The Godfather Trilogy
Adapting Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel, Francis Ford Coppola drew up several themes lying dormant within its pages and augmented them in a uniquely cinematic fashion to create a masterful saga.
Tag Archives: The Godfather
Vikings – Final Season
How can Vikings bring its epic saga to a close? It began in 937 as a bloody conquest and ends nearly thirty years later on the shores of a new world. A story of ambition, love, and rage, its great quest was for tranquility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
373. Cast Away
Superficially, Cast Away asks whether modern man can survive alone on a desert island. But Robert Zemeckis’ best film is really about destiny vs. free will.
351. Heat
Ever since its release in 1995, Heat has been held as the greatest ever heist movie. But it has another, completely different film living and dying inside of it.
341. Edward Scissorhands
Ever wondered where snow comes from? That and other wonders – and horrors – live inside Tim Burton’s classic.
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.
327. The Godfather
Regarded as the greatest gangster picture of them all, the passing years continue to reveal new layers and meanings in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece.
321. Die Hard
What makes a classic film? The plot’s originality, director’s vision, or the star’s magnetism? Paradoxically, any, all, yet none of the above. It’s the audience.
Vikings – Ivar the Boneless and His Rise to Power
This is a short video-essay examining the power shift in Vikings’ Season 5. Which of Ragnar’s sons will succeed him to the throne?
283. Dog Day Afternoon
With Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning script, Sidney Lumet’s thriller is a masterclass in breaking the basic rules of screenwriting.
282. 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.
275. Deliverance
When we think of American cinema in the seventies, all too often we all too quickly think of the great directors. But what of the cinematograph-auteurs?
273. Miller’s Crossing
The plot to Miller’s Crossing is so complex, it’s hard to even figure out where and when it is set. And that’s before we discuss the meaning of Tom Reagan’s hat.
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.
215. Great Scenes – Part One
What makes for a great scene? Performance? Conflict? Dialogue? Visuals? Music? Combine them and you have atomic weight.
209. Raiders of the Lost Ark
Thirty-five years old, Spielberg’s classic was inspired by more than just the Saturday matinee serials he watched as a child.
206. Blazing Saddles
We like to think of ourselves as modern and sophisticated, but is the humour of Blazing Saddles too outrageous for anyone in Hollywood to make it today?
