Richard Brody

Akerman’s chillingly sardonic feminist fable—which also bears the weight of unspoken wartime trauma—is built on a sublime paradox, the elusive identity of someone who, as the title suggests, is so easily identified.

De Sica, working with a host of screenwriters, builds a teeming story—involving broken friendships, families, institutions, dreams, and lives—in which elements of observation and research are concentrated into intensely emotional moments that heighten the film’s moral and mnemonic power.

Psycho, in its dark and sordid extravagance, remains utterly contemporary, in its subject as well as in its production.

Director Howard Hawks makes a familiar plot resound strangely with new sexual overtones.

Schatzberg doesn’t romanticize addicts’ troubles; with a tender but unsparing eye, he spins visual variations on shambling degradation and transient relief.

Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.

The plunging and roving camera provides visceral thrills; ecstatic special effects capture the sacred (the Crucifixion) and the profane (combat in the Great War); a metaphysical framing device (starring Lillian Gish) raises human conflict to universal import; and Griffith’s trademark closeups lend a quivering lip or a trembling hand the tragic grandeur of historical cataclysm.

The filmmakers, despite their rueful gaze, inspire empathy for all parties to this miserable commerce.

Losey’s strongest critique of the times emerges with a unique stylistic flourish in his wide-screen, black-and-white images, featuring slow glides, skewed angles, standoffish perspectives, and hectic striations. These images seem adorned with quotation marks, as if Losey placed his own movie in the mediatized madness that he was criticizing.

Gordon’s performance conveys something else that’s all too rare in movies of musicians—namely, joy. It’s a serene and lofty joy, with an element of wry detachment and even self-deprecation built in, but it’s vitally present nonetheless.

From the start, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., an independent film made on a very low budget (reportedly a hundred and thirty thousand dollars), is a polyphonic work of multiple voices and consciousnesses.

In Bogdanovich’s analytical twist on the genre, even joyous liberation leaves a huge mess.

It’s both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie. But the movie is also romantic in another, intimate way—it’s a great love story and a painful triangle, involving the tenderfoot lawyer (James Stewart), his gunslinger friend (John Wayne), and the woman they both love (Vera Miles).

Wood lacked both the dramatic sense to unfold his speculations in action and the technique (as well as the money) to embody, in any plausible way, his spectacular fancies, but their crude approximations vibrate with his stifled exaltation.

McCarey plays the shipboard courtship for generous and tender laughs—the wryly staged first kiss is one of the sweetest in all cinema—but the comedy that follows on dry land is mostly inadvertent.

The film not only bears witness to the self-surpassing power of inspired collaboration but, as an art work, also exemplifies it. [Review of re-release]

Sturges seems to leap out from behind the screen to address the viewer directly. Few classic filmmakers with so much to say manage to find so many splendid words to say it in.

May’s judgment on manhood is harsh: it entails renunciation, submission, humiliation, and the willingness to betray and to break the relationships forged in the heat of male bonding. Or, to be a man, one must stop being one of the guys.

Scorsese infuses this tale with the passionate energy of New York street life and wonder at the powerful workings of show business and studio craft. Yet his main subject is the ineffable factor of genius, which Jerry has, Rupert lacks, and no desire or effort can replace.

The film as it stands is a vision of a lost world of graces and traditions that are as alluring as they are confining, as beautiful as they are useless—as well as a portrait of the makers and the victims of modernity.

Rigid formality leaves much unsaid in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film, but the director reveals the hidden depths of ordinary life with a quiet astonishment and observes his characters with an exacting subtlety of expression.

One of the few great films based on a great book; its acerbic humor matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling morals.

Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition.

Italy’s crises of employment and housing are the subjects of its sentimental story, which is also a wildly imaginative tale brought to life with astonishing special effects and slapstick stunts.

Cassavetes’s most cleverly constructed film is also a definitive lesson in the death-defying, all-consuming art of acting, proof of a madness beyond the Method.

Lupino’s flinty performance and Bennett’s haunted one infuse the movie’s pugnacity and violence with tender vulnerability, and Walsh, a cinematic poet of brassy urbanity, stokes the story’s volatile elements—artistic passions, high-society temptations, streetwise bravery, postwar trauma, family loyalty, and the secrets and lies that pass for romance—to a crescendo of abraded grandeur.

Ousmane Sembène, in his first feature film, from 1966—which is also widely considered the first feature made by an African—distills a vast range of historical crises and frustrated ambitions into an intimate, straightforwardly realistic drama.

Whether pushing the camera close to the performers or zooming in from afar to survey them intimately, Simon captures the lavish life of theatrical imagination that inspires them and makes gender itself seem like an urgent performance.

Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

Having already helped launch the genre, the director Howard Hawks here reinvents his comic voice, establishing archetypes of theme and performance that still hold sway.

Allen joins the Catskills tummler’s anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession with baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions. It’s a mark of Allen’s artistic intuition and confessional probity that he lets Diane Keaton’s epoch-defining performance run away with the movie and allows her character to run away from him.

The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission.

It’s one of the rare movies that seems truly musical in its inspiration—and which, like much great music, envelops an astonishing complexity of invention and depth of insight in emblematically straightforward expressions.

Sembène looks ruefully yet tenderly at the ruses and wiles of the poor, whose desperate struggles—with the authorities and with one another—distract them from political revolt.

A masterwork of montage, a breathlessly frenzied collage of disparate sources that conjure the unholy tempest of a great man and a great mind at full gallop.

With this intricate web of personal and family connections, and the brave maneuvering in the face of the overseers’ commands, Gerima is doing nothing less than reconstituting and affirming the full humanity of the enslaved.

[Chahine]'s richly textured, good-humored, visually forceful storytelling portrays the surging, ribald vitality of Egyptian society that squirms beneath the unjust authority of dictators and dogmatists.

Sembène depicts a corrupt system that replaced white dictators and profiteers with black ones; the symbolic ending, a glimmer of revolutionary hope, is as gratifying as it is implausible.

The intricate story moves through New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico, and picturesque points in between, but Tourneur cooks up shot-by-shot surprises that outdo those of the screenplay.

Borden’s exhilarating, freely assembled story stages news reports, documentary sequences, and surveillance footage alongside tough action scenes and musical numbers; her violent vision is ideologically complex and chilling.

Bergman blends a theatrical subjectivity—scenes of the inner life that defy physical reality and depend on special effects, whether in the film lab or on set—with a tactile visual intimacy, with his characters, the objects close at hand, and the superb coastal landscape.

Every step depends on stifled emotions and closely guarded secrets, resulting in a buildup of operatic passion that endows everyday gestures and inflections with grandeur and nobility.

Mazursky applies a light and graceful touch to matters of intimate agony.

With eerie point-of-view shots, Buñuel gets inside the mind of a madman whose sadism is inseparable from his high social position; his commanding manner mirrors the folly and the cruelty of society at large.

Despite its heroic energy and impulsive youth, it’s a bleak philosophical work of its time, a bitterly terrifying vision of no exit.

It’s among the great American films of the sixties—including Juleen Compton’s Stranded and Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary—that display the global reach of that Paris-centered movement.

The story may sometimes come off as a ribald soldiers’ tale that Siegel, born in 1912, had been awaiting a sexual revolution to tell; still, his intense, intelligent breakdown of the film’s wild outbursts reveals subtleties of love, despair, and shame beneath the schematic luridness.

With its tangled shadows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white photography evokes the psychological distortions of reckless and rootless outsiders, the disproportion of their seedy circumstances to their doomed heroism.

Siegel’s terse, seething, and stylish direction glows with the blank radiance of sheet metal in sunlight; the movie’s bright primary colors and glossy luxuries are imbued with menace, and its luminous delights convey a terrifyingly cold world view.

Ozu’s despairing view of postwar Japan looks as harshly at blind modernization as it does at decadent tradition.

In Hellman’s film, Taylor and Wilson exert a negative charisma: their presence is both powerful and blank, deeply expressive in its neutrality. They offer one of the few original post-sixties reconfigurations of the movie star. Their manner is a perfect match for the story, and for the mythic, symbolic landscape in which it’s set.

Ford depicts a working-class solidarity based on morality, tradition, and community; he conveys his nuanced and tender sociology with surprising sound effects and expressionistic tableaux that feature the sort of angles that made Welles famous (and which the younger man borrowed, in turn, from Ford’s Stagecoach).

This light-toned but thematically substantial autofiction is organized like a sequence of diary entries brought to life with Moretti’s wryly confessional voice-overs.

The greatness of Murnau’s work—maybe even the essence of beauty—is that it offers much to talk about, because it is neither emptily decorative nor devoid of ideas, but, rather, embodies ideas even as it surpasses them, and conveys, by the very fact of its being, emotions far beyond those arising from story, character, or situation.

Though the end of the film seems rushed—its seventy-nine minutes could have gone on for hours—it is nonetheless a cause for rejoicing.

Cassavetes films Rowlands, his wife, with self-deprecating adoration; the demanding man likens himself to the defenseless boy, and both are saved by this gloriously burdened woman who would kill for them.

The director Anthony Mann fleshes out the intricate story with vigorous and subtle attention to its disparate elements—political, psychological, and brutal.

With a wide range of incisive, sardonic, hyperbolic humor and drama, Lee sketches the circular connections between racist images, racist policies, and the lack of leadership to resist them.

In contrast to the typical stoic masculinity of fifties Hollywood, this is “A Doll’s House” for the sensitive, passionate married man.

Above all, Pryor emphasizes (with deft compositions involving mirrors and effects) Jo Jo’s elusive selfhood—the fundamental problem of what performers who feel fully alive only while onstage or on camera do with the rest of their time.

With Experiment in Terror, Edwards, working in the familiar genre of criminal depravity, does something that may well be, for Hollywood, unprecedented: he makes a virtual piece of film criticism in movie form.

With one foot in the French New Wave and the other in the Ballets Russes, Cocteau fits a raging confession into a serene, sensuous neoclassical vessel.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?...is an overwhelming experience. It fills the current American landscape with the hatred, oppression, and violence that also scars its history.

The over-all tone of the drama—concerning foxhole friends who end up as partners in crime but rivals in love—evokes the flailings of unformed men whom a heedless society tossed in harm’s way and then cast aside.

John Ford’s bluff and sentimental comedy, from 1952, set in the Irish countryside, is as much an anthropological adventure as a romantic rhapsody.

Vincente Minnelli directed two of the best movies ever made on the subject of Hollywood filmmaking—“The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Two Weeks in Another Town.” But he made a third, “Goodbye Charlie,” from 1964...which is, in a way, the most daring and original of them all.

Sinatra’s vocal swagger is as exhilarating as ever, on a stage that gives him room to strut. And the overall effect is to heighten the effect and the presence of Frank Loesser’s brash yet subtle and bluff yet intricate songs. It’s not filmed theatre, but the cinematic transfiguration of the theatrical experience.

May directs with bristling restraint: the camera runs at length, keeping the characters trapped in the excruciating moment, and, with the central trio of typecast actors tightly held on this side of parody, the humor oscillates between sour comedy and droll tragedy.

Van Peebles tells the story with ferocious vigor and unsparing brutality, entering Jesse’s haunted memory and dramatizing the farsighted schemes and improvisational daring on which the men's survival depends.

A peculiarly hollow, centerless blend of theatre and literature, from which what’s missing, for the most part (though not entirely), is precisely the cinema...It isn’t so much that The Third Man is a bad movie—far from it. But it’s far from being a great one, too.

It’s not the whole story, of course; it’s resolutely on the side of decorum and falls far short of the inner and outer postwar apocalypses envisioned in film noir. But the intensity of its liberal romanticism is utterly gripping.

Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth and philosophical heft to this turbulent and grim family melodrama.

It may be a hectic, giddy, absurd movie—but, in its evocation of a conspiracy so logical that it is beyond belief, the film dramatizes the power of such an idea to attract true believers.

In fusing Cleo’s intricate consciousness with the teeming vitality of city life and the fine grain of daily activity, Varda displays her vast artistic inspiration and expands the power of the cinema itself.

The movie, directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, packs the ambient violence of a sports world and a media scene that are infested with gangsters; it’s an exposé not just of boxing but of the American way of business.

Pennebaker films Stritch’s first rendition, among the most celebrated outtakes in history, with a rapt devotion that’s as revealing of the limits of recording as it is of the thrills of live performance—and of the camera’s mediating creative power.

The sculptural physicality of the images, a 3-D explosion without glasses, embodies that violence while preserving the antagonists’ innocent grace; love smooths things out to a dreamy and reflective shine.

In Kiarostami’s furiously clear view, religious dogma suppresses the eye’s observations through the dictate of the word; his calmly unwavering images, with their wry humor and generous sympathy, have the force of a steadfast resistance.

Vertigo is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock’s own way with them.

Without sacrificing his critical judgment, Schrader retains a remarkable sympathy both for Hearst and for those who wrenched her from her life and made her—even if in deed only—one of their own.

Rarely have high spirits and theatrical energy seemed like such a tragic waste; an era and its myths seem to be dying on-screen in real time.

Scarface is by far the most visually inventive and tonally anarchic movie that Hawks made. Among other things, it’s a tribute to the freedom that independent producers afforded directors then—and still do today.

As deceptions and disguises pile up, the layers of mystery grow thicker, and the lurid symbolism of material objects is thrust to the fore.

Keene films the supernatural tale of timeless rusticity with fanatical attention to the barren and craggy seaside setting; her stunningly spare yet phantasmagorical images fuse the forces of nature with the spirit of mystery. Björk brings an otherworldly calm to her visionary role, and occasionally sings.

Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination.

Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is put together of the stuff of legend that the director experienced as personal reality, and he filmed the story as if he had been there. The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances.