
Brokeback Mountain
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.

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.

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.

Foxx sang the Ray Charles hook fresh from his Oscar for playing him, and it held number one ten weeks.

Cee-Lo cut the vocal in one take over a 1968 spaghetti western sample. Nine weeks at UK number one.
Maseo's cackle, Danger Mouse at the desk, and a song Albarn dreamed up driving past California windmills toward Coachella.

Judt carries Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west in one story, showing a continent that rebuilt itself by forgetting the war and then defined itself by remembering it.
A wordless chorus half of indie rock then copied, and Bowie sang it onstage with the band in 2005.

Fourteen weeks at number one, two soul interpolations underneath, and Carey singing softly rather than belting.

Stevens announced he would make one of these for all fifty states, then made two and stopped. One song is about John Wayne Gacy.

Kanye brought in Jon Brion, a film composer who had never worked on a rap record, and put a string section behind everything.

The hemisphere Columbus reached held cities larger than Paris, an Amazon farmed into orchard, and forests burned into pasture on purpose. What later settlers took for wilderness was a continent emptied by epidemics.

Sleigh bells, trumpets and a choir stacked into one crescendo, and Stevens cut five different versions of it.

A hundred hours of video shot by a man who camped among Alaskan grizzlies, edited by Werner Herzog, who disagrees with him completely: two views of nature, arguing across the cut.

An Ini Kamoze sample under it, Stephen Marley at the desk, and verses answering the postcard version of Jamaica.

Serious superhero films begin here: Nolan built the car for real, kept Gotham plausible, and treated a man in a bat costume as a psychological problem rather than a joke.