Coen Country
This short video-essay details the recurring thematic concerns explored by the Coen brothers over the last five decades. Intercutting all 18 of their films, the characters appear to talk to one another across the stories.
Tag Archives: cinematography
The Gordon Willis Frame
Gordon Willis was one of cinema’s greatest artists. Regardless of genre, his style and technique were so singular he should be regarded as a cinematrograph-auteur.
The Hitchcock Gallery
This short video-essay compares various themes and techniques that Alfred Hitchcock developed over his career. With 40 titles, it includes every feature film Hitchcock made from 1934 through to his retirement in 1976.
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.
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.
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.
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.
380. Ugetsu Monogatari
Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece owes a great debt of gratitude to Kazuo Miyagawa’s luminous, shimmering cinematography.
379. Midnight Cowboy
Released in 1969, Midnight Cowboy mixes avant-garde with mythology to examine male identity, intimacy, sexuality and trauma.
376. The Passion of Joan of Arc
In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, the story isn’t so much told through the Saint’s eyes as it is read on her face.
375. sex, lies, and videotape
With his Palme d’Or winning debut, Steven Soderbergh made a modern classic as well as a how-to manual for film students.
374. The Blue Angel
Few film songs come anywhere near the layered meanings of Falling in Love Again, sung by Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel.
372. A Man Escaped
Robert Bresson’s masterpiece is a perfect example of less is more; natural acting, minimal music, off-screen sounds and restricting yourself to a 50mm lens.
368. Andrei Rublev
Perhaps the greatest ever film about an artist, Andrei Rublev steadfastly refuses to show its subject painting let alone him holding a brush in his hand.
367. Kind Hearts and Coronets
How do you make a film about a sociopath who murders his entire extended family and still get the audience to root for him?
365. Saving Private Ryan
Released to ecstatic reviews in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s film soon suffered a backlash. Twenty-one years on it has finally come of age.
355. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
If such an inscrutable character sits at the heart of John Le Carré’s labyrinthine plot, how is the adaptation such a lucid film?
354. Let The Right One In
The vampire genre is ripe with themes; sexuality, feminism, xenophobia, disease, yet Let The Right One In broke new ground.
353. Gravity
For a film that requires so many special effects in order to create the feeling of weightlessness, how did Alfonso Cuarón still keep Gravity so grounded?
352. Roma
Alfonso Cuarón has long flirted with the neorealist style. His latest masterpiece, Roma illustrates cinema is not about what you show, but how you show it.
345. Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s off-beat romance deftly explores isolation, miscommunication and the superficiality of modern media.
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Steven Benedict (StevenBenedict2)
Formerly a podcaster, sometimes a filmmaker, frequently a lecturer, always trying to avoid viruses, bigotry and fake news.
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