My All-Time Favorite Movies - In Order

A deep dive into a dream world - arguably the greatest and most seductive piece of filmmaking ever commited to celluloid in cinema history Hollywood, the city where dreams come true. Yet the realities of the dream world have the tendency to eventually turn into a nightmare, a nightmare which is too real to be lived in. Mulholland Drive is a movie which engulfs the viewer in its intricate mystery plot like no other and leaves you with a load of memorable, haunting or outright shocking images you will never forget. You might be caught off guard by the true nature of the underlying mystery, and the denouement will keep you mesmerized for sure, making a re-watch essential, yet rewarding experience. As often with an excentric filmmaker's work, this is a movie to only get going in your head once it's already over, and if you're willing to get immersed in it.

Lynch's masterpiece invites to dig deeper, to uncover new layers, hidden references, multiple interpretations. The film is as psychologically profound as it is visually stunning and while it draws its fascination from what appears surreal at first glance, it is nevertheless firmly embedded in a reality that won't let us go, blood-curdling as it might turn out, a reality full of hopes, dreams, obsessions, fear, you name it.

One could ask, is Mulholland Drive merely an observation of the true value of celebrity culture as a commodity, or does it promt greater consideration of what it means to be individual in an environment seemingly devoid of genuine identity? It is precisely this insistent call for inquiry that has enshrined Mulholland Drive among cinemagoers and critics and it is this that will ensure audiences will continue to savour getting lost down Lynch's surrealist highway for generations to come.

"It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance...they were aroused by pure film."

So Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut about "Psycho," adding that it "belongs to filmmakers, to you and me." Hitchcock deliberately wanted "Psycho" to look like a cheap exploitation film. He shot it not with his usual expensive feature crew (which had just finished "North by Northwest") but with the crew he used for his television show. He filmed in black and white. Long passages contained no dialogue. His budget, $800,000, was cheap even by 1960 standards [...] Yet no other Hitchcock film had a greater impact. "I was directing the viewers," the director told Truffaut in their book-length interview. "You might say I was playing them, like an organ." It was the most shocking film its original audience members had ever seen.

These surprises are now widely known, and yet "Psycho" continues to work as a frightening, insinuating thriller. That's largely because of Hitchcock's artistry in two areas that are not as obvious: The setup of the Marion Crane story, and the relationship between Marion and Norman (Anthony Perkins). Both of these elements work because Hitchcock devotes his full attention and skill to treating them as if they will be developed for the entire picture.

What makes "Psycho" immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers. - RE.

Céline and Julie Go Boating is a do it yourself guide to rediscovering the delights of the street outside, and of the idiots all around you, here’s where we see Rivette first moving toward Shakespeare, and the world as all fools’ paradise. The titular aquatic voyage does literally occur, late in the third act, if that matters at all. But the very title, Céline and Julie Go Boating, also works well metaphorically for the notion that these two friends skirr into dark and attempt the taming of unnamed waters. The voyage Céline and Julie edge us on springs from impulses as expansive as our own imagination allows. Their desires and dreams are seductive and sweet like the crazy magic candy they partake of.

The miracle of Céline and Julie Go Boating is that all of its disparate elements are mixed into the final cut that the film achieves that rarest of qualities: it creates a world of its own, a world in which everything on screen represents an opening for the viewer.

It’s not just that the film holds up to repeat viewings; its very point is its seemingly infinite repeatability, its mysterious capacity to surprise both first-time viewers and those who know it as well as a magician reciting an incantation.

Celine and Julie Go Boating is everything cinema should be; fresh, innovative, creative, funny...It's one of the most layered films I've ever seen, and even after over a dozen or so viewings, it's lost none of its power to astonish me with its creativity, depth, or hilarity. Sure, there are deep serious films. No other film is as much of a joy to watch as Celine and Julie Go Boating. "Get this, Alice: it's really wonderland".

Further reading (an examination of the sexual politics of nonverbal communication structures in the film): http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/ok/subversivefantasy.html

A great visionary leap, unsurpassed in its vision of man and the universe. It was a statement that came at a time which now looks something like the peak of humanity's technological optimism The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in "2001: A Space Odyssey," but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, “2001" is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

The film creates its effects essentially out of visuals and music. It is meditative. It does not cater to us, but wants to inspire us, enlarge us. Nearly 50 years after it was made, it has not dated in any important detail, and although special effects have become more versatile in the computer age, Trumbull's work remains completely convincing -- more convincing, perhaps, than more sophisticated effects in later films, because it looks more plausible, more like documentary footage than like elements in a story.

Film can take us where we cannot go. It can also take our minds outside their shells, and this film by Stanley Kubrick is one of the great visionary experiences in the cinema. Yes, it was a landmark of special effects, so convincing that years later the astronauts, faced with the reality of outer space, compared it to "2001." But it was also a landmark of non-narrative, poetic filmmaking, in which the connections were made by images, not dialog or plot. An ape uses to learn a bone as a weapon, and this tool, flung into the air, transforms itself into a space ship--the tool that will free us from the bondage of this planet. And then the spaceship takes man on a voyage into the interior of what may be the mind of another species.

The debates about the "meaning" of this film still go on. Surely the whole point of the film is that it is beyond meaning, that it takes its character to a place he is so incapable of understanding that a special room--sort of a hotel room--has to be prepared for him there, so that he will not go mad. The movie lyrically and brutally challenges us to break out of the illusion that everyday mundane concerns are what must preoccupy us. It argues that surely man did not learn to think and dream, only to deaden himself with provincialism and selfishness. "2001" is a spiritual experience. But then all good movies are.

"2001: A Space Odyssey is a filmmaking exploration of the greatest kind that leaves an audience with one of the most incredible cinematic experiences possible. The sound, visuals and ideas within allow us to get lost in a progression of thought and concept that fully challenges our every sense. One of the most referenced films since it was made, 2001: A Space Odyssey is pushes the lengths to which cinema can go in every capacity." - Charlotte Cook

Yet undoubtedly "2001" is so much more than just a perfectly executed sci-fi picture. It's a voyage dealing not only with space exploration, but also with evolution, belief, artificial intelligence, alien life forms, metaphysics, philosophy, in short: man himself, his aspirations and challenges - and tries to point into what lies beyond. Or - if you want - one can still enjoy the picture just as the ultimate adventure. Take your pick! Feel free to draw your own conclusions, but there's a lot to get out of this multilayered film, providing you are ready to put your mind to it. "2001" is a movie for the ages, a sublime experience of transcendency, a film that represents the epitome of art in terms of film-making, best summarized with one single word: a masterpiece. - Roger Ebert, Artimidor

In this symbolic tale of an old man's journey from emotional isolation to a kind of personal renaissance, Ingmar Bergman explores in part his own past, and in doing so rewards us all with a tale of redemption and love "Wild Strawberries" is a thematically abundant film that fluidly condenses a lifetime's worth of experience into succinct cinematic fragments under Ingmar Bergman's complex construction of abstract corollaries.

This is the film that introduced me to the art film and I remember being mesmerized by the opening nightmare which comes as a shocking reminder of death to Isak, the film’s central character. He finds himself in the Old Town of Stockholm, assaulted by a burning sun. He plunges hastily into the few patches of shadow that the street affords. Gateways loom, great areas of black, used by director Ingmar Bergman to suggest a hostile nothingness. Isak is alone, faced by successive portraits of disaster: a watch without hands, a human figure that crumbles on the sidewalk, a coffin that contains his own body.

I have since watched it countless times and am still able to remember it by heart. What resonates with me is the strikingly simplicity which Bergman employs to tell his story. What I believe many will discover is when revisiting the film is, that one will, irregardless of gender, begin to identify with the old Isak Borg in his strange pilgrimage.

By the time the film ended, I felt wrung out, disoriented, happy and deeply sad at the same time: it's the experience the Greeks wanted their tragedies to convey to the spectator; they spoke of "katharsis." This katharsis or "conclusion" offers yet another epiphany—or possibly it would be better to say a series of miniature epiphanies that seamlessly feed into one another to make the end of this movie one of the most beautiful and emotionally satisfying in the whole of Bergman’s oeuvre. First, there are the reconciliations—Professor Borg with his housekeeper, Fru Agda; more crucially, Marianne with Evald (how delicately the love between the pair, “despite everything,” is communicated to us in gestures of fleeting elegance and reticence; how beautifully Thulin shines in her ball gown!). In the midst of these acts of forgiveness, there is, of course, the sequence of the award ceremony itself, with its grand fanfare, solemn procession, and moving encomiums in Latin summarizing the professor’s achievements. Finally, there is the aftermath: the hitchhikers’ lovely nighttime serenade and the dream that closes the movie, during which Borg, back again on the grounds of the family summerhouse, is guided by Sara to a spot where he can see, across the lagoon, his parents relaxing with their fishing rods, as they turn in the sunshine to wave to him.

Some months after the opening of the film, Bergman met a childhood friend, who told him that while he was watching Wild Strawberries he “began to think of Aunt Berta, who was sitting all alone in Borlänge. I couldn’t get her out of my thoughts, and when my wife and I came home, I said let’s invite Aunt Berta over at Easter.”

That, says Bergman, is the best review he has ever had.

Once Upon a Time in America is arguably the best gangster film ever made. As a whole this film brings to bear all the poignance, brutality, selfishness and altruism of America that is central to the gangster genre, with the clarity only an outsider can have. The music alone is a lesson in how soundtracks work at their best.

This is, for me, one of the finest examples of cinematic art. It isn't a simple, cut-n-dried 90 minute little package that gets wrapped up with a pretty bow at the end. You get pulled in by the enigmatic opening that unwinds the threads of the story to be found later. For many people having half an hour of purely visual story telling, of stories that are only mysteries at that point, before anything becomes truly linear is difficult to follow and discourages to many people. Our own memories are only snippets that only become linear as we concentrate on scenes from our lives. Once Upon a Time in America is like that as we follow Noodles through the `significant' part of his life - the times that formed him. When the story actually starts, we meet the girl that he always loved but could never have.

The flashback story, with bits and pieces falling into place like in a jigsaw puzzle, is what makes the films so overwhelming, so emotionally intense. This time around a Leone picture however is not so much about landscape and close-ups, but about characters and their environment, the area they live in and their history. De Niro, James Woods, Joe Pesci, Danny Aiello let it all come alive. And at the side of the young Jennifer Connelly the 13 year old unknown Scott Schutzman Tiler plays the young version of the protagonist Noodles and nearly steals the older one's thunder, which is no other than De Niro. On the one hand the street urchin's light-heartedness shines in the character's youth while the veteran actor immerses himself so completely in the aging gangster that the weight of his past becomes almost palpable.

Nashville still feels, and seems pitch perfect in every way. It epitomises all that cinema can be in terms of scope, ambition and narrative power, Nashville is the best musical by miles. Nashville is the most audacious American movie from the most adventurous period in American cinema and a great, prescient meditation on the decline of political discourse in the US. Robert Altman forged a distinctively naturalistic aesthetic in the 1970s, typified by dialogue that overlaps with lifelike messiness and a camera that restlessly pans and zooms within a scene, picking out detail with apparent spontaneity.

Nashville is so jam-packed with information it is a pleasure to sit and watch for over two hours. I got lost in the people and music. It is strange because I sit back and think, ‘How the hell did he do it?’ There are real people and you really feel like you experience everything with them. He uses full songs and concerts and yet even within the concerts there’s emotions going on. The ‘I’m easy’ scene says it all. But so does the striptease scene, or when Barabra Jean has a nervous breakdown, or…

"In Nashville, Altman creates the perfect allegory for American politics and social mores with a depiction of the country music capital that is both scathing and heartfelt."

• Bruce LaBruce

There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who have someplace to go, and those who do not. “The Apartment” is so affecting partly because of that buried reason: It takes place on the shortest days of the year, when dusk falls swiftly and the streets are cold, when after the office party some people go home to their families and others go home to apartments where they haven't even bothered to put up a tree. On Christmas Eve, more than any other night of the year, the lonely person feels robbed of something that was there in childhood and isn't there anymore.

The valuable element in Wilder is his adult sensibility; his characters can't take flight with formula plots, because they are weighted down with the trials and responsibilities of working for a living. In many movies, the characters hardly even seem to have jobs, but in “The Apartment” they have to be reminded that they have anything else.

"Romantic comedies just don’t work, maybe because the third acts are cloying and clogged up with routine problem solving. Except for The Apartment, which is set in a tough world, not a hoped-for one, and has an ending it has truly earned. A loving follow-up to Vidor’s The Crowd – and even Wilder’s own great city symphony." - Ben Gibson

In “The Apartment’s” central scene, the good Dr. Dreyfus delivers a hilariously curt summation of modern American values: “Live now, pay later! Diner’s Club!” He also exhorts his disaffected neighbor Baxter to resist this siren song and become a mensch —a Yiddish term that leaves the junior executive goy duly puzzled. This mysterious prescription is actually the submerged emotional arc of the movie. By the end of “The Apartment,” it’s Baxter who’s justifying his actions to Sheldrake by invoking the necessity of being a mensch. Baxter still may not know what the term means—but he’ll strive to be one anyway.

Finally, the theme of The Apartment could be shortly conveyed like this: I don't know what I want but I know how to get it, till I know what I want and then it gets me.

One of the highlights of cinematic achievements of the 20th century "Days of Heaven'' is above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. In the first hour of the film there is scarcely a scene set indoors. The farm workers camp under the stars and work in the fields, and even the farmer is so besotted by the weather that he tinkers with wind instruments on the roof of his Gothic mansion.

The film places its humans in a large frame filled with natural details: the sky, rivers, fields, horses, pheasants, rabbits. Malick set many of its shots at the "golden hours'' near dawn and dusk, when shadows are muted and the sky is all the same tone. These images are underlined by the famous score of Ennio Morricone (one of the very best). The music is wistful, filled with loss and regret: in mood, like "The Godfather" theme but not so lush and more remembered than experienced. Voices are often distant, and there is far-off thunder.

"Of Terrence Malick's two feature films to date, Badlands is perhaps the more satisfying, Days of Heaven the more remarkable" - Robin Wood

Against this backdrop, the story is told in a curious way. We do see key emotional moments between the three adult characters. (Bill advises Abby to take the farmer's offer. The farmer and Abby share moments together in which she realizes she is beginning to love him, and Bill and the farmer have their elliptical exchanges in which neither quite states the obvious.) But all of their words together, if summed up, do not equal the total of the words in the voiceover spoken so hauntingly by Linda Manz.

The whole story is told by her. But her words are not a narration so much as a parallel commentary, with asides and footnotes. We get the sense that she is speaking some years after the events have happened, trying to reconstruct these events that were seen through naive eyes. She is there in almost the first words of the film ("My brother used to tell everyone they were brother and sister,'' a statement that is more complex than it seems). And still there in the last words of the film, as she walks down the tracks with her new "best friend.'' She is there after the others are gone. She is the teller of the tale.

Malick’s underlying aesthetic aim—one he shares with several great directors, and which was already evident in Badlands—is to encourage the proliferation of a wide range of moods, sights, sounds, and surface textures, while simultaneously arriving at an overall, unifying form. Nothing expresses this better than one of the most beloved elements of Days of Heaven - the music [...] Malick is a true poet of the ephemeral: the epiphanies that structure his films, beginning with Days of Heaven, are ones that flare up suddenly and die away just as quickly, with the uttering of a single line (like “She loved the farmer”), the flight of a bird or the launching of a plane, the flickering of a candle or the passing of a wind over the grass. Nothing is ever insisted upon or lingered on in his films; that is why they reveal subtly different arrangements of event, mood, and meaning each time we see them. Because everything is in motion, everything is whisked away quickly, and the elements of any one cellular moment are very soon redistributed and metamorphosed into other moments. Just look at and listen to the last minutes of Days of Heaven, with their split-second swing between end-of-the-line melancholic emptiness and wide-open possibility, for a sublime illustration of this ephemerality, which is miraculously caught and formalized in the language of cinema.

What is the point of "Days of Heaven"--the payoff, the message? This is a movie made by a man who knew how something felt, and found a way to evoke it in us. That feeling is how a child feels when it lives precariously, and then is delivered into security and joy, and then has it all taken away again--and blinks away the tears and says it doesn't hurt.

Hawks and Ray, both utmost exponents of the auteur theory, represent two opposite poles of the cinematographic activity. The powerful, pragmatic intelligence of Hawks transforms his oeuvre into an unquestionable moral proposal, whilst the personal fragility of Ray transmits the maximum poetic intensity to his oeuvre Before even the credit titles can appear, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell arrive to a blast of music at screen center from behind a black curtain, in matching orange-red outfits that sizzle the screen. As electrifying as the opening of any Hollywood movie that comes to mind, this jazzy materialization so catches us by surprise that we are scarcely aware of the scene’s fleeting modulations as the dynamic duo makes it through a single chorus. The black curtain changes to a lurid blue, then a loud purple; the two women twice exchange their positions on stage while gradually dancing down a few steps; and the complex flurry of gestures they make toward each other — all gracefully dovetailed into Jack Cole’s deft choreography — makes the spectator feel assaulted by them as a team as well as individually: a double threat.

It is characteristic of Hawks in its concentration on the interactions between two loyal friends (Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as two showgirls -– the first one interested in money, the second one interested in love), even if these friends are uncharacteristically women rather than men, and all the male characters are in fact viewed as somewhat ridiculous. This is a satiric universe about the excesses of American capitalism predicated on the kind of exaggeration and grotesquerie found in cartoons. Hawks himself didn’t direct any of the musical numbers, which were handled by Jack Cole, but the overall unity is never in question, and each of these numbers represents both a climax in and an extension of the film’s unwavering thematic concerns. The magical chemistry between Russell and Monroe, predicated on the reality of the former and the unreality of the latter, was understood perfectly by Hawks, and it fascinatingly anticipates the chemistry between Dominique Labourier and Juliet Berto in Jacques Rivette’s Céline et Julie vont en bateau a little over two decades later.

Dressed in virginal white and carrying matching bouquets, Lorelei and Dorothy sing “Little Rock” with a revised conclusion as they grandly march down steps and the aisle to their grooms. While the camera pans from Dorothy looking from her diamond ring to Malone to Lorelei looking from her diamond ring to Gus and back to Dorothy and Lorelei together, looking at us, a heavenly mixed chorus offscreen reminds us that “Square-cut or pear-shape, these rocks don’t lose their shape” — implying that the disparate demands of humanism and capitalism, community and narcissism, can be finally met when the perfect circle becomes a wedding ring. But the last sly look of glancing complicity between Dorothy and Lorelei suggests that they have collectively sold us a bill of goods, an impossible object — a CinemaScope of the mind, a capitalist Potemkin. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Fonda casts a contagious shadow of a doubt In form, "12 Angry Men" is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father.

It unfolds in a back room of a courthouse where a jury of ordinary men has to decide upon life and death becomes the place of first rate drama, where a seemingly insignificant shadow of a doubt makes people talk at least once more about what at first appeared to be a clear cut case.

The reluctant, some even clearly prejudiced members of the motley jury all look at the case from very different angles, but they are made real by distinguished acting and screenwriter Reginald Rose's crispy dialog, which never misses the mark. Also remarkable is the fact that the battle of the jurors is embedded in a highly believable environment - a hot day, people sweating, emotions getting the better of them, then a downpour outside, there are casual conversations about what's on people's minds in the breaks, restroom scenes which serve further character elaboration.

The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood. By gradually lowering his camera, Lumet illustrates another principle of composition: A higher camera tends to dominate, a lower camera tends to be dominated. As the film begins we look down on the characters, and the angle suggests they can be comprehended and mastered. By the end, they loom over us, and we feel overwhelmed by the force of their passion. Lumet uses closeups rarely, but effectively: One man in particular--Juror No. 9 (Joseph Sweeney, the oldest man on the jury)--is often seen in full-frame, because he has a way of cutting to the crucial point and stating the obvious after it has eluded the others. - Exceptional film-making. - Artimidor, RE.

Often considered one of the greatest comedies of all time, this film is certainly hilarious and special. This was one of Marilyn Monroe’s best performances and her costars were absolutely brilliant. As far as humor goes it cannot get much zanier and crazier than this.

It possesses a quality found in the best comedies – a sense of humanity and an attitude of compassion for the lunatics who play the fool for our sake

In Some Like It Hot everyone seems to have so much fun in their courtship: While Curtis and Monroe are on Brown's yacht, Lemmon and Brown are dancing with such perfect timing that a rose in Lemmon's teeth ends up in Brown's. Lemmon has a hilarious scene the morning after his big date, laying on his bed, still in drag, playing with castanets as he announces his engagement. (Curtis: "What are you going to do on your honeymoon?" Lemmon: "He wants to go to the Riviera, but I kinda lean toward Niagara Falls.") Both Curtis and Lemmon are practicing cruel deceptions--Curtis has Monroe thinking she's met a millionaire, and Brown thinks Lemmon is a woman--but the film dances free before anyone gets hurt. Both Monroe and Brown learn the truth and don't care, and after Lemmon reveals he's a man, Brown delivers the best curtain line in the movies. If you've seen the movie, you know what it is, and if you haven't, you deserve to hear it for the first time from him.

Controversial, essential, brilliantly scored, wonderfully shot - a must-see! A Clockwork Orange" is an ingenious film-makers's masterclass. It's a captivating high-speed ultra-horror tour de force, a raw, grisly plunge into violence, in-out sex, rape and murder, a fall into nothingness, there and back again, accompanied by doom a-knocking with the sound of the Funeral Marsh of Queen Mary. There's also lots of Ludwig van in between in a central role, making "A Clockwork Orange" one of the best scored pictures of all time. The topic at hand is a sci-fi tale about gruesome violence based on Anthony Burgess' book, which director Stanley Kubrick made too frighteningly real for some, sugared by the film's aestheticism of violence, critics say he thus embellished despicable acts. This forced Kubrick to retract his own movie in the UK in order to prevent copycats from imitating the film - a circumstance, which of course only contributed to its undisputed cult status. "A Clockwork Orange" was a risky undertaking, a film that stirred, shocked, repelled or was loved all for the wrong reasons, but there is no way around it any way you look at it.

The film’s bravura style, comprising modish interiors, Wendy Carlos’s electronic score and Burgess’s invented ‘Nadsat’ dialect, was overshadowed by its exuberantly realised sexual violence. Controversy led to the film’s withdrawal from British exhibition for over two decades. It remains a powerful essay on the pleasures and consequences of physical and psychological violence. - Artimidor

Playful, political, poetic and so stylishly elaborate it's almost parodic. That westward bound train must be one of film history's most potent metaphors. "Here's looking at you" might be Humphrey Bogart's trademark slogan, but eyes in a Leone Spaghetti Western reveal much more emotions and even plot than Bogey ever could convey with his. Sergio Leone made extreme close-ups the dominant shots to explain character - and a look into Frank's eyes (played by Henry Fonda), who was deliberately cast against his usual character in "Once Upon a Time in the Wild West", makes it perfectly clear why. There's no need for lengthy dialog if a capable director can do so much more with style alone. And of all around brilliant visuals in Leone's Westerns there is no shortage, no doubt about that. If the widescreen scenery is as grand, deep and epic a director can even deliberately allow the weight of silence to descend on the viewer and let the image speak for itself.

Once sound effects are added to compositions like these they become more than nice enhancements or mere fillers, they turn into characters themselves of a total work of art. An art that reaches even higher levels if you take Ennio Morricone's melancholic score into account which rounds off this rare masterpiece. Morricone delves deep into the souls of characters, makes whole landscapes tangible, even develops plot of the powerful story. Add to that a flawless cast (aside from Fonda Jason Robards, Claudia Cardinale, Charles Bronson and others star) and every lover of the moving picture is likely to be seriously moved. Or blown away if you haven't seen anything like this before. There are so many memorable shots in "Once Upon a Time in the Wild West" that one can stop counting them early on and take the whole thing as the ultimate template on how a great film should look like. Films like these are cinematic paradise, made for the history books, and every moment of it should be savored. Definitely one of the greatest.

People always talk about Bresson when discussing the idea of ‘sequencing’ but for me Leone is just as important if in a much more self-conscious, bravura manner. He can extend moments between characters endlessly and create atmospheres in completely inimitable, beguiling ways. Epic and spectacular but always with emotional content, he could create awe-inspiring sequences with little more than gazes. Pure cinema.

Double Indemnity, one of the highest summits of film noir, is a film without a single trace of pity or love "Double Indemnity” has one of the most familiar noir themes: The hero is not a criminal, but a weak man who is tempted and succumbs. In this "double” story, the woman and man tempt one another; neither would have acted alone. Both are attracted not so much by the crime as by the thrill of committing it with the other person. Love and money are pretenses. The husband's death turns out to be their one-night stand.

In order to begin a story with the ending and still maintain suspense throughout the movie (much like Sunset Blvd.) a film-maker needs to be quite sure of his skills to capture the attention of his audience. Director/writer Billy Wilder, assisted by established novelist Raymond Chandler with the screenplay, knows how to do it. He presents his film noir entirely in flashbacks, narrated in atmospheric voice-overs leading eventually to what we've already seen in the introduction. And despite the fact that we know where it's all heading we're still glued to our seats. New at the time and often copied ever since, but rarely done that well.

Where other noirs treat forbidden sex as a plot device, Wilder’s film understands it on an emotional level. On a superficial level, Neff’s story is a familiar one about a smart aleck who got outsmarted by a ruthless dame. But peek beneath that brass-hard surface and you find a perversely involving story of a romance that didn’t work out — a tragedy about two doomed heels in love. The lead actors play Neff and Phyllis not merely as a patsy and his manipulator but as sexy beasts, so knowingly cynical that they practically taunt each other into bed. “When they met it was murder!” screamed the film’s advertising tagline. Nearly sixty years after its release, “Double Indemnity” is still a killer.

Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious is the most elegant expression of the master's visual style, just as Vertigo is the fullest expression of his obsessions. It contains some of the most effective camera shots in his--or anyone’s--work, and they all lead to the great final passages in which two men find out how very wrong they both were.

I do not have the secret of Alfred Hitchcock and neither, I am convinced, does anyone else. He made movies that do not date, that fascinate and amuse, that everybody enjoys and that shout out in every frame that they are by Hitchcock. In the world of film he was known simply as The Master. But what was he the Master of? What was his philosophy, his belief, his message? It appears that he had none. His purpose was simply to pluck the strings of human emotion -- to play the audience, he said, like a piano. Hitchcock was always hidden behind the genre of the suspense film, but as you see his movies again and again, the greatness stays after the suspense becomes familiar. He made pure movies.

So many movies have ended in obligatory chases and shoot-outs that the ability to write a well-crafted third act has almost died out. Among its many achievements, “Notorious” ends well. Like clockwork, the inevitable events of the last 10 minutes take place, and they all lead to the final perfect shot, in which another Nazi says to Sebastian, “Alex, will you come in, please? I wish to talk to you.” And Alex goes in, knowing he will never come out alive.

“By the time you read this letter, I may be dead…. If this reaches you, you will know how I became yours when you didn’t know who I was or even that I existed.” Thus begins the letter that gives Letter from an Unknown Woman its title. Lisa Berndle’s (Joan Fontaine) words arrive to us from the threshold of death, while her voice irrupts into our world from some elsewhere. The letter’s recipient is a certain Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), the object of Lisa’s dying devotion, a man who has been blind to her love, and whom this letter wishes both to cure from this condition as well as to condemn him for it. This letter will release Stefan to his death, a fate that he ultimately embraces. By the end of the film, Stefan chooses to fight a duel he initially intended to flee, and one which he is certain to lose. At the same time, the letter is also delivered to us, the film’s audience, since Stefan’s reading of the letter initiates a single flashback, whereby we receive the letter’s content as narrative images that seems to emanate from Lisa’s point of view (bridged, from time to time, by her voiceover, which haunts the screen). At stake here is only one thing: her existence has been unacknowledged, a fact that quite literally, kills her. This is the reason she comes back to haunt the screen; her plea for acknowledgement posthumously directed both to Stefan and to us.

Lisa melodramatically fuses the power of her fantasy with her sense of existence: “as hard as it may be for you to realize, from that moment on I was in love with you. Quite consciously, I began to prepare myself for you.” There are few characters in film history who so purely embody the momentum of melodrama. This film, thus, seems to derive its genre less from convention than from Lisa’s very being, a being staked, not unlike that of the tragic heroines of opera, on curtains that rise and fall, until they no longer rise again. Film, of course, unlike opera, is a medium of resurrection, where images can come back to haunt us from a distant past; the melodrama of this film exploits this fully.

Ophuls’ authorship is melodramatically and self-consciously asserted in the excessive, obsessive and constantly restated revelation that nothing happens by chance. This is reinforced by the film’s style. For example, the crane shot that instigates Stefan’s re-entry into the film underlines the felt sense of a directorial presence (of Ophuls? of the dead Lisa?). The camera is initially positioned within the lingering crowd in the opera foyer during the entr’acte; it is the first time that the entrance of the camera precedes Lisa’s presence in the film. [...] The walk up the stairs is accomplished as part of what is still a single long take, and as Lisa reaches the top the camera frames a group of anonymous onlookers who, like the offscreen voice before and the camera’s gestural movements within this scene, underscore the next event, “Look, isn’t that Stefan Brand?” This cues Lisa to join them at the banister, the closely gathered audience reminding us of our own fellow spectators in the cinema. Only then does the camera finally cut to what we take to be Lisa’s point of view shot: a high-angle shot of Stefan, a lost object now regained. This is the magic and the curse that film can perform.

Shortly thereafter, a static high-angle shot watches Lisa move diagonally from the bottom of screen left to the top of screen right, already almost a shadow; here she literally exits the film’s frame, never to be recovered again – except as a flash of past images, or as a ghostly superimposition, or in our viewing and re-viewing of this film again through time. In all these cases, all we have access to are scenes from the film itself, scenes we merely revisit – not unlike Lisa’s beloved train travel. Yet the question arises: What right does Lisa have to ask this man for recognition? Must we rebuke him? Stefan has never been anything other than a man predicated on existing in an evanescent present. He is a man who also has a stake in his fantasy of an ideal woman who never arrives. Thus, a world conceived with the deliberateness of a stairway, where every step is fatefully arrived at, meets the randomness of one envisioned as an endlessly shuffled deck of cards. Fantasy is the inescapable violence we enact upon each other, making the Other invisible. The power of melodrama, and certainly of this melodrama, resides precisely in luring us to these realisations through the banal, the sugar-coated, and perhaps the even laughable desire of a certain unknown woman.

Every scene, every shot is the product of a keen and sensitive eye – an eye which has deep comprehension of the beauty of rugged people and a rugged world

• "My Darling Clementine is possibly the finest drama in the western genre, with a stunningly subjective Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda). It achieves near-perfection cinematically in many of its passages via its blocking, shooting and editing."

A profound comment about love as being something that is most intense when it is uncertain Over the years, Hawks had developed a refined understanding of how romantic comedy works. The audience must be convinced that the central couple are made for each other; a screwball comedy’s own particular cleverness lies in keeping the lovers apart for as long and in as crazily creative a way as possible. Remarriage plots are the most grown-up variation, because these are the movies that say two people can be perfectly suited and still louse it up.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a beautiful pipe dream of a movie – a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been Furthermore, it is an anti-western, a film that questions the heroic pioneering myths perpetuated in classic cowboy movies.

It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Some spend their lives trying, but always fall short. Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971). This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come -- not for McCabe, not with Mrs. Miller, not in the town of Presbyterian Church, which cowers under a gray sky always heavy with rain or snow. The film is a poem--an elegy for the dead.

Typically for Altman, the dialogue is often overlapping or indistinct, creating a naturalistic impression of conversations overheard. With songs by Leonard Cohen and hazy, sepia-like widescreen photography by Hungarian Vilmos Zsigmond, the result is a beguilingly dreamlike vision of times past, texturally unique in the history of the western.

Study the title. "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." Not "and," as in a couple, but "&," as in a corporation. It is a business arrangement. Everything is business with her. What sorrows she knew before she arrived in Presbyterian Church are behind her now. Everything else is behind her now, too, the opium promises. Poor McCabe. He had poetry in him. Too bad he rode into a town where nobody knew what poetry was but one, and she already lost to it.

Hawks and Ray, both utmost exponents of the auteur theory, represent two opposite poles of the cinematographic activity. The powerful, pragmatic intelligence of Hawks transforms his oeuvre into an unquestionable moral proposal, whilst the personal fragility of Ray transmits the maximum poetic intensity to his oeuvre Bigger Than Life is a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle-class aspirations because it virtually defines madness—Avery’s drug-induced psychosis—as taking those values seriously. Each emblem of the American dream implicitly honored by Avery in the opening scenes (his ideas about education, his respect for class and social status, his desire for his son ‘to improve himself’) is systematically turned on its head, converted from dream to nightmare, by becoming only more explicit in his behavior.

Bigger Than Life is a film filled with such contradictions, such paradoxes and confusions of emotion and reason; indeed, these are part of what makes it big and ugly and beautiful as life, even in its outsized proportions. And these proportions are measured first and foremost by James Mason, whose perfectly vivid realization of Ed Avery gives the film its minuteness and scope.

Shooting in crisp wide-screen with cinematographer Joseph MacDonald, Ray begins Bigger Than Life as a series of immaculate hedgerows, picket fences, and modern kitchen appliances, only to gradually lower the camera angles (much like 12 Angry Men, made the following year) and lengthen the shadows as the film transforms into a dystopian, surrealist expanse—an obvious precursor to David Lynch's maggot-infested Lumberton, North Carolina; Father Knows Best reconfigured as Greek tragedy. An outsider by temperament and himself no stranger to addiction, Ray aligns his own sympathies with Avery even as he moves from delusional to homicidal—or is this apparent madman simply telling an uncomfortable brand of truth? "God was wrong!" Avery bellows as the movie arrives at its still-terrifying climax—an attempted correction of Abraham's aborted fatherly sacrifice that reverberates long after the Production Code–imposed "happy" ending, which itself is only as happy as you deem a retreat from the edge of insanity to the quiet madness of conformity.

Imitation of Life is definitely a must see. It’s probably the best melodrama of 20th century (comparable perhaps only with Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm) and the peak of Sirkian irony. It is an inevitable point of reference in dealing with melodrama? and central to the dense intertextuality of the genre. Eventually, it is a metaphor for cinema itself.

Furthermore, it is the most beautiful melodrama ever filmed; emotionally it is so strong, and is a masterpiece of mise en scène from the first sequence on the beach to the funeral of the black mother.

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. A stationary camera is objective. A moving camera implies a subjective viewer, whether that viewer is a character, the director, or the audience. Haneke uses the technique of making the camera "move" in time, not space. His locked-down shots are objective. When they're reversed on a VCR, they become subjective.

Michael Haneke's "Caché" bears all the hallmarks of a first rate mystery thriller. It tells the suspenseful story of a couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche in superb realistic performances) being observed by a candid camera, a couple, who finds these tapes on their doorstep, and as the narrative progresses the terror gets cranked up notch by notch. It's a story of suspicion, confrontation, a cruel walk down memory lane, the unnerving search for a hidden key that unlocks the source of the mystery - a culprit has to be delivered. But if you don't know the artist Haneke you better be prepared for something else than the common superficial whodunit. In the background lingers anything but a mystery thriller with a common payoff, and this gap between expectations and delivery has divided the audience ever since. Crafted with an immense care for detail, "Caché" is challenging and requires the viewer to participate, but if you're up for it, what unfolds will get under your skin for sure.

Especially "Caché's" final shot is a fervently discussed one, deliberately breaking with conventions. It actually looks like one of the most unspectacular endings in film history, but on the other hand it might give you the notion that you've missed something. Yet it makes a point and stays true to what the title promised all along. Or would you see the two characters hidden in that scene if you aren't actually looking for them? Strange how the obvious can so easily be ignored. And still there's another pair of eyes in that very scene, a pair of eyes one has taken for granted until this point. It's the pair of eyes one easily overlooks and yet it's always there, responsible for a point of view that merges reality with fiction, and as we learn it's the focus of the film: It's all about the eye of the beholder. Watching a film.

When "Caché" played at Cannes, some critics deplored its lack of a resolution. I think it works precisely because it leaves us hanging. It proposes not to solve the mystery of the videos, but to portray the paranoia and distrust that they create. If the film merely revealed in its closing scenes who was sending the videos and why, it would belittle itself. We are left feeling as the characters feel, uneasy, violated, spied upon, surrounded by faceless observers. The non-explanation supplied by the enigmatic last scene opens a new area of speculation which also lacks any solution or closure. And the secrets of Georges' past reach out their guilty tendrils to the next generation. - Roger Ebert, Artimidor

Required viewing for every human being! I have very particular reasons for including this film, which is the least familiar title on my list but one which I defy anyone to watch without fascination. No other film I have ever seen does a better job of illustrating the mysterious and haunting way in which the cinema bridges time. The movies themselves play with time, condensing days or years into minutes or hours. Then going to old movies defies time, because we see and hear people who are now dead, sounding and looking exactly the same. Then the movies toy with our personal time, when we revisit them, by recreating for us precisely the same experience we had before. Then look what Michael Apted does with time in this documentary, which he began more than 30 years ago. He made a movie called "7-Up" for British television. It was about a group of British 7-year-olds, their dreams, fears, ambitions, families, prospects. Fair enough. Then, seven years later, he made "14 Up," revisiting them. Then came "21 Up" and, in 1985. "28 Up," and next year, just in time for the Sight & Sound list, will come "35 Up." And so the film will continue to grow... 42... 49... 56... 63... until Apted or his subjects are dead.

The miracle of the film is that it shows us that the seeds of the man are indeed in the child. In a sense, the destinies of all of these people can be guessed in their eyes, the first time we see them. Some do better than we expect, some worse, one seems completely bewildered. But the secret and mystery of human personality is there from the first. This ongoing film is an experiment unlike anything else in film history.

With Goodfellas Scorsese gives birth to the 21st century in one of the most influential films of the last two decades. A movie that can be rewatched endlessly and remain fresh and surprising. Perfect in every aspect, behind and in front of the camera

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States.

So says Henry Hill in the opening moments of Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” a movie about the tradecraft and culture of organized crime in New York. That he narrates his own story--and is later joined by his wife, narrating hers--is crucial to the movie’s success. This is not an outsider’s view, but a point-of-view movie based on nostalgia for the lifestyle. “They were blue-collar guys,” Hill’s wife explains. “The only way they could make extra money, real extra money, was to go out and cut a few corners.” Their power was intoxicating. “If we wanted something, we just took it,” Henry says. “If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.”

At the end of the film, Henry (Ray Liotta) still misses the old days. His money is gone, most of his friends are dead, and his best friend was preparing to kill him, but after he finds safety in the federal witness protection program, he still complains. “We were treated like movie stars with muscle,” he remembers. “Today, everything is different. There’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else.”

What Scorsese does above all else is share his enthusiasm for the material. The film has the headlong momentum of a storyteller who knows he has a good one to share. Scorsese’s camera caresses these guys, pays attention to the shines on their shoes and the cut of their clothes. And when they're planning the famous Lufthansa robbery, he has them whispering together in a tight three-shot that has their heads leaning low and close with the thrill of their own audacity. You can see how much fun it is for them to steal.

The film’s method is to interrupt dialogue with violence. Sometimes there are false alarms, as in Pesci’s famous restaurant scene where Tommy wants to know what Henry meant when he said he was “funny.” Other moments well up suddenly out of the very mob culture: The way Tommy shoots the kid in the foot, and later murders him. The way kidding-around in a bar leads to a man being savagely beaten. The way the violence penetrates the daily lives of the characters is always insisted on. Tommy, Henry and Jimmy, with a body in their trunk, stop at Tommy’s mother’s house to get a knife, and she insists they sit down at 3 a.m. for a meal.

Scorsese seems so much in command of his gift in this film. It was defeated for the best picture Oscar by “Dances with Wolves,” but in November 2002 a poll by Sight & Sound magazine named it the fourth best film of the past 25 years (after Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” and Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander”). It is an indictment of organized crime, but it doesn't stand outside in a superior moralistic position. It explains crime’s appeal for a hungry young man who has learned from childhood beatings not to hate power, but to envy it. When Henry Hill talks to us at the opening of the film, he sounds like a kid in love: “To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies. They weren't like anybody else. I mean, they did whatever they wanted. They double-parked in front of a hydrant and nobody ever gave them a ticket. In the summer when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops.”

Atmospheric, morally troubling, and often suspenseful, this is the sort of movie you’re likely to carry around with you long after you’ve seen it His colleagues in the surveillance industry think Harry Caul is such a genius that we realize with a little shock how bad he is at his job. Here is a man who is paid to eavesdrop on a conversation in a public place. He succeeds, but then allows the tapes to be stolen. His triple-locked apartment is so insecure that the landlord is able to enter it and leave a birthday present. His mail is opened and read. He thinks his phone is unlisted, but both the landlord and a client have it. At a trade show, he allows his chief competitor to fool him with a mike hidden in a freebie ballpoint. His mistress tells him: “Once I saw you up by the staircase, hiding and watching for a whole hour.”

Harry, the subject of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974), is not only bad at his job, but also deeply unhappy about it. Once his snooping may have led to the deaths of a woman and child. Now he fears that his new tapes will lead to another murder. In the confessional, he warms up by telling the priest that he has taken the Lord’s name in vain and stolen some newspapers from a rack. Then he says: “I’ve been involved in some work that I think will be used to hurt these two young people. It’s happened to me before. People were hurt because of my work, and I’m afraid it could happen again and I’m . . . I was in no way responsible. I’m not responsible. For these and all my sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry.”

“The Conversation” comes from another time and place than today’s thrillers, which are so often simple-minded. This movie is a sadly observant character study, about a man who has removed himself from life, thinks he can observe it dispassionately at an electronic remove, and finds that all of his barriers are worthless. The cinematography (opening scene by Haskell Wexler, the rest by Bill Butler) is deliberately planned from a voyeuristic point of view; we are always looking but imperfectly seeing. Here is a man who seeks the truth, and it always remains hidden. He plays the conversation over and over, but does Mark say, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” or “He’d kill us if he had the chance”?

Ordet is a highly accomplished work of cinematic art. Dreyer’s formal and technical mastery, the seeming simplicity of his style, and the depth of the film are overpowering.

Religion is a rich and varied subject for many filmmakers to pursue. Many filmmakers make at least one movie that explores the religious side of society. Sometimes these movies can be hard-hitting satires that point out the hypocrisy of religion. Other times, they can be small lyrical dramas about a person’s internal faith. But most filmmakers do not make their career subject matter the big R word. But most filmmakers aren’t like Th. Carl Dreyer.

The camera movements have an almost godlike quality. At several points, such as during the prayer meeting, they pan back and forth slowly, relentlessly, hypnotically. There are a few movements of astonishing complexity, beginning in the foreground, somehow arriving at the background, but they flow so naturally you may not even notice them. The lighting, in black and white, is celestial -- not in a joyous but in a detached way. The climactic scene could have been handled in countless conventional ways, but the film has prepared us for it, and it has a grave, startling power.

The triumph of Ordet is to bring us a moving, detailed image of a life that is rich, ordinary, practical, and physical—an image that makes us ache for such close comprehensiveness—and at the same time to purify this image so that it comes to us as new and absolute, so that we feel the necessity, justice, and marvelousness of the moment (stretched to eternity) when the dead Inger comes back to life.

For more than nine hours I sat and watched a film named "Shoah," and when it was over, I sat for a while longer and simply stared into space, trying to understand my emotions. I had seen a memory of the most debased chapter in human history. But I had also seen a film that affirmed life so passionately that I did not know where to turn with my confused feelings. There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made Shoah surprised me in several ways. The first was how the interviews were conducted. Lanzmann is a very direct and aggressive interviewer and initially, I was very put off by how he delved into his subjects. He seemed almost wreckless and completely devoid of empathy as he continued to ask the most personal and private questions, never hesitating to force his subjects to think back to what was not only the darkest moment of their lives, but the darkest moments of modern Western history.

Eventually, what happens however, is astonishing. Most interviewees eventually give up their resistance, and very carefully relate their stories. Lanzmann forces them to consider details. How many bodies per furnace? How wide was the ditch? How far was the train ramp from the camp's bunkers? These details facilitate memory and soon, the subjects open up in the most remarkable way.

No matter how you feel, or what you think you know about the Holocaust, this film puts faces to the tragedy in a way few conventional documentaries could. The emphasis here is on memory and oral history.

The other thing I found fascinating about this film was how the translations actually helped you absorb what is being said in a way direct subtitling wouldn't. For instance, most of the subjects speak German or Polish. Lanzmann speaks French mainly and some German. His translator translates what's being said into French and then the subtitles translate the French into English. By being able to look into the eyes of the people speaking, in their own native language, and then read the subtitles, was a very subtle, but very effective tool that deadens the 'shock value' of what is being spoken and gives the viewer more time to absorb the content.

"Q. You were inside the gas chamber?

A. Yes. One of them said: "So you want to die. But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives. That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us."

And that is the final message of this extraordinary film. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. In it, Claude Lanzmann celebrates the priceless gift that sets man apart from animals and makes us human, and gives us hope: the ability for one generation to tell the next what it has learned"

Some people have complained also that the film also has many long takes, which are seemingly of nothing. For instance, Lanzmann lets his camera linger on the remnants of Chelmno, which was razed after the war. Although it just looks like a five minute shot of a field, what struck me was how different this bucolic field must have been in 1942. Making this connection justifies every frame shot. Lanzmann, however, will not force this down your throat. You must be patient.

This is an astonishing film that must be seen by everyone, at least once. Please review the general historical context of the Holocaust before you see it, to get the most out of it, but otherwise, this is living testament of the most vital kind - brilliant, essential film-making. - Chris Barry

Do the Right Thing utilises a multitude of cinematic techniques to show a microcosm of a culture and world that hadn’t been shown on screen at the time of its release. It continues to serve as an important example of the effect of strong storytelling and technical craft in putting forward political and social issues through film Upon first seeing "Do the Right Thing" I walked out of the screening with tears in my eyes. Spike Lee had done an almost impossible thing. He'd made a movie about race in America that empathized with all the participants. He didn't draw lines or take sides but simply looked with sadness at one racial flashpoint that stood for many others.

Many audiences are shocked that the destruction of Sal's begins with a trash can thrown through the window by Mookie (Lee), the employee Sal refers to as “like a son to me.” Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: “Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.” But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.

Lee paints the people with love for detail. Notice the sweet scene between Mookie and Tina (Rosie Perez), the mother of his child. How he takes ice cubes and runs them over her brow, eyes, ankles, thighs, and then the closeup of their lips as they talk softly to one another. And see the affection with which he shows Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), an old man who tries to cool everyone's tempers. Da Mayor's scenes with Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) show love at the other end of the time line.

None of these people is perfect. But Lee makes it possible for us to understand their feelings; his empathy is crucial to the film, because if you can't try to understand how the other person feels, you're a captive inside the box of yourself. Thoughtless people have accused Lee over the years of being an angry filmmaker. He has much to be angry about, but I don't find it in his work. The wonder of “Do the Right Thing” is that he is so fair. Those who found this film an incitement to violence are saying much about themselves, and nothing useful about the movie. Its predominant emotion is sadness. Lee ends with two quotations, one from Martin Luther King Jr., advocating non-violence, and the other from Malcolm X, advocating violence “if necessary.” A third, from Rodney King, ran through my mind.