Best in Film 2008

Rating: Not reviewed


1. The Dark Knight
While straightforward dramas continue to express post-9/11 and Iraq War concerns with didacticism and histrionics, it has fallen upon genre films like "Children of Men," "Cloverfield" and "The Dark Knight" to be a more accurate reflection of the uneasy state of the world. "The Dark Knight," perhaps even more so than "Children of Men," dares to look through a glass darkly and challenge the liberal and conservative politics that have led to the current general state of fear and loathing. Part of what was so wonderful about the "Dark Knight" phenomenon was how many viewers were willing to meet director Christopher Nolan's probing gaze. Even more firmly rooted in the real, War on Terror world than the already socially conscious "Batman Begins," "The Dark Knight finds Batman (Christian Bale) facing off against the Joker (an electrifying Heath Ledger), who, like the Ra's al Ghul of "Begins," is not-so-subtly presented as an Osama bin Laden stand-in. "The Dark Knight" becomes legitimate pop art by questioning Batman's increasingly murky tactics and morality – where "Begins" was a fight for Gotham City, "The Dark Knight" is a battle for Batman's soul. The film disturbs as much as it thrills: for every exhilarating, Michael Mann-worthy heist and William Friedkin-esque chase scene there are probing questions as profound as those in "Munich" about the loss of the U.S.'s moral authority and if the sacrifice in the name of national security was worth it.

2. Synecdoche, New York
Surreal and psychoanalytical, "Synecdoche, New York," screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's first film as a director, is a creatively unbound examination of unbound creativity and the way such creation can keep artists from living in the real world. As the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind the Spike Jonze-directed "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" and the Michel Gondry-directed "Human Nature" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Kaufman created the neo-surrealist movement, but, even by those standards, he's working on an entirely different level here. Kaufman sets his story in a strange version of Schenectady, N.Y., in which people are in a constant state of decay, live in burning houses and have tattoos that come to life. The film unfurls with Kaufman's unique blending of the absurd and the heartfelt as the playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) retreats from his painful real world of divorce and disease to create an unwieldy play in which he has staged a replica of a city block (and then a replica of a replica of that replica) that's meant to represent the authenticity he can no longer grasp on a personal level. The melancholy would be overwhelming, the weirdness too disconcerting and the meta-psychoanalysis too solipsistic if the film weren't also so profound.

3. In the City of Sylvia
Josι Luis Guerin's "In the City of Sylvia" may have been taken "Rachel Getting Married's" place as the most divisive film of the year if it had actually been given even a modest limited release rather than being confined to the art house ghetto. Assuming the film manages to acquire home video distribution, Guerin's hypnotic tone poem will be studied in film schools as the art work it is. The film (almost literally) follows an artist simply known as "Ιl" (Xavier Lafitte) as he observes the patrons at an art school cafι and then as he pursues a woman (Pilar Lσpez de Ayala) through the streets of Strasbourg in a silent, M.C. Escher version of "Before Sunrise." The slim plot serves as a playful master class of pictorial framing, spatial relationships, cinematic voyeurism and the Kuleshov effect. The film belatedly gives a context to Ιl's pursuit, but the film, for all its intellectually engaging and subtle visual poetry, is always one of yearning, of the hope in the chase.

4. WALL-E
In "WALL-E," the titular robot is an endearing machine reduced to a shadow of its former self as it peddles garbage until a new, flashy, seemingly Apple-affiliated robot brings renewed purpose to its life – the metaphor for what Pixar has done for Disney animation is even more apparent here than it was in 2007's "Ratatouille." "WALL-E" also happens to be radical in more meaningful ways, including daring to think children would be enthralled by a dialogue-free romance between robots that's as heartfelt as "City Lights" and a cautionary tale of pollution, over-consumption and dwindling intellect that echoes but is ultimately more effective than Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" because of its ravishing beauty.

5. Cloverfield
In "Cloverfield," the destruction of New York City at the hands of an H.P. Lovecraft-ian horror is created with an immediate realism that's psychologically rattling through the use of subjective "found footage" that, no mere gimmick, provides an intimacy and empathy Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" attempted with its "everyman" perspective but failed at. "Cloverfield" is elevated to classic status because, like the best horror movies, it addresses current social anxieties. The attack on New York isn't a callous exploitation of 9/11 terror; it's an allegorical examination of the fears imbedded in a generation's psyche since 2001. Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and his friends' expedition through the chaos is an attempt to refuse hopelessness. Rob is a symbol of a generation derided for being apathetic, disengaged from the world and "in clover," as it were, who, against the expectations of his elders, rises to the occasion to save someone he loves. "Cloverfield" captures the video zeitgeist of this generation, but it also portrays its heart.

6. Still Life
Jia Zhangke's "Still Life" takes place in the Yangtze River town of Fengjie that, after 2000 years of existence, is being demolished and flooded as part of the Chinese government's mammoth Three Gorges Dam project. Mineworker Sanming (frequent Jia actor Han Sanming) arrives in Fengjie from Shanxi in search of the wife and child who left him 16 years ago, while nurse Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) searches for her husband so she can file for a divorce. Tellingly, Sanming and Hong are only explicitly connected by an archaeologist, Wang Donming (Wang Hongwei). Sanming, Shen Hong and Donming form a trinity that complexly addresses China's – and man's – relationship with the past. All three seek out the past for closure, but Sanming wants a permanent reconnection, Shen Hong wants to move on and the archaeologist realizes the past is already gone and may not even be able to be saved. Jia and cinematographer Yu Lik-wai gracefully compose the film in images that are as fluid and forceful as the Yangtze itself.

7. Reprise
"Reprise" begins with Norwegian friends Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) placing their respective manuscripts in a mailbox at the same moment, an act that launches the film into a hyper-edited tour de force that's practically a short film unto itself of what their lives could've been if they're simultaneously hailed as the voices of their generation. The rest of Joachim Trier's directorial debut follows the actual fallout of that fateful moment, including the resulting acclaim, mental collapse, critical indifference and failed romances that result. It's an invigorating film about the passion of art and youth that's itself artful and youthful.

8. Rachel Getting Married
The detractors of Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married" find the wedding celebration too over-the-top, the drama too awkward and Buchmann family black sheep Kym (Anne Hathaway) narcissistic to the point of toxicity. But that's the point. The Buchmann's naοvely see the wedding of Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) as an opportunity to wash away the pain of past tragedies, and pain that deep requires an especially desperate celebration. Kym, as the main keeper of the family's sadness, only appears selfish in her constant need to let her family know how persistently she feels remorse for what she did through her self-flagellations. When Kym says she's "Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom this evening" during her rehearsal dinner speech, she's saying as much about her role in the family as she is about being the downer to a good time. True, her grandstanding is self-serving. Then again, so is guilt.

9. The Band's Visit
"The Band's Visit" is a comedy of manners that's a study in hilarious awkwardness comparable to "The Office." Stern Arab Lt. Col. Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai) and his orchestra arrive in Israel to play at the Arab Cultural Center in Petah Tikva, but the band mistakenly ends up in the Jewish desert town of Beit Hatikva that has "no culture. Not Israeli culture, not Arab, no culture at all." With nowhere else to go, the band is kindly taken in by fierce restaurant owner Dina ("Late Marriage" star Ronit Elkabetz) and her unemployed patrons. What's most remarkable about the film is that it's obviously about Israeli-Arab relations, but it never explicitly addresses the tensions between the cultures. The blossoming friendship between Tawfiq and Dina reveals the common ground between the ethnicities, and all people really, in the human attributes of kindness, sorrow and hope.

10. Standard Operating Procedure/Taxi to the Dark Side
Documentarian Errol Morris finds sympathy for the heretofore monstrously viewed soldiers who, the Bush administration would have the public believe, acted independently when they tortured and humiliated Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. "Standard Operating Procedure" portrays Abu Ghraib as a place not where a few soldiers were allowed to run wild on their own accord, but where the soldiers were given orders to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation by any means and were part of a military culture where the torture of Arabs was acceptable and even expected. Morris portrays his subjects with surprising empathy that still acknowledges the atrocity of their actions, showing them to be scapegoats for a military, administration and country that, since 2001, often seems to have lost its moral bearings. The Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side" is the essential flipside to "Standard Operating Procedure." Alex Gibney's film tells the story of Afghan taxi driver Dilawar, who was held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan under suspicion of being the getaway driver for terrorists who attacked an American military camp that morning. Dilawar was tortured for five days before dying from blunt-force trauma. What Gibney details is a Kafkaesque nightmare for those imprisoned in U.S. camps: most of the detainees, like Dilawar, are arrested without substantial evidence by Afghans looking to collect a bounty, and who are never actually charged by American military police. Both films rile up a nation's moral indignation.

11. A Christmas Tale
12. Man on Wire
13. The Witnesses
14. Slumdog Millionaire
15. Milk
16. Waltz with Bashir
17. I've Loved You So Long
18. Paranoid Park
19. My Winnipeg
20. The Duchess of Langeais
21. Elegy
22. Taxi to the Dark Side
23. Wendy and Lucy
24. The Class
25. The Fall
26. The Wrestler
27. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
28. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
29. The Unforeseen
30. The Visitor
31. Nights and Weekends
32. Up the Yangtze
33. Pineapple Express
34. Gran Torino
35. The Last Mistress
36. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
37. Trouble the Water
38. Chris & Don
39. Kung Fu Panda
40. The Strangers
41. Rogue
42. Woman on the Beach
43. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
44. Redbelt
45. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!
46. Be Kind Rewind
47. Encounters at the End of the World
48. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S.
Thompson
49. Teeth
50. The Ruins

Best Actor
Winner: Sean Penn in "Milk"
Runners-Up: Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler"; Ben Kingsley in "Elegy"; Sasson Gabai in "The Band's Visit"; and Richard Jenkins in "The Visitor"

Best Actress
Winner: Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married"
Runners-Up: Michelle Williams in "Wendy and Lucy"; Kristin Scott Thomas in "I've Loved You So Long"; Keira Knightley in "The Duchess"; and Sally Hawkins in "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Best Supporting Actor
Winner: Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight"
Runners-Up: Robert Downey Jr. in "Tropic Thunder"; James Franco in "Pineapple Express" and "Milk"; Mathieu Amalric in "A Christmas Tale"; and Emile Hirsch in "Milk"

Best Supporting Actress
Winner: Penelope Cruz in "Elegy" and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"
Runners-Up: Rosemarie DeWitt in "Rachel Getting Married"; Elysa Zylberstein in "I've Loved You So Long"; Emmanuelle Bιart in "The Witnesses"; and Debra Winger in "Rachel Getting Married"

Best Ensemble
Winner: "Synecdoche, New York"
Runners-Up: "A Christmas Tale," "The Witnesses," "Rachel Getting Married" and "Milk"

Best Director
Winner: Christopher Nolan for "The Dark Knight"
Runners-Up: Josι Luis Guerνn for "In the City of Sylvia," Matt Reeves for "Cloverfield," Andrew Stanton for "WALL-E" and Charlie Kaufman for "Synecdoche, New York"

Best Original Screenplay
Winner: Charlie Kaufman for "Synecdoche, New York"
Runners-Up: Arnaud Desplechin for "A Christmas Tale," Joachin Trier and Eskil Vogt for "Reprise," Dustin Lance Black for "Milk" and Laurent Goyot, Andrι Tιchinι and Viviane Zingg for "The Witnesses"

Best Adapted Screenplay
Winner: Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer for "The Dark Knight"
Runners-Up: Gus Van Sant for "Paranoid Park," Nicholas Meyer for "Elegy," Simon Beaufoy for "Slumdog Millionaire" and Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and Jacques Rivette for "The Duchess of Langeais"

Best Foreign Language Film
Winner: "In the City of Sylvia"
Runners-Up: "Still Life," "Reprise," "The Band's Vist" and "A Christmas Tale"

Best Animated Film
Winner: "WALL-E"
Runners-Up: "Waltz with Bashir," "Kung Fu Panda," "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" and "Bolt"

Best Documentary
Winner: "Standard Operating Procedure/Taxi to the Dark Side"
Runners-Up: "Man on Wire," "The Unforeseen," "Up the Yangtzee" and "Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father"

Best First Feature
Winner: Charlie Kaufman for "Synecdoche, New York"
Runners-Up: Joachim Trier for "Reprise," Eran Kolirin for "The Band's Visit," Philippe Claudel for "I've Loved You So Long" and Alex Holdridge for "In Search of Midnight Kiss"

Best Cinematography
Winner: Natasha Braier for "In the City of Sylvia"
Runners-Up: Michael Bonvillain for "Cloverfield"; Shai Goldman for "The Band's Visit"; Yu Lik-wai for "Still Life" and Anthony Dod Mantle for "Slumdog Millionaire"

Best Film Editing
Winner: Olivier Bugge Couttι for "Reprise"
Runners-Up: Kevin Stitt for "Cloverfield," Chris Dickens for "Slumdog Millionaire," John Gurdebeke for "My Winnipeg" and Nϊria Esquerra for "In the City of Sylvia"

Best Art Direction
Winner: "Synecdoche, New York"
Runners-Up: "The Dark Knight," "Cloverfield," "The Fall," "The Duchess"

Best Costume
Winner: "The Fall"
Runners-Up: "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," "The Duchess," "The Other Boleyn Girl" and "The Last Mistress"

Best Make-Up
Winner: "Hellboy II: The Golden Army"
Runners-Up: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Dark Knight," "Synecdoche, New York," and "The Duchess"

Best Dramatic Score
Winner: James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer for "The Dark Knight"
Runners-Up: A.R. Rahman for "Slumdog Millionaire," Max Richter for "Waltz with Bashir," Jon Brion for "Synecdoche, New York" and Rachel Portman for "The Duchess"

Best Musical or Comedy Score
Winner: Habib Shadah for "The Band's Visit"
Runners-Up: Thomas Newman for "WALL-E," Alex Beaupain for "Love Songs," Randy Newman for "Leatherheads" and Jon Brion for "Step Brothers"

Best Visual Effects
Winner: "Hellboy II: The Golden Army"
Runners-Up: "The Chronicles of Naria: Prince Caspian," "Iron Man," "The Dark Knight and "Cloverfield"

Best Sound
Winner: "The Dark Knight"
Runners-Up: "In the City of Sylvia," "WALL-E," "Cloverfield" and "Iron Man"

Best Sound Effects Editing
Winner: "In the City of Sylvia"
Runners-Up: "WALL-E," "The Dark Knight," "Cloverfield," and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army"

Best Song
Winner: "The Wrestler" performed by Bruce Springsteen in "The Wrestler"
Runners-Up: "Trouble the Water" performed by Kimberly Rivers Roberts in "Trouble the Water," "Up to Our Nex" performed by Robyn Hitchcock in "Rachel Getting Married," "Little Person" performed by Jon Brion in "Synecdoche, New York" and "Down to Earth” performed by Peter Gabriel in "WALL-E"

Best Soundtrack
Winner: "Shine a Light"
Runners-Up: "CSNY Dιjΰ Vu," "Definitely, Maybe," "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" and "The Wrestler"

Biggest Disappointment
Winner: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"
Runners-Up: "My Blueberry Nights," "George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead," "Tropic Thunder" and "Cassandra's Dream"

Most Overrated Film
Winner: "Ballast"
Runners-Up: "Frozen River," "George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead," "Frost/Nixon" and "The Flight of the Red Balloon"

Most Pleasant Surprise
Winner: "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl"
Runners-Up: "The Forbidden Kingdom," "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who," "The Stranger" and "Bolt"

Most Underrated Film
Winner: "Synecdoche, New York"
Runners-Up: "Cloverfield," "The Ruins," "The Fall" and "Be Kind Rewind"

Posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/best.film.2008

Best Albums of 2008

Rating: Not reviewed


1. "Dear Science" – TV on the Radio
It's ironic that the two greatest bands of the decade have "radio" in their names, a medium that has relatively no use for them. While TV on the Radio hasn't done anything as radical as release an album for free on the Internet, it is challenging Radiohead as the band that has created the most wild, paranoid adventures in hi-fi in the 2000s. "Dear Science" is bursting with horns (provided by Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra), handclaps, cold "Kid A" synthesizers, urgency and righteous fury. "Dancing Choose," the best rap song of the year, is a diatribe against the media, advertising and complacency. On "DLZ," singer Tunde Adebimpe laments, "Fuck your war / 'Cause I'm fat and in love / And no bombs are fallin' on me for sure / But I'm scared to death / That I'm livin' a life not worth dying for. All the cynicism, so appropriate in 2006 with the release of "Return to Cookie Mountain," almost seems out of place in the dawning of the Age of Obama (if the hype is to be believed), but on the glorious march of "Golden Age," TVotR prove they still believe in a better place, even if it's coming like a "natural disaster."

2. "Hold On Now, Youngster..."/"We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed – Los Campesinos!
In 2008, Los Campesinos!, riding a wave of hype from the 2007 EP "Sticking Fingers Into Sockets," released "Hold On Now, Youngster..." and "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed" – the former the band's debut LP, the latter a recording the band frustratingly refuses to classify as an album, EP or other official form of follow-up – and both are an exuberant expression of youth making joyful (indie) noises. "Youngster" serves as a full-length introduction to the Welsh septet's wit and blissful music, a blending of shouted choruses, xylophones and rampant guitars. "Doomed" advances the band's modus operandi in every way in songs like the title track and "Miserabilia" that contain more depth – both sonically and lyrically – while remaining just as poppy and clever. This two-pronged attack is a promising sign of great things to come.

3. "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends"/"Prospekt's March" EP – Coldplay
The ability to craft a great pop record is a much-maligned effort in this holier-than-thou indie-centric culture, but for anyone who truly loves music and loves being moved by it there can be no greater accomplishment (though in 2008, two bands did admittedly do it better). Coldplay is now the sole band that consistently produces great pop and the group is unswervingly underestimated because of it. It would be one thing if Chris Martin and Co. had been creatively stagnant and spent the whole of the 2000s rehashing torch songs like "Yellow." To its credit, the band has steadily worked to push its sound forward, slowly evolving it so that its conceivable it could release something on par with "Revolver" or at least (at least!) "Rubber Soul." In the meantime there is "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends," an album that's grandiose yet unpretentious and, thanks to excellent production from legendary producer Brian Eno and Arcade Fire producer Markus Dravs, experimentally rewarding, especially on the colossal orchestration of the title track, the emotional consolation of "Lovers in Japan" and the percussive madness of "Lost!" The "Prospekt's March" EP in some ways outstrips the already great LP with the bonus of "Glass of Water," "Now My Feet Can't Touch the Ground" and "Life in Technicolor II," further proving just how much Coldplay has to offer to those who are willing to embrace great pop.

4. "808s and Heartbreak" – Kanye West
Kanye West's breakup album "808s and Heartbreak" is covered with too much ice for there to be "Blood on the Tracks." Using the Auto-Tuner vocal distorter as an aural distancing effect, West sings and raps about the dissolution of his engagement to Alexis Phifer with a bitterness that hardly invites empathy, though that frozen rage is nonetheless relatable. That's especially impressive given West's lyrics are still flossy. The difference this time, as on the song "Welcome to Heartbreak," is he's lamenting how all the Louis Vuittons and cars can't fill the void left by a broken heart. Compare Pink's "So What" to West's "Amazing" – both are about being rock stars in the wake of breakups, but while "So What" is a bratty middle finger to Pink's ex-husband, West's song is a dirge that undercuts his boasts, revealing being a star is worthless for West without someone to love. "Love Lockdown" is a minimalist and primitive expression of a stopped heart. "Street Lights," in which passing lights serve as a metaphor for passing memories, taps surprising reservoirs of honesty and emotion. On the song, West says, "I know my destination / But I'm just not there." It takes a real man to admit he isn't one yet, and his journey toward maturity should be a rewarding experience for music fans.

5. "Fleet Foxes"/"Sun Giant" EP – Fleet Foxes
With its EP debut "Sun Giant" and self-titled LP debut, Fleet Foxes paints an American pastoral in the colors of folk from the past (Appalachian roots music, sunshiney folk like the Mamas and the Papas and folk-rock like The Band) and the present (Grizzly Bear and Iron & Wine). The Seattle-based quintet, led by Robin Pecknold's crisp vocals and the production of Phil Ek (Modest Mouse and The Shins), compose (in the strongest sense of the word) beautiful melodies that evoke picturesque rustic splendor – songs like "Sun It Rises" and "Blue Ridge Mountains" actually somehow sound exactly what the titles name.

6. "Hercules and Love Affair" – Hercules and Love Affair
The voice of Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons is so often used to haunting effect it comes as a surprise to realize one can dance to it. That's exactly what DJ Andrew Butler did by teaming with Hegarty – as well as Nomi Ruiz and Kim Ann Foxman – and creating Hercules and Love Affair. Impressively, the music is just as muscular and romantic as the name implies. On "Time Will," Hegarty pleads for fidelity ("I cannot be your half a wife") while Butler drops a synthesizer bass line and bends noises around Hegarty's voice. "Hercules' Theme" is a song built for disco strutting and "You Belong," about a lover being with another for the night, is a full-frontal acid house assault. On an album full of dico rave-ups, "Blind" takes the crown for its hard-charging locomotive rhythm, contagious trumpet bridge, Hegarty's Donna Summer-worthy vocals and the climactic bass breakdown. Butler and Co. have crafted a verdant and unique record that's swooningly bombastic.

7. "In Ghost Colours" – Cut Copy
Cut Copy's sophomore effort "In Ghost Colours" deliriously bridges the gaps between electronica, pop and rock for a sound that would be classic had it been released any time in the last 30 years. "In Ghost Colours" offers a near embarrassment of riches, from the synthesizer lust of "Hearts on Fire" to the traumatic, "Waiting for Godot"-like experience of waiting for that someone special at a club of "Lights and Music" to the rocky relationship reassurance of "Out There on the Ice," all New Order-worthy dance tracks of temptation, confusion and blue Mondays. When Dan Whitford sings, "There's something in the air tonight / A feelingthat you have that could change your life," that something, that feeling, comes "In Ghost Colours."

8. "For Emma, Forever Ago" – Bon Iver
After leaving his band DeYarmond Edison, Justin Vernon retreated to a Wisconsin cabin for the winter and spent four months writing and recording new songs under the name Bon Iver (loose French for "good winter"). The resulting "For Emma, Forever Ago," is an earnest, heartbreaking and altogether beautiful album about loneliness and lost love with the idyllic imagery of Henry David Thoreau. Bon Iver's music is full of plaintive strumming, falsetto cries and esoteric poetry like "Only love is all maroon / Lapping lakes like leery loons." It isn't all melancholy, though – the instrumental "Team" is nearly muscular enough for a "Friday Night Lights" training montage and "For Emma" is almost jangley with its horns and haunted guitar. But perhaps the single most devastating moment in music this year is when Bon Iver calls out "Who will love you?" on his breakout song "Skinny Love." Bon Iver's debut is one of slow-burning and quiet heartache.

9. "Nouns" – No Age
Of the trio of lo-fi, tinnitus-inducing garage bands that put out records this year – including Times New Viking and Blood on the Wall – No Age seems most likely to be remembered in the same league as the punk legends to which its deeply indebted. Drummer-vocalist Dean Allen Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall pack a mammoth sound into "Nouns" despite being a two-piece and having less than opulent production values. Songs like "Sleeper Hold" and "Eraser" are as fuzzed-out as My Bloody Valentine and as chaotically controlled as Sonic Youth. In the distortion and clamor are slick melodies that capture the sound of being young and raucous.

10. "All is Well" – Sam Amidon
In what was a banner year for the neo-folk movement that saw acclaimed releases from Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Horse Feathers, The Tallest Man on Earth, Sun Kil Moon, The Ruby Suns, Lackthereof and Grand Salvo, Sam Amidon's "All is Well" somehow fell through the cracks, even though one suspects had the exact same album been released under the name "Sufjan Stevens" it likely would've made most critics' end of the year top 10 lists. The sound of "All is Well" is the definition of timeless. The album, like Amidon's other two solo LPs, is a collection of traditional folk songs re-interpreted with new melodies and minimalist arrangements designed to break the hearts of a whole new generation of listeners. Amidon's soft, tentative voice and loose phrasing are always perfectly suited to songs like "Prodigal Son," about a young man who returns home to acknowledge the wrong he's done, and the title track, in which a dying man finds relief in the weight of his sins finally being lifted. "Saro," based on the traditional "Pretty Saro," is perhaps the best synthesis of Nick Drake-like sorrow and the Illinoisemakers orchestration of Stevens. Amidon's voice cracks when he hits the high notes as he sings, "I wish I was a poet / Could write infinite / I'd write my love a letter / One she'd long understand / I'd send it by the water." Behind his aching voice, strings swell and woodwinds flutter until the heart is rended. Amidon breathes new life into these songs, making them his own while paying proper respect to their heritage. The songs are moving and startling, the sound of truly, ageless music.

11. "Microcastle/Weird Era Cont." – Deerhunter
12. "Third" – Portishead
13. "At Mount Zoomer" – Wolf Parade
14. "You & Me" — The Walkmen
15. "New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)" – Erykah Badu
16. "Tha Carter III" – Lil Wayne
17. "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" — The Drive-By Truckers
18. "Saturdays = Youth" — M83
19. "Meπ suπ eyrum viπ spilum endalaust" – Sigur Rσs
20. "Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!" – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
21. "Shapeshifters" – Invincible
22. "The Airing of Grievances" — Titus Andronicus
23. "The Chemistry of Common Life" — Fucked Up
24. "Santogold" – Santogold
25. "Saint Dymphana" – Gang Gang Dance
26. "Rook" – Shearwater
27. "The Vivian Girls" – Vivian Girls
28. "Exit" – Shugo Tokumaru
29. "Where I Go You Go To" – Lindstrψm
30. "This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That" – Marnie Stern
31. "Midnight Organ" – Frightened Rabbit
32. "Receivers" – Parts & Labor
33. "Women" – Women
34. "Mixtape About Nothing" – Wale
35. "Uproot" – DJ /rupture
36. "Lie Down with the Light" – Bonnie "Prince" Billy
37. "Devotion" – Beach House
38. "Youth Novels" – Lykke Li
39. "From the Great American Songbook" – Tom Carter & Christian Kiefer
40. "Happymatic" – Hilotrons
41. "Soft Airplane" – Chad VanGaalen
42. "Visiter" – The Dodos
43. "Object 47" – Wire
44. "Treny" – Jacaszek
45. "Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes" – The Music Tapes
46. "Rising Down" – The Roots
47. "Furr" – Blitzen Trapper
48. "Parallax Error Beheads You" – Max Tundra
49. "II Trill" – Bun B
50. "In Ear Park" – Department of Eagles

Posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/music//best.albums.2008

Best Singles of 2008

Rating: Not reviewed


1. "Paper Planes" – M.I.A.
Mathangi "M.I.A." Arulpragasm's "Paper Planes" took the long road toward becoming the music phenomenon of the year: the song first earned critical acclaim when it appeared on M.I.A.'s album "Kala," which was released August 2007; it then gained underground traction with remixes and covers by Bun B, Rich Boy, Blaqstarr, DFA, Scottie B, Adrock of the Beastie Boys, Holy Fuck and Esau Mwamwaya (as "Tengazako"); it reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with its use in the "Pineapple Express" trailer (though it wasn't used in the film); was cemented as a classic by being sampled by Kanye West for the ultimate posse track "Swagger Like Us"; and then had hidden depths revealed when the line "Sometimes I think sitting on trains" was synced to the image of two young Indian boys attempting to escape their tragic lives when the song was used in "Slumdog Millionaire." The song's praise and amazing mainstream success is well-earned. M.I.A. (with the help of producers Switch and Diplo) rather miraculously takes a guitar riff from The Clash's "Straight to Hell" and a line from Wreckx-N-Effect's "Rumpshaker" and makes them her own with lyrics that are either a parody of minority stereotypes (according to M.I.A.) or a bittersweet description of the highs and lows of drug-dealing worthy of "The Wire."

2. "Lovers in Japan" – Coldplay
"Viva la Vida" has the orchestral swell, "Violet Hill" has the (relative) edginess and "Lost+" has Jay-Z, but "Lovers in Japan" is Coldplay's true pop gem of the year. Like The National before it, Coldplay equates the difficulties of relationships ("Lovers keep on the road you're on") with the difficulties of war ("Soldiers, you've got to soldier on / Sometimes even the right is wrong") and adds in the anywhere-but-here mentality of the Arcade Fire ("Tonight maybe we're going to run / Dreaming of the Osaka sun"). In the end, Chris Martin hopefully, perhaps naοvely, promises, "I have no doubt / One day the sun will come out." The song rides along on Martin's Western saloon piano and Guy Berryman's Adam Clayton-esque bass until it finally blossoms into something magisterial.

3. "Love Lockdown" – Kanye West
"Love Lockdown's" driving rhythm is that of an arrhythmic heart, a heart that has been damaged. Kanye West, penning the song in a year of heartbreak, declared on his blog it was his "favorite song 2 date!!" Where it ranks in West's pantheon is for future music critics and historians to discuss, but it is his most experimental track, even more so than the Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger." Through robotic Auto-Tune vocal distortion, West details his romantic faults until deciding, as taiko drums pound, to keep his passions confined. "You lose," West sings, and Alexis Phifer's loss becomes music's gain.

4. "L.E.S. Artistes" – Santogold
Santi "Santogold" White's Teagan and Sara-indebted "L.E.S. Artistes" is supposedly a screed against the hipster pretensions of New York City's Lower East Side, but if that's all it were, its appeal wouldn't be so broad and the emotions it conjures wouldn't be so acute. Santogold's declaration "I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up / If I could stand up mean for all the things that I believe" is a universal cri de couer for personal integrity.

5. "White Winter Hymnal" – Fleet Foxes
"White Winter Hymnal" opens as a round that repeats the line, "I was following the...." The song is slowly layered, first with harmonies and a tambourine and then with an acoustic guitar strumming before exploding with a full Wall of Sound that includes the timpani beat from "Be My Baby." The lyrics seem to be about a teacher following a class of children until one of the students falls and gets a bloody nose in the snow, but that hardly matters when Robin Pecknold's vocals and Skyler Skjelset's guitar make the Fleet Foxes' song the aural equivalent of a sleigh ride.

6. "Blind" – Hercules & Love Affair
"Blind" is a delirious disco concoction. The production values by Hercules and Love Affair mastermind Andrew Butler and his co-producer, the DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, are surprisingly intricate, involving infectious muted trumpets, conga drums, a chewy bassline, an eddy of synthesizers and Antony Hegarty's impassioned, yearning falsetto. A song that could've fit in at Studio 54 during the New York club's 1970s heyday, it's now forcing many a typically stoic hipster to fall under its massive spell.

7. "Skinny Love" – Bon Iver
If "Love Lockdown" is for the bitter, then "Skinny Love" is for the truly broken hearted. Even with the kick-drum stomp and rim taps proving there's someone else in the room, Justin Vernson's song is the sound of romantic desolation and the loneliness that results. There is some anger here – "And I told you to be patient / And I told you to be fine / And I told you to be best / And I told you to be kind / And now all your love is wasted / And then who the hell was I?" – but one is left, not with animosity, but with Vernon's devastating, lovelorn question, asked as much to himself as to a former lover, "Who will love you?"

8. "Time to Pretend" – MGMT
MGMT's "Time to Pretend" is half about "Behind the Music"-inspired dreams of rock superstardom and half about the real heartache that can come with such a career path, yet it's also strangely accessible as a song that's just as much about indulging in a few nights or years of revelry before old age sets in ("Yeah it's overwhelming, but what else can we do? / Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning news?") Alex VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser ride a space melody and a killer, seven-note synth hook into a strangely sad place with the realization they, like most of us, are "fated to pretend" once those days of being wild are over.

9. "Hearts on Fire" – Cut Copy
Cut Copy's "Hearts on Fire" is a song for anyone who has ever fallen in love at first sight, but more specifically for anyone who has ever fallen in love at a dance club during a brief, glorious moment when music and passions serendipitously coalesce, hands brush and time seems to freeze. "Hearts on Fire" is the perfect song to have that experience to, not only because it provides excellent narration – "I reach out to you and our hearts collide," Dan Whitford keenly sings – but with its double-time tick-tocking, synthesizer-derived rhythm, C+C Music Factory "oh-ohhs" and New Wave guitar, it's also a great first dance.

10. "Going On" – Gnarls Barkley
DJ Danger Mouse's eclectic production and Cee-Lo Green's soulful vocals have rarely coalesced in an organic enough way to make their ambitious Gnarls Barkley project as successful as their supporters claim it to be. That's not the case with the curiously undervalued "Going On," which didn't receive the acclaim of "Crazy" even though it deserved it. Danger Mouse's rhythms and samples – this time a sped-up version of a Motown backbeat, church organ and a spacey guitar – are thrillingly fused with Cee-Lo's impassioned voice. The song is a (mostly) kind fare-thee-well to a former lover as Cee-Lo tries to move on: "May my love lift you up to the place you belong / But I'm going on / And I promise I'll be waiting for you." Danger Mouse breaks the song down at the climax with soaring strings, pan flute and tribal grunts as Cee-Lo seems to ascend to a better place. The song overwhelms in its final seconds when Cee-Lo suddenly changes his mind and says, "Don't follow me."

11. "Gobbledigook" – Sigur Rσs
12. "Heart of Chambers" – Beach House
13. "Eraser" – No Age
14. "I'm Good, I'm Gone" – Lykke Li
15. "Kids" – MGMT
16. "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" – Air France
17. "Nothing Ever Happened" – Deerhunter
18. "I Feel It All" – Feist
19. "Kim & Jessie" – M83
20. "Ready for the Floor" – Hot Chip
21. "Little Bit" – Lykke Li
22. "A Milli" – Lil Wayne
23. "Innν mιr syngur vitleysingur" – Sigur Rσs
24. "Machine Gun" – Portishead
25. "You Belong" – Hercules and Love Affair
26. "Out There on the Ice" – Cut Copy
27. "Water Curses" – Animal Collective
28. "Golden Age" – TV on the Radio
29. "Oh My God" – Ida Maria
30. "He Doesn't Know Why" – Fleet Foxes
31. "Couleurs" – M83
32. "House Jam" – Gang Gang Dance
33. "Stay Positive" – The Hold Steady
34. "Swing That Tambourine" – Kristoffer Ragnstam
35. "Swagger Like Us" (feat. Kanye West, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne) – T.I.
36. "Strange Overtones" – David Byrne and Brian Eno
37. "My Year in Lists" – Los Campesinos!
38. "Disturbia" – Rihanna
39. "Lights and Music" – Cut Copy
40. "One Pure Thought" – Hot Chip
41. "Electric Feel" – MGMT
42. "Violet Hill" – Coldplay
43. "Lights Out" – Santogold
44. "Live Your Life" (feat. Rihanna) – T.I.
45. "I Feel Better" – Frightened Rabbit
46. "Viva la Vida" – Coldplay
47. "Universal Mind Control" (feat. Pharrell) – Common
48. "Fast Blood" – Frightened Rabbit
49. "Black Rice" – Women
50. "Wearing My Rolex" – Wiley
51. "Tell the World" – Vivian Girls
52. "Fools" – The Dodos
53. "Midnight Man" – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
54. "American Boy" (feat. Kanye West) – Estelle
55. "In the New Year" – The Walkmen
56. "Don't You Evah" – Spoon
57. "Furr" – Blitzen Trapper
58. "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" – Beyoncι
59. "Heartless" – Kanye West
60. "Teen Creeps" – No Age
61. "Sea Lion Woman" – Feist
62. "Nowheres Nigh" – Parts & Labor
63. "Call It a Ritual" – Wolf Parade
64. "Death to Los Campesinos!" – Los Campesinos!
65. "Happy House" – The Juan Maclean
66. "Dance, Dance, Dance" – Lykke Li
67. "Run to Your Grave" – The Mae Shi
68. "Put On" (feat. Kanye West) – Young Jeezy
69. "No Matter What" – T.I.
70. "Language City" – Wolf Parade
71. "Use Somebody" – Kings of Leon
72. "Sabali" (feat. Les Souers Sidibe) – Amadou & Mariam
73. "Constructive Summer" – The Hold Steady
74. "Whispers" (feat. Kathy Diamond) – Aeroplane
75. "The Rip" – Portishead
76. "Untrust Us" – Crystal Castles
77. "Crimewave" (Crystal Castles vs. Health) – Health
78. "Grounds for Divorce" – Elbow
79. "For Emma" – Bon Iver
80. "Sweet Love for Planet Earth" – Fuck Buttons
81. "Royal Flush" (feat. Andre 3000 and Raekwon) – Big Boi
82. "Many Moons" – Janelle Monae
83. "I Like It I Love It" – Lyrics Born
84. "Everyone Nose" – N.E.R.D.
85. "Shut Up and Let Me Go" – The Tings Tings
86. "Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial City)" – Kelley Polar
87. "Lost!"/"Lost+" (feat. Jay-Z) – Coldplay
88. "No Sunlight" – Death Cab for Cutie
89. "Look at Me (When I Dance Witchoo" – Black Kids
90. "No Sex for Ben" – The Rapture
91. "Graveyard Girl" – M83
92. "Sex on Fire" – Kings of Leon
93. "Five Years Time" – Noah & the Whale
94. "Spiraling" – Keane
95. "Mercury" – Bloc Party
96. "Charlotte" – Booka Shade
97. "Drivin' Down the Block" (Remix) (feat. Pusha T, Bun B and The Cool Kids) – Kidz in the Hall
98. "Black President" – Nas
99. "Frankie's Gun" – The Felice Brothers
100. "Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!" – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/music//best.singles.2008

The 100 Greatest American Films of All Time

Rating: Not reviewed


1. Citizen Kane (Welles, Orson; 1941)

Though infamously denied the Best Picture Oscar for 1941, Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" has been hailed as the greatest film ever made at least since the influential Sight & Sound magazine crowned it such in 1962. Welles' thinly veiled roman ΰ clef of the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst is an American tragedy of how spoiled youth Charles Foster Kane (Welles) built an empire and died alone in his fortress of Xanadu.

Despite being only 25 and making his debut film, Welles nonetheless exploded the possibilities of a cinematic language still in its infancy, employing a radical flashback structure with co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz; low-key and chiaroscuro lighting, unprecedented deep focus and low- and wide-angle long-takes with an elaborate mise-en-scθne with cinematographer Gregg Toland; and over-lapping dialogue.

Welles didn't invent any of these techniques – he was profoundly indebted to Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg and John Ford, whose "Stagecoach" Welles supposedly watched 40 times as his only preparation for filmmaking – but he did use them in such a way that had rarely been done before. With "Citizen Kane," modern filmmaking was born.

"Citizen Kane" begins with the end: after a series of shots establishing the isolation of the massive, Gothic estate "Xanadu," Kane is seen dying as he whispers the word "Rosebud" and drops a snow globe. Kane's life story is then quickly told through a "March of Time" newsreel (the newsreel is the film in miniature, even beginning with the news of Kane's death before delving into his accomplishments). Dissatisfied by the shallow distillation of such a significant figure and demanding an answer to the Rosebud mystery, journalist Thompson (William Alland) is dispatched to delve more deeply into the enigma that is Kane.

Thompson reads the diary of Walter P. Thatcher (George Coulouris), Kane's guardian after his mother (Agnes Moorehead) turned him over to the bank upon striking it rich with a silver mine; and interviews Kane's manager Bernstein (Everett Sloane), former best friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), second ex-wife Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) and butler Raymond (Paul Stewart) to learn of his joyful days peddling yellow journalism, his painful failed run for governor and his bitter marriages.

Through seven overlapping perspectives (in many ways the film prefigures Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon"), "Citizen Kane" paints a Freudian and existential portrait of a man who, like Thompson, futilely searched for meaning and found none.


2. Vertigo (Hitchcock, Alfred; 1958)

Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" is a tale of obsession obsessively directed. Even more so than "Rear Window," "Vertigo" has come to be seen as a metaphor for Hitchcock's approach to filmmaking. Hitch spent hours meticulously planning the smallest detail, making sure the cinematography, Saul Bass' hallucinatory imagery, color schemes, costumes, flower arrangements and even passing cars matched his vertiginous vision. The director's perfectionism extended to his lead actress Kim Novak, who suffered at the hands of Hitchcock in much the same way her character does in the movie.

Jimmy Stewart, in a virtuoso performance, plays a private detective who falls in love with a woman (Kim Novak) who claims to be possessed by a spirit, and the detective's passionate devotion has tragic consequences for both lovers. "Vertigo" is the human story of an obsessed man and an exploited woman, each grappling with the emotions of fear, remorse, desire and loss, and the realization that idealized love can't exist within the confines of an imperfect world.


3. The Godfather Trilogy (Coppola, Francis Ford; 1972, 1974, 1990)

Francis Ford Coppola 's epic "The Godfather" trilogy turns the American Mafia into a thing of Greek myth – and Greek tragedy. With an unusual amount of compassion for a "gangster movie" up until that time, Coppola's trilogy traces the rise of the Corleone family under Vito (in Oscar-winning performances by Marlon Brando in "Part I" and Robert De Niro in the flashbacks of "Part II") and its fall under reluctant, and then brutal, new godfather Michael (Al Pacino in his greatest role).

The films are visceral in their iconic sequences of revenge-driven violence juxtaposed against family gatherings and religious rituals, but they're also extraordinarily mournful, with the Corleones symbolizing the collapse of the American family and the corruption of the country in general.


4. Days of Heaven (Malick, Terrence; 1978)

A lyrical allegory in which, in the words of the Book of Joel, "the field is ruined, [and] the land mourns," a laborer named Bill (Richard Gere), his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and 12-year-old sister Linda (Linda Manz) travel from Chicago to the Texas panhandle of 1916 for work on the wheat field of a dying farmer (Sam Shepard). The farmer falls in love with Abby and, knowing the farmer is supposed to die within a year and hoping he may leave them something in his will, Bill encourages Abby to marry him. The quartet spend a few halcyon months together, but the farmer soon discovers Bill and Abby are continuing their relationship under his nose, and then a plague of locusts descends upon the farm and the fields are set aflame.

Director Terrence Malick's second masterpiece following 1973's "Badlands" is an aria of images and sound that strips the medium to its essence and reveals the poetry within. The ethereal 70 mm cinematography by Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler is staggering, the fragmented avant-garde editing by Billy Weber astounding. Malick wouldn't make another film until 1998 when he returned with his third masterpiece, "The Thin Red Line."


5. Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff) (Welles, Orson; 1965)

Orson Welles once said of "Chimes at Midnight," "If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I'd offer up." "Chimes" is indeed a formidable masterpiece that nearly surpasses "Citizen Kane" in its greatness. In a narrative tour de force, Welles combines William Shakespeare's "Henry IV Parts I and II," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Henry V" and "Richard II" to tell the tragedy of arguably fiction's greatest character, John Falstaff.

Welles brings enormous comedy and pathos to the role of the corpulent Falstaff, a man who is the great friend of Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) until Hal tosses him aside upon becoming King Henry V. Welles films Shakespeare in a manner even Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh failed at by making the Bard's world seem lived in instead of turgid. The film is justly renowned for its influential Battle of Shrewsbury, a sequence full of mayhem and carnage that obviously influenced Branagh's "Henry V," Michael Mann's "The Last of the Mohicans," Mel Gibson's "Braveheart," Ridley Scott's "Gladiator," Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and even Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.


6. The Searchers (Ford, John; 1956)

Racism, genocide, self-hatred, obsession, revenge and social displacement are the heavy themes tackled by "The Searchers," cinema's greatest Western. John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a Confederate soldier who visits his brother's ranch for a brief rest and ends up on a life-consuming odyssey to hunt down the Comanches who abducted his niece (played as a teenager by Natalie Wood). Edwards initially seems bent on saving the girl, but eventually it becomes clear he intends to kill her because she will have been "ruined" by her Indian captors.

John Ford's film is lean, harsh and daring in its portrayal of such a hate-filled man who, whether or not he finds his missing niece, will be forever set adrift in a world that no longer has a place for him. The film's influence can be seen on Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," George Lucas' original "Star Wars," David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," among others.


7. Raging Bull (Scorsese, Martin; 1980)

The true story of Jake LaMotta's rise and fall is rendered a brutal, intimate epic of self-immolation by Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who gives one of American cinema's most bravura performances as LaMotta. "Raging Bull" charts LaMotta's fight to claim the middleweight boxing title, his volatile domestic life with wife Vicki (Cathy Moriarty) and brother Joey (Joe Pesci) and his descent, becoming a bloated stand-up comic who has to pawn the jewels from his championship belt to pay his debts.

Scorsese's bold black-and-white camera work subjectively portrays LaMotta's fight scenes with the slow motion viciousness of Sam Peckinpah, turning the sentimentality of "Rocky" on its head. De Niro's infamous physical transformation (he gained 60 pounds for the film's later scenes) is the least impressive aspect of a performance that plumbs the dark recesses of a man's tortured soul, yet sympathetically depicts a man who is painfully human.


8. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, Stanley; 1968)

Stanley Kubrick's psychedelic film of space exploration-as-quest-for-God, Nietzschean philosophy, an Homeric journey and warning of man-machine symbiosis still baffles and thrills 40 years after it first confounded audiences.

Doing away with conventional ideas of narrative, "2001: A Space Odyssey," co-written by sci-fi master Arthur C. Clarke, is really four philosophically dense, cinematically awe-inspiring sequences depicting prehistoric man's encounter with a monolith, scientists excavating an identical monolith on the moon, an ill-fated mission to Jupiter manipulated by the computer HAL 9000 and an astronaut's mystical imprisonment by an unknown force and his transformation into a Star Child. Kubrick won his only Oscar for his work on the groundbreaking visual effects. The greatest science fiction film of all time.


9. Nashville (Altman, Robert; 1975)

"Nashville" follows 24 characters converging on the titular city for concerts and political rallies over the course of five days. Coming on the heels of Watergate, Vietnam and the death of 1960s idealism, the film is largely a rumination on political disillusionment and personal existential decay. These themes are most especially evident in such characters as Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), a beloved country star in the midst of mental collapse; Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles), a tone-deaf waitress who comes to the city to be a star, only to be tricked into performing as a stripper; conscienceless folk singer Tom Frank (Keith Carradine); loner Kenny Frasier (David Hayward); and stoic Grand Ole Opry star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson).

Director Robert Altman's epic of America, country music and politics is practically a living, breathing organism. Joan Tewkesbury's free-form, heavily improvised script flows from one character and set piece to another, with Altman's unmoored camera practically providing a God's-eye view of the city and the lost souls within it. The manner in which Altman, Tewkesbury, cinematographer Paul Lohmann and film editors Dennis M. Hill and Sidney Levin organically composed this tapestry continues to inspire startling in its audacity.


10. Singin' in the Rain (Donen, Stanley/Gene Kelly; 1952)

"Singin' in the Rain" should've been a disaster. The movie only exists because producer Arthur Freed was about to lose the film rights to a number of outdated songs by Nacio Herb Brown and lyricist Arthur Freed from the 1920s and 1930s and so he commissioned screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green to construct a movie around them. The writers faced an even greater challenge in concocting a musical that would inevitably be compared to star and co-director Gene Kelly's previous film, the 1951 Best Picture-winning "An American in Paris."

Almost inexplicably, Comden, Green, Kelly and co-director Stanley Donen nonetheless managed to construct the greatest musical of all time. There is sheer joy in musical numbers like "Good Mornin'," the famous title sequence and the acrobatics of "Make 'Em Laugh." The film – in which Kelly, his comic sidekick Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds struggle to save a movie musical from disaster during the advent of sound technology in the late 1920s – has lost none of its exuberance.


11. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau, F.W.; 1927)

F.W. Murnau brought German Expressionism to American films with his Hollywood debut "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans." The film is a romantic fable in which The Man (George O'Brien) has an affair with The Woman From the City (Margaret Livingston) and contemplates drowning his Wife (Janet Gaynor) to be with her. Murnau conducts the Man and Wife's reunion with magical lyricism. The film was a commercial flop, but it won an Academy Award for "Unique and Artistic Production" in 1929 that some argue makes it the first Best Picture winner. The greatest silent film and greatest romance film of all time.


12. Casablanca (Curtiz, Michael; 1942)

A cynical gin joint owner (Humphrey Bogart) is forced to choose between his own selfish interests, love and virtue when the love of his life (Ingrid Bergman) enters his bar to ask him to help her husband (Paul Henreid) escape the Nazis. Directed by underappreciated auteur Michael Curtiz ("The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Mildred Pierce") with the stylistic flair of noir, the film, like "Singin' in the Rain," achieved greatness practically by accident through a haphazard production and near miscasting (Ronald Reagan and George Raft were almost given Bogart's role). The film introduced numerous phrases into the American lexicon, including the misquote "Play it again, Sam"; "Here's looking at you, kid"; "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship"; "Round up the usual suspects"; and "We'll always have Paris.


13. City Lights
(Chaplin, Charles; 1931)

The sound age of cinema was ushered in by "The Jazz Singer" in 1927, but Charlie Chaplin insisted "movies need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics" and so continued to make silent films well into the 1930s. Chaplin's greatest film "City Lights" proves the auteur's point by being, as the film was subtitled, "A Comedy Romance in Pantomime." Chaplin's indelible Tramp character falls in love with a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) who mistakes him for a millionaire. To raise money for a surgery that can correct her vision, the Tramp comically works as a street sweeper and enters into a boxing match. The bittersweet moment when the flower girl sees the Tramp for the first time is perhaps the greatest closing scene in all of cinema and has been imitated in films such as "Manhattan," "La Dolce Vita" and "Magnolia."


14. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, Francis; 1979)

Gripped by madness and a bold cinematic vision, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is a fever dream of a polemic that, like "Citizen Kane" and "Days of Heaven," finds astonishing new ways to tell stories through the visual power of cinema. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent into Cambodia during the Vietnam War to "terminate with extreme prejudice" renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). "Apocalypse Now" is consistently surreal and disorienting thanks to Vittorio Storaro's Oscar-winning cinematography and the editing of Walter Murch, never more so than in the climactic, semi-improvised meeting between Willard and Kurtz that ruins the film for some, but is the brilliant logical end point to such a surreal journey. The greatest war film of all time.


15. The General (Keaton, Buster/Clyde Bruckman; 1926)

Loosely inspired by the Civil War incident known as the Great Locomotive Chase (a.k.a. Andrews' Raid), Buster Keaton plays a Confederate train engineer who has to save his train, girl (Marion Mack) and the Army of Tennessee from the Union. With this being silent comic master Keaton, the rescue is filled with sight gags, slapstick and ingenious, reckless stunts that pit man against machine and nature, including a scene in which a train races across a collapsing bridge. Poorly received upon its release by critics, audiences and the studio (Keaton would never again have full creative control over his movies), it has since been almost universally accepted as a masterpiece.


16. Greed (von Stroheim, Erich; 1924)
Erich von Stroheim's original vision for his epic "Greed" is forever lost: the director initially constructed a nine-hour version, cut it down to four and then had it butchered to two by MGM, causing von Stroheim to call the studio version of his film "the skeleton of my dead child." A reconstructed version that uses still photos and title cards for the missing scenes and runs 243 minutes is more than enough evidence for the masterpiece von Stroheim conceived. The film tells the story of dentist John McTeague (Gibson Gowland) and how the transformation of his wife (Zasu Pitts) into a miser upon winning the lottery results in his own spiritual debasement. The reconstruction adds parallel plots about two other couples, one that's even more corrupt in its pursuit of gold and another that manages to maintain its innocence and love. The climactic scene in the Death Valley in which all is reduced to blood and dust is magnificent in any form.


17. The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, Victor; 1939)

Thanks to a long-standing tradition of annual television showings, "The Wizard of Oz" is perhaps the most-seen film of all time and as such has served as an introduction to cinema and its power to transport the viewer to another place for millions of future film lovers. Victor Fleming's Technicolor marvel sends Dorothy (Judy Garland) and her little dog Toto to Oz where she encounters a menagerie of incredible characters including the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), the Tin Man (Jack Haley,) the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) and the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton). Arguably fake-looking when compared to what's being done in movies like "Lord of the Rings," "The Wizard of Oz's" less sophisticated sets, costumes and special effects still hold a magic and charm that CGI is rarely able to attain. The greatest fantasy of all time.


18. Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (Griffith, D.W.; 1916)

Director D.W. Griffith made "Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages" as an apologia for his 1915 epic "The Birth of a Nation," a work that's tarnished by Griffith's racist depiction of freed slaves after the Civil War and the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. No matter the motivation, "Intolerance" is an intrepid feat of filmmaking and storytelling, especially for 1916. The film tells four stories of prejudice at once, moving through time from the fall of Babylon (the film's most opulently designed setting), to the crucifixion of Jesus to the St. Bartholomew's Massacre of Huguenots in 1536 France to a 1914 America torn apart by conservatism and capitalism. Lillian Gish's "Eternal Mother" serves as a bridge between the stories. The finale's breathtaking crosscutting greatly influenced Sergei Eisenstein ("Battleship Potemkin").


19. The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, Charles; 1955)
The directorial debut of actor Charles Laughton (1935's "Mutiny on the Bounty") was so wildly reviled upon its initial release, he never made another film. "The Night of the Hunter" contains so many unnerving elements, it's easy to understand why Eisenhower America was so repulsed. Robert Mitchum plays an ex-con-turned-insane-preacher who marries a widow (Shelley Winters) because her children (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce) know the whereabouts of the bounty from a major cash robbery. The film turns into a supremely odd Southern Gothic horror fairytale that's as dreamlike (a magical nighttime boat trip) as it is nightmarish (Mitchum's performance is a thing of haunting evil).


20. The Third Man (Reed, Carol; 1949)

American writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Vienna and discovers his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is dead. Using the detective skills he believes he has developed from writing and reading pulp novels, Holly launches a naοve search for the truth of what happened to Harry in an odyssey through the malaise of post-World War II Europe that symbolically ends in the sewers. Carol Reed directs "The Third Man" in the macabre, chiaroscuro style of noir and German Expressionism from a tautly crafted script by Graham Greene that dashes idealism and plunges into cynical despair. Welles improvised the film's most famous line: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." The greatest film noir of all time.


21. North by Northwest (Hitchcock, Alfred; 1959)

After "Vertigo," Alfred Hitchcock set out to intentionally make a frivolous piece of entertainment completely free of metaphors and symbolism. Hitchcock succeeded in making one of Hollywood's most purely entertaining thrillers, but "North by Northwest" is still thematically rich. In its plot of a confident Madison Avenue advertising executive (Cary Grant) being mistaken for a spy, the film deals with nothing less than the natures of identity and sanity (as its apparently accidental title from "Hamlet" would suggest), the instability of the man-imposed sense of order and questions of urban masculinity. "North by Northwest" contains some of Hitchcock's most thrilling scenes, including the infamous crop-duster sequence and a race across Mt. Rushmore (Hitchcock joked about having Grant's character stand up in Lincoln's nostril and sneeze).


22. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson, Peter; 2001), The Two Towers (Jackson, Peter; 2002) and The Return of the King (Jackson, Peter; 2003)

Utterly extraordinary in its epic ambition and accomplishment, director Peter Jackson managed to achieve the impossible – he turned one of the most influential works of the 20th-century into a benchmark of 21st-century filmmaking. No film has ever put the technological resources of the medium to such ravishing and humane use. Though it's easy to get lost in the pure grandeur of all three "The Lord of the Rings" films, Jackson's trilogy succeeds because it retains the passion and intelligence of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork.


23. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, Steven; 1982)

Although "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" is one of the most popular films of all time, it's one of the most misunderstood among critics. Steven Spielberg's depiction of 10-year-old Elliot (Henry Thomas) discovering an alien in his backyard is often decried for being too sentimental and childish. Such critiques seem to willfully ignore the authentic depiction of a middle-class, suburban, single-parent home, with all the sadness and ebullient moments of hope that come with it. The miraculous moment when E.T. makes a bicycle fly – one of the single greatest scenes in all of movies – would mean less if it weren't for that finely attuned sense of realism. "E.T." may be a scif-fi/fantasy blockbuster, but it's also an intimate tale of how a friend can help heal a broken heart.


24. The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, Ernst; 1940)

The famed "Lubitsch touch" is defined by Scott Eyman as director Ernst Lubitsch's ability to bring "benign grace" and "rueful wisdom" to comedies that in less refined hands could've easily been coarse. Nowhere is that touch more elegantly applied than in "The Shop Around the Corner." Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan play squabbling employees Alfred and Klara at a Budapest department store who, unbeknownst to them, have fallen in love through an anonymous pen pal club for lonely hearts. Although endlessly witty, the film is also tender and sad, such as when, after Alfred realizes who his pen pal really is and stops writing her, Klara despondently continues to reach inside her empty mailbox for love letters that aren't there. The remake "You've Got Mail" only further proves the masterfulness of the Lubitsch touch.


25. Letter From an Unknown Woman (Ophόls, Max; 1948)

"Letter From an Unknown Woman" has long been dismissed as a "woman's film" or a tearjerker, but thanks to Cahiers du Cinιma and Robin Wood, it has more recently received the acclaim it has long deserved. In 1900 Vienna, Lisa (Joan Fontaine) falls in love with narcissistic concert pianist Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan). Stefan is seemingly unaware of the depth of Lisa's passion until, on the eve of a duel, Stefan receives a letter from her detailing her long-held feelings for him. The letter ends with the line, "If only you could have recognized what was always yours, you could have found what was never lost." Like most great romances, the love story is one of loss, sadness and missed opportunities. The brilliance of the film mostly lies in the rigorous mise-en-scθne constructed by director Max Ophόls. His graceful tracking shots give the film a lyrical quality that elegantly pull the film toward its tragic end.


26. The Crowd (Vidor, King; 1928; US)

With the advent of the Great Depression and sound, King Vidor's silent work of social realism about a couple's struggles in the big city failed to connect with audiences in need of escapist fare like "Wings" and "Seventh Heaven." Without sentimentality, the film follows ordinary couple John and Mary Sims (James Murray and Vidor's wife Eleanor Boardman) as their attempts to stand out from the crowd are repeatedly dashed by the indifferent inhabitants of New York City. There are minor moments of joyful triumph amidst the despair, and the couple eventually comes to realize love could be enough to uplift them – even as the crowd once again engulfs them.


27. Chinatown (Polanski, Roman; 1974)

Private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired to investigate a supposed case of infidelity and ends up stumbling upon a murder, falling in love with the victim's wife (Faye Dunaway), getting his nose slit and uncovering incest and a real estate scheme involving the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. From the first clue to the last, Gittes gets everything wrong, and with tragic consequences. The only solace Gittes receives is advice to "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Roman Polanski's gritty direction and the labyrinthine mystery of Robert Towne's legendary screenplay have long been hailed, but at the certain of the maze is the bruised heart of a man whose machismo-driven arrogance has cost him dearly.


28. Touch of Evil (Welles, Orson; 1958)

Desperate to return to Hollywood filmmaking, Orson Welles took on this B-movie (perhaps at the insistence of star Charlton Heston, perhaps as part of a bet) about police corruption, drugs and kidnapping in a border town. The film is most famous for its opening, three-minute tracking shot (better appreciated in the 1998 restoration form) of a bomb being placed in a car, being driven through a Mexico/U.S. border crossing into the U.S. and exploding. Heston plays a Mexican official who investigates, resulting in the kidnapping of his wife (Janet Leigh) and the exposure of a crooked detective (Welles). Welles elevates the material with a perverse tone and cinematic pyrotechnics, but his film was once again taken away by the studio and re-cut, and he never directed for Hollywood again.


29. Duck Soup (McCarey, Leo; 1933)

Audiences weren't ready for political satire in 1933, but when "Duck Soup" was rediscovered in the 1960s, it was seen for the prescient work it really is. If anything, the film is more relevant today – compare Fox News' coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War with the glee that sweeps over the country of Freedonia when Grouch Marx's dictator Rufus T. Firefly announces he's going to war with Sylvania because an ambassador calls him an "upstart." "Duck Soup" is fired by an anarchic spirit, but commendation must be paid to director Leo McCarey (an Oscar winner for "The Awful Truth") for reining in the Marx Brothers enough to make their chaotic nonsense truly glorious.


30. Psycho (Hitchcock, Alfred; 1960)

"Psycho" redefined where movies could go when it took audiences on a perverse journey into the Bates Motel. Initially a taut heist movie, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) robs her boss and spends an ill-fated night in an establishment run by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). The infamous shower scene results in one of the most subversive moments in film history. It's also a skillful piece of filmmaking in and of itself, using carefully framed close-ups and rapid editing to subliminally create a visceral sensation of murder. To keep the ending a secret, Hitchcock bought every copy of the Robert Bloch book it was based upon and declined to screen it for critics.


31. The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, Orson; 1942)

As his follow-up to "Citizen Kane," Orson Welles tackled Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Magnificent Ambersons" about the fall of a wealthy family in the midst of a town's social and industrial upheaval. The film is full of long tracking and crane shots and in some ways has greater emotional strength than "Citizen Kane" because of the character arc of spoiled George Minafer (Tim Holt) from aristocrat to laborer and the unrequited love between George's mother Isabel (Dolores Costello) and automobile innovator Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten). But, in what would become a common occurrence for Welles, the film was drastically re-cut by the studio: 40 minutes were removed, and extra scenes were shot by a different director. Considering how amazing the film still is, one can only imagine what it would've been like if it had been left alone.


32. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, Martin; 1976)

Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro dive headlong into the nightmarescape of 1970s New York City with "Taxi Driver." De Niro's iconic Travis Bickle seeks refuge from his alienation first through an awkward romance with a campaigner (Cybil Shepherd) working for a senator and then by trying to save a teenage prostitute (Jodie Foster) from her pimp (Harvey Keitel). The film is seedy and gruesome, a howl from a storm drain. Screenwriter Paul Schrader was inspired by the published diary of Arthur Herman Bremer, who shot George Wallace during his U.S. presidential run. Bremer could easily be speaking for Bickle when he writes in his diary, "No one ever noticed me nor took interest in me as an individual with the need to receive or give love." "Taxi Driver" in turn inspired John Hinckley to shoot Ronald Reagan to impress Foster.


33. Rio Bravo (Hawks, Howard; 1959)

Howard Hawks, whose dramas and Westerns are renowned for the professionalism of their heroes, made "Rio Bravo" in response to "High Noon's" depiction of a sheriff (Gary Cooper) desperately asking the people of his town for help. In "Rio Bravo," Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) takes on a powerful cattle baron's posse with only the help of a drunk (Dean Martin), an old man (Walter Brennan) and an impetuous gunslinger (Ricky Nelson). If the bold men seem larger than life, it's because they are – the sets were built to seven-eighths scale to make them appear that way. The film was initially seen as a right-wing and reactionary show of support to McCarthyism, but the deeply flawed yet morally just heroes' fight can just as easily be interpreted (as film theorist Robin Wood does) as one against capitalism, with the heroic individuals standing up to the corporation of the cattle baron.


34. Sherlock, Jr. (Keaton, Buster; 1924)
Buster Keaton plays a film projectionist who's also studying to be a detective and, after falling asleep on the job, literally walks into the movie he's showing. The film is full of amazing gags, not the least of which is the technically advanced sequence in which the projectionist walks onto the screen and is subsequently tormented by a madly edited movie that perilously moves him from beaches to snowy cliffs in the blink of an eye. In another amazing shot, Keaton dives through a window and comes out the other side dressed as a woman.


35. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, Billy; 1959)

It's almost hard to believe now, but at one point it was actually original and even shocking to make a movie about men dressing like women. Although the concept may no longer be as fresh, no movie (sorry Tyler Perry fans) has ever used it so inventively as "Some Like It Hot." Billy Wilder's manic masterpiece about musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (a sublime Jack Lemmon) who dress in drag and join an all-female band (which includes Marilyn Monroe) during the Prohibition is a manically plotted investigation into issues of masculinity and sexual desire. The comedy is also incredibly naughty without being overly explicit. However lines like "It's not how long it takes, it's who takes you" and "I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop" and one of Monroe's incredibly revealing dresses kept the movie from meeting the Hays Code movie censorship guidelines and it was officially "Condemned" by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting.


36. Schindler's List (Spielberg, Steven; 1993)

With great moral complexity, "Schindler's List" depicts the journey of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) from selfish cynic to a man – in a symbol of America and Europe – wracked with guilt for waiting too long to do something to stop the extermination of the Jewish people at the hands of Nazis like Amon Goeth (an exceptional Ralph Fiennes). Steven Spielberg's direction and Janusz Kaminski's wondrous cinematography at once renders the camps with artistry and understatement, making the horrors – and the uplift – that much more profound. Spielberg initially didn't think he was up to the challenge of directing the Holocaust drama "Schindler's List" and offered the film to Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack and Roman Polanski (a Holocaust survivor whose mother died in Auschwitz, Polanski later tackled the subject and won an Oscar with 2002's "The Pianist").


37. The New World (Malick, Terence; 2005)

Terence Malick's take on the legendary romance between Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher) and Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) in "The New World" is a visual tone poem in which, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee." The simple elegance and unassuming profoundness of Malick's film begins with its title. "The New World" at once refers to what settlers christened the land that would come to be called "America," how the "Naturals" of that land viewed the encroaching newcomers, the discovery of one's first love and so much more. Malick's consideration of that new world is practically transcendental as his camera goes, as Emerson says in "The Poet," "Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love."


38. Blade Runner (Scott, Ridley; 1982)

Ridley Scott's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" adds concerns about capitalism and environmental collapse to Dick's metaphysical musings about the essence of existence and identity. Harrison Ford plays a detective in noir mode forced to hunt down escaped existential "Replicant" androids in a dystopian vision of Los Angeles in 2019. "Blade Runner's" production design, influenced by Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and the work of French comic book artist Moebius, is a frightening, authentic-seeming look at corporate-controlled urbania. Scott released a "Final Cut" in 2007 that's the only true reflection of his vision for the film, and, though only slightly different from the unauthorized "Director's Cut," it should be considered the official version of the film.


39. All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, Douglas; 1955)

Like "Letter to an Unknown Woman," "All That Heaven Allows" was relegated to the "women's film" ghetto until a revived interest in the works of Douglas Sirk rescued it from oblivion. All of Sirk's films work on a sociopolitical level that separates them from most melodramas while accessing the genre's passion and emotion on a more genuine level. In "All That Heaven Allows," a wealthy widow (Jane Wyman) falls for a younger landscaper (Rock Hudson) and must choose between a love that will bring her scandal or adhering to social norms and living a passionless life. The film deeply influenced Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodσvar and Todd Haynes, who paid it homage with "Far From Heaven."


40. Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, Stanley; 1975)

After his financing for his "Napoleon" project fell apart, Stanley Kubrick decided to put the substantial research he did on the 18th century to use in an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's "The Luck of Barry Lyndon." Ryan O'Neal plays the title character, an Irishman who remakes himself after the 1756-1763 Seven Years' War to become a member of the aristocracy, first by working as a cardsharp, then by marrying the wealthy widow Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson). The film is savagely satirical and ravishing to look at: Kubrick used lenses designed by NASA for the Apollo moon landings so he could use only candles for his lighting.


41. Heaven's Gate (Cimino, Michael; 1980)

Perhaps the most wildly misunderstood American film ever made, "Heaven's Gate" is more widely known for the financial calamity it brought to studio United Artists (the film cost $44 million to make and only grossed $3.84 million, which would be a $115.24 million loss in 2008 dollars) than its cinematic worth. It's largely because of the work of esteemed critic Robin Wood the film is still seriously considered at all. Director Michael Cimino ("The Deer Hunter") drew inspiration from the 1892 Johnson County War for his 219-minute epic about, ironically, a catastrophic fight against capitalism. Kris Kristofferson stars as a Harvard-educated Wyoming sheriff slow to protect immigrants from murderous cattle barons who never escapes the tragedy he was complicit in. Despite the length and vociferous criticism from the likes of Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby, the film is rigorously structured (the movie is filled with rhymes between the life of the bourgeoisie and the immigrants) and gloriously photographed.


42. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, Alfred; 1943; US)

In the film that Alfred Hitchcock claimed to be his personal favorite, Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright play an uncle and niece both named Charlie who come to odds when Young Charlie suspects Uncle Charlie of being a serial killer. In the end, Young Charlie has to repress what she learns in order to maintain a semblance of the social order. The film's explosive vision of the darkness residing in small town America (the authenticity of the details of the idyllic setting can be attributed to the script by "Our Town" writer Thornton Wilder) is an obvious forebear to David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks."


43. The Lady Eve (Sturges, Preston; 1941)

Father and daughter con artists "Colonel" and Jean Harrington (Charles Coburn and Barbara Stanwyck) target ale tycoon and snake expert Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) during a cruise. The plan falls apart when Jean falls for Charles, and then she returns with an elaborate ruse for revenge when he dumps her after discovering her aborted scheme – and then makes another plan to win him back. Along the way the film fabulously plays with the Creation myth: Charles is responsible for a snake on the voyage, Jean precipitates the fall of man by dropping an apple on Charles' head and resulting in a pratfall in their meet-cute. The insane circumstances and frantic pacing are the epitome of Preston Sturges' screwball style.


44. Out of the Past (Tourneur, Jacques; 1947)

Director Jacques Tourneur is better known for his atmospheric, low-budget horror films "Cat People," "I Walked with a Zombie" and "The Leopard Man," but his masterpiece is the film noir "Out of the Past." Robert Mitchum plays Jeff, a gas station owner who's forced to remember his old life as a private detective when his past finally catches up to him. Jeff recalls his last job working for a gangster (Kirk Douglas) and the femme fatale who betrayed him (Jane Greer) and moves fatalistically toward his inevitable end. Tourneur's talent for chiaroscuro and tense staging is brought to bear more emotionally here than in his horror work.


45. There Will Be Blood (Anderson, Paul Thomas; 2007)

In adapting Upton Sinclair's 1927 muckraker "Oil!," Paul Thomas Anderson fashions a character study posing as an epic that's a cinematic cousin to "The Searchers" and "Raging Bull." Daniel Day-Lewis inhabits the very shell of self-made oilman Daniel Plainview and Anderson concocts astounding cinematic sequences that never call attention themselves, thereby allowing the astonishing long takes and stately mise-en-scθne to overwhelm all the more. "There Will Be Blood" tackles the larger theme of the competing interests that form the backbone of America – not the country's romanticized and barely realized democracy, but religion and capitalism – and no matter the winner, the loser is sure to be the oil-rich town of Little Boston. And so goes the nation.


46. His Girl Friday (Hawks, Howard; 1940)

"His Girl Friday" adapts the newspaper stage play and 1931 film comedy "The Front Page" into a war-of-the-sexes screwball comedy. Cary Grant plays newspaper editor Walter Burns, who's trying to keep from losing his best reporter and ex-wife Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell, whose role in the play is a man) from wedded bliss. Burns convinces Hildy to take the story of a convicted killer (John Qualen) about to be executed, and madcap mania ensues. As in most Hawks films, Hildy is given equal footing with Burns, and it's up to both of them to earn each other in the end. The breathtaking pace of the joke-a-second dialogue remains unmatched.


47. Rear Window (Hitchcock, Alfred; 1954)

Confined to a wheelchair in his apartment and eager to escape the talk of marriage from his girlfriend (Grace Kelly), L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) takes to staring through his window into the apartments across the street. One of Alfred Hitchcock's most daring conceits, the film is astoundingly thrilling considering it's almost entirely set within a living room. Although "Rear Window" is generally seen as an allegory for the movies, the voyeurism of L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) on the couples across the street and his discovery of an act of domestic violence is more accurately a metaphor for anxieties related to marriage and the figurative castration fears that come with it – the binoculars and cameras Jeffries uses telling get larger each time he looks through the window.


48. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick, Stanley; 1964)

In his only comedy, Stanley Kubrick uses "Dr. Strangelove" to take aim at Cold War sensibilities – especially the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction that ostensibly kept the U.S. and Russia from bombing each other into oblivion from the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – and the missile race that accompanied them that served as an extreme form of men attempting to make up for their shortcomings. Peter Sellers brilliantly portrays an RAF soldier attempting to prevent the MAD chain of events set off by an impotent general (Sterling Hayden), the embattled U.S. president and the titular crazed scientist who struggles to hide his Nazi past. Sellers was also supposed to portray Major "King" Kong (to assure box office success, the studio wanted Sellers to play at least four characters), but he conveniently sprained an ankle to get out of it, ceding the role to Slim Pickens, who was more than up to the challenge.


49. Blue Velvet (Lynch, David; 1986)
College student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) comes home from school to take care of his ailing father and involves himself in a mystery when he finds a severed ear. Like the most perverse Hardy Boys-Nancy Drew Mystery that never was, Jeffrey teams up with Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of the detective on the case, to discover a vicious and sordid underworld in their quiet town that threatens abused lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini). David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" is as visually lush as the title suggests and extremely unnerving in its depictions of sexual violence and the manner in which they burrow their way into the subconscious.


50. My Darling Clementine (Ford, John; 1946)

John Ford's version of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral between the Earp Brothers and the Clanton Gang is still the best. More than just the typical bullet-filled oater, "My Darling Clementine" is one of the earliest Westerns to deal with larger themes, in this case the forcing of social norms onto the Wild West. Ford's climactic battle also prefigures Sam Peckinpah in the emotional weight given to the fight: as in "The Wild Bunch," there is real loss here, even in victory. Ford knew the real Wyatt Earp in his youth and based his version of events on what Earp told him.


51. The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, Sam; 1969)

"The Wild Bunch" is, as director Sam Peckinpah said, "what happens when killers go to Mexico. The strange thing is that you feel a great sense of loss when these killers reach the end of the line." To achieve a suitable level of brutality for his elegy, Peckinpah conceived of the idea of slow-motion violence in order to show the real damage done by the bullets that seemed to have no effect in the Western and action films up until that point. His conceit has been misunderstood and misused ever since (with Michael Bay perhaps the biggest offender). It's no wonder really: the gun battles in Peckinpah's tragic Western are bullet ballets.


52. Munich (Spielberg, Steven; 2005)

In its addressing of the post-9/11 moral crisis, "Munich" is a work of vital disturbance, one that tears off the paper that often covers the ideological cracks in Steven Spielberg's works. "Munich" examines the thrill of committing – and watching – a violent act of retribution, and the emotional fallout that comes from such blood-spilling. Spielberg stages each action set piece of Israeli assassins out to avenge an act of terrorism that took place during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich with the verve and originality of classic Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin.


53. Short Cuts (Altman, Robert; 1993)

Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" is a more rigorously structured version of "Nashville" that pays homage to Los Angeles rather than Music City. The film intertwines nine stories and a poem by Raymond Carver so that 22 characters cross paths as they grapple with themes of mortality, infidelity and isolation. As in "Magnolia," which this film profoundly influenced, all of the characters are united by a phenomenon with seismic repercussions. The amalgamation of the stories (the screenplay was co-adapted with Altman by Frank Barhydt) allows Altman to move between multiple plotlines and genres with the same fluidity he brought to "Nashville," but the narrative engine is even more combustible here.


54. Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, Howard; 1938)

Reserved paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant, modeling his performance on silent film star Harold Lloyd) is on the verge of marrying brittle Alice Swallow (Virgina Walker) when heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) enters his life, bringing both catastrophe and passion with her against his vigorous protestations – "In moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you," he admits, "but – well, there haven't been any quiet moments." To merely describe "Bringing Up Baby" as a screwball comedy barely does justice to the mayhem on display – this is a film in which a dinosaur bone, a bone-loving dog and a pet leopard named Baby are major sources of prolonged and chaotic hilarity. The insanity is so profound the film is practically a fantasy. Notably, while dressed in women's lingerie, Cary Grant uses the word "gay" for the first time in movies to mean "homosexual."


55. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (Linklater, Richard; 1995, 2004)

"Before Sunrise's" depiction of American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and French Celine (Julie Delpy) meeting by chance in Vienna and falling in love was this generation's greatest romance – until Jesse and Celine's bittersweet reunion in "Before Sunset" did the impossible and topped it. Taken together, "Before Sunrise" (which perfectly captures that awkward stage when two people are falling love) and "Before Sunset" (in which the characters are faced with regret and the damage of time) make for a formidable romance filled with wit, philosophical musings and actual love that probes the hearts and minds of two hopeless romantics.


56. The Naked Spur (Mann, Anthony; 1953)

Jimmy Stewart is best know for his collaborations with Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, but he made nine films with Anthony Mann, many of which afforded him with opportunities to traverse the dark regions of humanity he otherwise only visited in Hitchcock's "Vertigo." The psychological Western "The Naked Spur" plays upon preconceived notions of Stewart: because it's him, one assumes his bounty hunter Howard Kemp is out to bring in murderer Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) purely for just reasons. But Kemp is just as selfishly motivated as the miner (Millard Mitchell) and union soldier (Ralph Meeker) who try to hoard in on the bounty Kemp needs to buy back his farm. Often exhilarating in its fully conceived characters adrift in a moral wilderness, the story also thrills in its tensely conceived shootouts.


57. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman, Robert; 1971)

A self-conscious subversion of the tropes of the Western genre, Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" is a melancholy "anti-Western" that deconstructs the frontier myth through the uneasy partnership between gambler and supposed gunslinger "Pudgy" McCabe (Warren Beatty in his greatest performance) and opium-addicted madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie). McCabe is forced to ward off capitalist interests when murderous miners attempt to take over his land. The climactic shootout breathtakingly takes place during a snowstorm (the real blizzard nearly shut down production).


58. Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, Sergio; 1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, Sergio; 1984)

With his "Once Upon a Time..." films, director Sergio Leone presents summations of the Western and the gangster genres. "Once Upon a Time in the West" stars Charles Bronson as an enigmatic gunslinger attempting to protect a prostitute-turned-homesteader (Claudia Cardinale of "8 1/2") from a villain played by Henry Fonda. The film is even more luxuriously cinematic and grandly mythic than "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" in its expression of the collision of the Wild West with capitalist-driven "society." Leone turned down an opportunity to direct "The Godfather" because he wanted to instead adapt Harry Grey's "The Hoods" about Jewish gangsters (Robert De Niro and James Woods among them) who rise to power in Lower East Side New York during Prohibition. Leone turned the novel into "Once Upon a Time in America," a melancholy epic poem about the immigrant experience as a pipe dream. (The two films form a loose trilogy with "Duck, You Sucker," which was originally to be titled "Once Upon a Time...The Revolution," but because it's technically an Italian-Spanish production, it's not included here.")


59. Pinocchio (Sharpsteen, Ben & Hamilton Luske; 1940)

Pinocchio's passage from being a wooden puppet without strings into a real boy is actually a coming-of-age story about becoming an adult – only after learning the value of placing self-sacrifice over selfishness and experiencing loss does Pinocchio become a person. Walt Disney's animation is lush and magical, from the appearance of the Blue Fairy to the terror of Monstro the Whale. Even compared to the work of Pixar, Hayao Miyazaki and later Disney pictures such as "Beauty & the Beast" and "The Lion King," "Pinocchio" remains the greatest animated film ever made.


60. The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, George; 1940)

Some have interpreted "The Philadelphia Story" as a cruel vehicle for cutting Katharine Hepburn (who at that point was considered box office poison) down to size with jokes made at the expense of Hepburn's real-life persona. That hardly seems fair considering Hepburn's character Tracy Lord is presented with three romantic possibilities, and the man she ends up with is the one who best appreciates her for who she is. Hepburn's Tracy is about to remarry, but her wedding plans are upended by her ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) arriving with tabloid reporter Mike Connor (Jimmy Stewart). Mike falls in love with Tracy despite his contempt of the rich – "The prettiest sight in this fine, pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges," he says – complicating Haven's plans to win Tracy back. A sophisticated farce, it's one of Hollywood's most enduring romantic comedies.


61. The Living Dead Tetralogy: Night of the Living Dead (Romero, George A.; 1968), Dawn of the Dead (Romero, George A.; 1978), Day of the Dead (Romero, George A.; 1985) and Land of the Dead (Romero, George A.; 2005)

Though they contain no shared characters, "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "Day of the Dead" and "Land of the Dead" all seem to exist in the same universe, with each film escalating the zombie threat of the one that came before. The greatness of the "Dead" tetralogy rests as much with its queasy gore as with its sociopolitical subtext. Like John Updike with his "Rabbit Angstrom" tetralogy, George A. Romero and his four zombie films dissect the flaws of American society almost once per decade: in the 1960s of "Night," it was the defective values of the American family; in the 1970s of "Dawn," consumerism; the misunderstood "Day" reacted against Reaganite America; and the underrated "Land" exposed the continued disparity between the haves and the have-nots so presciently it's retroactively a parable of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.


62. Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, Howard; 1939)

Howard Hawks did for films what William Shakespeare did for plays – he brought philosophy and humanity to cinematic storytelling. "Only Angels Have Wings" could've easily been a sentimental melodrama about airplane pilots flying a dangerous route in the Peruvian Andes, but Hawks turns the story into a rich psychological examination of how those pilots are able to retain their professionalism in the face unending tragedy. Cary Grant plays the manager of the air mail service and Jean Arthur plays the woman who loves him but can't bear to live in constant fear of his death. The Academy Awards created the Best Special Effects category to honor the film's flying scenes.


63. In a Lonely Place (Ray, Nicholas; 1950)

"In a Lonely Place" stars Humphrey Bogart as a screenwriter with a history of abusing women who's accused of murdering a hatcheck girl. The screenwriter's lack of empathy regarding her death, and his mean violent streak, make it seem entirely possible he's capable of murder, but then a neighbor (Gloria Grahame) reveals the poet inside him. An existential thriller with hardboiled, romantic dialogue – "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." – the film is among the best films noir, although it's sadly largely forgotten.


64. Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, Leo; 1937)

Leo McCarey made "Duck Soup," "The Awful Truth," "Love Affair" and "An Affair to Remember," but his favorite of all his films was "Make Way for Tomorrow." So convinced was he of the film's superiority to his other works that when he accepted the Academy Award for "The Awful Truth" he said, "Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture." "Make Way for Tomorrow" is an extraordinarily moving and simple film about an elderly couple, Bark and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi), who lose their home to the bank and are forced to live apart because none of their three selfish children will agree to house them together. Bark and Lucy are eventually placed in rest homes on opposite sides of the country, but they're given one day together to tour a city they no longer recognize and dance together at the hotel where they had their honeymoon. As Orson Welles said of the film, "It would make a stone cry."


65. The Maltese Falcon (Huston, John; 1941)

"The Maltese Falcon" isn't the first film noir (that debated label usually goes to Fritz Lang's "Fury" from 1936 or the otherwise forgotten 1940 film "Stranger on the Third Floor"), but it was the most influential in establishing such hallmarks for the subgenre as the amoral private detective, the femme fatale, hardboiled dialogue and stylized direction (from John Huston, making his directorial debut) as ruthless as the unscrupulous characters. Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, a sadistic detective who plays all sides against the middle in the search for a priceless statue and for whoever killed a partner he didn't even like: "When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him."



66. The Star Wars Saga: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (Lucas, George; 1999), Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (Lucas, George; 2002), Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, George; 2005), Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (Lucas, George; 1977), Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, Irvin; 1980) and Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (Marquand, Richard; 1983)

George Lucas somewhat diminished the splendor of his "Star Wars" series when he added to the saga with a second trilogy of prequels, but Lucas has still accomplished something glorious in his pop mythology of the Force, lightsabers, Jedi knights, princesses and robots. "Star Wars" (renamed "Episode IV – A New Hope) splendidly set the saga in motion with its reworking of Joseph Campbell-approved mythic tropes, a plot borrowed from Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" and the most astonishing special effects ever to hit the silver screen. "Empire Strikes Back," with its script co-written by "Rio Bravo" screenwriter Leigh Brackett, is the best of the series because of its sense of grandeur and depth of feeling. "Return of the Jedi" closes out the original trilogy with an epic battle and a surprisingly tragic end for Darth Vader. The prequels are included here simply out of goodwill, but their impressive special effects and exploration of the ease with which man can slide into evil hold cinematic worth.


67. Rushmore (Anderson, Wes; 1998)

"Rushmore" is by far the most influential film of the past 10 years, spawning imitators of varying degrees of quality (in descending order: "Garden State," "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Juno") that have irregardless gone on to the awards and commercial success that were denied Wes Anderson's masterpiece upon its arrival in 1998. Co-written with Owen Wilson, "Rushmore" is a film of deadpan absurdism and inexplicable melancholy about the heartache that comes when passionate pursuits aren't fulfilled. Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is a student at the Rushmore Academy who stages over-the-top plays and is the president of every club, but who's an academic failure. Max befriends despondent millionaire Herman Blume (Bill Murray, in the role that rejuvenated his career) and falls in love with teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams). The film is as generous in its gorgeous, carefully arranged compositions – influenced by "Harold and Maude," "The Graduate" and Jacques Tati's "Playtime" – as it is in the grace with which it considers its characters.


68. Children of Men (Cuarσn, Alfonso; 2006)

Director Alfonso Cuarσn transforms P.D. James' parable of a world in which children are no longer being born into a humanist work of folk art that illuminates the world's current political crisis through one man's moral evolution. Cuarσn and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (aided by CGI) convey this moral and social chaos through the use of Herculean single takes that last three to 10 minutes. Cuarσn reveals a tentative faith in humanity in the form of Theo (Clive Owen) as he comes to convey man's best attributes: compassion, self-sacrifice and hope. "Children of Men" may say the apocalypse is now, but the film more boldly states the future can still be fought and won.


69. To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, Ernst; 1942)

"To Be or Not to Be" was condemned when it was released shortly after America's entrance into World War II because, like Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," its Nazi-related humor was considered insensitive and, amazingly, anti-Polish. The film is now considered one of the greatest comedies of all time. Maria and Josef Tura (Carole Lombard and Jack Benny) are the stars of an acting troupe in Warsaw that, after its anti-Hitler play "Gestapo" is shut down, uses its talents to help the resistance fight Col. "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman) and the Nazis. Director Ernst Lubitsch, whose profile was caricatured in a Nazi poster demonstrating how to spot a Jew, wasn't being tactless – he was using comedy to vent his blistering anger.


70. Notorious (Hitchcock, Alfred; 1946)

After her father is convicted for being a Nazi spy, playgirl Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is forced by the American government to spy on the suspicious German sect of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) in post-World War II Brazil. Alicia falls in love with her American handler R. Devlin (Cary Grant), but he seemingly treats her as coldly as Alex. Eventually both men place her in enormous danger for their selfish ends. "Notorious" is one of Hitchcock's sexiest and most romantic films, and it infamously skirted around the Hays Code rule in which characters could only kiss on screen for three seconds by having Devlin and Alicia talk in between each touching of the lips to stretch the kiss out to three minutes.


71. Manhattan (Allen, Woody; 1979)

"Annie Hall" may be funnier and have the Best Picture Oscar, but Woody Allen's valentine to New York City is his true masterwork. Ravishingly filmed by cinematographer Gordon Willis ("The Godfather" films) and scored to George Gershwin's music, "Manhattan" is a summation of Allen's neuroses and passions that manages, for the only time, to raise Allen's cinematic aesthetics to the same level as his great dialogue. Allen plays Isaac Davis, a man struggling with his writing (he works for a bad sitcom but wants to be taken seriously) and his loves, 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) and his best friend's neurotic mistress Mary (Diane Keaton). The final shot recalls "City Lights," but the only loves Isaac are left with are his movies and his city.


72. The Reckless Moment (Ophόls, Max; 1949)

"The Reckless Moment" is the rare noir film that features a female heroine, and director Max Ophόls takes advantage of the fluke to use the genre to explore the theme of female oppression. Lucia (Joan Bennett) believes her daughter Bea (Geraldine Brooks) has killed her lover when she finds his dead body on the beach. Lucia tries to cover up the murder and is blackmailed by Martin Donnelly (James Mason) on behalf of an associate and ends up falling in love with her. As Lucia tries to keep her daughter from jail and struggles with her adulterous feelings, the prison of the family – "You don't know how a family can surround you at times" – and patriarchy slowly reveals itself.


73. The Big Sleep (Hawks, Howard; 1946)

This knotty adaptation of Raymond Chandler's mystery is gleefully perverse for its time, with pornographers and nymphomaniacs among the rogue's gallery private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) has to fend off in order to save a socialite (Martha Vickers) from herself and solve seven murders in the process. "The Big Sleep's" plot is so convoluted screenwriters William Faulkner (yes, that Faulkner) and Leigh Brackett asked Chandler for an explanation, and even he wasn't sure what happened. That doesn't stop the film from being enormously entertaining in its depraved energy and splendid innuendos. The first pairing of Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the film is famous for a scene in which the duo uses horseracing as a thinly veiled double entendre: "A lot depends on who's in the saddle."


74. Sunset Blvd. (Wilder, Billy; 1950)
Billy Wilder's "Sunset Blvd." is a seedy examination of the almost literal skeletons in Hollywood's closet that's tellingly narrated by a corpse. To escape creditors, struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) agrees to help faded Hollywood star Norma Desmond (faded Hollywood star Gloria Swanson) re-launch her career by penning her adaptation of "Salome." Norma only finds her way back in front of the cameras through an act of murder. The script by Wilder and frequent writing partner Charles Brackett is a malignant thing that cleverly attacks the shallow and fickle nature of Hollywood.


75. The Shining (Kubrick, Stanley; 1980)

Stanley Kubrick loosely adapted Stephen King's novel "The Shining" to create a more terrifying and tenser work that, at its core, tackles masculine concerns of success and supporting a family, and how failing in both of those regards can lead to domestic violence. Unable to make ends meet as a writer, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes work as an off-season caretaker of Colorado resort the Overlook Hotel. Jack is hoping to use the seemingly easy job to support his attempt to finally write the Great American Novel, but Jack, his wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) soon discover something is seriously amiss. Kubrick's innovative use of the new Steadicam technology turns the mundanity of riding a tricycle down a hallway into something terrifying. The final 40-minute sequence is a tour de force of terror. King was so upset with Stanley Kubrick's adaptation that, in 1997, he (unwisely) commissioned ABC to produce a six-hour miniseries that hewed closer to his novel.


76. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, Michel; 2004)

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman goes from merely bending minds to breaking hearts in what may be the most complex screwball romantic comedy ever made. Joel (Jim Carrey) retreats into the recesses of his own mind when he decides to have his relationship with Clementine (Kate Winslet) erased by low-fi, questionable scientists (Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood), only to discover that he desperately needs to retain the memory of her. Michel Gondry's direction and Ellen Kuras' cinematography are a feast of technical pyrotechnics and whimsy. But it's the fundamental theme that all memories – especially the painful ones – contain a beauty that makes them worth remembering that finally makes "Eternal Sunshine" a heartbreaking romance.


77. Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle, William; 1948)

Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) is an uninspired artist until his chance encounter in Central Park with Jennie (Jennifer Jones), who may be a ghost. "Portrait of Jennie" becomes a compelling investigation of the artistic process and a metaphor for addiction-fueled art as Eben becomes increasingly dependent on visits from Jennie in order to paint. Eben's slow understanding of the truth of what Jennie is turns the film into a moving romantic work when Eben, on the verge of completing his masterwork, realizes finishing the painting will mean losing Jennie forever. The transcendence of Jennie and Eben is symbolized by the film's transition from black-and-white to Technicolor.


78. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Keaton, Buster/Charles F. Reisner; 1928)

William Canfield Jr. (Buster Keaton) is the college graduate son of a riverboat captain, Steamboat Bill (Ernest Torrence), who's embarrassed by his son's newfound sense of fashion and lack of steamboat acumen. William works hard to impress his father while fighting against steamboat rival John James King (Tom McGuire) and romancing King's daughter Marion (Marion Byron). "Steamboat Bill, Jr." contains two oft-imitated scenes – William tries on hats and changes his personality in accordance; the faηade of a house falls on William, but he's saved by the third story window being opened – and a spectacular sequence involving a cyclone.


79. GoodFellas (Scorsese, Martin; 1990)

"As far back as I can remember," narrates Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), "I always wanted to be a gangster." "Goodfellas" grippingly shows that gangster life, turning acts of sadism into slapstick comedy (the opening murder of the man in the trunk) and sadists into tragic figures. "Goodfellas" is a work of superior cinematic craftsmanship that doubles as sociological spectacle: there is as much to be thrilled by in how Scorsese directs a famous sequence of Henry entering the Copacabana as there is in the authentic portrayal of irredeemable thugs (also including Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in his Oscar-winning role) rising to the top through sadistic and immoral means. Scorsese revels in the exhilaration of the mob lifestyle, but he also shows the reality of the paranoia and likely death that come with it.


80. The Thin Red Line (Malick, Terrence; 1998)

Terrence Malick had the misfortune of returning to filmmaking after a 20-year absence with a World War II movie in the same year Steven Spielberg unleashed his own war spectacle on the American film-going public. When given a choice between "Saving Private Ryan's" kinetic D-Day action sequences and Malick's more lyrical staging of the Battle of Guadalcanal in "The Thin Red Line," audiences chose the former and Oscar voters chose..."Shakespeare in Love." "The Thin Red Line" is the better war film though: it's a challenging work that presents the indifference of nature to man's petty squabbles through powerful, poetic cinematography and exhilarating, more intimately felt battle scenes.


81. Brazil (Gilliam, Terry; 1985)

Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" does nothing more than amalgamate the plots and dystopian visions of "Nineteen Eight-Four," "Fahrenheit 451," "Brave New World," "The Trial," "Metropolis" and "Alphaville," but it does so with such ιlan and narrative and visual daring, it makes the age-old fears of humanity being overrun by bureaucracy and technology seem vital again. Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, a cog in the machine who becomes a revolutionary when he literally meets the girl of his dreams (Kim Greist) and inadvertently joins forces with the freedom-fighter handyman Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). Gilliam famously battled with Universal to release the film in the U.S., with the studio at one point proposing a "Love Conquers All" version that cut 40 minutes from the film and ended happily.


82. Modern Times (Chaplin, Charles; 1936)

Charlie Chaplin rages against the machine in "Modern Times," in which Chaplin's Tramp is literally chewed up by the gears of a factory (the sequence is a comedy classic) and nearly loses his humanity to industrialization. With this being a Chaplin film, the Tramp's humanity is restored with the help of a spirited "Gamin" (Paulette Goddard). Although it deals with Great Depression anxieties, the film remains a formidable statement about how technology dehumanizes and isolates when it's communion the soul requires – all told through slapstick, of course. Even though sound films had been the norm for nearly a decade, "Modern Times" only features sound effects and music, and no spoken dialogue from the characters. "Modern Times" is Chaplin's last silent film and the last appearance of the much-beloved Tramp.


83. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand, David; 1937)

It all begins with the simple invocation of "Once upon a time there lived a lovely little princess named Snow White." Snow White escapes the clutches of a Queen who wants her heart in a box (pretty macabre for a children's movie) and is taken in by seven dwarfs who whistle while they mine for diamonds. Walt Disney's decision to make the American full-length animated feature was ridiculed by the press and Hollywood insiders as "Disney's Folly." Even his wife told him, "No one's ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture." To say Disney proved the naysayers wrong is an understatement. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" transports the audience into a magical fairytale realm with its vivid animation, wonderful songs and dark sense of danger.


84. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, Tobe; 1974)

Five teenagers stumble upon a house of horrors in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and though it's by far the most terrifying film ever made, Tobe Hooper deploys that terror as a means toward exploring profound sociological issues. After all, it's the 1970s gas crisis that forces Sally (Marilyn Burns), her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and her friends off the road; Franklin appears to be another neglected Vietnam veteran; the masked Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his family have turned to murdering people because they've been replaced by machines at the slaughterhouse at which they used to work; and the ease with which human flesh is replaced with animals is, to say the least, pro-vegetarian. Hooper's masterpiece is far less violent than its title would make it seem; taking a cue from Alfred Hitchcock, most of the bodily harm is implied rather than explicitly shown – which in some ways makes it worse.


85. Red River (Hawks, Howard; 1948)

Biblical, Homeric, Oedipal, Shakespearean, literary, operatic and above all things quintessentially Western, Howard Hawks' "Red River" is the epic account of the opening of the Chisholm Trail in 1867 that allowed cattle to be driven from Kansas to Texas. John Wayne plays Thomas Dunson, a relentless cattle driver whose tyranny is challenged by his adopted son Matt (Montgomery Clift in his first film role). When Matt takes over the drive from his father, Dunson promises, "Every time you turn around, expect to see me, 'cause one time you'll turn around and I'll be there. I'm gonna kill ya, Matt." The psychological conflict turns the film into "Mutiny on the Bounty" on the rolling plains.


86. Annie Hall (Allen, Woody; 1977)

Woody Allen went from being a maker of wacky, frivolous satires to being a serious artist with "Annie Hall." Allen plays a neurotic stand-up comedian (Woody Allen) who recounts his relationship with the ebullient Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) after being devastated by their breakup. Believed by many to be based on Allen's real-life relationship with Keaton, whose real last name is Hall and whose nickname is Annie, the film maturely examines the remains of a relationship with unrivaled intellectual wit and a keen ability to blend surreal flights of fancy into the real world, making it arguably the only successful English-language film of magic-realism. "Annie Hall" was originally titled "Anhedonia" (a psychological inability to experience pleasure) and was filmed as a murder mystery.


87. The Conversation (Coppola, Francis; 1974)

In the same year he made "The Godfather Part II," Francis Ford Coppola reworked Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blowup" into a film about paranoia and surveillance in the age of Watergate. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a socially anxious surveillance expert who takes a job monitoring a couple (Harrison Ford and Cindy Williams) in San Francisco's Union Square. As Caul puts a reel together of the conversation, he worries what the phrase "He'd kill us if he got the chance" means and what impact his tape will have. Walter Murch's extraordinary sound design and editing turn "The Conversation's" depiction of mania and remorse into a work of existential angst.


88. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, Stanley; 1971)

Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) and his "droogs" enjoy a life of sadism and debauchery in near-future England – he listens to Mozart, has threesomes, drinks drug-spiked milk and engages in "ultra-violent" acts like beating and raping victims while performing "Singin' in the Rain" – until he's arrested and submitted to the Ludovico technique to end his violent ways. Stanley Kubrick's surreal (many scenes were filmed with a fisheye lens) and sex-and-violence-filled adaptation of Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" was initially rated "X" in the U.S., received a "Condemned" rating by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting and was withdrawn from England by Kubrick himself until 1999 because of the death threats he received.


89. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, William; 1946)

Although "The Best Years of Our Lives" is still revered as a classic in most circles, the critical tide has slowly turned against the film and director William Wyler since the 1960s for being too schematic and too sentimental. Outside of cynicism, it's hard to understand why. Wyler's 172-minute, extraordinarily moving human epic focuses on the lives of three veterans – Al Stephenson (Oscar-winner Fredric March), Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) and Homer Parrish (Oscar-winner and real veteran Harold Russell) – as they attempt to readapt to life in the U.S. after the end of World War II. Although glad to be home, the men find the Army has left them ill-equipped for civilian life: Al is an alcoholic forced to turn down veterans for loans at the bank at which he works, Fred is forced to go back to working as a soda jerk and has been cuckolded by his wife, and Homer has lost his hands, preventing him from ever touching his fiancιe again. Considering the plight of Iraq veterans, the film is at least as relevant today as it was 60 years ago.


90. Kill Bill – The Whole Bloody Affair (Tarantino, Quentin; 2003 and 2004)

Quentin Tarantino is often lambasted for his pastiche approach to filmmaking while his spiritual cinematic fathers like Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg have long been lionized for their nods to film history in their films. In "Kill Bill," his references and appropriations are legion, but they're used as thrillingly as the allusions in "Once Upon a Time in the West," "Taxi Driver," "The Conversation" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The profound spirituality and redemption quests of his films are also often ignored. As film theorist Michael K. Crowley has splendidly pointed out, the bloody, sword-wielding killing spree of the Bride (Uma Thurman) is a visceral Buddhist allegory about overcoming the "Five Poisons" that obstruct the path to enlightenment, with the Bride fighting corporeal embodiments of Pride (Lucy Liu as O-ren Ishii), Hatred (Vivica A. Fox as Vernita Green), Delusion (Michael Madsen as Budd), Envy (Darryl Hannah as Elle Driver) and Desire (David Carradine as Bill). Of course, it's still a kinetic orgy of bloody mayhem with a strong emotional core as the Bride comes to discover that revenge means killing someone that you loved – or love.


91. Assault on Precinct 13 (Carpenter, John; 1976)

Howard Hawks loosely remade his "Rio Bravo" concept twice with diminishing returns, but John Carpenter applied the same premise to "Assault on Precinct 13," updating Hawks' themes of professionalism and morality to turn 1970s Los Angeles into the setting for a racially and sexually charged urban Western that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Hawks' original. During its last day of service, police station Precinct 9, Division 13 (the title is a misnomer made by the distributor that rejected the original, pulpier name "The Anderson Alamo") comes under attack by the multiracial Street Thunder gang. Functioning on a skeleton crew, it's left up to a black lieutenant (Austin Stokes), a secretary (Laurie Zimmer) and a white prisoner (Darwin Joston) to defend the precinct in sequences of blistering intensity and sociopolitical subtext that belie the $100,000 budget.


92. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, John; 1962)

After years of defining the Western with films like "Stagecoach," "My Darling Clementine" and "The Searchers," director John Ford finally deconstructed the genre with "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." The arrival of U.S. Sen. Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) for a pauper's funeral prompts a newspaper's interest in the life of the recently deceased Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), forcing Ransom to finally tell the truth about what happened the day the nefarious Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) was shot. In doing so, Ransom exposes not only the lie that formed the foundation of his political career, but the lie of frontier myths and masculine codes often propagated by Westerns. A newspaper editor is so shocked he tells his reporter the famous words, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."


93. Badlands (Malick, Terrence; 1973)

Terrence Malick based his impressive directorial debut "Badlands" on the real-life killing spree of the James Dean-obsessed Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, who killed 11 people in Nebraska and Colorado in 1958. Malick uses contrapuntal narration to show how Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is able to romance innocent Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) despite his murderous ways: Holly idealizes Kit's killings, while the images of Malick and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto show the grim, bloody reality. The first of Malick's four masterpieces, "Badlands" set the template for all his films to follow with a mise-en-scθne that's at once photorealistic and rapturous.


94. The Dead (Huston, John; 1987)

For his final directorial effort, 80-year-old John Huston adapted James Joyce's short story "The Dead" and took a line spoken in that work to heart: "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age." Ravaged by emphysema and directing from a wheelchair, Huston nonetheless made a work of exquisite zest. The film is surprisingly faithful to Joyce's seemingly unfilmable short story as it documents a dinner party thrown by the Morkan sisters (Helena Carroll and Cathleen Delany) and their niece (Ingrid Craigie) for the Feast of the Epiphany in 1904 Dublin. The feast is a lively celebration, but it brings back a flood of sad memories for Gretta Conroy (Angelica Huston), leading to a confession to her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) that causes his identity to fade "out into a grey impalpable world." The interactions between the characters are so natural, so full of life, to paraphrase Joyce, it causes the soul to swoon slowly.


95. Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, Alexander; 1957)

Director Alexander Mackendrick and screenwriter Clifford Odets turn acrimony into acerbic artistry in "Sweet Smell of Success." Tony Curtis' many teenage fans were disappointed by their idol abandoning his usual pretty-boy roles to play desperate press agent Sidney Falco, resulting in the film's box office failure. But Curtis was never better than he is here. In order to get his clients mentioned in the powerful column written by J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), Falco is forced to destroy the career and reputation of a musician (Martin Millner) whose only real crime is that he's dating Hunsecker's sister (Susan Harrison). Mackendrick's realistic yet nightmarishly noirish vision of New York City influenced Martin Scorsese, while Odets' caustic, idiomatic dialogue – "I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic" – is some of the best ever spoken in American movies.


96. King Kong (Cooper, Merian C./Ernest B. Schoedsack; 1933)

"King Kong" is widely seen as a modern re-enactment of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairytale, with the giant ape Kong falling in love with blond ingιnue Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). But, as film theorist Harvey Roy Greenberg has pointed out, there are intriguing psychosexual rumblings beneath the surface that make the film a symbolic Freudian struggle for a boy to pass through adolescent sexual desires that alternate between idealized and violent reactions toward women to become a sexually mature man, with Kong serving as the unleashed id of woman-hater-turned-romantic Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot). Or it could just be a piece of pure entertainment that still delights because of Willis O'Brien's superb visual effects – Kong's fight with dinosaurs and his scaling of the Empire State Building are iconic for good reason. Filmmaker Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) sails with actress Ann and First Mate Jack to Skull Island to make a movie of the mythical Kong, captures the beast and brings him to New York to display him as an oddity. Despite Denham's protestations "It was Beauty killed the Beast," it's Denham's avarice that leads to Kong's downfall.


97. Sullivan's Travels (Sturges, Preston; 1941)

Tired of making comedies like "Ants in Your Plants of 1939," Hollywood director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) vows to make a movie adaptation of the stark Depression-era novel "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" that's a "commentary on modern conditions" with "stark realism" and "a little sex in it" – a "true canvas of the suffering of humanity." To research the film, Sullivan poses as a hobo with a struggling actress (Veronica Lake) and ends up being incarcerated in a work camp. There Sullivan learns the uplift comedies can give to the very people he wanted to make a film about. Preston Sturges' witty "Sullivan's Travels" mocks social realism (even John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair get jabs), not just to prove the worth of his own comedies, but to point out, as Sullivan says, "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh."


98. Johnny Guitar (Ray, Nicholas; 1954)

"Johnny Guitar" is one of the most radical Westerns ever made. Eschewing realism and consciously subverting every convention of the genre, Nicholas Ray's bold film – both in terms of its plot and exaggerated color scheme – is superficially about gun-toting saloon owner Vienna (Joan Crawford) and her former lover Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) joining forces to fight a mob (led by Mercedes McCambridge's Emma) bent on throwing her out of town or lynching her. The feminist film pits Vienna and Emma against each other, while the unarmed Johnny is often seen swooning for Vienna. "Johnny Guitar" is an even better use of the Western as an allegory for McCarthyism than "High Noon": the witch hunts are thrillingly staged, real McCarthyite Ward Bond plays a villain and the script was penned by blacklisted screenwriter Ben Maddow.


99. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Sturges, Preston; 1944)

It's almost impossible to believe "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" actually got past the Hays Code censors of 1944. Even at the time of its release, journalist James Agee, baffled by the movie being approved, wrote, "The Production Code Office has been raped in its sleep." Preston Sturges' hilarious film is about a girl, Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton), who goes to a party with soldiers on their way to war and ends up married and pregnant, but with only a vague recollection of her husband's name – she thinks it may be Ignatz Ratzkywatzky. Her harried, longtime crush Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) volunteers to claim to be the father and save her virtue. There's one bravura four-minute sequence in which Norval, increasingly flabbergasted, learns the full extent of what he has gotten himself into. Laugh-for-laugh, it ranks with "Duck Soup" as the funniest American movie of all time.


100. The Leopard Man (Tourneur, Jacques; 1943)

"The Leopard Man" is the real father of the slasher film, even if its violence largely takes place off screen and is even more subliminal than that in the genre's wrongly credited progenitor "Psycho." Terror grips a New Mexico border town when a supposedly tame leopard escapes and is blamed for the death of three women – except the killings continue after the beast is found. Director Jacques Tourneur conducts his death scenes so the emphasis is on the suspense leading up to the death, not the carnage itself. The New Mexico setting and female victims allow the "The Leopard Man" to comment on themes of sexual repression, racial oppression and the oppressiveness of tradition. The film's greatest sequence involves a girl who's chased through town and reaches the safety of her home, only to be mauled, her blood flowing beneath her locked front door.

Posted Monday, June 16, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/greatest.american.films

The 100 Greatest American Films of All Time: Introduction

Rating: Not reviewed


Ten years ago today, the American Film Institute unveiled its much heralded "100 years...100 Movies" list, a list of the 100 greatest American films of all time that celebrated 100 years of American filmmaking as voted upon by filmmakers, critics and industry insiders. The list was immediately greeted with disdain for its debatable inclusions (the historically important but otherwise negligible "The Jazz Singer," the badly aged "My Fair Lady" and "Dances with Wolves," for example) and jaw-dropping exclusions ("Sunrise," "The General" and "Nashville," among others). As frustrating as it was for some critics, the list served its purpose by becoming a jumping-off point for a discussion about the American cinematic canon.

That was certainly the case for me. I remember watching the show on CBS the summer before my senior year of high school and being exposed to dozens of great, classic films I never would've heard of or seen otherwise. The special was also criticized as a thinly veiled way to boost Blockbuster rentals – the now-antiquated video chain even offered AFI-related coupons and dutifully marked which films in the "Classic" section were AFI-approved. Again, without that "Rent One Get One Free" promotion, I wouldn't have been able to afford to see all of the AFI 100.

The AFI oddly updated its list last year instead of waiting for the tenth anniversary. The new list makes some corrections ("The Jazz Singer," "My Fair Lady" and "Dances with Wolves" are out; "Sunrise," "The General" and "Nashville" are in) and new mistakes (the dubious inclusion of "Titanic," "The Shawshank Redemption," "The Sixth Sense" and "Sophie's Choice").

Nevertheless, I'll always be in debt to that 1998 special. The AFI 100 was a significant stepping stone in my development as a fledgling film critic – and, more importantly, as a film lover.

In honor of the tenth anniversary of the first AFI 100, I humbly offer my own list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. The list is slightly off-kilter, especially when compared to the AFI offering – many sacred (and, I would say, moldy) cinematic cows were sacrificed to make way for works I would argue are more visionary. Like the AFI 100, it's sure to infuriate some (after all, there's no such thing as an objective list of the greatest American films), but hopefully it will make some of you think about you believe are the best American movies.

To be considered an American film for my purposes, the film must be at least 40 minutes long and fulfill at least two of the following criteria: it must have an American director, Americans significantly involved in the filmmaking process (screenwriter, cinematographer, editor), American stars and/or significant American financing. Because of these criteria, AFI qualifiers like "Lawrence of Arabia" are ruled out and some are controversially allowed in, like "Chimes at Midnight" (which stars, was directed by and had its screenplay adapted by American Orson Welles but was filmed entirely in Spain; was financed by France, Spain and Switzerland; and is based on William Shakespeare plays). I freely admit these criteria also make some of my choices eligible for UK lists, which is perfectly fine.

Without further ado, here is the list at a glance. Click here to see the list with full commentary. Pleased to enjoy...

The 100 Greatest American Films of All Time

1. Citizen Kane
2. Vertigo
3. The Godfather Trilogy
4. Days of Heaven
5. Chimes at Midnight
6. The Searchers
7. Raging Bull
8. 2001: A Space Odyssey
9. Nashville
10. Singin' in the Rain
11. Sunrise
12. Casablanca
13. City Lights
14. Apocalypse Now
15. The General
16. Greed
17. The Wizard of Oz
18. Intolerance
19. The Night of the Hunter
20. The Third Man
21. North by Northwest
22. The Lord of the Rings
23. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
24. The Shop Around the Corner
25. Letter From an Unknown Woman
26. The Crowd
27. Chinatown
28. Touch of Evil
29. Duck Soup
30. Psycho
31. The Magnificent Ambersons
32. Taxi Driver
33. Rio Bravo
34. Sherlock, Jr.
35. Some Like It Hot
36. Schindler's List
37. The New World
38. Blade Runner
39. All That Heaven Allows
40. Barry Lyndon
41. Heaven's Gate
42. Shadow of a Doubt
43. The Lady Eve
44. Out of the Past
45. There Will Be Blood
46. His Girl Friday
47. Rear Window
48. Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
49. Blue Velvet
50. My Darling Clementine
51. The Wild Bunch
52. Munich
53. Short Cuts
54. Bringing Up Baby
55. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset
56. The Naked Spur
57. McCabe and Mrs. Miller
58. Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America
59. Pinocchio
60. The Philadelphia Story
61. The Living Dead Tetralogy
62. Only Angels Have Wings
63. In a Lonely Place
64. Make Way For Tomorrow
65. The Maltese Falcon
66. The Star Wars Saga
67. Rushmore
68. Children of Men
69. To Be or Not to Be
70. Notorious
71. Manhattan
72. The Reckless Moment
73. The Big Sleep
74. Sunset Blvd.
75. The Shining
76. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
77. Portrait of Jennie
78. Steamboat Bill, Jr.
79. Goodfellas
80. The Thin Red Line
81. Brazil
82. Modern Times
83. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
84. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
85. Red River
86. Annie Hall
87. The Conversation
88. A Clockwork Orange
89. The Best Years of Our Lives
90. Kill Bill
91. Assault on Precinct 13
92. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
93. Badlands
94. The Dead
95. Sweet Smell of Success
96. King Kong
97. Sullivan's Travels
98. Johnny Guitar
99. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
100. The Leopard Man

Again, for the list with commentary, click here.

A break down of the list…


The most represented director:

(Two-way Tie) Howard Hawks (6 with "Rio Bravo," "His Girl Friday," "Bringing Up Baby," "Only Angels Have Wings," "The Big Sleep," "Red River") and Alfred Hitchcock (6 with "Vertigo," "North by Northwest," "Psycho," "Shadow of a Doubt," "Rear Window" and "Notorious")


The most represented leading actor:

Cary Grant (6 with "North by Northwest," "My Girl Friday," "Bringing Up Baby," "The Philadelphia Story," "Only Angels Have Wings" and "Notorious")


The most represented leading actress:

(Two-way Tie) Diane Keaton (3 with "The Godfather" Trilogy, "Manhattan" and "Annie Hall") and Janet Leigh ("Touch of Evil," "Psycho" and "The Naked Spur")


The most represented year:

(Six-way* Tie) 1940 (4 with "The Shop Around the Corner," "His Girl Friday," "Pinocchio" and "The Philadelphia Story"), 1941 (4 with "Citizen Kane," "The Lady Eve," "The Maltese Falcon" and "Sullivan's Travels"), 1946 (4 with "My Darling Clementine," "Notorious," "The Big Sleep" and "The Best Years of Our Lives"), 1974 (4 with "The Godfather Part II," "Chinatown," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "The Conversation"), 1980 (4 with "Raging Bull," "Heaven's Gate," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Shining") and 2005* (4 with "The New World," "Munich," "Land of the Dead," "Revenge of the Sith")

*2005's number is inflated because of the inclusion of sequels that wouldn't have been included in their own right


The most represented decade:

The 1940s (24 with "The Shop Around the Corner," "His Girl Friday," "Pinocchio," "The Philadelphia Story," "Citizen Kane," "The Lady Eve," "The Maltese Falcon," "Sullivan's Travels," "Casablanca," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "To Be or Not to Be," "Shadow of a Doubt," "The Leopard Man," "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," "My Darling Clementine," "Notorious," "The Big Sleep," "The Best Years of Our Lives," "Out of the Past," "Letter from an Unknown Woman," "Portrait of Jennie," "Red River," "The Third Man" and "The Reckless Moment")


Full list of appearances by year and by decade:

1916 – 1 (Intolerance)

1910s – 1

1924 – 2 (Greed, Sherlock Jr.)
1926 – 1 (The General)
1927 – 1 (Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans)
1928 – 2 (The Crowd, Steamboat Bill, Jr.)

1920s – 6

1931 – 1 (City Lights)
1933 – 2 (Duck Soup, King Kong)
1936 – 1 (Modern Times)
1937 – 2 (Make Way for Tomorrow, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
1938 – 1 (Bringing Up Baby)
1939 – 2 (The Wizard of Oz, Only Angels Have Wings)

1930s – 9

1940 – 4 (The Shop Around the Corner, His Girl Friday, Pinocchio, The Philadelphia Story)
1941 – 4 (Citizen Kane, The Lady Eve, The Maltese Falcon, Sullivan's Travels)
1942 – 3 (Casablanca, The Magnificent Ambersons, To Be or Not to Be)
1943 – 2 (Shadow of a Doubt, The Leopard Man)
1944 – 1 (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek)
1946 – 4 (My Darling Clementine, Notorious, The Big Sleep, The Best Years of Our Lives)
1947 – 1 (Out of the Past)
1948 – 3 (Letter from an Unknown Woman, Portrait of Jennie, Red River)
1949 – 2 (The Third Man, The Reckless Moment)

1940s – 24

1950 – 1 (In a Lonely Place)
1952 – 1 (Singin' in the Rain)
1953 – 1 (The Naked Spur)
1954 – 2 (Rear Window, Johnny Guitar)
1955 – 2 (The Night of the Hunter, All That Heaven Allows)
1956 – 1 (The Searchers)
1957 – 1 (Sweet Smell of Success)
1958 – 2 (Vertigo, Touch of Evil)
1959 – 2 (North by Northwest, Rio Bravo, Some Like It Hot)

1950s – 13

1960 – 1 (Psycho)
1962 – 1 (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)
1964 – 1 (Dr. Strangelove)
1965 – 1 (Chimes at Midnight)
1968 – 2 (2001: A Space Odyssey, Night of the Living Dead)
1969 – 1 (The Wild Bunch)

1960s – 7

1971 – 2 (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, A Clockwork Orange)
1972 – 1 (The Godfather)
1973 – 1 (Badlands)
1974 – 4 (The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Conversation)
1975 – 2 (Nashville, Barry Lyndon)
1976 – 2 (Taxi Driver, Assault on Precinct 13)
1977 – 2 (Star Wars, Annie Hall)
1978 – 2 (Days of Heaven, Dawn of the Dead)
1979 – 2 (Apocalypse Now, Manhattan)

1970s – 18

1980 – 4 (Raging Bull, Heaven's Gate, The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining)
1982 – 2 (E.T., Blade Runner)
1983 – 1 (Return of the Jedi)
1984 – 1 (Once Upon a Time in America)
1985 – 2 (Day of the Dead, Brazil)
1986 – 1 (Blue Velvet)
1987 – 1 (The Dead)

1980s – 12

1990 – 2 (The Godfather Part III, Goodfellas)
1993 – 2 (Schindler's List, Short Cuts)
1995 – 1 (Before Sunrise)
1998 – 2 (Rushmore, The Thin Red Line)
1999 – 1 (The Phantom Menace)

1990s – 8

2001 – 1 (The Fellowship of the Ring)
2002 – 2 (The Two Towers, Attack of the Clones)
2003 – 2 (Return of the King, Kill Bill – Vol. 1)
2004 – 3 (Before Sunset, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kill Bill – Vol. 2)
2005 – 4 (The New World, Munich, Land of the Dead, Revenge of the Sith)
2006 – 1 (Children of Men)
2007 – 1 (There Will Be Blood)

2000s: 14 (inflated because of the separate counting of films considered as one work in the actual list; really there are only 7 or 8 films from the 2000s depending on how Before Sunset is counted)

Posted Monday, June 16, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/greatest.american.films.intro

Semi-Pro
Written by Scot Armstrong
Directed by Kent Alterman
New Line Cinema
2008
Rating:


"Semi-Pro" aspires to the absurdity of "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" and the underdog sports parody of "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" and ends up painfully strained in the effort. Will Ferrell, again skewering misplaced white male machismo, plays a one-hit-wonder turned basketball team owner and player Jackie Moon. Jackie's team, the Flint Tropics, is in the American Basketball Association and is at risk of being dissolved when the National Basketball Association absorbs the struggling league. Jackie's comic desperation to turn the fan-less and largely untalented Tropics one of the four teams to make it to the NBA forces him to play actual basketball with the help of aging player Monix (Woody Harrelson) and perform crazy promotional stunts. There's some inspired lunacy, like Jackie wrestling a bear and deliriously extended scenes in which Jackie tries to throw up and make a free-throw, but in comparison to the overtly similar "Major League" and "Dodgeball," "Semi-Pro" shoots a brick.

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/semi-pro

The Other Boleyn Girl
Written by Peter Morgan
Directed by Justin Chadwick
Focus Features/Columbia Pictures
2008
Rating:


If Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth" is a feminist work of female defiance and its sequel "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" is borderline anti-feminist in its hysteria, then the pseudo-prequel "The Other Boleyn Girl" is a work of faux feminism. Buried beneath the opulent costumes and "Masterpiece Theater" director Justin Chadwick's endless shots of fields of grain, passing clouds and castle exteriors is a story about the timelessness of misogyny and man's tendency to turn women against each other.

When Katherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent) falls out of favor with King Henry VIII (Eric Bana) because of her inability to produce a male heir, Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) sees an opportunity to advance his ambitions – by pimping out his daughters Anne (Natalie Portman) and Mary (Scarlett Johansson) as Henry's mistresses.

The script by Peter Morgan (his third consecutive historically based clunker following the overrated and Oscar-winning "The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland") reduces Anne and Mary to their uteruses. This reduction may have been fine if "The Other Boleyn Girl" was still able to muster up the energy to say something profound about the historical mistreatment of women, but the movie is just as shallow in its feminism as it is in its history.

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/the.other.boleyn.girl

Be Kind Rewind
Written and directed by Michel Gondry
New Line Cinema
2008
Rating:


Movies are part of modern culture's collective unconscious, making us all in someway – whether Hollywood studio lawyers like it or not – owners of the films we love. Michel Gondry magically literalizes that idea with "Be Kind Rewind," a valentine to the movies that are a part of us, to community, to friendship and to do-it-yourself showmanship.

Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) owns the Be Kind Rewind video store/thrift shop in Passaic, N.J., that's an anachronism for two reasons: it only offers now thoroughly obsolete videotapes and those who work at the store are actually passionate about the films that are rented. While Mr. Fletcher is away spying on the competition of an impersonal, DVD-only video chain, he leaves Mike (Mos Def) in charge of the store. Mr. Fletcher tries to warn Mike against allowing his friend Jerry (Jack Black) into Be Kind Rewind, but Mike doesn't hear him properly, and it turns out to be a caution worth heeding.

In a mishap at the power plant he has declared war against, Jerry unknowingly becomes magnetized and thereby erases all of the tapes during a visit to the store. With Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) checking on the store for Mr. Fletcher and requesting a copy of "Ghostbusters," Mike, unable to find another videotape of the movie, decides to make his own version with Jerry. "I'll be Bill Murray," Mike says to Jerry, "and you be everybody else."

Mike and Jerry's hilarious but heartfelt rendition of "Ghostbusters" is quickly uncovered to be a knockoff, but instead of being busted, the friends are encouraged to make more movies. The friends decide to turn this enterprise into a way to save the store from impending demolition by charging $20 per film, initially claiming the movies are Swedish imports.

Despite being released by Time Warner company New Line Cinema, Gondry's film feels like a rebuke against a studio system that prefers heartless pyrotechnics to soulful filmmaking. Just compare the warmth of Mike and Jerry's "Rush Hour 2" to the real thing. The "Sweded" versions of the movies also allow Gondry to come up with highly inspired moments of lo-fi artistry that border on the sublime. The junkyard version of "RoboCop" and the pseudo-puppetry of "The Lion King" are particularly inspired, and it's hard to imagine a more wonderful, joyful moment in movies this year than the single tracking shot that follows Mike, Jerry and their newfound partner in crime Alma (Melonie Diaz) remaking "When We Were Kings," "King Kong," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Carrie" and "Men in Black."

"Be Kind Rewind" is full of the kind of humanity, awe and filmmaking passion all too frequently absent from Hollywood products and the surging Indiewood contrivances. This is a film that truly loves movies and the communal art of creation.

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/be.kind.rewind

Goldfrapp: Seventh Tree
Mute
2008
Rating:


Goldfrapp's shift to a more pastoral form of techno from the erotic electro funk of 2005's "Supernature" won't be that much of a surprise to those familiar with the stately "Felt Mountain" the duo released in 2000. The return to orchestral lushness even seems like the formation of a perfect circle.

Instead of making an album that's suitably sumptuous and idyllic, "Seventh Tree" is bland and mellow. Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory seem to be attempting to make something as ethereal as classic Kate Bush, only to have created something that's unmemorable in its pleasantness. The failure to pump any soul into this batch of melancholy ballads comes as a surprise because of Goldfrapp's past success "Pilots" and "You Never Know." There's some feeling to "A & E" and a redeeming European-, 1970s-style funk to "Cologne Cerrone and Houdini," but these are songs that underline the half-hearted, less-than-super nature of the effort.

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/music/goldfrapp/seventh.tree

Beach House: Devotion
Carpark
2008
Rating:


Beach House's "Devotion" is as fragile as a yearning heart tautened from desperate pulsing and delicate from the fear of unreciprocated love. This album is lovelorn, and rapturously so, but wrapped in the melancholy that sometimes comes with such romantic dedication. Beach House has perfected the sound of romantic haunting in much the same way Daphne du Maurier did with "Rebecca." Amazingly, the duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally accomplish this with little more than Legrand's ethereal voice, a slide guitar, a Casiotone keyboard synthesizer beat set on repeat and some stray auxiliary percussion.

"You Came to Me" unfolds over a Bosa Nova sequence that appropriately brings to mind an Oceanside resort, but Legrand weighs down what could've been a wispy triviality with her lugubrious intonation of, "This is the right time for a haunting." "The Wedding Bell" is the ghost of a country & western jaunt on which Legrand movingly asks, "Oh, is your heart still mine to sail?"

"Gila" has a more powerful backbeat and seers with menace. Legrand sounds more love jaded as she sings "Don't you waste your time" and Scally expresses danger with his guitar. "D.A.R.L.I.N.G." is more Motown devotional than Nico icy cool, just one step from a stripped down Ronnie Spector.

Fittingly, "Heart of Chambers" is the heart of the album. A desperate waltz of heartache, there is real pain and real hopefulness to the melancholy dirge and Legrand's impassioned plea of, "I'd like to / Be someone / You could finally learn to / Love again." That despair, that desire is the very essence of devotion.

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/music/beach.house/devotion

The Duchess of Langeais
Written by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and Jacques Rivette
Directed by Jacques Rivette
IFC First Take
2008
Rating:


Jacques Rivette, like many of his French New Wave compatriots, has a true talent for finding the raw power within literary works that in more reserved hands (such as most of the Merchant-Ivory productions) would be pulse-less. Returning to the stories of Honorι de Balzac for the third time after the monumental "Out 1" and "La Belle Noiseuse," racing pulses aren't a problem for Rivette in "The Duchess of Langeais" despite its plot of an unconsummated affair.

"The Duchess" begins with French General Marquis Armand Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard) visiting a Barefoot Carmelite cloister in hopes of speaking to his former lover, Duchess Antoinette Langleais (Jeanne Baliber of Rivette's "Va Savoir"), now a nun. The meeting is abruptly ended by the mother superior closing a curtain on Montriveau. Another curtain opens on a ball five years earlier when Armand and Antoinette first meet. The Duchess is warned the "leonine" General is "dull and somber," but she insists on being introduced to him. Montriveau for his part declares of the married Duchess, "I shall make her my mistress!"

The love affair between the Duchess and the General is a passionate battle of wills, pitting "steel against steel." Antoinette seems to be playing games with Armand, constantly interrupting his stories of war under Napoleon and refusing more physical advances. Armand finds this increasingly infuriating and even threatens violence (the French title "Touch Not the Ax" refers to a menacing anecdote Armand tells). But, unbeknownst to both of them until it's too late, Antoinette has pledged to Armand something more than her body – her heart.

Rivette is sometimes the most experimental of the New Wave auteurs – not even Jean-Luc Godard has attempted a 12-hour opus like Rivette's controversial "Out 1" – and he's also one of the movements greatest minimalists. His direction and camerawork with cinematographer William Lubtchansky ("Regular Lovers," "Va Savoir") is stately and tense, so that when Antoinette warns, "Armand, you are flying into a passion," the peril of romantic obsession is intensely felt. Rivette offers some of the patented irony and detachment effects of the New Wave in the form of biting intertitles, but more often he allows the barely repressed emotion to bleed through, allowing Antoinette and Armand's tκte-ΰ-tκte to feel like a real battle for the human heart.

Posted Sunday, February 24, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/the.duchess.of.langeais

Atlas Sound: Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel
Kranky
2008
Rating:


"Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel" is a debut album that gives poignant voice and melody to the unhealed adolescent scars incurred since Deerhunter's Bradford Cox started recording solo material under the name Atlas Sound at the age of 12.

For the now-25-year-old Cox, some of those scars are literal. Cox suffers from Marfan Syndrome, a disease that results in gangly limbs and cardiovascular problems. When Cox was 16, he spent a stolen summer in a hospital undergoing surgeries because of the disorder. "Quarantined" movingly concerns that hospital stay while also touching upon the plight of child AIDS patients isolated because of their disease. "Quarantined and kept so far away from my friends," Cox sings. "I'm waiting to be changed."

More often, "Let the Blind..." deals with psychological and emotional wreckage. "Recent Bedroom" details Cox's difficulty dealing with the death of an aunt ("I could not cry / I don't know, I don't know why"); "Winter Vacation" is the vivid experience of seeing a landscape through the eyes of new love ("I've seen waves, hushed and soaked in static"); and "Ativan" relates wanting to sleep through a lover moving on ("I slept while you had lunch / Lunch with a girl who takes time to listen to every word you utter").

"Let the Blind..." may be about Cox's childhood hang-ups, but they're dealt with through an awe-inspiring grasp of sonic maturity. Listening to "Let the Blind..." is to be set adrift in glacial, disorienting ambience. Sometimes it can be a cacophony of surprisingly harmonious noise, as in the clash of xylophones and African percussion instruments on "Quarantined." "Winter Vacation," "Cold as Ice" and "Small Horrors" are chilly yet emotionally effecting works of enveloping sound. "Scraping Past" wouldn't have been out of place on Radiohead's last four albums. "Recent Bedroom," "River Card" and "Ativan" sound like "Nuggets" of 1960s and 1970s acid rock and proto-punk.

All of it is deeply moving. It's a truly haunting experience, like listening to Brian Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets," My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless," Radiohead's "Kid A" or Spiritualized's "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space."

Cox leaves blood on these tracks – the blood of a sad youth, the blood of a profound musician.

Posted Sunday, February 24, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/music/atlas.sound/let.the.blind.lead.those.who.can.see.but.cannot.feel

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
Written and directed by George A. Romero
The Weinstein Co.
2008
Rating:


Legendary horror director George A. Romero returns to the zombie movies that made him famous – and which he most recently visited with 2005's "Land of the Dead" – with "Diary of the Dead," a first-person video chronicle of a global zombie epidemic.

Though they had no shared characters, "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "Day of the Dead" and "Land of the Dead" all seemed to exist in the same universe, with each film escalating the zombie threat of the one that came before. "Diary," however, is an apparent reboot that begins as the dead first start coming back to life. "Diary's" distance from the other "Dead" films is a relief since it allows the films from "Night" to "Land" to form a near-perfect tetralogy of terror and social commentary; the inclusion of "Diary" would've sullied that esteemed franchise's name.

The greatness of the "Dead" tetralogy rests as much with its queasy gore as with its subtext. Like John Updike with his "Rabbit" tetralogy, Romero and his films presciently dissected the flaws of American society almost once per decade: in the 1960s of "Night," it was the defective values of the American family; in the 1970s of "Dawn," consumerism; "Day" reacted against Reaganite America; and "Land" exposed the continued disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

It can only be disappointing that in 2008 Romero's target is blogs.

"Diary" begins dispiritingly with aspiring filmmaker Jason Creed (Joshua Close) filming a creature feature about a mummy. Jason continues rolling his camera after he calls cut to document his complaints about the too-fast mummy portrayal by Ridley (Philip Riccio) – in a takedown of the "28 Days Later" movies and the "Dawn" remake, Jason complains the dead can't move that quickly because it would snap their rigor-ed ankles. The decision to comment on other horror movies immediately takes "Diary" out of the sophisticated realm of the "Dead" and "28" series and places it in the dominion of the many winking horror movies that followed "Scream" without ever successfully recapturing Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's adoration for the genre they thrillingly spoofed.

Jason's movie comes to a permanent end when news arrives over the radio (the radio!) the dead are coming back to life. Crew member Tony (Shawn Roberts) insists it's all a hoax to sell soap, but Jason believes the threat is real and needs to be documented by him since the corporate media is sure to botch the truth.

Therein lies the flaw of "Diary." As coverage of the War on Terror, the run-up to the Iraq War and the Iraq War itself has proven, the media often lets the American people down when it allows the government and corporate interests to bury real news. Amateur documentarians and blogs aren't without their flaws, but many of them present journalistic truth unfiltered. "Diary" attempts to deflate those bloggers while at the same time admitting the manipulation of the mainstream media; Romero can't have his human brains and eat them, too.

Many of the disapproving reviews of "Cloverfield" negatively compared the J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie to "Diary" (it screened at the Toronto Film Festival and Fantastic Fest in September 2007) because Romero's film supposedly contains the distancing devices of Bertolt Brecht in its "YouTube Generation" bashing. A world in which the life-scarring "2 Girls 1 Cup" exists is worthy of parody, but someone who wants to document the actual existence of zombies doesn't seem completely worthy of derision. "Diary" does provocatively probe questions of the journalist-subject relationship and to what extent the journalist should drop the documentation posing and become actively involved, but it's a one-note provocation idiotically answered.

It doesn't help that, except for Debra and a few survivalists encountered along the way, the main characters of "Diary" are uniformly insipid, the kind of shallow beings the heroes of "Cloverfield" are accused of being but weren't to those who were paying attention.

The main problem with "Diary" is precisely its decision to follow Brechtian impulses rather than actual storytelling ones and that it lacks the immediacy of "Cloverfield" and "The Blair Witch Project." "Blair Witch" and "Cloverfield" are horrifying because of their "You Are There" perspectives. "Diary," however, is a documentary within the film titled "The Death of Death" that's narrated by Jason's girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) and has been edited between two cameras that were used. That the other camera is often seen contributes to "Diary's" distancing and consistent failure to connect with the audience in an emotional or even terrifying way.


Ultimately, "Diary" shares less in common with "Blair Witch" or "Cloverfield" than it does with Brian De Palma's 2007 film "Redacted." Using the same Brecht and Godard influences, the use of "Web site" footage and an amateur documentarian, DePalma attempted to tell the true story of the vengeance-based gang rape of 14-year-old Iraqi Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her and her family by American soldiers. The result is the worst film of De Palma's career, just as "Diary" is Romero's least film.

The reason "Redacted" and "Diary" fail where "Cloverfield" and "Diary" succeed is that it's impossible to envision the latter as anything but a first-person film because its narrative strategy is so firmly linked to what could've otherwise been a gimmick, while the former would've benefited from being told through more traditional means. "Redacted" is especially frustrating since it should've been the "Casualties of War" of Iraq. "Diary," meanwhile, could've attacked media manipulation by having one of its characters be an ethically challenged journalist more invested in the big story and the great shot than in trying to save those around him rather than entirely focusing on a group of characters whose deaths can't come quickly enough.

For the first time in the 40-year history of the "Dead" films, Romero doesn't have anything interesting to say.

Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/diary.of.the.dead

Definitely, Maybe
Written and directed by Adam Brooks
Universal
2008
Rating:


"Definitely, Maybe" plays like a big screen version of the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother": that is to say it's surprisingly charming and a little weird in the graphic details a father provides his offspring about the manner in which he met his wife. Prompted by an impending divorce and a premature sex education class, precocious Maya (Abigail Breslin) asks her father Will (Ryan Reynolds) for the story of what brought her parents together. Will agrees with one strange caveat: the story will be a "romantic mystery" with changed names so Maya will have to guess which of the three women Will has fallen for since 1992 is, in fact, her mother. The gimmick pays off even if it doesn't make much sense because his romantic entanglements with college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), effervescent office girl April (Isla Fisher) and sophisticated journalist Summer (Rachel Weisz) are genuinely sweet and complexly adult – a minor miracle for today's romantic comedy.

Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/definitely.maybe

Jumper
Written by David S. Goyer and Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg
Directed by Doug Liman
20th Century Fox
2008
Rating:


"Jumper" is a sci-fi film without a cosmology, a superhero film with no hero and a launch for an action franchise that seems unlikely to have a second entry.

David Rice (Hayden Christensen) is among an unnumbered blessed/cursed souls with the ability to teleport anywhere in the world as long as he can see his jumping location or has seen it before, much like "X-Men's" Nightcrawler. David discovers this ability while in a state of desperation when, in high school, he falls through the ice of a river and wills himself to the local library. The development of David's power is wonderful in its anywhere-but-here philosophy. There's even some fun to be had in David's early crime spree of effortlessly robbing banks and stores to support a lavish lifestyle.

But in any decent superhero story, David would be the villain, or at least the misguided youth who needs to learn the responsibility of his powers from a better hero. David is impossibly selfish, and his flaws aren't helped by the typically petulant performance of Christensen.

David's life of leisure is interrupted when a barely explained group of supposed religious zealots called the Paladins arrive with curious, baffling weapons to kill David simply because "only God should have the power to be in all places at all times" (perhaps if David explained to them he's only technically ever in one place at one time, it would've saved him some trouble). To target the elusive David, Paladin captain Roland (Samuel L. Jackson) goes after David's estranged father (Michael Rooker) and Millie (Rachel Bilson), a high school crush who David has finally found the nerve to romance. Another Jumper, the more interesting and more motivated Griffin (Jamie Bell), joins David to take down Roland.

"Jumper" has huge effects – the most impressive sequence involves a fight between David and Roland that goes from the Great Pyramids to Tokyo to the Arctic to a freeway to a swimming pool to Chechnya – yet its story is fairly minor, nothing like Bryan Singer's operatic "Superman Returns" and "X-Men" films (despite having a heretofore perfect batting average with "Swingers," "Go," "The Bourne Identity" and "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," director Doug Liman proves to be no Bryan Singer). Because David is so egocentric, his fight to save Millie will have nothing to do with a larger battle to save anyone else, let alone the world. Worse, David's jumping actually imperils innocent bystanders. The hint of a larger Jumper community and the Paladins' history stretching back to the Inquisition suggests a world this film has no interest in because it would get in the way of the mindless jumping effects it cribs from "X2," a film that knows how to blend spectacle with mythology and emotion.

Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008

Link to this review: http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/jumper