sex, lies, and videotape
Winning the Palme d’Or with his very first feature, Steven Soderbergh not only made a modern classic, he also delivered a how-to manual for film students.
Tag Archives: Editing
The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe’s superb account about the early days of NASA’s space program needed filmmakers who shared a daring similar to the maverick pilots.
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?
Saving Private Ryan
Released to ecstatic reviews in 1998, Spielberg’s film soon suffered a backlash. Far more complex than first thought, 21 years on it has finally come of age.
Arrival
No matter how cinematic, all films are nothing more than a form of writing that borrows from other forms of writing. Which is why Arrival comes in code.
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?
Man with a Movie Camera
Once “too revolutionary”, Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde masterpiece is now felt in Man on Fire, Ratatouille and Inception.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Werner Herzog’s hallucinatory telling of a Conquistador’s search for El Dorado etches a landscape of greed on the human face.
Yi Yi
As the title to Edward Yang’s masterpiece indicates, Yi Yi is a series of doubles; narrative, thematic, visual and aural, that deliver a subtle family portrait.
Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein devised montage for black and white and silent film. How have the elements of sound, colour and digital cinema extended his theories?
Easy Rider
Upon its release, it seemed that Easy Rider typified the spirit of the nineteen-sixties. But it really should be viewed as the first film of the seventies.
Bicycle Thieves
Many films enjoy exaggerated reputations, but it is almost impossible to underestimate the beauty, truth and importance of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.
The Gospel According to Matthew
How did a blasphemous, homosexual, Marxist, atheist manage to make the greatest film about the life of Jesus Christ?
Festen
William Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes are just some of the disparate influences on view in Thomas Vinterberg’s masterpiece.
Reds
As Hollywood found the formula for the modern blockbuster, Warren Beatty embarked on a project examining the origins of American communism.
The Battle of Algiers
The impact of Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece is so great that it extends far beyond cinema and into terrorist organisations, as well as the US Pentagon.
The Leopard
All countries have troubled histories they would rather forget. The Leopard is a masterpiece that admits to those troubles as well as the failure to fix them.
Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver was written in ten days by first-time screenwriter, Paul Schrader as a means to exorcise his festering, masochistic, narcissistic anger.
8 1/2
Fellini’s masterpiece is often described as a film about not being able to make a film. But really it is about responsibility, liability, lying, loving and living.
Great Openings – Part Four
What makes for a great opening? Character? Conflict? Poetry? Hopefully, more than something we’re supposed to just listen to.
Bonnie and Clyde
When great art heralds great change, it often experiences a difficult birth. Bonnie and Clyde is a seminal moment in American film that almost never happened.
Great Openings – Part Three
What makes for a great opening? Character? Conflict? Poetry? Hopefully, more than something we’re supposed to just listen to.
Dunkirk
All boring films are alike; every great film is great in its own way. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk belongs not just to the latter but amongst the greatest ever made.
Great Openings – Part One
What makes for a great opening? Character? Conflict? Poetry? Hopefully, more than something we’re supposed to just look at.
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Steven Benedict (StevenBenedict2)
Award-winning filmmaker. Podcaster, broadcaster, author and lecturer. I'm downloading the universe one app at a time.
Dublin, Ireland
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Tweeting since August 22, 2012
