AVguide.com: Film/Music Recommendations: Film Reviews- The Top DVDs of 2003
Film/Music Recommendations
’Tis the season, and to help you with Christmas and New Year’s gift-giving, TPV offers our annual list of the naughtiest and nicest movies of the year. The following DVDs, released between November 2002 and December 2003, aren’t all reference-quality transfers (though those marked with an asterisk are, and many others come mighty close). What they all are are terrific films—well worth renting, purchasing, or giving as gifts. Here are the picks of this past year’s crop, listed alphabetically.
 
8 Mile (2002)
Curtis Hanson, director. Universal. Though its premise is all too familiar?a good kid from a messed-up family triumphs against all odds?what saves 8 Mile is a largely fine cast, the intelligent directing of Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), and the acting debut of hip-hop artist Eminem, who is immensely appealing in this semi-biographical role.
Reviewed by Wayne Garcia in Issue 49, Drama
13 Conversations About One Thing (2001).
Jill Sprecher, director. Sony.
A chamber music-like meditation on the search for happiness—and what to do with it when we find it. Extremely well acted by an ensemble cast, with Alan Arkin a standout as a spiteful insurance company manager.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 48, Drama
About a Boy (2002).
Chris & Paul Weitz, directors. Universal.
A surprisingly pleasant adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1998 novel about a rich, shallow, contented Londoner (Hugh Grant) who, while pretending to be a single father to pick up single moms, meets a 12-year-old boy (Nicholas Hoult) whose plight gradually touches his heart.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 48, Comedy
The Adventures of Antoine Doinel: The 400 Blows
(1959),
Antoine and Colette (1962),
Stolen Kisses (1968),
Bed and Board (1970),
Love on the Run (1979).
 François Truffaut, director. Criterion.
The 400 Blows follows a 13-year-old boy yearning for escape. The boy is Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, and rarely has a tale of troubled youth been told with so much warmth and so little sentimentality. Truffaut grew so smitten with the boy’s fate that he made four sequels over the next 20 years. All five films are joined together in this box set.
Reviewed by Fred Kaplan in Issue 50
*The Adventures of Robin
Hood (1938).
Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, directors. Warner.
Simply and famously the best of all ’30s swashbucklers. Errol Flynn, as usual, brings inimitable physical grace, dashing good looks, and utter insouciance to Robin, and Olivia de Havilland is suitably and beautifully maidenly as Marian. The villains (Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains) are just as delightful.
Reviewed by Jonathan Valin in Issue 51, Action-Adventure
Une affaire de goût [A Matter of Taste] (2000).
Bernard Rapp, director.
Tla Releasing.
After impressing diners with his discerning palate, a handsome young waiter named Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Lorit) is hired by a very rich businessman named Frédéric (Bernard Giraudeau) to be his food-taster. Slowly, Nicolas gives up his own identity to become a double who is willing to “taste” all of life’s pleasures for Frédéric. Very noir and creepy.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Noir
Afterglow (1997).
Alan Rudolph, director. Columbia Tristar.
Reviewed by RSB in Issue 52.
A Kid for Two Farthings (1955).
Carol Reed, director.
Home Vision.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 52.
All About Eve (1950).
Joseph Mankiewicz, director. Fox.
Eve has one of the most flawless scripts ever conceived for the screen. Great performances from Bette Davis as aging stage-diva Margo Channing and Anne Baxter as the serpentine ingénue who pretends to be her protégé.
Reviewed by Harry Pearson in Issue 48, Drama
The Andromeda Strain (1970).
Robert Wise, director. Universal.
Four scientists fight against time to identify a deadly virus brought back to earth in a satellite flytrap designed for that very purpose. Exciting, scary, and (unfortunately) timelier than ever.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 49, Sci-Fi
Animal House (1978).
John Landis, director. Universal.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 52.
Aparajito (1957).
Satyajit Ray, director. Columbia Tristar.
See Pather Panchali below.
L’Atalante (1934).
Jean Vigo, director.
New Yorker Video.
An undisputed masterwork. A young barge captain (Jean Dasté) brings his luminous young bride (Dita Parlo) aboard his boat and they shove off on the shaky adventure of marriage. When she and her husband become separated, Vigo uses some of the most haunting images ever put on film to show us their longing for each other.
Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek in Issue 49, Drama
Atlantic City (1981).
Louis Malle, director. Paramount.
A near-perfect comic melodrama filmed among crumbling Atlantic City shops and hotels being razed to make room for new casinos. With Burt Lancaster as an old numbers-runner with a streak of gallantry, and Susan Sarandon as the troubled young croupier he lusts after and champions.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 51, Comedy
The Awful Truth (1937).
Leo McCarey, director. Columbia.
Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are a married couple who’ve split up for silly reasons, and while they entertain the notion of second marriages to egregiously unsuitable partners, they keep leaning in each other’s direction. McCarey’s work with the two stars and sharp-witted supporting cast is sensational.
Reviewed by Steve Vineberg in Issue 49, Comedy
Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) (1964).
Jean-Luc Goddard, director. Criterion.
The New Wave’s Pulp Fiction. Two delinquent boys and the girl who loves them (adorable Anna Karina) plan and botch a robbery. Sort of a film noir, sort of a romantic comedy, sort of a musical, Band of Outsiders is, at bottom, about being Jean-Luc Goddard—young, smart, hip, French, and in love with the movies.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 47, Drama
Barbershop (2002).
Tim Story, director. MGM.
Comedies often deal with social issues more effectively than serious dramas do, and Barbershop is a near-perfect example, riffing sharply on the idea that a sense of community is one of the most enriching components of everyday life. Regular goings-on at a ghetto barbershop are intercut with a hilarious subplot in which two ne’er-do-well thieves try to bust open the ATM they’ve stolen.
Reviewed by SZ in Issue 48, Comedy
Barton Fink (1991).
Joel and Ethan Coen, directors. Fox.
The most appallingly funny film ever made about writer’s block, Barton Fink traces the Hollywood adventures of its eponymous hero—a woefully self-absorbed Jewish playwright (John Turturro), who fancies himself the champion of a new hard-hitting leftist theater for and about the “common man.” The truth is Fink’s about as far removed from the common man as a human being can get. The Coens contrive to teach him a lesson in empathy that even a moral idiot can’t miss.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 49, Comedy
Beauty and the Beast (1946).
Jean Cocteau, director. Criterion.
Cinema has been good to fairy tales, but never better, or more magical, than it is here. When Jean Cocteau’s Beast (Jean Marais) dies at the close and is transmuted into Prince Charming, it is said that a woman in the opening night audience cried out, “Give me back my Beast!” That is the spell this great movie casts on grown men and women alike.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 48, Fantasy
Bend it Like Beckham
(2002).
Gurinder Chadha, director. Fox.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 52.
Bitter Moon (1992).
Roman Polanski, director. New Line.
While on a cruise ship to celebrate their wedding anniversary, Nigel (Hugh Grant) and Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas) meet Oscar (Peter Coyote) and his sexy French wife Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner). Obviously turned-on by Mimi, Nigel is lured by Oscar into hearing his and Mimi’s love story. Employing lengthy flashbacks, Polanski paints a fairytale Parisian romance that slowly turns into something out of an erotic Brothers Grimm.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 51, Drama
The Black Marble (1980).
Harold Becker, director. Anchor Bay.
Robert Foxworth is a burnt-out cop, always drunk on vodka and suddenly saddled with a new partner, Paula Prentiss. Harry Dean Stanton is a dog handler up to his neck in gambling debts, who kidnaps a Schnauzer and demands ransom from a down-on-her-luck blueblood (Barbara Babcock). She goes to the police. Foxworth gets involved with the case, with Babcock, and finally with Prentiss. A dark, loopy classic.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 49, Noir
Bloody Sunday (2002).
Paul Greengrass, director. Paramount.
A nerve-shattering, thrillingly complex recreation of the Derry, Northern Ireland, civil rights march of January 30, 1972—which left 13 unarmed civilians dead and 14 wounded from the guns of British troops. Few filmmakers since Costa-Gavras, Pontecorvo, and Francesco Rosi in their firebrand periods have worked with as potent an intuition as Greengrass to bring an audience inside surging political action.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 50, Drama
Blue Car (2003).
Karen Moncrieff, director. Miramax.
Devastating drama about a deeply troubled teenage poet (Agnes Bruckner) who is mentored and then taken cruel advantage of by her high-school poetry teacher (David Strathairn). One of the better films of 2003. JV
*Casablanca (1942).
Michael Curtiz, director. Warner.
As everyone knows, Casablanca is the story of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart)—a man who loses his soul when he loses The Woman He Loves (Ingrid Bergman) and finds it again when, out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into his. Casablanca may be Hollywood’s wacky, wartime version of Grand Hotel, but the malarkey gets transmuted to gold by the Epstein brothers’ script, Curtiz’s direction, and Bogart’s great performance.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 51, Drama
*Catch Me If You Can (2002).
Steven Spielberg, director. Dreamworks.
This old-fashioned chase comedy—based on the true story of con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr., a sixteen-year-old kid who managed to successfully impersonate a co-pilot, an emergency room physician, and an assistant district attorney—is the least pretentious and most entertaining film Steven Spielberg has directed in what seems like forever. Expert comic performances from Christopher Walken, Tom Hanks, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Comedy
*Chicago (2002).
Rob Marshall, director. Miramax.
Terrifically entertaining adaptation of Bob Fosse’s stage musical about two murderesses in Roaring Twenties Chicago, who beat their raps thanks to a silver-tongued lawyer, a cynical press, and their own show-biz moxie. Notable for the surprising star turns of the principal performers—that fabled song-and-dance team of Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger, and Richard Gere.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Musical
Christ Stopped At Eboli (1979).
Francesco Rosi, director. Facets.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 52.
The Claude Chabrol Collection:
Les Biches (1968),
La Femme infidèle (1969),
Que la bête meure (1969),
Le Boucher (1969),
La Rupture (1970),
La Décade prodigieuse (1972),
Nada (1974),
Les Innocents aux mains sales (1975).
Claude Chabrol, director. Pathfinder.
It would be a vast understatement to call this eight-DVD set an embarrassment of riches. At age 73 French “New Wave” filmmaker Claude Chabrol has slowed down only slightly as he continues to turn out films which start off as upper-middle-class dramas that, coolly and quietly, pull the viewer into a psycho-social darkness never fully explained away.
Reviewed by Royal S. Brown in Issue 50, Noir
The Complete Monterey Pop Festival (1968).
D.A. Pennebaker, director. Criterion.
Symbolically, Woodstock remains king of filmed concerts, but for substance and importance, Monterey is the touchstone. This lower-profile gathering opened the gates to innovative music, alternative culture, and unlimited possibilities. Filmed by D.A. Pennebaker.
Reviewed by Bob Gendron in Issue 47, Musical
Contempt (1963).
Jean-Luc Godard, director. Criterion.
Jean-Luc Godard’s most mournful masterpiece, Contempt is an examination of the disintegrating marriage of a failed screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his gorgeous wife (Brigitte Bardot). What’s so heartbreaking about Contempt is the way it makes us long to be able to stop the damage, to pretend this fractured relationship isn’t nearly as hopeless as it seems.
Reviewed by SZ in Issue 47, Drama
Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon (1957).
Jacques Tourneur, director. Columbia.
A genuine hair-raiser from horror-film pioneer Jacques Tourneur (Cat People,
I Walked with a Zombie), about a skeptical scientist (Dana Andrews) who comes to Britain and tangles with a magus, who sics a demon on him.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 46, Horror
Dark Blue (2003).
Ron Shelton, director. MGM/UA.
Kurt Russell gives a phenomenal performance as Eldon Perry, Jr., an ace cop in L.A.’s Special Investigations Squad, who’s convinced that his wife (Lolita Davidovich) and new partner (Scott Speedman) still find his macho bravado charming. In the course of investigating a brutal murder, Perry discovers how wrong he is.
Review by MS in Issue 50, Noir
Dead of Winter (1987).
Arthur Penn, director. MGM.
A relentlessly dark and clever thriller about a woman (Mary Steenburgen) hired to impersonate a murdered woman (Steenburgen again) in order to blackmail the murdered woman’s sister (Steenburgen encore).
Reviewed by RSB in Issue 47, Horror
Death and the Maiden (1994).
Roman Polanski, director. New Line.
A trio of characters—a woman who was tortured by a South American death squad (Sigourney Weaver), her husband (Stuart Wilson), and a stranger who may have been the woman’s chief torturer (Ben Kingsley)—confront each other in this devastating drama. Polanski reshapes Ariel Dorfman’s too-polemical play into a dark psychological suspense thriller of considerable power.
Reviewed by Mark Dellelo in Issue 50, Drama
Down With Love (2003).
Peyton Reed, director. Fox.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 52.
Drumline (2002).
Charles Stone III, director. Fox.
Nick Cannon plays a young hotshot snare drummer who lands a marching-band scholarship at an Atlanta university. The story of how he grows, as a man and as a musician, by learning teamwork and self-respect is more ancient than the Mississippi itself. But director Charles Stone III tells it as if it’s the first time we’ve ever heard it.
Reviewed by SZ in Issue 50, Drama
The Duellists (1977).
Ridley Scott, director. Paramount.
Ridley Scott’s phenomenal 1977 debut film is a wry, volatile, gorgeous-looking romantic adventure, filled with extravagant swordplay. Its central characters—two soldiers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) locked in a perpetual duel of honor over an insignificant slight—remain partial mysteries, which is as it should be for warriors at once absurd and mythic.
Reviewed by SV in Issue 47, Drama
Eraserhead (1977).
David Lynch, director. Available from www.davidlynch.com.
Described by Lynch as “a dream of dark and troubling things.” The dreamer in this case is one Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a young man dressed in your basic engineer-geek tie and jacket and sporting an improbable, foot-high coiffure that looks like, well, an eraser topping a rather pudgy pencil. Eraserhead is an exercise in humor so black that we don’t know whether to laugh or barf.
Reviewed by RSB in Issue 49, Horror
Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1946, 1964).
Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel, directors. Criterion.
In a neat bit of marketing, Criterion offers the two most famous film versions of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated 1927 short story “The Killers” in a single box set. The Siodmak version is the more Hemingway-like, with never-more-gorgeous Ava Gardner as a femme fatale to Burt Lancaster’s sap of a boxer, Ole Andersen. Though perfunctory, the Siegel version is nastier, with a sexy turn by Angie Dickinson, and Lee Marvin as a guy so noir he knocks a blind woman cold.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 48, Noir
The Far Country (1954).
Anthony Mann, director. Universal.
The far country of the title is 1896 Alaska. James Stewart plays against type as a solidly unlikable loner looking out strictly for himself and acquiring ideals only at the film’s very end. His closest affinity, in the best noir tradition in which director Mann had previously worked, is with the film’s principal bad guy, an entrepreneur/lawman/crook played by John McIntire.
Reviewed by RSB in Issue 50, Western
Far from Heaven (2002).
Todd Haynes, director. Universal.
Todd Haynes’s homage to the movies of Douglas Sirk, the king of overwrought fifties melodrama, is warmer and less ironically distanced than anything Sirk ever made. Julianne Moore is an efficient and effortlessly charming ’50s housewife and homemaker who learns her husband has a deep, dark “secret.”
Reviewed by SZ in Issue 49, Drama
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).
Terry Gilliam, director. Criterion.
Hunter S. Thompson’s early ’70s classic captures the queer transformation of a culture of peace and love into a culture of paranoid rage and drug-fueled anomie. Johnny Depp (as Raoul Duke) and Benecio Del Toro (as Dr. Gonzo) serve this story of two world-class hipsters’s road trip to the hell of Las Vegas as well as it could be served. Funny and, occasionally, sad.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 48, Comedy
Femme Fatale (2002).
Brian De Palma, director. Warner.
A noir mystery story about a beautiful woman trying to escape her sordid past (and doomed future), Femme Fatale has the kinky sex, the shifting identities, and murderous violence of Mullholand Dr. without the depth. It doesn’t really have the same sense of mystery, either. Sexy, superficial, and entertaining.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 48, Noir
*Finding Nemo (2003).
Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, directors. Disney.
Another computer-animated feature from Pixar—this one set primarily in an undersea world of spectacularly iridescent beauty. The sentimental story—about an overprotective daddy fish’s search for his lost son Nemo—is salted with enough hip, funny characters (a bluefish with a short-term memory problem, a trio of sharks who hold AA-like meetings to keep them from eating their aquatic neighbors) to keep its sweetness from cloying. The transfer is spectacular—the best, both visually and sonically, of the year. JV
The Flamingo Kid (1984).
Garry Marshall, director. MGM.
Matt Dillon as an impressionable working-class 18-year-old and Richard Crenna as the well-heeled sports-car dealer who takes him under his wing are what make this modest, genial, loose-jointed coming-of-age comedy set in Brooklyn during the summer of 1963 worth watching.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 51, Comedy
The Good Girl (2002).
Miguel Arteta, director. Fox.
Thirty-year-old Wal-Mart clerk Justine Last (Jennifer Aniston) has an adulterous affair with a disturbed, would-be writer (Jake Gyllenhaal) and, as her duplicity starts to fall apart, contemplates running off with her lover and the fifteen thousand dollars he’s stolen. Entirely deglamorized, Aniston is a revelation.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 49, Drama
No Pic Green Card (1991).
Peter Weir, director. Touchstone.
Two strangers—a china-doll-delicate socialite horticulturalist (Andie MacDowell) and a shambling bull-in-a-china-shop Frenchman (Gérard Depardieu)—agree to a marriage of convenience in this sweet farce.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 50, Comedy
*Heaven (2003).
Tom Tykwer, director. Warner.
Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s final unproduced script (Kieslowski died before a film could be made) is his best work since Run, Lola, Run. Indeed, in its less flashy (but still magical-realist) way, this oddly Edenic, dreamily philosophical love story about a lady terrorist pursued by corrupt cops and a young policeman who falls in love with and aids her is as good as Lola—or any of Kieslowski’s Decalogue. JV
High Noon: Collector’s Edition (1952).
Fred Zinneman, director. Artisan.
One of the most highly regarded westerns. Gary Cooper as beleagured Marshall Will Kane is as riveting as an actor can be, and Fred Zinneman’s direction is comparably lean and disciplined, creating the impression that these are actual events presented objectively.
Reviewed by David Morrell in Issue 47, Western
*The Hired Hand (1971).
Peter Fonda, director. Universal.
This sad, simple tale of a cowboy who risks his life to save a friend manages to achieve the concision and power of poetry, cutting to the very core of the Western—the lure and loneliness of cowboy freedom, the comfort and compromise of settling down, the conflicting obligations of love and friendship. Superbly acted by director Fonda, Verna Bloom, and the great Warren Oates, beautifully written by Alan Sharp (who followed this up with Ulzana’s Raid ), gorgeously photographed by Vilmos Zsgimond, wonderfully scored by Bruce Langhorne, and expertly restored by editor Frank Mazzola. JV
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959).
Alain Resnais, director. Criterion.
Hiroshima, a city utterly devastated then built anew on the grounds of that devastation, is made a metonym of the inner life of the film’s protagonist—an unnamed thirtyish French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) with a devastatingly tragic history of her own, who, on assignment in Hiroshima, dares to repeat the past by falling madly and dangerously in love with a young Japanese.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Drama
Igby Goes Down (2002).
Burr Steers, director. MGM.
The most refreshing coming-of-age film since Rushmore. Kieran Culkin plays Igby Slocumb, a 17-year-old dropout seeking escape from everything about his onerous life. Though Holden Caufield would have found a kindred spirit in Igby, director Burr Steers has more than enough wit and compassion to avoid the tag of “derivative.”
Reviewed by FK in Issue 48, Drama
Images (1972).
Robert Altman, director. MGM.
Reviewed by RSB in Issue 52.
The In-Laws (1979).
Arthur Hiller, director. Warner.
A hilarious screwball comedy in which Alan Arkin as poor, put-upon suburban dentist Shelly Kornpett, and Peter Falk as Shelly’s soon-to-be-brother-in-law, the borderline-mad CIA agent Vince Ricardo, become embroiled with General Garcia (Richard Libertini), a Latin American dictator who collects velvet paintings, does icky Senor Wences imitations, and plans to undo the economies of the Western world.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Comedy
Intolerance (1916).
D.W. Griffith, director. Kino.
The screwiest, most elaborate, and most entertaining message movie ever made. Kino’s 197-minute print contains Griffith’s grand design in all its crazy fullness. By the final 50 minutes, viewers susceptible to movie suspense will be biting their fingernails down to the cuticles, forgetting they know the outcome of most of these classic stories of intolerance.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 47, Drama
The King of Comedy (1983).
Martin Scorsese, director. Fox.
Long before To Die For and the craze for insta-celebrity, there was The King of Comedy. This tale of Rupert Pupkin, a delusional, talentless comic-wannabe (Robert DeNiro) who worships Jerry Langford, a Johnny Carson-type talk-show host (Jerry Lewis), and conspires with a fellow fanatic (Sandra Bernhard) to kidnap him, then demand a spot on the show as a bargaining chip is riotously funny and disturbing.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 47, Comedy
Knife in the Water (1962).
Roman Polanski, director. Criterion.
A bullying middle-aged writer, his sexy young wife, and a handsome boy with a pocketknife take a pleasure-boat ride that turns ugly. Generations, classes, sexes, and temperaments come into violent conflict in Roman Polanski’s overwound, wickedly black serio-comedy. The stunning debut that made Polanski’s international reputation. JV
Late Marriage (2001).
Dover Kosashvili, director. New Yorker Video.
This Israeli film about a family’s efforts to find an eligible bride for their son is a sort of dark, nightmarish antidote to the gentle satire and sweet sentimentality of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Both movies begin with a warm, loving, extended clan horrified at an aging child’s inability to settle into blessed matrimony, but in Late Wedding, the satire turns caustic.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 48, Drama
*Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
David Lean, director. Columbia Superbit.
The greatest of all historical epics. Though a superb actor, Peter O’Toole never again came quite as close to perfection as he did in this, his film debut, as T. E. Lawrence, the conflicted soldier/philosopher who dreamed of an Arabia for Arabs and was undone by the British, Arab tribalism, and his own ego. Director Lean and cinematographer Freddie Young were also never better, staging large-scale battles, framing incomparably beautiful desertscapes, and managing intimate scenes with equal aplomb.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 51, Drama
Led Zeppelin (2003).
Jimmy Page and Dick Carruthers, DVD Creative Directors. Atlantic.
Produced by Jimmy Page and culled from the best live performances available, Led Zeppelin is the sought-after Holy Grail—an astonishing look at the seldom-videotaped band that, with Black Sabbath, defined heavy metal, but also encompassed blues, folk, world, R&B, and soul.
Reviewed by BG in Issue 50
*Lilo and Stitch (2002).
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, directors. Disney.
L&S is a phantasmagoric concatenation if ever there were one—Elvis songs, alien creatures, surfing, Zoe Caldwell’s voice, the CIA, family values, and what not—and, crazy as it sounds, all of it works. Lilo is a very difficult little girl (living in Hawaii) and Stitch is an alien escapee, bred by a mad scientist to create trouble. Both are outsiders, who connect, then bond. A delicious animated entertainment, even for jaded grownups.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 48, Fantasy
Living in Oblivion (1995).
Tom DiCillo, director. Columbia Tristar.
A smart and wickedly funny look at the world of independent filmmaking, featuring Steve Buscemi as the director for whom everything goes wrong—even in his dreams.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 48, Comedy
The Long Goodbye (1973).
Robert Altman, director. MGM.
Director Robert Altman describes the main character in this Raymond Chandler adaptation as “Rip Van Marlowe,” suggesting that the detective made famous on the screen by Humphrey Bogart had been asleep for twenty years, awakening to find himself in 1970s Los Angeles in the form of Jewish hipster Elliott Gould.
Reviewed by RSB in Issue 46, Noir
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002).
Peter Jackson, director. New Line.
More peerless fun for the greybeard, pointy-hat, carries-a-staff crowd. The second (and seamlessly continuous) installment of Peter Jackson’s eventually-to-be-nine-hours-long epic fantasy is considerably grimmer and more grueling than the first three-hour segment, concentrating as it does on three simultaneous struggles confronting the now-fragmented “fellowship.”
Reviewed by ML in Issue 51, Fantasy
Man of Aran (1934).
Robert Flaherty, director. HVE.
A masterpiece of quasi-documentary filmmaking, in which director Flaherty used inhabitants of the desolate Isle of Aran (off the west coast of Ireland) to dramatize man’s perpetual fight against nature. There are long segments of this gorgeously photographed film of such terrifying grandeur that it is hard to believe they weren’t somehow optically enhanced or performed by stuntmen.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Documentary
The Man Who Laughs (1928).
Paul Leni, director. Kino.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 52.
Metropolis (1927).
Fritz Lang, director. Kino.
In its restored state, complete with the re-recorded original score and title cards filling in lost plot-lines, this proto-sci-fi movie is as poetic as it is gigantic.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 48, Sci-Fi
Mildred Pierce (1945).
Michael Curtiz, director. Warner.
There have been movies before Mildred centered on women who use their wiles to achieve status. But in this picture, Pierce doesn’t use sex to achieve her place in the (marketplace) sun; she does it by making a better product. Joan Crawford is great as this feminist icon, whose strength is slowly sapped by the vampires who surround her.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 48, Drama
Minority Report (2002).
Steven Spielberg, director. DreamWorks.
Steven Spielberg’s dystopia begins so brilliantly, you wonder if this, and not A.I., might be the great fusion of his narrative talents with Kubrick’s bleakly stylized vision. Then, about halfway through, Spielberg decides he doesn’t want to make a film noir, after all, and rips a page from L.A. Confidential. Still, this is a smart thriller, especially by today’s standards.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 47, Sci-Fi
Mostly Martha (2002).
Sandra Nettelbeck, director. Paramount.
You don’t have to be a foodie to dig this touching, funny German movie about a Hamburg chef named Martha (Martina Gedeck) and the effects that her headstrong and deeply unhappy niece (Maxime Foerste), and a hunk named Mario (Sergio Castellitto) have on her cosseted life.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 48, Comedy
Murderous Maids (2000).
Jean-Pierre Denis, director. Rialto.
Review forthcoming
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002).
Joel Zwick, director. HBO Films.
Looked at in the context of 9/11, it’s easy to understand why mainstream audiences fell head-over-heels for this sloppy kiss of a romantic comedy. It’s comfort food for troubled times.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 48, Comedy
My Darling Clementine (1946).
John Ford, director. Fox.
One of the greatest of great westerns. John Ford prints the legend in this version of the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” but his own moody darkness and the towering performance of Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp make this dream of the labor of taming a wild town, and the wildness in men’s hearts, as sweet as fact. JV
My Life As a Dog (1985).
Lasse Hallström, director. Criterion.
In My Life, a 12-year-old boy loses his father to parental divorce, his mother to tuberculosis, his brother to sheer disliking, his beloved puppy to the pound, but ends up all right with a loving uncle and aunt in the country, even though there too he’s forced out of a bedroom to a small gazebo. The description may sound both grim and mawkish, but the film is anything but.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 49, Drama
My So-Called Life (1994).
Winnie Holzman, series creator. BMG.
Never have the high-school years been depicted more vividly, more truthfully, or more movingly than in My So-Called Life, a network television series which aired for a brief 19 episodes in 1994.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 47, Comedy
New Waterford Girl (1999).
Allan Moyle, director. Wellspring.
Rebellious, bookish, but beautiful 15-year-old Mooney Pottie (Liane Balaban) yearns to escape the tiny seaside village of New Waterford on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton. A scholarship to a Manhattan art school makes this seem possible, but her family won’t let her go, until she comes up with an inspired plan: create the illusion of being a slut and then fake a pregnancy.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 48, Comedy
Nowhere in Africa (2001).
Caroline Link, director. Columbia TriStar.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 52.

Of Unknown Origin (1983).
George P. Cosmatos, director. Warner.
Forget Willard and its toothy spawn. This clever, little-known horror flick is the Moby Dick of rat-pics. Indeed, Moby Dick is amusingly referenced in the course of the film—and appropriately so, as its protagonist, Bart Hughes (Peter Weller), gradually transforms himself from a top-flight NYC ad exec into a housebound Captain Ahab out to kill the white whale of all rodents.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Horror
One Hour Photo (2002).
Mark Romanek, director. Fox.
Robin Williams as “Sy the Photo Guy,” a well-into-middle-age Wal-Mart clerk so desperately lonely that he surreptitiously adopts a picture-book middle-class family—the Yorkins, whose photos he develops in the Wal-Mart mini-lab—as his own, and tries sadly (and then terrifyingly) to get them to adopt him.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 47, Horror
Orphans of the Storm (1921).
D.W. Griffith, director. Kino.
Orphans of the Storm, like so much of D.W. Griffith’s work, is partly about dazzling the audience with spectacle. But Griffith’s movies are also about delicacy of feeling writ large. Lilian Gish manages an astonishingly interior performance as a victim of the French Revolution. The fragile beauty of her work is perfectly balanced by massive battle scenes that rival anything done today with computer graphics.
Reviewed by SZ in Issue 47, Drama
Pather Panchali (1955).
Satyajit Ray, dir. Columbia.
A perennial pick on Sight & Sound’s (indeed, on everyone’s) Top Films of All-Time list, this movie, the first in Satyajit Ray’s celebrated “Apu trilogy,” traces the childhood of a poor Indian boy in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Bengal, India. What makes this story (and its two companion pieces, Aparajito and The World of Apu) so unforgettable is not just the glimpses we get into a life we’ll never lead, but the glimpses we get into the life that we do. Like Ecclesiastes, Pather Panchali turns the cycle of life into lyric poetry. JV
*The Pianist (2002).
Roman Polanski, director. Universal.
The true story of Polish pianist Vladimir Szpilman, a celebrated Jewish musician who survived six years of suffering, fear, and privation with the help of Jewish and gentile friends (one of them a Nazi officer). Though critics and viewers alike seem to want to believe that The Pianist is an uplifting message movie about the triumph of the human spirit, they could not be more profoundly wrong. The Pianist is equally and unsettlingly about the injustice and ordeal of mass murder and the injustice and ordeal of survival.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 49, Drama
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).
Gore Verbinski, director. Buena Vista.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 52.
Il Posto (1961).
Ermanno Olmi, director. Criterion.
“Bittersweet” is a word used to describe many coming-of-age films, but few fit it better than Il Posto. A young man from a small village takes the train to Milan to apply for a clerk’s position, a “secure job for life,” and relishes a brief taste of the city’s freedom, vitality, and romance, before realizing that, in the corporate world, security can be a life (and life-smothering) sentence. Olmi approaches his subjects with autobiographical empathy and intimacy.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 51, Drama
Punch-Drunk Love (2002).
Paul Thomas Anderson, director. Columbia.
Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is the well-meaning owner of a toilet-plunger factory, who has no experience at life, no instinct for how humans are supposed to feel, and thus little grasp over his own emotions, which erupt from passivity to rage at the slightest provocation. The plot follows him falling in love with a woman (Emily Watson) who’s strange in complementary fashion and, thus, finding his emotional center, his place in society.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 51, Comedy
Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002).
Phillip Noyce, director. Miramax.
In 1931 Australia, a British consul (Kenneth Branagh) separates three half-caste girls from their mothers and consigns them to a settlement to be cultivated for entrance into white society. The movie focuses on their extraordinary escape. Based on a true episode from the history of the aboriginal people’s “stolen generations.”
Reviewed by MD in Issue 49, Drama
Read My Lips (2001).
Jacques Audiard, director. Columbia Tristar.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 52.
The Ring (2002).
Gore Verbinski, director. Dreamworks.
After watching a mysterious video, a group of teenagers receives a phone call telling them they’ll die in a week; in seven days, to the minute, each of them dies a grotesque death. Cleverly tapping into urban legend, the story quickly becomes a detective movie as a reporter (Naomi Watts) investigates the deaths, along the way watching the video herself.
Reviewed by Paul Seydor in Issue 49, Horror
Roman Holiday: Special Collector’s Edition (1953).
William Wyler, director. Paramount.
An enchanting reverse-Cinderella story. Audrey Hepburn—in the performance that both made her a star and won her an Oscar—plays a princess from a small European country who, oppressed by her royal responsibilities, runs away in the midst of a Rome visit. Gregory Peck is the American journalist on whose doorstep she lands, and whose heart she steals.
Reviewed by SV in Issue 47, Comedy
Rush (1991).
Lili Fini Zanuck, director. MGM.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays an apple-cheeked rookie cop and Jason Patric her veteran mentor, in what is, by and large, a grimly realistic movie about the steep price undercover cops pay for living with the animals.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 47, Noir
Russian Ark (2003).
Aleksandre Sokurov, director. Wellspring Media.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 52.
Sciuscià (Shoeshine) (1946).
Vittorio De Sica, director. Image.
The protagonists of this great neorealist film are two Roman shoeshine boys, who, themselves betrayed, land in trouble and are forced to betray each other. Shoeshine is unforgettably sad, but it’s made with a lyrical purity that makes the agony bearable.
Reviewed by SV in Issue 47, Drama
Secretary (2002).
Steven Shainberg, director. Lion’s Gate.
A sweet, endearing love story about a sadistic lawyer (James Spader) and his masochistic secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Gyllenhaal single-handedly turns what could have played like the sick misadventures of a grotesque into a triumphant voyage of self-discovery that ends, fairy-take-like, in the perfect love that all of us long for.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Comedy
Serpico (1973).
Sidney Lumet, director. Paramount.
Director Sidney Lumet and his star, Al Pacino, give shape and highly personal texture to the true story of Frank Serpico, an almost fatally honest cop who dug to the roots of corruption in the New York Police Department in the early 1970s and whose subsequent testimonies before the Knapp Commission helped clean up the force.
Reviewed by SZ in Issue 47, Drama
Shampoo (1975).
Hal Ashby, director. Columbia.
Shampoo is a great farce, but it has too many layers to be called merely funny. You can’t even call it a movie about lost innocence, as its three central characters (Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, and Goldie Hawn) aren’t stereotypical ’60s free spirits with open minds and hearts but master manipulators looking to get away with as much as possible. Still, you feel for all of them.
Reviewed by SZ in Issue 48, Comedy
The Singing Detective (1986).
Jon Amiel, director. BBC/Warner.
The Singing Detective was breakthrough television when it appeared on PBS nearly 20 years ago, a bracing, witty, baffling pastiche of mystery thriller, musical satire, and Freudian psychodrama. The remarkable thing is that, after so many years, the series holds up so well.
Reviewed by FK in Issue 50, Drama
Sliding Doors (1998).
Peter Howitt, director. Paramount.
A high-class bittersweet soap opera set apart by director Howitt’s Run, Lola, Run-like use of parallel story lines—in which things work out differently for the heroine depending on the timing of what she sees and when—and by the nuanced performance of Gwenyth Paltrow as the (double) protagonist.
Reviewed by RSB in Issue 48, Drama
Straw Dogs (1972).
Sam Peckinpah, director. Criterion.
A battle for dominance between a meticulous mathematics professor and his sexy English wife (Dustin Hoffman and Susan George) proliferates into gang rape and horrific violence in a small English village. Though its roots are in the volatile sixties, Peckinpah’s horror story about civilization and its discontents is one for the ages.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 48, Drama
Talk to Her (2002).
Pedro Almodóvar, director. Columbia.
A friendship springs up between two men who love and care for two women who are in comas. Along the way terrible things happen, but Almodóvar humanizes all, even when one of the characters does the unforgivable. One of the best films of last year.
Reviewed by HP in Issue 50, Drama
The Tenant (1976).
Roman Polanski, director. Paramount.
Set and filmed in Paris, the third of Roman Polanski’s evil apartment movies (following Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby) is creepily funny, as it follow the misadventures and gradual breakdown of a timid clerk—played by Polanski himself—who comes to feel that he is slowly being turned into the suicidal woman who previously occupied his flat.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 50, Horror
La Terra Trema (1954).
Luchino Visconti, director. Image.
The story of downtrodden Sicilian fisherman, Luchino Visconti’s second film, La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles), plays out as a kind of Italian Grapes of Wrath. In documentary fashion, Visconti used Sicilian villagers as actors and shot on location. One of the most moving and gorgeous-looking films to emerge from the Italian neo-realist movement.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 47, Drama
The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, et al., directors. MGM.
Alexander Korda’s production of The Thief of Bagdad is one of the four or five best kids’ movies ever made, capturing how kids feel when they first discover the real world and think that it is magical.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 47, Fantasy
*The Thing From Another World (1951).
Howard Hawks, director. Warner.
A group of soldiers and civilian scientists, stationed near the North Pole, battle a deadly visitor from outer space. A witty script by Charles Lederer, a great cast, plus snappy Hawksian direction make this contest between man and beast about as plausible and scary as such things can be made to seem.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Sci-Fi/Horror
Throne of Blood (1957).
Akira Kurosawa, director. Criterion.
Kurosowa’s version of Macbeth is one of those rare occasions when a work of genius is translated not just into a different medium but into a different culture, and still survives as great poetry. A masterpiece, with truly remarkable performances by Toshirô Mifune as Lord Washizu (Macbeth) and Isuzu Amada as his witchy consort, Asaji (Lady Macbeth).
Reviewed by JV in Issue 50, Drama
Time Out (2002).
Laurent Cantet, director. Miramax.
Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) is a businessman who simply carries on after being fired from the job he’s held for years—whiling away the workdays on aimless road trips, calling his wife from his cell phone to report about nonexistent meetings and deadlines, and choosing to sleep in his car rather than face his family. A dark, quiet, devastating movie.
Reviewed by MD in Issue 48, Drama
Tokyo Story (1953).
Yasujiro Ozu. Criterion.
An undisputed masterpiece (rated in the Top Ten Films by Sight & Sound) about an elderly couple visiting their ungrateful children in Tokyo. This devastatingly sad movie about changing times, changing generations, and a mortality that never changes is rather like a quiet, domestic, but no less devastating version of Lear. JV
*The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).
John Huston, director. Warner.
An American classic. Fred Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), two down-and-out Americanos, chance upon an old prospector named Howard (Walter Huston). Together the trio set out to search for treasure in the wild, bandit-filled Sierra Madre mountain range. Superb performances from Bogart, Huston, and Holt.
Reviewed by JV in Issue 51, Drama
No Pic Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993),
Blanc (1994), Rouge (1994).
Krzysztof Kieslowski, director. Miramax.
Kieslowski’s great tragic-comic trilogy about contemporary European life is one of the masterpieces of recent cinema.
Review by HP forthcoming
Trouble in Paradise (1934).
Ernst Lubitsch, director. Criterion.
Trouble in Paradise propels a viewer into the high life of the imagination, thanks to the wordplay of screenwriter Samson Raphaelson—and the perfection of Ernst Lubitsch’s direction. A gentleman bandit (Herbert Marshall) falls in love with an impudent thief (Miriam Hopkins). But when the two team up to fleece beautiful perfume heiress Kay Francis of her fortune, there’s trouble in paradise.
Reviewed by MS in Issue 48, Comedy
Umberto D. (1952).
Vittorio De Sica, director. Criterion.
One of the most heart-breaking of movies. A neo-realist drama, beautifully written by Cesare Zavattini, who also wrote De Sica’s heart-breaking Shoe-shine and The Bicycle Thief, about an elderly civil servant (Carlo Battisti) trying to preserve his dignity in a post-war world that has no use for the old, the weak, and the indigent. JV
What Time Is It There? (2001).
Tsai Ming-Liang, director. Wellspring.
A beloved husband has died and left his widow (Lu Yi-Ching) distraught with grief, and his son (Lee Kang-Sheng), who sells watches from a display case on the streets of Taipei, dazed and aghast at his mother’s delusions. A girl (Chen Shiang-Chyi), leaving the next day for Paris, persuades the son to sell her his own watch. From then on their lives are inexplicably synchronized.
Reviewed by ML in Issue 50, Drama
Wings of Desire (1987).
Wim Wenders, director. MGM.
Wim Wenders was awarded Best Director prize at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival for this highly poetic film about angels—guardian angels to be precise—who roam Berlin listening in on people’s thoughts, lending comfort with an invisible pat on the back, nudge of the forehead, or whisper in the ear.
Reviewed by WG in Issue 51, Drama
The World of Apu (1960).
Satyajit Ray, director. Columbia Tristar.
See Pather Panchali.
*Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).
Michael Curtiz, director. Warner.
Reviewed by SV in Issue 52.


Advertisement