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The Searchers
(John Ford, 1956) |
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959) Tales from the Gimli Hospital |
Zelig (Woody Allen,
1983) I saw
this when I was around 14, and it was a revelation to me. For the first
time I realized how much distortion our attempts at adaptation could cause
in one's personality. If you are an outright neurotic and have no trouble
admitting it, then Woody Allen should make you feel at home. If you're
thinking of joining the club, then Zelig is the rite of initiation.-- Mariana Cirne |
| Mariana
Cirne When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989) The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966) Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962) |
Myron
Santos Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993) Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973) Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993) The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988) Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953) |
kc
mcauley Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949) Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wallace Worsley, 1923) Romeo and Juliet (Paul Czinner, 1966): "The ballet with Fonteyn & Nureyev" Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936) |
The Battle of Algiers
(Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)
Decidedly partisan against the colonialist French, the film is striking
precisely for the starkness of its political position - both in cinematic
styling and in narrative focus. Pontecorvo's mock photojournalistic technique,
handheld camera, close-up cutting, distance views, and black and white
graininess, and his reliance on primarily non-professional actors in actual
settings, lend more than an air of realism to what turns out to be a treatise
on insurgence, struggle, and persistence. With intent to examine and to
demonstrate, he closes in on the details of urban mobilization and power-base
resistance, the cruelties and savageries consequential to fighting for
a cause, the faces of the victims and the victimizers, and the harsh but
immediate understanding between enemy soldiers. As enthralling as it is
instructive, whether the emotions it raises are of angry disputation or
passionate agreement. You cannot watch without being moved, or without
being moved to think.-- Shari L. Rosenblum |
| Delicatessen
(Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991) 
I'd been down on French films most of my life, mainly because I hadn't
yet discovered Clouzot, and I still haven't invested much time in Truffaut
or Godard. I thought French cinema was mostly unfunny sex comedies. Jeunet
et Caro helped me look beyond that stereotype. Personal impact aside,
I think it's a damn funny, visually stunning bit of Gilliamesque sci-fi.
-- Greg Sorenson |
A
Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951) 
Montgomery Clift is a sensationally handsome and brooding presence in
this melodrama based on Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Monty never
gets his due. It wasn't just Brando and Dean that popularized "the
method." It was Montgomery Clift, Brando, and Dean, thank
you very much. The man needs to be restored to his proper place in the
acting pantheon. This film is in glorious black & white and features one
of the most erotic screen kisses ever filmed. Liz Taylor and Monty were
best friends offscreen but it reads pretty damn lustful on. -- Nathaniel Rogers |
Liquid Sky (Slava Tsukerman, 1982)
"You thought your jeans stood for love, freedom and sexual equality. We,
at least, know we're in costume." A near-perfect slice of underground
80s new wave NYC life (replete with drugs, alternate sexuality, and surreal
fashion), wrapped in an enduring one-joke sci-fi plot, Liquid Sky
was not as widely seen as it should have been, and is ripe for discovery
by a new generation. It's just as outré today as when it was new,
and its playful sense of humor (not to mention a bit of scathing cultural
commentary) may have been lost amidst what little publicity the film got,
which focused on its overt sexuality and frank language. New wave punks,
bicuspid genitalia, opiate-seeking micro-aliens, and jumbo shrimp. Essentially
scandalous. -- Michael Buck |
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Melissa B. Cummings Au Revoir, Les Enfants |
Richard Doyle Ali: Fear Eats the Soul |
Jobanks The Piano |
Holiday (George Cukor, 1938) A
superb Phillip Barry play reworked for the screen by Donald Ogden Stewart
and directed by George Cukor, this film reads like a who's who of classic
30s moviemaking. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant team up, with fine support
from Lew Ayres, Edward Everett Horton, Jean Dixon and oodles of other
kicky character actors. Never stagey, the dialogue here fairly sparkles
and the film clips by at a brisk pace. For my money, the best of the Hepburn/Grant
pairings, definitely featuring the best chemistry between the two of any
of their films together. Also both a clever tolerance and an everyman-style
condemnation of the rich and priveleged, all wrapped up in one entertaining
little package. Oh, and did I mention it's my favorite film ever? -- terri mabry |
Celine and Julie Go Boating
(Jacques Rivette, 1974) Okay,
so there are these two girls. They meet, eat some candy, move into a flat
together, share a bed, share a man, switch personalities, switch identities,
stumble upon a haunted house, meet (or invent) a family of spirits, and
then witness, and eventually participate in, the very theatrical ghostly
goings-on. A surrealistic mess-terpiece of the best sort, where the viewer
is as much a part of the proceedings as the participants. Suspenseful,
funny, with a child-like sense of whimsy, and above all, thoroughly unique.
-- Moné Peterson |
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Sasha Stone Midnight Cowboy |
Devin Rambo The Blue Angel |
Martijn ter Haar The Ballad of Narayama |
All Quiet on the Western Front
(Lewis Milestone, 1930)
Eloquent and tragic, rather than angry and cynical, pieces of it seem
to glisten at the edges of the many anti-war films that have come since.
Though not the first cinematic address against war, there is something
stronger, more committed, in its presentation. It stands on the threshold
between silent and talkie and it makes a most impressive use of sound
effect as moral and emotional punctuation. Its images resonate with equal
power. From schoolboy indoctrination to fate's ironies - the faces of
innocence anxiously rushing to be lost; and then again, new faces, same
rush; shoes passed on from soldier to soldier in a death montage, confrontations
with the other side, locked in, face to face with the dying enemy, or
frolicking in the water with the enemy's women, the danger of forgetting
to fear, and the ultimate irony that underlies the armistice that never
arrives soon enough. As a young child, the fact that the film's subjects
were not Americans or allies, but Germans - our traditional enemy - was
in itself an emotional revelation. There it was, with humanist rather
than political polemic, and it was heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking
still. -- Shari L. Rosenblum |
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Greg Sorenson Dames |
Don Larsson Band of Outsiders |
Les Phillips The Conversaton |
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When
we asked you to submit your picks for the most essential films, we encouraged
you to be as personal as you wished. What we should have known is that
a readers poll, which is based on the number of votes each film receives,
is bound to winnow out the more quirky and individual choices in favor
of movies that more people have seen. So in keeping with the idea of
showcasing personal tastes, we here offer a sampling of comments about
films, from staff and readers, that didn't make the top 100, but perhaps
deserve to be better known. In addition, we have excerpted many of the
lists that were submitted, so as to give an idea of the delightful variety
of film knowledge and appreciation that you offered to CineScene. The
five films that have been excerpted from each list are not necessarily
the top five from that list - they were picked because they fell "outside
the lines" of the CineScene 100, yet in our opinion still deserved
mention. 
I
first saw it when I was about eight, and amongst all the action and
adventure available to a young boy, this had resonance, long before
I knew what resonance was. Didn't even know its title for years, it
was just "that movie with the old guy in the rocking chair." My Dad,
who could take movies or leave them, also felt like this one was special.
Now I see it as the masterpiece many people feel it is, a harsh, melancholy
film of great humanity. Yeah, it's got a few moments where the comic
relief is a bit thick, but have any of you people ever lived on a ranch
in Texas? Real life comedy relief is a helluva lot less realistic than
it is in this film! As much as I love Ford, I like the sentimentalities
of some of his other films much less than the "that's life, now let's
get on with it" spirit that infuses The Searchers. The music
haunts me, as does the eloquent silences when subplots never spoken
rise to stand side-by-side with the spoken substance of the storyline.
After years of viewings, I still never fail to find things of interest
and surprise each time I watch it. 
The essence of this film is Cool. Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is Cool
Cool Cool. Pat (Jean Seberg) is also Cool, not Michel Cool, but
Cool in her own way. Paris is major Cool, and must be the only place
on Earth one can have such a marvelous time scraping for cash and running
from the cops. It is, of course, all a facade which inevitably comes
crashing down, but for a while Michel achieves a singular kind of glory,
and when he has the audacity to fire off a round at the sun, one almost
expects it to drop from the sky in supplication. -- Moné
Peterson
With
a $10K budget and ancient b&w film stock, Guy Maddin channeled the 1930s
and created images mysterious, hysterical, and inexplicably beautiful.
Exploding onto the moribund Soviet film scene with a riotous burst of
color, this extraordinary poetic masterpiece is based on an ancient Carpathian
folk legend of a young man and woman who become lovers despite a blood
feud between their families. A familiar theme, but Parajanov uses it as
a springboard to disrupt conventional narrative. The camera darts and
whirls in seemingly impossible ways. Spatial perspective is as mutable
as our thoughts, while the images are steeped in music and folklore, each
phase of the story boasting a different intoxicating color scheme. All
of which technique is brilliantly designed to take the viewer out of ordinary
awareness and into the mythic realm of the unconscious. Almost forty years
later, Shadows remains both one of the most beautiful and revolutionary
films ever made. 
As formally challenging as Bresson's other work, this film - ostensibly
about a donkey - may be his most humane. Aloof in its objectivity, the
film still manages to evoke compassion for the flawed human beings who
put the burdens of their sins on the beast's back. The final pastoral
pietà is both ironic and deeply moving. 
The most beautiful adventure I've ever seen. I always cry during certain
moments in this movie and my heart also skips a beat when I hear Kim
(Winona Ryder) say: "Hold me," and Edward (Johnny Depp) painfully replies:
"I can't!" 
After fifteen years in which Buñuel couldn't find backers for his
films, and survived by directing an occasional Mexican potboiler, he finally
got his chance. The result was one of the most searing cries of anguish
ever put on film. The dirt-poor street kids in Los Olvidados struggle
to survive in a world of crime and brutality, a world in which they eventually
turn on each other in their rage and impotence. Buñuel delves deeper
into their psyches with unforgettable touches of surrealism - the "mother
meat" dream sequence is justly famous. The film dares to look into
the abyss without offering us any consolation or redemption. It was bitterly
attacked by the Mexican government and press, of course, until it was
showered with awards at Cannes. Then they changed their tune.