A great deal of the admiration lies in the ratio of visual to context (read: year released); For 1943, Tourneur's use of tribal drums and shock imagery is not merely revolutionary but - dare I say - timeless. The half-baked story - concerning a nurse in love with the husband of her charge, a zombie woman who could be cured (maybe) by voodoo - is pretty much just filler for the uncompromising and unsettling mood. Like a swami hypnotizing a snake, Torneur turns up the sound of distant drum beats in seemingly inconsequential scenes, turning them into edgy, nightmarish head swimmers. Wraps up, predictably, using the plot rather than the scares.

The first hour is a pure A with no questions asked and no room for argument. German expressionism bleeds through images of a plague-stricken world where the devil offers a failing doctor - the title character, played by The Last Laugh's sad doorman Emil Jannings - a chance to succeed and to regain his yoouth; By the fourth reel, though, a long-winded "love" story, wherein both the devil and Faust find themselves in predicaments they seem helpless to fathom, saps the movie's strength. Nevertheless, Murnau never stops composing snap-perfect frames, culling the sense that man is overshadowed by his own delusion and that great stone walls are, you know, awesome.

The sexual politics, ahead of their time as they are, bring most of the shine out in what amounts to a collection of one-liners that betray an obvious attempt to transcend the limits of the play it is based upon. Gable and Harlow, natch, are terrific.

A great, sad road picture where Warren Oates plows through his sexist, self-serving tendencies to blur the line between bounty hunter and demon saint. It's like Peckinpah's self-destructive reflection at 24 frames per second.

I have to agree with the masses (including the K man himself), having seen it for the first time in 11 years, that NO, Spartacus isn't very Kubrickian (saying there are shades of the master's stamp would be fudging it, I think). Nevertheless, a little Stanley goes a long way and Spartacus, to be sure, is the best of the Sword and Sandal epics (of which, to be fair, I've seen a paltry few).

Was a pretty solid A throughout most of it, but eventually wraps up all too blandly. The disoriented hunt for Mabuse's subjects - after Mabuse has died - is a great police procedural. The inclusion of everything from interrogations to assassinations to brainwashing to trances makes most of it seem beautifully obtuse, furiously bizarre and, often, terrifically exciting; Lang was a master at staging - - and I couldn't begin to list the numerous setpieces that had be practically digging up his grave with praise. (Okay, I'm not writing another word. Promise.)

It's disheartening in its Clancy cold war relics (no Russian is good unless defecting), McTiernan's perceived vindication of the language barrier in a single zoom in and zoom out (more brazen than his 13th Warrior campfire Viking 101 course, but still...) and the curious - near retro - audience pandering (heirarchy and Government intrigue have become so assimilated into our collective filmic consiousness, we're not even aware of all the sequential steps that are, consequentially, skipped in order to get to certain payoffs). The storyline itself breeds a certain near-antiquated sort of thriller (also odd for McTiernan, whose Die Hard and Rollerball couldn't be cut from a more distant cloth), one where things are quietly contemplated (the obvious model, as the film acknowledges, is chess) and carried out and Connery is allowed to get away with hair-pin endangerment of his crew more than enough times for the audience to feel thoroughly insulted. Baldwin, however, gives one of his very best performances, seeming more human that I believed him capable. (Needless, vivid memory #357: Last time I saw this film (when it was on the tail end of its theatrical run)  I bought a large cola and drank none of it, tragically popping the cup in the car on the way home. My underwear was stained light brown from the soda syrup. Don't ever tell anyone I told you that story.)

It's like a ping-pong game for that #1 spot: Currently Before Sunset has just waffled the fuck out of Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring (again).

The car is obviously meant to be a bubble reflecting life in bustling, present day Tehran, vis a vie the ten passengers one character carts around (they discus their lives in master shots as we train our eyes on the edges of the screen, watching the city go give them an exact, almost degrading context. Degrading because we're only bringing with us what we already know about Tehran, and the film is barely a slice-of-life, a method that might have absolved it from stranding us sans an overview of the enviornment inhabited by pawns 1-10).  The other trouble is, the bubble is filled with a spirit that seems to equate mundanity with some sort of transcendent statement about Iran and its people (it doesn't help matters that the same exact difficulties - presented in the same exact words and mannerisms - are used to paint the picture in nearly every export from the country: Women are fucked over in society, men are overprotective, everything you saw in The Circle was true, etc.) Because Kiarostami is typically banned from presenting his films in his homeland, we are given no choice but to take as understood that Ten is meant to be seen through a Western - or outsider - filter. To that end, I wonder why Kiarostami - maker of the genius 'Kokek Trilogy' (thaat earned mine - and every other critic's - attention) - might choose to make such a base statement. His obvious preoccupation with digital video's convenience plays more like an Arab Taxicab Confessions than a modern dissection of a culture). Occasionally, the dialogue - and the actors - are interesting enough to divert us from the film's heavy undertones (particularly the kid who acts annoyed by the repetition of his mother's gripes - like he's on his twelfth take and thirteenth coffee).

I wish it didn't have that score (it's so manipulative), but Pontecorvo - despite being a generalizer - obviously has a point. What's happened is so wrong and needs to be shouted from the rooftops so loudly (in Italian first, but then dubbed over in French for some reason) - - and was, in such a timely fashion - - that the film exists as a revolutionary snapshot; The Battle of Algiers is like Farenheit 9/11, only dramatized and (so far) more effective.

If unbridled passion fueled The Passion of Joan of Arc, it seems to be expertly muted in Dreyer's brilliant study of a world where magic is assumed to be real (and is!). The corruption of church officials seems even more personal and subjective by way of objectivity here. The purposefully stitled ending gives an anticlimactic gush to the proceedings that has done better in my mind than when I saw it. Nevertheless, you're glued for the first hour and change, with an opening sequence that introduces sound as a practical weapon (bells and wind seem so otherworldly, it's as if we've never heard them before. Hard to escape the general feeling that Day of Wrath is more of the same terrain as Passion but, nevertheless, Dreyer's ideas are more substantial than most retreads even set out to be.

Easily the most cohesively funny and exhilirating of Bunuel's films. Un Chien Andalou is a bit too short and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie goes on a bit long, but L'Age d'or is just the right length for the stream of consciousness dissection of societal absurdity. By the end, when the gears have shifted into some serious left field (three survivors of a orgy leaving a tower in the film's biggest changeover), you're so sucked in, it's barely even important how you got there. Generally, L'Age d'or, like all great surreal work, is simply communicated in another language. The thematic resonance of its ideas is linked, allowing you the privelidge of thinking on a completely different wavelength.

Because, as the book says: He who releases a musical without the actual singing, still releases a musical.

The most perfectest Thanksgiving movie.

Set in the same universe as Twins and Dave. More or less tolerable than the former, never as charming as the latter. Harrison Ford is the kind of matinee idol that will be compared to Bogart and Gable someday, but Six Days, Seven Nights seems more content as an immediately forgettable throwaway than a romantic comedy. Sophmoric, mindless adult humor is second cousin to toilet humor and Reitman's film seems to badge this fact bluntly (in a dim, confused subplot about David Schwimmer's inability to resist sex with a large breasted woman) and with byproducts intact (modern day pirates pursue Ford and Anne Heche, they repair a plane in almost the same manner Ford laughs off ("We'll, like, glue it back on"), meals and comfort make the ordeal so easy for the audience, it almost looks like a vacation). Also, having watched this just a day or so after watching Cast Away, it probably seemed more outlandish than it might to fun seekers (although I doubt it). To re-iterate: Ford, playing Baloo the bear from the TV show "Talespin" demonstrates his smoldering persona with a legitimately risky (and not wholly unsuccessful) mate, Schwimmer is the perfect foil (as he has no range to speak of) and the whole thing smacks of almost negative calories.

Astonishingly avante garde in its conception, yet edited as Citizen Kane was, for consumption by the modern eye seeking "entertainment", Welles The Tragedy of Othello: Moor of Venice is one of the few Shakespeare adaptations that takes great pains to pull itself in opposing directions for the better (it reduces the Bard's play to ribbons, but evokes its themes with blunt, brute force). Exercising a complete and utter disdain for semblance of continuity or loyalty to the text, what Welles conjures is the powerful prophecy of self-fulfillment, the weakness of human nature and the subtext of racism and sexism - all without drying for a nanosecond. Othello one of the most beautifully shot films ever to nearly miss finding an audience (its long and oft recounted trail from Cannes in '51 to disappearance to reconstruction in 1992 I'll not bore you with), an immediate force largely responsible for its inclusion in my top ten of all time for years and years. Having viewed it for the first time in almost a decade, I'm struck with the totality of the vision - driven more by editing and visual metaphor than either of Welles' other Shakespeare ventures (Macbeth and Chimes at Midnight) - and the tireless reflection cast upon the timelessly depressing story of betrayal and folly: Nearly ignored for a lack of commercial appeal (and his even greater knack for bitter stubbornness), Welles' made (nearly) nothing if not masterpieces - - but struggled his whole career. His performance seems channeled from that place where you rise above yourself (i.e. - act in everyone else's movie to fund your own) only to find the rug yanked from under your feet.