skopia
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You will not believe it is true and it is: two climbers in the Andes, one broken leg, and a decision that neither man has ever fully stopped explaining.
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.
Suspense does not get more physical than this: four desperate men drive truckloads of nitroglycerin over mountain roads, and every rut in the surface becomes an ordeal.
Hitchcock's most grown-up film, and the one where the suspense is entirely about feeling: a woman is sent to seduce a Nazi by the man who loves her.
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.