Podcasts Archives - Steven Benedict

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401. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

For my final podcast, I look at how Steven Spielberg effectively remade his first feature, Firelight to deliver a message of hope.

400. The 400 Blows

In January 1954, Francois Truffaut wrote a landmark essay on film criticism. Five years later, he put his theory into practice and cinema never been the same since.

399. The Irishman

The gangster genre is dominated by men, but in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman the most important position is held by a woman who utters barely a dozen words.

398. Rome, Open City

Rome Open City began filming as Auschwitz was liberated and Roberto Rossellini’s film marks a crucial step in the creation of art in the wake of the Holocaust.

397. Mulholland Dr.

Puzzling audiences ever since it premiered at Cannes in 2001, David Lynch’s dark masterpiece seems to address the abuse of women in the film industry.

396. L’Avventura

With this modernist masterpiece, Michelangelo Antonioni told a story that abandoned its initial plot. Booed at Cannes, it paved the way for a new cinematic form.

395. The Conversation

It is said a film is made three times; writing, filming and editing. In which case, editor Walter Murch deserves enormous credit for this masterpiece.

394. Amarcord

Like many Fellini films, Amarcord is a contradiction; an account of his youth yet a complete fabrication, a vivid realisation of the past, but also a dream.

393. City Lights

Four years after the advent of sound in cinema, Charlie Chaplin insisted on making a silent movie the entire plot for which hinged on not being able to see.

392. Un prophète

This French masterpiece avoids all the clichés of American prison films while at the same time bearing an uncanny similarity to a 1960s’ Japanese action picture.

391. WALL•E

Twenty-one feature films, $14b at the worldwide box-office and 15 Oscars. If you ever wondered about the secret of Pixar’s success, read their mission statement.

390. Cléo from 5 to 7

In Agnes Varda’s classic, Corrine Marchand plays one woman; happy Cléo and anxious Florence, walking about Paris in real time awaiting her medical results.

389. The Insider

Whether it be ethically, legally, politically, geographically or even chemically, Michael Mann’s multi-Oscar nominated picture is about crossing the line.

388. Incendies

In adapting Wajdi Mouawad’s play, Denis Villeneuve used two time lines to push the past against the present and ask if suffering is the only outcome of war.

387. The Third Man

The Palme d’Or winner in 1949, Carol Reed’s masterpiece drew on covert sources and unexpected styles and techniques to deliver a melancholic mystery.

386. Ten

Master auteur, Abbas Kiarostami forged his career by defying conventional film grammar to successfully find new ways of presenting the human condition.

385. Unforgiven

Originally titled Whore’s Gold, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning western exposes the psychosis, bigotry and misogyny at the heart of the genre’s mythology.

384. Gomorrah

Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s book on the Neapolitan camorra smacks down the innumerable movies that have marketed the Mafia mythology.

383. Notorious

Forget Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film is Notorious. With his usual McGuffin, he wrapped a paranoid love story inside an espionage thriller about genocide.

382. A Separation

Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning divorce drama delivers a story that is specific to a particular time and place yet also manages to resonate on a universal level.