Introduction

By 1995, when I arrived in San Diego to write for the Reader, Duncan Shepherd had been its film critic for more than 20 years. And as often as not, whenever I told people what I did for a living, they would ask, "Do you know Duncan Shepherd?" I would say that I did not, and judging from the most common rejoinder - "Man, I hate that guy" - I suspect that they did not, either.

"He never likes anything unless it's old or foreign," was the reason they most often gave for their hatred. They had some grounds for saying so, but still, it was a crummy thing to say about a man who gave one of his rare five-star ratings to Fargo — as modern and American movie as a person could wish for, you betcha — and another to Clint Eastwood's Boston crime drama Mystic River.

But however much they said they hated him, they still asked me about him. And they asked me about him because they read him, paid attention to him, checked their own priorities and antipathies against his. When he hated what they loved, they were offended, because he mattered. The Reader enjoyed a broad circulation and commanded considerable cultural capital. So Duncan Shepherd, Reader film critic, had to be reckoned with.

Part of the frustration was contextual: he was the guy they found in the free weekly paper outside of Starbucks. Where did he get off digging on Alain Resnais and dissing on Steven Spielberg? Why did he insist on writing the way he did? Here's another common complaint: "I can never understand what that guy is saying. Half the time, I need a dictionary just to read his reviews." They wanted to know if they would have a good time at the movies, and they found themselves reading this guy with a vocabulary. What gives?

Here's what gives: once upon a time, a young Duncan Shepherd picked up a copy of Film Culture magazine. He was digging into the fracas between two famous film critics, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, and he wanted to read Sarris' landmark essay, "Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962." But instead, he found himself paying attention to the essay that followed Sarris's. It was titled, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," and it was written by Manny Farber.

Farber was a film critic, but he was also an accomplished painter (his elephant v. termite essay is as much about Cezanne as it is about John Wayne), and he did not regard his work as a critic as being essentially dissimilar from his work on canvas. "I get a great laugh," he once wrote, "from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués — such a horrible joke. I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do." Speaking of dictionaries: how many of you had to look up the word "manques"? I did. It means, "Unfulfilled due to some inherent flaw." But you know what? That's okay. I learned something.

Shepherd was in Minnesota when he met Farber in print, and in New York when he met him in person. (Shepherd was at Columbia; Farber was teaching at the School of Visual Arts.) Shepherd assisted in collecting the material for Farber's first book, Negative Space: Many Farber on the Movies. And soon after Farber headed west to start a film studies program at the University of California, San Diego, he recruited Shepherd - by then a fledgling critic himself - as a teaching assistant.

Shepherd spent three years in the classroom with the man Roger Ebert called "the great iconoclast of American film criticism," and what Shepherd says about Farber's teaching style is not unlike what I would say about Shepherd's reviews: "It wasn't necessarily what he had to say (he was prone to shrug off his most searching analysis as 'gobbledegook') so much as it was the whole way he went about things, famously showing films in pieces, switching back and forth from one film to another, ranging from Griffith to Godard, Bugs Bunny to Yasujiro Ozu, talking over them with or without sound, running them backwards through the projector, mixing in slides of paintings, sketching out compositions on the blackboard, the better to assist students in seeing what was in front of their faces, to wean them from Plot, Story, What Happens Next, and to disabuse them of the absurd notion that a film is all of a piece, all on a level, quantifiable, rankable, fileable. He could seldom be bothered with movie trivia, inside information, behind-the-scenes piffle, technical shoptalk, was often offhand about the basic facts of names and dates, was unconcerned with Classics, Masterpieces, Seminal Works, Historical Landmarks. It was always about looking and seeing."

Of course, there are differences. Shepherd didn't have the multimedia capability of a lecture hall, and a film review must needs hew a little closer to the source material than a film class. But the goal in both cases was the same: new angles of attack, enlarged perspective, an appreciation for the way, as Shepherd put it, "the context is everything." And where Farber brought the world into his classroom; Shepherd brought the classroom to the world. His reviews sought to wean readers from What Happens Next; instead of simply describing a film's attributes, he took hold of it like Jacob wrestling the angel, and sought to see it face to face. Which, naturally, led to another complaint from his critics: "Sometimes, I can't even tell what the film is about."

A final word: Shepherd was a careful writer who wanted (and deserved) to be read carefully: "Different people use the same words differently," he once observed. "To some, 'interesting' in application to a piece of entertainment is faint praise, something less than 'entertaining,' something nearer to 'peculiar,' spinach, castor oil. To others, it means what it says, interesting, absorbing, stimulating, even better than 'entertaining.'" For 38 years, Duncan Shepherd was an interesting film critic. He retired in 2010, but you can still see the movies he saw, and so it's still worth reading what he wrote about them.

Reviews are presented alphabetically. Where possible and/or applicable, run times and ratings have been included.

— Matthew Lickona

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Buñuel's rascally subversions and perversions seem, in a way, more precious in the period prior to when they were expected of him (him, the Sovereign Surrealist), when instead they had to be smuggled out furtively, nervily, when they came from under the counter only. And there is hardly a better chance to appreciate his sneakiness than in this accepted Saturday-matinee version of the classic Defoe survival tale, dutifully retold point by point in the basso profundo narration of Dan O'Herlihy, but shot through with Buñuel's special insights and insinuations (as to, for example, the libidinous possibilities of echoes, a scarecrow, and a long-haired native innocently trying on the clothes and jewels of a salvaged wardrobe chest). Buñuel's first film in color. 1952.

Alice in the Cities: The homeward odyssey of a disheveled German journalist who, in New York City, gets stuck with the responsibility of escorting back to Europe a callously abandoned nine-year-old girl. (In handling this Paper Moon relationship, the movie flirts constantly with sentimentality but is too low on energy and passion to make a serious pass at it.) Wim Wenders fashions a subtle and sedate narrative surface that deals only in humdrum events and that has an unerring sense of the stale taste of life on the road. Meanwhile, the really big subjects underlying this movie (the homogenization of Western culture, the rootlessness of the individual, and other such whoppers) are passed over lightly, felt but not examined, as if they were buried under a layer of ashes. With Rudiger Vogler. 1974.

Alphaville: Prologue: "Reality is too complex, so you make it fiction to make it comprehensible." What this fiction is about, according to its tentative original title, is "Tarzan vs. IBM." Godard takes his hero from the public domain, the pulp domain — Lemmy Caution, a sort of Gallic Mike Hammer — and sends him into the indefinite future, to an unspecific planet, travelling by way of a Ford Galaxy. (Contemporary Paris, unaltered, stands in for the city of the future, but in Raoul Coutard's imagery it becomes a sinister place of impenetrable pitch-blackness and glaring fluorescence. Some of the images reveal a terrific camera eye: a view streetward through the façade of a building, for instance, is a mishmash of contrasting architectural lines — an overlap of curlicue ironwork and straight-edged neon.) Godard, however, has infused his trench-coated Ape Man with a couple of alternate identities, which flick on and off as easily as electric lights. Caution is an explorer-ethnographer of an alien culture, taking pocket-camera snapshots everywhere he goes; and he is also an aloof critic-connoisseur of his own he-man mystique, tossing off occasional highbrow comments on the hard-boiled action genre. Taken altogether, Alphaville is not a great deal more comprehensible than reality. With Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff. 1964.

Anatomy of a Murder: Merely the best courtroom drama ever committed to film, with its lively theatrics tempered by sober and unbudging moral ambiguity. It is hardly less remarkable as perhaps the most mature consideration of rape (least polemical, least hysterical) ever put on film. And in the semi-retired asexual backwoods lawyer who really prefers fishing and jazz, James Stewart has one of the best roles of his career, and would have a clear claim on the best male performance of the year (1959) if Gary Cooper hadn't also had one of his best roles in The Hanging Tree and Robert Mitchum hadn't had one of his best roles in The Wonderful Country and Robert Ryan hadn't had one of his best roles in Odds Against Tomorrow. The casting is inventive all down the line, notably including Arthur O'Connell as Stewart's alcoholic fishing partner and one-time mentor, Eve Arden as his long-suffering secretary, Joseph Welch (the liberal hero of the Army-McCarthy hearings) as the witty judge, and Orson Bean as an unprepossessing (no beard, no German accent) Army psychiatrist. With Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott; written by Wendell Mayes; directed by Otto Preminger. 1959.

Beauty and the Beast: A traditional fairytale kingdom of enchanted forest, decaying castle, and magic, poetic occurrence is laid out by Jean Cocteau, perfect in every detail: the crowd-pleasing cinematic sleights-of-hand, the resplendent, soft-toned imagery of France's "quality cinema," the fragile, fine-china beauty of Josette Day, and the humiliatingly hairy makeup of Jean Marais. 1946. 1 hour, 36 minutes.

Bell, Book, and Candle: Witchcraft comedy, fittingly bewitching, from the John Van Druten stage play, exploring extensively the metaphor of love as a magical power, a spell, an enchantment, a transfigurement. Meaningful use of the Bohemian ambience of Greenwich Village (regardless how artificially reproduced on the backlot); smartly cast, from the top-billed James Stewart and Kim Novak (re-teamed, at a different studio, in the same year as Vertigo, no less combustibly and, strange to say, much more believably) down through a bongo-drumming Jack Lemmon, a whisky-inhaling Ernie Kovacs, a mundanely sexy Janice Rule, the sisterly weirdies Hermione Gingold and Elsa Lanchester, not to forget the seal-point Siamese who plays Pyewacket, the witch's familiar; deftly directed by Richard Quine, who, in love with Novak in real life, got the absolute best of her on screen: Pushover, Strangers When We Meet, and this one, masterpieces in diverse genres, film noir, soap opera, romantic fantasy. 1958. 1 hour, 43 minutes.

The Big Clock: Near-perfect murder mystery, from a novel by the poet Kenneth Fearing, about a Big Town crime reporter, overdue for vacation, following a killer's trail that seems to lead straight to himself. Classically compressed in time and space (two of the three "unities"), and the action (the third) is ushered along swiftly and flowingly by the underrated director, John Farrow. The title object is both an imposing and useful item in itself and an unstrained symbol of bigger things. Remade in 1987 as No Way Out, far, far from perfect. With Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, George Macready, Maureen O'Sullivan (Mrs. Farrow), and Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Laughton). 1948.

The Bride of Frankenstein: Certainly not the only, but perhaps the single greatest, exception to the rule about sequels never surpassing their forerunners. A lively and densely packed hour and a quarter, overrun by an unsuppressed sense of humor, it begins with a one-stormy-night prologue in which the story is resumed by Mary Shelley herself (Elsa Lanchester, who will reappear in the climax as the Bride), and it moves on to a frozen, thawed, and reheated Monster; to a madder scientist than young Dr. Frankenstein, an old buzzardly Dr. Praetorius (the incomparable Ernest Thesiger), with his miniaturized humans and all the best lines; to the violin-playing and cigar-smoking hospitable hermit whom Mel Brooks made such fun of in his less funny Young Frankenstein; and finally to that disastrous bit of laboratory matchmaking and the finger-in-the-electrical-socket hairdo. Music, sets, photography, all pitch in and do their share. With Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Una O'Connor; directed by James Whale. 1935.

The Bridges of Madison County: Portrait in courage: Clint Eastwood grappling, both behind and in front of the camera, with the Robert James Waller best-seller about a four-day affair between a nomadic National Geographic photographer and an Italian-Iowan farm wife (Meryl Streep). Whatever has been or could be said about this being an American Brief Encounter, and about the mundane realism of buzzing flies and yellow-naugahyde kitchen chairs, is all very well as far as it goes. But beyond and above all that, this is a noble and gallant and heroic effort, and a triumphant one to boot. While staying essentially faithful to the book, Eastwood has a made a movie that is nothing like it. What was so false and pretentious on the page has become completely natural. What was mushy has been made firm. What was skimpy has been fleshed out. And when the director stretches out the movie, with its pastoral idling and its uncondensed dialogues, to two and a quarter hours, he goes way beyond what even the slowest reader would require to get through the (breezy, breathy) book. What, in the end, the movie is about that the novel is not about is the eroticism of taking time. (Of delayed gratification. Of extended foreplay. Of contained fires. Of checked and double-checked desire.) If it were about nothing else, it would still be unique among American movies. Its ostensible themes — isolation, unfulfillment, the secret self — are far from nothing, are far meatier than the standard Hollywood fare, but here they're just gravy. Annie Corley, Victor Slezak. 1995. PG-13

Cold Heaven: What kind of movie — what genre of movie — is this, anyway? It starts out as a classical but lurid mystery thriller; then wanders off on a search for a shared border between horror/fantasy and honest-to-God religious art; then takes a final superhuman broad jump into the purview of the love story. It does all this with a minimum of stylistic fuss (minimum for Nicolas Roeg, anyway); the task in itself is sufficiently daring and attention-getting. And if the ending is seen as going too far, it won't be so much because of a lack of faith in the Almighty as because of a lack of faith in the artistic arsenal of analogy, metaphor, dream imagery, symbolism. This ending is moving as only the authentically poetic can be moving — untranslatably and unparaphraseably. It is moving not only (or mainly) for the fineness of its sentiment, but for its completion and revelation of a previously concealed design. After all, comprehending the logic and beauty of a design is the nearest aesthetic equivalent — nearest aesthetic analogue — to feeling the presence of the divine. With Theresa Russell, Mark Harmon, James Russo, Will Patton, Richard Bradford. 1992. R

Contempt: Godard described his movie as an Antonioni subject done in a Hitchcock style. That's a start. A French couple, out of an Alberto Moravia novel, drift apart, glumly, passively, uncommunicatively, after they travel to Italy in order for the husband to patch up the screenplay of a troubled Fritz Lang project, an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. (The aggravated producer, Jack Palance, in a seething satirical performance, throws a tantrum after viewing the rushes — "You want to know what I think of that, Fritz?" — and hurls a can of film across the room like a discus. In calmer moods, pointing his index finger to the heavens, he recites great truths from a book the size of a postage stamp.) The husband-and-wife's meanderings around the Cinecitta movie colony are shot by Raoul Coutard with an inexhaustibly tracking camera and with a wide-screen image of brilliant hues: Pop-color cars and clothes, Mediterranean blues (in the sea and sky) and chalk whites (on the land). Coutard's fluid work and the lush, surging, insistent score by Georges Delerue provide an unusually strong and steady current to carry along Godard's puckish in-jokes and caprices. And, in the dead center of the movie, the marathon marital spat, lasting the better part of an hour, is an unusually sustained, torturous event for the notoriously nervous, mercurial Godard. With Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. 1963.

Curse of the Cat People: The loosely connected sequel to Val Lewton's Cat People is stiffer than its forebear, less smooth and supple in its movement. (Gunther von Fritsch was chosen to direct the project, rather than Jacques Tourneur, who had moved on to bigger things, and von Fritsch had to be replaced early in production by former film editor and fledgling director Robert Wise.) Even so, this film has its share of partisans holding it to be the best of all the Lewtons. They have a strong case. A subtle blending of child psychology and ghost story, it adventurously expands the boundaries of what's allowable in a conventional horror film as well as in a conventional sequel. Sometimes a little naive in its expression, but all the more touching because of that, and genuinely profound and insightful in spite of it. Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Julia Dean, Elizabeth Russell, and Simone Simon. 1944.

Curse of the Demon: The modesty of means and of goals is much overcome by the passionateness of creative effort in this B-grade British horror film. The story pits an arrogant diabolist named Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) against a pooh-poohing American rationalist (Dana Andrews), who has a stiff drink in hand at every convenience. The source for the story is the scholarly M.R. James's "Casting of the Runes," and thence comes some (not all) of the movie's lofty, literary tone and its wealth of information on the subject of demonology. But its finest quality is visual, and for that the man most responsible is Jacques Tourneur, one of Val Lewton's cadre of directors in the early Forties. He is afforded here the same scrupulous production work as on the Lewton films (his art director is Ken Adam of the James Bond series), but is not restricted to a studio backlot. He gets terrifically creepy effects with the Stonehenge ruins, the British Museum reading room, an unremarkable hotel corridor, a palacial country house watchdogged after dark by a fearsome black cat, and some sudden gusts of wind. (The night photography around the country house, especially, raises suspicions that Georges Franju may have looked at this before making his Eyes Without a Face.) The movie is arranged as a series of set pieces, each of the pieces fitted securely alongside the next, and all of them cemented together with a general atmosphere of inclemency — a neat job. The tall-as-an-oak monster who puts in appearances at either end of the movie has been subject to complaints from horror purists and from Tourneur himself; but it is technically well done, as such creatures go, and it wreaks less damage than the complainers have made out. 1957.

The Damned: Visconti's horrendous dredging up of the Nazi nightmare begins inside a blast furnace, and for nearly three hours thereafter, his vision of human depravity rages like a fever. It's open to question whether Visconti was very interested in Naziism as a historical fact, or whether he was merely interested in finding an excuse, acceptable to everyone, for unloosing a delirious, agitated, and somewhat sweaty visual style. Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Berger, Charlotte Rampling, and Florinda Bolkan. 1969. R

Day of Wrath: Witchcraft in 17th-century Denmark, with something for almost everyone, the moralist, the feminist, the occultist, the cinephile — especially him. It's not at all for the dogmatist, of whatever persuasion. Carl Dreyer starts out leading your sympathies where they will go most readily. A hoary old Lutheran pastor oversees the torture and immolation of a harmless grandmotherly dabbler in white magic. He has a new young wife who doesn't love him, and who has connections to witchery herself, and he has a grown son who soon returns home and immediately strikes sparks with his same-aged stepmother. You can see where things are heading, but Dreyer, without peer among moviemakers as a true believer in the occult, doesn't make things easy for you. The pastor isn't a tyrant and isn't a sadist and isn't evil, and he very much loves his wife. The latter isn't evil either, but she does some bad things, and she really is a witch (the editing tells you so). Few will be willing to go the whole way with Dreyer — slow and uncompromising as he is — but the rewards are larger the further you do. 1943.

Days and Nights in the Forest: Four fleshy and sophisticated Calcuttans go on rural holiday. Not a lot "happens," but a lot comes to light. Shakespeare's Polonius, one might imagine, would flourish in the attempt to pin down what kind of movie this is. It is comical, pastoral, political, poetical, historical, spiritual, and God knows what all. And it is exquisite in all regards — in surface, in cultural detail, in performance. Not always a terribly relaxed and graceful filmmaker, Satyajit Ray has never been more terribly so than here, where he performs a sort of E.M. Forsterish feat of polishing off a meal of Gargantuan substance while seeming only to nibble fastidiously at appetizers. With Sharmila Tagore, Soumitra Chatterjee, and Robi Ghose. 1970.

Death in Venice: Luchino Visconti's beautifully cadenced rendition of the Thomas Mann novella. In slow zooms and panning shots, it scrutinizes the deterioration, amid wilting heat and epidemic, of a prissy musical composer, lingering too long at a deluxe hotel, held there by the physical magnetism and riveting gaze of an aesthetic-erotic ideal of male youth, just out of reach. Dirk Bogarde, struggling against the downhill slide, is both affected and affecting; and at the finish, he makes one of the most woeful images in movie history, his ridiculous, rejuvenating hair-dye melting in the sun and trickling down his cheeks like hideous black teardrops. 1971. PG

Dersu Uzala: Alongside Akira Kurosawa's customarily virile athletic work, this slow, contemplative movie is apt to be seen all the more clearly as an old man's movie, a movie made with a reduced pulse rate and a tenacious, almost desperate attempt to savor every passing moment. At bottom, it is a My Most Unforgettable Character tale, set around the turn of the century and having to do with a Russian army captain who, while inexpertly leading a geological expedition through the uncharted forests of Eastern Russia, meets a stoop-backed, shaggy-coated hunter and trapper (he is at first mistaken for a bear) and persuades the reclusive woodsman to join the expedition as a guide. Kurosawa gets an almost magical sense of landscape onto the widescreen (the movie was shot, with Russian financing, in 70mm). He stoutly resists the compositional rules of Romantic landscape painting that have governed outdoor location shooting since the beginnings of cinema — that is, he never attempts to box in the terrain by way of artificial devices of framing or perspective. Rather, he lets the terrain run perfectly, flatly parallel to the screen plane, so that the viewer is confronted with an overall texture, instead of a structure, for each locale — a vivid and individualized texture that's like a wall or a tapestry examined from the microscopic vantage point of a spider. The pantheism of this movie is not something worn only on the outside, like an ecology bumper sticker, but is inscribed into the movie's every shot. 1976. G

Diary of a Chambermaid: Not the first project that Buñuel undertook in France, but the one that signalled his thorough Frenchification: more refinement, more elegance, more finesse. The Octave Mirbeau novel, which Renoir had adapted into a synthetic Hollywood production in 1946, was felt by some (perhaps predominantly Renoir partisans) to be too Buñuelian for Buñuel's own good, too ready-made, too little trouble. But it tells an enthralling story, and it affords Buñuel more narrative suspense and suppleness than are generally expected of him. Historical footnote: the fascist political figure hurrahed in the final scene is the very man with whom the director had had censorship problems three and a half decades earlier. Jeanne Moreau, Georges Geret, Michel Piccoli. 1964.

Diary of a Country Priest: Robert Bresson's truly, not falsely, pious treatment of the Georges Bernanos novel about a dying village priest (the sad-faced yet childish Claude Laydu) whose parishioners don't understand him. It occupies the most advantageous position in Bresson's output, the spot where his minimalist style has already been fully refined but not yet overrefined to the point where it's harder and harder to keep on following him without either screaming or giggling. 1950.

Dodes' ka-den: Kurosawa, working for the first time in color (not counting the single dash of pink in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low), constructs an audaciously colored mosaic of a Japanese shanty-town — a basically muddy gray landscape brightened here and there by the gaudy hues of the slum dwellers' costumes, home decorations, dreams, moods, hallucinations. One of the last surviving classicists, Kurosawa keeps this large, dense work in very sharp focus — literally, in terms of the vivid surface detail of the images, and also in terms of the clarity of vision, the simplicity of expression. Nothing diverts or devitalizes Kurosawa's anguished humanist sentiments over the course of their initial conception to their eventual transmutation into tangible objects, colors, faces, gestures, habits: a selfless teenage girl, never rising from her kneeling position even to sleep, folds dainty paper flowers to support her indolent father; a rigid, eyelidless zombie, moving about as if on casters, never fails to padlock his worthless shack in the morning when he goes out to nowhere; a beggar boy totes a tiny pail to restaurants' backdoors, collecting throwaway scraps for his father's meager dinner; a wife's brassy personality comes into focus on the chest of her tiger-stripe shirt, where concentric black circles zero into bull's-eyes over her nipples. The lineup of lower-depth characters quickly stretches out far enough to remind you of Kurosawa's famous fondness for 19th-century Russian novels and American detective fiction; but with the first character introduced — a retarded boy who runs an imaginary streetcar up and down the slum all day long — the movie crescendos to an early emotional climax which it never quite equals thereafter, but which few other movies ever remotely approach. 1970.

The Driver: Cops-and-robbers stuff, stripped to the barest essentials of the genre, reduced to the irreducible, abstracted to no more than the bluesy mood and the methodical, calculated, chess-game maneuvers. The nearly monochromatic color and uncluttered compositions conjure up a poetic night world somewhat in the manner of "Whistler's nocturnes." Writer-director Walter Hill informs this genre piece with the sensibility of a French aesthete (a Jean-Pierre Melville or a Jacques Deray), and with a solid Old Hollywood workmanship which gives it a full body — smooth, seamless, and taut like a snake. A lean, somber, standoffish beauty, it is undoubtedly not to everyone's taste, and is probably advisable for film noir aficionados only. The whole show, in fact, is something like a coded message passed from the moviemaker to the devotees of the genre, in full view of, but beyond the full understanding of, the rest of the audience. With Ryan O'Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, and Ronee Blakley; photographed by Philip Lathrop. 1978. R.

East of Eden: Elia Kazan's variation on the Cain-and-Abel theme: an accursed ne'er-do-well and his blessed goody-goody brother compete with one another under the stern, critical eye of their Bible-thumping father. The color and the locales (in John Steinbeck's California, circa World War I) are perceived with the same wide-eyed wonder as the moral lessons. James Dean, Julie Harris, Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet. 1955. PG. 1 hour, 55 minutes.

The Exterminating Angel: Luis Buñuel in his most cryptic mood: no clues and no clarifications. The elegant party guests in a high-rent Mexico City neighborhood adjourn to the living room after dinner and, for days following, are unable to leave the room, and are fitfully perplexed and exasperated by their peculiar inability. Buñuel hardly gives pause to the puzzle aspect of the thing, but rolls up his sleeves and digs into it, in mercilessly realistic detail, as though it were a Robinson Crusoe survival problem. He has almost never had a merrier time unearthing the private perversities, shames, and squeamishnesses of the human race. And the cumulative sense of claustrophobia, of frayed nerves, of stench and decay, and of shadowy horror is quite overwhelming. With Silvia Pinal and Claudio Brook. 1963.

Eyes without a Face: Georges Franju's macabre masterpiece, originally released in the U.S. with English dubbing under the title The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, an elegant, graceful, stately, almost ceremonial variation on the mad-scientist theme. A megalomaniacal plastic surgeon (the stocky, stolid Pierre Brasseur), responsible for his daughter's facial disfigurement, is determined to repair the damage, and toward that end dispatches his faithful assistant (Alida Valli, in symbolic dog-collar necklace) to cruise the streets and pick up compatible skin donors — a classic discreet screen lesbian. The naiveté of the vision — the replacement face is peeled off its owner in one piece and fitted onto the recipient like a rubber mask — only puts it in closer touch with the worlds of dreams and fairy tales. Unsurpassed black-and-white photography by the eminent Eugen Schüfftan, infusing perfectly natural and mundane settings with eldritch Expressionistic elements; haunting musical theme by Maurice Jarre, in melancholy waltz time; liberal sprinkling of the director's unmistakable I.D. marks: the interior decorator's eye for pattern and texture; birds; abused animals; the angelic Edith Scob as standard-bearer of innocence and virtue. Scob's is a beautiful acting job from behind a stiff, smooth, blank mask (save for a brief period of post-surgical optimism), relying largely on the expressive devices of sculpture and dance rather than the full tool kit available to the average thespian. 1959.

Fados: What Carlos Saura did for the art of flamenco and tango in films called Flamenco and Tango, he now sets out to do for that soulful Portuguese folk song, dating back to the early 19th Century, the fado. A spacious and spare studio, translucent partitions, process screens, backdrops, mirrors, colored lights, silhouettes — the full arsenal of stage tricks. The greater emphasis on song than on dance perhaps converts it, in a sense, into the most traditional movie musical of Saura's multiple contributions to the genre. Yet it remains unclassifiable. As a quasi-documentary, it documents nothing other than itself. It is not a concert film. It does not take you through rehearsals. It offers nary a glimpse behind the scenes. It interviews no one. It supplies no narration and only the briefest printed text at the start and the tersest chapter headings throughout. (Saura is characteristically uninformative as to the names and identities of the performers.) It is arguably a kind of musical variety show in the vein of The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Paramount on Parade, without a wisp of backstage plot, each separate number specially designed for the screen and organized around a unifying theme, to define fado, stretch the definition, chart the development, trace the influence, scope out parallels, pay tribute, and, in the grand and glorious finale, relocate it in the urban bar where it flourished, put it trustily into the mouth of the next generation (namely Carminho, adorably still wearing braces on her teeth). "Variety" also would be very much the word for the endlessly inventive presentation, the mixing-and-matching of the above-mentioned tricks, always with Saura's selective eye, steady hand, solid footing. Whether he chooses at any instant to focus on faces, fingers, feet, or full bodies, his choices inspire absolute faith. Forget whether this is pure, or puristic, fado; it is pure cinema, luminous, molded, cohesive, flowing, rhythmic, mesmeric. With Mariza, Lura, Lila Downs, Argentina Santos, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Toni Garrido. 2007. 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Fargo: Above and beyond all else, around and through all else, the Coen brothers have assembled here a timeless document on their native state, Minnesota. On its notorious winters. On its snow shovels and its ice scrapers (implement of an uproarious temper tantrum). On its parkas and mittens and gloves and galoshes (standard tidy row of them inside the front door). On its pancake houses and Swedish-smorgasbord cafeterias ("How's the fricassee?"). On its Paul Bunyan and his Babe, the Blue Ox. But mostly, and most hilariously, on its language. Its vernacular: "Oh, jeez" and "Okey-dokey" and the punctuation of sentences with a superfluous "here" or "now" or "there" or "then" at the end of them. Its place-names: Wayzata, Chaska, White Bear Lake, Moose Lake. Its people-names: Lundegaard, Gustafson, Gunderson ("So, ya married Norm Son-of-a-Gunderson!"). Its corporate names: Honeywell, Embers, Ecklund-Swedlund. And of course, encompassing and permeating all that, its regional accent: a clipped, choppy bastardization of the Scandinavian (or for the jocular, the Scandihoovian). Even a Japanese-American resident comes off sounding like the spawn of John Ford's stock Swede, John Qualen, and sure enough, like an echo out of Monument Valley, somebody actually says "Yer darn tootin'!" Is this portrait not, however, perhaps just a little bit narrow? (Surely everyone in Minnesota can't talk like that!) Is it not, even, a little bit unkind? Well, the same questions could be asked of, let's say, Ring Lardner or (Minnesota's own) Sinclair Lewis, two of the scrupulous chroniclers of American speech and manners with whom the Coens can justly and comfortably be grouped. And the more than just functional narrative — the allegedly "true story" of a Minneapolis car salesman who hires two mercenaries to kidnap his wife as a moneymaking scheme, ransom to be paid by his wealthy and thrifty father-in-law — is rich in thematic implications: the universal vices of the car dealer (a dealer by profession and by nature) set against the Minnesota virtues of a seven-months-pregnant small-town police chief: "There's more ta life than a little money, ya know. Doncha know that?" With William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, Harve Presnell. 1996. R.

The Fire Within: The final hours of a suicidal alcoholic out-patient, movingly played by Maurice Ronet. One of the grayest of movies, not just visually (the filthy weather, the charcoal-y photography by Ghislain Cloquet), but emotionally and morally as well. The Satie soundtrack does a lot for the movie, but the movie does as much for him as he for it. Based on the novel by Drieu la Rochelle; directed by Louis Malle. 1963.

Goodbye South, Goodbye: Hou Hsiao-hsien reimagines the gangster genre in the form of a Taiwanese slice of life, an anti-drama, an anti-melodrama, that eases, glides, sneaks into its moments of animosity and violence. Or better say slices of life, plural, to emphasize the unconnected, random, desultory quality. What passes for a narrative has nothing to do with a scheme, a caper, a conflict; it has to do with a way of being. And while maintaining at all times the illusion of disinterested observation, the movie finds its meaning and its moral force in the tension and the distance between the pettiness and aimlessness of the lives on view and the purity and rigor of the visual style. The steady gaze — the placid gaze — the aloof gaze — becomes a withering gaze. And yet, for all that purity and rigor, the style is relaxed, flexible, never stiff, never a formulated strategy that could go ahead on automatic pilot, always dependent instead on an unerring eye for composition and an unerring sense of rhythm. (If you don't pick up the beat, if you go in with some pre-set internal metronome, you're doomed to the fidgets.) Practically every shot proclaims the presence of a major cinematic stylist. Watching them pass by is a sensuous pleasure of the highest and rarest type. And a privilege, too. A hundred and five minutes are too few. 1996.

The Hidden Fortress: Kurosawa's first use of the wide screen, and his ingeniousness with images of that shape becomes apparent fairly soon — say about the first or second shot. The storyline, if not the images alone, pulls you in, and along, with a folk-tale kind of enchantment, and it makes room for what must surely be the meatiest female role in Kurosawa's entire output — a doughty princess disguising herself in servant's clothing and travelling through hostile territory under the protection of a loyal samurai. Toshiro Mifune, Minoru Chiaki, and Kamatari Fujiwara. 1958.

High and Low: Out of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, Akira Kurosawa has fashioned a formula kidnapping melodrama that, elaborated to two-and-a-half hours, manages to engage all his burning moral concerns, undimmed, as well as all his ingenuity as an action director unsurpassed on the wide-screen. Kurosawa makes good use of McBain's knowledge of familial police operations, the pep talks, teamwork, joshing, etc. But besides that, he shows an excruciating appreciation of the ironies and ambiguities in the conflict between the Haves and the Have-Nots (the High and the Low, if you will) that isn't quite equalled in American detective fiction — McBain, McGivern, MacDonald, Macdonald, McAnyone — maybe in Dostoevski or Dickens. The plot is laid out in precise and evocative arenas (the haughty hilltop mansion occupied by the kidnap victims and, far below, the sleazy, neon-lit Ginza strip haunted by the psychopathic kidnapper); it is continually tricky and surprising (an early twist, for instance: the abducted boy turns out, after the first ransom demand, to be not the son of the rich shoe manufacturer but the son of the chauffeur); and it is faultlessly paced and timed (the mounting tensions of almost an hour of claustrophobic, stage-like drama inside the mansion are explosively released in a frantic scene aboard a rattling express train; the kidnapper, halfway through, finally makes a slithery, unpredictable entrance, sighted first as a reflection in a pool of water and followed along narrow streets, stairs, halls, to a tiny room where he gloats over his newspaper notices; and the clues and revelations, ferreted out only with difficulty and patience, are met by oddly appealing outbursts of trumpets on the soundtrack and, on one special occasion, by a splash of pink on the black-and-white film stock). Toshiro Mifune is fine, strong, restrained, as the shoe man; but he takes second place to Tatsuya Nakadai as the humble, humane policeman in charge of the case. Nakadai's reactions — his eyes bug out unnaturally, like a strangulation victim, and his chin drops to his chest, when the kidnapper, under surveillance, incredibly bumps into Mifune in front of a shoe-store window — serve as a sort of mirror or model for audience reactions. His supporting performance is the epitome of unselfish sideline-sitting. 1963.

I Vitelloni: Federico Fellini's biting, early masterpiece about a quartet of rudderless, smalltown young men who subscribe without passion or energy to most of the Seven Cardinal Sins, who dream commonplaces, who take animal satisfaction from whatever is within easy reach, and who in no sense ever raise themselves from their backsides. 1953.

Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime: It stands to reason that if Alain Resnais were to go into science fiction, he would go by time machine. For this purpose, the vehicle he has devised, with perfect deadpan sobriety, looks a good deal like Cinderella's magic pumpkin. It enables the passive guinea-pig hero to relive, in impartially selected and equally weighted moments, a long and dismal love affair which ended with an unexplained death and an attempted suicide. It also enables Resnais to demonstrate concretely that the Past is not a rock-solid territory, but rather a malleable one, subject to endless reshaping by time, memory, and imagination. Shamefully shrugged off by critics as a minor work, this profound, multileveled movie is rigorously formalized. (Each memory fragment, for example, is recorded in a single take; only on one occasion — an incongruous glamor-girl mug shot — is a memory broken into with an extra shot.) But beneath the austere and even-tempered surface, it achieves an overwhelming pathos — the effect of dwelling inescapably and remorsefully in the past; the incurable misery of the lovers ("I used to wake up nights...I hated it...stayed awake so as not to wake up"); and the understated, downcast performance of Claude Rich as the apathetic time traveller. With Olga-Georges Picot; written by Jacques Sternberg. 1968.

Kings of the Road: The third in a sort of trilogy of road movies by Wim Wenders goes a good deal further than its forerunners (Alice in the Cities, Wrong Moves), and not just in actual length. (On that point, however, it should be said that Wenders makes a positive value of length, stretching it out so as better to convey the disorientation of endless days on the road.) The more significant advance of the movie is its smoother, fuller integration of classical studio moviemaking (the precision of technique, the evenness of tone and tempo, the overall gloss) and of post-New Wave independent (the improvisatory freedom, the looseness of plot, the obliqueness of theme). Rudiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler. 1976.

Kiss Me Deadly: Robert Aldrich's low-budget overhaul of a Mickey Spillane avenger tale became one of the very few essential private-eye films. (The dreaded Mafia of the novel became a bigger dread: the Bomb. And the tough-guy hero became, in Ralph Meeker's toughly unsympathetic portrait, a total anti-hero if not non-hero.) Starting with a heavily panting highway pickup who's naked beneath her trenchcoat, a mellow Nat King Cole tune on the car radio, and a cryptic quotation from Christina Rossetti, the action unfolds as a murky nightmare journey through L.A.'s dark side. The zombified inhabitants seem to be acted by ventriloquist dummies. Their words are supplied by A.I. Bezzerides, in a spellcasting script with odd flights of grandiloquence: the villain's mythological allusions, the cop's spine-tingling recital of the cornerstones of the Atomic Age, and, best of all, the monologue by Mike Hammer's secretary, Velda, on the pursuit of "the Great Whatzit. " With Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Wesley Addy, Cloris Leachman. 1955.

La Guerre Est Finie: Alain Resnais inundates this pensive political thriller with homely details: the tidy and deliberate unpacking of an underground agent at the finish of a routine, eventless, perilous mission; the exchanged intimacies and cups of coffee among long-time comrades; their plain, quiet sweaters and overcoats. Of course, Resnais is interested in more than meets the eye, in the mysteries inside and beyond the tangible mundanities. And Yves Montand's face — a worn, pliable, cracked rubber mask — supplies a non-stop, silent testimony to the accumulated weight of past experiences and unarticulated feelings in the character of this Spanish Civil War refugee, still, thirty years later, carrying on the opposition to Franco, smuggling propaganda pamphlets across the French border, growing much older and gaining no ground, running out of time. This character, a downcast, undecorated hero who comes up to many of the standards of his illustrious countryman, Miguel de Unamuno, continues to adhere to his former commitments, follows form and obeys orders, even while all of his supports give way, his beliefs dissolve, his superiors lose faith in him, the adolescent hotbloods of the New Left taunt him, and his comrades drop dead of heart failure. Written by Jorge Semprun; with Ingrid Thulin and Genevieve Bujold. 1966.

The Last Laugh: F.W. Murnau's chronicle of a hotel doorman's grievous degradation, when he's demoted to lavatory attendant and has to swap his fancy drum major's uniform for a barber's plain white coat, and (for strictly commercial reasons) his sudden, miraculous redemption and exaltation. Done without a single title card, excepting the one that separates the proletarian tragedy from the fairy-tale ending, this is a tour-de-force of pure visual storytelling. Some of the camera moves, and the meanings attached to them, are a bit textbook-y and dated, but their wonderful diversity and fluidity are not. With Emil Jannings. 1924.

Last Year at Marienbad: Robbe-Grillet's seductive (or masturbatory) incantations, hypnotically enhanced by a Messiaen-esque organ, drift abstractedly over Resnais's rhythmic images, the mellifluous tracking shots and the jagged cutting, in this eternally beautiful, if no longer fashionable, "puzzle picture," which has to do with powerful (even surrealistic) erotic stirrings in the most frigid, petrified setting: a palatial resort hotel with its perfectly symmetrical architecture, geometric grounds, barbered bushes, classical statuary, and its immaculate clientele, their sculpted hairdos, mannequin postures, unblinking gazes. And don't worry too much about the did-she-or-didn't-she mysteries of the so-called story; worry more about will-she-or-won't-she. Giorgio Albertazzi, Delphine Seyrig. 1961.

L'Avventura: The search for a woman who mysteriously vanishes (suicide?) on a volcanic Mediterranean island, conducted dutifully but somewhat distractedly by her lover and her best friend, produces one of the pace-setting movies of the Sixties (the pace being erratic, lethargic, anti-dramatic). This did more than any other single movie to legitimize boredom as a screen subject and boringness as a method of treating it. With Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Lea Massari; directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1959.

Le Samourai: An elegy on the American gangster genre by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (note to the unwary: no actual sword-wielding samurai are to be found herein). The opening twenty minutes or so are as smoothly tooled as any stretch of cinema you could ever hope to see, with each shot clicking into place with incontrovertible finality. The story interest tails off after that, but the character interest (or rather, stereotype interest) holds up all the way to the monkish hitman's ritualistic self-sacrifice. The colorless photography of Henri Decae is beautifully controlled; the performance of Alain Delon is likewise. 1967. PG.

Les Maitres-Fous (The Witch-Doctors): Jean Rouch first took up the movie camera as a tool to aid in his ethnographic studies of African natives; but, like Flaherty, he knew the value of shaping his raw data along strong dramatic lines. His movies, at their best, bear witness to the melancholy mission of the anthropologist as laid out by Susan Sontag, apropos of another anthropologist, in her essay "The Anthropologist As Hero," who seeks to memorialize a vanishing culture before it's too late, but who hastens the day by his very presence (and, in Rouch's case, by the presence of the movie camera). This half-hour short, about an ancient religious ritual given contemporary political overtones and carried on in the jungle outside a modern African city, offers a beautifully ironic juxtaposition of the mundane and the mystical. It is something of a shocker, too — indeed it comes in for a mention, in a different Sontag essay, as a "cornerstone of the poetic cinema of shock" and is recommended for strong stomachs only. 1955.

The Long Day Closes: Terence Davies's followup to his autobiographical Distant Voices, Still Lives. Although every bit as severely stylized, it is not so much the mere repetition of the earlier film as the absolute perfection of it. The monstrous father is now well out of the picture, and there's no sizable antagonist to take his place, only a stern schoolmaster ("I'm Mr. Nicholls. You play ball with me, and I'll play ball with you"), an officious school nurse on the hunt for head lice ("What nasty little creatures you little boys are!"), and the occasional bully, taunter, and tormentor among the classmates. Peripheral figures, all. Lacking a legitimate boogeyman, the movie might sound in summary as if it could not have much of a grip, composed as it is of random and representative and undramatic slices of life, fragments, moments, memories, set down in achingly sensuous detail. Do all these moments, all these memories, add up to anything? They do. The "story" of the movie, if you must have one, is the movie itself. It's a movie about transformation — about the shaping and framing and processing of experience. This goes on both in the present tense (the re-creation, the reshaping, of past events on screen) and in the past (the shaping of events, even as they happen, by the prepubescent hero and the assorted influences on him). The most concise statement of the theme comes near the end, almost as a final summation, in the form of an overhead, space-dissolving tracking shot that erects a bridge between the movie house, the church, and the school, and correspondingly sets up an equation between art and religion and education. It's all part of life; it's all a kind of art; it's all transforming/transformed; it's all shaping/shaped. Leigh McCormack, Marjorie Yates. 1992. PG.

Mado: Claude Sautet's portraits of the French bourgeoisie are sometimes accused of being rather more celebratory than critical of "the good life," but the truth is he's not interested in propagandizing one way or the other. The compassion in his point of view is a measure of his refusal to divorce, or distance, himself from his characters so as to indulge in didactic moralizing. His skills as a straight storyteller are generally overlooked or underrated, because his supremely mellifluous movies proceed at almost exactly the pulse of everyday life (in Mado, he injects some pungent sex and criminal intrigue without noticeably quickening that pulse). One sample of his narrative facility, here, is the conception of the title character (Ottavia Piccolo) which enables him easily to paint a wide stripe across the social spectrum — she's an amoral, free-lance prostitute who, with her young friends and menopausal clientele, makes an ideal bridge between opposite classes and generations. Another sample of his facility is the cloak of mystery he wraps around the ambivalent Charles Denner character — the suspenseful buildup to his first appearance, the Dickens-ian dramatic flair with which he makes his long-anticipated entrance, and the mixture of curiosity, jealousy, snobbery, and urgent need with which he is greeted. (This is to say nothing of Denner's playing of the part, a bravura performance in the midst of a perfectly tuned ensemble.) Sautet's subtle sense of character, his breadth of subject, his anguished social purpose, and his attention to detail mark him as one of the modern cinema's few upholders of old novelistic virtues, and this movie shows him working at the top of his bent. Michel Piccoli, Jacques Dutronc, Romy Schneider. 1976.

The Magnificent Ambersons: Orson Welles's second movie, taken from the Booth Tarkington novel, is stronger than his first, Citizen Kane, in most ways — in coherence, in complexity, in common sense. Welles himself, for a change and for a relief and for a better balance, isn't on screen in this one. The story tells of the last generation, represented snottily by Tim Holt, of a declining Midwestern industrial dynasty, trying to uphold proud family customs in the onrush of new ways, new powers at the turn of the century. The portentous Expressionism of Stanley Cortez's lighting, which transforms and denatures the bygone Midwest, is a more tangible force than Progress, however; and this alone accounts for the feeling of debilitation and desperation that pervades the cavernous home of American aristocracy, with its steep staircases, tiered balustrades, chilly foyer, and its unseen ghosts of forefathers and traditions. With Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorehead, Anne Baxter. 1942. PG.

The Makioka Sisters: The theme is a Yasujiro Ozu favorite, or perhaps one should say a Japanese favorite, the passage from feudal tradition to postwar Westernization. (It is set in the Kyoto/Osaka region just before the Second World War, so right away it is clouded with a sense of perishability.) The sisters of the title are four — two already married, two not yet — and the interplay of thoughts and emotions among and around them is wonderful to watch — even more subtle and complex (and this is saying something) than the interplay of color and light (sedately Vermeerian indoors; deliriously Fragonardian outdoors), as dense and minutely observed as a Henry James novel. Kon Ichikawa, directing at almost seventy years of age in such a way as to make other directors appear to be lying down on the job, employs a wealth of illuminating closeups, not just of revelatory faces, but of inanimate objects too (sometimes framed so tightly as to become mere abstract surfaces), and always with a daunting sense that this wealth of detail is only loose change, that it has been scrounged up along a path leading to untold riches. Throughout, there is a portentous (to use a pet Jamesian term) sense of the unexpressed and even inexpressible. But Ichikawa, partisan to none and attentive to all, even down to the lowliest servant, allows us to see clearly enough both what is precious and what is preposterous in the feudal ideal, to see how it could have lasted so long as well as how it could not last forever. And it is the note of elegiac celebration, rather than that of analytical irony, that predominates, with a big boost from a musical motif by Georg Friedrich Handel. Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa. 1983.

A Man and a Woman: With this, his sixth feature, the previously unknown Claude Lelouch became the Grand Prize recipient at the Cannes festival, an Oscar winner in the Foreign Film category, one of the most financially liberated of filmmakers, and a stylist — shooting quickly, mobilely, on the road, and from the hip — with a worldwide impact. His style is too often classed with advertisements of the take-a-puff-it's-springtime sort. In fact, it is many things, no more partial to the romanticism of foot-loose, rain-dampened weekend outings than to the mundanity of shapeless, stagnant, improvised chitchat. The firmest area in this extremely flexible, free-form romance between a glamorous Grand Prix racer and a withdrawn script girl is the careful tracing of the mechanics of wooing — from the chance meeting through the first restrained get-togethers, phone calls, and love notes, and the gradual erosion of the woman's resistance by his outside pressure and her internal weakness. Lelouch allows the characters considerable space to express themselves, through their manners and their vocations and their imaginations; and he, operating his own camera, alters his approach to fit the situation. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee, responding well to their freedom, flesh out the characters with body, detail, and conviction. 1966.

The Merry Widow: Ernst Lubitsch jumped from the Paramount lot, where he reigned supreme, to MGM for this one musical only. And to all of his lavish requests for re-creations of mythical kingdom and legendary Par-ee, the new studio did not know how to say no. Subsequently, this gargantuan dream, with hopes pinned on the eternity of the Jeanette MacDonald-Maurice Chevalier chemistry, fell on its face. Financially speaking, that is. Artistically, it's a beauty. Lubitsch's coy wit is as scintillating as it ever is; and there is also, stronger than ever, a just suppressed discontent beneath all the stiff and precise adherence to proper courtly form. And on a few occasions, there's a delirious feeling of truly letting loose: when Jeanette MacDonald first begins to sing, for instance, or when, for an even better instance, she first begins to dance. Una Merkel, George Barbier, Edward Everett Horton. 1934.

Mirage: Probably the best amnesia thriller ever, though it takes Gregory Peck a while to realize he's suitably afflicted. By then, he also realizes he's a target for murder. As seemingly impossible in its set-up, as damnably tantalizing and tormenting, as a John Dickson Carr pseudo-supernatural detective novel, and yet with a reasonably satisfying solution at the end. Or anyway not an unreasonably dissatisfying one. Excellent black-and-white photography of a frigid, geometrized, inhuman Manhattan. And an entertaining collection of characters, with top marks going to Walter Matthau's crusty private eye and Kevin McCarthy's hail-fellow office politicker (favorite mode of address: "Booby"). Diane Baker, Jack Weston, George Kennedy; directed by Edward Dmytryk. 1965.

Muriel: Alain Resnais brings a good mystery writer's snoopiness and creepiness to a fragmented, elliptical story focussing on the past and the secrets of an aging, part-time antiques dealer and compulsive gambler (Delphine Seyrig, shockingly deglamorized from Resnais's Marienbad), and her tormented stepson, just back from the Algerian War. The contemporary political comment doesn't amount to much, but the subtle poetic script by Jean Cayrol, who also wrote the text of Resnais's concentration-camp documentary, Night and Fog, is full of other resonances. The conceits, for example, of an apartment furnished entirely with items for sale and of a modern provincial city reconstructed atop its own ghost after WWII, are tremendously evocative. And Sacha Vierny's color work around this setting is sharp, diamond-hard, luminous — some of the best ever seen on screen. Indeed the movie as a whole, multifaceted enough to support several viewings and to look a little different with each one, seems at times, from certain angles, to be also among the best ever. 1963.

Mystic River: Clint Eastwood's somber meditation on chance, fate, doom; scarred souls and endless repercussions; violence begetting violence. Just as Unforgiven was an act of penance for the body counts in his Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns as well as in his self-directed imitation Leones (High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider), this can be viewed as an act of penance for the lone-wolf vigilantism of his Dirty Harry urban shoot-'em-ups: a kind of cleansed Harry. (There is no room here for Eastwood the actor, standing aside for the "liberal" casting of Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, and their highly emotional, tearful, unstoical, un-Eastwoody histrionics.) Although formulated as a murder mystery, it is not narrowly focussed on the investigation, but divides its time more or less evenly among three main characters, and expands continuously into the specific milieu, the complex personal relationships, the affected and ongoing lives, in fact life in general, life with a capital "L." All throughout, it sustains a tone of lamentation, underscored by the churchy musical theme composed by Eastwood himself (albeit orchestrated by his trusted collaborator, Lennie Niehaus). The retributive anger never supplants the sorrow; the release never comes. Admittedly, the outcome of the case depends upon a fortuitous coincidence that reeks of mystery-making for its own sake: a previously unrevealed second murder on the same night as the first. Yet the solution to the original murder is not overly tricksy, is perhaps even overly obvious; and the mood of the moment in any case is not one of parlor games and "gotcha." The honest — the aggrieved — the penitent — emotionalism of the film makes up for either the fortuitousness or the obviousness, as necessary. Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden. 2003. R.

Nazarin: Luis Buñuel's picaresque tale about the impossibility in this miserable world of following the path to Christian perfection, told with an unrelenting De Sade-ian nastiness but with a much nicer sense of irony. A movie that gives sustenance to long-suffering believers and merciless scoffers alike. With Francisco Rabal; based on a novel by Benito Perez Galdos. 1958.

Niagara: Infidelity and foul play amid the postcard attractions of Honeymoon Heaven, U.S.A. The tabloid sensationalism centers around a Korean Conflict veteran (Joseph Cotten, a real sourpuss), who suffers from postwar depression, and his restless wife (Marilyn Monroe in her early, slutty period). On the sidelines, a jolly Shredded Wheat salesman serves as cheerleader for all the Middle American values. The murder in the Bell Tower is the stand-out scene, wherein Henry Hathaway, the director, seems momentarily to be tuned in to the same Muse as Fritz Lang. He is more in his natural element in the climactic rescue-by-helicopter at the brink of Niagara Falls; this he handles like a dutiful, diligent child of D.W. Griffith. 1953.

Nightmare Alley: Beautifully shaped and sharply detailed chronicle of the rise and fall of a conscienceless carny (played with unaccustomed toughness by Tyrone Power): up to the heights of high-society spiritualist and down to the depths of sideshow geek. Beautifully photographed and sharply written, too: Lee Garmes and Jules Furthman, respectively. Somewhat undervalued, overall, because its suave director, Edmund Goulding, has little history of this sort of thing: mainly women's pictures and a few middlebrow literary adaptations. With Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, Taylor Holmes, and Mike Mazurki. 1947.

The Night of the Shooting Stars: Old and familiar the material in this movie surely is. The odyssey of a splinter group of Tuscan villagers, through territory murderously patrolled by German troops and diehard local Fascists, to meet up with the advancing Americans, takes us back at least to Open City and Paisan, even in such particulars as the anecdotal plot construction, the cast of archetypes, and the diet of instant irony, pathos, tragedy, humanity, etc. But the viewpoint is one appropriate to our own time and to memory: not the journalistic urgency and factuality of Rossellini, but something subjective, impressionistic, heightened and embroidered, almost folkloric — a bedtime story in answer to the question, "What did you do in the war, Mommy?" This particular Mommy was only six years old as the war wound down; and, taking the child's-eye view as a starting point, the Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, who themselves occupied the designated time and place in their early adolescence, have reinvented the WWII movie. A distinct locale, color scheme, sound effect, bit of music (sometimes audaciously chosen), or combination thereof, together with the often roundabout way the essential information is set forth, gives event after event a specificness that amounts to actual newness. With Omero Antonutti and Margarita Lozano. 1982. R.

Olympia: This two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin games, varying from straight news reportage to poetic montage on athletic grace, established several marks still unsurpassed in sports-movie history. The genius behind it is Leni Riefenstahl, better known for her Nazi propaganda piece Triumph of the Will. Out of the fierce nationalism that clouds the entire event, the individual feats and flubs of the competitors, the moviemaker's personal adoration of the body beautiful, and the technical mastery with which all this is managed, the movie elicits a phenomenal range of emotional responses. It is one of the Thirties movies to be most enriched by the passage of time: numerous images, as when the flags of WWII enemies-to-be are hoisted in unison for an awards ceremony, have since become supercharged. 1938.

Ordet: One of a kind: Carl Dreyer's make-over of the Kaj Munk play about religious differences in Denmark. Calculatedly talky, slow, and ponderous, it is shot in long takes, in theatrical space, and in leaden grays; and with all of that, it seems as if anchored inescapably to earth. And then a miracle happens — literally. This is Dreyer's supreme testament of faith in Things Beyond — freed from the fantasy apparatus of Vampyr and the ambiguity of Day of Wrath, unallied with any "approved" miracle-worker, and of course unapproached by any rival filmmaker: it leaves no room for doubt. (No room for doubt about him anyway.) At the same time, it is warmly humane and humanistic: the grieving widower's lament, "I loved her body too," is the sharpest-edged line in the entire debate. 1954.

Out of the Past: Perhaps the best private-eye movie made in the Forties, when competition was stiffest. The idiomatic narration and dialogue are no doubt funnier now, in unintended ways, than they once were, but Robert Mitchum's narcotized delivery preserves some of the poetry, too. More immune to time's passage is the visual poetry, the leafy shadows of Nicholas Musuraca's photography and the hypnotic rhythms of Jacques Tourneur's direction. The narration, in any event, breaks off halfway through, after we have been brought up to date and have emerged from flashback. At that point, a hauntingly lingered-over image, of Mitchum suited up in standard P.I. trenchcoat and handsomely framed by a wrought-iron gate, commences the movie's smoothest stretch, as the forces of fate close in for the kill. With Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas; screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring (a.k.a. Geoffrey Homes), adapted from his novel, Build My Gallows High. 1947. 1 hour, 37 minutes.

Pather Panchali: Satyajit Ray's debut movie (rather auspicious, to say the least) is a delicate balance between cultural documentation of rural India and lyrical evocation of the world's infinite amazements — the forest, rainfall, trains, death — as seen through the eyes of children. It put India on the map of international cinema. 1955.

Peter Ibbetson: Based on the George Du Maurier fantasy about two illicit lovers who, separated by prison walls, carry on their affair in their dreams. This ethereal Thirties romance is, in spite of — or because of — the masculine sobriety injected by action director Henry Hathaway and star Gary Cooper, something unique in the romantic cinema and a special favorite of the French surrealists (the transcendent reality of the dreamworld, the conquering power of the libido). With Ann Harding. 1935.

The Portrait of a Lady: When Henry James created Isabel Archer, one of his American innocents abroad, he had plenty of good reason to feel, as he recalled in his preface to a later edition of the novel, that he was venturing into virgin territory (well ahead of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, et al.) in centering the subject of a massive novel in the consciousness of an ordinarily intelligent, ordinarily inquisitive, ordinarily brave, ordinarily brash young woman — a "frail vessel," in a phrase borrowed from George Eliot. He was doing her the honor of supposing that the destiny of such a person could be made to "matter." And filmmaker Jane Campion, in turn, has done James the honor of finding nothing timid or primitive or imperialistic about his trailblazing. Just as there is nothing condescending in her approach to James, neither is there any of the coattail-riding so common in screen adaptations of literary classics. This is the rare case of one artist communing with another, on the same subject matter, and collaborating as equals on a wholly new work from a new perspective. A modern, a feminist perspective. If Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady may be seen as a pioneer in the portrayal of women in fiction, then Isabel Archer herself becomes a kind of pioneer. And Campion has come back to them, a time traveller from a century away, not to radiate a superior air of advancement and enlightenment, not to gloat about having come a long way, baby, but rather to pay a debt of gratitude, to firm up the bond between the generations, to renew the resolve to soldier on. And what, in the context of a feminist testimonial, could be more meaningful or more moving than that? With Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey, Mary-Louise Parker, Martin Donovan. 1996. PG-13

Providence: Another of Alain Resnais's examinations of the creative powers of the mind. The specific subject is a dying novelist's rather nasty fictional world and the richly ambiguous relationship of that world to the real one; and the treatment is marked by Resnais's patented juxtaposition of an icily elegant surface and troubled waters below. It is quite remarkable how undisturbed this surface remains, despite infusions of idiomatic British humor and scatological dialogue from scriptwriter David Mercer, who is perhaps best known for Morgan (this is Resnais's first film in the English language). John Gielgud as the randy old novelist delivers what might be his best screen performance, and Miklos Rozsa contributes one of the great musical scores of the Seventies, a darkly romantic work that harks back to the mood and manner of his film noir scores of the Forties. With Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner, and Elaine Stritch. 1977. R.

Repulsion: Polanski's brilliantly crafted and profoundly morbid thriller about a London manicurist who harbors a consuming hatred of sex, and who, when her stable sister leaves town on a romantic holiday, goes spectacularly insane locked inside her flat — the walls turn to putty, the carcasses putrify, and the outside world won't keep away. Catherine Deneuve is for the first time used counter to her serene, blank appearance. 1965.

Rocco and His Brothers: Visconti's chronicle of a Sicilian family's disintegration after its uprooting and resettling in industrial Milan equals the scale and sweep and social minutiae of very fat novels. It originates in the realist tradition, but its shriekingly operatic stylization, on justifiable occasions, carries it along Visconti's own private tributary. With Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatore, and Claudia Cardinale. 1960.

The Scent of Green Papaya: Though its title may sound like some middle-to-lowbrow parody of an Asian art film (no less than Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice or Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums), and its air of quietude may in many ways live up to that same brow's dimmest and direst imaginings, this is the real deal. The story it tells — of a servant girl in a bourgeois home in the Saigon of 1951, and then in a different home after a ten-year time jump — is simplicity itself. Far more to the point is its overall narrative method, which might be described as one of selective intimacy balanced off against selective reticence. The intimacy, wherever it asserts itself, is little short of microscopic: a slow drip of milky sap on a leaf, an ant carrying off a crumb four times his size, the skinning, shaving, and slicing-open of the titular fruit, and so forth. But it is also impressionistic — discriminatory, discretionary. And it creates an odd sense of emphasis whereby events of major importance are passed over quickly and obliquely while ones of seemingly no importance are dawdled over and examined in minute detail. This of course is deliberate and calculated, and it shifts the focus of the narrative from the conventionally "dramatic" occurrence to the daily one, from individual events to their grander context, from the fleeting moment to the continuous timeline, from one life in specific to life in general. The first feature film of (at the time) twenty-nine-year-old Tran Anh Hung, an expatriate Vietnamese residing in France, fulfills the stiffest requirements of a piece of imaginative fiction. It plunges us deeply into an enclosed world, a particular and particularized place and time and set of characters. (If the place had to be re-created on Parisian studio sets rather than on location, so much the better. So much the more imaginative. So much the more fictitious.) And it brings this place thoroughly alive, from ants to plants to human occupants to the house itself: a richly textured environment of railings and balusters, of window frames and symmetrical painted grilles, of diaphanous curtains and netting, of flora and fauna — never piled on too much at once, but appreciatively sorted out in cleanly focussed and firmly clamped-down images. It might sound paradoxical to say that by plunging us so deeply into a particular life, the movie opens out onto life in general. But there it is. If we see deep enough, we attain distance. 1993.

Second Breath: In many ways, although not in the way of sheer handsomeness, this is the apex of Jean-Pierre Melville's art. It is set apart from his others by the largeness of its population (composed of course only of cops, gangsters, and their acolytes: there's no one else in Melville's universe) and by a plot so complex it's almost impossible to grasp at a single sitting (the twenty minutes or so excised from the American print can't make it any easier). But even with a manner of expression as terse and shorthand as Melville's, you should have little difficulty telling the good guys from the bad guys — as long as you realize that which side of the law they're on is beside the point. In Lino Ventura, Melville discovers his ideal hero, as soulful as he is stoic. And Pierre Zimmer, as the lone-wolf Orloff, is as good as any of the also-rans: more stoic, that is, than soulful (but smooth enough to pull off a hidden-gun trick that is literal magic). Paul Meurisse is something special, too, as the prissy and professorial cop who does double duty as a kind of critic-connoisseur of life in the underworld. 1965.

Second Chance: One of the two or three best things Lelouch has done to date. His skill as colorist has never been more in evidence, with a soft and harmonious image pieced together out of yellows, greens, browns. Catherine Deneuve has never looked lovelier, and in the flashbacks is done up in a way that recalls the more nostalgic loveliness of Kim Novak circa 1962. Anouk Aimee, used well by Lelouch in A Man and a Woman, is used well again in a sentimental return to the screen after a too long absence. And even Francis (a little goes a long way) Lai, Lelouch's regular musical composer, contributes an uncommonly catchy theme that never makes you sick or tired the countless times it comes around. If there is any inherent meaning in Lelouch's off-the-cuff narrative style and his ambulatory camerawork, it's just that the course of events can never be anticipated. And his story here, which might have made a good Bette Davis tearjerker forty or so years earlier, is full of appealing improbabilities and loose ends on its way to a beautifully diagrammed and extremely dogmatic Happy Ending, in which the heroine's adolescent son, taking a hand in destiny, plays Cupid to his long-suffering mother and his high-school history teacher, and then sneaks to the sidelines to watch the results of his manipulations. 1976. PG.

A Serious Man: At bottom, the Coen brothers' most "personal" work. To be sure, they've never been reduced to hired hands. They've always had the good fortune to be able to make the films they wanted to make, films that reflected their personal tastes and personal attitudes and personal interests and personal viewpoints. Still, in the strict autobiographical sense, this one must be acknowledged as extra personal, set as it is in the Minneapolis suburb of their adolescence (Jefferson Airplane on the soundtrack to fix the date, 1967), in a Jewish household headed by a university professor with a son on the brink of his bar mitzvah. The filmmakers bring to their subject the unkind eye of the caricaturist. They demonstrate an acute and excruciating body awareness, the girth, the ear hair, the sebaceous cyst on the neck, the protagonist's half squat at the classroom blackboard, his outthrust butt, his pant cuffs riding up to his calves. And their subtly bulging face shots and torso shots, fronted and centered, approach the freak-show aura of the photographs of Diane Arbus. The parade of surnames has a Dickensian grotesquerie all its own: Gopnik, Finkle, Marshak, Nachtner, Schlutz, seldom a simple Shapiro. And the three rabbis of three different generations are hilariously ineffectual in three different ways. But to complain that the character portraits are not rounded, are slanted, would be to complain that a caricaturist is not a classicist, that Daumier is not Ingres. This is, it bears stressing at this point, a personal film. It is also — unexpectedly enough, as unexpected as the superstitious Old Country folk tale of the prologue and its old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio — a religious film, a film concerned not just with the specific religion of Judaism and its whole exotic lexicon, but with broader religious questions, universal inquiries into life's mysteries: what have I done to deserve this? what have I done with my life? what ought I to do? what am I here for? Joel and Ethan Coen have long and lately devoted themselves to the vast panoply of human stupidity. Stretching out now, stretching back to Barton Fink, they have chosen to reassure us, although "reassure" doesn't sound quite right, that an intelligent, educated, well-meaning, and would-be serious man is no less at a loss. Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind, Aaron Wolff, Fred Melamed. 2009. R. 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Sherlock Jr.: Keaton's concern with the nature of the movie medium always far outdistanced Chaplin's or any other competitor's in the silent comedy field, and the dream sequence in which the mousy movie projectionist projects himself onto the movie screen is about as far in that direction as he ever went. The movie has some laughs, too — in the pool game with an explosive 8-ball and in the obligatory chase. 1924.

The Silence: Bergman achieves an intense appreciation of physical states — sexual desire, fatigue, illness, old age, a child's smallness — in a stifling, sticky, sensual film about two sisters, travelling companions, one a lustful young mother and the other a moribund lesbian, who make a stopover at a baroque hotel in an unspecified foreign city, while the streets outside rumble with warlike noises. Technically — with Sven Nykvist in charge of lighting and camera movement — it's perfection. Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom. 1963.

Spirit of the Beehive: A minor masterpiece from Spain, which country has not yielded many, major or minor. On one level, it has to do with the psychological devastation that follows from an impressionable little girl's viewing of the original 1931 Frankenstein. On another level, it has to do with the wider-scale psychological devastation that followed from Franco's ascent to power (Franco-stein?). The latter subject is not dealt with so openly that the movie might have been nabbed by the Spanish censors; but the other subject is absorbing enough on its own. Ana Torrent as the traumatized child — an ingrained rainy-day sadness on her face, moist shining eyes, a hook-lipped, turtle-like mouth that suggests an upside-down pout — is one of the most hauntingly unforgettable children ever seen on screen. But her role is only a half. Her screen sister, Isabel Telleria, is her perfect and necessary complement. For every story-swallower, after all, there must be a story-spinner, and where Ana is the ideal audience, the believer, the dupe, Isabel is the conniving artist, the deceiver, the manipulator. No movie has gone harder at the purely aesthetic, amoral aspect of childhood. And with its thrillingly atmospheric photography by Luis Cuadrado (the dark and yellowy interiors often suggestive of Zurbarán, Caravaggio, Ribera), it creates a child's sense of the liveliness and voluptuousness of even the most barren environment. Its finicking aestheticism, make no mistake, is not mere ornamentalism, but is straight to the point. Directed by Victor Erice. 1973.

Stevie: A touchstone in the field of documentary filmmaking, setting an untoppable standard for personal involvement on the part of a filmmaker. In 1982, while a student at Southern Illinois, the future director of Hoop Dreams, Steve James, signed up to be the Big Brother of a troubled eleven-year-old in rural Pomona, Stephen "Stevie" Fielding, the illegitimate offspring of an alcoholic and brutal mother, handed over first to his stepgrandmother (living right next door), and then passed through a series of foster homes, in which somewhere along the line he was sexually abused: "He always seemed to be an accident waiting to happen." In 1995, guilt-ridden at having lost touch with Stevie, James sought him out again and brought along a camera crew, finding a childishly sulky adult who had come through a violent marriage and compiled an impressive rap sheet of petty crimes. The "waiting," in a sense, was over, but the worst was still to come. After a two-year hiatus — time off to shoot the low-budget biopic, Prefontaine — James discovers that in the interim Stevie has been charged with molesting an eight-year-old cousin. No genius of fictional construction could have come up with a more potent mix. James's wife happens to be a counselor for sex offenders. They have children of their own. And James himself is thrust in front of the camera as a major character, a member of the family, together with the recalcitrant Stevie ("I don't need no damn therapy"); the latter's reformed and churchified mother, toward whom Stevie maintains what once might have been called a love-hate relationship, emphasis on hate; his enfeebled stepgrandmother, who remains bitterly at war with the mother; his married but childless stepsister ("Some people have kids and throw 'em in trash cans, and here I want a child and can't have one"), who miraculously becomes pregnant in the course of filming; and Stevie's slightly handicapped fiancée, whose uncensored facial expressiveness more than makes up for any verbal deficiencies. Between them, what a world of woe! With James as our point of identification, if not life raft, the film draws us ineluctably into its web, where we can't simply dismiss Stevie (as we so easily could, in the handy stereotypes of Poor White Trash, Inbred Hillbilly, Redneck Geek, and the like, if we had seen only his arraignment on the nightly news) and can't extricate ourselves from the awful futility of the situation. As much as the film is a spectacle of bad teeth, bad hair, bad grammar, bad prospects, it is also a spectacle of the existential heroism of those who go on trying to help someone who is miles past helping. And although the DV image, too, is bad, the badness is thoroughly offset by the alertness of the camerawork. 2003. R.

The Thing: Science fiction about a six-foot-six-inch frozen vegetable (James Arness) that is chopped out of the Arctic ice, thaws out underneath an electric blanket, and terrorizes a tiny Air Force outpost until the smart-aleck woman on the scene suggests that the way to domesticate a vegetable is to cook it. Claustrophobic atmosphere; close-packed images; some truly chilling effects. Of its kind, nearly perfect. Christian Nyby directed it, but Howard Hawks supervised it, and it unmistakably bears his stamp: group portraits of people bonded together by their isolation in a hostile wilderness and by their mutual dependence on bulky clothing, coffee breaks, and wiseacre banter. With Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan. 1951.

Touchez Pas au Grisbi: One of the greatest gangster films ever made — in France, or anywhere. The Frenchman most associated with the genre is of course Jean-Pierre Melville, whose earliest effort in that vein, Bob le Flambeur, followed a year after this Jacques Becker trailblazer, and while there is a strong family resemblance between the two, Melville's subsequent efforts grow increasingly distant and distinct: more closely patterned after their American antecedents, more aestheticized, more geometrized, more mechanized. Where Melville is attracted to archetypes (or, as you prefer, stereotypes), Becker is attracted to humans. Where Melville is cold, Becker is warm. This is not to suggest that Becker is inoculated against the classical conventions of the genre: the aging hood, the Last Big Score, the honor and dishonor among thieves, the chesslike moves and countermoves, and the violent climax on a lonely country road with tommy guns and hand grenades. Neither is it to suggest he is not prone to romanticize his subject. But it is a blue-blooded romanticism which celebrates the human animal, the individual, the sentiments, the heart. Jean Gabin, René Dary, Paul Frankeur, Jeanne Moreau, Lino Ventura. 1960.

Trouble in Paradise: Two congenital jewel thieves of opposite sexes and a mouth-watering millionairess (mouth-watering not just for her millions) form a romantic and larcenous triangle in what's supposed to be Depression-era Europe. But the breathlessly sustained levels of artifice, insouciance, and cold-blooded wit carry it into a world all its own. Or all Lubitsch's own. They also carry it into an unassailable place in the canon of High Camp. Written by Samson Raphaelson; with Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Edward Everett Horton, and Charles Ruggles. 1932.

Ulzana's Raid: Egghead western, written by the Scottish novelist Alan Sharp, largely devoted to the esoteric military tactics involved in rounding up a small Apache raiding party. You realize how unfamiliar you are with the fine points of Indian fighting when you hear one cavalryman eulogized as "a good man," shortly after you have uncomprehendingly watched him gallop to the aid of a distraught woman and child, shoot the woman squarely in the forehead, stick the pistol into his own mouth and fire, and abandon the child to the mercies of the Apaches. Robert Aldrich's direction is generally in service to the fascinating script and to the cast of archetypes, quietly well played by Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, Richard Jaeckel, and above all Jorge Luke; but he always rises to special occasions. An especially beautifully constructed action scene comes to pass when the wise old trail scout finds himself alone on an open plain, bearing down on two Indians who guard the entire string of Indian horses — and as he spurs his own horse to full tilt, and his hatbrim is pinned up by the headwind, and he unsheaths his Winchester with a graceful baton-like twirl, he becomes a figure magically brought to life out of a Charles Russell painting. 1972. R.

Un Chien Andalou: The surrealist fashion plate, jointly made by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel (his first movie, and already several of his staples are on display: insects, donkeys, razor blades, comical clergymen). Very exciting for the dream logic that allows a portion of a scene to change course while the remainder of the scene continues on as before; undoubtedly less shocking now than it was in 1928, but still rude and hurtful to anyone who is especially touchy about eyeballs, armpits, and other such sensitive spots; short enough and full enough to be viewed over and over without ever growing weary. 1929.

Under the Sun of Satan: A serious movie about serious people, a seriously self-doubting priest and a seriously conscience-stricken sinner (a mistress and murderess), with a serious appearance by the Devil Himself, a serious bout of telepathy, a serious dabble in vampirism, a serious visitation by a ghost, and a serious miracle. This last is the nearest thing in a generation, though still nowhere near equal, to Carl Dreyer's Ordet: Maurice Pialat, miles from Dreyer, is an avowed nonbeliever. (It is fitting, then, that his adaptation from the oeuvre of Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos should have centered on a work that expresses an almost blasphemous sense of futility and inconsolability.) A director with a past bent toward formless and scruffy naturalism (Loulou, A Nos Amours, Police), Pialat meets this loftier material with an altogether new demeanor, formal, calm, focussed. (It is not preposterous to speak of him as inspired.) He plunges us at the very outset into a roiling spiritual crisis, in a dim-lit interior that, appropriately enough, is afforded no geographical or temporal co-ordinates. The drama gradually opens up to give us some bearings, to reveal a credible place and time, but it remains unyieldingly interior, introspective, intellectual. "Why aren't we like animals?" the sinner laments at one point: "They live and die unthinkingly." You would have to look far to find people on screen further than these from animals. With Gerard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire. 1987.

Vampyr: Carl Dreyer's ingenious, anomalous, experimental horror film, gropingly photographed by Rudolph Maté through a veiled camera that casts a milky haze over the haunted countryside. The vampire is a white-haired old lady; the hero is a nonplussed do-nothing dandy; and the prevailing mood is one of unprecedented malaise. 1932.

Vidas Secas (Barren Lives): One of the earliest and still proudest examples of the Brazilian Cinema Nôvo, based on the celebrated Graciliano Ramos novel — a South American Grapes of Wrath — about a peasant family scratching out a living in the inclement Northeast. It offers a brutally materialistic vision of life, in the best and most cinematic sense of the word. Nothing exists beyond the at-hand realities of the environment; "hell," for a child, is defined by the sun, the heat, the parched earth, the jagged topography. Direct and simple in its presentation, this is at the same time a supremely skillful piece of moviemaking, with a very affecting climax photographed from the point of view of a dying dog. Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. 1962.

Walkabout: Edward Bond's screenplay — two school children, accustomed to crisp uniforms and transistor radios and such things, find themselves marooned in the Australian outback — possibly is more complex in its ideas about a cultural misalliance than is readily apparent. No matter. Nicolas Roeg's bright, clear, airy images create a wonderland of surreal encounters, altered perspectives, magnifications and diminutions. Jenny Agutter, Lucien John. 1971. R.

Wild Child: François Truffaut's factual, unembellished re-enactment of the events set down in a French doctor's journal, having to do with the capture and gradual domestication of an adolescent found roaming the forests as a beast. The plain, semi-documentary style sits a bit strangely amid the quaint 18th-century trappings (ruffled shirts, horse-drawn carriages, etc.) and the silent-movie affectations (iris shots, stagy camera). The movie is adamant about denying its actual date, which is rather a surprise from a fashion-plate like Truffaut, and it pursues a scrupulous exactness about the physical properties of the bygone period: the starchy clothes, the antique household objects, and the commonplace sounds heard around these cramped old houses — the footfalls, the opening and closing of a door, the scritch-scratch of a quill pen. Truffaut's tendency toward reckless sentimentality is held in harness here, thanks partly to Nestor Almendros's calm gray images, partly to Truffaut's stiff, toneless acting as the doctor, and partly to the unfaltering sense of rhythm. 1970. 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Wild Strawberries: An eminent octogenarian, haunted by bad dreams and sad memories, travels through an eventful all-day car ride and a painful review of his life, en route to accepting an award at the day's end. One of Ingmar Bergman's best movies, starring Victor Sjostrom, a noted Swedish director of the silent era. 1957.

The World of Apu: The conclusion of Satyajit Ray's Apu serial is the only installment that fits the requirements of tight, well-proportioned storytelling, as it follows the protagonist from bachelorhood in Calcutta to wedlock, widowerhood, and reluctant fatherhood. The chronicling of a sexual relationship is a new step for Ray, and it is invested with a sublime sense of self-consciousness, curiosity, and delight (the bridegroom muses, "What is it I see in your eyes?" and his wife deadpans, "Mascara"). 1959.

Yojimbo: Akira Kurosawa's bloody-minded political parable about the struggle for supremacy in a godforsaken 17th-century rural village. The feudists on both sides are uniformly petty, pea-brained, and baboonish (the only thing protecting them from one another is their cowardice), and justice is done when an unemployed samurai wanders into their midst and capriciously slaughters them all. Toshiro Mifune, scratching and swaggering to a great musical score, enjoys himself enormously as the nihilistic samurai who is endowed with an unsportsmanly superiority in the art of swordfighting. 1962.