Number Original Title Director Year Country
1 
poster		 The Rules of the Game  Jean Renoir  1939  France 
Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir�s masterpiece The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners. At a weekend hunting party, amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests and are mirrored by the activities of the servants downstairs. The refusal of one of the guests to play by society�s rules sets off a chain of events that ends in tragedy. Poorly received upon its release in 1939, the film was severely re-edited, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II. Only in 1959 was the film fully reconstructed and embraced by audiences and critics who now see the film as a timeless representation of a vanishing way of life. 
2 
poster		 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans  F.W. Murnau  1927  USA 
F. W. Murnau � invited to America by William Fox, the promise of complete artistic freedom, and a blank cheque � made Sunrise on the cusp of two eras: it represents the silent film at the peak of its poetic sophistication, and the sound film in its infancy. Fox told Murnau to take his time, to make any film he wished, and Sunrise was completed without any studio interference � as though with a dying flourish in a medium which at that moment had achieved a startling richness of expression. It was the swan song of the era.

Conceived by Murnau and written by Carl Mayer while they were both still in Germany, Sunrise takes a simple situation � the marriage of a peasant couple (George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor) from a country hamlet, invaded by a seductress from the city (Margaret Livingston) � and elevates it to the realm of fable, stripped of melodrama yet brimming with poetic impulses. George O'Brien becomes almost gothically depressed by his affair and plots a Dreiser-like boat accident for Gaynor, his sweet wife. This doom hovers and flits like moonlight over the rest of the film, which lithely tries to dodge it.

Murnau captivated the Americans with his legendary "invisible" tracking shots, and together with double exposures, expressive lighting, and distorted sets, the viewer is immersed in the fate of these simple characters. Sunrise won three Oscars at the very first Academy Awards ceremony honouring the 1927-1928 season. Janet Gaynor won for Best Actress; Charles Rosher and Karl Struss for Best Cinematography; and the film itself won a special Oscar for "Unique and Artistic Picture", the only time this award has ever been given.  
3 
poster		 Pierrot le fou  Jean-Luc Godard  1965  France 
"I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple," Jean-Luc Godard said of this brilliant, all-over-the-place adventure and meditation about two lovers on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina). Made in 1965, this film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful 'Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S. The movie's frequent shifts in style, emotion, and narrative are both challenging and intoxicating: American director Samuel Fuller turns up at a party scene to offer his definition of cinema, Karina performs two memorable songs in musical-comedy fashion, Belmondo's character quotes copiously from his reading, and a fair number of red and blue cars are stolen and destroyed. 
4 
poster		 Casino  Martin Scorsese  1995  USA 
This Martin Scorsese film depicts the Janus-like quality of Las Vegas--it has a glittering, glamorous face, as well as a brutal, cruel one. Ace Rothstein and Nicky Santoro, mobsters who move to Las Vegas to make their mark, live and work in this paradoxical world. Seen through their eyes, each as a foil to the other, the details of mob involvement in the casinos of the 1970's and '80's are revealed. Ace is the smooth operator of the Tangiers casino, while Nicky is his boyhood friend and tough strongman, robbing and shaking down the locals. However, they each have a tragic flaw--Ace falls in love with a hustler, Ginger, and Nicky falls into an ever-deepening spiral of drugs and violence. 
5 
poster		 Argent, L'  Robert Bresson  1983  France 
Robert Bresson's 1983 film returns to some of the themes of his earlier work--the notion of stolen grace from Pickpocket, the suppression of scenes in favor of a continuous flow of action from A Man Escaped--but there is also a new passion and electricity in Bresson's minimalist images; it nowhere feels like the work of an 80-year-old man. Among the violent events are a bank robbery, a car chase, a prison insurrection, and a series of brutal murders; the world is ready to explode into chaos, but Bresson retains his contemplative distance, searching for the sense in which this "avalanche of evil" can lead to the ultimate spiritual victory of his protagonist. Bresson, working his sound track as assiduously as his visuals, once again makes us realize how little use most films make of the resources of the cinema. A masterpiece.  
6 
poster		 My Darling Clementine  John Ford  1946  USA 
If there is one film that deserves every word of praise ever uttered or written about it, it is John Ford�s My Darling Clementine. Perhaps the greatest film in a career full of great films, arguably the finest achievement in a rich and magnificent genre, and undoubtedly the best version of one of America�s most enduring myths, the film is an undeniable and genuine classic.

Superficially the story of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the events leading up to the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, Ford�s film is more accurately described as an epic fable more concerned with themes of community and duty than with direct visualization of facts. Ford is not interested in the canonization of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as larger-than-life American heroes but instead with the evocation of how real men (and, to a significantly lesser extent, women) attempted to recreate the kind of peaceful, pleasant communities in the West they had enjoyed in the East.

Ford made great films before Clementine and great films after it, but if there were one film I had to pick to introduce a neophyte to Ford (or to Westerns in general), it would be this. There is no clearer distillation of Ford�s visual style, thematic concerns, manner of storytelling, and development of character than My Darling Clementine. 
7 
poster		 That Obscure Object of Desire  Luis Bu�uel  1977  France 
Luis Bu�uel�s final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director�s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Bu�uel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flare, Bu�uel uses two different actresses in the lead� Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Angela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from Pierre Lou�s� 1898 novel, La Femme et le Pantin, That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harkens back to Bu�uel�s brilliant surrealistic beginnings. 
8 
poster		 The Golden Coach  Jean Renoir  1953  France 
The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d�or) is a ravishing eighteenth-century comic fantasy about a viceroy who receives an exquisite golden coach, and gives it to the tempestuous star of a touring commedia dell�arte company. Master director Jean Renoir�s sumptuous tribute to the theatre, presented here in the English version he favored, is set to the music of Antonio Vivaldi and built around vivacious and volatile star Anna Magnani.  
9 
poster		 Vertigo  Alfred Hitchcock  1958  USA 
Although it wasn't a box-office success when originally released in 1958, Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most spellbinding, most deeply personal achievement. James Stewart plays a retired police detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife (a superb Kim Novak, in what becomes a double role), whom he suspects of being possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman. Shot around San Francisco (the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of the Legion of Honor are significant locations) and elsewhere in Northern California (the redwoods, Mission San Juan Batista) in rapturous Technicolor, Vertigo is as lovely as it is haunting. 
10 
poster		 Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia  Sam Peckinpah  1974  Mexico 
A moment of silence now for the late, great Warren Oates. Too little appreciated, he left an awesome body of work, and this deranged Peckinpah rant offers one of his finest turns. Released at a time when coy, self-serving, liberal sweetmeats such as The Long Goodbye, California Split, Save the Tiger, Carnal Knowledge, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest were the critical rave, this shocking film did little business. Its atmosphere of paranoia and desperation prefigured Taxi Driver and its ilk. An ugly, vicious film about not very glamorous people engaged in ugly, vicious activities, it�s more black comedy than anything. The film begins in the main meeting room of a hacienda - is this a flashback or another Peckinpah anti-classic Western? The head of the family, looking at his very pregnant young daughter, demands of a room full of dangerous-looking men and sad, black-clad women, �Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia!� Seconds later, the gates of the hacienda fly open, and four-wheel-drive vehicles and jeeps come tearing out. Peckinpah makes it immediately clear that he is going to mess with the audience in this one. Always the mythmaker, he was at his happiest blowing those myths apart. A romantic interlude as Oates and Vega drive through Mexico is accentuated by a rape. Starring Oates as Benny, a not-very-bright hustler/loser, Bring Me ... deals with the world of the misfit in very real and very brutal terms. At times, it seems as though the film is an almost conscious response to the anti-hero personified by Bogart in Casablanca, in which the iconoclast is draped in mystery and romance with more than a hint of poetry. 
11 
poster		 Trouble in Paradise  Ernst Lubitsch  1932  USA 
When thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) meets his true love in pickpocket Lily (Miriam Hopkins), they embark on a scam to rob lovely perfume company executive Mariette Colet (Kay Francis). But when Gaston becomes romantically entangled with Mme. Colet, their larcenous ruse is jeopardized and Gaston is forced to choose between two beautiful women. Legendary director Ernst Lubitsch�s masterful touch is in full flower in Trouble in Paradise, a pinnacle of the sophisticated romantic comedy, loaded with sparkling dialogue, witty innuendo, and elegant comic invention.

 
12 
poster		 Atalante, L'  Jean Vigo  1934  France 
Jean Vigo's only full-length feature (1934, 89 min.), one of the supreme masterpieces of French cinema, was edited and then brutally reedited while Vigo was dying, so a "definitive" restoration is impossible. The simple love-story plot involves the marriage of a provincial woman (Dita Parlo) to the skipper of a barge (Jean Daste), and the only other characters of consequence are the barge's skeletal crew (Michel Simon and Louis Lefebvre) and a peddler (Gilles Margaritis) who flirts with the wife at a cabaret and describes the wonders of Paris to her. The sensuality of the characters and the settings, indelibly caught in Boris Kaufman's glistening cinematography, are only part of the film's remarkable poetry, the conviction of which goes beyond such categories as realism or surrealism, just as the powerful sexuality in the film ultimately transcends such categories as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and even bisexuality. Shot by shot and moment by moment, the film is so fully alive to the world's possibilities that magic and reality seem to function as opposite sides of the same coin, with neither fully adequate to Vigo's vision. The characters are at once extremely simple and extremely complex (richest of all is Simon's Pere Jules, as beautiful a piece of character acting as one can find anywhere), and while the continuity is choppy in spots--a factor skillfully cloaked by Maurice Jaubert's superb score--the film's aliveness and potency are so constant that this hardly seems to matter. A major inspiration to subsequent generations of filmmakers, yet no one has ever succeeded in matching it. 
13 
poster		 Bed & Board  Fran�ois Truffaut  1970  France 
The fourth installment in Fran�ois Truffaut�s chronicle of the ardent, anachronistic Antoine Doinel, Bed and Board plunges his hapless creation once again into crisis. Expecting his first child and still struggling to find steady employment, Doinel (Jean-Pierre L�aud) involves himself in a relationship with a beautiful Japanese woman that threatens to destroy his marriage. Lightly comic, with a touch of the burlesque, Bed and Board is a bittersweet look at the travails of young married life and the fine line between adolescence and adulthood.  
14 
poster		 Kiss Me Deadly  Robert Aldrich  1955  USA 
The end of the world, starring Ralph Meeker (at his sleaziest) as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (at his most neolithic). Robert Aldrich's 1955 film is in some ways the apotheosis of film noir--it's certainly one of the most extreme examples of the genre, brimming with barely suppressed hysteria and set in a world totally without moral order. Even the credits run upside down. This independently produced low-budget film was a shining example for the New Wave directors--Truffaut, Godard, et al--who found it proof positive that commercial films could accommodate the quirkiest and most personal of visions.  
15 
poster		 Early Summer  Yasujiro Ozu  1951  Japan 
The Mamiya family is seeking a husband for their daughter, Noriko, but she has ideas of her own. Played by the extraordinary Setsuko Hara, Noriko impulsively chooses her childhood friend, at once fulfilling her family's desires while tearing them apart. A seemingly simple story, Early Summer is one of Yasujiro Ozu's most complex works�a nuanced examination of life's changes across three generations. 
16 
poster		 Day of Wrath  Carl Dreyer  1943  Denmark 
Carl Dreyer made this extraordinary 1943 drama, about the church's persecution of women for witchcraft in the 17th century, during the German occupation of Denmark. He later claimed that he hadn't sought to pursue any contemporary parallels while adapting the play Anne Petersdotter (which concerns adultery as well as witchcraft), but that seems disingenuous--Day of Wrath may be the greatest film ever made about living under totalitarian rule. Astonishing in its artistically informed period re-creation as well as its hypnotic mise en scene (with some exceptionally eerie camera movements), it challenges the viewer by suggesting at times that witchcraft isn't so much an illusion as an activity produced by intolerance. And like Dreyer's other major films, it's sensual to the point of carnality. I can't think of another 40s film that's less dated.  
17 
poster		 The Story of Adele H.  Fran�ois Truffaut  1975  France 
The critics loved to honor the late Francois Truffaut for his glowingly humanistic films, yet as time goes by it becomes more and more clear that his dark, obsessive works (The Soft Skin, The Green Room, The Man Who Loved Women) are by far the most personal and most enduring. This 1975 effort revealed a falsely promising Isabelle Adjani as the daughter of Victor Hugo, devoted to the point of demented self-destructiveness to a feckless British lieutenant. Though, like Truffaut's other black films, it suffers from a monotony of tone, its intensity is impressive and remains uncompromised by the prettifying aesthetic touches Truffaut adds here and there in an apparent attempt to distance himself from the overcharged material. The further Truffaut steps back, the more implicated he seems to be.  
18 
poster		 My Life to Live  Jean-Luc Godard  1962  France 
This film explores a Parisian woman's descent into prostitution. The movie is comprised of a series of 12 "tableaux"-- scenes which are basically unconnected episodes, each presented with a worded introduction. 
19 
poster		 Thieves' Highway  Jules Dassin  1949  USA 
Thieves� Highway vividly depicts the perilous world of �long-haul boys,� who drive by night to bring their goods to the markets of America�s cities. Richard Conte stars as ex-G.I. Nick Garcos, a tyro trucker bent on satisfaction from the man responsible for crippling his father�ruthless market operator Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb). But when Figlia gets wise to his plan, Nick finds himself in a web of treachery and heartbreak. 
20 
poster		 Only Angels Have Wings  Howard Hawks  1939  USA 
Howard Hawks's 1939 film represents the equilibrium point of his career: the themes he was developing throughout the 30s here reach a perfect clarity and confidence of expression, without yet confronting the darker intimations that would haunt his films of the 40s and 50s. The setting is a South American port where a group of fliers, led by Cary Grant, challenges the elements nightly by piloting mail across a treacherous mountain range. This all-male existential ritual (Grant almost seems the high priest of some Sartrean temple) is invaded by an American showgirl (Jean Arthur) who stops off for a steak and remains, fascinated by the heightened, heady atmosphere of primal struggle. The film's moral seriousness (which sometimes approaches overt didacticism) is balanced by the usual Hawks humor and warmth, and as Grant and Arthur are drawn into a romance, the film moves toward a humanistic softening of its stark premises. 
21 
poster		 Vera Cruz  Robert Aldrich  1954  USA 
A rip-roaring, cynical and slighty sadistic Western adventure with a subversive political dimension, Vera Cruz boasts great performances from big stars, a gallery of up'n coming talent and frenzied direction from Robert Aldrich making his first big-budget movie. It was also the first movie in SuperScope, and by virtue of its ruthless, mercenary attitude is a major forerunner of the Italian Spaghetti Westerns which came a decade later.

Besides being a remarkably 80's - style 'buddy' picture, Vera Cruz is astonishingly cynical for 1954. Not only do Ben Trane and Jo Erin upstage one another with more stylish double-crosses than the battling birds of Tex Avery's What's Buzzin' Buzzard?, Lancaster's psychotic joy for killing equals the amorality of the mayhem in the later Sergio Leone westerns. 
22 
poster		 City Lights  Charles Chaplin  1931  USA 
Chaplin was never too strong on plot structure--his movies would wander all over the place, lingering here and lingering there--but more often than not he got something better than traditional dramatic unity. City Lights (1931), which wanders between episodes involving Charlie's love for a blind flower girl and his friendship with a drunken millionaire who doesn't know him when he's sober, is a beautiful example of Chaplin's ability to turn narrative fragments into emotional wholes. The two halves of the film are sentiment and slapstick. They are not blended but woven into a pattern as eccentric as it is sublime.  
23 
poster		 The Aviator's Wife  Eric Rohmer  1981  France 
A perfect film. Eric Rohmer began his series titled "Comedies and Proverbs" with this 1980 tale of romantic entanglements, disappointments, and ever fresh possibilities, all set in a verdant Paris. Shot in 16-millimeter, the film has a simple, open visual style, yet its construction is extremely complex and pointed, as Rohmer abandons the first-person perspective of the "Six Moral Tales" in favor of an elegant, intertwining pattern of shifting points of view. The title character never appears but instead precipitates a chain of events that pull a young postal worker (Philippe Marlaud), his older girlfriend (Marie Riviere), and a teenage gamine (Anne-Laure Meury) together and apart. Charming, languorous, piercing, discreet--quintessential Rohmer, and more.
 
24 
poster		 Au hasard Balthazar  Robert Bresson  1966  France 
"Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished," Jean-Luc Godard once said, "because this film is really the world in an hour and a half." Robert Bresson's 1966 masterpiece defies any conventional analysis, telling a story of sin and redemption by following Balthazar, a donkey, as he passes through the hands of a number of masters, including a peasant girl, a satanic delinquent, and a saintly fool. Perhaps the greatest and most revolutionary of Bresson's films, Balthazar is a difficult but transcendently rewarding experience, never to be missed. 
25 
poster		 Notorious  Alfred Hitchcock  1946  USA 
In Notorious, a brilliant allegory of love and betrayal, Hitchcock fuses two of his favorite elements: suspense and romance. A beautiful woman with a tainted past (Ingrid Bergman) is enlisted by American agent Devlin (Cary Grant) to spy on a ring of Nazis in post-war Rio. Her espionage work becomes life-threatening after she marries the most debonair of the Nazi ring, Alex (Claude Rains). Only Devlin can rescue her, but to do so he must face his role in her desperate situation and acknowledge that he's loved her all along. Stunning performances, Ben Hecht's excellent script, and Hitchcock's direction at its best make Notorious a perfect film. 
26 
poster		 Seven Men from Now  Budd Boetticher  1956  USA 
Praised by the pioneering French critic Andre Bazin as "one of the most intelligent westerns I know but also the least intellectual," this 1956 feature by the underrated Budd Boetticher stresses action over dialogue while constructing a subtle moral allegory. Randolph Scott plays an ex-sheriff trailing the seven men who murdered his wife in a robbery; along the way he picks up a bumbling couple en route to California and an outlaw (Lee Marvin, whose appealing swagger contrasts with Scott's laconic certitude). Boetticher uses the landscape not as a metaphor for wildness but as a starkly neutral ground on which his characters play out their shifting positions, which suggests that each individual is responsible for his or her own choices. The taut opening is stunning: the protagonist strides into a tightly framed patch of ground from behind the camera, initiating his attempts to both traverse and dominate space, and the ensuing gunfire offscreen accompanies images of the horses he'll take from the men he's killing, a beautiful elision that emphasizes destiny over violence. 
27 
poster		 A Canterbury Tale  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger  1944  UK 
There are few narrative films in which the gulf between exterior aspects � character and plot � and deeper symbolic intent is as wide as in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger�s wartime masterpiece A Canterbury Tale. The divergence between the superficialities of story and setting and the profound truths the filmmakers are attempting to express is uniquely broad, and endlessly fascinating. On the surface a bucolic, even na�ve portrait of English rural life during wartime, the film builds and develops, layering inference and intent until on almost every level the question of what the film is really �about� seems all but unanswerable�the answer changes by the minute as our sympathies are questioned, our beliefs challenged, questions of history and identity are raised, examined and set aside, genres toyed with and discarded amid tonal shifts as liquid and unexpected as sunlight bursting through clouds, or through the projector onto the screen itself. 
28 
poster		 The Flowers of St. Francis  Roberto Rossellini  1950  Italy 
In a series of simple and joyous vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of the People�s Saint: humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice. Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis�s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St. Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment. 
29 
poster		 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg  Jacques Demy  1964  France 
Genevi�ve, 16, lives with her widow mother, who owns an umbrella shop in Cherbourg. She and Guy, an auto mechanic, are in love and want to marry. But her mother does not agree. She thinks Genevi�ve is too young and Guy is not wealthy enough. Guy leaves for two years in the army, and Genevi�ve is pregnant. She still loves Guy, although she has little news from him. Because the baby needs a father she marries Roland Cassard, a rich gem dealer, who fell in love with her at first sight and promised to bring up the child as his own... A movie whose dialogue is entirely sung. 
30 
poster		 I Know Where I'm Going!  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger  1945  UK 
Michael Powell's 1945 film resists easy classification: it opens as a screwball comedy, grows into a mystical, Flaherty-like study of man against the elements, and concludes as a warm romance. Wendy Hiller, in one of the best roles the movies gave her, is a toughened, materialistic young woman on her way to meet her millionaire fiance in the Hebrides; Roger Livesey is the young man she meets when a storm blows up and prevents her crossing to the islands. Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric.
 
31 
poster		 Contempt  Jean-Luc Godard  1963  France 
Jean-Luc Godard�s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. Contempt (Le M�pris) stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), a crude and arrogant American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot) as he attempts to doctor the script for a new film version of The Odyssey. 
32 
poster		 The Passion of Joan of Arc  Carl Theodor Dreyer  1928  France 
Carl Dreyer's last silent, the greatest of all Joan of Arc films. Lost for half a century, the 1928 original was rediscovered in a Norwegian mental asylum in the 80s (other prints had perished in a warehouse fire, and the two versions subsequently circulated consisted of outtakes). Joan is played by stage actress Renee Falconetti, and though hers is one of the key performances in the history of movies, she never made another film. (Antonin Artaud also appears in a memorable cameo.) Dreyer's radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this "difficult" in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It's also painful in a way that all Dreyer's tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory. 
33 
poster		 Life, and Nothing More...   Abbas Kiarostami  1991  Iran 
Known less accurately as And Life Goes On . . . (to distinguish it from Bertrand Tavernier's Life and Nothing But), this 1992 masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami uses nonprofessional actors to restage real events. Accompanied by his little boy, a film director from Tehran drives into the mountainous region of northern Iran, recently devastated by an earthquake that's killed more than 50,000 people. He searches through various villages for two child actors who appeared in Where Is the Friend's House? (a 1987 Kiarostami feature), but what we find is more open-ended and mysterious: the resilience and in some cases the surprising optimism of people putting their lives back together, the beautiful landscapes, the alternating and overlapping viewpoints of the director and his son. A picaresque narrative with a profound sense of place and a philosophically weighted use of the long shot that occasionally calls to mind Tati, this haunting look at what does and doesn't happen to people confronted by natural disaster won the Rossellini prize at the 1992 Cannes film festival, and it's still one of the very best Iranian features I've seen. 
34 
poster		 M  Fritz Lang  1931  Germany 
A simple, haunting phrase whistled off-screen tells us that a young girl will be killed. "Who is the murderer?" pleads a nearby placard as serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann. In his harrowing masterwork M, Fritz Lang merges trenchant social commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.  
35 
poster		 3:10 to Yuma  Delmer Daves  1957  USA 
3:10 to Yuma is one of the best of the late '50s Westerns, and is about as handsome as the black & white Western ever got. Low-key performances from an interesting cast back up great work by Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, whose tense angst adds a Noirish dimension. It's not as flashy as the color superwesterns being made at the time, or with any particular gimmick to exploit, yet more enjoyable than 'meaningful' efforts like The Left-Handed Gun. Basically an extended standoff, the show develops a nice little knot of suspense. 
36 
poster		 Belle de jour  Luis Bu�uel  1967  France 
Though it may not equal the sublimity of his three last features, Luis Bu�uel's 1967 masterpiece remains a seminal work that clarifies his relationship with Hitchcock. Like Hitchcock, Bu�uel was a prude with a strong religious background and a highly developed sense of the kinky and transgressive; what he does here with Catherine Deneuve, whom he used again memorably in Tristana, parallels Hitchcock's encounters with Tippi Hedren. Adapting a novel by Joseph Kessel, Bu�uel and Jean-Claude Carriere recount the story of a frigid but devoted upper-class housewife (Deneuve) who secretly works at a high-class brothel to satisfy her masochistic impulses. Placing her fantasies, dreams, and recollections on the same plane as her everyday adventures, Bu�uel comes closer to the French New Wave than he did before or after, and much of his secondary cast reinforces this association, including Michel Piccoli, Macha Meril, and Pierre Clementi as a dandyish gangster. 
37 
poster		 Citizen Kane  Orson Welles  1941  USA 
Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be known easily. Welles plays newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. The result is that every well-meaning or tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and photographed by Gregg Toland, the film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and aural feast that almost seems to be rising up from a viewer's sub-consciousness. As Kane, Welles even ushers in the influence of Bertolt Brecht on film acting. This is truly a one-of-a-kind work, and in many ways is still the most modern of modern films from the 20th century.  
38 
poster		 A Man Escaped  Robert Bresson  1956  France 
Based on a French lieutenant's account of his 1942 escape from a gestapo fortress in Lyon, this stately yet uncommonly gripping 1956 feature is my choice as the greatest achievement of Robert Bresson, one of the cinema's foremost artists. (It's rivaled only by his more corrosive and metaphysical 1970 film Au Hasard Balthazar.) The best of all prison-escape movies, it reconstructs the very notion of freedom through offscreen sounds and defines salvation in terms of painstakingly patient and meticulous effort. Bresson himself spent part of the war in an internment camp and subsequently lived through the German occupation of France, experiences that inform his magisterial grasp of what the concentrated use of sound and image can reveal about souls in hiding. Essential viewing.  
39 
poster		 Young Mr. Lincoln  John Ford  1939  USA 
Few historical figures are as revered as Abraham Lincoln, and few director-star pairings embody classic American cinema as perfectly as that of John Ford and Henry Fonda. In Young Mr. Lincoln, their first collaboration, Fonda gives one of the finest performances of his career, as the young president-to-be, struggling with an incendiary murder case as a novice lawyer. Compassionate and assured, this is an indelible piece of Americana.
 
40 
poster		 Winchester '73  Anthony Mann  1950  USA 
One of Anthony Mann's inspired collaborations with James Stewart (1950). Here, Stewart wins the highly prized weapon of the title in a shooting contest, and uses it to track down the man (Stephen McNally) who killed his father. Mann pursues his revenge theme with Elizabethan fury, developing the neurotic, driven element in Stewart's screen persona. The final shoot-out remains a classic study in mise-en-scene, as Mann transforms a jagged landscape into a highly charged psychological battleground. 
41 
poster		 The Mirror  Andrei Tarkovsky  1975  Soviet Union 
Mirror (Russian title 'Zerkalo') from 1975, is Tarkovsky's fourth of seven feature films. It has relevancy being numerically "central" in his oeuvre also marking itself as, by the director's own account, 'My most openly autobiographical, daring, and self-revealing film'. Infused with dense, personal references from memory and an inaccessible use of time, space and performances, this is considered the director most artistically bold work being steeped in layered constructions. In examining his entire body of work this tends to be a catalyst of his vision of transcendency. About the film, Tarkovsky states "It is an autobiographical film. The things that happen are real things that happened to people close to me. That is true of all the episodes in the film. But why do people complain that they cannot understand it? The facts are so simple, they can be taken by everyone as similar to the experience of their own lives. But here we come up against something that is peculiar to cinema: the further a viewer is from the content of a film, the closer he is; what people are looking for in cinema is a continuation of their lives, not a repetition. There are no entertaining moments in the film. In fact I am categorically against entertainment in cinema: it is as degrading for the author as it is for the audience." 
42 
poster		 Some Came Running  Vincente Minnelli  1958  USA 
Vincente Minnelli turns the James Jones novel into one of his finest and most garish melodramas (1959), with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Shirley MacLaine struggling to stay alive in the hopelessly small town of Madison, Indiana. Minnelli has said that he based his visual style on the inside of a jukebox, and the film is a sort of neon epiphany. The final sequence, set at a carnival, remains an object lesson in the expressive use of CinemaScope.  
43 
poster		 Happy Together  Kar Wai Wong  1997  Hong Kong 
A star vehicle, not only because its leads were two of the hottest stars in Hong Kong cinema (Tony Leung and the late Leslie Cheung) and a Taiwanese pop star (Chang Chen, who played the 14-year-old hero of Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day), but also because writer-director Wong Kar-wai is something of a star himself. In fact his aggressive mannerist style--the use of different characters as narrators, the variable speed of Chris Doyle's frenetic cinematography, the shifts between color and black and white--forms the core of this 1997 story of doomed love between two men in Buenos Aires, one of whom befriends a straight Taiwanese youth in the same city. Structurally and dramatically this is all over the place, but stylistically it's gripping, and thematically it suggests an oblique response to the end of Hong Kong's colonial rule. 
44 
poster		 � nos amours  Maurice Pialat  1983  France 
A 15-year-old French girl (Sandrine Bonnaire, extraordinary) finds refuge from her troubled family in a series of casual sexual encounters. The subject invites a certain social-worker condescension (it's the stuff of TV movies), yet Maurice Pialat's mise-en-scene allows us no comforting distance from the characters. His ragged long takes plunge us straight into the action and hold us there, as if we, too, were combatants in this family war. His unorthodox dramatic construction rejects the symmetry of classical plotting, and the narrative has a quirky, self-propelling quality that allows for some astonishing things to happen. Pialat himself plays the father, whose disappearance sets the action in motion and whose reappearance makes it explode.  
45 
poster		 Fidanzati, I  Ermanno Olmi  1963  Italy 
Ermanno Olmi�s masterful feature is the tender story of two Milanese fianc�s whose strained relationship is tested when the man accepts a new job in Sicily. With the separation come loneliness, nostalgia, and, perhaps, some new perspectives that might rejuvenate their love. Olmi�s deep humanism charges this moving depiction of ordinary men and women, and the pitfalls of the human heart. 
46 
poster		 Lancelot du Lac  Robert Bresson  1974  France 
Robert Bresson's telling of the King Arthur legend begins where most versions end, describing a Camelot of fading glory, where the ideals of chivalry and spiritual purity are threatened by a modern, pragmatic mentality. The rhythms of this grave, spare film are slow and irresistible, the images closely cropped and full of inexpressible portent. Released in 1974, it belongs with Pickpocket and Au hasard Balthazar at the highest level of Bresson's achievement.  
47 
poster		 The Leopard  Luchino Visconti  1963  Italy 
Luchino Visconti�s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is an epic on the grandest possible scale. The film recreates, with nostalgia, drama, and opulence, the tumultuous years of Italy's Risorgimento�when the aristocracy lost its grip and the middle classes rose and formed a unified, democratic Italy. Burt Lancaster stars as the aging prince watching his culture and fortune wane in the face of a new generation, represented by his upstart nephew (Alain Delon) and his beautiful fianc�e (Claudia Cardinale). Awarded the Palme d�Or at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, The Leopard translates Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel, and the history it recounts, into a truly cinematic masterpiece. 
48 
poster		 Ordet  Carl Theodor Dreyer  1955  Denmark 
A farmer�s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love�one child believes he�s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist�s daughter. Putting the lie to the term �organized religion,� Ordet (The Word)is a challenge to simple facts and dogmatic orthodoxy. Layering multiple stories of faith and rebellion, Dreyer�s adaptation of Kaj Munk�s play quietly builds towards a shattering, miraculous climax. 
49 
poster		 Eclisse, L'  Michelangelo Antonioni  1962  Italy 
The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni�s informal trilogy on modern malaise, L�eclisse (The Eclipse) tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) only to drift into a relationship with another (Alain Delon). Using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for the couple�s doomed affair, Antonioni reaches the apotheosis of his modernist style, returning to his favorite themes: alienation and the difficulty of finding connections in an increasingly mechanized world. 
50 
poster		 The Four Hundred Blows  Fran�ois Truffaut  1959  France 
Fran�ois Truffaut�s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups), is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut�s life-long cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre L�aud), The 400 Blows sensitively recreates the trials of Truffaut�s own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime. The film marks Truffaut�s passage from leading critic of the French New Wave to his emergence as one of Europe�s most brilliant auteurs. 
51 
poster		 Corbeau, Le  Henri-Georges Clouzot  1943  France 
A mysterious writer of poison pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community�s calm surface. Made during the Nazi Occupation of France, Henri-Georges Clouzot�s Le Corbeau was attacked by the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press, the Catholic Church, and was banned after the Liberation. But some�including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre�recognized the powerful subtext to Clouzot�s anti-informant, anti-Gestapo fable, and worked to rehabilitate Clouzot�s directorial reputation after the war. Le Corbeau brilliantly captures a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing turning an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem. 
52 
poster		 Winter Light  Ingmar Bergman  1962  Sweden 
�God, why did you desert me?� With Winter Light, master craftsman Ingmar Bergman explores the search for redemption in a meaningless existence. In this stark depiction of spiritual crisis, small-town pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Bj�rnstrand) performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation. When he is asked to assist with a troubled parishioner�s (Max von Sydow) debilitating fear of nuclear annihilation, Tomas is terrified to find that he can provide nothing but his own uncertainty. Beautifully photographed by Sven Nykvist, Winter Light is an unsettling look at the human craving for personal validation in a world seemingly abandoned by God. 
53 
poster		 Land Without Bread  Luis Bu�uel  1933  Spain 
A powerful and important 1932 documentary by Luis Bu�uel on the monstrous conditions of life in the very poorest section of western Spain, Las Hurdes, not far from the Portuguese border. The film is doubly horrifying because of the matter-of-fact commentary written by poet Pierre Unik and spoken on the sound track as if the scenes of misery and degradation were parts of an ordinary travelogue. This is the jeystone to Bunuel's career. 
54 
poster		 The Right Stuff  Philip Kaufman  1983  USA 
Tom Wolfe's book on the history of the U.S. Space program reads like a novel, and the film has that same fictional quality. It covers the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager to the Mercury 7 astronauts, showing that no one had a clue how to run a space program or how to select people to be in it. Thrilling, funny, charming and electrifying all at once. 
55 
poster		 Trou, Le  Jacques Becker  1960  France 
Released alongside Breathless and The 400 Blows, Jacques Becker's 1959 film was the last great flowering of French classicism; the "tradition of quality" here goes out with a masterpiece. It's a prison-break film, based on a true story, that follows the dictates of the genre almost every step of the way but makes the conventions shine with new life and meaning. The suspense is built slowly and carefully, through finely perceived physical details and quirks of character. The obvious comparison is to Bresson's A Man Escaped, but Becker has none of Bresson's taste for abstraction; his film is rooted in the immediate, the concrete, the human.  
56 
poster		 The Steel Helmet  Samuel Fuller  1951  USA 
Sam Fuller's first and greatest war film (1951) is even better in its terse and minimalist power than the restored version of The Big Red One released last year. The first Hollywood movie about the Korean war, this introduced Gene Evans, the gruff star Fuller was to use many more times, as a crude, bitter, savvy sergeant who, despite his obvious racism, bonds with a South Korean war orphan. In addition to being visually and aurally brilliant, the film includes virtually unprecedented debates about America's racial segregation and the internment of Japanese during World War II. An independent production, The Steel Helmet did so well that it immediately won Fuller a contract at 20th Century Fox. 
57 
poster		 Andrei Rublev  Andrei Tarkovsky  1969  Soviet Union 
Andrei Tarkovsky's first major film (1966, though banned and unseen until 1971), 185 minutes long, cowritten by Andrei Konchalovsky, about a 15th-century icon painter. This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we've come to expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a stirring climax in color. Not to be missed.  
58 
poster		 The Merchant of Four Seasons  Rainer Werner Fassbinder  1972  West Germany 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder has a genius for detailing the pain of suppressed emotional states, and even at its most achingly deliberate, his style in dealing with the petit bourgeois mentality is a source of endless fascination. This 1971 feature, originally shot for German television, chronicles the struggles of a fruit peddler to build a semblance of a life for himself and his wife--with whom he maintains only the barest contact--in postwar Germany. 
59 
poster		 The Gold Rush  Charles Chaplin  1925  USA 
Charles Chaplin's best-loved film, with the tramp down-and-out (as usual) in Alaska, where he looks for gold, falls in love with a dance-hall girl (Georgia Hale), eats his shoes for Thanksgiving dinner, and ends up a millionaire. The blend of slapstick and pathos is seamless, although the cynicism of the final scene is still surprising. Chaplin's later films are quirkier and more personal, but this is quintessential Charlie, and unmissable.  
60 
poster		 Viridiana  Luis Bu�uel  1961  Mexico 
Luis Bu�uel returned to his native Spain to create this 1961 masterpiece, which marked his rebirth as a filmmaker of international repute. Mexican star Silvia Pinal plays the title character, a girl about to enter a convent whose confident plans for sainthood are interrupted by her uncle's (false) announcement that he has raped her in her sleep. She forges ahead anyway, filling her uncle's estate with beggars and madmen in an obsessive demonstration of Christian charity. Franco's government, which financed the film, later attempted to suppress it, burning all the prints that remained in Spain. Luckily, a few had already been sent to France, and the rest--Bu�uel's brilliant late period--is history.  
61 
poster		 Band of Outsiders  Jean-Luc Godard  1964  France 
A gangster story, sort of, by Jean-Luc Godard, who supposedly told his backers that he was going to make a sequel to Breathless and then delivered this mix of musical comedy, slapstick, violence, and incidental observations on politics and philosophy. Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, and Anna Karina make fairly inept burglars, but they do a wonderful version of the "Steam Heat" number from Stanley Donen's The Pajama Game. This 1964 feature remains one of Godard's most appealing and underrated films, relatively relaxed and strangely optimistic. 
62 
poster		 The Battle of Algiers  Gillo Pontecorvo  1966  Algeria 
Gillo Pontecorvo's powerful and lucid 1965 docudrama about the Algerian struggle for independence in the 1950s was screened for Pentagon employees in August 2003, though one wonders how helpful it might have been: the terrorists here aren't suicidal or religiously motivated, and their orientation seems quite different from that of contemporary Middle Eastern types. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't see this--it's one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling. The French aren't depicted as heavies, despite their use of torture, nor are the Algerian rebels, who set off bombs in cafes. In fact the French colonel here (Jean Martin, the only professional actor in the cast) expresses admiration for the rebels, who ultimately achieved their goals when Algeria won its independence. 
63 
poster		 His Girl Friday  Howard Hawks  1940  USA 
Most of what Robert Altman has done with overlapping dialogue was done first by Howard Hawks in this 1940 comedy, without the benefit of Dolby stereo. (The film, in fact, often circulates in extremely poor public-domain prints that smother the glories of Hawks's sound track.) It isn't a matter of speed but of placement--the dialogue almost seems to have levels in space. Hawks's great insight--taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman--has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways. Cary Grant's performance is truly virtuoso--stunning technique applied to the most challenging material. 
64 
poster		 In a Year of 13 Moons  Rainer Werner Fassbinder  1978  West Germany 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's distant, episodic study of the sad, turgid last days of an unhappy transsexual. There's none of the allegorical cushioning he provided in The Marriage of Maria Braun: Elvira (seamlessly played by Volker Spengler) is irreducibly, ineluctably him/herself, and her problems are not social, political, or moral, but exclusively those of her grotesque condition--the unloved lover. The subject invites easy compassion and pity, but Fassbinder's icy camera style keeps us at arm's length, calling up a much more complex response.  
65 
poster		 The Wages of Fear  Henri-Georges Clouzot  1953  France 
In Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 suspense classic, four out-of-work Europeans (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck), trapped in a squalid South American village that's exploited by a U.S. oil company, agree to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerine over 300 miles of primitive roads in exchange for $2,000 each--if they survive. When this existentialist shocker opened in the U.S., 43 minutes had been hacked away, but the gripping adventure elements left intact were still enough to turn the film into a hit. (This restored and at least semicomplete version of the film, 148 minutes long, was released in the early 90s.) A significant influence on Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism. It's also clearly a love story between two men (Montand and Vanel).  
66 
poster		 Eyes Wide Shut  Stanley Kubrick  1999  USA 
Stanley Kubrick's last feature (1999) skillfully portrays the dark side of desire in a successful marriage. Since the 60s he thought about filming Arthur Schnitzler's novella "Traumnovelle," about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies. It has a Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy, and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this delicate territory. Yet the story has been altered to make the doctor (Tom Cruise) more of a hypocrite and his wife (Nicole Kidman) feistier; Kubrick's also added a Zeus-like tycoon (played perfectly by Sydney Pollack) who pretends to explain the plot shortly before the end but in fact only summarizes the various mysteries; his cynicism and chilly access to power reveals that Kubrick was more of a moralist than Schnitzler. This is a gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick's other work, grows in mystery over time.  
67 
poster		 The Browning Version  Anthony Asquith  1951  UK 
Michael Redgrave gives the performance of his career in Anthony Asquith�s adaptation of Terence Rattigan�s unforgettable play. Redgrave portrays Andrew Crocker-Harris, an embittered, middle-aged schoolmaster who begins to feel that his life has been a failure. Diminished by poor health, a crumbling marriage, and the derision of his pupils, the once brilliant scholar is compelled to reexamine his life when a young student offers an unexpected gesture of kindness. A heartbreaking story of remorse and atonement, The Browning Version is a classic of British realism and the winner of best actor and best screenplay honors at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival. 
68 
poster		 Avventura, L'  Michelangelo Antonioni  1960  Italy 
The controversial, highly charged 1960 masterpiece that put Michelangelo Antonioni's name on the international map. It's a work that requires some patience--a 145-minute mystery that strategically elides any conventional denouement--but more than amply repays the effort. The ambiguous title adventure begins on a luxury pleasure cruise. The disconsolate girlfriend (Lea Massari) of a successful architect (Gabriele Ferzetti) mysteriously disappears on a remote volcanic island, and the architect and the woman's best friend (Monica Vitti) set out across Italy looking for her, becoming involved with each other along the way. In the course of their epic travels, Antonioni paints a complex portrait of a crisis in contemporary values and relationships. His stunning compositions and choreographic mise en scene, punctuated by eerie silences and shots that linger expectantly over landscapes, made him a key Italian modernist director of the 50s and 60s, perhaps rivaled only by Rossellini. This haunting work--the first in a loose trilogy completed by La notte and Eclipse--shows him at the summit of his powers.  
69 
poster		 The General  Buster Keaton  1927  USA 
Buster Keaton may have made more significant films, but The General (1927) stands as an almost perfect entertainment. Keaton is a locomotive engineer in the Civil War south whose train is hijacked by Union spies; his attempts to bring it back become a strangely moving and very funny account of man's love for machine. Marion Mack is the girl, who can't quite compete. 
70 
 The End  Christopher Maclaine  1953  USA 
San Francisco beat poet Christopher Maclaine made only four films, but The End (1953) is among the greatest and most original I've ever seen. Rarely screened, perhaps because of its crude, homemade look, it has an emotional and spiritual authenticity few mainstream films can match. It tells the stories of seven people on the last day of their lives (most of them are preparing to kill themselves, but the world is also about to be annihilated by the bomb) with a mix of black humor and bizarre twists. The editing and Maclaine's narration are constantly veering off in unexpected directions, replicating the disordered thoughts of a person on the brink; during one particularly jumbled sequence of images, he invites us to make up the story. 
71 
poster		 The Best Years of Our Lives  William Wyler  1946  USA 
This 1946 domestic epic about three World War II veterans returning to civilian life, 172 minutes long and winner of nine Oscars, isn't considered hip nowadays. Its director, William Wyler, and literary source, MacKinlay Kantor's novel Glory for Me (adapted here by Robert Sherwood), are far from fashionable, and the real veteran in the cast, Harold Russell, who lost his hands in the war, has occasioned outraged reflections from critic Robert Warshow about challenged masculinity and even sick jokes from humorist Terry Southern. But I'd call this the best American movie about returning soldiers I've ever seen--the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did. The rest of the cast--including Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Fredric March, Cathy O'Donnell, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael, and Ray Collins--is strong too.  
72 
poster		 Love in the Afternoon  Eric Rohmer  1972  France 
Though happily married to his adoring wife H�l�ne, with whom he is expecting a second child, the thoroughly bourgeois business executive Fr�d�ric cannot banish from his mind the multitude of attractive Parisian women who pass him by every day. His flirtations and fantasies remain harmless until Chloe (played by the mesmerizing Zouzou), an audacious, unencumbered old flame, shows up at his office, embodying the first genuine threat to Fr�d�ric�s marriage. The luminous final chapter to Rohmer�s Moral Tales is a tender, sobering, and wholly adult affair that leads to perhaps the most overwhelmingly emotional moment in the entire series. 
73 
poster		 Harakiri  Masaki Kobayashi  1962  Japan 
Following the collapse of his clan, unemployed samurai Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives at the manor of Lord Iyi, begging to commit ritual suicide on his property. Iyi�s clansmen, believing the desperate ronin is merely angling for charity, try to force him to eviscerate himself�but they have underestimated his honor and his past. Winner of the 1963 Cannes Film Festival�s Special Jury Prize, Masaki Kobayashi�s Harakiri is a scathing denouncement of feudal authority and hypocrisy. 
74 
poster		 Dolce vita, La  Federico Fellini  1960  Italy 
Fellini's breakthrough film marked the rise of the Italian film industry to its greatest height. In the early 60s Rome and Cinecitt� were the cinema center of Europe. La dolce vita shows the director leaping from fairly intimate stories to a much larger canvas that covers the 'happening place' of a Rome elite that orbit around celebrities, the media, nightlife and sensation. Marcello Mastroianni is at the center of it all, and Fellini's sprawling, episodic storyline stays focused on his experiences. The mature direction allows Marcello's glamorous corruption to represent the lack of values in the glossy, shallow new world.  
75 
poster		 A Day in the Country  Jean Renoir  1936  France 
Begun in 1936 as a feature but never completed, Jean Renoir's A Day in the Country was released as a 45-minute short after the war. It's his only attempt to emulate the style of his father, Auguste: the setting is 1880, along the banks of a lovely, impressionist Seine, where a middle-class mother and daughter from the city enjoy a fleeting dalliance with two men who take them on a boat trip. The charm of the film seems almost too easily won, but Renoir's real brilliance emerges in the way the light tone is subtly modulated into the profound sadness and regret of the conclusion.  
76 
poster		 The Marriage of Maria Braun  Rainer Werner Fassbinder  1979  West Germany 
In 1978, Rainer Werner Fassbinder retreated from the failures of Chinese Roulette and Despair with what, for him, was an extremely naturalistic and accessible work. The sublime Hanna Schygulla stars as a plucky frau perennially separated from her husband, first by war, then by prison, and finally by pervasive capitalist malaise. She channels her frustrated romantic energy into the construction of an industrial empire--a plot that mixes love and money in the manner of Mildred Pierce. Though Fassbinder takes a more open attitude toward his characters, letting them exist as fully developed psychological specimens, his deadly irony continues to operate on the level of mise-en-scene, drawing his actors into an unstable world of seductive surfaces and shifting meanings. Fassbinder argues that happiness delayed is happiness denied, tempering the film's emotion with precise analysis. 
77 
poster		 Pickpocket  Robert Bresson  1959  France 
Robert Bresson�s incomparable tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsion grows, however, so too does his fear that his luck is about to run out. Tautly choreographed and crafted in Bresson�s inimitable style, Pickpocket reveals a master director at the height of his powers. 
78 
poster		 A Woman Is a Woman  Jean-Luc Godard  1961  Italy 
Jean-Luc Godard's third feature and first studio production (1960) starts with a subversive premise: a "neorealist" musical in which the major characters (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy) can't really sing and dance, much as they'd like to. Periodically ravishing to look at (it's Godard's first foray into both color and 'Scope) and listen to (Michel Legrand did the nonsinging score), it's also highly deconstructive in the way it keeps jostling us away from these pleasures and in the general direction of indecorous reality. (It's also packed with both subtle and obvious references to other movies.) While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won't oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film's high spirits may still win you over. It is perhaps most memorable for being a highly personal "documentary" about Karina and Godard's feelings about her at the time, brimming with odd details and irreverent energies. 
79 
poster		 The Wild Bunch  Sam Peckinpah  1969  USA 
Sam Peckinpah's notorious western depicted an outlaw gang, made obsolete by encroaching civilization, in its last burst of violent, ambiguous glory. By 1969, when the film was made, the western was experiencing its last burst as well, and in retrospect Peckinpah's film seems a eulogy for the genre (there is even a dispassionate audience--Robert Ryan's watchful Pinkerton man--built into the film). The on-screen carnage established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling.  
80 
poster		 Fanny and Alexander  Ingmar Bergman  1982  Sweden 
Ingmar Bergman announced that this 197-minute film from 1983 would be his last theatrical feature (though it is actually, like Scenes From a Marriage, the condensed version of a much longer television series). It is less an autumnal summation of his career than an investigation of its earliest beginnings: through the figure of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman traces the storytelling urge, developing from dreams and fairy tales into theater and (implicitly) movies. The film doesn't so much surmount Bergman's usual shortcomings--the crude contrasts, heavy symbolism, and preachy philosophizing--as find an effective context for them. Tied to a child's mind, the oversimplifications become the stuff of myth and legend. As in Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a realistic psychological drama is allowed to expand into fantasy; the result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.  
81 
poster		 Dead Man  Jim Jarmusch  1995  USA 
A quantum leap by American independent Jim Jarmusch--a hypnotic and beautiful black-and-white western (1995). Johnny Depp plays an accountant from Cleveland named William Blake who travels west with the promise of a job to the infernal town of Machine, only to be told that the job's been taken. After killing a man (Gabriel Byrne) in self-defense and sustaining a mortal bullet wound, Blake is guided toward death by a Native American outcast named Nobody (Gary Farmer) while a trio of bounty hunters and various others try to track him down. This masterpiece is simultaneously a mystical, highly poetic account of dying; a well-researched appreciation of Native American cultures; a frightening portrait of modern American violence and capitalist greed that refuses to traffic in the stylistic alibis of Hollywood; a warm, hilarious depiction of cross-cultural friendship; and a hallucinatory trip across the American wilderness.  
82 
poster		 From the East  Chantal Akerman  1993  Belgium 
ntal Akerman's haunting 1993 masterpiece documents without commentary or dialogue her several-months-long trip from east Germany to Moscow--a tough and formally rigorous inventory of what the former Soviet bloc looks and feels like today. Akerman's penchant for finding Edward Hopper wherever she goes has never been more obvious; this travelogue seemingly offers vistas any alert tourist could find yet delivers a series of images and sounds that are impossible to shake later: the countless tracking shots, the sense of people forever waiting, the rare plaint of an offscreen violin over an otherwise densely ambient sound track, static glimpses of roadside sites and domestic interiors, the periphery of an outdoor rock concert, a heavy Moscow snowfall, a crowded terminal where weary people and baggage are huddled together like so many dropped handkerchiefs. The only other film I know that imparts such a vivid sense of being somewhere is the Egyptian section of Straub-Huillet's Too Early, Too Late. Everyone goes to movies in search of events, but the extraordinary events in Akerman's sorrowful, intractable film are the shots themselves--the everyday recorded by a powerful artist with an acute eye and ear. 
83 
poster		 The Awful Truth  Leo McCarey  1937  USA 
Leo McCarey's largely improvised 1937 film is one of the funniest of the screwball comedies, and also one of the most serious at heart. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are a pair of world-weary socialites who decide to drop the pretense of their wide-open marriage, but fate and Ralph Bellamy draw them together again. The awful truth is that they need each other, and McCarey, with his profound faith in monogamy, leads them gradually and hilariously to that crucial discovery. The issues deepen in a subtle, natural way: the film begins as a trifle and ends as something beautiful and affirmative. 
84 
poster		 Masculine-Feminine  Jean-Luc Godard  1966  France 
"Give us this day our television--and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom." At first, this 1966 study of "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola" seems the most casual of Jean-Luc Godard's 60s films: it consists of a series of short, discontinuous scenes--labeled "precise facts"--loosely centered on a romance between Jean-Pierre L�aud and Chantal Goya, but with room for the Vietnam war and a quick recap of LeRoi Jones's Dutchman. But a closer look reveals a supple intertwining of quick shots and long takes, themes and variations--Godard is very strict in his sloppiness. An excellent film, still as fresh as the day it was made.  
85 
poster		 The Red Shoes  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger  1948  UK 
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Trilby-based ballet film (1948, 133 min.) has been the cult property of dance freaks for far too long. A look beneath its lushly romantic surface reveals a dark, complex sensibility, and that surface, rendered in the somber tones of British Technicolor, reflects a fantastically rich cinematic inventiveness. Moira Shearer is the ballerina who, following the outlines of a Hans Christian Andersen tale, trades her life for her art; Anton Walbrook, as her impresario, is perhaps the most forceful embodiment of the shaman figures--magical, outsized, sinister--who haunt Powell and Pressburger's work. The Red Shoes remains the best known of Powell and Pressburger's 18 features, yet it's only the tip of the iceberg--beneath it lies the most commanding body of work in the British cinema 
86 
poster		 The Long Goodbye  Robert Altman  1973  USA 
Robert Altman's antiheroic rewrite of Raymond Chandler. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe as a chain-smoking nebbish--an innocent child of the 40s set down in what Altman sees (problematically) as the grown-up, shades-of-gray world of the 70s. The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings--the blunt ideas at its core--don't become apparent before several viewings. Somewhere deep down inside, there's a screenplay by Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo); Altman has lost it in his improvisation, but it does give this 1973 film a firm, classical shape that has eluded Altman's other work.  
87 
poster		 Shoot the Piano Player  Fran�ois Truffaut  1960  France 
Fran�ois Truffaut is drunk on the possibilities of cinema in this, his most playful film. Part thriller, part comedy, part tragedy, Shoot the Piano Player relates the adventures of mild-mannered piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour, in a triumph of hangdog deadpan) as he stumbles into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair. Loaded with gags, guns, clowns, and thugs, this razor-sharp homage to the American gangster film is pure nouvelle vague. 
88 
poster		 Barry Lyndon  Stanley Kubrick  1975  UK 
All of Stanley Kubrick's features look better now than when they were first released, but Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest. This personal, idiosyncratic, melancholy, and long (three hours) adaptation of the Thackeray novel is exquisitely shot in natural light (or, in night scenes, candlelight) by John Alcott, with frequent use of slow backward zooms that distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative about an 18th-century Irish upstart (Ryan O'Neal). Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey. 
89 
poster		 Lawrence of Arabia  David Lean  1962  UK 
David Lean's 1962 spectacle about T.E. Lawrence's military career between 1916 and 1918, written by Robert Bolt and produced by Sam Spiegel, remains one of the most intelligent, handsome, and influential of all war epics. Combining the scenic splendor of De Mille with virtues of the English theater, Lean endeared himself to English professors and action buffs alike. The film won seven Oscars, including best picture and direction, yet the ideological crassness of De Mille and most war movies isn't so much transcended as given a high gloss: the film's subject is basically the White Man's Burden--despite ironic notations--with Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, and Omar Sharif called upon to represent the Arab soul, and Jose Ferrer embodying the savage Turks. The all-male cast helps make this one of the most homoerotic of all screen epics, though the characters' sexual experiences are at best only hinted at. 
90 
poster		 Boudu Saved from Drowning  Jean Renoir  1932  France 
Jean Renoir's effortless 1932 masterpiece is as informal, beguiling, and subversive as its eponymous hero, a tramp who is saved from suicide by a Parisian bookseller and ends up taking over his benefactor's home, wife, and mistress. Michel Simon's Boudu is one of the great creations of the cinema: he's not a sentimental, Chaplinesque vagabond, but a smelly, loutish big-city bum; all he's got going for him is his unshakable faith in his perfect personal freedom. The bookseller thinks of himself as a free spirit and a dedicated humanitarian; he wants to be both Boudu's brother and his benefactor, but the tramp resists all of his approaches. He won't be trapped in any roles; like the water of the river from which he comes (and to which he returns), his only duty is to keep moving. Shot largely on location along the quays of Paris, the film features several early experiments with deep focus and nonnaturalistic sound, though its chief stylistic feature is Renoir's incomparable way of gently shifting moods, from the farcical to the lyrical to the tragic and back again.  
91 
poster		 Naked  Mike Leigh  1993  UK 
Brilliant, problematic, and hyperbolic, Mike Leigh's postapocalyptic look at post-Thatcher England may look like allegory, but only because the picaresque story line, this time involving lone individuals rather than families, seems to sprawl more randomly than usual (which, incidentally, makes the customary clash of acting styles all the more glaring). What passes for a plot involves the restless, random movements of a working-class pontificator on the dole who's visiting his former girlfriend in London, to no clear purpose, and a number of the people he encounters, including his former girlfriend's roommate, a homeless couple, a philosophical night watchman, and a couple of women who take him in. We also periodically follow a similarly misogynistic, sadistic yuppie whose path eventually crosses the hero's; it's here that Leigh's occasional weakness for caricature seems most obvious. Though far from perfect, this 1993 film is galvanizing and disturbing, powerfully acted and teasingly unresolved.  
92 
poster		 The Shop Around the Corner  Ernst Lubitsch  1940  USA 
There are no art deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Ernst Lubitsch's finest and most enduring works, a romantic comedy of dazzling range that takes place almost entirely within the four walls of a leather-goods store in prewar Budapest. James Stewart is the earnest, slightly awkward young manager; Margaret Sullavan is the new sales clerk who gets on his nerves--and neither realizes that they are partners in a passionate romance being carried out through the mails. Interwoven with subplots centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense. 
93 
poster		 Kiss of Death  Henry Hathaway  1947  USA 
Richard Widmark's film debut as a giggling psycho killer (assigned to eliminate an old lady, he chuckles as he launches her wheelchair down a staircase) is the chief point of interest in this 1947 film noir, directed in a pseudodocumentary style by Henry Hathaway. Victor Mature, the nominal star, is a petty crook who informs on his colleagues and becomes the target of an underworld manhunt. 
94 
poster		 Dazed and Confused  Richard Linklater  1993  USA 
America, 1976. The last day of school. Bongs blaze, bell-bottoms ring, and rock and roll rocks. Among the best teen films ever made, Richard Linklater�s Dazed and Confused eavesdrops on a group of seniors-to-be and incoming freshmen. A launching pad for a number of future stars, Linklater�s first studio effort also features endlessly quotable dialogue and a blasting, stadium-ready soundtrack. Sidestepping nostalgia, Dazed and Confused is less about �the best years of our lives� than the boredom, angst, and excitement of teenagers waiting . . . for something to happen 
95 
poster		 Laura  Otto Preminger, (more)  1944  USA 
Otto Preminger's directorial debut (1944), not counting the five previous B films he refused to acknowledge and an earlier feature made in Austria. It reveals a coldly objective temperament and a masterful narrative sense, which combine to turn this standard 40s melodrama into something as haunting as its famous theme. Less a crime film than a study in levels of obsession, Laura is one of those classic works that leave their subject matter behind and live on the strength of their seductive style. With Dana Andrews as the detective, Gene Tierney as the lady in the portrait, and Clifton Webb as the epicene litterateur. 
96 
poster		 The Decalogue  Krzysztof Kieslowski  1989  Poland 
Krzysztof Kieslowski's major work (1988) consists of ten separate films, each running 50-odd minutes and set mainly around two high-rises in Warsaw. The films are built around a contemporary reflection on the Ten Commandments--specifically, an inquiry into what breaking each of them in today's world might entail. Made as a miniseries for Polish TV before Kieslowski embarked on The Double Life of Veronique and the "Three Colors" trilogy, these concise dramas can be seen in any order or combination; they don't depend on one another, though if you see them in batches you'll notice that major characters in one story turn up as extras in another.

Each segment is shaped like a well-constructed short story, often with a sardonic twist at the end, and though the performances--by many of the best actors in Polish cinema--are powerful, the direction is mainly a matter of realization rather than stylistic filigree.
 
97 
poster		 Artificial Intelligence: AI  Steven Spielberg  2001  USA 
A collaboration between the living Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick seems appropriate to a project that reflects profoundly on the differences between life and nonlife. Kubrick started this picture and came up with the idea that Spielberg should direct it, and after inheriting a 90-page treatment Kubrick had prepared with Ian Watson and 600 drawings he'd done with Chris Baker, Spielberg finished it in so much his own manner that it may be his most personal film, as well as his most thoughtful. It might make you cry; it's just as likely to give you the creeps--which is as it should be. This is a movie people will be arguing about for many years to come (2001) 
98 
poster		 Force of Evil  Abraham Polonsky  1948  USA 
Abraham Polonsky's superior 1949 melodrama about the numbers racket. A poetic, terse, beautifully exact, and highly personal re-creation of the American underworld, with an unpunctuated Joycean screenplay by Polonsky that is perhaps unique in the American cinema. This is film noir at its best. Beautifully acted by John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, and Beatrice Pearson. 
99 
poster		 Amants du Pont-Neuf, Les  Leos Carax  1991  France 
This 1992 French feature by Leos Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood) could be the great urban expressionist fantasy of the 90s: like Sunrise and Lonesome in the 20s and Playtime and Alphaville in the 60s, it uses a city's physical characteristics to poetically reflect the consciousness of its characters. Carax daringly and disconcertingly begins the film as a documentary portrait of the homeless in Paris, but it becomes a delirious love story between two people (Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche) who live on one of Paris's most famous bridges and experience the whole city as a kind of enchanted playground, a vision that reaches an explosive apotheosis during a fireworks display over the Seine. To realize his lyrical and monumental vision Carax built a huge set in the French countryside that depicted Pont-Neuf and its surroundings, making this one of the most expensive French productions ever mounted, not to mention Carax's best work to date. 
100 
poster		 The 39 Steps  Alfred Hitchcock  1935  UK 
As an artist, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed this early achievement many times in his career, but for sheer entertainment value it still stands in the forefront of his work. Robert Donat is the dapper young man who stumbles across a spy ring; Madeleine Carroll is the cool, luminous blond with whom he shares a pair of handcuffs. The ideas established in this 1935 feature lead in two different directions in Hitchcock's later work--toward the interpersonal themes of the "couple" films (Marnie, Frenzy, The Paradine Case) and the metaphysical adventures of the chase pictures (North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much). With Lucie Mannheim, Peggy Ashcroft, and Godfrey Tearle. 
101 
poster		 The Band Wagon  Vincente Minnelli  1953  USA 
For many, this 1953 feature represents the height of the American musical. Fred Astaire is a washed-up Hollywood star, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant are a husband-and-wife writing team, and Jack Buchanan is an artsy Broadway director. Roughly translating the film's curious quasi-autobiographical overtones, Astaire equals Astaire, Fabray and Levant equal Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the scenarists, and Buchanan equals director Vincente Minnelli. The musical becomes a frenetic meditation on pop art versus high art, coming down hard on the side of the former. Rife with great numbers, including the ineluctable "Triplets."  
102 
poster		 The Big Sleep  Howard Hawks  1946  USA 
Summoned by the dying General Sternwood, Philip Marlowe is asked to deal with several problems that are troubling his family. Marlowe finds that each problem centers about the disappearance of Sternwood's favoured employee who has left with a mobster's wife. Each of the problems becomes a cover for something else as Marlowe probes. 
103 
poster		 Close Up  Abbas Kiarostami  1990  Iran 
A dense and subtle masterpiece from Iran (1990, 97 min.) by Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), this documentary--or is it pseudodocumentary?--follows the trial of an unemployed film buff in Tehran who impersonated acclaimed filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and became intimate with a well-to-do family while pretending to prepare a film that was to feature them. Kiarostami persuades all the major people involved to reenact what happened, finally bringing the real Makhmalbaf together with his impersonator for a highly emotional exchange. Much of the implicit comedy here comes from the way "cinema" changes and inflects the value and nature of everything--the original scam, the trial, the documentary Kiarostami is making. Werner Herzog has called this the greatest of all documentaries about filmmaking, and he may not be far off--if only because no other film does more to interrogate certain aspects of the documentary form itself. 
104 
poster		 Bigger Than Life  Nicholas Ray  1956  USA 
Nicholas Ray's potent 1956 CinemaScope melodrama dealt with the ill effects of cortisone on a frustrated middle-class grammar-school teacher (James Mason) at about the same time that the first wave of "wonder" drugs hit the market. But the true subject of this deeply disturbing picture is middle-class values--about money, education, culture, religion, patriarchy, and "getting ahead." These values are thrown into bold relief by the hero's drug dependency and resulting megalomania, which leads to shocking and tragic results for his family (Barbara Rush and Robert Simon) as well as himself. Ray's use of 'Scope framing and color to delineate the hero's dreams and dissatisfactions has rarely been as purposeful. (It's hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of "normal" American family life during the 50s.) With Walter Matthau in an early noncomic role as the hero's best friend; scripted by Cyril Hume, Richard Maibum, and an uncredited Clifford Odets. 
105 
poster		 El  Luis Bu�uel  1953  Mexico 
One of Luis Bunuel's more perverse low-budget Mexican features (1952), also known in this country as This Strange Passion. Arturo de Cordova plays a wealthy Catholic whose insane jealousy toward his wife (Delia Garces) first becomes apparent on their honeymoon. In some ways it's a parody of machismo, full of anticlerical thrusts, but like many other Bunuel features of this period, the irreverence--consisting in part of such ghoulish, Sade-inspired notions as the hero wanting to sew up his wife's vagina--tends to be almost parenthetical rather than the main focus. Bunuel remained true to his surrealist origins throughout his Mexican period, but the full command of his earliest and latest films, as well as such intermediate masterpieces as Los olvidados and The Exterminating Angel, resulted in stronger fare than this. Still, the hero's wonderful crooked walk in the final shot seems the perfect emblem of Bunuel's own sly subversion in adverse circumstances 
106 
poster		 Samoura�, Le  Jean-Pierre Melville  1967  France 
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture�with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology�maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville�s masterpiece Le Samoura� defines cool. 
107 
poster		 Battleship Potemkin  Sergei M. Eisenstein  1925  Soviet Union 
Hardly anything remains to be said about this, the most famous and most analyzed--not the least by its creator, Sergei Eisenstein--film of all time. Let it suffice to say that if you've heard something about "montage" (the joining of filmed images to suggest an idea, create a mood, or evoke a theme), this is the work that defines it. The film records the birth of revolutionary consciousness among the crew members of the battleship Potemkin, anchored at Odessa in 1905. Its appearance in 1925 shook the film world, and many filmmakers still haven't recovered. 
108 
poster		 All About Eve  Joseph L. Mankiewicz  1950  USA 
A favorite drama-fest, Bette Davis vehicle, and security blanket for people in love with the theater, All About Eve is a classic film that appeals to movie lovers and Oscar hounds. Writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz's considerable talent is all here, especially in his very stage-like, overwritten witticisms that passes well as the language of high-toned stage folk. There are at least six great roles here, with several actors doing the best work of their careers.  
109 
poster		 Carmen Jones  Otto Preminger  1954  USA 
Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones is one of the most uncompromising portrayalsof black America in the cinema S The film first opened in the fall of 1954,11 years after the play had enjoyed a moderately successful run onBroadway. Transposing Georges Bizet's op�ra comique, Carmen, to anall-black, World War II setting had been a pet project of lyricist OscarHammerstein II for many years His lyrics for Carmen Jones are eloquentfusions of dialect and poetry. The supporting cast reads like a who's whoof Fifties black entertainers. Preminger strips the musical of all excessand frills. He creates an austere, depoeticized, anti-lyrical world inwhich nothing obstructs his camera's detached recording of the action. Many of the musical and dramatic sequences are constructed in majestic long takes accompanied by complex camera movements, an observance of spatial and temporal unities that encourages us to view the volatile melodrama withou tjudging the characters or their actions. The tension Preminger creates in these frequently electrifying CinemaScope compositions between the impassive gaze of his camera and the fury storming across the screen is the source of much of the power and depth of Carmen Jones 
110 
poster		 Unforgiven  Clint Eastwood  1992  USA 
One of Clint Eastwood's most accomplished westerns, based on a rather elaborate script by David Webb Peoples (who cowrote Blade Runner). Like Bird, this 1992 film seems at times to equate dark cinematography with artistry (albeit with stunning locations in Canada and California and beautifully composed results), and as with White Hunter, Black Heart its view of reality depends almost entirely on countercliches and their implied critique of the machismo of earlier Eastwood movies. Eastwood plays a reformed alcoholic killer, now a widower, father, and failing hog farmer in Kansas, who's lured into a bounty hunt by a brash kid (Jaimz Woolvett) and persuades an old partner (Morgan Freeman) to join them. Other important characters include two prostitutes (Frances Fisher and Anna Thomson), a gunman-turned-sheriff (Gene Hackman, rather like Karl Malden's character in One-Eyed Jacks), an English bounty hunter (Richard Harris), and a dime-novel writer (Saul Rubinek) who mythologizes the west. As a moral reconsideration of the role of violence in previous Eastwood films, this is strong and sure, and characters who play against genre expectations give the film a provocative aftertaste. 
111 
poster		 Forty Guns  Samuel Fuller  1957  USA 
Samuel Fuller's wild, wonderful, semicoherent black-and-white 'Scope western (1957) was shot in ten days, and in some ways looks it. But it's also the first feature that fully announces his talent as an avant-garde filmmaker, even in this unlikeliest of genres. Barbara Stanwyck stars as the "woman with a whip," the land baroness of Tombstone Territory. She's assisted by the 40 dudes of the title, and Barry Sullivan is the marshal who turns up to challenge her. There's a hilarious romantic subplot involving a female gunsmith (whose sexual initiation is handled through an iris and dissolve that Godard incorporated into Breathless), an endless crane-and-track shot through a western town that defies belief, a lot of delirious violence, perverse sexuality, and imaginative visual energy, and several startling plot twists. If you've ever wondered why Godard and other French New Wave directors deify Fuller, this movie explains it all.  
112 
poster		 Rififi  Jules Dassin  1955  France 
After making such American noir classics as The Naked City and Brute Force, blacklisted director Jules Dassin went to Paris and embarked on his masterpiece: a twisting, turning tale of four ex-cons who hatch one last glorious heist in the City of Lights. At once naturalistic and expressionistic, this melange of suspense, brutality, and dark humor was an international hit and earned Dassin the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. 
113 
poster		 The Outlaw Josey Wales  Clint Eastwood  1976  USA 
Josey Wales makes his way west after the Civil War, determined to live a useful and helpful life. He joins up with a group of settlers who need the protection that a man as tough and experienced as he is can provide. Unfortunately, the past has a way of catching up with you, and Josey is a wanted man. 
114 
poster		 Goodfellas  Martin Scorsese  1990  USA 
Martin Scorsese collaborated with Nicholas Pileggi on this 1990 adaptation of Wiseguy, Pileggi's nonfiction book about gangsters in Brooklyn, and in terms of narrative fluidity it may well be the most accomplished thing Scorsese's ever done. Set between the mid-50s and the mid-80s, the semifictionalized story centers on a half-Irish, half-Sicilian Mafia recruit (Ray Liotta)--who narrates the movie along with the Jewish woman (Lorraine Bracco) he eventually marries--and the other gangsters in his immediate circle (Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Paul Sorvino). Paradoxically, the violent, amoral world the film depicts may be the darkest Scorsese has ever shown, but the surface mood is lighter than any Scorsese film since Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore--yielding a dark comedy about the casual acceptance of violence and betrayal by a numskull hero whose cavalier attitudes and primitive appetites may remind you in spots of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Stylistically, it's a remarkable effort--with a continuous sense of gliding motion, broken only by occasional freeze-frames (which imply a reflectiveness not shown by any of the characters)--and the film is entertaining and gripping throughout. 
115 
poster		 Casque d'or  Jacques Becker  1952  France 
A radiant Simone Signoret dominates Jacques Becker's 1952 film, which is based on a Paris underworld incident of 1898 that is, in some ways, the French parallel to the legend of Frankie and Johnny. Becker emphasized atmospherics at the expense of psychology, which outraged the literary critics of the time and impressed the young Turks who later made up the New Wave. A turning point for French cinema, although it must be understood in context. With Serge Reggiani and Claude Dauphin. 
116 
poster		 The Grand Illusion  Jean Renoir  1937  France 
A film about war without a single scene of combat, Jean Renoir's 1937 masterpiece about French and German officers during World War I suggests that the true divisions of that conflict were of class rather than nationality. The point is embodied in the friendship between two aristocratic officers, a German (Erich von Stroheim, in his greatest performance in a sound film) and a Frenchman (Pierre Fresnay), both of whom ultimately become sacrificial victims after a nouveau riche Jewish officer (Marcel Dalio) and a French mechanic (Jean Gabin) manage to escape from Stroheim's fortress to freedom. The relationship between the mechanic and a German widow (L'Atalante's Dita Parlo), who barely speak each other's language, is no less moving. The film doesn't have the polyphonic brilliance of Renoir's The Rules of the Game, made two years later, but it's still one of the key humanist expressions to be found in movies: sad, funny, exalting, and glorious. 
117 
poster		 The Last Picture Show  Peter Bogdanovich  1971  USA 
Peter Bogdanovich was following the route of the French New Wave filmmakers when he left criticism to make this 1971 feature, and like many of the New Wave films, it's an intimate psychological story laced with references to Hollywood movies. The setting is a small, stagnant Texas town of the 1950s; everybody's moving away, and even the movie theater is ready to close (the last picture show is Howard Hawks's Red River, apparently programmed by the Texas correspondent of Cahiers du Cinema). The few people who remain spend their time carrying on sordid affairs and eulogizing the vanishing west. 
118 
poster		 Mother and Son  Aleksandr Sokurov  1997  Germany 
Apart from the eye-filling black-and-white video Oriental Elegy, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov's painterly, visionary side has seldom been more evident than in this gorgeous 1997 contemplation of a son caring for his dying mother. The story is minimal, but the color images are so breathtaking that there�s never a lax moment; even when the already slow action is reduced to a virtual standstill, Sokurov�s intensity insures that something is always happening, both on the screen and inside us. (This is only 73 minutes long, but if you�re hungry for plot, it will seem like an eternity.) In his taste and his patience, Sokurov may be our only truly 19th-century avant-gardist--which means in effect that his works are timeless.  
119 
poster		 Nouvelle vague  Jean-Luc Godard  1990  Switzerland 
By the time of Nouvelle Vague�s release in 1990, Godard�s style became more refined and his films less pointed and jaded than his aggressive and confrontational, yet brilliant, 1970s period. He continued, as always, to make a significant number of films throughout the 1980s from the tender, personal Je Vous Salue, Marie to the comically ironic tribute to Jerry Lewis, Soigne ta Droite. While the work of this decade (from the mere five films I�ve seen) still retains the mark of a genius, it seems to be building up to his more complex, ambitious, and fluid films of the 1990s and 2000s. Nouvelle Vague may be Godard�s most complex and layered film, but attempting to unlock its secrets makes it one of his most rewarding. 
120 
poster		 Red River  Howard Hawks  1948  USA 
This monumental 1948 western is one of Howard Hawks's greatest films. John Wayne plays a Texas rancher who steals land from a rich Mexican owner, defends it with his gun, and tries to blaze a 1,000-mile trail to get his beef to market. His performance reportedly inspired John Ford to exclaim, "I didn't know that big sonovabitch could act." A young Montgomery Clift brings notable intensity to the role of Wayne's surrogate son. 
121 
poster		 My Name Is Ivan  Andrei Tarkovsky  1962  Soviet Union 
Andrei Tarkovsky's powerful 1962 first feature, also known as Ivan's Childhood and The Youngest Spy, is his most conventional as narrative, though it contains some remarkable dreamlike interludes that anticipate his later work. Shot in black and white, it follows the adventures of a boy serving as a spy on the front lines during World War II. 
122 
poster		 2001: A Space Odyssey  Stanley Kubrick  1968  UK 
Seeing this 1968 masterpiece in 70-millimeter, digitally restored and with remastered sound, provides an ideal opportunity to rediscover this mind-blowing myth of origin as it was meant to be seen and heard, an experience no video setup, no matter how elaborate, could ever begin to approach. The film remains threatening to contemporary studiothink in many important ways: Its special effects are used so seamlessly as part of an overall artistic strategy that, as critic Annette Michelson has pointed out, they don't even register as such. Dialogue plays a minimal role, yet the plot encompasses the history of mankind (a province of SF visionary Olaf Stapledon, who inspired Kubrick's cowriter, Arthur C. Clarke). And, like its flagrantly underrated companion piece, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, it meditates at length on the complex relationship between humanity and technology--not only the human qualities that we ascribe to machines but also the programming we knowingly or unknowingly submit to. The film's projections of the cold war and antiquated product placements may look quaint now, but the poetry is as hard-edged and full of wonder as ever.  
123 
poster		 Two English Girls  Fran�ois Truffaut  1971  France 
Francois Truffaut returned to the world of Jules and Jim to fashion this bittersweet tale of love imperfectly expressed and passion unwisely spent (1971). Here Truffaut has shed his boyish innocence and taken on a mood of calm, mature resignation; the gap between character and setting that often shows up in his films has been masterfully closed. With Jean-Pierre Leaud, Kika Markham, and Stacey Tendeter. 
124 
poster		 Casablanca  Michael Curtiz  1942  USA 
Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified. (It's been suggested that communism is the political involvement that Bogart's grizzled casino owner Rick may be in retreat from at the beginning.) This hastily patched together picture, which started out as a B film, wound up getting an Oscar, and displays a cozy, studio-bound claustrophobia that Howard Hawks improved upon in his superior spin-off To Have and Have Not. Then again, we get Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Marcel Dalio, and S.Z. Sakall, and Dooley Wilson performing "As Time Goes By."  
125 
poster		 Faces  John Cassavetes  1968  USA 
John Cassavetes's galvanic 1968 drama about one long night in the lives of an estranged well-to-do married couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin) and their temporary lovers (Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel) was the first of his independent features to become a hit, and it's not hard to see why. It remains one of the only American films to take the middle class seriously, depicting the compulsive, embarrassed laughter of people facing their own sexual longing and some of the emotional devastation brought about by the so-called sexual revolution. (Interestingly, Cassavetes set out to make a trenchant critique of the middle class, but his characteristic empathy for all of his characters makes this a far cry from simple satire.) Shot in 16-millimeter black and white with a good many close-ups, this often takes an unsparing yet compassionate "documentary" look at emotions most movies prefer to gloss over or cover up. Adroitly written and directed, and superbly acted--the leads and Val Avery are all uncommonly good (and the astonishing Lynn Carlin was a nonprofessional discovered by Cassavetes, working at the time as Robert Altman's secretary)--this is one of the most powerful and influential American films of the 60s. 
126 
poster		 Once Upon a Time in Mexico  Robert Rodriguez  2003  USA 
A drug lord who pretends to overthrow the Mexican government. A corrupt CIA agent (Johnny Depp) who at that time, demands retribution from his worst enemy to carry out the drug lord's uprising against the government.  
127 
poster		 Zero for Conduct  Jean Vigo  1933  France 
Jean Vigo's 1933 masterpiece charts the rebellion of three young French boys in a sordid little provincial boarding school. A wholly original creation, the film walks a narrow line between surrealist farce and social realism. The most famous sequence, which leads directly to Lindsay Anderson's If . . . , has the boys atop the school on graduation day, merrily dumping garbage on the assembled dignitaries--some of whom are cardboard cutouts. 
128 
poster		 Rosetta  Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne  1999  France 
From its opening seconds, this feature from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (La promesse), winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1999 Cannes film festival, has to be the most visceral filmgoing experience of the past year, including all of Hollywood's explosions and special-effects extravaganzas. It concerns the desperate efforts of the 18-year-old title heroine (played by Emilie Dequenne, a remarkable nonprofessional), who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother and suffers from stomach cramps, to find a steady job; she particularly hopes to work at a waffle stand whose current employee has romantic designs on her. This may sound like the grimmest sort of neorealism, but the Dardennes keep the story so ruthlessly unsentimental and physical it would be a disservice to describe it as neo anything. You feel it in your nervous system before you get a chance to reflect on its meaning--it's almost as if the Dardennes were intent on converting an immediate experience of the contemporary world into a breathless theme-park ride--and it makes just about every other form of movie "realism" look like trivial escapism. It's certainly not devoid of psychological nuance either, and it's had such an impact in Belgium that a wage law for teenagers, which passed in November 1999, is known as "the Rosetta plan."  
129 
poster		 Texasville  Peter Bogdanovich  1990  USA 
One of the most surprising things about Peter Bogdanovich's bittersweet, touching comedy sequel to The Last Picture Show (1971)--based, like its predecessor, on a Larry McMurtry novel--is that, far from being a trip down memory lane, it's largely structured around historical amnesia. The hero walks with a limp and has grown estranged from his wife, and his former girlfriend has lost her husband and son, though the reasons and circumstances behind these and other essential facts go unmentioned: they're buried somewhere in the forgotten past. Although the film is built around the town's big centennial celebration, there are no big dramatic events in the usual sense; the film's focus is the complications, readjustments, and discoveries of middle age, and it's entirely to the credit of old movie buff Bogdanovich, who wrote the script, that there isn't a single film reference in sight. Nevertheless, he's learned the major lesson of Leo McCarey--that people and their tragicomic behavior matter much more than plot. 
130 
poster		 Week End  Jean-Luc Godard  1967  Italy 
Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 imagining of the twilight of the Western world, in which bourgeois society is stalled in an endless traffic jam, revolutionaries pass their time slaughtering pigs, and Mozart is played in open fields while the camera tracks in elegant circles. It's funny and grating, seductive and repulsive, by the usual Godardian turns: the paradoxes he loves to spin are emotional as well as intellectual. Though the film teeters on the brink of an icy Maoism, it never takes the plunge.  
131 
poster		 The Asphalt Jungle  John Huston  1950  USA 
John Huston's bleak, semidocumentary account of a jewel heist and its moral consequences. One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution. But Huston's interest remains with his characters, who dissolve as tragically as the prospectors of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the adventurers of The Man Who Would Be King. The film has been remade at least three times, as The Badlanders, Cairo, and Cool Breeze. With Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, and an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe. 
132 
poster		 Besieged  Bernardo Bertolucci  1998  Italy 
Bernardo Bertolucci's sensual made-for-TV feature (1998), with dialogue in English, focuses on the attraction of a wealthy English pianist in Rome (David Thewlis) to his African housekeeper (Thandie Newton), a medical student whose husband is a political prisoner. As a story this is relatively slight for Bertolucci, and is carried mainly by the actors; and as an allegory about colonialism and guilt-ridden privilege it verges on the routine. But as stylistic expression--a mosaic of images and singular editing patterns--it's the most interesting thing he's done in years, as well as the most pleasurable. It's a story told mainly through images and music (ranging from African pop and McCoy Tyner to Mozart and Grieg)--with dialogue kept to a minimum and looks and gestures exploited to the fullest--and as a re-creation of silent cinema it's much more achieved than The Thin Red Line, its only recent competitor.  
133 
poster		 North by Northwest  Alfred Hitchcock  1959  USA 
Cary Grant, a martini-sodden advertising director, awakes from a middle-class daydream into an underworld nightmare when he's mistaken for a secret agent (1959). A great film, and certainly one of the most entertaining movies ever made, directed by Alfred Hitchcock at his peak. With Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Leo G. Carroll.  
134 
poster		 Cercle rouge, Le  Jean-Pierre Melville  1970  France 
Master thief Corey (Alain Delon) is fresh out of prison. But instead of toeing the line of law-abiding freedom, he finds his steps leading back to the shadowy world of crime, crossing those of a notorious escapee (Gian Maria Volont�) and alcoholic ex-cop (Yves Montand). As the unlikely trio plots a heist against impossible odds, their trail is pursued by a relentless inspector (Bourvil), and fate seals their destinies. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le cercle rouge combines honorable anti-heroes, coolly atmospheric cinematography, and breathtaking set pieces to create a masterpiece of crime cinema. 
135 
poster		 Jules and Jim  Fran�ois Truffaut  1962  France 
That eternal theme of melodrama--the love too fine to last--given intelligent and sensitive treatment by Francois Truffaut. Oskar Werner and Henri Serre are the two friends of the title, who, when World War I breaks out, must fight on different sides; Jeanne Moreau, in a performance that combines the intensely physical and the fleetingly enigmatic, is Catherine, the woman who loves them both. With this 1961 film Truffaut comes closest to the spirit and sublimity of his mentor, Jean Renoir, and the result is a masterpiece of the New Wave. 
136 
poster		 Unbreakable  M. Night Shyamalan  2000  USA 
A comic-book dealer obsessed with the idea that comics are only slightly exaggerated versions of real phenomena begins to pester a security guard, the only survivor of a train wreck that killed more than 100 people, insisting that his survival is evidence he's superhuman. The security guard, whose marriage has deteriorated and whose near catatonia seems to have overtaken everyone in an expressionist Philadelphia, vehemently denies the nutty hypothesis partly because it would explain a lot--he's unnaturally strong, he's never been sick a day in his life, and he's uncannily good at spotting troublemakers at the football stadium where he works. Metronomically measured dialogue and color-coded cinematography and production design--including visual symbolism that would make most filmmakers seem to be swinging a sledgehammer--are smoothly integrated into this mesmerizing dark fable, which also contains moments of comedy and action that don't disrupt its oddly earnest tone. 
137 
poster		 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie  Luis Bu�uel  1972  France 
Luis Bu�uel's 1972 comic masterpiece, about three well-to-do couples who try and fail to have a meal together, is perhaps the most perfectly achieved and executed of all his late French films. The film proceeds by diverse interruptions, digressions, and interpolations (including dreams and tales within tales) that, interestingly enough, identify the characters, their class, and their seeming indestructibility with narrative itself. One of the things that makes this film as charming as it is, despite its radicalism, and helped Bu�uel win his only Oscar is the perfect cast, many of whom bring along nearly mythic associations acquired in previous French films. Frightening, funny, profound, and mysterious. 
138 
poster		 The Searchers  John Ford  1956  USA 
We may still be waiting for the Great American Novel, but John Ford gave us the Great American Film in 1956. The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford. Through the central image of the frontier, the meeting point of wilderness and civilization, Ford explores the divisions of our national character, with its search for order and its need for violence, its spirit of community and its quest for independence. 
139 
poster		 Full Moon in Paris  Eric Rohmer  1984  France 
Eric Rohmer's shift from a subjective to an objective viewpoint for his "Comedies and Proverbs" series brought with it a gradual darkening of tone: his characters no longer live in a world colored by their personal attitudes and expectations, but are trapped in a universe that blankly refuses to take their desires into account. Full Moon in Paris (1984, 101 min.), the fourth in the series, is bleaker than any of its predecessors: the heroine (Pascale Ogier) lives with a lover in the suburbs of Paris, but takes a small apartment in town as a way of asserting her freedom. But no one is truly free in the network of relationships Rohmer sketches around her, and by asserting her independence she upsets the delicate equilibrium that has provided her with a measure of happiness.  
140 
poster		 Quai des Orf�vres  Henri-Georges Clouzot  1947  France 
The skillful writer-director Henri-Georges Clouzot is mainly known for his corrosive misanthropy. Yet surprisingly, this accomplished 1947 noir turns that misanthropy precisely on its head without ever resorting to sentimentality or stereotypes. The milieus of a seedy music hall and police station in Paris are delineated with such richness and attentiveness toward the postoccupation climate that when the murder of a licentious film producer brings a police inspector (the great Louis Jouvet) into the music hall, Clouzot is able to reveal a complex and interactive working-class world in which cops and criminals are sometimes difficult to tell apart. The principal epiphanies in this tale emerge from Jouvet's expressions of kinship with a flirtatious singer (Suzy Delair) and a lesbian photographer (Simone Renant), but there are also memorable portraits of the singer's mousy pianist husband (Bernard Blier), a music publisher (Henri Arius), and several others.  
141 
poster		 Giant  George Stevens  1956  USA 
Like the title says, it's a whopper: 201 minutes of a Texas family's rise to fame and fortune, based on an Edna Ferber novel. Much of it is awful, but it's almost impossible not to be taken in by the narrative sprawl: like many big, bad movies, Giant is an enveloping experience, with a crazy life and logic of its own. George Stevens directed, at the height of his bloated epic period (1956), but unlike his A Place in the Sun, this one isn't entirely sober and sanctimonious; it takes some pleasure in melodrama for its own sake. The mansion on the plain, designed by art director Boris Levin, remains one of the most memorable graphic images of the 50s. With Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean--in his last and strangest role.  
142 
poster		 The Sweet Hereafter  Atom Egoyan  1997  Canada 
At the tragic center of the story are the deaths of many children in a small town when a school bus spins out of control and sinks into a frozen lake (depicted in an extraordinary single shot that calls to mind a Brueghel landscape) and what this threatens to do to the community, especially after a big-city lawyer turns up and tries to initiate litigation. Egoyan restructures Banks�s novel (which is narrated by several characters in turn and proceeds chronologically) into the kind of mosaic narrative used in his recent features and in most of Kurt Vonnegut�s novels (in which several different time frames and narrative lines are intercut and proceed simultaneously). He also adds some material about the Pied Piper, capturing the essence of some parts of the book but simplifying most of the characters and making the mountainous setting more mythical. The Sweet Hereafter is no exception, and this film has potent things to say about communal ties and the repressive machinations of capitalism that can sever them.  
143 
poster		 The Godfather: Part II  Francis Ford Coppola  1974  USA 
The continuing saga of the Corleone crime family tells the story of a young Vito Corleone growing up in Sicily and in 1910s New York; and follows Michael Corleone in the 1950s as he attempts to expand the family business into Las Vegas, Hollywood and Cuba. 
144 
poster		 Crossfire  Edward Dmytryk  1947  USA 
Homicide Capt. Finlay finds evidence that one or more of a group of demobilized soldiers is involved in the death of Joseph Samuels. In flashbacks, we see the night's events from different viewpoints as Sergeant Keeley investigates on his own, trying to clear his friend Mitchell, to whom circumstantial evidence points. Then the real, ugly motive for the killing begins to dawn on both Finlay and Keeley... 
145 
poster		 Fallen Angels  Kar Wai Wong  1995  Hong Kong 
A personal assistant pines for the professional killer whose room she cleans while he's away--when she isn't getting herself off there. The killer, who expresses his ambivalence about his work and his assistant in voice-over, seems depressed yet uncynical. When a hyperactive woman approaches him at McDonald's, they hurtle into a compulsive, melodramatic relationship. Meanwhile a silent, roving shop clerk bullies people into accepting goods and services, until he becomes smitten with a woman who's as belligerent as he is. Writer-director Wong Kar-wai makes these five self-consciously idiosyncratic types--often seen through distorting lenses in cinematographer Christopher Doyle's somber, garish Hong Kong--fully and instantly believable. Their encounters seem accidental but have a poetic logic that reverberates in some lovely jukebox pop. 
146 
poster		 Tartuffe  F.W. Murnau  1926  Germany 
If you think you know all there is to know about F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise, Tabu)--and it's not likely that you would, because he never repeated himself, and major portions of the work of this consummate master of the silent era are now lost--take a look at this underrated 1926 adaptation of the Moliere comedy, framed with a modern story. The mise en scene is beautifully modulated and the performances--by Emil Jannings, Lil Dagover, and Werner Krauss, among others--are first-rate.  
147 
poster		 Chinatown  Roman Polanski  1974  USA 
A tribute to the detective thriller and all it represented in terms of notions of heroism and possibilities for action--and an elaboration of Roman Polanski's black thoughts on the absurdity of it all. This stylish 1974 whodunit stars Jack Nicholson (never better) and Faye Dunaway (likewise). A bit abstract, though gorgeously shot (by John Alonzo) and cleverly plotted (by Robert Towne), Polanski's film suggests that the rules of the game are written in some strange, untranslatable language, and that everyone's an alien and, ultimately, a victim. 
148 
poster		 Carabiniers, Les  Jean-Luc Godard  1963  France 
Jean-Luc Godard set out in 1963 to deliberately make a war film that would be neither dramatically involving nor formally compelling--and he succeeded so brilliantly that the film was seen as a disaster, precisely because the liberal-humanist critics of the time were being educated by it rather than reassured. A vitally important film, in terms of Godard's notions of form and in terms of his growing political awareness, it tells of two peasants drafted into the king's army, whose victories on the battlefields lead to their execution as traitors when diplomacy takes a characteristic turn.  
149 
poster		 Fists in the Pocket  Marco Bellocchio  1965  Italy 
Tormented by twisted desires, a young man takes drastic measures to rid his grotesquely dysfunctional family of its various afflictions in this astonishing 1965 debut from Marco Bellocchio. Charged by a coolly assured style, shocking perversity, and savage gallows humor, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca) was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality, a truly unique work that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema. 
150 
poster		 The Naked Spur  Anthony Mann  1953  USA 
An uncharacteristically nasty James Stewart plays an obsessive bounty hunter with Robert Ryan in tow in one of the very best Anthony Mann westerns--which means one of the very best westerns, period. This 1953 film has Janet Leigh in jeans, beautiful location shooting (and Technicolor cinematography) in the Rockies, and some of the most intense psychological warfare to be found in Mann's angular and anguished oeuvre. With Ralph Meeker, Millard Mitchell, and a top-notch script by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom. 
151 
poster		 Heat  Michael Mann  1995  USA 
There's nothing really new in this lengthy 1995 thriller by writer-director Michael Mann about cops (Al Pacino and others) and robbers (Robert De Niro and others) in Los Angeles, but it has craft, pacing, and an overall sense of proportion, three pretty rare classic virtues nowadays. The story takes as long as it does because the big heist is actually shown rather than elided (a la Reservoir Dogs), and because the action keeps passing back and forth between Pacino and De Niro, concentrating on their personal failings as well as their professional smarts.  
152 
poster		 Ugetsu  Kenji Mizoguchi  1953  Japan 
The mood of Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 masterpiece is evoked by the English translation most often given to its title, "Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After the Rain." Based on two 16th-century ghost stories, the film is less a study of the supernatural than a sublime embodiment of Mizoguchi's eternal theme, the generosity of women and the selfishness of men. Densely plotted but as emotionally subtle as its name, Ugetsu is one of the great experiences of cinema. 
153 
poster		 The Thin Red Line  Terrence Malick  1998  Canada 
There's less sense of period here and more feeling for terrain than in any other World War II movie that comes to mind. Terrence Malick's strongest suits in his two previous features, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978)--a painterly sense of composition and a bold and original use of offscreen narration--are enhanced here, first by a successful wedding of ecology and narrative (which never quite happened in Days of Heaven) and second by the notion of a collective hero, which permits the internal monologues of many characters in turn. Malick clearly is distancing the material philosophically and poetically, muting the drama periodically and turning it into reverie. This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to Saving Private Ryan it's the work of a grown-up with something to say about the meaning and consequences of war. 
154 
poster		 A Good Marriage  Eric Rohmer  1982  France 
The second installment of Eric Rohmer's "Comedies and Proverbs" is, like The Aviator's Wife, a study in destructive imagination and the limitations of personal perspectives--which is to say that the characters talk as much as they did in the "Six Moral Tales," but no one really hears what they're saying. Obsession meets indifference in the form of a young art student (Beatrice Romand) who is determined to leave the bohemian life and marry a successful lawyer (Andre Dussollier). The lawyer, however, has not been informed of her plans. The humor exists on a very fine line between sharp satire and acute embarrassment, yet Rohmer is never cruel to his aggravating heroine; a comedy in the classic sense, this 1982 film charts her redemption. 
155 
poster		 The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz  Luis Bu�uel  1955  Mexico 
The last film of Luis Bu�uel's "commercial" Mexican period (1955, 89 min.), Archibaldo shows the master working without the complete freedom he was granted later on. But Bu�uel is still able to put some bizarre--and very funny--personal touches on this story of a man obsessed with the idea that the music box he owned as a child has the power to kill.  
156 
poster		 Hiroshima mon amour  Alain Resnais  1959  France 
Alain Resnais' truly revolutionary 1959 film about the "impossible love" between a French actress and a Japanese architect. Integrating past and present, poetic images and documentary footage, music and Marguerite Duras' dialogue, the film achieved a structural balance of such emotional and intellectual power that audiences were stunned. Its rearrangement of temporal and emotional impressions is now old stuff for filmmakers (and even directors of television commercials), but Resnais' contributions to the New Wave are virtually incalculable. 
157 
poster		 Poto and Cabengo  Jean-Pierre Gorin  1980  USA 
Jean-Pierre Gorin's first solo effort as a filmmaker after a long period of collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard surpassed all of his previous work hands down. The putative subject is a pair of young female twins in southern California who have apparently invented their own language, and while this personal documentary explores this subject in some detail, it proves to be about a great deal more: Gorin's own exile, the lower-income white culture of San Diego, the American Dream, and language itself. A memorable, innovative effort, packed with wonder and invention  
158 
poster		 The Seven Samurai  Akira Kurosawa  1954  Japan 
Akira Kurosawa's best film is also his most Americanized, drawing on classical Hollywood conventions of genre (the western), characterization (ritual gestures used to distinguish the individuals within a group), and visual style (the horizon lines and exaggerated perspectives of John Ford). Of course, this 1954 film also returned something of what it borrowed, by laying the groundwork for the "professional" western (Rio Bravo, etc) that dominated the genre in the 50s and 60s. Kurosawa's film is a model of long-form construction, ably fitting its asides and anecdotes into a powerful suspense structure that endures for all of the film's 208 minutes. The climax--the battle in the rain and its ambiguous aftermath--is Kurosawa's greatest moment. 
159 
poster		 Dial M for Murder  Alfred Hitchcock  1954  USA 
Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 adaptation of Frederick Knott's dinner-theater warhorse about a fading tennis champion (Ray Milland) who arranges the murder of his wife (Grace Kelly). The film is confined almost entirely to a cramped apartment set--a constricted space that takes on a highly expressive quality in the picture's original 3-D version. The screenplay tends to constrain rather than liberate Hitchcock's thematic thrust, but there is much of technical value in his geometric survey of the scene and the elaborate strategies employed to transfer audience sympathy among the four main characters. 
160 
poster		 Lola  Rainer Werner Fassbinder  1981  West Germany 
Part two (between The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronika Voss) of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's trilogy on Germany's "economic miracle" of the 1950s. This 1982 film is a very loose remake of The Blue Angel, with an upright building commissioner (Armin Mueller-Stahl) falling in love with a corrupt cabaret singer (Barbara Sukowa); but where the driving force in Sternberg's film is sex, in Fassbinder's it's money. Despite the cold, abstract visuals--Sirk's colors and Sternberg's clutter--the film is one of Fassbinder's warmest, with a close, affectionate direction of actors unlike anything he'd ever attempted. It's a smooth, even, professional film in which nothing surprising happens--which seems, obscurely, to be its point. 
161 
poster		 Ashes and Diamonds  Andrzej Wajda  1958  Poland 
On the last day of World War Two in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar. But a mistake stalls his progress and leads him to Krystyna, a beautiful barmaid who gives him a glimpse of what his life could be. Gorgeously photographed and brilliantly performed, Ashes and Diamonds masterfully interweaves the fate of a nation with that of one man, resulting in one of the most important Polish films of all time.
 
162 
poster		 The Lady Eve  Preston Sturges  1941  USA 
A conniving father and daughter meet up with the heir to a brewery fortune�a wealthy but na�ve snake enthusiast�and attempt to bamboozle him at a cruise ship card table. Their plan is quickly abandoned when the daughter falls in love with their prey. But when the heir gets wise to her gold-digging ways, she must plot to re-conquer his heart. One of Sturges� most clever and beloved romantic comedies, The Lady Eve balances broad slapstick and sophisticated sexiness with perfect grace.
 
163 
poster		 Divorce - Italian Style  Pietro Germi  1961  Italy 
Marcello Mastroianni is the Sicilian nobleman who dreams of marrying his pure and innocent cousin (Stefania Sandrelli) but must first rid himself of his wife (Daniela Rocca). Italian law won't permit a divorce, but it is understanding about husbands who kill their unfaithful mates--so Mastroianni takes his wife out shopping for a lover. Drawing on the sangfroid of the British murder comedies of the 50s (in particular, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets), director Pietro Germi gave a new impetus to Italian comedy with this 1962 feature: he nudged the genre from farce to satire, from the comedy of hysterical overplaying to the wit of underreaction. It remains a terrific entertainment, a European corollary to Preston Sturges.  
164 
poster		 The Passenger  Michelangelo Antonioni  1975  Italy 
A masterpiece, one of Michelangelo Antonioni's finest works (1975). Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider star as a journalist who trades one identity for another and the woman who becomes his accomplice (and ultimately the moral center of his adopted world). Less a thriller (though the mood of mystery is pervasive) than a meditation on the problems of knowledge, action for its own sake, and the relationship of the artist to the work he brings into being. Next to this film, Blowup seems a facile, though necessary, preliminary. By all means go. 
165 
poster		 The Double Life of Veronique  Krzysztof Kieslowski  1991  France 
An exquisite enigma by Krzysztof Kieslowski (Decalogue) following the parallel lives of two 20-year-old women, one in Poland and one in France, both played by the beautiful Irene Jacob. The Polish Veronika is a talented singer with a heart condition; the French Veronique quits her voice lessons and gets involved with a puppeteer who writes children's books. Masterfully directed, this rather dreamlike 1991 French-Polish production explores a dual nature that seems to grow uncannily out of the coproduction situation itself--almost as if Kieslowski were dreaming of a resurrected artistic identity for himself as Polish state financing went the route of Polish communism.  
166 
poster		 In the Bedroom  Todd Field  2001  USA 
A film about devastating loss, wild grief, and single-minded vengeance seemed particularly germane in the year of its making (2001). In character actor Todd Field's directorial bow, Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson play an educated middle-class couple coping, badly, with the violent death of their college-age son. In the Bedroom possesses many virtues: it has a real feel for the topography and rhythms of its coastal Maine setting and a true empathy for its people--Spacek and Wilkinson are given all the time and space they need to layer the guilt, rage, and prejudice that lie beneath a lifetime of enlightened gentility, and they have a field day. Just when the proceedings have veered into familiar bloodletting-and-trembling territory, the entire axis of the film shifts, and the closing moment, so subtle it could be missed, calls into question practically everything that went before.  
167 
poster		 Late Spring  Yasujiro Ozu  1949  Japan 
Yasujiro Ozu's 1949 film inaugurated his majestic late period: it's here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters. Setsuko Hara, in the first of many performances for Ozu, plays a young woman who has renounced marriage to stay with her elderly father (Chishu Ryu). When the father belatedly realizes what she's done, he must encourage her to leave without wounding her feelings. The sense of loss and regret is beautifully balanced with the optimism of a new life beginning: for Ozu the family unit is not only a network of personal relationships but also the crisis point in the tragedy of time. 
168 
poster		 Gun Crazy  Joseph H. Lewis  1949  USA 
One of the most distinguished works of art to emerge from the B movie swamp, Joseph H. Lewis's 1949 film is a proto-Bonnie and Clyde tale of an outlaw couple on the run. Lewis's long takes and sure command of film noir staples (shadows, fog, rain-soaked streets) make this a stunning technical achievement, but it's something more--a gangster film that explores the limits of the form with feeling and responsibility.  
169 
poster		 Do the Right Thing  Spike Lee  1989  USA 
This 1989 feature is still Spike Lee's best, chronicling a very hot day in the life of a single block in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, with a series of minor encounters and incidents leading to an explosion of racial violence at an Italian-owned pizzeria. Sharp and knowing, though not always strictly realistic, it manages to give all the characters their due. Bill Lee's wall-to-wall score eventually loses some of its effectiveness, and a few elements (such as the patriarchal roles played by the local drunk and a disc jockey) seem more fanciful than believable. But overall this is a powerful and persuasive look at an ethnic community and what makes it tick--funky, entertaining, packed with insight, and political in the best, most responsible sense.  
170 
poster		 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story  Todd Haynes  1987  USA 
Todd Haynes's 1985 short with Barbie dolls created something of a cult for its black-comedy treatment of anorexia nervosa, the 70s, and popular interest in the Carpenters. The film is certainly memorable, although for best ironic use of the Carpenters' hit "(They Long to Be) Close to You," Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid comes a close second.
 
171 
poster		 Touchez pas au grisbi  Jacques Becker  1954  France 
The French title of Jacques Becker's 1953 gangster thriller translates as "Hands Off the Loot," but a much better English title used for this film is Honor Among Thieves. Jean Gabin wasn't yet 50 when he starred as a big-time, high-style gangster hoping to retire, but he still looks pretty wasted, and this pungent tale about aging and friendship, adapted from a best-selling noir thriller by Albert Simonin, would be hard to imagine without his puffy features. Jeanne Moreau, in one of her first parts, plays a showgirl who two-times Gabin's similarly aging partner (Rene Dary), and future star Lino Ventura also puts in an appearance. But it's Gabin's show all the way, anticipating the melancholy, atmospheric gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville that started to appear a couple years later.  
172 
poster		 The Far Country  Anthony Mann  1954  USA 
A 1955 entry (along with The Man From Laramie) in Anthony Mann's series of psychological westerns with James Stewart. Not the equal of Bend of the River or The Naked Spur, but still up there with the most quirkily personal westerns ever made. Mann's psychodramas are played out against Jungian landscapes of hills and valleys; the use of the Alaskan background here is nothing less than metaphysical. With Walter Brennan, Ruth Roman, and Jay C. Flippen.  
173 
poster		 Throne of Blood  Akira Kurosawa  1957  Japan 
One of the most celebrated screen adaptations of Shakespeare into film, Akira Kurosawa�s Throne of Blood re-imagines Macbeth in feudal Japan. Starring Kurosawa�s longtime collaborator Toshiro Mifune and the legendary Isuzu Yamada as his ruthless wife, the film tells of a valiant warrior�s savage rise to power and his ignominious fall. With Throne of Blood, Kurosawa fuses one of Shakespeare�s greatest tragedies with the formal elements of Japanese Noh theater to make a Macbeth that is all his own�a classic tale of ambition and duplicity set against a ghostly landscape of fog and inescapable doom. 
174 
poster		 My Son John  Leo McCarey  1952  USA 
An appalling masterpiece. Resist the temptation to laugh at the film's violent anticommunism and try to see it as the audiences of 1952 did, and you'll experience the most wrenching right-wing film ever made. The film's propaganda is all the more powerful because director Leo McCarey refuses to acknowledge any intellectual, ideological intent: his argument is wholly emotional, and it is a powerful one. Robert Walker, fresh from Strangers on a Train, is a government worker who signs with the reds in oedipal revolt against his domineering, patriotic father (Dean Jagger); Helen Hayes is the mother who must choose between son and country.  
175 
poster		 Pickup on South Street  Samuel Fuller  1953  USA 
It isn't his best, but this 1953 feature may be the archetypal Sam Fuller film, a condensation of his themes and techniques with the steam still rising. As Fuller's typically perverse, pigheaded hero--a pickpocket who accidentally lifts a roll of top-secret microfilm--Richard Widmark draws on the snickering, psychotic style that first made him a star as a heavy. Fuller's didacticism is fully vented, as is his flair for chunky, racking violence: the film contains an unforgettable image of a thug's chin being bounced rhythmically down a flight of stairs. There's an excellent, layered performance from Thelma Ritter, an actress generally given to cartoonishness. 
176 
poster		 Chungking Express  Kar Wai Wong  1994  Hong Kong 
An immensely charming and energetic comedy (1994, 97 min.) by Wong Kar-wai, one of the most exciting and original contemporary Hong Kong filmmakers. Though less ambitious than Days of Being Wild (1990) or Ashes of Time (1994) and less hyperbolic than Fallen Angel (1995), this provides an ideal introduction to his work. Both of its two stories are set in present-day Hong Kong and deal poignantly with young policemen striving to get over unsuccessful romantic relationships and having unconventional encounters with women (a mob assassin and an infatuated fast-food waitress respectively). Wong's singular frenetic visual style and his special feeling for lonely romantics may remind you of certain French New Wave directors, but this movie isn't a trip down memory lane; it's a vibrant commentary on young love today, packed with punch and personality. 
177 
poster		 Point Blank  John Boorman  1967  USA 
John Boorman's modernist, noirish thriller (1967) is still his best and funniest effort (despite the well-phrased demurrals of filmmaker Thom Andersen regarding its cavalier treatment of Los Angeles). Lee Marvin, betrayed by his wife and best friend, finds revenge when he emerges from prison. He recovers stolen money and fights his way to the top of a multiconglomerate--only to find absurdity and chaos. Boorman's treatment of cold violence and colder technology has lots of irony and visual flash--the way objects are often substituted for people is especially brilliant, while the influence of pop art makes for some lively 'Scope compositions--and the Resnais-like experiments with time and editing are still fresh and inventive. The accompanying cast (and iconography) includes Angie Dickinson, John Vernon, and Carroll O'Connor; an appropriate alternate title might be "Tarzan Versus IBM," a working title Jean-Luc Godard had for his Alphaville.  
178 
poster		 Twentieth Century  Howard Hawks  1934  USA 
To register a minority opinion, I find this knockdown screwball farce (1934), directed by Howard Hawks four years before Bringing Up Baby, six years before His Girl Friday, and fifteen before I Was a Male War Bride, a great deal funnier than all three. It costars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard at their hyperbolic best as egomaniacal theatrical monsters, a director and a star in a series of duels. The story comes from a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur that lampoons theatrical excess as much as The Front Page lampoons journalistic excess--a subject that Hawks can view with greater familiarity. The show here belongs almost entirely to the fast-talking stars, mainly having it out on the cross-country train of the title, and the movie is a veritable concerto for their remarkable talents, put across by Hawks with maximal energy and voltage. 
179 
poster		 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance  John Ford  1962  USA 
A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous. This 1962 western flaunts its artificiality, both in its use of studio interiors and in the casting of an aging James Stewart as a young, idealistic lawyer who comes to the frontier. For some, the stylization is a crippling flaw, but I find it sublime: the film takes place, through elegant flashbacks, in a past that is remembered more than lived; essences are projected over particulars. With John Wayne, his tragic qualities movingly unveiled, and Lee Marvin, Woody Strode, Vera Miles, and key members of the Ford stock company.  
180 
poster		 My Beautiful Laundrette  Stephen Frears  1985  UK 
Directed for television by Stephen Frears (The Hit) from a scenario by playwright Hanif Kureishi, this is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism--it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance (1986). Omar, a Pakistani student, charms his wealthy uncle into letting him take over one of his less successful enterprises--a crud-caked launderette in a questionable South London neighborhood. He solicits the help of Johnny, an old school buddy grown into a surly street tough, and as their plans for the business take shape they fall in love. Frears doesn't treat the gay relationship as anything remarkable--which makes the film itself remarkable--but simply as a surge of encouraging human feeling against a background of economic devastation and racial divisiveness.  
181 
poster		 The Unforgiven  John Huston  1960  USA 
John Huston and Burt Lancaster clashed over this 1960 western--the director wanted to emphasize the psychodrama, the producer-star needed a genre hit--and their differences are evident in the movie's erratic tone. Some images are stylish and chilling, like the one-eyed vigilante in the desert promising doom for an exotic Texas rancher (Audrey Hepburn) that he insists is a Kiowa. Her adoptive family, headed by big brother Lancaster, is thrown into conflict when the natives come to reclaim her.  
182 
poster		 Persona  Ingmar Bergman  1966  Sweden 
Heavily artistically infused this chamber piece from Bergman lauded numerous international awards for both the film and the performances. It's beautiful imagery from Sven Nykvist's magnificent cinematography, its high level of pretension and its inability to be comprehensible have given it a unique place in cinema history. "Persona" can causes a myriad of personal reactions. Perhaps its greatest triumph is forcing the viewer to allow "it" to penetrate... to open yourself to its deeply felt expressions and perhaps have it touch upon your own. "Persona" is rife with universal emotions; pain, love, desire, regret, longing. 
183 
poster		 Stolen Kisses  Fran�ois Truffaut  1968  France 
Jean-Pierre L�aud returns in the delightful Stolen Kisses, the third installment in the Antoine Doinel series. It is now 1968, and the mischievous and perpetually love-struck Doinel has been dishonorably discharged from the army and released onto the streets of Paris, where he stumbles into the unlikely profession of private detective and embarks on a series of misadventures. Whimsical, nostalgic, and irrepressibly romantic, Stolen Kisses is Truffaut�s timeless ode to the passion and impetuosity of youth. 
184 
poster		 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre  John Huston  1948  USA 
John Huston has rarely been in better form than in this 1948 study of gold fever and worse obsessions among an unlikely trio of prospectors (Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston). Bogart is outstanding as the pathetic bully Fred C. Dobbs, and Walter Huston won a deserved Oscar for best supporting actor as a giddy, grizzled old-timer. Don't forget, that's Alfonso Bedoya who asks Bogie for a cigarette. 
185 
poster		 Criss Cross  Robert Siodmak  1949  USA 
Robert Siodmak was one of the most influential stylists of the 40s, helping to create, in films such as Phantom Lady and The Killers, the characteristic look of American film noir. But most of his films have nothing more than their pictorial qualities to recommend them--Criss Cross (1949, 87 min.) being one of the few exceptions, an archly noir story replete with triple and quadruple crosses, leading up to one of the most shockingly cynical endings in the whole genre.  
186 
poster		 Mulholland Dr.  David Lynch  2001  France 
I'm still trying to decide if this 146-minute piece of hocus-pocus (2001) is David Lynch's best feature since Eraserhead. In any case, it's immensely more likable than his other stabs at neonoir, perhaps because it likes its characters and avoids sentimentalizing or sneering at them (the sort of thing that limited Twin Peaks). Originally conceived and rejected as a TV pilot, then expanded after some French producers stepped in, it has the benefit of Lynch's own observations about Hollywood, which were fresher at this point than his puritanical notations on small towns in the American heartland. The best-known actors wound up relatively marginalized, while the lesser-known talent. The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable, though no less thrilling, in the closing stretches--but that's what Lynch is famous for.
 
187 
poster		 Last Tango in Paris  Bernardo Bertolucci  1972  Italy 
The operatic extravagance of Bernardo Bertolucci's style has emerged more clearly since this 1972 drama, which still managed to seem vaguely naturalistic in the midst of its extravagant camera moves and eccentric construction. The surface plausibility is probably the contribution of Marlon Brando, whose performance has strength and detail enough to counterbalance Bertolucci's taste for pure psychological essence. With Maria Schneider as Brando's lover and Jean-Pierre Leaud in the Ralph Bellamy part (he has a job).  
188 
poster		 Elevator to the Gallows  Louis Malle  1958  France 
In his mesmerizing debut feature, twenty-four-year-old director Louis Malle brought together the beauty of Jeanne Moreau, the camerawork of Henri Deca�, and a now legendary score by Miles Davis. A touchstone of the careers of both its star and director, Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'�chafaud) is a richly atmospheric thriller of murder and mistaken identity unfolding over one restless Parisian night. 
189 
poster		 Robinson Crusoe  Luis Bu�uel  1954  USA 
One of the most unjustly neglected of Luis Bu�uel's films, this 1952 feature also happens to be one of the two he directed in English (the other is the equally neglected The Young One). Bu�uel shows an overall fidelity to the plot of Daniel Defoe's classic novel while steering the thematic concerns in a somewhat different direction, and even manages to incorporate a few touches of surrealism. Dan O'Herlihy is superb in the title role (he was nominated for an Oscar when this film was belatedly released in the U.S.), while Jaime Fernandez makes a more than adequate Friday. The color photography is also distinctive. 
190 
poster		 Gone with the Wind  Victor Fleming  1939  USA 
A critic-proof movie if there ever was one: it isn't all that good, but somehow it's great. The first part, in which the gracefully moving camera of George Cukor (soon to be replaced) establishes the ordered world of Tara in elegant visual terms, is really very fine. But the last half is all slow, desultory denouement, and the death of the little girl is the dirtiest kind of screenwriter's trick. No one I know of has yet solved the secret of this 1939 film's apparently timeless appeal, though I'd guess it has something to do with the elaborate mechanisms of fate, history, and sex brought to bear on Scarlett, whose overweening libido must be punished as magnificently as it has been celebrated. The striking color overlays, which are the film's sole stylistic eccentricity, were the contribution of that cryptic auteur, production designer William Cameron Menzies. Victor Fleming signed it, though there were many, many fingers in this particular pie. 
191 
poster		 Two or Three Things I Know About Her  Jean-Luc Godard  1967  France 
"Her" being both Marina Vlady, as one of Jean-Luc Godard's most enigmatic prostitute-heroines, and the city of Paris. Though poorly received on its first release, this 1966 film seems in retrospect one of Godard's most stimulating investigations of images and surfaces--the meanings they convey and the webs they spin.  
192 
poster		 Exotica  Atom Egoyan  1994  Canada 
This 1994 film may be the best of writer-director Atom Egoyan's slick, Canadian carriage-trade productions (the other two are Speaking Parts and The Adjuster), though it's also a regression, both formally and thematically, compared to his previous film, Calendar. The central location--a triumph of lush, imaginative set design--is a sort of strip club where young female dancers sit at male customers' tables and verbally cater to their psychic needs; at the center of this faux-tropical establishment is an odd little house where the club's pregnant owner hangs out with the jaundiced announcer (Egoyan regulars Arsinee Khanjian and Elias Koteas), voyeuristically overseeing the voyeuristic clientele. The main customer is still mourning the death of his young daughter, and other significant characters include a dancer who sits at his table, a baby-sitter, and an eccentric smuggler whose path briefly crosses that of the bereaved father. 
193 
poster		 Johnny Guitar  Nicholas Ray  1954  USA 
Nicholas Ray's great sur-western (1954, 110 min.), in which, as Francois Truffaut put it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence, this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature, reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano, Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper.  
194 
poster		 Gertrud  Carl Theodor Dreyer  1964  Denmark 
Centers on a proud, stubborn woman (Nina Pens Rode) who demands total commitment in love and forsakes both her husband and a former lover for a young musician who's relatively indifferent to her. It moves at an extremely slow, theatrical pace in long takes recorded mainly in direct sound (though shot principally in a studio) and deserves to be ranked along with The Magnificent Ambersons, Lola Montes, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as one of the great haunted-memory films. Its meaning hinges partially on the refusal or inability to compromise and what this implies over the range of an entire life (in this case Dreyer's as well as his heroine's). The heroine may be regarded as a monster, a sublime and saintly martyr, or most likely an impossible fusion of the two. Dreyer's film has a similarly dialectical and contradictory effect--at once narrative and (in the figure of Gertrud herself) nonnarrative, static and flowing, a tribute to free will and a positing of the unconscious as tragic destiny. It's exquisite, unbearable, and unforgettable.

 
195 
poster		 Rashomon  Akira Kurosawa  1950  Japan 
Akira Kurosawa's 1951 film won the grand prize at the Venice film festival, introducing Kurosawa (and through him the Japanese film) to most of the Western world. Set mainly in 12th-century Kyoto, the film, based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, offers the radically different eyewitness accounts of four people (including a dead man) about a violent incident involving ambush, rape, and murder in a forest. The philosophically subversive premise of the story, at least by implication, is that all four narrators are telling the truth; Kurosawa's much more sentimental conclusion, made even worse by a hokey finale, is that everyone lies. This serious limitation aside, the film is still an impressive piece of work, visually and rhythmically masterful; with Toshiro Mifune (as the bandit) and Machiko Kyo. 
196 
poster		 Bob le flambeur  Jean-Pierre Melville  1955  France 
This light, breezy 1955 heist film is probably the least characteristic movie Jean-Pierre Melville ever made. It replaces his sternly fatalistic philosophizing with a benign, genuinely comic spirit, and his rigidly classical style yields to a pleasant informality. Yet the characters--professional gamblers, craftsmanly safecrackers--and their code are recognizably Melvillian, and the portrait of Pigalle after dark is superbly evocative and romantic. The plot--a gambler on a streak of bad luck plans the robbery of the Deauville casino--is largely lifted from Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, though the suspense has been wittily inverted: we're made to hope that the robbery doesn't come off 
197 
poster		 Crimes and Misdemeanors  Woody Allen  1989  USA 
Opthalmologist Judah Rosenthal has had an affair with Dolores for several years, and now she threatens to ruin his life if he doesn't marry her. When his brother Jack suggests to have Dolores murdered, Judah is faced with a big moral dilemma: destruction of his life or murder. Meanwhile, documentary filmmaker Clifford Stern is trying to make a film of a philosophy professor, but instead he's commissioned to make a portrait of succesful TV producer and brother-in-law Lester, who to Clifford represents everything that he despises. 
198 
poster		 Meshes of the Afternoon  Maya Deren  1943  USA 
A solitary flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a phone off the hook: discordant images a woman sees as she comes home. She naps and, perhaps, dreams. She sees a hooded figure going down the driveway. The knife is on the stair, then in her bed. The hooded figure puts the flower on her bed then disappears. The woman sees it all happen again. Downstairs, she naps, this time in a chair. She awakes to see a man going upstairs with the flower. He puts it on the bed. The knife is handy. Can these dream-like sequences end happily? A mirror breaks, the man enters the house again. Will he find her? 
199 
poster		 The Godfather  Francis Ford Coppola  1972  USA 
The ultimate family film. Francis Ford Coppola gives full due to the themes of clannish insularity that made Mario Puzo's novel a best seller, though his heart seems to be with Al Pacino's lonely, willful isolation. This 1972 feature is sharp, entertaining, and convincing--discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that Coppola hasn't achieved since. With Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, and Diane Keaton. 
200 
poster		 Paris, Texas  Wim Wenders  1984  France 
This 1984 collaboration with Sam Shepard, about a speechless wanderer (Harry Dean Stanton) returning from the desert and trying to resume relationships with his abandoned and scattered family, has an epic sweep (with superb color photography by Robby M�ller) that occasionally brings the movie within hailing distance of its outsized ambitions. (Praised in Europe and widely scorned in the U.S., in part because, like Wenders's Hammett, it treats an American subject from a European perspective, it at least has the merit of treating some old myths out of John Ford with fresh and contemporary insights.) Like Wenders's other road movies, this is largely about the spaces between people and the words they speak--Antonioni updated and infused with German romanticism; the various means of indirection through which the hero communicates with his son (Hunter Carson) and wife (Nastassja Kinski) constitute a striking motif. With Dean Stockwell and Aurore Clement, as well as a plaintive score by Ry Cooder. 
201 
poster		 The Unbearable Lightness of Being  Philip Kaufman  1988  USA 
Philip Kaufman achieves a delicate, erotic balance with his screen version of Milan Kundera�s �unfilmable� novel. Adapted by Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carri�re, the film follows a womanizing surgeon (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he struggles with his free-spirited mistress (Lena Olin) and his childlike wife (Juliette Binoche). An intimate epic, The Unbearable Lightness of Being charts the frontiers of relationships with wit, emotion, and devastating honesty. 
202 
poster		 The Portrait of a Lady  Jane Campion  1996  UK 
 
203 
poster		 Rebecca  Alfred Hitchcock  1940  USA 
�Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.� Rebecca�s haunting opening line conjures the entirety of Hitchcock�s romantic, suspenseful, elegant film. A young woman (Joan Fontaine) believes her every dream has come true when her whirlwind romance with the dashing Maxim de Winter culminates in marriage. But she soon realizes that Rebecca, the late first Mrs. de Winter, haunts both the temperamental, brooding Maxim and the de Winter mansion, Manderley. In order for Maxim and the new Mrs. de Winter to have a future, Rebecca�s spell must be broken and the mystery of her violent death unraveled. The first collaboration between producer David O. Selznick and Hitchcock, Rebecca was adapted from Daphne du Maurier�s popular novel and won the 1940 Academy Award� for Best Picture and Cinematography (Black and White). 
204 
poster		 Dumbo  Ben Sharpsteen  1941  USA 
Though it was made during a bitter artists' strike in 1941, it's one of Disney's most charming and perfectly proportioned films, uninflated by the cultural pretensions Uncle Walt was fond of slipping in. Dumbo, the outcast elephant who learns to fly, makes a moving and unforced metaphor for the misfit child. 
205 
poster		 Mystic River  Clint Eastwood  2003  USA 
Clint Eastwood's grimly deterministic view of human nature is never more apparent than in his masterful tragedies: Bird, White Hunter, Black Heart, Unforgiven, and this dark police procedural, adapted by Brian Helgeland from a novel by Dennis Lehane. Three childhood chums in working-class Boston grow up to become a family man who has never fully recovered from childhood sexual abuse (Tim Robbins), an ex-con and convenience-store owner whose 19-year-old daughter has been brutally murdered (Sean Penn), and a police detective (Kevin Bacon) investigating that crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne).  
206 
poster		 Shadows  John Cassavetes  1959  USA 
John Cassavetes� directorial debut revolves around an interracial romance between Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), a light-skinned black woman living in New York City with her two brothers, and Tony (Anthony Ray), a white man. The relationship crumbles when Tony meets Lelia�s brother Hugh (Hugh Hurd), a talented dark-skinned jazz singer struggling to find work, and discovers the truth about Lelia�s racial heritage. Shot on location in Manhattan with a cast and crew made up primarily of amateurs, Cassavetes� Shadows is a visionary work that is widely considered the forerunner of the independent film movement. 
207 
poster		 Searching for Bobby Fischer  Steven Zaillian  1993  USA 
One of the craftiest and most satisfying pieces about gender politics to come along in ages (1993)--all the more crafty because audiences are encouraged to see it simply as a movie about a seven-year-old chess genius, based on Fred Waitzkin's nonfiction book about his son Josh. Very well played (with Max Pomeranc especially good as Josh), shot (by Conrad Hall), and written and directed (by Steven Zaillian, who also scripted Schindler's List), it gradually evolves into a kind of parable about how a gifted kid learns to choose his role models and choose what he needs from them. The part played by gender in all this is both subtle and complex, relating not only to chess strategy (e.g., when to bring your queen out) and the personality of Bobby Fischer, but also to the varying attitudes toward competition taken by his parents (Joe Mantegna and Joan Allen) and two teachers (Laurence Fishburne and Ben Kingsley). It makes for a good old-fashioned inspirational story, absorbing and pointed.  
208 
poster		 Night and Fog   Alain Resnais  1955  France 
Only half an hour long, this is the greatest film ever made about the concentration camps (1956). Directed by Alain Resnais from a script by camp survivor Jean Cayrol (who subsequently scripted Muriel), it's a perfect riposte to the eyewash of a New Yorker writer a few years back that Resnais, like Bergman, is noted for his "metaphysical touch." If there's a less metaphysical movie on the subject of the camps I haven't seen it. Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Shoah is so indebted to this film that it never could have been conceived, much less made, without Resnais' example, and Schindler's List is a cartoon alongside it. 
209 
poster		 Psycho  Alfred Hitchcock  1960  USA 
A dark night at the Bates Motel, in the horror movie that transformed the genre by locating the monster inside ourselves. Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece blends a brutal manipulation of audience identification and an incredibly dense, allusive visual style to create the most morally unsettling film ever made. The case for Hitchcock as a modern Conrad rests on this ruthless investigation of the heart of darkness, but the film is uniquely Hitchcockian in its positioning of the godlike mother figure. It's a deeply serious and deeply disturbing work, but Hitchcock, with his characteristic perversity, insisted on telling interviewers that it was a "fun" picture. 
210 
poster		 Veronika Voss  Rainer Werner Fassbinder  1982  West Germany 
Once beloved Third-Reich era starlet Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) lives in obscurity in postwar Munich. Struggling for survival and haunted by past glories, the forgotten star encounters sportswriter Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) in a rain-swept park and intrigues him with her mysterious beauty. As their unlikely relationship develops, Krohn comes to discover the dark secrets behind the faded actresses� demise. Based on the true story of a World War II UFA star, Veronika Voss is wicked satire disguised as 1950s melodrama. 
211 
poster		 Salvatore Giuliano  Francesco Rosi  1962  Italy 
July 5, 1950�Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano's bullet-riddled corpse is found facedown in a courtyard in Castelvetrano, a handgun and rifle by his side.

Local and international press descend upon the scene, hoping to crack open the true story behind the death of this young man, who, at the age of twenty-seven, had already become Italy�s most wanted criminal and celebrated hero. Filming in the exact locations and enlisting a cast of native Sicilians once impacted by the real Giuliano, director Francesco Rosi harnessed the facts and myths surrounding the true story of the bandit's death to create a startling expos� of Sicily and the tangled relations between its citizens, the Mafia, and government officials. A groundbreaking work of political filmmaking, Salvatore Giuliano established Rosi�s reputation and assured his place in cinema history. 
212 
poster		 Strangers on a Train  Alfred Hitchcock  1951  USA 
Alfred Hitchcock's famous 1951 thriller, centered on a classic Catholic theme--that there is no difference between thinking a sin and committing it. When Guy (Farley Granger) daydreams the murder of his wife, black, neurotic Bruno (Robert Walker) materializes as if in answer to his prayers: Bruno will kill Guy's wife if Guy, in turn, will kill Bruno's father. Some critics (famously Robin Wood) have claimed that the film cops out by relieving Guy of his end of the deal, but something else is going on here, particularly when Bruno's father--elevated, unseen, all-powerful--is clearly more than a father. Perhaps Strangers on a Train still hasn't yielded all its secrets. 
213 
poster		 Stagecoach  John Ford  1939  USA 
It's fashionable to put down John Ford's 1939 classic; certainly it's the weakest of Ford's major westerns, burdened with a schematic and pretentious Dudley Nichols script (the "cross section of society" on board the stagecoach), but its virtues remain intact. The visual contrast of claustrophobic interior spaces (the coach, the various way stations) with the expanse of Monument Valley provides a vivid physical correlative to the film's thematic push for freedom, and the linear plot has a captivating metaphorical quality in its progress from a dying city through the wilderness to a city reborn. The film moves from east to west, with all that implies. With John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and the incipient Ford stock company. 
214 
poster		 Children of Paradise  Marcel Carn�  1945  France 
Poetic realism reaches sublime heights with Children of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis), the ineffably witty tale of a woman loved by four different men. Deftly entwining theater, literature, music, and design, director Marcel Carn� and screenwriter Jacques Pr�vert resurrect the tumultuous world of 19th-century Paris, teeming with hucksters and aristocrats, thieves and courtesans, pimps and seers. 
215 
poster		 Metropolis  Fritz Lang  1927  Germany 
Fritz Lang's 1927 silent epic about class struggle in a city of the 21st century still has a lot of popular currency, but it's never been a critics' favorite. This 124-minute version is the longest since the German premiere, and though it's still a half hour shorter than the original (now lost), its unobtrusive use of intertitles to fill in the blanks makes it more coherent. The restoration clarifies the relationships among the hero (Gustav Fr�hlich); his late mother, who died giving birth to him; his father, the ruler of Metropolis (Alfred Abel); and the father's bitter romantic rival (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), an inventor who creates a robot in the mother's image. Later the robot is upgraded to impersonate the hero's heartthrob (Brigitte Helm), a radical preacher who helps organize the city's exploited workers. Lang cowrote the script with Thea von Harbou, his wife at the time, and however naive its pre-Marxist socialism may seem (especially in the dumb conclusion), its post-Freudian contours, explicated by the mother's story, are highly sophisticated. The film looks fabulous, and Gottfried Huppertz's original score is another worthy addition.  
216 
poster		 Amateur  Hal Hartley  1994  USA 
If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations (1994). Even if the usually enjoyable Hal Hartley seems more at home on Long Island than in New York City, his chosen turf here, and Martin Donovan seems less comfortable than he did in Hartley's Trust, the weird and wonderful Elina L�wensohn certainly holds her own. And though Isabelle Huppert doesn't quite manage the conceit handed her--playing an ex-nun and virgin who writes pornography--at least she doesn't make it go away. Hartley stays true to his own flakiness. 
217 
poster		 The Thing Called Love  Peter Bogdanovich  1993  USA 
River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, and Sandra Bullock all play young country-music hopefuls in a touching romantic comedy-drama inspired by Nashville's Bluebird Cafe (1993). (For perverse reasons known only to itself, Paramount buried this movie, so you may never have heard of it.) It bears as little relation to the real Nashville as Altman's 1975 feature, but director Peter Bogdanovich, the talented cast, and the credited (Carol Heikkinen) and uncredited screenwriters (Bogdanovich, cast members, and Pump Up the Volume's Allan Moyle) are so busy conjuring up a charming world of their own that I didn't mind. Mathis and Bullock are especially good, and Phoenix and Mulroney, playing out a jealousy-prone friendship as if they were Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, do a fair job with their roles.  
218 
poster		 China Gate  Samuel Fuller  1957  USA 
Sam Fuller's prophetic vision of Vietnam (1957)--the saga of Lucky Legs, a Eurasian prostitute ("I'm a little of everything and a lot of nothing") with loyalties divided among the French, the communists, and the American soldier who happens to be the father of her child. Fuller's Indochina is a hopeless mishmash of cultures and ideologies; the challenge is to create a personal identity out of a political one. A rough, gnawing film, directed with Fuller's unique anger and bluntness. Angie Dickinson plays Lucky Legs; Gene Barry is the soldier; and Nat "King" Cole plays another soldier and sings the title tune.  
219 
poster		 8�  Federico Fellini  1963  Italy 
If all you know about this exuberant, self-regarding 1963 film is based on its countless inferior imitations (from Paul Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland and The Pickle to Woody Allen's Stardust Memories to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz), you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini's exhilarating, stocktaking original, an expressionist, circuslike comedy about the complex mental and social life of a big-time filmmaker (Marcello Mastroianni) stuck for a subject and the busy world surrounding him. It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did--certainly more fun than anything he made after it.  
220 
poster		 The Long Good Friday  John Mackenzie  1980  UK 
By the early 80s the British film industry was profitably turning away from the David Lean-Carol Reed "tradition of quality" to find new life in grittier styles and subjects. This transposition of an American gangster tragedy (complete with Christological references) to London's West End doesn't quite have an American drive and assurance, yet the film is fascinating for the culture gaps it opens. Bob Hoskins gives a growly, charismatic performance as the kingpin brought low by phantom forces over the course of an Easter weekend, and there's a political theme that asserts itself with nicely rising force. 
221 
poster		 Rocco and His Brothers  Luchino Visconti  1960  France 
An epic (1960) from Luchino Visconti about five brothers (Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Spiros Focas, Rocco Vidolazzi, Max Cartier) who, with their widowed mother (Katina Paxinou), leave their impoverished farm in southern Italy for the corruptions of Milan. This looks like a primary sourcebook for the overheated operatic styles, homoerotic intensity, quasi-incestuous delirium, and casual conceptual misogyny of Scorsese, Coppola, and Cimino--and you may have to value the ranker elements of those filmmakers more highly than I do to consider this precursor more than a mannerist touchstone. Visconti is an incontestable master in films as diverse as La terra trema, Senso, The Leopard, and The Innocent; but those films don't employ women as unconvincingly or as insultingly as this one does. Still, you may be swept along by the sheer grace and stamina of the mise en scene and Nino Rota's music.  
222 
poster		 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon  John Ford  1949  USA 
Of all John Ford's lyrical films, this 1949 feature is the one that most nearly leaves narrative behind; it is pure theme and variation, centered on the figure of a retiring cavalry officer (John Wayne, playing with strength and conviction a man well beyond his actual age). The screenplay (by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings) is entirely episodic, and it ends in a magnificently sustained series of anticlimaxes, suggesting it could spin out forever. In Ford's superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.  
223 
poster		 A Streetcar Named Desire  Elia Kazan  1951  USA 
Howard Hawks once complained that, after he'd spent 20 years trying to scale down and simplify screen acting, Elia Kazan went and shot all his work to hell with this 1951 film, which features some of the most hysterical performances in film history. But they are also great performances, and Hawks could have taken heart from Kim Hunter's work, which provides superb, understated balance to the famous fireworks of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Kazan's direction is often questionably, distractingly baroque, swelling up the considerable subtlety of the Tennessee Williams play, but if the hothouse style was ever justified, this is the occasion. 
224 
poster		 King of New York  Abel Ferrara  1990  Italy 
A former drug lord returns from prison determined to wipe out all his competition and distribute the profits of his operations to the city's poor in this stylish and ultraviolent modern twist on Robin Hood. 
225 
poster		 French Cancan  Jean Renoir  1954  France 
Nineteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in Jean Renoir�s exhilarating tale of the opening of the world-renowned Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin plays the wily impresario Danglard, who makes the cancan all the rage while juggling the love of two beautiful women�an Egyptian belly-dancer and a naive working girl turned cancan star. This celebration of life, art and the City of Light�with a cameo by Edith Piaf�is a Technicolor tour de force by a master of modern cinema. 
226 
poster		 Shadow of a Doubt  Alfred Hitchcock  1943  USA 
Alfred Hitchcock's first indisputable masterpiece (1943). Joseph Cotten is Uncle Charlie, aka the Merry Widow Murderer, who returns to his hometown to visit his niece and namesake, played by Teresa Wright. Hitchcock's discovery of darkness within the heart of small-town America remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death. Thornton Wilder collaborated on the script; it's Our Town turned inside out.  
227 
poster		 Punch-Drunk Love  Paul Thomas Anderson  2002  USA 
Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is a small business owner with seven sisters whose abuse has kept him alone and unable to fall in love. When a harmonium and a mysterious woman (Emily Watson) enter his life, his romantic journey begins. 
228 
poster		 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb  Stanley Kubrick  1964  UK 
Like most of his work, Stanley Kubrick's deadly black satirical comedy-thriller on cold war madness and its possible effects (1964) has aged well: the manic, cartoonish performances of George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Peter Sellers (in three separate roles, including the title part) look as brilliant as ever, and Kubrick's icy contempt for 20th-century humanity may find its purest expression in the figure of Strangelove himself, a savage extrapolation of a then-obscure Henry Kissinger conflated with Wernher von Braun and Dr. Mabuse to suggest a flawed, spastic machine with Nazi reflexes that ultimately turns on itself. 
229 
poster		 Days of Heaven  Terrence Malick  1978  USA 
Terrence Malick's remarkably rich second feature (1978) is a story of human lives touched and passed over by the divine, told in a rush of stunning and precise imagery. Nestor Almendros's cinematography is as sharp and vivid as Malick's narration is elliptical and enigmatic. The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece.  
230 
poster		 Singin' in the Rain  Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly  1952  USA 
One of the shining glories of the American musical, this 1952 feature was fabricated (by screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green) around a collection of old songs written by producer Arthur Freed and brought to bright, brash, and exuberant life by directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The setting is Hollywood's troubled transition to sound, and there is just enough self-reflexive content (on the eternal battle between illusion and reality in the movies) to structure the film's superb selection of numbers. The tone ranges from the lyrical (the title number) to the burlesque ("Moses Supposes") to the epic ("Broadway Melody"), but through it all runs a celebration of movement as emotion.  
231 
poster		 Smiles of a Summer Night  Ingmar Bergman  1955  Sweden 
After fifteen films of mostly local acclaim, the 1956 prize-winning comedy Smiles of a Summer Night at last ushered in an international audience for director Ingmar Bergman. Set in turn-of-the-century Sweden, four women and four men attempt to juggle the laws of attraction amidst their daily bourgeois life. When a weekend in the country brings them all face to face, the women ally to force the men's hands in their matters of the heart, exposing their pretentions and insecurities along the way. Chock full of flirtatious propositions and sharp-witted wisdom delivered by such legends of the Swedish screen as Gunnar Bj�rnstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Ulla Jacobsson, Smiles of a Summer Night is one of film history's great tragicomedies, a bittersweet view of the transience of human carnality. 
232 
poster		 The Age of Innocence  Martin Scorsese  1993  USA 
Society scion Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland, but his well-ordered life is upset when he meets May's unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. At first, Newland becomes a defender of the Countess, whose separation from her abusive husband makes her a social outcast in the restrictive high society of late-19th Century New York, but he finds in her a companion spirit and they fall in love. 
233 
poster		 Lola  Jacques Demy  1961  Italy 
Jacques Demy's first and in some ways best feature (1961, 90 min.), shot in exquisite black-and-white 'Scope by Raoul Coutard, is among the most neglected major works of the French New Wave. Abandoned by her sailor lover, a cabaret dancer (Anouk Aimee) brings up their son while awaiting his return and ultimately has to choose among three men. Chock-full of film references (to The Blue Angel, Breathless, Hollywood musicals, the work of Max Ophuls, etc) and lyrically shot in Nantes, the film is a camera stylo love letter, and Michel Legrand's lovely score provides ideal nostalgic accompaniment. In his third feature and biggest hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy settled on life's disappointments; here at least one major character gets exactly what she wants, and the effect is no less poignant. 
234 
poster		 Sunset Blvd.  Billy Wilder  1950  USA 
Billy Wilder's searing, funny, morbid look at the real tinsel beneath the phony tinsel (1950). Aging silent-movie vamp Gloria Swanson takes up with William Holden, a two-bit screenwriter on the make, and virtually holds him captive in her Hollywood gothic mansion. Erich von Stroheim, once her director, now her butler, is the other figure in this menage-a-weird. A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder's better efforts.  
235 
poster		 Traffic  Steven Soderbergh  2000  Germany 
Traffic examines the effect of drugs as politics, business, and lifestyle. Acting as his own director of photography, Steven Soderbergh employs an innovative, color-coded cinematic treatment to distinguish the interwoven stories of a newly appointed drug czar and his family, a West Coast kingpin�s wife, a key informant, and cops on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border. Rarely has a film so energetic and suspenseful presented a more complex and nuanced view of an issue of such international importance. Instantly recognized as a classic, Traffic appeared on more than 200 critics� ten-best lists, and earned 5 Academy Award� nominations.  
236 
poster		 Dead Ringers  David Cronenberg  1988  Canada 
David Cronenberg's finely tuned psychological thriller (1988, 115 min.) explores the complex lives of two gynecologists, identical twins (both played by Jeremy Irons) who share everything from their lovers to their successful fertility clinic. Their close mutual ties become challenged when both are attracted to the same actress (Genevieve Bujold). A tour de force--especially for Irons, whose sense of nuance is so refined that one can tell almost immediately which twin he is in a particular scene--and the special effects involving both twins simultaneously are so well handled that one quickly forgets about the underlying illusion.  
237 
poster		 Fallen Angel  Otto Preminger  1945  USA 
Otto Preminger's 1945 film noir is one of the masterpieces of the postwar long-take style: each scene is mounted with a minimum number of edits, as Preminger sends his actors through elaborately choreographed blocking and his fluid camera moves in and out among them, framing and reframing to highlight emotions without breaking the unity of the performance. The portrait of small-town loneliness and desperation is well and sharply drawn, while Faye--generally cast as a pure-hearted foil to Betty Grable in Fox's musicals--creates a character of impressive maturity and wrenching vulnerability.  
238 
poster		 Calendar  Atom Egoyan  1993  Armenia 
Ironically, Atom Egoyan's 1993 masterpiece is the most spontaneously generated of his features, one in which he plays the male lead--a petulant photographer whose marriage falls apart during an assignment to shoot a dozen historic Armenian churches for a calendar. The movie basically oscillates between two time frames: scenes with the photographer, his translator wife (Arsinee Khanjian), and their local guide (Ashot Adamian) in Armenia, and scenes in Canada afterward, in which the photographer repeatedly goes through the same romantic ritual with a number of other women. One of the best movies made anywhere about tribalism and its perils, this is at once hilarious and painful, fresh and beautiful--an apotheosis of Egoyan's preoccupations with identity, sex, and representation. 
239 
poster		 Nightmare Alley  Edmund Goulding  1947  USA 
This dark and determinedly sleazy 1947 film comes as quite a surprise from its director--Edmund Goulding, whose specialty through the 30s, in films like Grand Hotel and The Old Maid, was his inveterate tastefulness (although, come to think of it, the sleaze of Nightmare Alley has a suspicious gloss). Tyrone Power stars as a sideshow barker who successfully promotes himself as a mind reader, only to have his ruthlessness catch up with him in a finale that still seems shockingly draconian, particularly where a matinee idol like Power is concerned. A fascinating anomaly. With Colleen Gray and Joan Blondell; the screenplay, adapted from William Lindsay Gresham's novel, is by Howard Hawks's frequent collaborator Jules Furthman. 
240 
poster		 Bringing Up Baby  Howard Hawks  1938  USA 
David Huxley is waiting to get a bone he needs for his museum collection. Through a series of strange circumstances, he meets Susan Vance, and the duo have a series of misadventures which include a leopard called Baby. 
241 
poster		 The Killers  Robert Siodmak  1946  USA 
Robert Siodmak's atmospheric 1946 rendition of Ernest Hemingway's classic short story proved a success for the young Burt Lancaster, playing an ex-fighter who double-crosses the fixers and ends up the target of reprisal. Siodmak evokes an atmosphere of impending disaster, and as the insurance investigator assigned to the case (Edmond O'Brien) pieces together the story of the fighter's rise and fall from grace with the mob, the film becomes an example of film noir at its most expressive. 
242 
poster		 Applause  Rouben Mamoulian  1929  USA 
Rouben Mamoulian's 1929 classic tells the story of a chorus-line mama (the great Helen Morgan) trying to keep her daughter out of the sleazy world of burlesque. The film is always used in courses on the history of the movies to show that not all early talkies were static and leaden, and it's true that Mamoulian manages some remarkable moving-camera effects (the only other director doing things of that sort was King Vidor in Hallelujah, also in 1929). Though this is Mamoulian's earliest, it's possibly his freshest film. 
243 
poster		 Charade  Stanley Donen  1963  USA 
A terrifically entertaining comedy-thriller (1963), perfectly crafted by Stanley Donen from an ingenious screenplay by Peter Stone. Audrey Hepburn, freshly and not too unhappily widowed, is pursued by a gang of her late husband's war buddies, who think she now possesses the money they stole in combat. Cary Grant appears to be her only ally, until he starts doing strange things, too--such as taking a shower with his clothes on. There's a marvelous use of Paris locations, as you'd expect from the director of Funny Face. With James Coburn, George Kennedy, Ned Glass, and Walter Matthau.  
244 
poster		 Where Is the Friend's Home?  Abbas Kiarostami  1987  Iran 
It's entirely possible that Abbas Kiarostami, who's been making films in Iran for about three decades, is our greatest living filmmaker. The problem isn't that his films are esoteric, simply that they're different from Western and other Iranian films alike, in the way they're put together (without scripts and in most cases without professional actors), in the way they address us, and in what Kiarostami includes and leaves out. Where Is the Friend's House? (1987, 85 min.), one of his most popular films in Iran, is a miniature epic about a schoolboy trying to return a classmate's notebook. Like the somewhat related Life and Nothing More (1992; also known as And Life Goes On . . .) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), both shot in the same section of northern Iran, this is a sustained meditation on singular landscapes and the way ordinary people live in them; an obsessional quest that takes on the contours of a parable; a concentrated inquiry that raises more questions than it answers; and a comic as well as cosmic poem. It's about making discoveries and cherishing what's in the world--including things that we can't understand. 
245 
poster		 Out of the Past  Jacques Tourneur  1947  USA 
The most delicate and nuanced of film noirs (1947), graced with a reflective lyricism that almost lifts it out of the genre. Robert Mitchum, a former private eye, has taken refuge from life as the owner of a small-town gas station. A gangster (Kirk Douglas) presses him back into service to search for his wandering mistress (Jane Greer). This is no expressionist thunderstorm of guilt and fate, but a film of small, finely textured effects, centered on subtle grades of morality. The cool, feathery photography is by Nicholas Musuraca; the director is Jacques Tourneur. With Rhonda Fleming, Steve Brodie, and Richard Webb. 
246 
poster		 Gilda  Charles Vidor  1946  USA 
Andre Bazin reportedly once hypothesized that if Hollywood were the court of Versailles, Gilda (1946) would have been its Phedre--which may just be a fancy way of pointing out the enduring greatness of a campy melodrama that, from certain points of view, isn't even very good. Directed by Charles Vidor, memorably shot by Rudolph Mate, and written by Marion Parsonnet, it's set in a highly fanciful Buenos Aires, where a professional gambler (Glenn Ford) goes to work for a casino owner (George Macready) who then marries the gambler's old flame (Rita Hayworth), thereby setting off the sickest and weirdest bout of repressed love and hatred (both hetero- and bisexual) you ever saw. And Hayworth, whether she's performing "Put the Blame on Mame" (dubbed by Anita Ellis) or just being her glamorous self, was never more magnificent.  
247 
poster		 Nobody's Business  Alan Berliner  1996  USA 
Alan Berliner's essayistic 1996 documentary about his crotchety father, his relationship with him, and family memories in general is a wonderful piece of work that's every bit as entertaining, thoughtful, and distinctive as Intimate Stranger (1992), Berliner's earlier feature about his maternal grandfather. 
248 
poster		 The Man from Laramie  Anthony Mann  1955  USA 
Anthony Mann brought a touch of Oedipus Rex to almost everything he did--he was fascinated by families exploding from the inside--but in this 1955 western it's more than a touch: he's clearly aiming for classical resonance. Yet the film is never pretentious, perhaps because Mann is able to create characters complex enough to support the grand emotions, and because the landscape--animistic, enveloping--becomes mythic in his wide-screen framing. It's one of Mann's cleanest, clearest films, constructing an elaborate but ultimately lucid network of character relationships, all of them perverse. With James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, and Donald Crisp. 
249 
poster		 A Perfect World  Clint Eastwood  1993  USA 
After escaping from a Huntsville prison, convict Butch Haynes and his partner Terry Pugh kidnap a young boy, Philip Perry, and flee across Texas. As they travel together, Butch and Philip discover common bonds and suffer the abuses of the outside "Perfect World." In pursuit is Texas Ranger "Red" Garnett and criminologist Sally Gerber. 
250 
poster		 The Big Clock  John Farrow  1948  USA 
John Farrow directed this tasteful film noir (1948), which is something of a contradiction in terms; it's reminiscent of Fritz Lang without Lang's hysteria. Ray Milland stars as a crime reporter working for a magazine run by Charles Laughton, and his investigation of a murder leads him right to the boss's office. Farrow creates a coldly threatening atmosphere, mainly through his expert use of the styles and shapes of modern architecture.Based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing; it was remade almost 40 years later as No Way Out. 
251 
poster		 Written on the Wind  Douglas Sirk  1956  USA 
One of the most remarkable and unaccountable films ever made in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk's 1957 masterpiece turns a lurid, melodramatic script into a screaming Brechtian essay on the shared impotence of American family and business life. Sirk's highly imaginative use of color--to accent, undermine, and sometimes even nullify the drama--remains years ahead of contemporary technique. The degree of stylization is high and impeccable: one is made to understand the characters as icons as well as psychologically complex creations. With Dorothy Malone (in the performance of her career), Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Rock Hudson. 
252 
poster		 Raging Bull  Martin Scorsese  1980  USA 
Based on the life and career of boxer Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull focuses on Jake's rage and violence that makes him virtually unstoppable in the ring. The same anger also drives Jake to beat his wife and his brother Joey, and sends Jake down a self-destructive spiral of paranoia and rage. 
253 
poster		 Alexander Nevsky  Sergei M. Eisenstein  1938  Soviet Union 
Sergei Eisenstein turns the story of the great Russian prince into an abstract exercise in visual and aural counterpoint--it's more theory than movie. But Edouard Tisse's superb photography and Prokofiev's stirring score contribute to a rhythm that is well-nigh irresistible, culminating in the famous battle on the ice. Made in 1939, it was Eisenstein's first sound film--Stalin had sidelined him for a decade.  
254 
poster		 Adoption  M�rta M�sz�ros  1975  Hungary 
Single factory worker Kata, 43, wants to have a child with her long-time secret lover, a married man called Joska. He doesn't like the idea. Kata befriends teenage schoolgirl Anna, abandoned by her parents at the age of six. Anna runs away from the local children's home and moves in with Kata so that she can keep on seeing her boyfriend Sanyi. Kata goes to see Anna's parents and persuades them to give the young lovers their permission to marry. Through Anna, Kata becomes interested in neglected children and decides to adopt a baby from the children's home. 
255 
poster		 Pulp Fiction  Quentin Tarantino  1994  USA 
The film initiates with two small-time thieves, Honey Bunny and Pumpkin, who spontaneously decide to hold up a restaurant. The film then shifts to the story of Jules and Vincent, who hit men for the well known and feared Marsellus Wallace, who is caught up in a deal gone wrong with struggling boxer Butch Coolidge. 
256 
poster		 Ninotchka  Ernst Lubitsch  1939  USA 
A sparkling, witty political fairy tale from 1939, about a cold but beautiful lady commissar (Greta Garbo) who melts to the bourgeois charms of Paris and Melvyn Douglas, jeopardizing both honor and career. That's love. Garbo fully complements the casual sophistication and stylistic grace of director Ernst Lubitsch, cleverly playing off her dour public image. The satire may be mostly a matter of easy contrasts, but the lovers inhabit a world of elegance and poise that is uniquely and movingly Lubitsch's. Billy Wilder, who would later uncurdle into the last exemplar of the Lubitsch tradition, collaborated on the script.  
257 
poster		 My Own Private Idaho  Gus Van Sant  1991  USA 
Gus Van Sant's 1990 feature, his best prior to Elephant, is a simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie about two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific northwest. Phoenix, a narcoleptic from a broken home, is essentially looking for a family, while Reeves, whose father is mayor of Portland, is mainly fleeing his. The style is so eclectic that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that almost everything works. Even the parts that show some strain--like the film's extended hommage to Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight--are exciting for their sheer audacity. Phoenix was never better, and Reeves does his best with a part that's largely Shakespeare's Hal as filtered through Welles.  
258 
poster		 Mean Streets  Martin Scorsese  1973  USA 
The future is set for Tony and Michael - owning a neighbour- hood bar and making deals in the mean streets of New York city's Little Italy. For Charlie, the future is less clearly defined. A small-time hood, he works for his uncle, making collections and reclaiming bad debts. He's probably too nice to succeed. In love with a woman his uncle disapproves of (because of her epilepsy) and a friend of her cousin, Johnny Boy, a near psychotic whose trouble-making threatens them all - he can't reconcile opposing values. A failed attempt to escape (to Brooklyn) moves them all a step closer to a bitter, almost preordained future. 
259 
poster		 Libeled Lady  Jack Conway  1936  USA 
Warren Haggerty is the chief editor of the New York Evening Star. He keeps on delaying his marriage with Gladys because of problems his newspapers must face. When it is filed a 5 million dollars claim by Connie Allenbury for having printed she is a marriage-breaker, he organizes the unconsummated marriage of Gladys and the don Juan Bill Chandler. The goal is to catch Connie alone with a married man... 
260 
poster		 Miller's Crossing  Joel Coen, (more)  1990  USA 
A highly styled 'genre' film which can perhaps be seen as a pastiche of all gangster movies. Tom Reagan is the laconic anti-hero of this amoral tale which is also, paradoxically, a look at morals within the criminal underworld of the 1930s. Two rival gangs vie for control of a city where the police are pawns, and the periodic busts of illicit drinking establishments are no more than a way for one gang to get back at the other. Black humour and shocking violence compete for screen time as we question whether or not Tom, right-hand man of the Irish mob leader, really has a heart. 
261 
poster		 Notre musique  Jean-Luc Godard  2004  France 
Set in Sarajevo and structured in three parts after Dante's Divine Comedy, this beautiful film centers on a young French-Jewish journalist based in Israel who's attending the same literary conference as Godard. The wars it contemplates through a montage of documentary and archival footage include ones waged in Algeria, Vietnam, Bosnia, and the Middle East; Native American victims also make an appearance in Sarajevo, alongside certain others.  
262 
poster		 The King of Comedy  Martin Scorsese  1983  USA 
Martin Scorsese's 1983 movie about an aspiring comic (Robert De Niro) who kidnaps a talk-show host (Jerry Lewis) is clearly an extension of Taxi Driver--both in its themes of obsession and its ambiguous stylistic mixture of fantasy and reality (it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins--my feeling is that the entire last half of the film takes place in the De Niro character's mind). But the shift in archetypes from Catholic to Jewish, plus the visual shift from extravagant expressionism to flat, overlit TV images, radically alters the point of view; you feel for the first time that Scorsese is trying to distance himself from his characters--that he finds them grotesque. The uncenteredness of the film is irritating, though it's irritating in an ambitious, risk-taking way. You'd better see for yourself. With Diahnne Abbott and Sandra Bernhard. 
263 
poster		 The Bourne Identity  Doug Liman  2002  USA 
Matt Damon seems an unlikely choice for amnesiac spy Jason Bourne, from Robert Ludlum's novels, but he's surprisingly good at bringing out the bewilderment of a man who can't remember who he is but keeps discovering he has disturbing skills--like the ability to disarm thugs by reflex. He spends the movie chasing after his identity, as well as being chased by the government agency that's turned him into an assassin and now wants him eliminated. Along the way he hooks up with a drifter, played with a nice mix of suspicion and attraction by Franka Potente (Run Lola Run). In many ways this 2002 feature feels like a throwback to an earlier era of suspense films--yes, the action sequences are big, but they retain an intimate feeling that somehow makes the story matter. 
264 
poster		 Kundun  Martin Scorsese  1997  USA 
Recounting the life of the 14th Dalai Lama prior to his departure from Tibet, this highly uncharacteristic feature by Martin Scorsese (1997) is still his best since The King of Comedy, but you can't profitably approach it expecting either the violence or the stylistic punchiness of something like GoodFellas. Scripted by Melissa Mathison (in close consultation with the Dalai Lama and his family) and cast almost exclusively with Tibetan exiles, this nonreligious movie about a religious leader is beautiful, abstract, charged with mystery, but never pretentious. Far from dictating a position on the Dalai Lama, the film doesn't even define a particular point at which the spoiled toddler is transformed into a holy man; a good deal of the historical, political, and religious context is implied rather than explained, and most of the major events occur offscreen. Despite the questionable wallpaper score by Philip Glass, Scorsese's delicate, inquisitive style has an inevitability and a rightness all its own. 
265 
poster		 The New World  Terrence Malick  2005  USA 
When 17th century explorer John Smith and a few men go up the river to trade with the Indians, he befriends the princess Pocahontas and they fall in love. While in love, Smith must obtain his duties as president of Jamestown fort and challenges to himself what is the better path for himself to take: stay with the fallen apart colony or go up the river and love Pocahontas in the wild. The Indians realize that the English do not mean to leave, so they attack. A few men at the fort decide to capture Pocahontas as a hostage so the Indians will not attack them. Smith is ordered to leave Jamestown by the King, and John Rolfe, a wealthy tobacco planter arrives at the fort. Pocahontas, now living there adapts to the English cultures and falls in love with Rolfe. She falls apart deciding who she is dedicated to, Smith or Rolfe. 
266 
poster		 Saboteur  Alfred Hitchcock  1942  USA 
When sabotage destroys part of an aircraft plant, plant worker Barry Kane is falsely blamed for the crime. Determined to clear his name, he sets out to track down the man he believes to be the actual saboteur, the mysterious Mr. Fry. He chases Fry across the western deserts to New York, where the two men confront each other atop the Statue of Liberty. 
267 
poster		 Ride the High Country  Sam Peckinpah  1962  USA 
Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are aging gunfighters ushering a gold shipment to a mining town in an early, prestardom western by Sam Peckinpah (1962). It's one of his best achievements: warmly elegiac but not sloppily nostalgic, with the thesis, for once, taking a backseat to the drama. 
268 
poster		 The River  Jean Renoir  1951  France 
Jean Renoir's 1951 masterpiece, his first film in color. The story concerns a group of English colonialists living on the banks of the Ganges, but beyond that the film describes how the European mind gradually succumbs to the eternal perspectives of India. Renoir's images flow with the same still motion as his metaphorical river: entering or leaving the frame is a matter of life and death, but in the end it is the same. For Andre Bazin, this was the Rules of the Game of Renoir's postwar period, a film in which "the screen no longer exists; there is nothing but reality."  
269 
poster		 One False Move  Carl Franklin  1992  USA 
Three coke dealers--one black (Michael Beach), one white (cowriter Billy Bob Thornton), and one with a racially mixed background (Cynda Williams)--flee a deal that entails the slaughter of many innocents in South Central Los Angeles. They head for Star City, Arkansas, the woman's hometown, where the local sheriff (Bill Paxton), working with two LA cops (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings), hopes to catch them. There's plenty to be impressed by while watching this 1992 noirish thriller, cowritten by Tom Epperson and directed by Carl Franklin. 
270 
poster		 The Last Emperor  Bernardo Bertolucci  1987  France 
Bernardo Bertolucci's visually ravishing spectacle (1987) about the life of Pu Yi (1905-'67) is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time. Pu Yi (played by three children at ages 3, 8, and 15, and by John Lone as an adult) remained an outsider to contemporary Chinese history for most of his life, and Bertolucci uses his remoteness from China as an objective correlative of our own cultural distance as Westerners (virtually all of the dialogue is rendered in English). Working with visual and thematic rhymes, Bertolucci is interested in charting the gradual substitution of the state for the family--though two key agents in this process are the father figures of his Scottish tutor (Peter O'Toole) and a governor at a Chinese prison. 
271 
poster		 Black Narcissus  Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger  1947  UK 
A story of damaged faith and rising sexual hysteria (1946) set among a group of nuns in India who are working to convert a sultan's palace into a convent. Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it--the title, for example, refers not to some campy romantic theme but to a cheap men's cologne worn by the local princeling. The film's lush, mountainous India, full of sensual challenges and metaphorical chasms, was created entirely in the studio, with the help of matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. Powell's equally extravagant visual style transforms it into a landscape of the mind--grand and terrible in its thorough abstraction. 
272 
poster		 Peeping Tom  Michael Powell  1960  UK 
Michael Powell's suppressed masterpiece, made in 1960 but sparsely shown in the U.S. with its ferocity and compassion intact. The German actor Carl Boehm plays a shy, sensitive British boy (Powell doesn't try to cover his accent, which is typical of the film's deliberate sacrifice of realism for effect) who loves movies with all his heart and soul because he knows what they're really about--sex and death. This seductive, brightly colored thriller isn't about the "problem" of voyeurism as much as the sub-rosa fascinations of the cinema. It's an understanding and at times even celebratory film--attitudes that scandalized critics years ago and are still pretty potent today. The uniformly excellent cast includes Anna Massey, Moira Shearer (the ballerina of Powell's The Red Shoes), and Maxine Audley.  
273 
poster		 The Third Man  Carol Reed  1949  UK 
It once was praised as a sharply realistic study of American idealism (in the person of pulp novelist Joseph Cotten) crushed by European cynicism (embodied by war profiteer Orson Welles), but today it's the extravagant falsity that entertains--from Welles's "cuckoo clock" speech to the crazy camera angles and madly expressionist lighting chosen by director Carol Reed. It isn't easy when you're up against the likes of Reed, writer Graham Greene, and producer David O. Selznick, but Welles still manages to dominate this 1949 film, both as an actor and as a stylistic influence. What's missing is the Welles content. With Trevor Howard, Alida Valli, and Bernard Lee.  
274 
poster		 Scrooged  Richard Donner  1988  USA 
Frank Cross runs a US TV station which is planning a live adaptation of Dickens' Christmas Carol. Frank's childhood wasn't a particularly pleasant one, and so he doesn't really appreciate the Christmas spirit. With the help of the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, Frank realises he must change. 
275 
poster		 Rio Bravo  Howard Hawks  1959  USA 
Howard Hawks's finest western (1959), and perhaps his finest film--but who wants to quibble on this level? John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Walter Brennan hole up in a sheriff's office, there to protect a prisoner from a band of hired guns outside. But the subtly stylized setting soon becomes an arena for a moral battle, as the characters discover and test their resources of trust, skill, and courage, values poised against encroaching chaos. It's American filmmaking at its finest--clean, clear, and direct--and it's also the most optimistic masterpiece on film, valiantly shoring fragments against human ruin. Superb in every respect, from Wayne's performance to Russell Harlan's brilliant night photography. 
276 
poster		 Notti bianche, Le  Luchino Visconti  1957  Italy 
Long dismissed as a footnote to Luchino Visconti's career, this 1957 film, from the Dostoyevsky story, now seems to be a crucial turning point, the link between Visconti's early neorealist manner and the obsessive stylization of his late films. Shot on forthrightly false sets entirely within a studio, the film brings a lonely stranger (Marcello Mastroianni, in one of his first important parts) together with a surrealistically detached woman (Maria Schell) for a brief, enigmatic affair. Robert Bresson treated the same material in his Four Nights of a Dreamer; curiously, it became one of Bresson's most socially oriented films, while this is one of Visconti's least.
 
277 
poster		 The Street with No Name  William Keighley  1948  USA 
After two gang-related killings in "Center City," a suspect (who was framed) is arrested, released on bail...and murdered. Inspector Briggs of the FBI recruits a young agent, Gene Cordell, to go undercover in the shadowy Skid Row area (alias George Manly) as a potential victim of the same racket. Soon, Gene meets Alec Stiles, neurotic mastermind who's "building an organization along scientific lines." Stiles recruits Cordell, whose job becomes a lot more dangerous... 
278 
poster		 Pride & Prejudice  Joe Wright  2005  France 
The story is based on Jane Austen's novel about five sisters - Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia Bennet - in Georgian England. Their lives are turned upside down when a wealthy young man (Mr. Bingley) and his best friend (Mr. Darcy) arrive in their neighborhood. 
279 
poster		 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid  Sam Peckinpah  1973  USA 
Sam Peckinpah's fascination with living and dying well becomes the underpinning for this somber study of two friends: one who accepts his own myth and dies well and one who accepts the future and survives at the cost of his dignity. A brilliant film with good performances from Kris Kristofferson as Billy, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, and an outstanding performance from James Coburn as Pat Garrett. Music by Bob Dylan, who also appears as an enigmatic friend of Billy's and never seems to know exactly why he is on-screen.  
280 
poster		 Small Change  Fran�ois Truffaut  1976  France 
In the town of Thiers, summer of 1976, teachers and parents give their children skills, love, and attention. A teacher has his first child, a single mother hopes to meet Mr. Right, another mom reaches out to Patrick, a motherless lad who is just discovering the opposite sex. Patrick befriends Julien, a new student who lives in poverty with his mother and has a terrible secret. Bruno shows his friends how to chat up girls. Sylvie stages a witty protest against her parents. Brothers give a friend a haircut. A toddler falls from a window and is unhurt. Everybody goes to the cinema. At camp, Martine catches Patrick's eye. A teacher explains: "Life is hard, but it's wonderful." 
281 
poster		 Dangerous Liaisons  Stephen Frears  1988  USA 
A film adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play, which is based in turn on Choderlos de Laclos' classic 18th-century epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses. Aiming for a mixture of erotic decadence and upscale artiness a la The Draughtsman's Contract, the film seems a bit studied, but the creepy plot still holds a certain fascination, and Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, and Keanu Reeves all do their best with it, though Mildred Natwick in a cameo manages to steal the show  
282 
poster		 Short Cuts  Robert Altman  1993  USA 
While helicopters overhead spray against a Medfly infestation a group of Los Angeles lives intersect, some casually, some to more lasting effect. Whilst they go out to concerts and jazz clubs and even have their pools cleaned, they also lie, drink, and cheat. Death itself seems never to be far away, even on a fishing trip. 
283 
poster		 The Roaring Twenties  Raoul Walsh  1939  USA 
Raoul Walsh's style achieved maturity with the magnificent use of deep-focus images and spatial metaphors in this 1939 film, conceived as a nostalgic look back to the brutal Warners gangster films like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar. James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart meet in the trenches of World War I and subsequently rise through the rackets, ending up on opposite sides in a gang war. Walsh's mastery of narrative rhythm keeps the action building steadily, while he draws upon the Bogart-Cagney relationship for superbly developed counterpoint.  
284 
poster		 Grand Hotel  Edmund Goulding  1932  USA 
The people come, the people go. Less effective as a movie than as a dazzling parade of star iconography: Greta Garbo as the "I want to be alone" ballerina, John Barrymore as a decaying aristocrat, Joan Crawford as a frisky secretary, and Wallace Beery as a ruthless tycoon. In some ways this 1932 item is the definitive MGM film, in which the direction (Edmund Goulding), screenplay (William A. Drake), and cinematography (William Daniels) all seem deliberately pale, the better to set off the glitter of the stars; they're like jewels mounted in a deliberately neutral display case. With Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt, and Tully Marshall. 
285 
poster		 The Road Warrior  George Miller  1981  Australia 
George Miller's 1981 sequel to his 1980 sleeper, Mad Max. Set in a postapocalyptic Australia, where nomadic tribes battle each other for precious gasoline, it's a highly stylized, roaringly dynamic action film that shuns plot and characterization in favor of a crazy iconographical melange--it's like the work of a western punk trucker de Sade. The style is more spectacular and comic-bookish than that of the original, which isn't all to the good: without the crude but functional motivations of the first film, the violence here comes to seem somewhat arbitrary and distasteful. But for pure rhythm and visual panache, Miller has few real competitors; the climactic chase, with its deft variation of tempo and point of view, is a minor masterpiece.  
286 
poster		 To Catch a Thief  Alfred Hitchcock  1955  USA 
Cary Grant is a retired cat burglar on the Riviera and Grace Kelly is the spoiled American rich girl who seems to have the perpetual hots for him, in Alfred Hitchcock's fluffy 1955 exercise in light comedy, minimal mystery, and good-natured eroticism (the fireworks scene is a classic). Jessie Royce Landis (North by Northwest) is delightful as Kelly's clearheaded mother (she and Grant were born the same year, by the way), and John Williams gives expert support as usual.  
287 
poster		 Enemies: A Love Story  Paul Mazursky  1989  USA 
Who would have thought that Paul Mazursky (An Unmarried Woman, Down and Out in Beverly Hills), defender of middle-class mediocrity, could have brought off this sensitive 1989 adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's slyly subversive and emotionally complex novel? It's an erotic love story and comedy-drama about Holocaust survivors living in New York City in 1949-'50, with Ron Silver as a ghostwriter for a rabbi (Alan King) who winds up married to three women at once--his original wife (Anjelica Huston), thought to have perished in a concentration camp; a non-Jewish former servant (Margaret Sophie Stein) who saved his life by hiding him in a hayloft and lives with him now in Coney Island; and a volatile Jewish woman (Lena Olin), who lives with her mother (Judith Malina) in the Bronx. Part of the fascination of this lovely and sexy movie, scripted by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky, is that one can never be sure where it's going, although it proceeds with disarming and impeccable logic. The period flavor is beautifully caught, and the performances--including an effective cameo by Mazursky himself as Masha's estranged first husband--are full of unexpected depths and surprises. All the actors are impressive, but it's the female leads who really shine.  
288 
poster		 Men with Guns  John Sayles  1997  USA 
Humberto Fuentes is a wealthy doctor whose wife has recently died. In spite of the advice of his children, he takes a trip to visit his former students who now work in impoverished villages. His trip soon becomes a quest, politically awakening him when he finds out that one of his students was killed by the army. 
289 
poster		 Wuthering Heights  William Wyler  1939  USA 
The Earnshaws are Yorkshire farmers during the early 19th Century. One day, Mr. Earnshaw returns from a trip to the city, bringing with him a ragged little boy called Heathcliff. Earnshaw's son, Hindley, resents the child, but Heathcliff becomes companion and soulmate to Hindley's sister, Catherine. After her parents die, Cathy and Heathcliff grow up wild and free on the Moors and despite the continued enmity between Hindley and Heathcliff they're happy-- until Cathy meets Edgar Linton, the son of a wealthy neighbor. 
290 
poster		 Raise the Red Lantern  Yimou Zhang  1991  China 
Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, Zhang Yimou's grim 1991 adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and indirectly contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is much bleaker. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants devote their lives to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal long shots. Zhang confirms his mastery and artistry here in many ways, some relatively new (such as his striking sound track), though the cold, remote, and stifling world he presents here doesn't offer much emotional release.  
291 
poster		 The Warriors  Walter Hill  1979  USA 
Walter Hill's existential action piece (1979), rendered in a complete stylistic abstraction that will mean tough going for literal-minded audiences. The straightforward, straight-line plot--a street gang must cross the length of New York City, pursued by police and rival fraternities--is given the convoluted quality of a fever dream by Hill's quirky, claustrophobic direction.  
292 
poster		 Two-Lane Blacktop  Monte Hellman  1971  USA 
This exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates performance, looks even better now than it did in 1971, although it was pretty interesting back then as well. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged '55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird). (GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer's novel Nog.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract--it's unsettling but also beautiful. 
293 
poster		 �ge d'or, L'  Luis Bu�uel  1930  France 
Luis Bu�uel's first and most radical feature (1930) was banned for decades, and it continues to pack a jolt. Forsaking consecutive plot, the film is more like an anarchist bomb, starting off as a documentary before assaulting church, state, and society--particularly high society--in the name of eros. Funny, blasphemous, sexy, strange, subtle, and evocative in its use of sound, it's also thoroughly Bu�uelian, though without the bittersweet sense of resigned acceptance that characterizes some of his later works. Except for his 1932 documentary Las Hurdes, this ferocious act of revolt kept Bu�uel virtually unemployed as a director for 17 years; when he finally returned as a narrative filmmaker, he delivered something quite different from the wild poetry of his first three films. 
294 
poster		 Murder, My Sweet  Edward Dmytryk  1944  USA 
Dick Powell (Busby Berkeley's boy soprano) takes on a new image and emerges as the toughest screen incarnation of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. In this 1944 version of Farewell, My Lovely, Edward Dmytryk, still in his interesting pre-HUAC film noir stage, handles the Chandlerian complications with style. With Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, and Mike Mazurki. 
295 
poster		 Modern Times  Charles Chaplin  1936  USA 
Charlie Chaplin finally got around to acknowledging the 20th century in this 1936 film, which substitutes machine-age gags for the fading Victoriana of his other work. Consequently, it's the coldest of his major features, though no less brilliant for it. Chaplin was criticized for stealing the assembly line sequence of Rene Clair's A nous la liberte, but Clair got it back by lifting some of City Lights for Quatorze juillet. Chaplin's rendition, at any rate, is much more alive and meaningful in character terms than Clair's; the difference between them is the difference between genius and talent. With Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, and a colleague from the Sennett days, Chester Conklin.  
296 
poster		 C�r�monie, La  Claude Chabrol  1995  France 
Not to be confused with films of the same title by Nagisa Oshima and Laurence Harvey, this expertly contrived and ultimately shocking 1995 psychological thriller is still probably the best feature by New Wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol since Just Before Nightfall (1971). It's a mysterious, haunting tale about a sullen if dutiful maid (Sandrine Bonnaire), a postal worker who becomes her best friend (Isabelle Huppert), and a likable bourgeois family that the two women are fated to despise. Adapted from Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgment in Stone and coscripted by psychoanalyst Caroline Eliacheff, this film unfolds with the rigor of a dream. With Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Virginie Ledoyen, and Valentin Merlet. 
297 
 Killer of Sheep  Charles Burnett  1977  USA 
The first feature (1978) of the highly talented black filmmaker Charles Burnett, who has set most of his early films in Watts (including My Brother's Wedding and To Sleep With Anger); this one deals episodically with the life of a slaughterhouse worker. Shot on a year's worth of weekends on a minuscule budget (less than $20,000), this remarkable work--conceivably the best single feature about ghetto life that we have--was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works of the American cinema, an ironic and belated form of recognition for a film that has had virtually no distribution. It shouldn't be missed. 
298 
poster		 Blue Velvet  David Lynch  1986  USA 
It's personal all right, also solipsistic, intransigent, and occasionally ridiculous. David Lynch's 1986 fever-dream fantasy, of a young college student (Kyle MacLachlan) returned to his small-town roots and all manner of strangeness, is replete with sexual fear and loathing, parodistic inversions (of Capra, Lubitsch), and cannibalistic recyclings from Lynch's own Eraserhead and Dune. The bizarrely evolving story--MacLachlan becomes involved with two women, one light and innocent (Laura Dern, vaguely lost), the other dark and sadomasochistic (Isabella Rossellini), as well as with a murderous psychopath (a brilliantly demented Dennis Hopper)--seems more obsessive than expressive at times, and the commingling of sex, violence, and death treads obliquely on familiar Ken Russell territory: it's Crimes of Passion with the polarities reversed. Still, the film casts its spell in countless odd ways, in the archetype-leaning imagery, eccentric tableau styling, and moth-in-candle-flame attraction to the subconscious twilight. 
299 
poster		 The Man with the Movie Camera  Dziga Vertov  1929  Soviet Union 
Dziga Vertov's 1928 Russian film amounts to a catalog of all the tricks the movies can perform. As a newsreel cameraman travels through a city (actually an amalgam of Moscow and Odessa), Vertov transforms the images captured by his camera through a kaleidoscope of slow motion, superimposition, animation, and wild montage effects. Vertov's motives were impeccably Marxist-Leninist--he wanted to expose the materialism behind an illusionist medium--but his film set off a storm of debate among his colleagues, who accused him of the bourgeois crime of "impressionism." The film's real influence did not emerge for another 40 years, when it was taken up by American structuralist filmmakers on one side of the Atlantic and by French neoleftists on the other. 
300 
poster		 Yojimbo  Akira Kurosawa  1961  Japan 
Akira Kurosawa has any number of dramatic and cinematic cliches (both American and Japanese) to overcome--and does so brilliantly--in this action-packed, highly comic 1961 translation of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest to the samurai movie tradition. Toshiro Mifune is again incomparable as the masterless samurai who wanders into a small war between two rival gangs and proceeds to set things right by further stirring them up. 

Total: 300 movies

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1