skopia
Roosevelt had the vicar's closing speech printed on leaflets and dropped over occupied Europe: an English family absorbs the first year of the war, and America was watching very closely.
Dublin in 1922, shot entirely on a fogged soundstage: John Ford won his first directing Oscar for it, and a slow-witted man sells out a friend for twenty pounds.
The novel was written from the screenplay and not the other way around: a Harvard hockey player and a Radcliffe music student marry against his father, and one line became inescapable.
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward fell in love making this and married before it opened: William Faulkner boiled down into one Mississippi town, and the heat is doing most of the acting.
It took Best Picture without a single other nomination, which nothing else has managed: Greta Garbo says the line about wanting to be alone, and the one-building ensemble format begins here.
Alvin York blocked a film about himself for two decades and gave in only to fund a Bible school: a Tennessee pacifist wins the Medal of Honor and Gary Cooper wins Best Actor.
Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis are chained together at the wrist, which was the entire argument in 1958: two convicts break out of a crash in the South and cannot move separately.
The least mythologizing Vietnam film anyone made: ten days in May 1969 taking one hill that the army abandoned immediately afterward, filmed as almost pure exhaustion and mud.
Jean Renoir was recording live street sound in 1931 when almost nobody could: a meek bank cashier who paints on Sundays falls for a woman he meets one night in Montmartre.
John Ford built an entire Welsh mining village in the California hills and shot it like memory: a colliery family in a valley the pit is slowly ruining, narrated by the youngest son.
George Stevens built the annex to the actual dimensions so the cast would feel it: two years in a few rooms above a warehouse, and nothing outside them is ever shown.
The NFL refused all cooperation and players said it was the only accurate football film ever made: Nick Nolte plays a receiver held together by painkillers and stubbornness for one more season.
Richard Attenborough got Steve Biko into cinemas while apartheid was still standing: Denzel Washington's first Oscar nomination, and a white newspaper editor learning what Black South Africans already knew.
Three of its actors were nominated for Best Actor in the same year, and the supporting categories were created the next: Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh remains the definition of a tyrant.
The blacklist plot was cut to almost nothing and Sydney Pollack called that his biggest regret: Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford are mismatched enough that the romance runs on friction alone.
Jessica Tandy was eighty when she won Best Actress, the oldest ever: twenty-five years of an Atlanta employer and her chauffeur, played so lightly that people underrate what the film is doing.
The last musical to hold Best Picture for thirty-four years, and the last G-rated winner: Carol Reed turns Dickens into an enormous street spectacle and the songs never let up.
Sam Peckinpah's only war film, told entirely from the German side of the Eastern Front: Orson Welles called it the finest anti-war film since All Quiet on the Western Front.
Paul Scofield had played it on stage and was not a film star, and he won anyway: Thomas More refuses to say one sentence, and the whole English state comes for him.
South Africa's first Academy Award for a foreign language film: a Johannesburg gang member steals a car and finds a baby in the back, and the film gives him no easy way out.
Robert Duvall wrote and sang his own songs, then took Best Actor for the quietest work of his life: a broken country singer stops drinking at a Texas motel and stays.
William Hurt took Best Actor and the film became the first independent production nominated for Best Picture: two cellmates in a Brazilian prison, one political and one who describes old movies.
Jeremy Irons plays Claus von Bulow as completely unreadable and was rewarded for it: the film is narrated by his wife from the coma she never woke from, and takes no position.
Robert Penn Warren's novel about Huey Long, filmed with real Californians pulled off the street as extras: a country lawyer discovers what he can do with a crowd.
Henry Fonda won his only competitive Oscar at seventy-six and died four months later: he and Jane Fonda play an estranged father and daughter, which was not much of a stretch for either.
Gary Sinise directed it and played George opposite John Malkovich, the best casting the book has ever had: two migrant workers and one plan they will not stop describing.
Joseph Mankiewicz won for both writing and directing it: three women receive a single letter announcing that a woman they all know has left town with somebody's husband.
The first film made outside America to be named Best Picture: Laurence Olivier cut half the play, shot it in high-contrast monochrome, and moves the camera through Elsinore like a ghost.
The flight over the Rift Valley is why anyone remembers it: Meryl Streep built Karen Blixen's Danish accent from recordings, and the film takes its time in a way nothing does now.
Sleepless in Seattle sent an entire generation back to it: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr agree to meet on the Empire State Building observation deck in six months, and then wait.
The Vangelis theme is so famous that people forget the film underneath is about religion: two runners at the 1924 Olympics, one running for God and one against English antisemitism.
Samuel Fuller fought in the division he is filming and waited thirty-five years to tell it: a squad from North Africa to Sicily to Normandy, filmed as a job that does not end.
Al Pacino spent months learning to hold his eyes unfocused and never once looks at anything: a blind retired colonel hires a prep school student for one enormous weekend in New York.
Made during the war and dedicated to the commandos and airborne troops of Britain: Laurence Olivier opens inside the Globe and then simply walks the film out into the real world.
The dining room fight took five days to shoot: Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke both took Oscars, and neither Helen Keller nor her teacher gives an inch anywhere in it.
It holds both Best Picture and the Palme d'Or, which only three other films manage: a Bronx butcher who has given up on meeting anybody meets somebody, and it runs ninety-three minutes.
Every note was sung live on set instead of lip-synced to a recording, which nobody had attempted at this scale: the camera sits inches from faces the entire time.
Miramax delayed releasing it after September 11 because the politics looked unpatriotic: Graham Greene's novel about American certainty in 1952 Saigon, with Michael Caine giving his best late performance.
Bob Dylan wrote the score, appears in it, and gave the world Knockin on Heaven's Door: MGM cut Peckinpah's version to pieces, and the restoration is a great elegiac western.
Linda Hunt is the only person ever to win an Oscar for playing someone of another sex: Jakarta in 1965, and an Australian correspondent who understands almost nothing about it.
They cast hockey players and taught them to act rather than the reverse: Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks skating his young Olympic squad into the ground before Lake Placid in 1980.
It was set for direct-to-video release until Jeff Bridges' performance changed the studio's mind: a country singer down to bowling alleys in the Southwest, and a reporter who wants his story.
Notre Dame had not allowed a film crew on campus in fifty years: a kid with no size and no grades wants to dress for one game, and everybody tells him no.
Tom Stoppard rewrote the script and you can hear him in every scene: a blocked Shakespeare finds his Juliet, and nothing else is this funny about how theater actually gets made.
Food is the only language anyone in it is allowed: a Mexican daughter forbidden to marry cooks her feelings into every dish, and everyone at the table has to eat them.
Made in Sheffield for just over two million pounds and it outgrossed everything in Britain that year: six unemployed steelworkers decide to strip for money, and the comedy comes out of genuine desperation.
Geoffrey Rush learned the Rachmaninov himself so the hands would be right: the pianist David Helfgott, filmed across three ages, and a father who cannot let a prodigy leave home.
Coppola cast almost every young male star of the coming decade before any of them were famous: Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon and Rob Lowe, filmed in Tulsa like a fever dream.
Ennio Morricone said he recognized himself in this score technically and spiritually: Jesuits build a mission above the Iguazu falls in the 1750s, and Europe decides its fate from several thousand miles away.
Marion Cotillard ages from a young street singer to the end of Piaf's life and is unrecognizable throughout: the first Best Actress win for a performance given entirely in French.
Pauline Kael called the premiere a landmark comparable to the Rite of Spring, and the reputation has since collapsed: Maria Schneider was nineteen and was not told the scene had been changed.
Spike Lee scored a basketball film with Aaron Copland and cast an NBA guard in the lead: a father is released from prison for a week to talk his son into a school.
Paul Newman got his Oscar twenty-five years late, for playing the same character a second time: Scorsese films pool halls like boxing rings, and Tom Cruise is the new hustler.
James Braddock was a broken-handed longshoreman on relief when he got a fight nobody expected him to survive: Ron Howard films the Depression as the real opponent, and Paul Giamatti steals it.
Bob Fosse spent years trying to film his own 1975 stage musical and never did: every number plays inside the head of a woman on trial, and the trial is staged as vaudeville.
Sally Field took Best Actress and the union organizing is filmed as actual work: a North Carolina textile mill, a hired organizer from New York, and a millhand who starts asking questions.
Mike Figgis shot it on 16mm for almost nothing and Nicolas Cage took the Oscar: a fired screenwriter drives to Las Vegas with no plan beyond drinking, and meets someone who asks nothing.
Stanley Kramer put real concentration camp footage into a Hollywood film in 1961 and made audiences sit with it: the trial is of judges, which makes the question about everybody.
The studio released a Christmas film in May and hid the fact from its own advertising: Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar as a department store Santa who insists he is the real one.
Eminem plays a version of himself and the battle scenes used real crowds: Curtis Hanson films Detroit like a cold documentary, and the first Oscar for a rap song came out of it.
George Stevens shot the close-ups so tight that Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor barely fit the frame: a poor young man takes a job at his rich uncle's factory and starts climbing.
Denzel Washington coaches the first integrated team at a Virginia high school in 1971: the history is tidied up considerably, and it still gets a room every single time.
Ron Howard took Best Picture for a mathematician's biography: Russell Crowe plays John Nash from Princeton prodigy to Cold War code work, and Jennifer Connelly matches him the whole way through.
Julia Roberts took the Oscar playing someone still alive and still angry about it: a legal clerk with no training assembles the case against a utility poisoning a California town.
Jamie Foxx wore prosthetics that sealed his eyes shut for up to fourteen hours a day: Ray Charles approved the performance himself, then died months before the film opened.
Randy Newman's fanfare is the sound of American sport: Robert Redford plays a player who arrives too old and too late, and the film treats baseball as an outright myth.
Forest Whitaker learned Swahili and studied Idi Amin's speeches for months: the film watches him through a young Scottish doctor who mistakes charisma for something safe to be near.
Indiana still argues about how close it is to what actually happened in 1954: Gene Hackman coaches a town of a few hundred people who care about nothing else at all.
The real Harvey Pekar appears in the film alongside the actor playing him, and they discuss it: a file clerk in Cleveland turned his ordinary life into comics, and stayed a file clerk.
They shot it in twenty-five days for five million dollars and won two acting Oscars: a Texas electrician starts importing unapproved drugs for himself and ends up supplying half the city.
William Burroughs turns up as a defrocked priest and somehow that is not the oddest thing here: Van Sant films a crew robbing pharmacies in 1971 Portland with no lecture attached.
Alfred Hitchcock disguised half the cuts so the film plays like one unbroken take: two students host a dinner party in the apartment where they have done something, and the camera never leaves.
Conrad Hall photographed suburbia like a crime scene and took the cinematography Oscar for it: Sam Mendes came from the theater and made the most contested Best Picture of its era.
Christy Brown wrote and painted with one foot, and nothing here makes him saintly: Jim Sheridan films a Dublin family that treats him as theirs, loudly and without any ceremony.
Theaters in Los Angeles and Detroit let Navy recruiters set up tables in the lobby: Tony Scott shot fighter jets in golden light and sold an entire decade on aviator sunglasses.
A French box office phenomenon built on two performances: a quadriplegic aristocrat hires a man from the projects precisely because he refuses to be careful around him, and Omar Sy took the Cesar.
The first major studio film to take AIDS seriously, aimed squarely at people who had not: a lawyer sues the firm that fired him, and Bruce Springsteen wrote the opening song.
Ron Kovic wrote the book and then the screenplay with Oliver Stone, who had been to the same war: a Long Island boy enlists in 1967, and Tom Cruise abandons his own image.
The split screen between what he expects and what happens is the best scene of its decade: a romantic comedy scrambled out of sequence that keeps insisting it is not a love story.
David O. Russell rebuilt the real Abscam sting as a comedy of terrible hair: two con artists are pressed into working for the FBI, and everyone in it is lying about something.
The director of Rocky did it again with a smaller kid: Pat Morita turns a handyman into a mentor half of America can still quote, and the training is all chores.
Before he was a poster, Ernesto Guevara was a medical student on a broken motorcycle: Walter Salles shot the actual route through South America, and the politics arrive as things seen.
Jon Favreau wrote it about his own bad year and they shot in real bars without permits: two hundred thousand dollars total, and the answering machine scene is unbearable in the best way.
Ron Howard made the best racing film by making it about two men who need each other: James Hunt and Niki Lauda in 1976, and the engines were recorded from the actual cars.
The funeral scene used around three hundred thousand extras, more than any film before or since: Richard Attenborough spent twenty years raising the money, and Ben Kingsley disappears completely.
Don Cheadle plays a hotel manager who used bribes and telephone calls to shelter over a thousand people: the 1994 Rwandan genocide, seen mostly through the absence of anyone coming to help.
Film noir's meanest specimen: Robert Aldrich turned Mickey Spillane's detective into a thug worse than the criminals he chases, and gave the genre an ending nobody in 1955 was ready for.
Made for eight million pounds and returned thirty times its budget: Colin Firth plays a duke who dreads a microphone, and Geoffrey Rush the unqualified Australian who will not defer to him.
The first silent film to take Best Picture since 1929, made by a French director nobody in Hollywood knew: a star of the silents watches sound arrive and refuses to adapt.
Adam Elliot spent five years making it, fifty-seven weeks of that shooting clay frame by frame: an eight-year-old in Melbourne writes to a middle-aged New Yorker, and they correspond for twenty years.
Disney kept live fawns at the studio so the animators could watch them move: the backgrounds are painted like Chinese landscape scrolls, and the film trusts weather and silence where other cartoons talk.
Denzel Washington took an Academy Award playing against everything audiences trusted him with: Antoine Fuqua shot in real Los Angeles neighborhoods, and a rookie narcotics officer gets one day to prove himself.
Payne stripped Jack Nicholson of every trick he has: a retired insurance actuary drives a motorhome across Nebraska writing letters to a six-year-old in Tanzania he has never met.
River Phoenix wrote the campfire scene himself and nothing else in the film touches it: Van Sant runs Shakespeare's Henry plays through two street hustlers on the Pacific Northwest road.
Meryl Streep learned Polish and German for it and delivers most of her performance in accented English she built from scratch: Brooklyn in 1947, and a survivor who will not talk about it.
J.C. Chandor shot it in seventeen days on one office floor and got Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey anyway: an investment bank works out overnight that it is holding something worthless.
Quvenzhane Wallis was five when she auditioned and became the youngest Best Actress nominee ever: a bayou community below the levee refuses to leave, filmed like a child's own mythology.
Fernando Meirelles shot Kenya the way he shot Rio, handheld and saturated: a mild British diplomat starts pulling at what his wife was investigating, and Rachel Weisz took the Oscar for playing her.
Minghella turned an unfilmable novel into the last great studio romance: a burned man in an Italian monastery remembers North Africa, and the desert photography is worth the length by itself.
A Paris cinema showing it was firebombed and Scorsese needed years to get it financed: Christ imagined as someone who could refuse, with Peter Gabriel's score sounding like the actual Middle East.
Hawaii has never looked less consoling: George Clooney plays a landowner left in charge of two daughters and a vast family trust while his wife lies unconscious after a boating accident.
Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon sang everything themselves after months of training: Johnny Cash's early years, filmed with the music treated as the argument rather than the soundtrack.
Cate Blanchett plays a Manhattan wife whose husband's fraud has taken everything, arriving in San Francisco with nothing but luggage and manner: Allen's harshest film, and she is unsparing in it.
Darabont's second Stephen King prison film runs three hours and nobody notices: a death row guard in 1935 takes delivery of the largest, quietest inmate the block has ever held.
Philip Seymour Hoffman spent months on the voice and it never sounds like an impression: Truman Capote gets the book of his life out of two condemned men, and knows what that costs.
Production shut down a year so Tom Hanks could lose fifty pounds: for an hour there is barely a word spoken, and a volleyball becomes a genuinely moving character.
Donnie Yen plays Bruce Lee's future teacher and does his own fighting throughout: Wing Chun filmed at full speed with long takes, in a Foshan under Japanese occupation.
Scorsese made a children's film in 3D to argue for film preservation: an orphan living inside a Paris railway station keeps a broken automaton his father left him, and the station watches him.
Meryl Streep rewrote her own courtroom speech because she thought the script had the mother wrong: a custody fight filmed at kitchen-table level, where the child is the only honest party.
Helen Mirren plays a reigning monarch during the worst week of her reign and makes her sympathetic without softening her: the week after Diana died, reconstructed almost hour by hour.
American television has run it every Easter for over fifty years: DeMille parted the Red Sea with gelatin, dumped water and a reversed film, and nobody has topped the sheer nerve of it.
Glenn Close and John Malkovich play two aristocrats who ruin people for entertainment: Frears films eighteenth-century seduction as a campaign with objectives, and the wit stays lethal to the end.
A widow and a man just out of a state hospital strike a deal: David O. Russell keeps the camera close enough to be uncomfortable, and Jennifer Lawrence shot it at twenty-one.
Beatty tracked down dozens of surviving witnesses and cut their interviews straight into the film: the Russian Revolution seen through two American radicals who cannot stop arguing.
Boyle built a thriller around someone who cannot move: James Franco is pinned by a boulder in a Utah canyon, and the camera keeps finding movement in a space three feet wide.
Hoffman spent a year with autistic men before shooting and the film changed what most people thought autism was: two brothers, one Buick, and a drive across America neither of them wanted.
Ford spent twenty years trying to make it and shot Ireland in Technicolor so green it looks invented: an American boxer goes home to Mayo and runs straight into everyone else's customs.
Christian Bale plays the older brother who threw away his own career and cannot stop coaching: Lowell, Massachusetts shot from inside the family, which is the hardest opponent in it.
Affleck filmed in the Charlestown blocks the story is about: bank crews in nun masks, and a robber who wants out of a neighborhood with no intention of releasing him.
Redford directed this before anyone thought he could, and it goes at what American families do not discuss: a Chicago suburb where everyone is fine, and a son in therapy who is not.
The camera drops out of the sky into a packed football stadium and does not cut for five minutes: an Argentine investigator reopens a case he could never leave alone.
James Dean died before it was finished and his last scenes had to be dubbed: three hours of Texas oil money, filmed as a family argument that runs thirty years.
Van Sant shot in the actual Castro Street storefront where Harvey Milk ran his campaigns: Sean Penn plays the first openly gay man elected to major office in California, and plays him delighted.
Tatum O'Neal was ten and is still the youngest winner of a competitive Academy Award: a Depression-era orphan running a Bible scam alongside someone who may be her father.
Nearly four hours of three people talking in Paris apartments, and nothing else defines what happened after 1968 so exactly: Eustache made it once and never made anything like it again.
Mexico City pulled it after three days and demanded it be banned, then Cannes gave Bunuel the directing prize: street children filmed without a trace of sentimentality about them.
Chazz Palminteri turned down large offers for his one-man play until someone would let him star: De Niro directed his first film out of it, about a boy with two fathers competing.
Distillers reportedly offered to buy the negative and destroy it: Wilder filmed four days of a writer's drinking with none of the period's usual comedy, and Best Picture followed.
Wilder made a POW comedy in 1953 and refused to soften the Americans in it: a barracks works out that somebody inside is trading information to the Germans, and starts looking around.
Branagh was twenty-eight and directing himself in Shakespeare, which should have been a disaster: the long single take across the mud after Agincourt is the finest shot in eighties British cinema.
The closing credits ask the audience not to reveal the ending, and audiences mostly obeyed: Wilder turns an Agatha Christie courtroom into a comedy about a barrister who is supposed to be resting.
Alfred Hitchcock's only Best Picture, collected by his producer, and the heroine never gets a name: a young bride arrives at an English house where the first wife's housekeeper still rules.
Oliver Stone meant it as an indictment and a generation took it as a recruitment ad: Gordon Gekko's speech about greed is the most misread scene in American film.
High-school football is the surface; the subject is a town with nothing else: Odessa, Texas in 1988, filmed handheld and close, where a losing season is a civic emergency.
Garrone filmed the Camorra with no glamour, no arc and mostly non-actors from the neighborhood: five strands in a Naples housing block, and organized crime looks like a bad job.
Clint Eastwood cast Hmong non-actors from open auditions across the country and put his own screen history on trial: a widowed Korean War veteran hates his new neighbors and runs out of reasons.
The tiger is almost entirely digital and you will not be able to tell: Ang Lee made the most beautiful 3D film there is, about a boy sharing a lifeboat with a predator.
Day-Lewis found a high, reedy voice for Lincoln because the historical accounts describe one: Spielberg and Tony Kushner build a whole film out of counting votes for the Thirteenth Amendment.
Reitman cast people who had actually just been laid off and filmed them reacting for real: a man who fires strangers for a living has arranged his whole existence around not landing.
Benigni argued that a comedian could make a film about the camps, and half the critics said he was wrong: a father convinces his small son the whole thing is an elaborate game.
Jennifer Lawrence was eighteen and unknown when Debra Granik cast her: a girl in the Ozarks has a week to find her father or lose the house, and nobody local will help.
Nobody who saw it at the right age has stopped quoting it: Robin Williams plays a teacher who tells boys at a 1959 boarding school that poetry is worth risking something for.
Edward Norton added thirty pounds of muscle for it and Tony Kaye tried to take his own name off the finished cut: a former neo-Nazi leaves prison and finds his brother following him.
Payne wanted monochrome and the studio fought him over it: an old man believes a sweepstakes letter and sets off walking toward Nebraska, and his son drives him rather than argue.
The kiss in the surf was scandalous enough to define the decade: Pearl Harbor sits at the end of it, and Sinatra took a role for almost nothing to save his career.
Sayles moves between past and present without a cut, panning from one decade into another: a Texas border town excavates a forty-year-old murder and finds the whole town's history attached.
American independent film became a business the week Soderbergh took the Palme d'Or at twenty-six: he made it for a million dollars, and it is four people talking about what they want.
Kirk Douglas helped break the blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo's real name on this film: a slave revolt against Rome staged at enormous scale, with Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton circling the politics.
Ron Howard shot the weightless scenes in an aircraft flying parabolas, twenty-three seconds at a time: no effects, real floating, and engineers improvising with only what the crew already had aboard.
The CIA really did produce a fake science fiction movie to get six Americans out of Tehran, and kept it classified until 1997: Affleck plays the operation completely straight.
Tarantino named his production company after this film: three young Parisians run through the Louvre in nine minutes and dance the Madison in a cafe, and Godard makes crime look like play.
Hawks bet Hemingway he could film his worst book, and hired William Faulkner to help: Bacall was nineteen, met Bogart on set, and says the whistle line straight to him.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man convicted of a bombing he had nothing to do with: the Guildford Four case, filmed while the wound in Britain was still fresh.
Comedy and heartbreak arrive in the same shot, which almost nobody has managed since: Chaplin's first feature has a tramp raising an abandoned boy, and Jackie Coogan was five years old.
Poitier refused to film in the Deep South, so Mississippi was recreated in Illinois: a Philadelphia detective is arrested for being Black in a small town and then asked to solve its murder.
Nothing else captures the pull of wanting somebody else's life this well: Minghella fills the Italian coast with sunlight and good clothes, and lets a young man's envy curdle in plain sight.
Sean Penn spent ten years persuading the family to let him film this: a graduate burns his savings and walks into the Alaskan interior, and the film neither mocks him nor canonizes him.
The chariot race took months to shoot and has never been bettered: Wyler's epic runs almost four hours and earns every minute of the nine it spends inside that arena.
