Ivan's Childhood - The first Andrei Tarkovsky film remains a stunner, looking at the Soviet experience of WWII through the eyes of a jaded twelve year-old who is driven to fight out of a passionate desire for revenge. It's a thoroughly miserable and at times transcendentally beautiful piece of filmmaking that delivers an emotional gut punch. At the same time, there's a mournful lyricism and a stateliness to the filmmaking that leaves a much deeper impact. The black and white cinematography is compelling and uncompromising, presenting images of the horrors of wartime that are impossible to forget.
The Trial - Orson Welles' work got more formally inventive in his later years, even as his budgets and filmmaking resources shrank. "The Trial" is an ambitious film, based on a Franz Kafka novel, and obviously compromised by Welles' limited resources. However, it still expresses its creator's vision of paranoid totalitarianism through some stunning images and sequences. My favorite is the brief visit with the artist, where a life of fame is depicted as being trapped in a room full of holes, where a horde of vicious, giggling little girls are constantly looking in and tormenting the celebrity.
The Exterminating Angel - A group of partygoers are trapped in an unexplained existential quandary. They are stuck in a room and cannot leave it. Through this simple premise, Luis Bunuel creates an absorbing allegory about the breakdown of social conventions and niceties in the face of crisis. As our civilized upper crust descends into mindless savagery, Bunuel takes the opportunity to send up some of his other favorite targets. Though the symbolism is purposefully left ambiguous, many observers took it as a criticism of various political and social forces involved in the Spanish Civil War.
Lawrence of Arabia - One of the most astounding pieces of epic cinema ever created, filling the screen with scorching images of the desert and Peter O'Toole at his most charismatic. This was one of the films that made the best use of the widescreen format, to the point where it's a very different experience seeing "Lawrence of Arabia" with the correct aspect ratio compared to anything else. For four hours, the audience is totally immersed in the world of T.E. Lawrence. With a canvas so large, a complicated man is allowed to remain complicated, with many of his mysteries left unsolved.
To Kill a Mockingbird - One of the better social dramas of its era, highlighting small town dynamics and racial injustice in the Depression era American South. The performances are excellent, especially from Gregory Peck as the forthright lawyer, Atticus Finch. Much of the film's power comes from being told from a child's perspective, which helps to elide some of the less plausible parts of the story as well. The courtroom scenes are especially telling. As memorable as Peck is as a powerful legal orator, his Atticus Finch leaves a far more lasting impression as a good father and pillar of his community.
Harakiri - One of my favorite Masaki Kobayashi films depicts a challenge to the Edo era power structures of the feudal lords and samurai with a bloody tale of revenge and dishonor. With a fantastic Tatsuya Nakadai performance, and a script that unfolds in a series of twisty reveals, "Harakiri" demystifies the concepts of the warrior's code and ritual suicide, revealing the ugly realities of their practice. It doesn't hurt that the samurai clashes are great action set pieces and very compelling to watch. Their horror and futility, however, ensure that "Harakiri" is far more sobering than celebratory cinema.
L'Eclisse - Monica Vitti and Alain Delon play a pair of beautiful young people who engage in a love affair, but alas they are inhabitants of a Michelangelo Antonioni universe, full of alienating landscapes and brutal civilization. We watch the characters struggle to connect and stay connected, their moods and emotional shifts reflected in the environments they inhabit. The depiction of the stock exchange as this frenzy of human activity and crashing sounds verges on abstraction, while the ending montage of empty places seems keen on emphasizing that the humans in the film may be secondary after all.
The Manchurian Candidate - The John Frankenheimer conspiracy thriller is completely implausible by today's standards, but it remains so enthralling to see play out. And Frankenheimer's conjuring of this surreal, paranoid atmosphere of anti-Communism where nothing can be trusted is a delight. The line between what's satirical and what's supposed to be taken at face value gets very blurry. The performances are a lot of fun, but I especially enjoy Angela Lansbury as Raymond Shaw's poisonous mother. She makes for one of the best evil matriarchs to ever grace the silver screen.
Cape Fear - Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum face off in a high octane thriller, with Mitchum giving one of his best performances. Here, he's the evil Max Cady, a repugnant creature who inexorably forces the confrontation between the two men. The entire film is really one, big buildup to the final action finale, ratcheting up the tension scene by scene. I vastly prefer this version to the 1991 Scorsese remake because it keeps things simple and straightforward. And as much as I enjoy Robert DeNiro in the remake, when it comes to menace and vileness, he's no Robert Mitchum.
Knife in the Water - One of Roman Polanski's early films is a taut little psychological melodrama about three people and a boat. It starts out as a study of power dynamics, as the two men fight over the attentions of their female companion. Jealousy, cruelty, and betrayal arrive in short order. "Knife in the Water" is a relentlessly tense film, quickly moving from one moral dilemma or difficult situation to the next, examining conflicts between all the characters in different combinations. I especially appreciate the careful use of violence - the threat of which is so much more potent than the act.
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