincher
Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Brian Cox, John Carroll Lynch
Rating: R
Genre: Drama

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I hate to use the word “meandering,” because it sounds like an insult, but David Fincher’s 2007 thriller is meandering in the best possible way—it’s a detective story about a hunt for a serial killer that weaves its way into and out of seemingly hundreds of different milieus, ratcheting up the tension all the while. Jake Gyllenhaal is terrific as Robert Graysmith, an amateur sleuth and the film’s through line, while the story is content to release its clues and theories to him slowly, leaving the viewer, like Graysmith, in ambiguity for long stretches, yet still feeling like a fast-paced burner. It’s not Fincher’s most famous film, but it’s absolutely one of the most underrated thrillers since 2000. There are few scenes in modern cinema more taut than when investigators first question unheralded character actor John Carroll Lynch, portraying prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen, as his facade slowly begins to erode—or so we think. The film is a testament to the sorrow and frustration of trying to solve an ephemeral mystery that often seems to be just out of your grasp. —Shane Ryan

 


97. Walkabout

Year: 1971
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Stars: Jenny Agutter, Lucien John, David Gulpilil
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Walkabout’s narrative follows an Australian sister and brother who encounter an Indigenous boy performing the traditional Aboriginal coming-of-age rite: the walkabout. Based on the James Vance Marshall book of the same name, Edward Bond’s original screenplay totaled 14 pages (barely enough for a short film). In Roeg’s hands, it became a meditation on modern rituals and ancient ones, conflicts between the native Aboriginal and invasive European cultures, human language and storytelling, female and male gender roles and the misunderstanding between them, the cruelty of nature and the madness of the modern world.—Andy Beta

 


98. Certain Women

Year: 2016
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Stars: Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams
Rating: R
Genre: Drama

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Silence speaks volumes in Kelly Reichardt’s films. In works like Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff, she has explored how people spend most of their day thinking, not talking, and that perhaps those quiet moments can be as revealing of character as anything that comes out of their mouths. (And, let’s not forget, even when we speak, we’re rarely saying precisely what we mean.) Reichardt’s less-is-so-much-more approach is again on display beautifully in Certain Women, a series of three barely interconnected stories in which empty spaces are pregnant with meaning and resonance. In the first vignette, a vaguely unsatisfied lawyer named Laura (Laura Dern) must counsel an aggrieved client (Jared Harris) who’s unhappy with the amount of money he’s received in a lawsuit settlement. In the second, Gina (Michelle Williams), a focused wife and mother, is on the search for some limestone for the house she and her disengaged husband (James Le Gros) are building. And finally, a lonely cattle rancher named Jamie (Lily Gladstone) stumbles into a nighttime legal class taught by an out-of-towner (Kristen Stewart), striking up a friendship with the disenfranchised woman. As usual with her films, Certain Women is so delicately but smartly constructed that ecstatic reviews may give people the wrong idea about its greatness. It’s wonderful not because it’s some towering, imposing colossus, but because every small moment feels thoughtfully considered, fully lived-in. Certain Women seeps into the skin and expands in the mind. It leaves you shaken—even though nothing seemingly momentous has happened. Reichardt treats cinema as a kind of meditation, which probably explains why her movies almost never feature traditional endings. Lives are a process, not necessarily a destination, and Reichardt honors her characters’ journey by letting it ebb and flow as it pleases. Like so many of her films, Certain Women is muted and restorative. Suddenly, the real world feels too loud. —Tim Grierson

 


99. The Executioner

Year: 1963
Director: Luis García Berlanga
Stars: Nino Manfredi, Emma Penella, José Isbert
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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It’s a tough life being an undertaker and a tougher life being a garrotter, which just adds to the layers of political commentary in Luis García Berlanga’s The Executioner. Oh, sure, things look pretty sunny for José Luis, el enterrador, but the film is about climbing social and professional ladders, wherein the higher Luis’s lead ascends, the worse off he becomes. He’s got a sweet apartment, a wonderful wife, a pretty awesome father-in-law, and job duties that he rarely if ever has to carry out courtesy of the Spanish government’s capital leniency. But come the day that he actually has to do that job, he freaks out, because anyone would: It’s no small thing to kill a man, and that’s exactly what José Luis gets paid for. How he gets into that kind of a pickle is the sum total of The Executioner’s macabre delights, the film masterfully taking the demonstrably unfunny business of state sanctioned murder and turns it into a black hearted chuckle fest. —AC

 


100. The 400 Blows

Year: 1959
Director: François Truffaut
Stars: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama

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Sometimes a movie can be boiled down to its final shot. The Long Goodbye has Philip Marlowe, unhurriedly strolling down a road in Mexico, playing his harmonica after killing his best friend. 8 1/2 has young Guido, bringing down the lights as he marches along with his flute, sending the audience out of the theater wondering whether his presence affirms life or nods to death. The 400 Blows has Antoine Doinel gamboling about on the coast before François Truffaut’s camera zooms in on the boy’s face, freezing the frame just as his eyes meet with the lens. For anyone who saw Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, that description probably sounds familiar, but this shot has been long-copied since The 400 Blows became a part of the cinematic canon after its 1959 release. (For example: Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, or even George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which both use a similar effect to achieve altogether different ends.) In Truffaut’s film, the shot is meant as a capstone, or, if you prefer, the closing of a book: It’s the climax of one chapter in Doinel’s life, though Truffaut probably didn’t have any thought of making sequels to the film to begin with. Questions linger as the credits roll, and of course they should. When one comes of age, their next age begins, and so The 400 Blows leaves itself open at the last, leaving us to consider what fate may befall Antoine from here. —Andy Crump

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