skopia
A household where everyone does exactly as they like collides with a banking family: Frank Capra won his third directing Oscar in five years, and the argument is still the one America has.
John McTiernan's remake is better than the original and knows how adult it is: a billionaire steals a Monet for entertainment, and the insurance investigator enjoys the chase as much as he does.
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 subway grate photograph is more famous than the film: Billy Wilder strands a Manhattan husband alone for the summer, Marilyn Monroe moves in upstairs, and the fantasies start immediately.
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.
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.
The World Trade Center had to be digitally erased from the skyline two weeks before release: an idiot male model, and Ben Stiller commits to the stupidity absolutely and without apology.
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.
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.
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.
Neil Simon's play handed American comedy a permanent shape: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau share an apartment badly, and the television series that followed ran for five years.
It became a national argument for months and put a phrase into the language: a married man has a weekend affair in Manhattan, and Glenn Close will not let it end there.
The elf costume is real and so is the height difference: Jon Favreau used forced perspective rather than effects, and within five years it was a Christmas standard.
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.
John Carpenter turned Manhattan into a prison on a shoestring and it still looks right: Kurt Russell plays a convict given twenty-two hours to retrieve the president, and enjoys none of it.
Spike Lee's biggest commercial hit is also his slyest: a rehearsed crew takes hostages inside a Wall Street bank, Denzel Washington negotiates, and Jodie Foster turns up representing somebody nobody can place.
Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt both won Academy Awards for a romantic comedy, which almost never happens: he plays a novelist nobody can stand, and the film does not soften him much.
Cher and Olympia Dukakis both took Oscars from it, and the screenplay took a third: John Patrick Shanley wrote a Brooklyn Italian family who argue at operatic volume and mean every word.
Tarantino took the color-coded aliases straight from this for Reservoir Dogs: four men hijack a subway car under Manhattan and Walter Matthau negotiates with them by radio, entirely deadpan.
Astaire and Rogers never danced better than in the last number here, which they shot until her feet bled: the plot is nonsense and the dancing is the argument for the whole genre.
Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall play four characters each under Rick Baker's makeup: an African prince goes to Queens specifically to be treated like nobody, and the barbershop scenes steal it.
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.
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.
Penny Marshall became the first woman to direct a film that made a hundred million dollars: Tom Hanks plays a thirteen-year-old in an adult body and never once winks at the audience.
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.
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.
Linklater cast children who could really play and let them: Jack Black gives the performance his whole career was building toward, teaching a class of ten-year-olds the history of rock.
De Palma's best film with Pacino, and it took people twenty years to notice: an ex-convict tries to go straight in 1975 New York, and the Grand Central chase is a masterclass.
A comedy built around a Nazi musical, released twenty-three years after the war: Brooks designed Springtime for Hitler to be unwatchable, and it remains the funniest sequence of the decade.
Natalie Portman was twelve and had never acted: Besson pairs her with a hitman who waters his houseplant like a dependent, and the film has been argued about ever since.
Frank Serpico was a real New York cop who would not take an envelope: Lumet films departmental corruption as an ordinary daily fact, and Pacino plays stubbornness as an entire personality.
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.
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.
Allen's most serious film, and his only one that asks whether anyone is watching at all: a respected doctor is cornered by a woman he cannot pay off.
Petit walked a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974 and Marsh tells it as a heist: the planning, the break-in, and forty-five minutes in the air.
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.
Willis O'Brien animated it a frame at a time and audiences in 1933 had never seen anything like it: the ape on that building is known to people who never watched it.
It should not work at all and it works completely: three academics start a small business catching ghosts in New York, and Murray ad-libs freely on top of the script.
Hoffman said the part permanently changed how he saw women, and what he learned is worked out here as farce: an unemployable actor becomes a soap opera star.
Every romantic comedy since has been trying to write this conversation: two people argue for twelve years about whether men and women can be friends, and Ephron's dialogue wins.
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.
Romeo and Juliet moved to two New York gangs, and the dancing spills out of the theater into real streets: nothing on film snaps like Robbins's choreography.
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.
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.
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.
It made the car chase in Bullitt look choreographed: this one was shot without permits, at ninety miles an hour, through real Brooklyn traffic that nobody had cleared.
It opens with the best love letter any city has received: Gershwin over black and white Manhattan, and then two hours of people ruining their lives beautifully.
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.
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.
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.
Horror discovered it did not need monsters: Polanski built two hours out of a young wife nobody believes, and the dread comes entirely from politeness and closed doors.
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.
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.
A comedy that breaks your heart and stays funny while doing it: Wilder took the sourest possible subject, a man lending his bed to his bosses, and made it warm.
The romantic comedy has never recovered from it: Allen talks to the camera, walks into his own memories, drops subtitles over small talk, and breaks every rule the form had.
Adults started arguing about superhero films because of this one: Ledger's Joker is so unnerving that the Academy gave a posthumous Oscar to a man in clown makeup.
Suspense has never been constructed more purely, and the real subject is the audience: Hitchcock traps you in one room with a man who cannot stop watching his neighbors.
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.
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.
