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.
The Chinese government let Bertolucci shoot inside the Forbidden City, the first Western production ever allowed in: a child emperor is crowned before thousands and then history keeps rearranging him.
Michael Mann's most romantic film ends with twelve near-wordless minutes carried entirely by the score: Daniel Day-Lewis learned to live off the land for it, and the frontier looks genuinely unmapped.
Haing Ngor had never acted in his life and won an Academy Award for this: Roland Joffe films the fall of Phnom Penh through an American reporter and the Cambodian colleague beside him.
Boyle shot Mumbai on small digital cameras in real streets and Rahman's score carried it around the world: a contestant from the slums is detained for cheating, and each question opens a memory.
Spielberg's lightest film runs on charm and a great John Williams theme: a teenager talks his way into a pilot's uniform and a doctor's coat, with an FBI agent always one hotel behind.
Mickey Rourke had been out of serious work for fifteen years and walked straight back into this: a broken-down wrestler working autograph shows in New Jersey, filmed like a documentary from behind.
The strangest thing in David Lynch's filmography is this: a G-rated Disney picture in which an old man drives a riding lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to reach his estranged brother.
Scorsese's The Departed is a remake of this, and the Hong Kong original is fifty minutes tighter: two moles assigned to find each other, and a plot that never stops to explain itself.
The Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph Welch plays the judge and Duke Ellington wrote the score: a murder trial turning on an alleged rape, argued in language so frank that 1959 audiences were shocked.
The Nazis sent brownshirts to disrupt its German screenings and banned it outright once in power: the first great sound film about war, told entirely from inside a German schoolboys' trench.
New Hollywood found its proof here: two bikers ride east on drug money, a four-hundred-thousand-dollar film outgrossed studio pictures, and the men who had run the studios for forty years lost the argument.
The diner scene has outlived the film's whole era: a classical pianist walked away from his family to work oil rigs, and nobody here will explain him or forgive him.
Capra built the most stirring film ever made out of parliamentary procedure: an amateur senator holds the floor with nothing but his voice and the rulebook, and Washington's press corps hated it.
Mamet wrote it and Morricone scored it: De Palma stages a shootout on a station staircase in open tribute to Battleship Potemkin, and turns Prohibition Chicago into pure American myth.
Nobody who has seen the last twenty minutes forgets them: Aronofsky films four people chasing different highs around Coney Island in split screen and body-mounted cameras, with Clint Mansell's string theme underneath.
The film where Wes Anderson's dollhouse precision finally serves real grief: Gene Hackman plays a father who lies his way back into a house full of ruined prodigies.
Godard at his most beautiful and least patient: Belmondo walks out of a party and drives south with Anna Karina, and the film keeps dissolving into color, quotation and pure play.
A film that changed federal law: the outcry over Stone's conspiracy case pushed Congress to pass the JFK Records Act, and the editing that sells it remains the most aggressive in American film.
The outdoors has never felt this hostile on film: Boorman shot in sequence and made his actors run the whitewater themselves, and a weekend canoe trip turns into something much older.
Eastwood's bleakest film: three boys from one Boston block grow into three men, and a murder pulls them back to the afternoon that separated them, with no interest in comforting anyone.
Greengrass cast real air-traffic controllers and military officers as themselves, and shot in real time: the least exploitative film about September 11 because it refuses every note of uplift.
Wes Anderson's style arrives fully formed here, and so does the melancholy Bill Murray everyone loves: a prep-school boy who runs every club and fails every class declares war on a millionaire.
A film about a spreadsheet that plays like a thriller: Sorkin and Zaillian turn Billy Beane's 2002 Oakland roster into an argument between a broke general manager and every scout in his building.
The best-acted film about work ever made: Mamet's salesmen speak in a rhythm nobody actually uses, and an ensemble of stars took deep pay cuts for the chance to say the lines.
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler as a man rather than a symbol, and Germany argued about the film for a year: the last twelve days in the bunker, filmed without comment or consolation.
Schnabel put the camera inside a paralyzed man's one working eye and left it there: the memoir it comes from was dictated letter by letter, by blinking, and the film feels weightless anyway.
Morricone wrote the theme that reduces grown men to tears: a Sicilian boy grows up in a village projection booth, and the subject underneath is what movies do to a life.
Mexican cinema arrived on the world stage with this: Inarritu's first film braids three Mexico City lives around a single car crash and refuses to soften any of them.
The Civil War film that finally noticed who else was fighting it: the 54th Massachusetts fights for boots, for pay equal to white soldiers, and for permission to be used at all.
Singleton came straight out of USC film school and filmed the neighborhood he grew up in: South Central rendered as a place where a father raising his son is itself a full-time job.
Shakespeare's Macbeth moved to sixteenth-century Japan with every line of the poetry gone: Kurosawa substitutes fog, Noh masks worn as faces, and a forest that seems to be watching the castle.
Herzog dragged a 320-ton steamship over a mountain with no models and no effects: his hero wants an opera house in the Amazon, and the production came to resemble the obsession it filmed.
That a major studio released this in 1940 is still hard to believe: Ford films an Oklahoma family driven west by the banks, and Gregg Toland lights the migrant camps like documentary photographs.
Captivity has never looked like this much fun: Sturges rebuilt a real 1944 breakout from a German camp into tunnel engineering, forged papers and men who refuse to sit still.
Vigo was dying at twenty-nine when he finished it and the studio hacked it apart anyway: restored, it is the most sensual thing ever filmed about being newly married on a working barge.
Stallone wrote it himself and would not sell the script unless he could star: a club fighter from Philadelphia is handed a title shot as a publicity stunt, and takes it completely seriously.
No film has put an audience inside a wooden warship this completely: Weir's frigate is a working machine of rope and rank, chasing a faster enemy across the bottom of the world.
Aronofsky filmed ballet as body horror and somehow made it work: a dancer's discipline turns on her, and Natalie Portman trained for a year to make it convincing.
Three hours, nine storylines, and a last act nobody sees coming: Anderson made the most ambitious American film of the nineties and dared it to collapse under itself.
The ending changed how an entire generation watched films, and it is genuinely unguessable: a child psychologist takes on a boy who is frightened of something very specific.
It looks and sounds like nothing else from its decade: neon Los Angeles, a synth score, a driver who barely speaks, and sudden violence that arrives without warning.
Eastwood made two films about the same battle, and the Japanese one is the better: shot almost entirely in Japanese, with a general nobody in America had heard of.
Soderbergh color-codes three separate drug-war stories so you always know which one you are in, then declines to let any of them resolve into a tidy lesson.
Two married people meet by chance in a railway station and keep meeting, and what they hold back is what destroys audiences: Lean does it in glances and Rachmaninov.
Godard put Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang together in a story about a marriage falling apart on a Capri terrace: the most beautiful thing he ever shot.
Eastwood spends an hour making you love a boxing underdog story and then does something else entirely: nothing in American film is tougher than where it ends up.
Fellini remembering his own seaside town under Mussolini and admitting he is embroidering it: no plot at all, just a year of weather, sex, food and fascism.
The Coens wrote it in the voice of a 1930s crime novel and never break character once: a hat blowing through woods is the famous image, and nobody explains it.
Burton and Taylor were married and it shows in every line: a history professor and his wife drink through one night and take each other apart in front of guests.
The teenager as a subject starts here: James Dean in a red jacket, a knife fight at an observatory, and parents who have no idea what is happening.
Few films are this hard to endure: a kindergarten teacher is accused of something he did not do, and Vinterberg shows how fast a village makes up its mind.
Cassavetes mortgaged his house to finance it, and Gena Rowlands gives the most exposed performance in American film: a marriage where love and damage cannot be separated.
Heaven is monochrome and earth is in Technicolor, which is the whole joke: a pilot bails out without a parachute and then has to argue for his life.
A small girl in Franco's Spain sees Frankenstein at a traveling cinema and decides the monster is real: almost nothing is said, and the silence is the point.
Nobody has filmed a game better: Newman's pool hustler wants to be great and cannot get out of his own way, and the smoke never leaves the room.
France spent a year arguing over it and the government screened it for ministers: twenty-four hours with three young men in a Paris suburb after a riot.
Churchill tried to stop it in production and then to bar it from export, convinced it made the British Army look ridiculous: Powell and Pressburger made it anyway.
It answers the only question that matters about the space race, which is why anyone would climb in: test pilots, astronauts, and the real Chuck Yeager tending bar in a cameo.
Wyler cast a veteran who had lost both hands to play a veteran who had lost both hands, and audiences in 1946 recognized their own living rooms.
Two unknown actors in their twenties wrote it for themselves and it worked: a janitor at MIT can solve anything except himself, and Robin Williams sits opposite him.
Rossellini shot it in the streets months after the Germans pulled out, on mismatched surplus stock scrounged from an army supplier: this is where Italian neorealism arrives.
For twelve years no film made more money anywhere on earth: Cameron built the ship, sank it more or less in real time, and made a generation cry in public.
Malick came back after twenty years and made a war film about grass, light and the voices in men's heads: Guadalcanal, filmed as though the island were the subject.
People still argue about whether it is sentimental or sly, and both readings hold: a simple man walks through forty years of American history without ever noticing.
The closest anyone has come to remaking La Dolce Vita and surviving it: an aging Roman journalist drifts through parties and ruins, and the city has never looked better.
The only X-rated film that ever took Best Picture: a Texas hustler and an ailing con man share a condemned New York apartment, and the friendship is the whole thing.
Tarantino turned American slavery into a spaghetti western and got away with it: a freed slave rides with a German bounty hunter, and the dialogue never stops crackling.
The Romanian New Wave announced itself with this: an illegal abortion arranged across one day in 1987, filmed in long static takes that give you nowhere to look.
The only James Dean performance released while he was still alive: Steinbeck's Cain and Abel moved to a California lettuce valley, and Dean improvises his way through it.
The Coens' most personal film and their least forgiving: a Minnesota physics professor's life comes apart for no reason at all, and nobody in it will explain anything.
Chloe Zhao cast a real rodeo rider and his real family to play themselves: the line between documentary and fiction never appears, and neither does a false note.
Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and made this to correct everyone else's version: no glamour, no clarity, and a platoon that splits between two sergeants and stays split.
It made a heroin film feel like a night out without ever pretending the squalor was not there: Boyle cut the whole thing to a soundtrack that never sits still.
A road trip with a narrator who keeps interrupting to tell you things the characters will never know: Cuaron slips a portrait of Mexico under a teenage sex comedy.
Scorsese found his whole method here at thirty: Little Italy, Catholic guilt, a handheld camera and a jukebox that never stops, most of it shot in Los Angeles.
Adjusted for inflation no film has ever earned more, and it is still telling the old South's version of itself: enormous, ravishing, and not to be trusted.
Reichardt makes the quietest films in American cinema, and this one is her warmest: two men on the Oregon frontier, one borrowed cow, and one very small crime.
Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto as a child and waited sixty years to film any of it: a pianist left alone in the ruins of Warsaw, and no heroism anywhere.
Bogdanovich insisted on monochrome in 1971, when absolutely nobody did that: a Texas town running out of reasons to exist, and the teenagers running out along with it.
American English took a line about failure to communicate from it, and Newman his best role: a man who will not be broken, on a chain gang that keeps trying.
Three hours of pure excess that never once slow down: Scorsese was seventy-one years old, and it moves faster than films made by directors a third his age.
Bunuel's most seductive film, and the role Deneuve never quite escaped: a bored bourgeois wife takes afternoon work in a brothel, and her fantasies blur in without warning.
It dragged the Roman epic back after thirty-five years of dormancy: Russell Crowe's fury is the whole engine, and the arena sequences still deliver everything they promise.
The Coens made the saddest film about failure that anyone has managed to make funny: a folk singer plays beautifully, sleeps on couches, and gets absolutely nowhere at all.
The film everyone should see once and nobody wants to see twice: Haneke barely leaves one Paris apartment while a marriage of decades reaches its last stretch.
Altman's method arrives here fully formed: twenty-four characters, overlapping microphones, and five days of country music and politics that add up to a portrait of the whole country.
Still the highest grossing hand-drawn film ever made: Disney sent a young cub into exile with a Shakespeare plot, and the opening sunrise raises the hair every time.
Psychiatrists named a delusion after it: a man begins to suspect his whole town is a set and everyone in his life is paid, and 1998 had no idea.
It was booed off the screen at Cannes and won a prize at the same festival: Antonioni made drift and boredom into subjects, and cinema has been arguing since.
Malick's first film, and the model for every young couple on a killing spree since: the girl narrates it in the flat voice of a magazine horoscope.
The Soviets shelved it for years and cut it repeatedly: Tarkovsky follows an icon painter through a brutal Russia, and the bell casting sequence justifies the whole three hours.
Herzog shot it for almost nothing on a real Amazon river with a lead actor he fought with constantly: Kinski's stare and a shrinking raft do everything.
Giulietta Masina gives the performance that everyone remembers from Fellini: a Roman streetwalker keeps hoping harder than her luck deserves, and the film never once pities her.
France's greatest film, and its Jewish designer and composer worked in hiding under German occupation: three hours of theater, mime and love among people who cannot afford it.
The most quietly frightening film anyone has made about guilt: videotapes of a family's own front door start arriving, and Haneke cares far more about what nobody says.
It won the Palme d'Or and audiences walked out of it: Malick set a 1950s Texas boyhood against the formation of the universe and left the connections to you.
It changed what a mainstream American film could be about: Lee filmed twenty years of two men unable to say what they are, almost entirely in silence.
Godard said it contained the world in an hour and a half: a donkey passes from owner to owner, and Bresson makes cruelty and grace arrive without warning.
New Hollywood starts here: the violence was unlike anything American films had shown, the Newsweek critic who panned it printed a retraction a week later, and the studio system collapsed.
Anderson was twenty-seven and announced himself completely: a San Fernando Valley porn crew who treat each other like family, filmed with far more warmth than the subject suggests.
Bergman cast the founding father of Swedish cinema as an old man reckoning with his own coldness: a drive across the country, punctuated by dreams that keep ambushing him.
The four-minute marriage montage is the most devastating thing Pixar has ever done, and it is wordless: after that, an old man flies his house away on balloons.
It sent a whole generation out to buy Mozart records: Salieri narrates his own jealousy from an asylum, and the music keeps making his case better than he can.
It took the very first competitive foreign language Academy Award, and Giulietta Masina is the reason: her face does more with one shrug than most performances manage in full.
Both armies and revolutionaries have studied it as a manual: Pontecorvo staged the Algerian insurgency so plainly that audiences have always mistaken parts of it for newsreel footage.
American distributors cut ninety minutes out of it and destroyed the reviews: restored to full length, Leone's fifty-year gangster elegy drifts between decades like an opium dream.
Varda was the one woman the New Wave could not leave out, and this is her breakthrough: ninety minutes of a singer walking Paris, waiting on news.
Spielberg made the rare first-contact film that treats the aliens as something to hope for: an ordinary man starts building a mountain in his living room and cannot say why.
Cimino spends a whole first act on a steel town and a wedding, so that when the war arrives it lands on people you already know by name.
The third film is the one that hurts: Linklater and his two actors let nine more years pass, then take it somewhere the first two politely refused to go.
Pacino turned a real 1972 Brooklyn robbery into the most electric performance of the seventies: a bank job collapses in ten minutes and becomes a street carnival.
Scorsese has been watching it since childhood and has never stopped: Powell and Pressburger put a ballet on screen in Technicolor so saturated that it plays like a fever.
Shot in nineteen days on three million dollars, and cut like a thriller: a drummer, a teacher who throws chairs, and the question of what greatness costs.
Huston won two Oscars for it and directed his own father to a third: three men look for gold in Mexico and the heat does the rest.
Bergman meant it as his farewell to cinema and made it the warmest thing he ever did: five hours in its full version, of Christmas light, ghosts, cruelty and childhood.
Kiarostami blurred documentary and fiction so completely that nobody has quite untangled it since: a man caught impersonating a director, with everyone involved playing themselves on camera.
Mizoguchi's ghost story is the one other directors mention when asked what changed them: two peasants chase money through a civil war, and the crossing through fog is unearthly.
No American film has been braver about refusing to resolve: one Brooklyn block on the hottest day of the year, and Lee will not tell you who was right.
Almost nothing happens and it stays with people for years: jet lag, neon, a Tokyo hotel bar, and two people awake at the wrong hours keeping each other company.
Scorsese remade a Hong Kong thriller and made it entirely his own: a cop inside the mob, a mobster inside the police, and a pitch that never once relaxes.
Kobayashi took the samurai film apart from the inside: an old warrior asks to die in a lord's courtyard, and what he says first dismantles the entire code of honor.
Denis turned Melville's Billy Budd into something closer to dance than to drama: Foreign Legionnaires drilling in the Djibouti heat, all bodies and sun and things nobody will say.
Gregory Peck gave America the father it wanted to believe in: a small-town lawyer defends a Black man in a case the town has already decided, seen through his daughter's eyes.
Lean built an epic about the seduction of a job well done: a British colonel in a Japanese prison camp finds a strange satisfaction in building their bridge properly.
Nothing else in cinema moves this slowly and holds this completely: Tarkovsky walks three men into a forbidden zone for nearly three hours, and almost nothing happens.
No image from any film has been parodied more: a knight plays chess with Death on a beach, and Bergman is completely serious about the question underneath it.
The first half is the most quoted boot camp ever filmed: Kubrick found a real Marine drill instructor, let him write half his own material, and made basic training terrifying.
Modern film editing starts here, and partly by accident: Godard shortened an overlong picture by cutting inside his own shots, and the jump cut has been legal ever since.
The first Best Picture from a Black director, and the least evasive film ever made about American slavery: McQueen holds shots long past comfort and refuses to look away.
It made an entire country look at its own surveillance state: a Stasi officer listens in on a playwright's apartment, and the last line of the film lands like a blow.
France stayed uncomfortable enough to keep it out of cinemas for eighteen years: Kubrick tracked the camera down the trenches and staged an injustice that still makes people furious.
Three of its four leads won Academy Awards and the fourth was Brando: this is where screen acting stopped being theatrical and started being something else entirely.
Cinematographers still study every frame: Kubrick lit interiors by candlelight alone using lenses built for NASA, and the result looks like walking through a gallery of paintings.
One life told in three chapters by three different actors, and shot in blues and purples so tender the film almost hums: nothing about it looks like anything else.
Nobody recommends this one lightly: Takahata put two children through the last months of the war in Japan, and being animated makes it harder to bear, not easier.
The first Iranian film to win the foreign language Oscar: Farhadi built a moral maze where every person is partly right, and you will change sides several times.
Leone took it wholesale for A Fistful of Dollars and Toho forced a settlement out of court: Kurosawa's samurai playing two gangs against each other is the template everyone still uses.
Nothing else captures an ordinary family like this: Yang holds three generations of a Taipei household in one frame, and the small boy photographing people's backs explains the whole method.
Kurosawa's answer to how a life should be spent: a bureaucrat gets one piece of terrible news and starts spending what is left deliberately, which will change how you see your job.
A generation was told their parents were wrong and believed it: Nichols made aimlessness look cinematic, and the soundtrack put Simon and Garfunkel into every house in America.
Nobody had tried this before: Linklater filmed the same cast a few days a year for twelve years, so you watch a real child turn into a real adult.
Indian cinema arrived in the world with this: Ray shot it on weekends with a first-time crew and no money, and the children seeing a train is pure wonder.
More has been written about this film than almost any other: Bergman put two women on an island until their faces merged, and left everyone to explain what happened.
Sciamma made a love story with almost no men in it and built the entire thing out of glances, firelight and the things two people decline to say.
No other war film can follow it: Klimov put a boy's face through the destruction of Belarus and let it age visibly, and nobody watches it twice lightly.
Ozu made the same film over and over and this is the most perfect version: a daughter who will not marry, a father who will not say what he wants, and one vase.
The French New Wave announces itself: Truffaut put his own miserable childhood on screen at twenty-seven, and the last shot changed what an ending was allowed to do.
The sharpest script ever written about ambition: an aging star takes in an adoring young fan, and theater people have been quoting the lines for three-quarters of a century.
It won the only Academy Award ever given for Unique and Artistic Picture: Murnau's camera never stops moving, and the film is astonishing to look at a century on.
Twenty-five years of argument have still not settled what it is actually saying: Fincher made consumer despair look genuinely thrilling, which is either the joke or the problem.
Kubrick pulled it from British cinemas himself after the reaction, and it stayed unavailable there for twenty-seven years: a state that enforces goodness, an invented slang, imagery nobody forgets.
The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.
Kurosawa was seventy-five and his eyesight was failing when he made it: King Lear moved to feudal Japan, with a great battle that plays to music and nothing else.
No screen performance has been called greater, and its actress never made another film: Dreyer shot Renee Falconetti's face in close-up, and his original cut went missing for fifty years.
Nothing beats it as a filmed argument, and it happens in a single room: eleven jurors want to go home, one will not, and the temperature keeps rising.
Banned in 1939, booed at its premiere, then in the top ten of every Sight and Sound poll for sixty years: Renoir turned a hunting party into a diagnosis of a doomed society.
Highest grossing film in the world for a decade, and it earns every cent: Spielberg shot at child height so the adults are legs and voices, and wrecks entire cinemas.
Nothing else moves quite like it: Meirelles cast the favela itself, cut two hours into what feels like twenty minutes, and took a Brazilian crime film to four Oscar nominations.
It put the word paparazzi into every language on earth: Fellini drifts through seven Roman nights of parties and beautiful exhaustion, and the fountain at dawn became permanent.
The first film not in English to win Best Picture: Bong turned class rage into something so entertaining that the whole world watched it and then argued about what it meant.
Screen acting changed with Brando in the back of that taxi: Kazan made the film to justify naming names, which gives the whole thing an uncomfortable heat.
Serial killer films begin here: Lang used sound as a weapon in his first talkie, gave the murderer a whistled tune, and turned a whole city into a trap.
It lost money in cinemas and has sat at the top of IMDb's ranking since 2008: a prison friendship, told patiently, that pays off better than almost anything.
A commercial failure that decades of Christmas television turned into a national ritual: it is far darker than its reputation, and the ending earns every tear it gets.
Nicholson against Nurse Ratched is the great screen battle of wills: a convict fakes insanity to serve his time in a hospital, and finds the ward already has a ruler.
Kurosawa gave the language a word for irreconcilable testimony and opened Japanese cinema to the world: four accounts of one killing, none of which can be squared with another.
Lynch built a Hollywood that runs entirely on dream logic and trusted the audience to assemble it: the whole thing feels like a half-remembered dream, and people keep returning.
Italian neorealism starts with this, and it still guts people: De Sica cast a factory worker as his lead and found a whole society inside one stolen bicycle.
Fellini could not think of a film to make, so he made one about that: the result is a circus of memory and fantasy that every artist since has borrowed from.
Longing has never been filmed better than this: Wong Kar-wai gets more out of a stairwell and one repeated waltz than most directors manage with an entire script.
Day-Lewis builds an American monster out of oil and resentment, and Jonny Greenwood's score scrapes at the nerves for two and a half hours without once letting up.
Screenwriters still take this one apart scene by scene to see how it works: Towne and Polanski built a mystery about stolen water that ends without a shred of mercy.
Scorsese shot boxing as penance rather than sport, and audiences come out feeling bruised: De Niro's jealousy destroys everyone near him, in the blackest black and white imaginable.
Travis Bickle escaped the picture and entered the language: Scorsese and De Niro made a lonely man's interior so exact that it stopped being about one man at all.
Every gangster film of the last thirty years is arguing with this one: Scorsese made the life so intoxicating for an hour that the comedown lands like a physical event.
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
Proof that a studio picture thrown together in a hurry can outlive everything around it: eighty years on, the lines are still in the language and the romance still lands.
More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
The quiet masterpiece of ordinary life: Ozu finds the ache of a whole century in parents visiting children who have no time for them, and it will find you too.
Every film about assembling a team for one last job descends from this one: Kurosawa makes seven men matter, then stages a battle in the mud nobody has equaled.
Welles was twenty-five and had never directed a feature before: he built a portrait of a man whose whole life nobody around him can add up, and changed everything.
The summit of the American crime film: Coppola turned an immigrant family's rise and rot into the country's own epic, and made damnation look like a coronation.
