Features
Nashville is monumental entertainment: it opens with a new anthem for the Bicentennial (“200 Years”) and closes with an image of the American flag draped over a scaled replica of the Parthenon. In around three hours, over two-dozen characters converge in Altman’s panorama of the titular city.
Corruption runs so deep in Chinatown that the elements themselves become a means to ill-gotten wealth, and untouched spaces are voids waiting to be filled by brutal, invisible forces.
What is it about Coppola’s pair of iconic films from 1972 and 1974 that have made them such widely agreed-upon selections for canonization, besides their enormous financial success?
Film history needed a Magnificent Ambersons. There had to be that one “lost” great film for which we could collectively weep, but whose brilliance remains undulled.
The type of succinct visual storytelling that marks Hollywood’s greatest output, from Sunrise to Vertigo to The Tree of Life, is not the purview of television; movies, however far we think they’ve fallen this week, exist in their own realm.
Despite Martin Scorsese propping it up with undying tenacity, John M. Stahl’s oft-touted 1945 "Technicolor noir," Leave Her to Heaven, still seems to languish on the peripheries of film history.
In its deft blending of tones and embedded cinephilic references, it maybe more closely resembles the supple, scary-funny early efforts of Steven Spielberg or Brian De Palma . . .
Antonioni’s film was lodged in my memory as an environmental dirge: billows of steam and smoke, ravaged landscapes, people dwarfed by machinery, a woman going mad amid the devastation. But a recent viewing brought back its essential ambiguousness.
Noise, Carrière 250 Meters, ¡Vivan las Antipodas!
The Open Sky, The Cultivation of the Invisible Flower, Soul Searching
Touch of Evil contains a single-take tracking shot of such elegance and skill that it may one day come to be seen as the ultimate expression of Orson Welles’s filmmaking prowess. See if you can spot it—it appears 34 minutes into the film.
From the modernist glimmer of New York’s skyscrapers to the gray colorlessness of the crop-dusting sequence to the deep reflective properties of that suit (insert obligatory Mad Men reference), North by Northwest is Hitchcock’s fullest exploration of the silverness of the silver screen.
So rather than run down yet another list of "fearless" predictions about who will win the big prizes, we thought this year we'd pay tribute to our favorite past Oscar winners: you know, those movies that really make one appreciate the joy and magic of the Oscar season.
In Forty Guns, Stanwyck is on the way out of movie acting—the television box was more forgiving—fifty years old and not looking a day younger, a little stoat-like with her curled lips, the hardness of her wave just offset by the purr in her throat.