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.
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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.
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.
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.
370. Cinema Paradiso
Nostalgia originally had nothing to do with the past but rather a desire to return home. Cinema Paradiso resonates with the feeling that cinema is your home.
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.
363. 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.
362. Last Tango in Paris
There are several good reasons to watch Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial drama. Not all of them make for palatable viewing.
360. Waltz with Bashir
Ari Folman’s animated documentary is different from many other films about trauma. But it is only in its final moments that it reveal its most telling truth.
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?
345. Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s off-beat romance deftly explores isolation, miscommunication and the superficiality of modern media.
342. Cold War
Despite its title, Cold War is not an espionage thriller. Instead, Pawel Pawlikowski loosely based it on his parents’ lives. But it’s not a biopic either. So what is it?
339. No Country for Old Men
While Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel broke genre convention, the Coens’ adaptation is a study in audiovisual chaos.
336. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Films about writers are tricky propositions but you can roughly divide the genre into two eras; pre- and post-Mishima.
331. Inside Llewyn Davis
Joel and Ethan Coen sometimes pit their characters against forces of nature. But Llewyn Davis faces a uniquely historical storm.
330. 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.
329. The Godfather Part II
Less a sequel and more a cloak that wraps itself around the original, it has a son haunted by the memory of his dead father.
325. Munich
Upon its release, Munich was attacked for historical inaccuracy, political naivety and moral equivalency. But it is one of Spielberg’s greatest works.
322. 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.
319. 2001: A Space Odyssey
For all its groundbreaking effects and narrative innovation, this owes a debt to a romantic fantasy and a Soviet propaganda film.
306. 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.
269. Great Openings – Part Three
What makes for a great opening? Character? Conflict? Poetry? Hopefully, more than something we’re supposed to just listen to.
