The Best War Film Ever Made: "Come And See"

Elem Klimov's "Come And See"
By Cole Smithey

Stalingrad-born Elem Klimov's "Come and See" is an undiluted expression of cinematic poetry in the service of an unspeakably turbulent, fact-based, anti-war narrative about the 628 Belarusian villages burnt to the ground along with their inhabitants by the Nazis. The film is a disorienting vision of a genocide hell on Earth that would pale Hieronymus Bosch's most gruesome compositions. An electricity-buzzing stench of death and social decay hangs over the picture's constant volley between neo-realistic, formal, and documentary styles that Klimov uses to convert as wide a range of specific wartime experience as possible. The director takes the viewer on a quicksilver descent into an existential madness of war through the eyes of his 14-year-old peasant protagonist Florya. Alexei Kravchenko's extraordinary performance as the film's subjective guide encompasses a lifetime of suffering over a period of a few brutal days of the Nazi invasion. 

Born into a communist family on July 9, 1933, Elem Klimov's parents constructed his first name as an acronym of Engels, Lenin, and Marx. In his 70 years, Elem Klimov made only five films: "Welcome, or No Trespassing" (1964), "The Adventures of a Dentist" (1965), "Agony" (1975) and "Farewell" (1981). "Come and See" was his astounding final picture that would establish Klimov as a storyteller of untold narrative depth and intuitive sensitivity. For the film, Klimov fashioned a detailed visual vernacular of dialectic form. The surreal narrative format expresses the overwhelming heartbreak of war. By the end, we witness a young boy's soul so ravaged by the war's horrors that he resembles an old man with only one mission in life.

When Klimov sat down to write the script with his collaborator Ales Adamovich, the ardently intellectual director crafted an acutely personal story about a boy who goes to fight against Nazi troops occupying his native Belarus in 1943, after joining up with a ragtag army of partisan soldiers taking shelter in the middle of a rugged wooded area. Objectively, "Come and See" is Elem Klimov's attempt to cinematically compartmentalize and contextualize his own wartime experiences as a child escaping the battle of Stalingrad, in the company of his mother and younger brother, by raft across the Volga while the city and river burned to the ground behind them.

Klimov said of the indelible event in relation to "Come and See," "Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."

The director asserts the story's peculiar social parameters at the start with an old man holding a horse whip while calling for two boys guilty of incessantly "digging."

"Playing a game? Digging? Well, go on digging you little bastards," the old man shouts at the boys.

From the distance arrives what seems to be a short, stout military officer carrying a stick and frothing at the mouth with recriminations for the old man that he approaches with measured steps. However, we soon realize that the apparent military officer is in fact one of the boys, speaking in a raspy adult voice and playing the part of a menacing armed forces commander. Exasperated, the old man gets on his horse and cart, telling his defiant son that if he won't listen to his father then he'll "listen to the cane." Klimov uses the vision of a young boy appearing as an old man to bookend the story as a symptom of the war's aging effect on its survivors. In the end, it will be the once fresh-faced Florya who has switched places with his friend whose fate falls to Nazi soldiers. The impersonating child deliberately chooses to comport himself as a veteran soldier, while Florya will have his youth stolen from him.

Florya's smaller companion walks along the beach to find Florya laughing manically at nothing in particular while crouched down in bushes. We are introduced to Florya as a child not in control of his behavior. There's already some madness present in his maniacal laughter. Florya is subordinate to his friend, who orders Florya to get back to work "digging." We know already that everything is not right.

Klimov employs a dynamic metaphor of the boys attempting to gain escape from the outside world by digging deeper into the earth. The oddly naturalistic scene exerts a primal human motivation at odds with noisy war planes that pass overhead.

Buried in the sand up to his shoulders, Florya struggles with both arms to pull something from under the sand as if he's being swallowed by an unseen monster attempting to drag him to the depths of hell. After much struggle, Florya excitedly extracts a prized rifle that he believes will give him entree into joining a partisan troop so that he can help battle Hitler's rampaging soldiers.     

A German recon war plane flies overhead to the sound of German radio-broadcast propaganda. Klimov will reuse the same archive footage of the bomber plane many times over during the course of the film to achieve a droning visual effect of an authentic historical reference that contributes to an unrelenting rhythm of sudden violence, and brutal spatial dilemmas. Already Florya's journey is a person that we can relate to only with total involuntary commitment.

The endemic breakdown of family and society is confirmed in the next scene where Florya's frantic mother pleas directly to Klimov's empathetic camera for her son to take the axe, that she places in his hands, to kill her along with her two twin girls rather than abandon the family to go fight in the war. The woman is disconsolate as she beats Florya with a bundle of rope, refusing to allow her son to leave. But Florya is immune to his mother's panic, and winks at his little sisters while he holds the axe, playing a secret game with his innocent sisters. Two protestant soldiers peer through the family's window before entering the home to take Florya to join a nearby regiment of soldiers camped in the middle of a rugged forest. It is the last time that we will feel any sense of home or normal life in the film. The soldiers' politeness turns abruptly to that of menacing authority figures taking Florya with them as a kind of willing prisoner.

In the military camp, Florya meets a lovely but deranged teenaged girl named Glasha (disconcertingly played by Olga Mironova) whose wild-eyed stare of steel-gray eyes makes her as much of a monster as a would-be love interest for Florya to gravitate toward. That Glasha, dressed in a pretty green party dress, is carrying on some kind of affair with the troop's military chief only momentarily distracts from the extent of her mental instability inasmuch as we subjectively bestow sanity to the Partisan group's stern military leader. There's contagious insanity in the air that seems to have infllitrated every character that Klimov introduces.

The film's first act closes with a group photograph of the troop that provides a formal tableau of thick narrative subtext--witness a wounded soldier bandaged like a mummy and a black female cow with "Eat me before the Germans do," written in white on its side.

Upon their departure, the ragtag troop abandons the young boy that the military chief has quietly deemed unsuitable for the demands of battle. Florya's inconsolable anguish at being deserted by his surrogate family boils to a breaking point when he accidentally steps on a nest of eggs, killing the tiny birds in a glimpse of nature made horribly grotesque by his unavoidable human brutality. It's this violent and immediate style of detailed poetic storytelling that grips you and pulls at your senses with an inescapable urgency of survival. Klimov's precise use of graphic symbolism will steadily increase to a fever pitch in the film's stunning post modern climax where a backward moving collage attempts to collapse the Pandora's box of Hitler and the war that determines Florya's survival.

Glasha is also abandoned by the soldiers, and the two adolescent refugees cry into each others' eyes in a heartbreaking expression of raw emotion that Klimov captures with extended fourth-wall-breaking close-ups that intuitively editorialize on their fragile mental states. Florya recognizes Glasha's strange psychosis, but is unable to evade her spell. The pity that the soldiers took on the pair by leaving them behind backfires when a rash of falling German artillery shells permanently rob Florya of his hearing. The bombings are especially shocking for their violent realism that arrives suddenly with large swaths of forest ripped apart by earth-quaking explosions accompanied by a high-pitched ringing that destroys Florya's hearing and wrecks his conscious mind.  

Klimov utilizes Florya's sensory deprivation with a twisted soundscape that indoctrinates us into Florya's pain and panic via a claustrophobic sonic space that increases our sense of being badly wounded. The next morning, Florya and Glasha frolic in the rain in a brief reverie where they forget the impending danger that awaits them. Under the muted sounds of sped up radio music, Glasha does a Charleston-styled flapper dance atop Florya's rain-soaked suitcase. There's a dreamlike quality to the couple's short lived musical respite before an outlandish pelican-type bird conveys an unnerving omen of unexplained incidents to follow. Wild animal life will play an important part of the image system filigree that Klimov uses to regularly connect the story to its ecological foundation in the landscape of Belarusia. 

Klimov is commanding in his willingness to create abstract visual motifs, as when Florya returns to his mother's house with Glasha and peers down into a well while looking for his family. We view Florya through the back end of an organic cinematic telescope through which he sees himself. What Florya doesn't see are the mangled bloody bodies of his family and neighbors piled high against the backside of what was once his family's home. Glasha looks back and sees the carnage as they walk away from the area, but worriedly refrains from alerting Florya to the horror just behind them.

Florya runs into a thick muddy swamp that he is compelled to cross, believing that his family are hiding on a small island that he must trudge through quicksand-like mud to get to. Glasha follows Florya into the mud and holds onto the back of his coat as they painfully make their way through the thick brown sludge. Klimov layers on subdued layers of musical textures and ambient sound to weave a theme of self-flagellation, as assisted by Belarusia's uncontrolled topography that threatens to swallow up our protagonist and his female companion.

Glasha betrays Florya the first chance she gets when a Belarusian peasant helps her escape the mud. The traumatized Glasha loudly explains that Florya's family was killed, and that now he is deaf and out of his mind. Through his muted hearing, Florya hears her cruel words that Glasha speaks and reacts with a pained cry that powerfully expresses a depth of agony that imprints the film with an indelible image of victimization. Moments later Florya will be led by peasants to the badly burned body of his friend's father, who speaks his last words about how he begged the Germans that set him on fire to kill him. A crowd of desperate peasants chant under Klimov's soundscape of blowing wind. Florya sees a trench coat-dressed effigy of Hitler with a human skull head that the peasants put clay on to make more lifelike. A group cut off Florya's hair and bury it as part of a cleansing ritual that reinvents the traumatized Florya as a walking ghost. 

In the third act Florya becomes a roaming independent soldier with a knack for barely escaping Nazi attacks. Florya's participation in expediting the extermination of a cornered group of Nazis by handing a gasoline filled can to a Nazi collaborator, is as suggestive an act as it is a literal one, for the Belarusian peasants will open fire on the Nazis before the fuel is ignited. Florya gains an historic perspective of Hitler that knows only annihilation. His hatred and fury seeks to eradicate the world of Adolph Hitler and his armies with tremendous prejudice. With his brain and body irreversibly changed, Florya has become the only thing that he will ever be capable of being for the rest of his life, a soldier against Hitler. 

"Come and See" won the Moscow Film Festival's Grand Prize in 1985. Afterward, Klimov was elected as first secretary of the Soviet Filmmakers' Union and, during his two years on the post, oversaw the release of more than a hundred previously banned Soviet films. Elem Klimov went on to struggle with the idea of creating a film version of Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita," and with making a film adaptation of Dostoevsky's "The Devils." However, in 2000, he gave up filmmaking because he felt that he had done "everything that was possible." The visionary filmmaker died on October 26, 2003, and left behind a war film that accomplishes everything possible in cinema, and reinvents it.

Tribeca 2009: It's a Wrap

In its eighth year, the Tribeca Film Festival finally found its identity as a medium-scaled arena for an eclectic collection of documentaries, independent films, horror movies, dramas, comedies, science fiction, and foreign fare to vie for audience attention. From a press standpoint, the festival has become a friendlier place for journalists to ply their trade. The inclusion of a screening library, while not comprehensive in its scope, provided some much needed freedom to screen films, and is a system that should be adopted by every other film festival in the world. Attracting its share of celebrities--Eric Bana, Spike Lee, and Steven Soderbergh were easy to spot--this year's festival maintained the right amount of movie biz glitz without cramping the style of Manhattan's been-there-done-that attitude.
 
Bette Gordon's 1984 independent psychological thriller "Variety," written by Kathy Acker, was shown in a special retrospective screening. A stunning proto-feminist noir experiment set in the sex shops of 1983 Times Square during Manhattan's economic downturn, Christine (Sandy McLeod), a Midwest transplant, takes a job as a ticket booth clerk at a Times Square porn theatre called the "Variety." Surprisingly, the sleazy urban atmosphere fires her erotic desires, and curiosities about the power of her own sexuality. Christine goes on a baseball game date at Yankee Stadium with Louie (Richard Davidson), a wealthy regular patron at the Variety with underworld connections, and secretly follows him after he's called away from their date. When she isn't stalking Louie, Christine tests the influence of her dirty imagination by speaking erotic fantasy monologues to her non-pulsed journalist boyfriend Mark (Will Patton). Daring, raw, and in tune with the social crosscurrents of the period, "Variety" achieves a cumulative effect of short-circuiting preconceived notions of taboo sexual stereotypes via Christine's journey of discovery. It's a thriller that takes poetic liberties equal to the harmonic leaps of John Lurie's evocative musical score.

With "Outrage," documentarian Kirby Dick brought the same methodical approach he applied to "This Film is Not Yet Rated," about Hollywood's shadowy ratings board, to examine the practice of closeted gay, largely Republican, politicians to systematically vote against gay rights issues as a way of deflecting attention from their own sexuality. Former closeted politicians, such as ex-New Jersey governor James McGreevey and current U.S. Representative Barney Frank candidly expound on their personal experiences of living double lives. Gay blogger Michael Rogers provides fervent discourse about the necessity of outing closeted politicians as a public service in a media environment that savors heterosexual scandals--see John Edwards--yet avoids exposing the hypocrisies of people like Ken Mehlman or Florida Governor Charlie Crist. From the film, it seems clear that Washington is full of closeted gays, some self-hating and some merely desperately frightened for their livelihoods. Either way, the winds of generational change are upon us.

In "Rudo y Cursi," writer/director Carlos Cuaron (screenwriter on "Y tu mama") told the story of rival Mexican step-brothers Beto (Luna) and Tato (Bernal) who get a golden opportunity to leave behind their impoverished lives as fruit-pickers when Batuta (Guillermo Francella), a soccer agent, discovers their skills and brings them into the fast paced world of pro soccer. Tato dreams only of achieving fame as a singer in spite of his lack of ability--he earns the undesirable nickname Cursi (Corny), while the more serious Beto, nicknamed Rudo ("rough"), falls prey to gambling leaches out to steal his soccer fortune. Bernal and Luna cherish their roles with palpable delight and play off one another with an authentic chemistry that is infectious. Both actors bring their A-game to the film, and the result is a pure delight. As prosaic as the story seems on the surface, there's plenty of heartfelt subtext in every frame.

Scott Sanders' Blaxploitation homage "Black Dynamite" had me rolling on the floor kicking and laughing with its perfectly timed jokes and sight gags. "Black Dynamite" could just be the big break that Michael Jai White deserves for his unforgettable performance as a super soul brother cut from the same cloth as Shaft and Dolomite. It's easy to get a contact high watching "Black Dynamite" as if you were sitting in a Times Square movie house circa 1976 watching the man get his comeuppance.

Mandy Stein's "Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB" was a welcome reminder of the famous East Village haunt where The Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Wayne County, The Dead Boys, Patti Smith, and every other punk group that mattered performed back in the good old/bad old days of New York. Although Stein's film left out a lot of significant information about its martyred subject, CBGB founder Hilly Kristal, it adds yet another essential chapter to the story of New York's Punk Rock movement.

Yojiro Takita's Oscar-winning "Departures" wet the eyes of everyone in the audience, and proved that the Academy voters can get right a category like Best Foreign Film.

Stephan Eliott's Noel Coward adaptation "Easy Virtue" hit a lilting gallop of '20s era England with Jessica Biel playing a racecar-driving American interloper to Kristen Scott Thomas' snooty matriarch.

Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" succeeded on the efforts of its extreme-porn-queen-cum-legit-thespian Sasha Grey as a $2,000-an-hour-call girl living in NYC with her fitness-trainer boyfriend. Former Premiere magazine Editor Glenn Kenny is hilarious in his role as a very sleazy know-it-all opportunist.

Ti West's "The House of the Devil" sent chills as an old-school horror film homage to an '80s that should have been. Even with some rumored butcher-edit job by the film's producers, it's a dark treat that ramps up suspense from three or four angles at once. Former Warhol Superstar Mary Woronov ("Rock 'n' Roll High School") is perfectly creepy.

Anders Banke's "Newsmakers" proved to be a super slick remake of Johnie To's "Breaking News," about a Russian Public Relations effort to glamorize for television a tense stand-off between some heavily-armed bad guys holed up with hostages in a post communist block apartment complex. Super action eclipses the upside of sexy.

Duncan Jones' "Moon" is the best Sci-Fi movie to come along in a generation or two. Sam Rockwell gives a pure tour de force performance as a lonely astronaut worker on the moon in this must see sci-fi thriller. I'll give you a clue--there's a clone involved. "Moon" was my favorite new film of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

"In the Loop" could be the most hilarious British political satire of the past 20 years. Based on the BBC TV show "The Thick of It," about the wonky inner workings of US and British politics during an unintended build-up to war, the movie was a crowd favorite.

2009 Tribeca Film Festival Awards:

Heineken Audience Award: City Island

Raymond De Felitta's "City Island," a comedy about a family of misfits staring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Alan Arkin, and Emily Mortimer, won the Heineken Audience Award of $25,000 at this year's festival.

Best Narrative Feature: About Elly

Asghar Farhadi's Iranian mystery on the Caspian Sea captured the hearts of World Narrative Feature Jurors Bradley Cooper, Uma Thurman, Todd Haynes, Meg Ryan and Richard Fischoff: "The universality of the characters and themes and the director's riveting grasp of this story make About Elly a film that collapses barriers and deepens our understanding of the world we share.”

Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film: Ciaran Hinds
Magnolia Pictures picked up world rights to writer/director Conor McPherson's psychological drama "The Eclipse," staring Ciaran Hinds as a recently widowed husband and father who sees ghosts in the Irish seaside town where he lives.

Best New Narrative Filmmaker: Rune Denstad Langlo for North

Rune Denstad Langlo's first narrative feature, after working in the documentary format, is a wry road comedy about a ski lift operator making his way to the north of Norway, to meet a son he never knew he had. The jurors have noted that Denstad's "consummate vision, strong grasp of story and command of the language of cinema make him a standout amidst a strong pool of candidates."

Best Actress in a Narrative Feature Film: Zoe Kazan in The Exploding Girl

After a smattering of small roles here and there, Zoe Kazan has truly broken out with her performance in Bradley Rust Gray's The Exploding Girl, a film about a young woman during a summer home from college. "Zoe shines in this understated role," the jurors comment. "Every component of this brilliantly restrained performance displays a command of her craft that stunned and moved this jury.”

Best Documentary Feature: Racing Dreams

Marshall Curry's documentary is a gripping tale about young go-karters who one day dream of driving in the big leagues of NASCAR. "We reacted with unanimous, unquestioned affection for Racing Dreams," the jurors state, "and found it a completely compelling, entertaining film of incredible quality.”
 

Special Jury Mention: Defamation

Yoav Shamir's documentary analysis of anti-Semitism existing today has earned him a Special Jury Mention in this year's Festival. Examining the issue from a wide variety of angles, the accolade for this open-minded film is not surprising. The jurors state that the award is for "lifting the veil on a subject so openly discussed."

Best New Documentary Filmmaker:
Ian Olds for Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi

Olds' film about the murder of a kidnapped Afghani hired by news organizations to work in Afghanistan is a mesmerizing tale, as horrifying as it is fascinating. According to the jurors, the work is “a film about an unsavory world, and its unsavory characters, which through its superb direction, shines a light on a world unfamiliar to many Americans."

Best New York Narrative: Here and There

Darko Lungulov's debut narrative feature about a New Yorker who travels to Belgrade is as geographically diverse and sensitive as the city of New York itself. The jurors were pleased by the fact that "it gave us not only New York, it gave us great characters, a great story, it gave us the world.”

Honorable Mention: Entre nos

Paola Mendoza and Gloria LaMorte's beautiful film is based on Mendoza's real-life experiences as a child, when her family moved from Colombia to New York City. Their sensitive depiction of issues ranging from immigration to poverty to single motherhood earned them an Honorable Mention in this year's Festival.

Best New York Documentary: Partly Private

Documentarian Danae Elon's look at the practice of circumcision in the modern-day world, especially modern-day New York, is a gripping look at the ancient practice, as well as so much more. "There were moments in this film that brought the whole world back to New York," the jurors said. "They were uniquely New York moments."

Best Narrative Short: The North Road

Actor Carlos Chahine steps into the role of director for the first time to make a touching short about a man driving his father's remains back to his hometown. The jurors feel that "The director, Carlos Chahine, portrays the absurdities and contradictions of how we deal with grief through humor, freshness and subtlety.”

Best Documentary Short: home

A touching work that deals with how Hurricane Katrina affected the house he grew up in, Matthew Faust's home seems a natural pick to win the Best Documentary Short award. "It tells a post-Hurricane Katrina story in a new, inventive and poignant way.”

Special Jury Mention: The Last Mermaids

The runner-up for Best Short Doc is this fantastic short, a film about female deep-sea divers off of the Jeju Island. The film's glimpse into a lost world is particularly eye-opening, and the jurors said that "the filmmaker provides a glimpse into a closed sisterhood—proud of their traditions, yet accepting the disappearance of their way of life.”

Student Visionary Award: Small Change

A film about a six year old girl hoping for the Tooth Fairy to arrive, Australian filmmaker Anna McGrath's student film Small Change is deceptively simple. The jurors state that "The filmmaker uses minimal storytelling to achieve maximum emotional impact and we commend the terrific performances of the young actors.”

Special Jury Mention: Oda a la Piña

This homage to a famous Cuban poem deals with a struggling cabaret dancer. Helmed by student filmmaker Laimir Fano, the film "captures the cultural rhythms and unmistakable sounds of the city to artistically portray a sense of poverty in what remains of old Havana and its beauty.”

Fighter Pilot By Cole Smithey

I'm one of the Navy fighter pilots that rocked the great state of New York on 9/11. At 6:59 AM my crew was scrambled to fly our six Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornets, along with ten other squads, to perform some aerial escorting for eleven hijacked commercial aircraft. Good thing the coffee was hot. In six minutes flat we were in Outrigger formation around our target. At the controls was a young Asian kid--must've been about ten-years-old. No matter. My squad was flying his plane now. Those boats are slow as molasses. Nothing I love better than pulling tight formation. I was on the left of the American Airlines plane--36 inches from the tip of my wing to his windshield. Kip was right-side. Tom and Jon had the wings--Berl on top--Ringo stuck at the bottom. As usual.

By the time we escorted the plane down safely at Langly, the other ten squads were waiting for us. "Damn it," I thought--my guys would have to buy beer for sixty other guys that night. At least the coffee was still hot.

Classic Film Picks

The African Queen
Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton were originally slated to play the roles of Rose, an uptight English missionary, and Charlie Allnut, the grizzled riverboat captain who rescues her from certain death at the hand of Nazi soldiers in WWII Africa. Their personalities cut from divergent hardwoods of hickory and oak, Bogart and Hepburn are magnetic. In spite of their horrible conditions attempting to escape down the treacherous Ulanga River--leeches, rapids, and a boat that barely works--the characters never complain, but boy do they battle it out as an improbable romantic attraction brews like an inescapable hurricane. Rose wants Mr. Allnut to help her sink a German gunboat called the Empress Louisa, and by hook or crook she convinces him to play along with her dubious plan. John Huston directed this Technicolor masterpiece away from the Hollywood studio system. When viewed as an article of independent filmmaking, "The African Queen" is all the more alluring for its treacherous atmosphere and brilliant performances. Bogart and Hepburn are truly amazing together.

Alien
"Star Wars" may have lit up bubblegum audiences to the appeal of science fiction fantasy, but Ridley Scott's 1979 Sci-Fi horror picture introduced real heart palpitating fear into the equation. Scott's groundbreaking use of sound, lighting, and complex design elements make the film a artistic journey that coincides with a great story. The look of the film was contributed heavily to by H.R Giger, whose 1976 painting "Necronom" served as a stepping off point for the actual alien of the film's title. The story, by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, follows a group of commercial astronauts aboard the cargo spaceship "Nostromo" on their way back to Earth with a full payload when they get an unknown transmission from a "planetiod" that they are obligated by their employers to investigate. The five men and two women team suffer damage to their ship upon landing, and promptly discover that the distress signal is coming from an abandoned spacecraft that houses the eggs of an alien beast for which there is no comparison in the history of cinema. Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Iam Holm, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, and Sigourney Weaver each give exceptional performances as a group of crew members whose number diminishes before the fury of alien intelligence. The level of suspense and fear that Ridley Scott ratchets up is excruciating, as cleverly devised plot points and character revelations keep the audience off balance right up to the final frame. The creative mechanical special effects in "Alien" have withstood the test of time even as CGI as taken over as the industry standard. Science fiction horror doesn't get any better than this.

Apu Trilogy
"Pather Panchali," "Aparajito (The Unvanquished), and "Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) make up Satyajit Ray's trilogy of films about a young man growing up in '20 era India. Although not originally intended as a trilogy, the films, which took eight years to complete, were a cultural breakthrough that showed the rest of the world a different side of worldclass Indian cinema. Ray's ability to transfer a poetic justice to the life trajectory of Apu from a good-hearted child to a responsible adult, and father to his son, comes through in the director's patient and all-encompassing embrace of the mysteries of life. Set in Bengal, the engrossing trilogy transports the viewer into another world that we come to know and accept as our own. Ravi Shankar created the music for this unforgettable masterpiece of humanist cinema filmed by the incomparable cinematographer Subrata Mitra.

Ashes and Diamonds
Based on the 1948 novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, the story takes place on May 8, 1945, the last day of WWII in Europe when two members of Poland's nationalistic underground Home Army aim to overthrow the New Communist District Secretary. Actor Zbigniew Cybulski came to be known as the James Dean of Poland for the character of Maciek assigned to assassinate the insurgent Communist leader. "Ashes and Diamonds" finished Wadja's war film trilogy with a flourish. Beautifully filmed and percolating with the futility of violence "Ashes and Diamonds" is a treasure of Polish cinema from a master filmmaker.

The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo’s groundbreaking 1965 documentary styled black-and-white thriller about the Algerian resistance effort to overthrow the French Colonial Government occupation of 1957 is a suspenseful and sophisticated political allegory that speaks eloquently to the current American military occupation of Iraq. “The Battle of Algiers” traces the potent terrorist efforts of a small group of revolutionaries as they battle against the French military, led by a former French Resistance fighter (Jean Martin). Pontecorvo cast non-professional actors and used the real leader of the Algerian revolutionaries (Yacef Saadi) to play himself. “The Battle Of Algiers,” which was banned in France for some time, is a one of a kind masterpiece of pure cinema that you will never forget. It is further proof that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. 

Belle de Jour
Luis Bunuel’s 1967 film stars Catherine Deneuve as Séverine Serizy the housewife of a wealthy doctor (Jean Sorel), who begins secretly spending her afternoons working in a high-class French brothel specializing in the fetishized kinks of its mercurial clientele. The masochistic Séverine adopts the pseudonym Belle de jour for her erotic identity at the brothel that allows her to express the sexual side of her nature that she is too inhibited to express with the husband that she nevertheless loves. Outrageous and yet anchored in female desire and erotic fantasy, “Belle de Jour” is a fascinating cinematic achievement that dares to connect Deneuve’s porcelain beauty to a world of subjugated bourgeois rebellion and the tragic price that she must ultimately pay for her transgressions. "Belle de Jour" is an ethically coded picture filled with fantasy, lust, satire, and nuance.

The Big Heat
Based on William P. McGivern's novel, Glenn Ford plays a by-the-book police sergeant named Dave Bannion, so busy grappling with the crime that rages around him that he isn't able to see his own negative influence as an active component in its anarchy. The women Bannion comes in contact with don't fare so well. Suicide, a nasty face scalding, and vengeful murder collide in Fritz Lang's explosive 1953 noir about police procedure as exemplified through Sergeant Bannion's tunnel-vision perspective. Lee Marvin makes an impressive turn as a brutal gangster in this perfect representation of the noir genre that opens with one of the most iconic opening sequences in cinema where a hand reaches into the frame to pick up a police issue .38 caliber pistol before firing it offscreen. Everything about "The Big Heat" is "hard boiled."

The Birds
Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 follow-up to "Psycho" (1961) is an ambitious adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story wherein the famed British filmmaker finds a full dramatic voice to connect his own fetishized sexual concerns to a socially sensitive satire of modern mores, as contrasted against a mysterious natural catastrophe. Groundbreaking on several levels of cinematic technique and dramatic form, "The Birds" combines forward-thinking special effects with an unconventional soundscape to instill a palpable lurking fear in the audience. Although not as horrifically shocking as "Psycho," "The Birds" is a more sophisticated film, and represents a high watermark in the prolific career of a true maestro of cinema. Tippi Hedren's performance as Melanie, a social butterfly that becomes caged by external conditions, is remarkable for the actress's ability to remain true to the stylized nature of the material's demands, while circumventing that limitation to render a pure vision of '60s era womanhood trapped by the affection of a man (Mitch-played by Rod Taylor) whose relationship to his mother darkly informs his troubled emotional make-up. Endlessly watchable, "The Birds" is a masterpiece that can be read on many levels, providing insight into every aspect of modern filmmaking and dramaturgy.

Black Book
"Black Book" is Paul Verhoeven's first film created in his native born Netherlands since 1985, and he brings to it valuable lessons he learned working for 20-years in Hollywood (see "Robocop," "Starship Troopers") to forge an unprecedented World War II-era masterpiece. The film’s iconic title comes from a secret list of Dutch collaborators. Much of its success emanates from the nimble performance of its leading lady Carice van Houten. In the role of a once wealthy Jewish singer, who joins a Dutch resistance group after barely escaping a massacre that claims the lives of her family, van Houten plays Rachel Stein with a naive blitheness that registers as a tour de force. Stein represents a quietly contained moral code wherein romantic loyalty is as much a part of her physiology as her determination to exact retribution from those responsible for her family’s death. At once the most expensive and successful Dutch film ever made, Verhoeven created the fast-paced script with his well-aquatinted screenwriter Gerard Soeteman (co-writer on "Soldier of Orange") based on historical events researched in the Dutch War Museum and in scholarly publications over a period of more than 20 years. 

Black Orpheus
Marcel Camus’ reinterpretation of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice reaches epic dramatic heights and dark emotional depths in this winner of the 1959 Palme d’Or at Cannes and of the 1960 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Attributed as the cultural milestone that introduced Bossa Nova music to the Western world (via Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa’s musical score) "Black Orpheus" sets its mythic tale against Rio do Janeiro’s Carnival where popular streetcar driver Orpheus (Breno Mello) falls madly in love with a lovely country girl named Eurydice (played exquisitely by Marpessa Dawn). A ‘snake bite’ from an electrical wire robs Orpheus of his dream lover and his is driven to explore the mysterious land of the dead to reunite with her. Infectious Samba and Bossa Nova rhythms permeate the beautifully filmed earthy Brazilian atmosphere of Carnival. "Black Orpheus" is an unforgettable classic of cinematic poetry, music, and myth.

The Blue Angel
Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 masterpiece is the modern morality tale that launched the sultry chanteuse Marlene Dietrich to international fame with her saucy role as Lola Lola, a dance-hall singer and dancer who destroys the life of Emmanuel Rath, an aging high school professor played by Emil Jannings who becomes obsessed with her. The result of the public humiliation and emotional degradation that Janning's character suffers, after being turned into a clown performing as part of Lola's stage act even though they are married, is one of saddest grace notes in cinema. One of the first films to usher in sound in cinema, “The Blue Angel” was simultaneously filmed in two versions--in English and in German--and remains an outstanding cinematic accomplishment that has influenced untold numbers of artists in all avenues of performance and exhibition.    

Blue Velvet
In 1986 David Lynch broke the language of cinema wide open in the same way that Jackson Pollock did with the art world in the early '40s. Using a minimalist palate set in small town America, Lynch blended surrealist elements into a story of adult sexual awakening juxtaposed against violence, mystery, and mental illness. Using character names drawn from '50s Americana iconography, and a moody musical score to match, Lynch presents returning hometown boy Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) who promptly unearths a severed ear in a field that he crossed thousands of times in his youth. Jeffrey finds a willing ally for his private investigation into the mystery of the ear's owner in the local police detective's romantically inclined daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). However, Jeffrey is unprepared for the psychological and emotional upheaval that will devour him when he stalks the fetishized life of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a sultry nightclub singer used to playing rough with a very debauched criminal named Frank (Dennis Hopper). "Blue Velvet" is David Lynch's greatest achievement. His balance of symbols and montage is at its most poetic and powerful. Every role is perfectly cast, and the story carries an indescribable undertow that kicks like a spastic mule in heat. It is the closest that any filmmaker other than Bunuel has ever come to such daring perfection of simultaneously primal and sophisticated cinema.

Das Boot
German-born director Wolfgang Perersen might just as well have made only one film in his career because his co-written adaptation of Lothar Buchheim's novel, about the real experiences of a WWII German U-boat crew, is a perfect masterpiece of wartime suspense. Inside the thick hull of their creaking U-96 submarine, the Captain (Jürgen Prochnow) fearlessly leads his ship through the Battle of the Atlantic. The underwater ship dodges depth charges, braves a fierce storm, narrowly escapes a collision with another sub, and is forced to sit at the bottom of the ocean after being attacked by enemy bombers. And there's more. This is a war film in which the brutal conditions of the characters' circumstance blurs the lines between allied or enemy forces. We are with the men inside their giant iron casket. "Das Boot" is absolutlely a big screen film that plays better in the German version with English subtitles rather than the dubbed version. It is unlike any other war film in that it confines the audience in a confined submarine where we digest the fear and panic of the human beings on screen. In short, "Das Boot" is a religious experience.

Brazil
If anyone ever doubts the visionary significance of Terry Gilliam's once bright genius as a filmmaker of enormous depth and cynical humor, you need only to visit upon his career-topping 1985 masterpiece of surreal satire, "Brazil." Co-written by Gilliam with Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard, the story is an ingenious blend of sci-fi, political satire, and dystopic comedy. Jonathan Pryce gives his own career high performance as Sam Lowry, a kind of Peter Sellers surrogate searching for the woman of his sleeping dreams and working as a government bureaucrat drone at a soul-crushing job that resembles something out of George Orwell's 1984. There are plenty of other thematic and visual associations made to Orwell's all-too-accurate vision of a totalitarian society where a government error dooms an innocent man and an equally guiltless woman named Jill Layton (Kim Greist) who, although she's deemed a terrorist by a complicit government, is the woman of Sam Lowry's dreams. Sam's desperate attempts to liberate Jill from the government's labyrinthine clutches marks him also as a "terrorist." Gilliam called the film, "the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984," and it's telling that other working titles included "The Ministry" and "1984 ½." Gilliam sparks a fierce anti-consumerist flame with prescient pokes at things like plastic surgery and credit cards. However, the film's most incendiary theme is that the media-hyped concept of "terrorism," which went on to become an all-encompassing excuse for every form of war crime imaginable after 9/11, is merely a thought-control fear mechanism for governments to enact carte blanche policies via an invisible (read non-existent) enemy. By the standards of America's unwritten moral code circa 2009, "Brazil" is a dangerous film. Watch it.

Breaking the Waves
When you are watching a moving film like Lars von Trier's 1995 film "Breaking the Waves," it's difficult to imagine that you are witnessing the high watermark of a filmmaker's career. Made shortly after Lars von Trier--he added the "von" himself--co-authored with Thomas Vinterberg the strident "Dogma 95 Manifesto" for low-budget filmmaking, "Breaking the Waves" came with a clarity of vision and social urgency that was an assault on the senses and the intellect. Emily Watson plays Bess McNeill, a simple-minded Scottish Calvinist churchgoer who marries Jan Nyman (terrifically played by Stellan Skarsgard), and oil rig worker who suffers a terrible accident that leaves him paralyzed. When Jan asks Bess to go out and have sex with other men and report back to him her experiences, Bess takes his wishes beyond the realm of common sense, due to her skewed interpretation of doing God's work through her carnal activities. Fiercely criticized for its shaky handheld camerawork, which gives the film an ungrounded feel of floating on roiling waves, the story is separated by colorful postcard chapter headings. Von Trier launches a clever attack on organized religion that resonates with Buñuel's famous line "I'm an atheist, thank God." Emily Watson gives an angelic, earth-shattering performance that is transformative, cathartic, and brutally painful. Here is a film that makes you feel like you've read the novel, seen the movie, and lived the life of a more empathetic protagonist than any you've ever encountered. You might need a stiff drink afterward, though.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Fermented in a tragic romanticism placed firmly in a no-man's land between liberation and capitalism, Sam Peckinpah's 1974 thriller is a film that sticks in your mind's eye like a lingering sun spot. Independently made outside the dulling influence of Hollywood, Warren Oates renders Peckinpah's alter ego as Bennie, an ex-pat piano player working for tips in a Mexican dive bar. The operatic-scaled drama is set in motion when El Jefe (Emilio Fernandez),a ruthless Mexican rancher, discovers that his teenage daughter Theresa is pregnant, and offers a million dollars for the actual head of the man--El Jefe's would-be successor--that impregnated his daughter. Bennie gets wind of the bounty from a couple of slimy hitmen (played by Robert Webber and Gig Young), and plots with his prostitute girlfriend Elita (played with gusto by Isela Vega) to take the head of the man who coincidentally loved Elita before dying in an accident. Although Bennie is unable to confess his love to Elita, their passion is evident in the mutual dream they share for living together once they recover the reward. Bennie spends the film's second half lugging around Alfredo's head in a fly-swarmed canvas bag that can be read as a metaphor for a film canister that Peckinpah would carry to deliver his latest finished product to greedy cigar chomping producers. The scenes of Warren Oates defending against the pursuing hit men trying to kill him, are substantial for his character's all-or-nothing approach to an increasingly virulent condition of corruption closing in from all sides. "Alfredo Garcia" is an unapologetically cynical film that captures the essence of a dying breed of an American male identity, of which Sam Peckinpah was a card-carrying member. Peckinpah and Oates were men made of hand carved hickory. You know it when you see it.     

Casablanca
Although it was made in 1942, "Casablanca" is still the greatest romantic drama ever made. The obsessive longing and regret that Humphrey Bogart's Rick and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa feel for one another is magnified by the relentless social conditions that they find themselves in when fate brings them together after many years apart. WWII Casablanca is a dangerous place for an ex-patriate American, and even more so for the girl of a French Resistance Freedom Fighter (even if they'd call a guy like Paul Henreid's Victor Laszlo a terrorist these days). Casablanca is an exotic location where a separated couple of dyed-in-the-wool lovers can reinvent their overpowering mutual love should they so choose unless the man, a apparent apolitical cynic, opts to sacrifice their once-in-a-lifetime chance in the name of a greater human cause. Such is the nature of director Michael Curtiz's film that features remarkable performances from Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Claude Rains. Broken into three clearly defined acts--the script was based on a stage play--and beautifully filmed with noir-inflected shadows by the great cinematographer Arthur Edeson ("The Maltese Falcon"), "Casablanca" has a way of refreshing itself the more times you view it. Between the heavily layered visual image systems at work, and the crisscrossing elements of social unrest and suppressed emotion, lies a movie that captures romantic lightening in a bottle. It doesn't hurt that Bogart and Bergman come together like flash paper to flame. The bitter sweetness of love never looked, or sounded, so good.  

Chinatown
Like "Casablanca," "Chinatown" represents a perfect storm of enormous cinema talent coming together under an intoxicating noir setting. Robert Towne's screenplay is the stuff of legend--a perfectly sculpted script without a scrap of fat on it. The setting is '30s era Los Angeles where political wrangling over water rights for the area is cause for more than a little criminal activity on every level of social strata. In a career-topping performance, Jack Nicholson plays private detective J.J. "Jake" Gittes, hired by a squirrelly dame named Ida (Diane Ladd), posing as Evelyn Mulwray, to follow her water commissioner husband Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) on suspicion of cheating. The web of deceit that Jake enters into costs him dearly on the way toward a downbeat ending that still shocks audiences. Conspiracy, incest, and murder triangulate in a real historical context of Los Angeles' scandalous past. For her part, as the real Evelyn Mulwray, Faye Dunaway plays a tragic figure of iconic proportions--a tainted heroine doomed to be violently misunderstood. "Chinatown" would be Roman Polianki's last American film, and as such carries a particular aura of the unavoidable hand of fate. The film was nominated in eleven Oscar categories in 1974, and won for Best Screenplay.

The Cincinnati Kid

This cinematic treatment of Richard Jessup’s novel, about an up-and-coming ’30s poker champ, benefited from screenwriting contributions by Ring Lardner Jr. (M*A*S*H) and Terry Southern (Easy Rider). However, it’s the film’s stellar cast, along with a gritty narrative and stylized direction, that makes The Cincinnati Kid the best poker movie ever. Hotshot poker player Eric Stoner, a.k.a. “The Kid” (Steve McQueen), goes up against old-guard poker master Lancey Howard, a.k.a. “The Man” (Edward G. Robinson), in a marathon game of five-card stud that will decide if The Man will be replaced. Roguish Rip Torn plays Slade, a spiteful local tycoon with a vested interest in seeing Howard beaten after being “gutted” in a poker game by The Man. 

The film’s characters are clearly defined by their actions leading up to the final poker scene so that we comprehend Stoner and Howard as serious poker competitors who view money as a tool to poker as “language is to thought.” When the final hand is played, Stoner has cleverly quelled Slade’s attempt to fix the game in his favor with a cheating dealer (Karl Malden), and has worn Howard down in spite of The Man’s various attempts to psyche him out. McQueen and Robinson exhibit perfect poker-faced control in the scene as they each go “all in” with the makings of a full house against a straight flush. The big poker lesson here is that “sometimes the cards fuck you.” Neither Hollywood nor poker gets any truer than that.

Citizen Kane
"Citizen Kane" occupies the first place slot in more lists of the best films ever made than any other. At the young age of 26, Orson Welles built on his already unbelievably prodigious career to make a movie loosely based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst's rise to dictatorial power in the media world. Originally entitled "America," the script was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, before being doctored by Welles. Although Welles' film was far from a biography of Hearst, a rough cut was screened by gossip columnist Louella Parsons who reported back to Hearst that it was indeed an unauthorized biography of him, and he set about attempting to purchase its original negative. The film is book-ended by the mysterious use of the word "rosebud" that the elderly Kane utters in the opening scene as the last thing he says before dying. The movie goes on to reveal in flashback the story of media maverick Charles Foster Kane who, after being separated from his parents as a teenager, goes on to wield enormous political and financial power. Joseph Cotton occupies a central role as Kane's best friend Jedediah Leland, who provides reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) with key elements of Kane's rise. As Thompson queries more of Kane's friends and associates, flashbacks build to reveal the significance of "rosebud," for the audience, if not the reporter. Welles' pioneering techniques of dialogue, editing, sound, and dramatic form are unmistakable for the 1940 film that would go on to win only one Oscar--for screenwriting. While "Citizen Kane's" famous reputation over-leverages its ability to satisfy modern audiences for the expectations they might bring to "the best film ever made," it is nonetheless an impressive dramatic epic that articulates some of the myths of capitalist America in a personal and human way. For that reason alone, "Citizen Kane" is essential viewing for any lover of cinema, history, or of both.  

A Clockwork Orange
There's Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," and then there's everything else. Kubrick's 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess' complex literary satire of crime and punishment is an earth-shattering cinematic experience that elicits an unprecedented visceral response from its audience. Malcolm McDowell plays British thug and sociopath Alex De Large, who wanders around a futuristic, economically ravished Britain where trash fills the streets. Alex lends friendly narration to the audience that he calls "brothers" as he incites violence with a band of delinquent misfits (called "droogs") at his command. Alex gets imprisoned after viciously raping and murdering an upper-class woman in her home with a large plastic phallus. Rather than go to prison he opts to undergo a torturous rehabilitation therapy (the "Ludovico technique"), involving forced viewings of Nazi war films accompanied by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The proven effects of the treatment lead to Alex's release into a society where he is repeatedly punished for his past transgressions. "A Clockwork Orange" proved a crucial touchstone for significant cultural shifts in music and film. '70s era filmmakers like Coppola and Scorsese were liberated by Kubrick's visionary approach to style, form, and subject matter, and many aspects of the punk rock movement are directly attributable to it. The film is intoxicating in its use of atmosphere, music, and irony to excite the viewer's imagination at a palpitating tempo. Everything comes as surprise for the voyeuristic viewer who is implicated in every criminal act of citizen and state. We are all victim, killer, police, and legislator. Sleep on that.

Come and See
Stalingrad-born Elem Klimov's "Come and See" is an undiluted expression of cinematic poetry in the service of an unspeakably turbulent, fact-based, anti-war narrative about the 628 Belarusian villages burnt to the ground along with their inhabitants by the Nazis. The film is a disorienting vision of a genocide hell on Earth that would pale even Hieronymus Bosch's most gruesome compositions. An electricity-buzzing stench of death and social decay hangs over the picture's constant volley between neo-realistic, formal, and documentary styles that Klimov uses to convert as wide a range of specific wartime experience as possible. Klimov takes the viewer on a quicksilver descent into an existential madness of war through the eyes of his 14-year-old peasant protagonist Florya. Alexei Kravchenko's extraordinary performance as the film's subjective guide encompasses a lifetime of suffering over a period of a few brutal days of the Nazi invasion. 

The Conformist
Made between "The Spider's Stratagem" (1969) and "Last Tango in Paris," (1972), "The Conformist" is Bernardo Bertolucci's immaculate work of cinematic art about the conflicted mindset of a man who carries out Mussolini's fascist ideology. Bertolucci's self-penned script is based on the same-titled novel by Alberto Moravia, and tells of Marcello Clerici (exquisitely played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who, when he was a boy, murdered a chauffeur that attempted to sexually molest him. As an adult, Marcello takes a job as an assassin working for Mussolini's secret police. In order to conceal the murder he committed as a child, Marcello desperately wants to become an ultimate social conformist within the "normal reality" of fascism. While on honeymoon in Paris with his wife Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), Marcello takes an assignment to assassinate Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), a former teacher who espouses anti-fascist ideals. A romantic affair with Quadri's bi-sexual wife Anna (Dominique Sanda) weighs heavily on Marcello's act of violence that reveals the extent of his cowardice. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro works with a painterly eye for transmitting Bertolucci's thematic image system wherein light and dark represent Marcello's caged psychology of a fractured unconscious and conscious mind. Storaro's formal compositions and elegant camera movements are breathtaking in their dynamic precision. The film's use of expressive Italian and French locations, and fascinating architectural designs, provide it with an enormity of fascist influence that is enthralling as it is intimidating. Conformity is a specter Marcello can only chase.

Cruising
There was so much controversy around William Friedkin’s gay-themed cop thriller when it came out in 1980 that audiences avoided it like the plague. But a lot of upcoming filmmakers saw "Cruising" and took notes, because the movie became the prototype for every serial killer movie to follow (see "Se7en," "Basic Instinct" etc.). Friedkin’s trademark interest in the minutiae of brutality gets a perfect setting in Manhattan’s pre-AIDS era leather bars where a serial killer is finding his victims. Al Pacino is transfixing as Steve Burns, the undercover cop sent to investigate the case from the inside. Friedkin doesn’t pull any punches in representing semi-public displays of homosexuality that play out within dark cavernous sex clubs. It’s this shocking and suspenseful environment that provides the film with an image system that seeps into the behavior of Pacino’s character. There was always some question about whether the ambiguous ending was the one Friedkin wanted, since the studio exerted editing powers over the film. Not only have the graphic scenes been replaced, but also the misunderstood ending has been left exactly as it was. The question isn’t whether or not Steve Burns is a killer, but rather how his on-the-job sexual experiences changed him personally. That’s where the movie leaves its physiological hook for audiences to hash out in kitchen conversations.

The Damned
The first of Luchino Visconti's "German Trilogy" of films that included "Death in Venice" and "Ludwig" is set in high society Germany during the early '30s where the Essenbecks, an industrialist family--modeled after the Krupp family's steel production company--are brought down and taken over by the Nazis after the infamous Reichstag fire. The  Essenbecks' anti-Nazi patriarch Baron Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals) is murdered by the SS, and his company's like-minded vice president Herbert Thallmann (Umberto Orsini) is indicted for the crime before escaping the from Gestapo that soon incarcerates his wife (Charlotte Rampling) and children at Dachau. Visconti stylishly captures the frenzied debauchery and violence that the Nazis employed throughout the era, including the Night of the Long Knives wherein Hitler's execution squads massacred his political enemies--the paramilitary Brownshirts known as the SA. Written by Visonti, with Enrico Medioli and Nicola Badalucco, "The Damned" is an incendiary precursor to Nazi era films like Liliana Cavani's "The Night Porter" (1974), Tinto Brass's "Salon Kitty" (1976), and even the musical play and film "Cabaret." By boldly confronting the psycho-sexual depravity of the Nazi mindset, all the way through to is inevitable incestuous nature, Visconti creates a specific cinematic vernacular for viewing and discussing Hitler's manic ideology. That Visconti's iconic vision became a cinematic touchstone for other influential filmmakers is a testament to the Italian director's power as a storyteller and conduit of historical information.  

Double Indemnity
Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir "Double Indemnity" stars Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff, a sharp Los Angeles insurance salesman convinced by Barbara Stanwyck's sultry character Phyllis into murdering her husband in order to collect double the amount of her insurance policy. "Double Indemnity" received Seven Academy Award nominations and remains one of the best loved film noir movies for good reason. Edward G. Robinson stars as MacMurray's by-the-book claims adjuster associate, but it's Barbara Stanwyck that rules the roost as one of cinema's most diabolically cunning femme fatals. Cinematographer John F. Seitz ("Sullivan's Travels" - 1941) contributes notably to the film's claustrophobic black-and-white atmosphere with ingenious camera angles and sharp use of exactly-lit compositions to create a fascinating image system. "Double Indemnity" received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture.

Dracula
Ladies fainted when Bela Lugosi rose from his coffin as a vampire in the 1927 Broadway production of "Dracula" that preceded Tod Browning's brilliant 1931 film version that had an equally chilling effect on movie audiences. Playwright Hamilton Deane based his lean script on Bram Stoker's famous novel, and introduced horror to the era of sound film. Dwight Frye's eerie performance as Renfield, the hapless British accountant who dares set foot inside Dracula's foreboding castle, sets a tone of ghoulish insanity that the vampire instills in men. For his well-established part, Lugosi is positively blood-curdling as he stalks every scene with his thick native Hungarian accent and dapper tuxedo and cape. "Dracula" is more than a milestone of cinematic horror, it represents a marriage of nightmare and reality that establishes an American gothic sensibility for other dramatic genres that followed. Stark, cold, and deeply sensual, "Dracula's" atmosphere and intention is rooted in a fear of unknown lust and desire from which there can be no escape. To view "Dracula" is to be bitten by the vampire's desperate attack.  

Duck Soup
Leo Macarey's 1933 Marx Brothers movie was overlooked by audiences during its depression-era release but received a much-deserved re-release in the '60s that found a welcoming young audience. The tiny republic of Freedonia is in economic collapse and turns rich widow Mrs. Gloria Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) who promptly replaces the its President with one insanely irreverent Rufus T. Firefly (hilariously played by Groucho Marx). Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo (in his last appearance) deliver their anarchic slapstick satire with a vengeance. Groucho's famously sung line, "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait 'till I get through with it" promises a kind of comic uproar that Hollywood can only dream of. Watch for the famous "mirror scene" in which Harpo--dressed as Groucho--matches Groucho's every movement in a non-existent mirror--pure comic genius.

Easy Rider
With the prodigious assistance of author Terry Southern, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda created what would become the first water of an artistic independent cinema by and for young-minded people. Wyatt (AKA Captain America - Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) are modern-day cowboys testing the boundaries of American freedom circa 1969 on a cocaine financed cross-country motorcycle road trip toward their dream of an early retirement. “Easy Rider” is a scrupulously real and surreal cinematic experiment about the impotent ‘60s counter-culture movement that naively attempted to alter American prejudice and greed. "Easy Rider" stands up as a profound period piece that continues to reverberate with the despondent hostilities of modern American existence. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, "Easy Rider" is a masterpiece.

Eraserhead
David Lynch's immersion in the surreal world of his protagonist Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) comes through in a creepy black-and-white horror movie of sorts. "Eraserhead" provided an offset balm to the crush of 1977 Hollywood blockbusters like "Star Wars" when it was released. Hugely popular among the Midnight Movie crowd, the story follows fright-wig Harry through painfully slow and strange events centered around romantic relations with his none-too-forthcoming girlfriend Mary. It seems Harry has become a father--but how, and to what kind of freaky creature baby? Time drips like old paint in Lynch's surreal experiment, that revels in all things upsetting, disorienting, dark, and mysterious. 

The Exiles
Director Brent MacKenzie’s black-and-white documentary/narrative genre blender about urbanized Native Americans in 1961 Los Angeles is a cold glass of cinematic water drawn from the same well as Joseph Strick’s "The Savage Eye" (1960). MacKenzie uses editorial voice-over narration to elaborate on his reckless characters’ existential lifestyle during a night of carousing amid LA’s impoverished Bunker Hill neighborhood where the steeply inclined "Angel’s Flight" trolley car delivered passengers into the thick of its immigrant community. Bold in its visionary attempt to capture an essence of American Indian reality that is evermore significant today for its strangled condemnation of America’s betrayal of a people it murdered and displaced before such war crimes became articulated in our common vernacular, "The Exiles" is a one-of-a-kind film.

The Exorcist
On the day after Christmas in 1973, Oscar-winning director William Friedkin followed up the tremendous success he enjoyed with "The French Connection" (1971), with the most daring horror film ever made; an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel "The Exorcist." Blatty, a devout Catholic, had been inspired by a 1949 Washington Post article entitled "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held In Devil’s Grip," and carefully crafted his novel around the area in Georgetown where he attended Jesuitical Georgetown University. It was a classically compelling American Gothic legend that set up an earth-shattering physical and religious battle between good and evil over the possessed body of a young girl named Regan MacNeil (unforgettably played by Linda Blair). Regan’s possessed entity was, and is, the closest vision of sheer evil to ever appear in fictive film. It was only fitting that the two exorcists attempting to save Regan’s life, by expelling the demon within her, offered up and ultimately sacrificed their lives. The supernatural incidents are resolved in the closing scenes of the movie, but the potential for evil to grip mortal humans is a ghost that lurks in the memories of every audience that sees "The Exorcist."

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Russ Meyer's fetishistic vision of powerful bisexual amazons of mixed ethnic backgrounds engaged in criminal super action exists in a cartoonish world of black and white humor where anything is possible. Light on plot but heavy on attitude, bawdy innuendo, and S&M style "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the kind of exploitation movie that you can barely believe exists even when you're watching it. A gang of three outlaw go-go dancers (played by Lori Williams, Haji, and the unforgettable Tura Satana) go drag racing in the desert and meet up with a young couple. Satana's muscle-flexing Varla kills the pugnacious guy with her bare hands before kidnapping his girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard) and going on robbery mission. It isn't long before the gang have poor little Linda gagged and bound because, well, she looks great that way. Meyer's audacious sense of eroticism, comic timing, and social satire is impressive, to say the least. "Faster Pussycat" lives up to its outrageous title for as much fun as any audience could have, with their clothes on.

The Fly
Add David Cronenberg's 1986 version of "The Fly" to the short list of successful remakes in the history of the movies. Cronenberg hit the height of his Hollywood success with a bold update of director Kurt Neumann's 1958 original that starred the great Vincent Price, who famously became spider bait in the film's celebrated final scene. From its ingenious pre-CGI special effects and spellbinding production design, to Jeff Goldblum’s sensational performance, “The Fly” is a masterpiece of cinematic horror that escalates to a degree of white heat. Scientist Seth Brundle (Goldblum) works on a teleportation device when he isn’t courting Geena Davis. Calamity strikes when a common house fly accidentally gets trapped in the teleporter with Seth during an experiment and he becomes fused with the insect. Cronenberg weaves surprise and suspense into a taught tapestry of overpowering emotion and shocking nightmare reality. Gory, gooey, and great, right through to the last frame, this is one horror movie you'll never forget.

Forbidden Games
Rene Clement's 1944 adaptation of Francois Boyer's novel is an exquisitely unsentimental movie about the corruptive effect of war on children. After her parents are killed beside her in an air raid, five-year-old Paulette (played by Brigitte Fossey) carries her dead dog with her as she attempts to reenact of the deaths that have traumatized her. Michel (Georges Poujouly), a young peasant boy, discovers Paulette wandering in the countryside and convinces his family to take her in. Soon, Paulette has Michel stealing crucifies and killing animals for her private animal cemetery, for which she wishes to include human corpses. "Forbidden Games" caused a scandal when it was released in 1952 because it co-opted a fictional story and embellished it with the recent tragedy of war. The film is every bit as controversial today for its transparently passionate view of the permanent damage that war inflicts on its youngest survivors.

The 400 Blows
Francois Truffaut's debut film not only galvanized the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement of French cinema, but also generated a personal language of cinema that Truffaut would elaborate on for the rest of his career. Based on Truffaut’s troubled childhood "Les quatre cent coups" represents a chapter of narrative history seemingly ripped from his personal diary. Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is the precocious yet well meaning child of ambivalent parents. Circumstances at school and at home conspire against Antoine when his every minor indiscretion is perceived as a sign of irredeemable delinquency. It isn’t long before Antoine is conforming to the color that his character has been painted, and finds himself in a reform school where he clearly doesn’t belong. Truffaut gives the audience a bold example of how youthful rebellion is fomented by myopic societal and parental authority figures. Jean-Pierre Leaud’s guileless performance is one of the most affecting and memorable renderings of character in all of world cinema. Antoine’s dire circumstances delineate a specific period of suppressive ideology that existed in Europe and America during the ‘50s and ‘60s. However, the cathartic power of "The 400 Blows" on its audience is timeless and all consuming. I would argue that Truffaut never again achieved the narrative clarity of his first film, because he infused so much individual passion and pain into it. "The 400 Blows" is a profoundly heartrending film that has inspired legions of audience members and would-be directors.

The Godfather
The great Hollywood producer Robert Evans is said to have been responsible for bringing the hammer down on Francis Coppola to shape "The Godfather" into the 1972 film that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. How much of Evans' genius went into the final cut is a moot mystery, because "The Godfather" stands as a masterpiece of American cinema that reflects the distinctive efforts of a particularly gifted ensemble of a cast, crew, and filmmaker. Mario Puzo's 1969 novel provided the ten-year narrative about the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family overseen by its patriarch Don Vito Corleone (magnificently played by Marlon Brando in the last truly great performance of his career). Luchino Visconti's influence, vis a vis his 1963 film "The Leopard," is apparent in Coppola's staging of social scenes like the wedding that serves to introduce the audience to the insular world of the Corleone family. Vito's son Michael (Al Pacino) respects his family's values and rules of conduct but suffers from an inner conflict about his participation in the family's crime syndicate until an attack on his father's life brings his sense of responsibility into perspective. Ideals of tradition and familial loyalty ring through Nino Rota's score to ensconce the audience in an atmosphere of unconditional involvement. Like a favored method of Mafia influence, "The Godfather" is an offer no audience can refuse.   

Harlan County, U.S.A.
One of the finest documentaries ever made, Barbara Kopple’s "Harlan County, U.S.A." is a brilliant exposé about the embattled history of coal miners in America as seen through the very personal prism of striking coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1972. With elegant use of archival footage, Appalachian coal mining songs, and intimate footage from the picket lines and union meeting rooms Kopple gives voice to the impoverished but steadfast miners and their wives who stood up for their family’s rights against the greedy coal mine owners and violent scabs. The film takes on an incidental feminist tone as union rabble-rouser Lois Scott galvanizes the women around her to picket against the gun toting "company thugs" that threaten their lives on a daily basis. The film is even more poignant today, considering how much exponentially worse conditions have gotten for today’s coal miners.

Harold and Maude
Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy "Harold and Maude." Bud Court and Ruth Gordon play the coolest oddballs on the planet. Death-obsessed 20-year-old Harold has a proclivity for staging fake suicides to get a rise from his maternally inept but filthy rich mother, when he isn't attending funerals for the fun of it. Maude is an 80-year-old freethinker who coincidentally shares Harold's fancy for memorial services. The pair fall into a romantic relationship that shouts in the face of societal mores as Cat Stevens's uplifting score does for the movie what Simon and Garfunkel did for "The Graduate." If there's one comedy to represent the woof and warp of the early '70s, "Harold and Maude" is it.

I Vitellioni
Before Federico Fellini began deconstructing narrative structure with "8 ½"  he made nine traditional narrative films of which "I Vitelloni" (1953) was the third. Fellini draws on the days of his youth by returning to his hometown of Rimini to play a kind of trick on the friends he left behind by making a movie about their rudderless ways of passing time. A group of four Italian men in their late '20s, and still living at home, dream of escaping their provincial '50s era Italian seacoast town. As the indolent men drink, carouse and lay about in a daze of postwar ennui we see the war's stark effects on the men's moral barometers. "I Vitelloni" is a visually and emotionally eloquent example of neo-realist filmmaking that captures a timeless quality of male experience in a very specific and pure way. Vitelloni means "young large calves."

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
In the barrage of low budget B-movie monster flicks coming out in the '50s, Don Siegel's 1956 filmic adaptation of Jack Finney's science fiction novel introduced a new kind of double-edged social satire to movie audiences. Filled with textbook chase sequences, and creepy character development, the story follows Dr. Miles Bennell (perfectly played by Kevin McCarthy) whose small California town's citizens are being duplicated by aliens. Hitchcock couldn't have done a better job of ramping up the suspense in a horror film that is as much fun today as when it shocked audiences in the '50s. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is an outstanding blend of sci-fi, horror, and cynical social satire.

Jaws
Spielberg's opening sequence in "Jaws" pushes the second-act shocker from Hitchcock's "Psycho" up to the start of a terrifying horror movie that also borrows from Hitchcock's other masterpiece "The Birds." A sexy nude woman goes for a midnight swim in the pitch-black ocean off Amity Island, where the most phallic of creatures lurks below. John Williams' pulsing musical score sends shockwaves of fear deep into the central nervous system of the audience. Suddenly all teetering apprehension erupts into sheer panic as the vulnerable girl is thrashed about in the open sea like a rag doll by an unseen monster of enormous strength and fury. The ferocity of nature must return to attack children before local police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) calls upon the salty-dog shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) and a geeky oceanographer named Matt (Richard Dreyfus) to go after the fish that threatens the livelihood of the resort town. In 1975 "Jaws" made Steven Spielberg a household name by delivering on an unpredictable primal threat and fear of the unknown. For as many women who refused to take showers after seeing "Psycho," just as many stayed away from the ocean after seeing "Jaws." Peter Benchley's characters are exquisitely fulfilled by Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfus, who carry out the literary portent of their archetypes to the letter. In the end, the shark is a MacGuffin necessary for the men to bond and test themselves against what they fear most--their own mortality.

La Dolce Vita
Before Federico Fellini's highly stylized "La Dolce Vita" won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1960 and introduced the world to modern Rome's decadent realm of paparazzi, pseudo-intellectuals and working class individuals against an urban wasteland of rootless existence. The film marked Fellini's break from neo-realism and conventional narrative structure, and stood as a defining and incalculably influential moment in cinema. Told over a period of seven nights and seven days, the story follows suave journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) as he flits between nightclubs, cafes, press conferences, churches and beds on an impotent quest for unattainable women. 'The sweet life' is shown as a hollow goal beyond the grasp even of those at its euphoric center. The satire on display is so simultaneously subtle yet blatant that the movie itself is intoxicating.

La Terra Trema
Luchino Visconti's 1948 "La Terra Trema." Visconti's third film is set in a poor Sicilian fishing port village being exploited by wholesale merchants. Based on Giovanni Verga's novel, the film centers on one family's attempt to break the economic stranglehold of their capitalist oppressors in spite of the crushing effect that such an effort might have on their town. As its title presages "La Terra Trema" is an earth-shattering example of neo-realist filmmaking that feels as much like a documentary as it does a fictional narrative film. Visconti used real Sicilian fishermen as non-actors expressing their circumstances and beliefs. The effect is a powerful portrait of graceful human dignity caught between the cruelty of the sea and opportunistic greed.

Last Year at Marienbad
Alain Resnais sumptuous 1961 film is a minimalist study in the ability of mise en scene to tell an inscrutable story of a love triangle. Resnais famously said that the film is “not a fixed work of art.” Indeed, “Last Year At Marienbad” is a cinematic puzzled filled with architectural compositions that dare the audience to penetrate their austere logic. The influences of Dadaism and surrealism play strongly in a hyper-visual context of porcelain beauty. Seeing the film is like being drugged with a pill that is the antithesis of the high audiences took away from Busby Berekely movies. It's a filmic parlor game that the fillmmaker plays very close to the vest. Ah, what sublime confusion.   

Leave Her To Heaven
Martin Scorsese famously called director John M. Stahl's 1945 post war Technicolor masterpiece "a film noir in color." Gene Tierney uses her pale blue eyes to stark unemotional effect as Ellen Berent, a femme fatale seductress who lays a marriage trap for successful author Richard Harland (played by Cornel Wilde). Ellen is an obsessive compulsive whose insular idea of wedded life excludes everyone except the man she holds onto with a death grip. Vincent Price plays Ellen's jilted former fiance in this lucious thriller filled with chewy dialogue, great costume designs, and lakeside locations to die for. Mental illness never looked so seductive or bit with such a ferocious over-bite as from Gene Tierney's demented character.   

Lifeboat
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 realization of a script started by John Steinbeck, and completed by Hitchcock, is an often overlooked cinematic treasure. Set in the claustrophobic confines of a lifeboat in the Pacific ocean, a group of eight survivors from a torpedoed freighter share their tiny vessel with the German commander responsible for their predicament. Hitchcock’s inventive use of cinema language to expand on the drama occurring within the limited confines of the boat is something to behold. Tallulah Bankhead steals the movie as a fur-wearing selfish journalist whose hair is barely ever out of place. Conceived as a wartime social satire, “Lifeboat” carries a boatload of conflicting ideologies that are still at issue today. Hitchcock's answer to the perpetual film school dilemma of making a movie on a boat as one of a filmmaker's biggest challenges, is a textbook example of how it's done right. 

The Maltese Falcon
John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. Although Dashiell Hammett’s “stuff that dreams are made of” novel already had two film versions under the title “Satan Met a Lady,” screenwriter John Huston chose the story for his directorial debut. Huston emphasized its suspense elements to create a noir that didn’t rely on spectacle, but rather on the intrigue of its amoral characters. Hitchcockian right down to its statuette maguffin of a black bird, “The Maltese Falcon” is considered the first “film noir” and launched Humphrey Bogart’s career. Every scene is something to savor thanks to great performances from Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet as “the fat man.”  

Matewan
John Sayles' suburb period drama is set in the '20s era West Virginia coal mining community of Matewan where union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) arrives with a group of black miners being brought in by the Stone Mountain Coal Company to break striking Italian miners. Sayles' meticulous script manifests the stark social influences of government, corporation, religion, race, and personal struggles pervading the Appalachian region at the time. James Earl Jones gives a powerful performance as a Black miner called "Few Clothes," and David Strathairn creates a distinctly un-stereotypical sheriff in the guise of Sid Hatfield. Layered with a beautiful musical score by Mason Daring, it's Chris Cooper's union leader that captures the imagination in an unforgettable picture of essential American history. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler contributes greatly to the look and feel of a truly special cinematic achievement.

Ms. 45
Abel Ferrara's 1981 cult über thriller is a feminist take on the good-old-bad-old days of '70s-'80s Manhattan that gave rise to films like "Death Wish" and "Taxi Driver." Screenwriter Nicholas St. John teaches his own school of dramatic form with an unprecedented double inciting incident. Mute garment-district seamstress Thana (played by the lovely Zoe Tamerlis) is raped twice after a long day at work. The second violation occurs in Thana's Hell's Kitchen apartment. There she gets the better of her attacker with an iron. After some piecemeal corpse removal, Thana makes use of the rapist's gun to go on a revenge killing spree that proves even more cathartic, if as stylish, as "Death Wish." It's a shame that when this film was finally released on DVD, nearly a minute of footage was cut from the original version. Ferrara's creativity is refreshing in its indictment of verbal, physical, and psychological abuse against women and serves as a significant time capsule of a particular era in American culture. "Ms. 45" is filled with tons of droll humor, a great soundtrack, and a determinedly unsanitized of New York in the early '80s. James Lemmo's camera work is contagious and the cool tone of the movie is exceptional. I went through a period when I kept my VHS copy of "Ms. 45" in the player for about six months and watched it repeatedly. There's a depth of symbolic magic in this movie, and more than a little sex appeal from its traumatized protagonist.

1900
"1900" is Bernardo Bertolucci's crowning achievement of collectivist socio-political cinema. It is a grand scale, formally composed, Italian drama about a society of peasant farmers over a period of nearly 50 years, as seen through the eyes of two socially opposite boys. That the internationally-cast epic was made possible as a result of the vast success of Bertolucci's controversial "Last Tango In Paris" (1972) contributes to the mystique of "1900." The 35-year-old director's newfound status allowed his unhindered imagination, at the height of his powers, to finish his trilogy of fascist-themed films with an original script co-written with his brother Giuseppe and Franco Arcalli (both were co-screenwriters with Bertolucci on "Last Tango"). Where the first two films in the trilogy ("The Spider's Stratagem"--1970 and "The Conformist"-- 1971) live in a stylish bourgeoisie noir world of cloaked deceit, "1900" explores the familial identity existing between a group of socialist farmers, the landowners they work for, and fascist factions penetrating rural Parma, Italy. Its half-century scope provides a raw macro/micro slant on psychological, generational, political, and cultural changes in the Italian region of Bernardo Bertolucci's birth.

Naked Lunch
David Cronenberg brings William S. Burroughs' notoriously "unpublishable" and "unfilmable" novel of heroin-induced hallucination fantasy to zesty cinematic life with an outrageous film that very nearly accomplishes the book's goal of "extinguishing all rational thought." With clinical precision Peter Weller playsBurroughs' alter ego Bill Lee, who works as an exterminator--read as undercover-typewriter-wielding-junkie-satirist--who finds that his wife Joan (Judy Davis) is copping his "insecticide" powder to get high. Bill answers to a corporate "controller" for the CIA-styled "Interzone" that sends him on a mission to kill his wife--something that Burroughs accomplished and got away with in real life during a deadly game of William Tell (!). As usual, Cronenberg pulls out all the stops. Here he gives us alien-head talking typewriters that issue orders to Bill (as played by Weller) with more sardonic irony than two Hunter S. Thompsons put together. Easily the trippiest film to come out of the '90s, "Naked Lunch" is a flawless balm to all the Tarantino-inspired gun fests unleashed after "Naked Lunch" made cinema screens drip with a surreal syrup that sticks to you eyeballs and intestines like literary goop. "Lunch is always naked," and so is Cronenberg's fantastic interpretation of Burroughs' twisted genius.

 

Nosferatu
Werner Herzog's 1979 homage to F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent film is an appropriately chilling telling of the gothic tale derived from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Klaus Kinski delivers a spot-on performance that may be finest of his career as the bloodthirsty vampire Count Dracula who takes advantage of a real estate broker (played by Bruno Ganz). Isabelle Adjani brings her immutable beauty to bear as the broker's fearful wife fated to suffer Dracula’s bite. The movie is filled with delightfully scary touches and recreated camera angles from Murnau's original.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
In 1975, Czech filmmaker Milos Forman ("Loves of a Blonde" - 1965) became an overnight cause celebre in America thanks to his brilliant film adaptation of Ken Kesey's best-selling 1962 novel of the same name. The film is a diabolically anti-authoritarian satire that sits comfortably alongside Phillippe de Broca's 1966 WWII asylum themed "King of Hearts." When Jack Nicholson was chosen to play roustabout mental patient R.P. McMurphy, the actor was already firmly etched in the public mind as a real-life icon of free-thinking, anti-establishment, rebellion thanks to his unforgettable performances in such topical films as "Easy Rider" (1969), "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), "Carnal Knowledge" (1971), "The Last Detail" (1973), and "Chinatown" (1974). But it's in "Cuckoo's Nest" where Nicholson exhibited a virtuosic ability to juggle infinite layers of social subtext and personal motivation while dancing on a razor's edge of representational acting. Incarcerated for relations with an underage girl, Nicholson's balding McMurphy is a testosterone driven man of the people, who takes his place as a liberator in the florescent lit rooms of a state mental facility overseen by Nurse Ratched (played by Louise Fletcher in an Oscar winning performance), a tightly wound bureaucrat and borderline sadist. McMurphy is attempting to work the system by allowing himself to be transferred from a prison work farm to the softer confines of a mental institution to finish his relatively short sentence. The film is an editorial commentary on the '60s mental institution system that filled around the country with traumatized war veterans, as well as a skewering of American politics and ideologies of social repression. The genius of the film is that you never feel you're being preached at, but rather being allowed a fly-on-the-wall view of a systematic crushing of humanity. That a filmmaker who escaped from communist Czechoslovakia in search of America's promised freedoms made one of the sharpest antiestablishment satires in the history comes as no surprise. What is surprising is that "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was recognized at the time of its release, and won five Academy Awards.

Overlord
D-Day--June 6, 1944--is as much a part of "Overlord's" enigmatic title as the Allied invasion code name to which it refers. Filmmaker Stuart Cooper drew from over three thousand hours worth of archival WWII footage from the Imperial War Museum to blend with his own, separately constructed narrative to create a one-of-a-kind story structure about the journey of an everyman British soldier named Tom (Brian Stirner). Cooper's canny use of historic war clips, filmed during the story's exact time period leading up to the D-Day climax of the film, lends an editorial newsreel context to Tom's personal story. With close attention to every detail of costume, atmosphere, and behavior, the filmmaker creates a hybrid cinematic artifact that is captivating. "Overlord" is a live action essay of the raw physical reality of one of the most significant moments in world history, as told from the recesses of a soldier's mind, and from a manifold vantage point that the character himself cannot begin to comprehend.

The Pianist
Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” is the director’s finest achievement, and elevates Adrien Brody (Oscar win for Best Actor 2002) to eminence in his representation of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Polanski himself was orphaned as a 7 year-old boy during the bombing of Warsaw; he escaped through a hole in a barbed wire fence. Polanski uses his familiarity with the horrific subject matter in an unsentimental way to depict an occupation that diminished 10,000 Polish Jews living in Warsaw to 20 over a period of four years. Based on Szpilman’s memoir, which was suppressed by Poland’s Communist government for 53-years, “The Pianist” follows Szpilman from his job as a pianist for Polish radio, to separation with his family, and into a long period of desperate hiding. The muted heroism of Szpilman’s survival flashes as a fragile and determined pulse in Adrien Brody’s magnificently understated performance.

Pixote
Long before Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund made "City of God" in 2002, about Rio de Janeiro's youth-centric atmosphere of organized crime, director Hector Babenco set the bar for such explosive cinema with his brilliant 1981 film "Pixote." The film's full title , "Pixote: a Lei do Mais Fraco" translates as "Pixote: The Law of the Weakest," and was based on José Louzeiro's book "A infância dos mortos" ("The Childhood of the Dead Ones") in a screenplay adaptation by Babenco and his script collaborator Jorge Duran, about a young boy named Pixote (pronounced Pee-jo-che). Fernando Ramos Da Silva was the expressive young non-actor chosen to play his life as a ghetto child for Babenco's evocative subjective camera. The boy is sent to a cruel juvenile reformatory where he sniffs glue and learns the ways of prison survival that inform his life after he and two of his friends escape the jail. Pixote desperately seeks the attention a mother figure even as he falls deeper into an inevitable vortex of crime and violence. "Pixote" is Hector Babenco's masterwork. The film is a distressed and powerful cry for social change in a Brazilian society that feeds on its on children. It is a deeply affecting and haunting film that penetrates the skin of its viewer through the personal commitment to its subject that comes through in every frame. That Fernandos Ramos Da Silva was eventually murdered at 19 by police in Sao Paulo only emphasizes the sad fate of so many more Brazilian children just like him. "Pixote" is an amazing cinematic social document made with fury and passion by an uncompromising director. There has never been another film that approaches its depiction of Brazil's condemned youth, not even "City of God."

Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock should be credited with making the first slasher film for the ground-breaking narrative template he created for "Psycho." Regardless of how many times you've seen it, "Psycho" is a compulsively watchable horror thriller that builds layers of exponential suspense with every scene. Famously made on a shoestring budget, with a television production crew, "Psycho" is a horror movie that gains claustrophobic momentum from its desolate "Bates" motel location where Janet Leigh's Marion Crane makes her last stop. Anthony Perkins gives a career-topping performance as the motel owner with a nasty mommy complex, based on real-life psychotic Ed Gein. The 1960 film found Alfred Hitchcock working at the height of his powers. The famous shower scene is still studied by film students for Hitchcock's brilliant use of montage. "Psycho" is everything a horror movie should be, creepy, sexy, dark, and terribly shocking. In a word, perfect. 

Raging Bull
Robert De Niro's metamorphosis into boxing legend Jake La Motta (AKA the Bronx Bull) is one of the most impressive acting transformations on celluloid. Martin Scorsese's bold decision to film "Raging Bull" in black and white pays off enormously in capturing the internal and physical struggle of a distinctive anti-hero set on a course of self destruction in the boxing world of the '40s and '50s. The glorious boxing scenes in "Raging Bull" are standard fare for university filmmaking classes due to Scorsese's facile use of cinema language to convey La Motta's character traits. "Raging Bull" is one of the best films of the '80s, but it is not without its flaws. Scorsese's heavily stylized approach keeps the audience at an arms distance that practically dares the viewer to see beyond it. Nonetheless, the experiment is pure cinema, and pure Scorsese. 

Repulsion
As his second feature film (after "Knife in the Water"), Roman Polanski's1965 psychological thriller uncoils like a primordial poisonous snake disguised by unfathomable beauty that conceals its deadly feminine bite. Catherine Deneuve was not yet a star when Polanski cast her in the role of Carol Ledoux, a lovely but emotionally disturbed 18-year-old Belgian girl living in London with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) while working as a beautician. When Helen goes away on vacation, the virginal Carol becomes a shut-in after murdering her suitor and lapses into a homicidal madness that takes the life of another who misjudges Carol's grip on sanity. Co-written by Polanski and Gerard Brach, "Repulsion" follows an escalating dove-tailing story form that Polanski explored in his later "apartment" films "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant." Several surreal nightmare sequences disclose Carol's troubled subconscious mind in suggestive and shocking ways. Its visually striking black-and-white atmosphere is accented with an intensely modulated jazz score by Chico Hamilton, as orchestrated by Gabor Szabo, and articulated with canny camera work to further reveal the warped psychological state of its anti-heroine. A study in a descent into insanity, "Repulsion" is a horror film steeped in a palpable dread of sexual repression that takes hold and never lets go.

Reservoir Dogs
In 1992 Quentin Tarantino did something that hadn't been done since 1986 with David Lynch's "Blue Velvet;" he reinvented cinema. A deft application of an originally voiced time-flipping narrative, Tarantino's "action" script is a filmic illusion that Hitchcock or Welles would applaud. The main conceit of Tarantino's bank heist story is that the film's "action" occurs after the heist, with well-constructed flashback sequences and monologues to impose an emotional undercurrent of back-story. Each of the six black-suited robbers is known to the others only by his color coded pseudonym. Eddie Bunker plays Mr. Blue, Tarantino is the chatty Mr. Brown, Harvey Keitel is Mr. White, and Steve Buscemi is Mr. Pink. Suffering from a belly gunshot wound sustained during the heist, Mr. Orange (perfectly played by Tim Roth) is an undercover cop sincerely befriended by Keitel's character. Left bleeding in the gang's where house, Mr. Orange witnesses the psychotic Mr. Blonde (manically played by Michael Madsen) torturing a young cop named Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) to the funky lyrical strains of "Stuck in the Middle With You (Stealers Wheel). Tarantino doesn't just sucker punch his unsuspecting audience in the solar plexus; he goes for the heart and groin as well. "Reservoir Dogs" is a flawlessly conceived concept film that's theatrical in nature, with a bit of Grand Guignol thrown in for dramatic effect. The film created a sub-genre of crime suspense copycats, of which Troy Duffy's "The Boondock Saints" (1999) is one of the most embarrassing examples. Over his career, Tarantino's films have proven everything that "Reservoir Dogs" seemed to promise and still achieves. Freshness.

Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip
This filmed performance of Richard Pryor’s first comic routine after the immensely talented comedian set himself on fire while free-basing cocaine is an example of the most raw and funny comic material you will ever witness. Pryor hits the comedy running and doesn’t let up until he’s exhausted the audience with so much gut-wrenching laughter that you won't know whether to stand up or lie down. His honest, and therefore brutally funny observations, about racism and his own drug abuse become moral touchstones that explode with brilliant humor as he thoughtfully explores avenues of thought and universal human experience as a satirist of the highest degree. There will always only ever be one Richard Pryor, and his profoundly inspired performance shows exactly why.       

The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Like the hugely successful B-Movie that inspired it, Harry Novak's 1965 sexploitation classic "Kiss Me Quick!" "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is an exploitation film that draws on a grab-bag of social identifiers to expand on conventional hypocrisies with more than just a nudge and a wink. Writer/composer/actor Richard O'Brien's 1973 British stage play became a hit and the play's director Jim Sharman wisely insisted on using the original cast, with the exception of American newcomers Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, when time came to direct the film version in 1975. Famous as more of a social phenomenon than as a great piece of cinema, I would argue that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is both thanks to an inspired musical score, and unforgettable camp performances. As part of the '70s midnight movie craze that coincided with the advent of punk music, the film attracted a playful young audience more than prepared to interact with it's innuendo-riddled dialogue around a fetish-based story about an alien transvestite from the galaxy of Transylvania called Dr. Frank N. Furter (played with Mick Jagger charm by Tim Curry) who seduces two stranded newlywed visitors to his castle where he creates life in the form of a chiseled male named Rocky Horror. This is a movie you have to see with an audience.

Rosemary's Baby
From its haunting musical motif to its actual Gothic setting in and around Manhattan’s West Side neighborhood Dakota building, “Rosemary’s Baby” is one of the most effective horror films ever made. Mia Farrow gives the performance of her career as a young newlywed bride to an ambitious actor (played by none other than John Cassavetes). The young couple moves into an apartment inside the Dakota where a group of Satanists have set up shop, and Cassavetes’ Guy Woodhouse character takes the bait behind his wife's back. The palpable sense of dread, suspicion, and conspiracy that Polanski creates puts a taste in the viewer's mouth that remains for days after seeing the film. As the second installment in Polanski's "trilogy of apartment films," ("Repulsion" was the first), "Rosemary's Baby" pulsates and seethes with the primal fear of an unknown birth. If ever there was a pro birth control horror movie, this is it.

The Rules of the Game
Jean Renoir's 1939 triumph The Rules of the Game. Adapted from Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne, Renoir used the music of Mozart to bookend the story about a country on the brink of war. The action is set in a large country mansion where guests gather for a party and observe the rules of society's game to varying degrees of success. Although on the surface the film plays out like an Oscar Wilde farce, albeit with a twist of an Agatha Christi-styled murder, it is one of the most scathing of political and cultural satires. Banned by the Nazis, and destroyed before being discovered and restored, "The Rules of the Game" influenced iconic directors like Orson Welles, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Robert Altman. It is one of best films ever made.

Salo
Pier Palo Pasolini's last film was the most ambitious of his career, and the most misunderstood. Still banned in several countries, "Saol" is an haunting journey into the depths of hell on earth, loosely stewarded by the literary underpinnings of the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" and the three descending levels of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno." Shockingly graphic, and yet formally composed, it is a film that employs the full arsenal of Pasolini's polemic and satiric tools toward a poetic commentary on fascism disguised as consumerist capitalism enforced by a complicit group of bourgeoisie dignitaries. It is a film that expands in meaning in the years since its creation to encompass every degree of political and military corruption that history has acutely fulfilled--most recently in the atrocious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Pasolini set the story in the Italian town of Salo, where his brother was killed during WWII, and where Pasolini himself was arrested at one point by Nazi soldiers. Four wealthy Mussolini fascist libertines prepare for their certain demise before the end of the war by kidnapping nine boys and nine girls, for the purpose of living out their most outlandish sexual fantasies within the confines of a private villa. The men employ the assistance of four experienced courtesans to fire their debauched imaginations with ribald parlor stories that inform the humiliating and brutal sex acts that they will execute upon their naked nubile prisoners. Dramatically feral and artistically fertile, "Salo" is a rigorous movie that dares to use the metaphor of torture as a device of utter physical and psychological annihilation for both the victim and the torturer. It is significant that such an intellectual filmmaker could so dynamically condense thick layers of social commentary into an artistically skeletal form that is perfectly transparent upon reflection. There is nothing exploitative about "Salo." It is a film that demands to be studied with the same degree of scrutiny that corporate, religious, and governmental industries should be subjected to for their enslaving effect on the planet and humanity. This is work, and not play.

Secrets & Lies
After years of working in British television, and making four impressive features that included "Bleak Moments" (1971) and "Naked" (1993), Mike Leigh firmly established himself internationally as Britain's version of John Cassavetes with a candid film of untold emotional depth and narrative complexity. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense Cumberbatch, a twenty-something black optometrist living in London, who traces her family tree after the death of her adoptive mother only to discover that her biological mother is a working class white woman named Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn). Leigh spent many months of preparation with his actors doing improvisation workshops in order to create a script that carries a super-natural sense of realism and elemental truth. Its centerpiece is an unbroken 8-minute shot of Hortense and Cynthia meeting in an empty restaurant for tea where walls of defenses gradually come crumbling down as the truth of their relationship is revealed. Every performance from Leigh's brilliant ensemble of actors, that include Timothy Spall and Phyllis Logan, is a thing of rare dramatic authenticity. Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste are extraordinary in their restraint, humor, and spontenaity. The film's also unbroken climatic social scene elevates its primordial familial fabric into an ethereal tapestry where every ancient thread of untruth is pulled out along with other lies that have attached themselves over the years. Much more than just a touching story of the ties that bind humanity and the way we reveal ourselves, "Secrets & Lies" (1996) is a staggering work of cinematic genius. It is truly a perfect film.

Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa introduced Samurai to the Western world in 1954 with his epic Japanese 16th century period film about a group of Samurai hired by farmers to defend a peasant village overrun by bandits. “Seven Samurai” served as a template for such popular American westerns as “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Wild Bunch,” and “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.” Toshiro Mifune is in top form as a rowdy Samurai exhibitionist still in command of the ideals and values of his quickly disappearing noble class. The original "assemble-the-team” movie (think “Reservoir Dogs”) operates on several social and historical levels that give it a timeless quality. Kurosawa's intention of making his first period film "entertaining enough to eat" is brought to that palpable condition through Mifune's endlessly watchable peasant warrior.

Sorcerer
William Friedkin leveraged the enormous amount of influence he accrued with success of "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist" to live out a fantasy of remaking Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller "Le Salaire de la Peur" ("Wages of Fear"). Infamous battles with Friedkin's production companies (Paramount and Universal) over casting and budgetary concerns were exacerbated by costly set disasters involving a rope suspension bridge used in one of the film's most suspenseful sequences. The director's decision to use an electronic music score by Tangerine Dream adds considerably creating to a volatile vibe that compliments screenwriter Walon Green's prescient adaptation of Geroges Arnaud's novel. During its finely crafted first act, Friedkin masterfully sets up the back-stories of four criminals from around the globe who end up in the same backwater town in Venezuela where an oil fire 200 miles away, gives the men an opportunity to make a sizable sum of money if they can successfully deliver several cases of nitro-sweating dynamite. In spite of Friedkin's public grousing about Roy Scheider being the wrong actor for the leading man role of Jackie Scanlon--the director originally wanted to cast Steve McQueen--Scheider delivers with a gutsy performance that is every bit as solid as his work on "Jaws." "Sorcerer" had the misfortune of being released at the same time as "Star Wars," and as such flopped at the box office in the blink of an eye. It's rare that a remake lives up to the original upon which it was based, but "Sorcerer" is that exceptional movie.

Starship Troopers
Paul Verhoeven's cynical satire of American politics is loosely based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 science fiction novel which went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960. Verhoeven's outrageous sci-fi epic piles on layers of commentary about the nature of militarization in a story about young and lovely high school graduates going off to war against invading giant arachnid bugs from the planet of Kelndathu. In the film's near future, American society has fully integrated political indoctrination through a constant barrage of propaganda to effect its fascist motives. In a world where "Service guarantees citizenship," even if the rich don't have to be citizens, every kid wants to do a great job for the Fatherland--and die! "Starship Troopers" is a canny war satire that outshines even Kubrick's great film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."


The Tenant
Roman Polanski’s intense 1976 psychological thriller stars the director himself as Trelkovsky, a troubled file clerk who takes over the former apartment of a young female suicide victim named Simone Choule who jumped from its Parisian windows. Trelkovsky comes to believe that his cruel nagging neighbors were to blame for the woman’s suicide, and are now using their same bizarre methods to extract a similar response from him. Enigmatic performances from Isabelle Adjani as a chic friend of the deceased, and from Polanski as a man losing his sanity, contribute greatly to the film's unusual layers of suspense that coincide with the director's keen eye for Paris locations, and brilliant visual compositions. Known as the last of Polanski’s apartment trilogy, following “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Tenant” contains one of the most outrageous double climaxes ever committed to celluloid. Nightmares will follow.

The Third Man
Carol Reed’s 1949 noir staring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles, and based on Graham Greene’s screenplay, is set in post war Vienna--a shell of a city divided into American, Russian, French, and British zones. Joseph Cotton’s Holly Martins arrives to Vienna with the promise of a job from his old college pal Harry Lime (played by Welles), but Lime’s funeral is the only welcoming he gets. Harry's supposed accidental death after being hit by a truck raises burning questions that Holly explores in a city that breathes with corruption from its active black market. A porter (played by Paul Hoerbiger) tells Holly of a "third man" that helped carry Lime's body away from the accident site, only to turn up murdered the next day. Holly eventually discovers the truth about his friend's underworld activities, and finally meets with Harry on Vienna's famous Ferris wheel in one of cinema's most beloved scenes where Welles delivers a truly cynical monologue that was at least partially improvised. "The Third Man" also has one of the best chase sequences ever filmed—and it doesn’t involve cars. The film won the Grand Prix for Best Feature Film at Cannes in 1949.

The Tim Drum
Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Gunter Grass' groundbreaking WWII novel is no less shocking in its representation of a boy named Oskar (brilliantly played by David Bennett) who, on his third birthday is given a tin drum. Oskar resolves to remain small and for the first 18-years of his life he remains the size of a 3-year-old boy, carrying around the tin drum that he protects with an unearthly shriek that will shatter glass. Resourceful Oskar is a tenacious survivor who uses his compact body-size as a perfect disguise during the Nazi's reign of terror. The Tin Drum encompasses a wing of Polish/German wartime history with an explosive cinematic nerve that contributed to a revitalization of German cinema in 1979 shared by Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Touching the Void
The docudrama genre as never been as well utilized as it is in director Kevin Macdonald’s groundbreaking rendering of the remarkable true story of two young British mountain climbers’ near death experience climbing the 21,000 foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. Based on mountain climber Joe Simpson’s book "Touching the Void: The Harrowing First-Person Account of One Man's Miraculous Survival," the film uses talking-head accounts by the actual climbers (Joe Simpson and Simon Yates), intercut with breathtaking reenactments of the actual events using stunt climbers and actors (Nicholas Aaron and Brendan Mackey). Fascinating, intense, and steeped in the extent of man’s will to live, “Touching The Void” is a film that will rattle your nerves and give you a colder chill than you have ever felt before. "Touching the Void" stands as a definitive textbook example of the rarest of feature film genres; the docudrama.

Variety
Bette Gordon's independent psychological thriller, written by Kathy Acker, is a stunning proto-feminist noir experiment set in the sex shops of 1983 Times Square. During Manhattan's economic downturn Christine (Sandy McLeod), a Midwest transplant, takes a job as a ticket booth clerk at a Times Square porn theatre called the "Variety." Surprisingly, the sleazy urban atmosphere fires her erotic desires, and curiosities about the power of her own sexuality. Christine goes on a baseball game date at Yankee Stadium with Louie (Richard Davidson), a wealthy regular patron at the Variety with underworld connections, and secretly follows him after he's called away from their date. When she isn't stalking Louie, Christine tests the influence of her dirty imagination by speaking erotic fantasy monologues to her non-pulsed journalist boyfriend Mark (Will Patton). Daring, raw, and in tune with the social crosscurrents of the period, "Variety" achieves a cumulative effect of short-circuiting preconceived notions of taboo sexual stereotypes via Christine's journey of discovery. It's a thriller that takes poetic liberties equal to the harmonic leaps of John Lurie's evocative musical score.

The Wages of Fear
Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 magnum opus "The Wages of Fear." Based on Geroges Arnaud's novel, the fiercely anti-capitalist story follows four out-of-work loners (played by Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eych and Folco Lulli) hanging out in a desolate South American town. The men take on a highly dangerous job of transporting two truckloads of nitroglycerine over 300 miles of bad road to put out raging oil fires. William Friedkin  did an admirable but overlooked remake called "Sorcerer" in 1977, on which he squandered his enormous success with "The Exorcist." "Wages of Fear" is an uncompromising parable about money, greed, and man's jealous desire for that which he can never have. Yves Montand is outstanding in this gritty and unrelentingly suspenseful picture. 

The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Winner of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or, Ken Loach’s historic film enables a look forward by looking back in time. Set in West Cork, Ireland in 1920, the story fixes on the strife within a group of Irish freedom fighters, the IRA’s Flying Column. The Flying Column is attempting to reclaim Ireland’s independence from Britain’s proxy Black and Tan squads occupying their verdant land. The formerly apolitical Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) gives up a budding career as a physician to join the resistance fight with his fiercely idealistic brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney), whose familial and political loyalties will be sorely tested by the story’s end. The story evokes a lesson that governments around the world consistently refuse to learn—that occupied people, regardless of their culture, always fight back since theyhave more at stake and less to lose. "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" is an exceptional work of vigorous cinematic art, filled with dynamic performances from its very talented all-Irish cast.

A Woman Under the Influence
In his 1974 film, John Cassvetes’ wife Gena Rowlands plays Mabel, an alcohol addicted and psychologically challenged wife to Peter Falk’s construction foreman Nick. The couple’s dysfunctional household, complete with their three kids, serves as an emotional lightening rod for their families and for their working class neighbors. Cassavetes defined the process of independent cinema by producing and distributing the film himself, without the aid of any traditional distribution channels. Gena Rowlands gives a fearless, career-defining tour de force performance that is a pinnacle of film-acting in an earth-shattering film unlike any other ever made. If you've never seen a Cassavetes film, this is a great one to start with. You will be changed.

Young Frankenstein
In 1974 Mel Brooks caught comic lightning in a bottle with his appropriately black-and-white spoof of James Whale's 1931 classic horror film "Frankenstein." Brooks was on a tear with his hugely popular film "Blazing Saddles" when he unleashed the innuendo-laced "Young Frankenstein" on unsuspecting audiences, who found themselves with stomach aches from sustained fits of laughter. Gene Wilder brilliantly plays the semi-mad college lecturer Frederick Frankenstein, who insists on the proper pronunciation of his name as "Fronkenschteen." As the grandson of the more famous mad scientist, Wilder's zany doctor inherits his family's Transylvanian estate. Naturally he decides to go there and is soon inspired to continue his grandfather's experiments, which involve creating life from parts of corpses. Frankenstein's comely blonde lab assistant Inga (Teri Garr) distracts the doctor from his soon-visiting fiancée Elizabeth (hilariously played by Madeline Kahn), and with the help of the very funny Marty Feldman as Igor (pronounced Eyegor), makes a Frankenstein monster of his very own. Peter Boyle fills the creature's clunky dancing shoes—yes, there's a song-and-dance-sequence--and Cloris Leachman strikes many a funny chord as Frau Blucher, whose name excites horses whenever its mentioned. Brooks used many of the actual props created by Kenneth Strickfaden from Whale's original film, which gives "Young Frankenstein" an atmosphere of reverent delight beneath its bawdy puns and outrageous physical humor.

Your Cole Smithey Oscar Prediction Cheat-Sheet

As with all predictions, this is just one critc's best guesses. Bon chance!

1. Best Picture: "Slumdog Millionaire" -- should and most likely will win.

2. Best Actor: If more people knew about the Mickey Rourke on-set shenanigans that temporarily shut down production on "The Wrestler," he probably wouldn't have gotten a nomination. Sean Penn should walk away with the statue for his amazing performance as Harvey Milk.

3. Best Actress: Kate Winslet will win for "The Reader" even though she deserves it more for "Revolutionary Road." Melissa Leo does not belong in the noms for the mediocre indy film "Frozen River."

4. Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger for "The Dark Knight" --for a spectacular performance.

5. Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz for "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" -- an example of sexuality trumping everything else.

6. Best Director: Danny Boyle for "Slumdog Millionaire"--the right choice.

7. Foreign Film: "Waltz With Bashir" (Israel) will probably win, although "The Class" (France) is a better film.

8. Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy ("Slumdog Millionaire") should deservedly walk away with this one.

9. Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black will likely get the trophy for "Milk," even though Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon and Pete Docter are favored by critics for "WALL-E."

10. Animated Feature Film: "WALL-E" will win easily in this sparsely populated category.

11. Art Direction: Donald Burt and Victor Zolfo will win for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," but my personal favorite is Nathan Crowley and Peter Lando for "The Dark Knight"

12. Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle for "Slumdog Millionaire" is my best bet, even if I'd personally give it to Wally Pfister for "The Dark Knight."

13. Sound Mixing: A toss-up between "The Dark Knight" and "Slumdog Millionaire," "Slumdog" will take the prize.

14. Sound Editing: "The Dark Knight" should get the little gold man, just to split the baby with "Slumdog" for "Sound Mixing."

15. Original Score: "Slumdog Millionaire"--A.R. Rahman.

16. Original Song: "Jai Ho" from "Slumdog Millionaire" -- a very catchy tune.

17. Costume: "The Duchess" -- the costumes were the best thing about the movie.

18. Documentary Feature: "Man on Wire" -- no competition here.

19. Documentary (short subject): Your guess is as good as mine in this category. You're on your own.

20. Film Editing: "Slumdog Millionaire."

21. Makeup: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- the best thing about the movie was the makeup.

22. Animated Short Film: As most of the audience, I didn't see 'em. "Lavatory -- Lovestory" sounds just strange enough to be read out loud at the Oscars.

23. Live Action Short Film: "Manon on the Asphalt" - for the same reason as #22.

24. Visual Effects: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- behind makeup, this is the other reason to see "Button."