"Setting aside the
small gestures, the delicate observation of daily life and the
sympathetic characterisation associated with neo-realism, La Dolce
Vita is a large-scale satire with grand set pieces and forceful
visual metaphors... The film has probably lost much of its ability to
shock, and the orgies are tame by present standards. But it has not lost
the power to fascinate, stimulate and provoke, and it remains a work of
moral force and a visual delight."
- Philip French, The Observer, 2008
"Charles
Chaplin's best-loved film, with the tramp down-and-out (as
usual) in Alaska, where he looks for gold, falls in love with a
dance-hall girl (Georgia Hale), eats his shoes for Thanksgiving dinner,
and ends up a millionaire. The blend of slapstick and pathos is
seamless, although the cynicism of the final scene is still surprising.
Chaplin's
later films are quirkier and more personal, but this is quintessential
Charlie, and unmissable." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
1976
| 113m | Col | USA | Psychological Drama, Urban Drama
"Taxi
Driver is a film that does not grow dated, or over-familiar. I have
seen it dozens of times. Every time I see it, it works; I am drawn into
Travis' underworld of alienation, loneliness, haplessness and anger." -
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Selected by
Edgar Wright, Christopher Frayling, Thomas Elsaesser,
Quentin Tarantino, Nick
James.
"Hollywood
craftsmanship at its smartest and just about at its best, and it is hard
to find better craftsmanship than that, at this time, in any art or
country... much the most ambitious movie about Hollywood ever done..."
- James Agee
"Only superlatives
will do to describe
Keaton’s hilarious Civil War dramatic comedy. Made in 1927,
at the culmination of the silent era, it sees the graceful, stone-faced
genius at his inventive best... a thrilling adventure yarn, based
essentially upon a pair of hurtling and symmetrically opposed train
chases, that is as superbly structured as it is executed."
- Wally Hammond, Time Out, 2006
1945
| 195m | BW | France | Period Film, Romantic Drama
"Children Of
Paradise is the ultimate theater-as-life movie, rich in historical
allusions past and present, a landmark production that overcame constant
harassment by the Germans and stands as a key testament to the spirit of
the French Resistance. But apart from mere dissertation fodder, the film
remains an exemplary piece of popular entertainment, full of vibrancy
and wit, with unforgettable characters and a delicate, bittersweet tone
that considers their emotions in balance."
- Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club, 2002
"No introduction needed,
surely, for
Hitchcock's best film, a stunningly realised (on a relatively
low budget) slice of Grand Guignol in which the Bates Motel is the arena
for much sly verbal sparring and several gruesome murders... A
masterpiece by any standard."
- Geoff Andrew, Time Out
"Fast and
loose, with a buzzing sense of the potential of the cinema undercut by
the beginnings of
Godard’s intellectual rigour, this is at once a
homage to the American gangster film, and an attack on the very ideas of
Americans, gangsters and films"
- Kim Newman, Empire
1955
| 125m | BW | Denmark | Drama, Religious Drama
"Carl
Dreyer's great 1954 film is concerned with the moral and metaphysical
shadings of love: Is it a thing of sex or of the spirit?...
Dreyer's
direction has been described as too theatrical, perhaps because the
action is largely confined to the farmhouse set, yet the spatial
explorations of his camera and cutting are profoundly cinematic and
expressive.
The film is
extremely sensual in its spareness, a paradox always at the center of
Dreyer's work." - Dave Kehr,
Chicago Reader
1979
| 150m | Col | USA | Anti-War Film, Adventure Drama
"Apocalypse
Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films,
because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul.
It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be
happy never to discover."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
1974
| 131m | Col | USA | Mystery, Post-Noir (Modern Noir)
"Chinatown is
unquestionably one of the best films to emerge from the 1970s... The
production, which went in front of the cameras without a final script,
marks the high-water point in the careers of both lead actor
Jack Nicholson
and director Roman
Polanski. It also represents the finest color entry into the
film noir genre."
- James Berardinelli, Reel Views, 2001
"Agee's
screenplay—from Davis Grubb's relatively graphic, forgotten novel—was a
fearless evocation of revival-tent axiomism that shouldn't have gotten
arrested in Eisenhower-era Hollywood. But
Laughton understood Agee's proximity to
Grimm vaudeville, and fashioned the most intensely expressionistic movie
of its day, outside of
Welles... Few "Golden Age" movies are as visually fecund, and
few have been so ruthlessly plundered."
- Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice, 2001
"More than any other film
L’Avventura seems to define the spirit of a time in cinema when
anything seemed possible and there was no territory into which it could
not venture. Above all what it seeks to capture is the world of fleeting
emotion, feelings which are unstable and crystallize only momentarily in
the camera’s gaze... L’Avventura is the one that started
Antonioni
on his quest, and remains the one that most clearly represents the
unique nature of his art."
-
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, The Criterion Collection, 2001
Selected by
Albert Maysles, Donald Richie,
Harold Becker,
Philip Strick, Julian Graffy.
1964
| 93m | BW | UK | Military Comedy, Political Satire
"Dr.
Strangelove is, first and foremost, absolutely unflinching... Kubrick's
precise use of camera angles, his uncanny sense of lighting, his
punctuation with close-ups and occasionally with zoom shots, all
galvanize the picture into macabre yet witty reality."
- Stanley Kauffman
1966
| 81m | BW | Sweden | Drama, Psychological Drama
"Never before
on film has the derailed psyche been more penetratingly examined, never
before has the drama been played so consistently beneath the surface,
yet without the slightest sacrifice in palpable excitement."
- John Simon
"With the
exception of the great
Eisenstein, I can't think of any film which has
conveyed a feeling of the remote past with such utter conviction... A
durable and unmistakable masterpiece."
- Michael Billington, Illustrated London News
"Jules and Jim is
among the masterpieces of the French New Wave and may be considered the
high achievement of that movement... We have a film that is at once
vital, astonishing, and mature. Its solidity as well as its richness
have kept it from fading even under the intense light of scholarship and
criticism to which it has been continually subject."
- Dudley
Andrew, Film Reference
"Hacked about by a
confused RKO, Welles' second film (from the novel by Booth Tarkington)
still looks a masterpiece, astounding for its almost magical re-creation
of a gentler age when cars were still a nightmare of the future and the
Ambersons felt safe in their mansion on the edge of town... With
immaculate period reconstruction, and virtuoso acting shot in long,
elegant takes, it remains the director's most moving film."
- Geoff Andrew, Time Out
"The
later films have their own merits, and Stolen Kisses is one of
Truffaut's
best, but The 400 Blows, with all its simplicity and feeling, is
in a class by itself. It was
Truffaut's first feature, and one of
the founding films of the French New Wave. We sense that it was drawn
directly out of Truffaut's heart."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1999
"The only Yuletide
favourite to pivot around an attempted suicide,
Capra’s post-war fable is a fascinating
melange of social and personal impulses and the questionable charms of
home... Funny, compelling and moving."
- Ben
Walters, Time Out, 2007
1982
| 118m | Col | USA | Science Fiction, Tech Noir
"The most remarkably and
densely imagined and visualized SF film since 2001: A Space Odyssey,
a hauntingly erotic meditation on the difference between the human and
the nonhuman. Set in a grungy LA of the 21st century characterized by
nearly constant rain and a good many Chinese restaurants--yielding
textures worthy of
Welles or
Sternberg--the plot involves a former
cop (Ford) hired to track down and kill a series of androids."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
"The most densely
allegorical of
Alfred Hitchcock's masterpieces, moving from psychology to
morality to formal concerns and finally to the theological. It is also
Hitchcock's
most innovative film in terms of narrative technique, discarding a
linear story line in favor of thematically related incidents, linked
only by the powerful sense of real time created by the lighting effects
and the revolutionary ambient sound track."
- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Selected by Carrie Rickey, Ty Burr, David Siegel, Ginette Vincendeau,
James Naremore.
"Modern Times
remains Chaplin's
most sustained burlesque of authority: It's replete with strikes and
police riots, and one of the most celebrated gags has the Tramp
inadvertently leading a worker demonstration and being jailed—not for
the last time—as an agitator." -
J. Hoberman, The Village
Voice, 2003
Selected by
Andrew Sarris,
Jonathan Kaplan, Peter
Wollen, Alfredo Guevara, Amir Labaki.
"It may not have the
elegant visual motifs of Strangers on a Train or the
psychological depth of Vertigo, but North by Northwest
is the breeziest, most successful entertainment
Hitchcock
made after leaving England... It’s about the only
Hitchcock
picture that’s sexy without being salacious, thanks mainly to Ernest
Lehman’s barbed dialogue and the scalding rapport between Cary Grant and
Eva Marie Saint."
- Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper, 2000
"A low-key mood study
about a broken-down carnival strongman and his half-wit assistant
traveling through the bleak backwaters of post-war Italy wouldn’t, at
first glance, appear to have much going for it in the way of
international critical and commercial appeal. But from the moment of its
release in 1954, it was clear that La Strada had everything...
Like the characters’ realizations about themselves and the world, the
meaning of La Strada slips over you gradually, simply,
unforgettably."
- David Ehrenstein, The Criterion Collection, 1988
