Top One Hundred Free Movies to Stream (August 2024)

Monthly expenses for streaming services can add up quickly. Luckily for moviegoers, there are plenty of movies that are released for free and legally on various sites. These range from public domain classics on YouTube to newer varieties that can be seen on the internet. AVOD Global Wide Range. These ad-supported sites (looking for free content, but with ads) come with Crackle, Plex, Freevee, Pluto TV, Roku, and Tubi. And if you have a student ID or public library card, a wide variety of free-to-access movies can be obtained at Kanopy and Hoopla.

We’ve rounded up the best ones to bring you the hundred most productive free videos to stream:

Top 20 Free Movies on CrackleCrackle offer one of the best free movie options, from classics to cult movies to the latest hits.

As it progresses, Short Term 12 remains rigorously structured in terms of plot; However, it is never calculated. In fact, the film is a wonderful example of how screenwriting can be invisible. By allowing his characters’ irrational feelings to influence occasions and bring about key turning points, Cretton deftly masks the film’s finely calibrated narrative mechanisms. And even if everything comes to a head in a key crisis, it is logical that the story will end with an outcome that closes its opening. Cretton’s lucid film is too fair to watch and convince us that there has been a profound replacement by Grace or by anyone else. Instead, he is content to forcefully remind us that tentative first steps can be just as narratively compelling as wonderful acts of faith. —Curtis Woloschuk

Calling Chopping Mall director Jim Wynorski’s most productive film is rarely saying much (at all), but it’s still a minor crop of ’80s sci-fi horror. It’s impossible to resist the pulp premise, dressed in 80’s Neon – A group of kids hide out in the mall after late night so they can have fun (and score) at one of the furniture stores for the night. What they don’t know, however, is that the mall recently introduced a new fleet of lethal and effective security robots that, let’s just say, are more than a little nervous. The casting introduces us to Kelli Maroney, who also appears in The Night of the Comet, with similar teenage accents, and Roger Corman’s regular Dick Miller as the janitor, once again banking on his iconic role: “Dawn of the Dead, with much more hanging”. humor Array Today, genre enthusiasts probably won’t fondly forget Chopping Mall for the fact that it contained one of the biggest practical effects of the time: the graphic explosion of Suzee Slater’s head, followed by the ironic line of the robot; Thank you, have a great day. ” You’ve got to love it. —Jim Vorel

William Styron’s heartwarming story about an ethereal and charming concentration camp survivor is brought to life on screen through Meryl Streep. Streep learned to speak French with a Polish accessory to maintain the integrity of one of the greatest literary characters of the fashion era. Alan Pakula allows Streep to do what she does best: she dresses the character as if she were a perfectly adapted coat. The result is one of the greatest cinematic performances of all time. Sophie’s Choice is the embodiment of the horror of war and its aftermath. —Joan Radell

Dr. Caligari’s Practice showcased German Expressionist cinema with an art direction that was as dark and twisted as the story it told. Set in an environment filled with crooked streets, warped roofs, and angled staircases, no film has the same creepy feel as this one. story of a mysterious doctor and the sleepwalker he uses as a murder weapon. While the film’s influence is immeasurable, its images have been more of a catalyst for concepts than a target for direct imitation. This is partly because the look is so original, and partly because the set’s graphic design may have lent itself more to the film medium: shadows and painted backgrounds can make characters look as if they are walking across theater sets. of plywood, rather than through a demented cityscape.

Special effects have become so complicated that many of us have probably forgotten how much natural wonder can be created with a wonderful tale and a plot that doesn’t rest for a second. This astonishing, fast-paced, zany comedy from Howard Hawks stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell and takes us back to two of the defining preoccupations of the decade: the “remarriage comedy” and the intrigue and obsession of the global press. The moment Lindy Johnson (Russell) walks into the workplace of the newspaper run by her ex-husband Walter Burns (Grant), you know it’s to tell her she’s getting remarried and leaving journalism to start a family, and you know she’s not It’s like that. she’s going to finish. There is no suspenseful mystery here. What motivates you in this movie is how you get there. Hilariously directed and expertly filmed, His Girl Friday derives much of its comedic effect from the characters’ incredibly clever, lightning-quick banter. Don’t even think about checking your phone while watching this. In fact, try to blink as little as possible. —Amy Glynn

In one of the most intriguing opening scenes in film history, D. O. A. begins with a long tracking shot of a man as he enters the police office to make an unusual request: he wants to report his own murder. This opening symbol pretty much sums up DOA. , a brilliant yet thought-provoking noir mystery with an incredible concept. After receiving a fatal poison, the main character has only a few days to find out who administered this dose to him and why. What follows is an excellent combination of high-stakes melodrama and sleazy entertainment, all compacted into a concise one hour and twenty minute running time. -M.

It was still a fantastic movie; a story of sadistic mental torture, murder and greed. But today, George Cukor’s suspense gem has also achieved the required viewing prestige because it is the source text of the term “gaslighting. ” The word entered public discourse and was subject to great abuse and misinterpretation. This film explains what gaslighting is (and what it is not). You probably want to see it before you can use that word and perceive what you’re saying. But that alone wouldn’t be enough to justify a bad movie. It’s not a bad movie; In fact, it is a treasure. Mysterious, emotionally charged, deliciously frightening and enlivened through the performances of Angela Lansbury and Joseph Cotten, it was a wonderful mental mystery in its time and remains one today. So yes, come for a lesson in psychopathology, but stay for Cuckor’s astonishing “God’s eye” taste direction (no unreliable narrators here!) and Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer’s glorious performances as a traumatized woman and an invented sociopath. our minds to make her lose her mind. —A. G.

At the beginning of Godzilla, before the monster is sighted off the coast of Odo Island, a local fisherman tells visiting journalist Hagiwara (Sachio Sakai) about the patch they are in, describing it as the last vestige of the ancient “exorcism”. . »His other friends once practiced. Hagiwara watches as actors “sacrifice” a young woman to the calamitous sea creature to satisfy her hunger and cajole her into leaving fish for others to enjoy, at least until the next sacrifice. Ishiro Hondo’s hit monster movie, the first of its kind in Japan, the most expensive film ever made in the country at the time, not even a decade after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is, after twenty sequels three, several times. So many years, a strangely elegiac exorcism in itself, a reminder of the trauma that a country continues to suffer at a time when the rest of the world sought to forget. As J Hoberman describes in his essay for the Criterion film’s release, much of the imagery of the Honda crisis is “encoded in naturalism,” a true vision of the harrowing destruction wrought by the beast, but indistinguishable from the aftermath. of the American attacks in 1945. , specifically when the United States and Russia, among other powers, tested H-bombs in the Pacific in the early 1950s, bathing the Japanese in even more radiation than they were already saturated with. And yet, Godzilla is a sci-fi movie, replete with a “mad” scientist with an eye patch and a human in a rubber dinosaur dress knocking down miniature bridges. That Honda handles such discomfort with a relentless poetic hand, purging his country’s mental pain with largely intimate volleys, is nothing short of astonishing. Shots of Godzilla trudging through thick smoke, spotlights highlighting his gaping jaws as the Japanese army’s cannons only shock the darkness with magnificent chiaroscuro, have rarely been equaled in films of this genre (and in the legion of director’s sequels); Honda saw gods and monsters and, as the world entered a new era of technological doom, he saw no difference between the two. —Dom Sinacola

What more can we say about Night of the Living Dead? It is evidently the most important zombie film ever made and also a huge influence as an independent film. George Romero’s reasonable but momentous film was a quantum leap in the meaning of the word “zombie” in pop culture, even though the word “zombie” is never actually uttered in it. More importantly, he established all the rules of the genre: zombies are reanimated corpses. Zombies are forced to eat the flesh of the living. Zombies are reckless, tireless, and immune to injury. The only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain. These regulations necessarily categorize each and every zombie movie from here on out: either the movie features “Romero-style zombies” or it tweaks the formula and ultimately stands out for its difference from the Romero standard. It’s necessarily the horror equivalent of what Tolkien did with the high fantasy concept of “races. ” After The Lord of the Rings, it became increasingly unlikely to write competing ideas about what elves, dwarves, or orcs might look like. Romero’s effect on the zombies is exactly the same caliber. There hasn’t been a zombie movie made in the last 47 years that hasn’t been influenced in some way, and you can have a slight verbal exchange about something similar to zombies. zombies if you haven’t noticed, then faint and watch it, if you haven’t noticed. The film still holds up well, especially for its moody cinematography and stark black-and-white photographs of zombie arms sticking out of the windows of a rural farm. Oh, and by the way, NOTLD is in the public domain, so don’t be fooled into buying it on a low-quality DVD. —Jim Vorel

Werner Herzog recreates the cornerstone of vampire cinema (and German Expressionist cinema, for that matter) through an ever-growing nightmare of disturbing, disjointed vignettes. Which is not new for the German director, but his strategies and sensitivity naturally lend themselves to the language of phantasmagoria, as he tells a familiar story through a symbol that upsets his subconscious. As in any Herzog film, the story never aims to spread perfectly – slightly logically – but rather to indelibly print on the inside of the viewer’s eyelids the austere silhouette of evil, absurdly born from the primitive concern that lies latent in both. The fact that Klaus Kinski also plays Count Dracula means that madness bristles at the edge of either line of chiaroscuro: Nosferatu revels in good looks at horror. In fact, Roger Ebert said, “Here’s a movie that honors the seriousness of vampires. No, i do not do it. But if they were real, this is how they deserve to look. —Dom Sinacola

Before Dracula and the official birth of Universal Horror, there was The Phantom of the Opera. (BTW: It’s a shame that none of the major streamers besides Netflix and Shudder have the rights to stream the entire old Universal Monster series. I need to be able to stream Son of Frankenstein or The Wolf Man on deguyd. Day , guys! Get the licensing deals!) Anyway, it’s great that Shudder has at least one of those old versions, because it’s in the public domain. This is the original edition of Phantom, starring Lon Chaney Sr. , “the boy with a thousand faces. ” The pacing is slow, the acting taste presented is pretty strange to see nowadays (overly dramatic vestiges of the vaudeville days), and you know how old history goes, but boy: Chaney’s face. He’s one of the truly iconic faces of horror, along with Boris Karloff, Bela Lupasssi, and Chaney’s own son, Lon Chaney Jr. , who would go on to play the Wolfman. The Phantom of the Opera is a must-have in the makeup imagined by Chaney, who supposedly made theater buyers faint in the aisles in 1925. —Jim Vorel

Of all the camp-based Friday the 13th scams, Sleepaway Camp is probably the most productive and is rarely very The Burning. Our main character is Angela, a troubled woman whom everyone probably chooses for without any intelligent reason. Seriously, this is one of those ’80s videos with a main character who is an “outsider” constantly harassed by dozens of other people, but without any impetus or explanation; that’s just Angela’s plight in life. Everyone who meets her immediately hates her and subjected her to merciless ridicule. But soon, the other people in the camp who were mean to Angela began to be eliminated. The film is calculated to present itself as a natural horror film, but the death scenes are so far-fetched that they also veer nicely into horror-comedy. The highlights come with the lewd camp cook, who has a giant tub of boiling water thrown in his face, or the boy who has a beehive thrown into the latrine with him. If you like old slashers, this is a must see, especially because of the ending. Maybe I wouldn’t spoil anything, but Sleepaway Camp can proudly boast one of the most shocking WTF endings in slasher film history. —Jim Vorel

Fun fact: Nine years before making the Christmas crop A Christmas Story, Bob Clark created the first virtually unwatchable “slasher movie” in Black Christmas. Yes, the same user who gave TBS its annual Christmas Eve marathon was also guilty of the first primary cinematic application of the word “The calls are coming from inside space!” Black Christmas, which was insipidly remade in 2006, predates John Carpenter’s Halloween by 4 years and features many of the same elements, namely visually. Like Halloween, it focuses heavily on POV shots of the killer’s eyes as he lurks around a dimly lit sorority space and spies on his long-term victims. As the deranged killer rings the room and makes obscene phone calls to the residents, we can’t help but also think of the scene in Carpenter’s film in which Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) calls her friend Lynda, only to overhear her. . strangled with the telephone cord. Black Christmas also plays a pivotal, and almost archetypal, role in solidifying the slasher legend of the so-called “final girl. ” Jessica Bradford (Olivia Hussey) is one of the most successful Final Girls in the history of the genre, an extraordinarily strong and resourceful young woman who can take care of herself in relationships and in fatal situations. It’s debatable how many subsequent slashers have been able to create protagonists who are such a plausible mix of capability and realism. —Jim Vorel

Bella’s (Rima Te Wiata) first meeting with Ricky (Julian Dennison), the new foster child she agreed to foster, does not inspire confidence, especially with his awkward jokes about her weight. At the same time, with children’s facility representative Paula (Rachel House) portraying Ricky as a wild, rebellious child, one fears the prospect of the boy trampling this mother over her head in all likelihood. But Bella wears him down with kindness. And Ricky ends up being less tough than he (what with his penchant for gangsta rap and everything that entails) had originally tried to project. Adapted from the novel Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump, Hunt for the Wilderpeople by Taika Waititi thrives on upending preconceived notions. The director shows sympathy for Ricky’s innocence, which is reflected in the film’s high adventure style. Cinematographer Lachlan Milne’s sweeping, colorful panoramas and chapter-based narrative design give Hunt for the Wilderpeople the feel of a storybook fable, but thanks to the warm dynamic between Ricky and Hec (Sam Neill), Even the film’s most fanciful moments are leading. a sense of genuine underlying pain: those two characters are strangers looking for a home of their own. —Kenji Fujishima

One of the all-time classic pairings between two monsters, Mothra vs. Godzilla was the time when many kids became lifelong Godzilla enthusiasts. Still seriously, before the Showa series moved on to children’s entertainment, it presented Godzilla as an unsympathetic monster absolutely immune to Earth’s weapons. Mothra, on the other hand, is Earth’s greatest hero and protector. For a giant moth, it offers a pretty clever fight against Godzilla. In typical Mothra fashion, she is defeated in the end, but her larvae can save the day. It turns out that every adult Mothra has a short lifespan. –Jim Vorel

A desirable examination of how the afterlife can shape us even when we know nothing about it, this understated Polish film from Pawel Pawlikowski is set in the 1960s, when World War II has ended but continues to disrupt people’s lives. In the title role, Agata Trzebuchowska, with an even balance of naivety and interest despite not being a professional actress, plays a nun in training who discovers that her circle of relatives were Jewish and were murdered during the Nazi occupation. She embarks on an odyssey to locate her graves with her cynical, alcoholic aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a former prosecutor for the communist government. The relationship between the two characters becomes increasingly complex as they delve deeper into the rabbit hole of the afterlife of their circle of relatives. Shot in black and white and in educational format (1. 37:1) by filmmakers Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski, Ida uses her framing to distinctive effect, sending the characters to the lower third of the screen. The effect can be disturbing and at the same time intriguing; This area may simply involve the vigilant force of the lord of Ida, but it may also be nothing more than a void. After a life of certainties, Ida will have to make a decision for herself. —Jérémy Mathews

Filmmaker James Nunn reunites with Scott Adkins once he returns for a whimsical, unsightly jaunt around a recently besieged militarized island, all made to look like one 90-minute take. For part of this runtime, you’d like them to be told to cut so you don’t have to watch someone walk through a box or down a main hallway in real time, especially since the walk-and-talk conversation is filled with a terrorist silly. characters of intrigue and hard work that would make a Call of Duty editor point out the lack of nuance. But when it comes to shootouts, knife fights, and fist fights, you’ll be glad Nunn and his team trusted the process. Adkins remains an exceptional workhorse, not only as a fighter but also as a dramatic actor. With the handheld camera intensely following him throughout, he is a compelling presence even when he isn’t breaking his arms or slitting his throat. He’s even magnetic when he charges. Players will authenticate the visual language of third-person shooters (or that of an FPS, extrapolated outwards), as camera angles around the canopy or above the shoulders reflect their visceral location. There is a lot to appreciate about the technical plans and execution here. Sure, it’s a terrible situation and no one really has anything to do (although Adkins’ SEAL teammates are doing well), however, a brutal 20-minute bombardment will drive all sticks deeper into the mud. , move to the edges of their seats. Matrix—Jacob Oller

And so, with an undeniable zoom, John Ford gave John Wayne his defining role and reintroduced American audiences to the guy who would become one of their most enduring cinematic icons. Two Johns, to get there. Stagecoach is rarely exactly a John Wayne movie even though John Wayne is in it; This was before the days of The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man and even Hondo, films that helped shape Wayne’s character and gradually forge the legend of him at the time. ‘screen. In Stagecoach, he’s just a guy with a gun, a revenge project, and a soft spot for a prostitute named Dallas. Rather than the Wayne tradition, the film belongs to the outsider tradition; It is an unlikely and incongruous organization of huguys who come together towards a common destiny. They’re taking a dangerous path, but Ford’s wonderful gift as a filmmaker is his ability to make danger dynamic and entertaining, and in Stagecoach he pulls it off effortlessly. —Andy Crump

Assault on Precinct Thirteen launches into its action-packed moment with one of the most audacious and transgressive acts you’ll ever notice in a movie – at best it feels like a taboo that you wouldn’t even see in a movie. ‘horror today, and I wouldn’t dare ruin it all for you. Suffice to say, this moment of unthinkable violence kicks off a gritty John Carpenter mystery, two years before Halloween made him a much bigger name. As such, you might expect Assault on Precinct 13 to be a more traditional or safer film, but it’s a much more complex undertaking than Halloween would have been. Inspired by Night of the Living Dead, Carpenter tells the criminal action of an officer who controls a deserted police station besieged by dozens of gang members. The interpersonal dynamic between officer and prisoners fully reflects the suspicion and brotherhood that would later manifest among the Arctic inhabitants of Carpenter’s The Thing, and the shootouts are just as bloody. Even on a limited budget, this is one of the most productive action films of the ’70s. – Jim Vorel

As Hooters fades further from the American consciousness, locations close everywhere, and the impulses of its once-typical customers mutate into more sinister, hard-to-understand online proclamations, the concept of the “breastaurant,” a signpost which was once common on the roads. like a cookie Barrel, is another sign of the decline of projects in the service sector, and the best subject for Andrew Bujalski, a filmmaker who is emerging as the great singer of the American athletic class. During an exhausting day at Double Whammies, manager Lisa Conroy (Regina Hall, Bastion) goes about her mundane tasks: meeting volatile consumers, educating new waitresses, dealing with a probably incompetent cable company. . . Raising funds for a car wash for a painter and his shitty boyfriend, who serves as a whip for the shitty restaurant owner (James LeGros, man with a lack of car confidence) and navigating reality. exhausting about what her task is and what she represents. Isn’t she more wonderful than that? Bujalski, wonderfully, answers “no,” because he’s so smart at her task and her team adores her (led by high-minded performances from Haley Lu Richardson and rapper/artist Junglepussy) and paints, paints, paints. paintings. And what are we supposed to do when more and more of the culmination of our hard work is taken from us, devalued or dragged into the streets, crushed or screamed into oblivion, our paintings defining us and condemning us to the absence of true definition ? ? Support the Girls understands the daily pain of those contradictions, without judging us, along with us, patting ourselves on the back. We no longer have to do what we have to do. —Dom Sinacola

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It’s definitely not an undeniable task to create a modern, retro-inspired slasher film that walks the fine line between genre parody and affectionate homage. Plenty of other people have tried just that and ended up with a result that spends all its time nodding to genre tropes, rather than simply delivering the goods. Terrifier is one of the few that works, at least partially, in the spirit in which it was designed, thanks to its evil attitude, sublime bloodshed, and key core functionality. This film relies entirely on the quality of David Howard Thornton’s performance as “Art the Clown”, elevating it from what could be seen as an undeniable riff on Stephen King’s It to a truly worthy genre effort. Much of this is due to Thornton’s fabulous facial expressions as Art, as well as his stellar costume and design: he’s designed to be a recurring horror movie character, and if this series had first premiered in 1982, We probably would have noticed. part of a horror movie. dozen Art the Clown sequels. The rest of the production is reasonable – it seems like they’re going for the degraded cinematic look of Tarantino’s Death Proof but don’t really achieve it – but there’s more than enough gore to satisfy any horror fan. hunger. If killer clowns are your thing, this is a must. —Jim Vorel

More than an hour later, the film’s call appears, appropriately lichen, sinister and almost unreadable, as all wonderful steel album covers are. The call and calling card, Mandy, segues without delay into a scene in which our hero forges his own Excalibur, a gleaming, warped ax adorned with sharp, vaguely erotic edges and accessories, the stuff of man’s wettest dreams. H. R. Giger. Although Red (Nicolas Cage) can, and almost does, use any weapon at his disposal to avenge the brutal murder of his titular love interest (Andrea Riseborough), he still crafts this lovable abomination like a ritual, instilling his quest for revenge with dark powers. talismans. magic, forced through Mandy’s Bakshi-esque visions to do what she needs on a bodily level. She enjoys the rite and succumbs to the rage that will push her to intensely excessive ends. We know almost nothing about his past before meeting Mandy, but we can say that he knows a blunt and fatal object. Thus begins Red’s messy, blood-curdling, gloriously violent killing spree. A dildo with a giant blade, a ridiculously long chainsaw, a fun stack of cocaine, the aforementioned spiked LSD, the aforementioned oracular chemist, a tiger, more than one sexual offering: Red finds them like debris from a nightmare. wake up. fighting or eating each and every one of them. Every shot of Mandy reeks of shocking beauty, rarely stylized to within an inch of intelligibility, but filled with creativity and control, euphoria and pain, clarity and honesty and the ineffable feeling that director Panos Cosmatos knows exactly how and what he needs . imprint itself unconsciously on the viewer. Still, Mandy is a revenge movie, and a revenge movie will have to satisfy the audience’s bloodlust. Cosmatos bathes Red (natch) in blood, each victory hard-won and subcutaneously rewarding. There is no other film this year that feeds so well on the public’s anger, and then sublimates it, diffuses it without allowing it to go dangerously further. We want this kind of recovery now; We are all furious at the distant injustice of a world, of a life and a society, of a government that does not care about us. This does not add value to our lives. Mandy is our revenge movie. Look at it big. Look at it carefully. See yourself exorcised on the screen. —Dom Sinacola

If you’ve never noticed Requiem for a Dream, you’ve probably still absorbed its iconography through mythos: the hyperreal confection of close-up photographs (the hiss of a syringe, the dilation of a pupil) that symbolize the drug addict’s euphoria; The chest-mounted Got Herera tracks either or both movements of an actor’s functionality as the world behind the actor’s head peels away; The breathless speed that director Darren Aronofsky employs, combining hypnotic reverie and almost unbearable intensity; even Clint Mansell’s soundtrack, which has almost become shorthand for a movie trailer for Epicness with a capital “E. ” First, it all came as a revelation in Aronofsky’s cult classic, which follows four other people (Ellen Burstyn, Jered Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans, both in the most productive roles of their careers) as their lives collide. . In the front opposite the background, all the shreds of happiness they once knew, completely erased by heroin, opioids, delusions of grandeur or maybe just hip urban life. Aronofsky’s gaze is unwavering, but what is lost when considering the influence of the film – of its iconic prestige just some 20 years later – is the empathy with which Aronofsky tries to get into the heads of his characters, without ever judging the decisions of those tragic characters. , just waiting for them to do it. someday I will be able to do better. He knows it won’t be like that, and we know it too, but the genius of the director’s second film is that he still manages to make us feel the slightest bit of hope. —Dom Sinacola

After all, 2008’s Ip Man marks the moment when Donnie Yen, actually perfect but never considered fair, comes into prominence, embodying a vaguely biographical edit of the mythical Wing Chung’s grandmaster and instructor of a series of long years. they run martial arts masters (one of whom was Bruce Lee). In Foshan (a city known for martial arts in southern and central China), a modest Wing Chung practitioner attempts to peacefully resist the Japanese invasion and profession of China in 1937, but is eventually forced to perform. Heart-wrenching, pulverizing action fills this semi-historical film, which triumphs gloriously as a compelling drama and bait for martial arts fans. —K. Alexandre Smith

Ginger Snaps is one of the best werewolf stories in school, but before I make comparisons to Twilight, let me say this for the record: where Twilight is touchy-feely, Ginger Snaps is cruel. Ginger and Brigitte, two foreign sisters obsessed with death, face maturation disorders and sexual awakening when Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) is bitten by a werewolf. As her desires begin to become bolder and more animalistic, Kinder Moment Sister (Emily Perkins) searches for a way to withstand the pain before Ginger carves a path of destruction through her community. Reflecting the influence of Cronenberg’s horror framework and, in particular, John Landis’ American Werewolf in London, Ginger Snaps is a strangely effective horror film and a blend of drama and black comedy that brought the werewolf myth to life. to the suburbs in the same way as Fright Night. controlled to do. Do it with vampires. It also made Isabelle a star of the genre, who has since made that impression in several sequels and above-average horror films, such as American Mary. Although the condition of lycanthropism is an apparent parallel to the struggles of adolescence and puberty, Ginger Snaps is the only film that took this rich vein of original curtains and imbued it with the same kind of punk spirit as Heathers. —Jim Vorel

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One of the most brutal horror films ever released, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, based on infamous Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, feels like a verité art space built on the grainy physicality of its flat Texas setting. . Plus, he brought in the superlatively sinister Leatherface, the iconic giant man who wields a chainsaw and wears a mask made of enormous skin, whose strange sadism is only overshadowed by the arrival of his cannibalistic circle of relatives with whom he lives in a dilapidated town. space in the middle of the Texas desert, dining on the meat that Leatherface and his brothers harvest, while Grandpa drinks blood and fashions furniture from the bones of the victims. Still, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may not be the bloodiest horror film ever made, but as an imaginative excavation of the subterranean anxieties of a post-Vietnam rural American population, it is unprecedented. Twisted, dark and charming at the same time, it comes in a wide variety of tones and techniques without ever wasting its unique intensity. (And there are few scenes in this era of horror with more disturbing sound design than the moment where Leatherface ambushes a guy with a single blow of a blunt hammer to the head before slamming the steel door on him. ) -Rachel Haas and Brent Ables

The Rosetta Stone to understand the dating between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski lies in observing how Herzog sees Kinski in the role of Aguirre, the conquistador who around 1560, by sheer force of his belligerence, led a small army of Spaniards towards their safe destination. loss. In Kinski’s haunting presence, Aguirre is openly delusional, his desire to find the lost City of Gold as he treks through the unforgiving rainforests of Peru so corrupt and strange that he ends up paralyzing his body from the inside out. . outside, crawling to free herself from his frame. center and escaping his insect eyes. Herzog exploits this fantasy when he bets on Kinski – known in real life for his cruelty and aggrandizing attitude – and in Aguirre, the wrath of God is not a purer sense of how Herzog reports Kinski’s genuine nature, letting him infiltrate – infect – the truth of the movie itself: “Based on a true story” wasn’t such a debased cinematic term until Fargo took up the challenge decades later. Anyway, this is how Herzog treats true stories: his documentary subjects, which he is known for shamelessly manipulating, and even the e-book Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed through Paul Cronin, a series of conversations that amount to a retrospective of his career, Cronin’s prologues with a long explanation. for the way Herzog took pains to edit and rewrite his own interviews. What remains in a position of constancy in the story of Gonzalo Pizzaro’s unfortunate expedition is something much more visceral: a reconstruction of the pain, the absurdity and the wonderful ghost of Hitale (and, therefore, of Hitale). —Dom Sinacola

After all, 2008’s Ip Man marks the moment when Donnie Yen, actually perfect but never considered fair, takes notice, staking a vaguely biographical edit of the mythical Wing Chung’s grandmaster and instructor on a series of feature films directed by martial arts masters (one of whom was Bruce Lee). In Foshan (a city known for the martial arts of southern and central China), a modest Wing Chung practitioner attempts to peacefully resist the Japanese invasion and profession of China in 1937, but in the end he is forced to perform. Heartbreaking, pulverizing action fills this semi-historical film, which triumphs gloriously as a compelling drama and bait for martial arts fans. —K. Alejandro Smith

Henry stars Merle himself, Michael Rooker, in a film that necessarily aims to get up close and personal with the life of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, along with his demented partner Otis Toole (Tom Towles). The film was filmed and set in Chicago on a budget of just $100,000. It is a wicked adventure into the depths of darkness, capable of infecting the human soul. This probably sounds like hyperbole, but Henry is an ugly movie: you feel dirty just watching it, from the dirty urban streets to the incredibly unfriendly characters who prey on local prostitutes. It’s not just a watch, but if you’re into true crime, it’s a must-see. Certain sequences, such as the “home video” filmed of Henry and Otis torturing an entire family, have given the film an infamous reputation, even among horror fans, as a relentless look at the nature of evil and the disturbing and banal. —Jim Vorel

You can credit films like Psycho or Peeping Tom for laying the groundwork for the slasher genre, and 1974’s Black Christmas for first combining all the elements into what is undeniably a “slasher film,” but the seminal giallo through Mario Bava from 1964 arrives. so close that it almost deserves that name as the first “real” slasher in almost every single way that matters. Blood and Black Lace is a surely striking and sumptuous film that is even more noticeable on the big screen, if possible, with stunning splashes of number one colors used for maximum impact. The story is a combination of dark comedy homicide mystery and titillation-tinged exploitation, featuring an organization of female models stalked by a mysterious assailant whose face is covered by an impenetrable stocking mask with expressionless features: a killer who He looks a lot like the DC Comics character. Ask. He is an instantly iconic symbol that left his mark on an entire Italian genre, and later assassins would reflect many of this character’s characteristics, from the black gloves and long coat to the mask itself. Although many have attempted to emulate his images, very few have managed to match the decadence and sense of sumptuous (and deadly) excess that Bava captures in Blood and Black Lace. —Jim Vorel

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Is Some Like It Hot one of Marilyn Monroe’s most productive films or one of her greatest antitheses? Sugar Kane is, simply put, the kind of character that Marilyn fought so hard to avoid playing for most of her career: a crazy blonde, a natural sex symbol, someone who exists in the context of the film only to make her tickling the male gaze. Matrix either in the story or outside. She hasn’t been given anything to work with, as most of the film’s heavy lifting is left to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Watching the movie in 2017, you might wonder why Billy Wilder didn’t invest Sugar with any empathy points, why he wrote her character as a one-dimensional object, a trophy for Lemmon and Curtis to compete for Array. You may not ask the question at all either. Some like the hot paintings, although Marilyn has little to do with it other than her character and her co-star; It’s funny, it’s fast, and it sells its central joke: that no one in the audience can see that Curtis and Lemmon are clearly guys in drag, perfectly, adding enough self-awareness of his own ridiculousness to keep the joke going. of becoming bitter. —Andy Crump

Filmed as if each frame were a frothy, realistic painting, storyboarded as if it were a Chaplin-style silent film, and brought together through a cast of comically impeccable performances, Emma, the debut feature from Autumn de Wilde. Array is made up almost entirely of thrillingly executed moments. More a comedy of manners than a natural romance, Jane Austen’s novel and De Wilde’s film take as their subject the fortunately single Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy), the “beautiful, intelligent and rich” owner of an estate. rural English, as He fills his days by combining a series of ego-driven (albeit well-intentioned) mating schemes. Signposted throughout the film’s opening in the warm dawn hours of Emma’s last wedding day in the village, those projects have a remarkable story of clever fortune; at least, enough smart fortune so that, on the one hand, Emma has her codependence and her unhappiness. and melancholy father (a charming, if anxious Bill Nighy) warn her not to initiate any plans that might alienate her from him, while on the other she has the handsome Woodhouse family friend, Mr. Knightley (a refreshingly fiery man). Johnny Flynn warns her that she objects to being so superior in her previous mating moves that she launches an audacious plan even if she doesn’t succeed. Beyond creating what would be a genuine cinematic delight in any context, the warm, bustling sense of network that this deep attention to detail aims to build is, as Paste’s Andy Crump points out in his thoughtful interview with de Wilde and Taylor-Joy, Precisely like any movie. 2020 revisits a 205-year-old comedy about cultivating smart manners. With our existing cultural moment explained through prolonged virtual isolation – and its cousin, cruelty enabled through anonymity – the next most productive thing is Wilde’s Emma. What I Can Do leans so heavily on the sublimity of Austen’s original that, for its two glorious phone-free hours, her audience can feel, collectively, transported. —Alexis Gunderson

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The Vast of Night is the kind of sci-fi movie that seeps into your deepest memories and feels like anything you’ve heard on the news, observed in a dream, or told in a bar. Director Andrew Patterson’s small-town paean to analog and alien beings is built from long, communicative takes and quick sequences of generational manipulation. Actually a duo of 1950s audio enthusiasts (Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz play a switchboard operator and a disc jockey respectively), the film is a fable filled with layers of stories, anecdotes and conversations that accumulate and intertwine before to cut the covers. . The effectiveness of the dusty place and its inhabitants, forged from an important school basketball game and one-way telephone conversations (the latter being the best examples of McCormick’s self-assured functionality and the sharp script by writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger). , it only makes their inevitable UFO fate in the desert even better. Comfort and friendship are invited with swagger and a torrent of words, making sensory silence (slowing down on one frequency or abandoning images to a single, mysterious radio caller) almost sacred. This is mythology at its finest, an origin story that makes obsession with aliens as natural and part of our curious lives as its many social snapshots. The beautiful ode to everything that happens [UNINTELLIGIBLE BUZZ] at night is a standalone inspiration for long-term Fox Mulders everywhere. —Jacob Oller

Despite being one of the creators of 1979’s Alien (giving a highly impactful, uncredited performance in the script and leading the franchise as editor and producer across several films), Walter Hill never made a true horror film. Southern Comfort is the closest he gets, and the tension in his white knuckles is sure to put more knots in his throat and abdomen than anything else he can locate. Set in 1973, we follow a squad of members of the Louisiana Army National Guard (including Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, Fred Ward and Peter Coyote) on a weekend maneuver by the regime who, through their arrogance and immaturity, frustrates an organization of Cajuns from the swamps where they are located. reoccupying With only fake ammunition at their disposal, the men find themselves in extreme situations as they struggle to oppose other people who know how to use the earth as a weapon. Its themes—American invaders corrupted by their exceptionalism into believing they had some kind of ownership over lands that did not belong to them, only to be met with resistance from a local opposition much wiser and more capable than Americans believed—led to the quick assumption that Southern Comfort was a metaphor for Vietnam. Hill vehemently rejects this, stating: “People are going to say this is about Vietnam. You can say what you want, but I don’t need to hear any more about it. Although the comparisons are obvious, Hill is also right: this type of narcissistic selfishness and colonizing mentality is not only exemplified by the Vietnam War. It is firmly visual around the history, supply and future of the United States. Southern Comfort was a notoriously difficult shoot for its cast and crew, as those characters navigate a swamp that attacks them at each and every turn. With incompetent leadership and undisciplined subordinates, Southern Comfort gives us not a righteous squad of American Army heroes, but a band of mindless hooligans who get what’s coming to them. It’s a film that exemplifies Hill’s skills as an action director, with masterful cross-cutting to keep the tension at a feverish level, smoldering as the scenery begins to get gruesome and continues to get worse. If Streets of Fire has the most important beginning of Hill’s career, Southern Comfort has the most powerful ending, with a final segment in which the surviving foot soldiers believe they have discovered salvation when they hitchhike to a small fried fish restaurant. on the Cajun network to despite everything, legitimize it little by little. It’s the biggest trap of all. Stunning cinema at its finest. –Mitchell Beaupre

A spiritual sequel to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out tells the story of B-movie sound technician Jack Terry (John Travolta) who witnesses a strange twist. of fate in a car he filmed one night near the Henry Avenue Bridge in Philadelphia. When he saves Sally (Karen Allen), the vehicle’s passenger, he becomes embroiled in a political scandal. Echoing Coppola’s Blow Up and The Conversation (1974), the film weaves a web of conspiracy and paranoia, as Jack and Sally, two lost and adrift souls, make the decision to do what they must, revealing a plot contrary to the governor at his own risk. Array Blow Out is also an iconic Philadelphia movie, which turns out to delight in undermining the city’s pride: the entire plot revolves around corrupt politicians and their agents, there’s a “Liberty Bell Strangler” on the loose, and its climaxArray A violent moment develops. in front of a giant American flag during the city’s “Freedom Day” parade. The film revisits De Palma’s recurring obsession with voyeurism, which is suited to Philadelphia’s public spaces. From the exercise station to the subway, through the streets and even in the characters’ apartments, someone is listening, except, of course, in the film’s ironic denouement, when the screams remain inaudible on the busy streets of the city. city. —Maura McAndrew

There are few filmmakers on Earth who can create the delight of films like The Handmaiden so delicately while maintaining plot momentum and a sense of fun. (Yes, that’s right: Park has made a really funny and surprisingly darkly funny movie. ) The film begins quite somberly, settling into a tearful farewell scene when Sook-hee (Kim Taeri) is transported to the mansion of Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), a reclusive and exorbitantly wealthy aristocrat, where she will serve as a servant to her niece, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee). But Sook-hee is no housekeeper: she is a pickpocket working on behalf of Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), a criminal who is plotting to take over Hideko’s assets. (That’s not a euphemism. He only needs her for her money. ) The revelation of Sook-hee’s true intentions is just the first of many in The Handmaiden’s narrative journey. Park designed the film as a puzzle box where each step taken to find the solution answers one question and raises new ones. But you’re here to be informed about sex, right? It’s in the sex scenes between the two Kims where Park shows the kind of filmmaker he really is. The sex is sexy, the scenes are passionate, but we find in each of them a tenderness that invites us to read them as romance rather than as pornography. We are not conditioned to look for humanity in pantomimes of a sexually specific nature, but that is precisely where The Handmaiden is most human. There is something comforting about this, as well as the way Park depicts deviance embodied through the film’s masculine component. We don’t really want you to explain this to us, but the message is still welcome. —Andy Crump

And speaking of uncovered footage, here’s another access to the genre that has gained much more positive critical attention. Lake Mungo also couldn’t be more different from something like Grave Encounters: there are no ghosts or demons chasing other people screaming down the hallway. , and it’s usually a story about family circle, emotions, and our preference to move on after death. You can also simply call him a member of the family circle “mumblegore,” without the blood. It focuses on a círculo. de relatives who were shattered by the drowning of a daughter, and the relatives’ next entanglement in what would possibly or would not be a ghost, and the mother’s preference for the kind of life her daughter had lived. Powerfully acted and subtly filmed, it is a tense (if raw) drama of a circle of relatives with supernatural notes that deviate to the worn limits of their reason. If there’s such a thing as a “horror drama,” this documentary-style film well deserves its title. —Jim Vorel

The documentary of Prince’s 1987 concert is one hour and 24 minutes long and chronicles the most important musical artist of a generation at the peak of his career (sorry, boss). With his touring band, which included Sheila E. on drums, Miko Weaver on guitar, Levi Seacer Jr. on bass, Eric Leeds on saxophone, Boni Boyer and Dr. Fink on keyboards and Cat Glover dancing, the film is basically based on his 1987 double. album Sign O’ the Times, which includes hits such as the title track, a piano interlude of “Little Red Corvette” and “U Got the Look”. It was filmed in two European shows, but much of the music was later re-recorded in Paisley Park. However, there is an urgency that only Prince can fulfill, in terms of clothing, of course. Released theatrically in the United States, the film gained more love after its theatrical release. It’s now one of the most productive tactics to perceive what’s at stake at a Prince concert. —Josh Jackson

Sometimes the national news tells stories about a horrific local murder that took place in a part of the country where we don’t live. And since this has happened elsewhere, perhaps far from the big cities, we may be making assumptions about the kind of other people who live there: negative assumptions. We dwell on those Americans who are like us; rather, we see them as a kind of strange “other. “And so we extinguish our empathy and depend on our blessings not to live where “there is. “What’s so striking about Blue Ruin is how writer-director Jeremy Saulnier plays with those dismissive assumptions while subverting them. Its dark story of revenge presents the strangeness of a small town, but it also helps to keep a close eye on the humans in the middle of the story. Blue Ruin can be a gloomy midnight movie at times. , but not at the expense of deeper questions about the diminishing returns of revenge. —T. G.

Abel Ferrara’s stylish take on Robin Hood transports the not-unusual man to the scum-infested streets of the Big Apple, where Frank White, Christopher Walken’s imprisoned former drug dealer, returns to his old playground. His strategy for social (and personal) reform: Eliminate competing barons and their businesses, and funnel profits down the ranks while investing in a hospital in the South Bronx. A win-win situation, even if it’s perverse, right? Except we know better. When cops (including David Caruso and Wesley Snipes) are as morally flexible as criminals (like Walken’s partner “Larry” Fishburne is unhinged), none of those fringe figures will be any closer to a combat opportunity. As he remorselessly judges a jury, Walken is never bigger or colder: “I must have been gone too long because my emotions died. I have no regrets,” he states categorically. B-movie veteran Ferrara (Ms. 45, China Girl) revels in excessive textures, juxtaposing the guts and grime of the inner city with the glitzy glamor of White’s penthouse lifestyle: This gangster movie has a gangsta touchstone for 90s fashion. -hops. The King of New York’s position on this list could arguably be swapped with Ferrara’s even more caustic follow-up two years later, Bad Lieutenant, another dark fable about attempts at redemption that failed spectacularly; As exceptional as Harvey Keitel was in the 1992 film, the lead role was originally intended for Walken. -AS.

Junta Yamaguchi’s 71-minute no-budget sci-fi stunt, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, plays like watching a point-and-click game, Let’s Play. The pieces and characters around the cafe serve to affect (or inherit the effect of its inevitable usefulness?) a temporary robbery that some idiot (Kazunari Tosa) discovers. An overhead screen shows what will happen in two minutes, from the attitude of a bottom screen. Logic is not that important; It’s a different breed of mumblecore than Primer, and bigger for it. Full of lazy idiots looking to figure out the central, clever concept and full of even dumber concepts about what to do with it, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has shades of One Cut of the Dead: the fake structure in a single shot, the Little One cast brought the energy, the inept and almost burlesque sense of humor. But it’s not even as clever as that horror movie, where the garbage unfolds on you as the plot starts pushing and shoving its own premises. As their narrative seeds arrive, grow, and bear fruit in small but satisfying ways, it’s hard not to feel satisfied that this small group has made it, even if only in a small way, because you begin to feel like the future will have you. They have already been conquered by their DIY spirit. —Jacob Oller

The Lost City of Z through James Gray is an anti-era film. In the vein of The Immigrant, Gray’s excellent last film, Z is fascinated by his surroundings (this time we begin crossing the Atlantic in Blighty, 1906 to 1925) and is lavishly embellished with period details; however, the strangled social climate and physically claustrophobic spaces of their seemingly complicated Western society makes this environment entirely unappealing. Only once we reach the Amazon, untouched by Western hands, does the film relax and its seductive music and outdoor landscapes become attractive. There, in a land of undeniable tribes and wilderness, a guy like soldier and explorer Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) can free himself from the narrow-mindedness that inflamed Britain in the early 20th century. century. Darius Khondji’s cinematography not only complements Gray’s film, but deepens its meaning, enhancing the appeal of Fawcett’s jungle, green and mysterious, where the house in England is boring and monotonous. Each symbol is sumptuous and misty, always searching for a lost era where adventurers can still find corners of the Earth absolutely untouched. (Gray would possibly show little love for the Empire, but describes colonial exploration itself as a rogue adventure. ) The film is not very complex, but it is deep. Like Fawcett, it hurts; like his obsession, the jungle, envelops, casts a lasting spell. —Brogan Morris

One of the most brutal horror films ever released, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, based on infamous Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, feels like a verité art space built on the grainy physicality of its flat Texas setting. . Plus, he brought in the superlatively sinister Leatherface, the iconic giant man who wields a chainsaw and wears a mask made of enormous skin, whose strange sadism is only overshadowed by the arrival of his cannibalistic circle of relatives with whom he lives in a dilapidated town. space in the middle of the Texas desert, together dining on the meat that Leatherface and his brothers harvest, while Grandpa drinks blood and fashions furniture from the bones of the victims. Still, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may not be the bloodiest horror film ever made, but as an imaginative excavation of the subterranean anxieties of a post-Vietnam rural American population, it is unprecedented. Twisted, dark and charming at the same time, it comes in a wide variety of tones and techniques without ever wasting its unique intensity. (And there are few scenes in this era of horror with more disturbing sound design than the moment where Leatherface ambushes a guy with a single blow of a blunt hammer to the head before slamming the steel door on him. ) -Rachel Haas and Brent Ables

It’s hard to understand why Grave Encounters doesn’t have a greater reputation among horror fans, who largely seem aware of it but deride the uncovered footage film as derivative or cheesy. In our opinion, this is one of the most productive discovered footage offerings of the last decade and, in fact, one of the most legitimately terrifying, as well as the funniest when necessary. It’s structured as as productive a parody as possible of stupid ghost-hunting TV shows, a la the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, and imagines the satisfying effects of what might happen when one of those groups full of charlatans is subjected to torture. extreme. Evil place indeed. But Grave Encounters goes further than expected: you hear that premise and expect a frantic, broken camera running and screaming in the dark, but it offers so much more. The low-budget special effects work is some of the most productive sights in a discovered footage film, and the nature of the haunting is decidedly more trippy and ambitious than it first appears. We will continue to protect this film, even if we will have to avoid the less encouraged sequel. —Jim Vorel

The less you know about Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, the better. This is true for all types of slow-burn cinema, but Kusama slowly burns to perfection. It turns out that the key to slow burn success in narrative fiction lies in the narrative. than the slow process itself. In the case of The Invitation, it is a story of deep, intimate pain, the kind none of us expect to have to suffer in our own lives. The film taps into a nightmarish vein of genuine terror, a loss so profound and pervasive that it fundamentally alters who you are as a human being. This is where we start: with a grief exam. It is obviously more productive not to say where we are ending, but the invitation is not very notable either. by its finish or by the direction we are taking to get there. Instead, it stands out because of its foundation, because of the whole genuinely extensive narrative infrastructure upon which Kusama builds the film in the first place. —A. C.

Wheels on Meals is a very, very silly movie, but its action is incredible. Hong Kong trios fare no better than Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung; Hung’s role in this one is minimal. Instead, it all comes down to incredible fight scenes between Chan and Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, a real-life American kickboxing champion who serves as Chan’s ideal dance spouse in several high-octane fights. Their final showdown is not only a wonderful scene, it is perhaps the most productive one-on-one match of Chan’s career, with Benny proving that he is no match for Jackie. In fact, it’s The Jet who pulls off one of the coolest combat scene feats I’ve ever seen, the supposedly inadvertent (and unfeigned) “candle shot,” in which a missed kick with his foot generates such force that explodes the whole body. I lit candles in a candelabra a few feet away. The backbone of the film is the story of a kidnapped Spanish heiress, but her scenes are much more fascinating. —Jim Vorel

Premiering at Sundance in 2002, Secretary temporarily gained attention for its unconventional romantic comedy technique. Starring a steamy Maggie Gyllenhaal in the lead role, her transformation from a self-abusive masochist to an active protagonist in a sadomasochistic love story is disturbing. To allay any complaints about the obvious lack of certain words, the film appropriately transitions between M. Gray (a role designed for James Spader, which also raises questions about whether the Fifty Shades of Gray author’s only two works of fiction had been exposed to this and Twilight) have strength in the dates with Lee to take control later in the film. This point highlights the fact that it is the submissive who ultimately has the ultimate strength in sadomasochistic dating. Although suffering from some vagueness and perhaps naivety as to what healthy sadomasochistic dating is like, The Secretary is nevertheless perhaps the greatest vital informant on sadomasochistic dating before 50 Shades of Gray entered the popular consciousness. –Justine Smith

Aided by elemental forces, her incredibly rich boyfriend’s Silicon Valley home covered by the deafening crash of ocean waves, Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) gently climbs out of bed, through the generation of high-tech laboratory, escapes by the wall of his complex and in his sister’s (Harriet Dyer) car. We wonder: why would she run like that if she wasn’t being mistreated? Why would she have a secret compartment in her closet where she could just buy a travel bag? Then Cecilia’s boyfriend appears next to the car and knocks on the window. His name is Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and according to Cecilia, Adrian made his fortune as a leading figure in the optical industry (OPTICS!) by meeting the self-proclaimed “suburban girl” at a party a few years ago. . Leigh Whannell, never sophisticated with his themes, calls for his villain to be a genius in the “seeing” generation, in the way we see, to update James Whale’s 1933 Universal Monster film and the story of H. G. Wells, to Embrace the Virtual Generation as Our Number One Fashion Mindset. Surveillance cameras monitor every inch of Adrian’s house; Later, he will use an undeniable email to ruin Cecilia’s relationship with her sister. He has the money and resources to examine any facet of Cecilia’s life. His gaze is uninterrupted. Cecilia knows that Adrian will track her down, and The Invisible Man is gripped by the abject terror of such vulnerability. Whannell and cinematographer Stefan Duscio have a knack for letting their photographs linger in space, drawing our attention to where we and Cecilia know an invisible danger lurks. Of course, we are betrayed: the silhouetteless room corners and doorways are not empty, not negative, but they are laden with hypothesis, until they are, the invisible guy is never exactly where we expect him to be. We begin to doubt ourselves; We are punished through stress and feel that we deserve it. It’s absolutely wonderful, both a well-oiled genre device and another example of Elisabeth Moss’ Herculean prowess. —Dom Sinacola

Do you know what’s annoying? When you’re a middle-aged gay Jewish South Beach drag club owner (Armand, played by Robin Williams) and your son shows up and asks for your blessing to marry his friend, who’s the daughter of a neocon senator (Gene Hackman) who leads something called “The Moral Order Coalition. ” You need to help your son, but you don’t like being cooped up by him, and dinner ends up meaning that you and your spouse, Albert (Nathan Lane), are forced into a whole new point of tension in which you’re directly involved. . , a cultural attaché in Greece and married to the heterosexual one-night stand (Katherine, played by Christine Baranski) who led to the conception of her child. His wife is offended, the senator is under investigation by the tabloids, tensions are high and his servant Agador (Hank Azaria) has agreed to transform into a still-Greek named “Spartacus”, but let’s face it, the tensions They are maximum. everywhere. And that’s before your baby mama gets stuck in traffic and Albert sees his chance to play the drag role of a lifetime. Totally Shakespearean detours occur. Mike Nichols’ 1996 remake of Edouard Molinaro’s La Cage aux Folles wasn’t exactly scathing social commentary, but beneath its cheerful, star-like exterior, there are depths you can overlook while distracted by wackiness and madness. . Williams and Lane’s sequined antics. In fact, not only is it boisterous and witty, but, like many of Robin Williams’ film roles, The Birdcage has a serious side in which there is a genuine investigation into non-public identity, and into hypocrisy, acceptance, snobbery and, above all, everyone’s individual style. of “drag” (and hey, we all have one, even if we don’t express it by putting on false eyelashes and singing a Sondheim song) is brought out for a much-needed examination. —Amy Glynn

Silent animated shorts with dramatic orchestral music, commonly called Silly Symphonies, were all the rage in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the most notable example of this era of animation is Fantasia, produced by Walt Disney and released to great success. by critics in 1940. Robot Carnival is anime’s answer to this film, a collection of nine short films produced by nine of the most esteemed anime directors and character creators of their era. Of course, not every single short film shines as a pillar of canonical wonder, say Hiroyuki Kitazume’s “Starlight Angel” or Hidetoshi Omori’s “Deprive. ” But when the shorts shine, it’s a sight to behold. Koji Morimoto’s “Franken’s Gear” is a brilliant selection for an opener, while Manabu Ohashi’s “Cloud” is a melancholic gem that memorably experiments with the use of scratch animation. Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s “Strange Tales of Meiji Machine Culture: Westerner’s Invasion” is an imaginative take on the giant robot subgenre as ridiculous as its name, and Takashi Nakamura’s “Chicken Man and Red Neck” is the true anime analogue of the iconic “Night on ” of fantasy. Bald Mountain. Even if Robot Carnival wasn’t a wonderful collection, and it is, it would still be a notable timestamp of the moment when a constellation of talented young managers aligned to create a task born entirely from a love for the medium. —Toussaint Egan

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A near-perfect distillation of the thrills and laughs of the pulp and radio serials of yesteryear, Raiders of the Lost Ark established Harrison Ford’s credentials as a non-Wookiee leading man (with a little help from Blade Runner) once and for all. The film also begs the question: Have you experienced a more impressive and transformative five-year era for the industry than Spielberg and Lucas from 1977 to 1982?—Michael Burgin

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s pulp mystery is a wise and compelling take on the oldest film genre: mental horror. Part parable, part cautionary tale, Shutter Island is an expertly paced mystery that feels much shorter and more thought-provoking than its long running time suggests. Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio dressed to the nines as a landscape-devouring G-Man) is sent to the island of the same name, a maximum-security psychiatric ward and penitentiary off the coast of New England called Ashecliffe, to investigate a criminally insane. . disappearance of a prisoner. It becomes temporarily obvious that there is something special about this case, and a palpable sense of foreboding manifests itself in Scorsese’s beautiful, eerie long shots: brick buildings looming against a dark sky, prisoners’ screams echoing through the air. crumbling hallways of the facility and Daniels, a World War II veteran. Array is haunted by vivid, surreal memories of his late wife and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Scorsese’s ability to emotionally involve his audience in the journey provokes an almost voyeuristic thrill in watching DiCaprio (hungry for what would possibly be an Oscar nomination) break down, so that the fragments of his psyche can be carefully tended to. the plot. That’s why Scorsese has not only created an admirable mystery: he is about to make the genre his own. –Michael Saba

Adam McKay’s kaleidoscopic look at the months leading up to the 2007 currency crisis, The Big Short is an angry film. And rightly so, the number of callous flying characters found here is enough to make any rational person’s blood boil. So is undoubtedly a funny film, which tempers its biting tendencies by pointing out how notoriously surreal the ordeal was. McKay seeks to counter the inherently dry and inscrutable subject matter exposed with colorful cinematic style ships. The big bet probably wouldn’t be A Hit, but it’s a must-see movie. —Marc Rozeman

Regain consciousness! A romantic comedy with a really romantic sensibility (of the desperate kind), Moonstruck is an undeniably lovable comedy about chance, family, and what it means to “settle down. “Pragmatic widow Loretta (Cher) marries a nice, no-nonsense boy (Danny Aiello), but soon finds herself in a sticky situation with her passionate and mercurial younger brother, Ronny (Nicolas Cage). Cher’s comedic talent is not insignificant and the chemistry between her and Cage is excellent. The film has an incredible wealth of glorious performers (perhaps notably Olympia Dukakis, who plays Cher’s mother). Norman Jewison’s directorial sensibility may not qualify as “great art,” but it’s a very clever romantic comedy, with sizzling dialogue, tons of energy, and engaging, sympathetic characters—a hymn to the inevitable joys and sorrows of being worried about family. This film has wit, intelligence and soul. And a sure symbol of Cher, dressed as an opera, kicking a can of beer on a quiet Brooklyn street that one can be forgiven for calling “iconic. “—Amy Glynn

Your appreciation of The Arrival of Denis Villeneuve will depend on your enthusiasm for being led astray. It is the complete embodiment of Villeneuve’s cinematic technique and a wonderfully engrossing painting of science fiction, a two-hour sleight of hand that is most productively experienced with as little prior knowledge of its plot as possible. Basically, it’s about the day the extraterrestrial beings arrive on Earth and all the days that follow, which, to sum up humanity’s collective reaction in one word, are chaos. You can interact with Arrival through his writing, which is powerful, striking, moving, and above all, always compassionate. You can also interact with him to see the subtext of him, if you’re really looking for it. It’s a physically powerful yet sensitive work of art captured in stunning, calculated detail by cinematographer Bradford Young, and guided through stellar paintings by Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a brilliant linguist commissioned by the US military. to understand how to talk to our extraterrestrial visitors. Array Adams is a chameleonic actress of immense talent, and Arrival allows her to wear all of her other camouflages throughout the entire runtime. She sweats, cries, bleeds, fights and much more that cannot be said here without revealing the maximum impressive treasures of the film. She also portrays humanity with more dignity and grace than any other fashionable actor. If extraterrestrial beings land on Earth, perhaps we deserve to just send it to say hello. —Andy Crump

TubiTubi’s greatest strength lies in the documentary and vintage categories.

Blue Velvet represents everything that cinema can be: horrible, hilarious, a truth elevated to an inexplicable, almost unbearable paradise. It’s about storytelling as symbology, classic American genres like film noir and mystery separated with haunting aplomb. For example, take the dark side of this equation: Lynch invents an Oedipal circumstance out of Kyle MacLachlan’s innocent child and Dennis Hopper’s evil “dad,” with Isabella Rossellini’s sexy “mom” character as a female figure. untraceable and a soft presence that must be protected. As the lovable Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) is seduced deeper and deeper into the disgusting underworld of American domesticity (represented through a series of images of insects, the inhabitants of our creepy underworld), his gaze becomes luminous, and that of the psychopath Frank Booth (Hopper) is dark; in fact, Frank comments on this. Sure, he’s literally talking about lighting up the room, but he also blows helium and calls himself Van Gogh, so each and every gesture, each and every indirect word should be taken with a grain of salt. Or fertilizer. And so, in black and white, Lynch discovers blue: there is something deeply unhappy about the kind of normal things, each and every everyday thing that Lynch notices, and in Blue Velvet, that unhappiness is, like it or not. The closest movie in the world. The 1980s made the American dream come true. —D. S.

In terms of tone, Billy Wilder’s POW story is a true comedy-drama, set in a strange post-war zone where American moviegoers were probably content to laugh at the horrors experienced by the prisoners, remembering all the effects fatal consequences of imprisonment, which were notoriously even more disastrous for those who suffered from the Holocaust. It’s William Holden who makes the movie click and hum, portraying American aviator Sefton as a somewhat shady but intelligent profiteer who thinks that if he needs to spend time in a prisoner of war camp, he might as well be an entrepreneurial bigshot while he’s at it. . in it, living as comfortably as possible. Compared to a film like The Great Escape, which would later tell a story that recalls many of the same tropes but without the crazy sense of humor, Stalag 17 is an escape story and a gentle mystery, centering on the identity of the German informant. who sabotages any and all attempts by the Americans to escape the camp and challenge the Germans. With a colorful cast of characters and good-natured humor, Stalag 17 takes a horror premise and exploits it for bigger laughs than one could imagine. —Jim Vorel

George C. Scott tempers his herbal irascibility to play a melancholic songwriter mourning the loss of his recently deceased wife and daughter in Peter Medak’s amalgamation of a haunted house movie and a superhero mystery. Dubbed one of the scariest films of all time thanks to Martin Scorsese, The Changeling spreads terror in spades, with Medak banking on the growing concern for the unknown with the precision of a horror master. (In fact, it’s surprising that Medak has never been close to the genre before. ) In an old mansion also occupied by the restless spirit of a child, Scott’s John Russell delves to uncover the story of an institutional man and the force monstrously wielded in pursuit of monetary gain. The Changeling would possibly be a boast for an effortlessly magnetic veteran, but it is also a mysterious mystery that captivates and frightens at the same time. What begins as another haunted space story ends as an observation on American history: a country built not only on hard work, but also on blood and not at all times. heroic sacrifices. —Brogan Morris

Do you know what’s annoying? When you’re a middle-aged gay Jewish South Beach drag club owner (Armand, played by Robin Williams) and your son shows up and asks for your blessing to marry his friend, who’s the daughter of a neocon senator (Gene Hackman) who leads something called “The Moral Order Coalition. ” You need to help your son, but you don’t like being cooped up by him, and dinner ends up meaning that you and your spouse, Albert (Nathan Lane), are forced into a whole new point of tension in which you’re directly involved. . , a cultural attaché in Greece and married to the heterosexual one-night stand (Katherine, played by Christine Baranski) who led to the conception of her child. His wife is offended, the senator is under investigation by the tabloids, tensions are high and his servant Agador (Hank Azaria) has agreed to transform into a still-Greek named “Spartacus”, but let’s face it, the tensions They are maximum. everywhere. And that’s before your baby mama gets stuck in traffic and Albert sees his chance to play the drag role of a lifetime. Totally Shakespearean detours occur. Mike Nichols’ 1996 remake of Edouard Molinaro’s La Cage aux Folles wasn’t exactly scathing social commentary, but beneath its cheerful, star-like exterior, there are depths you can overlook while distracted by wackiness and madness. . Williams and Lane’s sequined antics. In fact, not only is it boisterous and witty, but, as with many of Robin Williams’ film roles, The Birdcage has a serious streak in which there is a genuine investigation into non-public identity and hypocrisy. , acceptance, snobbery and, Above all, the individual style of each one. of “drag” (and hey, we all have one, even if we don’t express it by putting on false eyelashes and singing a Sondheim song) is brought out for a much-needed examination. —Amy Glynn

Each William Castle movie has its own country charms, but House on Haunted Hill is the boy’s masterpiece. It has it all: Vincent Price at his craziest of things, a big, creepy house, a mystery, and a walking skeleton that isn’t scary. This time Castle called the device “Emergo,” and it was a plastic skeleton on a pulley flying over the audience; it’s not the most creative, but it’s brazen enough that only Castle stooped so much. To me, it’s the epitome of the 1950s horror movie, even if it makes it to the end of the decade. It’s completely tame by today’s standards, but it features funny, over-the-top performances, a bit of witty dialogue, and a big helping of cheese. I can watch this over and over again and never get tired of it. It’s like a prepared meal of terror. The colored edition is even more fun, replacing the static black-and-white original with an unrealistic palette of color-coded characters that will remind you of the cast of Clue. —Jim Vorel

Carnival of Souls is a film in the vein of Night of the Hunter: artistically ambitious, directed by a first-time director, but largely overlooked from its initial release to its rediscovery years later. Admittedly, it’s not Night del Cazador’s masterpiece, but it’s a scary, effective, and impressive little story about demons, guilt, and restless spirits. The story follows a woman (Candace Hilligoss) who flees from her afterlife and is haunted by visions of a pale-faced man, superbly filmed (and performed) by director Herk Harvey. As it probably begins to fade and disappear, the nature of its very truth is questioned. Carnival of Souls is an old mind horror on a shoestring budget, and has since been cited as an influence. in the feverish and dreamlike visions of administrators such as David Lynch. To me, it felt like an episode of a long Twilight Zone movie, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Rod Serling would certainly have been a fan. Jim Vorel

John Ford, embodiment of the American ideal; favorite institutional director of hardcore cinephiles, casual cinephiles, and old-school auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein) doesn’t respond too subconsciously to the iconography of Abraham Lincoln (interpreted through Henry Fonda as if Lincoln had been the most compelling union organizer). of all times. Instead, Ford studies Lincoln’s ethical courage from a functional perspective: how can someone become a beloved member of a community? How does a sense of internal logic shape the crucible of justice? Which cake was better, the apple one or anyone else’s? In Ford’s film, which follows the lines of a biopic and a type of text for a real crime trial, Fonda’s Lincoln occupies and describes either of the two frames, serving as the literal centerpiece of a courtroom drama at the same time. It defines how the many personalities of a booming Illinois town combine to make the decision on the right path to follow. An early scene, in which Lincoln decides the fate of a dispute between a farmer and a tenant, with both men seeking legal advice from the young lawyer Mr. Lincoln orbiting Lincoln’s office, cinematographers Bert Glennon and Arthur C . Miller hold the camera. anchored to Lincoln’s office. long legs, which Fonda holds throughout the film, flopping over a desk, chairs, and various poles. It’s as if the filmmakers know that Lincoln’s presence—physically, but also more than physically—defines the area in which the president will sit in the long run. The crux of the question of one and either of the two and either of the two and either of the two, of the ethical conflict of either of the two and either of the two and either of the two and either of the two, revolves around to the human body. Criterion’s HD motion transforms those painstakingly blocked scenes into sumptuous field intensity, showing any one and any one and any one and any one and any inch of any and any one and any one and any one and any one and any one and any one and any one and any inch of any and any one and any one and any one and any one and any one and any one and any one and any extends It’s impressive stuff, even if the film ends with apprehension about the kind of larger-than-life other people we’re looking for – with global politics as transparent and shifting as it is and history as fungible as it is – re-evaluating today. Matrix—Dom Sinacola

There are few documentaries that keep the cameras recording while history is being written. But director Laura Poitras found herself in the midst of a memorable era in making Citizenfour, which takes us into the scenes in which NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden works with (among others) journalist Glenn Greenwald to expose the organization’s systematic surveillance to ordinary Americans. From the first awkward encounters in a Hong Kong hotel room to the following fallout around the world, Citizenfour has the momentum of a thriller, humanizing its subjects in such a way that we see uncertainty and anxiety pass through them, as well as guts. and indignation. Tim Grierson

Another example where the term “vampire” is questionable, these debut paintings by Canadian framed horror master David Cronenberg nevertheless offer a valuable and captivating (not to mention clearly crude) interpretation of the typical vampire tale. Rather than emerging as some kind of evil mystical force, Rabid’s vampires are the result of a biological mutation caused when a young woman crashes her motorcycle and develops a phallic stinger in her armpit. The intrusion then develops a bloodlust, spreading a vampiric disease that turns inflamed people into rabid animals. Like most productive horror filmmakers, Cronenberg filters this admittedly absurd premise through a private lens, highlighting a society engulfed in paranoia and frenzy after the so-called “liberation” of the 1960s. And although the film is loaded with a sporadically undercooked script and stilted acting by famous porn star Marilyn Chambers, it remains a valuable insight into a master’s long-term brain. —Mark Rozeman

Tokyo Story can simply be described as a film about regrets. It could also be described as a film about disappointment, or about how families temporarily fall apart, or about modernity’s utter indifference to ancient customs, traditions, and practices. But maybe save some time and a few words matter and describe it as a slice-of-life movie, orchestrated by one of cinema’s most respected masters, Yasujiro Ozu, a director who has spent his career making exquisitely calibrated but deceptively simple films. You don’t have to be an insufferable film buff to enjoy an Ozu film, especially Tokyo Story, arguably his most accessible, although it helps; This makes him a wonderful beginner filmmaker for anyone looking to develop his appreciation for cinema, and Tokyo Story is his beginner film. His aesthetic is impeccable, his performances moving and powerful, but the most striking quality that Ozu brings to his story of intergenerational division is the passage of time, hours, days, weeks, months, years, all painstakingly articulated in more than two hours of duration. . Array In the end, you will also feel like you have lived a life with the Hirayama clan. —Andy Crump

A dark drama from writer-director Lynne Ramsay, We Need to Talk About Kevin is an interesting examination of a sociopath, a family, and the former’s effect on the latter. Although Ezra Miller must show off his extraterrestrial talents as a defiant child, the richest detail of the film is the evolution of dating between his parents (John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton). Reilly and Swinton build a broken window in a marriage, with a (possibly evil) stone thrown through it. Captivating and unsettling, Ramsay’s effort (co-written by Rory Stewart Kinnear) addresses a confusing but central parental concern through its terrible specificity: What if I mess up about this?—Jacob Oller

In the undisputed king of movies for those heading into the real world, a highly successful recent high school graduate (Dustin Hoffman) panics at the prospect of his future and falls into an affair with his business partner’s much older wife. of the company. her father (Anne Bancroft). ). He helped shape a generation long embalmed throughout history, but the feeling of yearning for choice hasn’t aged. —Jeffrey Bloomer

François Truffaut is notoriously and wrongly credited with declaring, “There is no such thing as an anti-war film. “He said he simply couldn’t make a war film about Algiers on the grounds that “to show something is to ennoble it. “He also said that “every film about war ends up being pro-war. “If this is true, then perhaps Paths of Glory is the film that comes closest to generating an anti-war statement, although Stanley Kubrick’s work on World War I is the most productive depicted as dismissive of war: you can feel Kubrick’s contempt for his antagonists. Seething behind the camera, his righteous indignation at the shameless cowardice of the cowardly old men who send others to die on the battlefield at their request. Perhaps Paths of Glory is rarely very anti-war, but pro-human, a film that celebrates true dignity and honor by pointing out that you don’t need to rush to face inevitable death to be brave. —Andy Crump

On the verge of becoming an octogenarian, Kurosawa made the decision to turn inward to recount his many life experiences, using the various dreams he remembered throughout his life as a way of speaking about his way of seeing the bigger picture. An anthology of 8 dreams, divided. In 8 short films very different in style, tone and even genre, they come together magnificently thanks to the surprising cinematography of Takao Saito and Shôji Ueda and the often charming and often disturbing that surrounds each image. Each segment is memorable in its own right, but the one that stands out is a terrifying nightmare in which a World War II veteran will have to confront his dead squad and why he survived while the others perished. The good fortune of this section in filling the audience with concern perhaps implies that a certain Kurosawa might have found more good fortune in horror if he had been interested. –Oktay Ege Kozak

A melodrama set in a convent in British-ruled Himalayan India, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starring Deborah Kerr and David Farrar, Black Narcissus offers a recipe for a variety of. . . strangeness. And he’s a charming kind of weirdness. Five nuns are sent to discover a convent, a school and a hospital in an old harem. It’s hard to adjust to the new environment, and the agent that’s there to help them do that is, well, kind of tempting. Of course, there are tragic consequences. The story is quite compelling, but what strikes me about this film is its otherworldly visual sensibility. Powell’s camera work is fascinating and the film is infused with oversaturated colors, emphasizing the exoticism and confusion faced by the nuns, sending the viewer to another dimension. —Amy Glynn

In this era of acclaimed television series and film trilogies, Erich von Stroheim may have been a king. But in his day, he had a knack for making films longer than his bosses imagined. So instead of being split up and broadcast, Overnights, his eight hours of Greed were cut down to 140 minutes. Those who have noted von Stroheim’s editing have said it is a groundbreaking work, but even in its abbreviated form, the genius shines through. Deep focus cinematography captures detailed artistry. direction and, most memorably, allows for a scene in which a funeral procession passes through a window while a wedding takes place in the foreground. But the biggest moment is the notable desolate desert sequence, in which the price of all the cash the Search characters pay no longer makes sense. – Jeremy Mathews

The less you know about Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, the better. This is true of slow burn cinema of all kinds, but Kusama shoots slow to perfection. It turns out that the key to successful narrative fiction lies in the narrative rather than the slowness itself. In the case of The Invitation, it’s a story of deep, intimate heartbreak, the kind none of us expect to have to suffer in our own lives. The film taps into a nightmarish vein of genuine horror, of loss so profound and pervasive that it fundamentally alters who you are as a human being. This is where we begin: with an examination of grief. It stands out because of its foundation, because of the whole genuinely extensive narrative infrastructure upon which Kusama builds the film in the first place. The film begins in earnest when Will (Logan Marshall-Green in fine form) arrives at a dinner party his ex-wife, Eden (Tammy Blanchard), is hosting at what was once his home. He brought along his girlfriend, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi). But it’s undeniable that something is wrong with Eden, and since Will is the lens through which Kusama’s audience interacts with the film, we can’t say what that is. There’s a lot more to say about The Invitation, especially its climax, where everything is revealed and we see Will’s fears and Eden’s religious claims for what they are. Until then, it will remain in suspense, but for Kusama, nerves and emotions are sensations worth savoring. It’s obviously more productive not to say where we end up, but The Invitation stands out neither for its ending nor for the direction we take to get there. Instead, it’s notable for its foundation, for the whole genuinely sprawling narrative infrastructure upon which Kusama builds the film in the first place. —Andy Crump

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Steamboat Bill, Jr. ‘s climactic Cyclone series, which is a wonderful action and a wonderful comedy, alone would give the film a respected position in the canon of wonderful silent films of all time. The iconic take on the façade of a space falling on Keaton is just one of the many wonderful moments in this fluid and impactful series. But Steamboat Bill, Jr. also shows some of Keaton’s glorious intimacy as an actor, such as a scene in which his father tries to get him a more manly hat or a painfully hilarious attempt to simulate an escape shot. —Jérémy Mathews

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In the late 1920s, the excitement was palpable as brilliant filmmakers strove to unleash the medium’s full potential. Dawn was born from this ambition, when Fox brought German genius F. W. Murnau to Hollywood, where he and his camera crew used every single one of them. resource at his disposal to create some of the most striking celluloid images ever made. Telling the story of a husband who loses himself and then tries to redeem himself, Murnau’s camera soars over rural fields, entangled in the hustle and bustle of the city and gazes desperately at a lake in the middle of a storm, while his actors, George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor radiate sincerity. —Jeremy Mathews

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Stanley Kubrick, 24, who he later described as “an exercise in clumsy amateur cinema,” Fear and Desire proves that the filmmaker is a clear judgment on his own work. That’s not to say there’s nothing I like about it. An hour-long war film, a lukewarm and meandering critique of “police action” in Korea, but that all you have to love are immature interests hired through a filmmaker who is still learning the trade. The purple prose of future Pulitzer Prize winner Howard Sackler fills both discussion and voice-over with tense metaphors and summary intellectualization, and the actors, in general, react to the flattened curtains by overacting. Frank Silvera, who would appear in Kubrick’s much larger sequel, Killer’s Kiss, discovers that the ultimate humanity is in the quartet of infantrymen who crashed through enemy lines and turns out to be more sinister and brusque than the rest. His sensible technique with the workers, which contrasts with the minaudatory mania of Paul Mazursky (the filmmaker of Bob

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Buster Keaton was never one to make grandiose social comments, but he enjoyed observing absurd human behavior. So he had no difficulty making Our Hospitality, the story of a generations-long family feud that clashes with a code of Southern hospitality. This code says that you can’t kill someone when he’s a guest in your space, so when Keaton’s character unknowingly stumbles into the space of his enemy’s circle of kin, he can’t get out. Keaton spends a clever time looking to escape, with the interior of the space serving as his safe zone in case something goes wrong. The funniest component is the dinner prayer, where everyone looks at everyone else instead of actually praying. A river chase sequence, adding a fatal waterfall trick, brings things to their ultimate climax. And I haven’t even talked about Stephenson’s use of the rocket in the first act, the traditionally precise and ridiculously meaningless exercise that transports our hero from New York. This film also entered the public domain on January 1. —Jeremy Mathews

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You can just create a classic silent comedy film with highlights from Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. , and chances are no one will rightly complain. In the 91 years since Keaton wrote his love letter to the cinema, no one has tested the courtship between the public and the big screen better. Keaton plays a movie projectionist and aspiring detective who dreams of stepping onto a movie screen and becoming an artistic hero: the best metaphor for the appeal of movies. Keaton plays with the truth thanks to virtuoso special effects, but he also captures real stunts in single takes. (He broke his neck in one scene and still finished the take. ) He boldly subverts the structure: the clash is resolved halfway through the film without the hero’s help. He brings visual poetry to burlesque with rhyming jokes. The laughs come from failure in the genuine world and from possibility in the world of fantasy cinema, but the mechanisms are parallel. And he combines it all in an adventure that continues to evolve into greater hilarity. —Jeremy Mathews

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When U. S. spies borrow his locomotive and kidnap his girlfriend, a Southern railroad engineer (“The Big Stone Face,” Buster Keaton) is forced to chase his two beloved through enemy lines. Even if some Charlie Chaplin films make it difficult, The General is probably the most productive silent comedy ever made, if not the most productive comedy ever made. At the height of Buster Keaton’s remarkable career, the film was not good luck for critics or the box office after its release, but it has aged enormously. It’s a story show that combines romance, adventure, action (chases, fires, explosions), and comedy in a quiet, homogeneous masterpiece. —David Roark

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Do you know what’s annoying? When you’re a middle-aged gay Jewish South Beach drag club owner (Armand, played by Robin Williams) and your son shows up and asks for your blessing to marry his friend, who’s the daughter of a neocon senator (Gene Hackman) who leads something called “The Moral Order Coalition. ” You need to help your son, but you don’t like being cooped up by him, and dinner ends up meaning that you and your spouse, Albert (Nathan Lane), are forced into a whole new point of tension in which you’re directly involved. . , a cultural attaché in Greece and married to the heterosexual one-night stand (Katherine, played by Christine Baranski) who led to the conception of her child. His wife is offended, the senator is under investigation by the tabloids, tensions are high and his servant Agador (Hank Azaria) has agreed to transform into a still-Greek named “Spartacus”, but let’s face it, the tensions They are maximum. everywhere. And that’s before your baby mama gets stuck in traffic and Albert sees his chance to play the drag role of a lifetime. Totally Shakespearean detours occur. Mike Nichols’ 1996 remake of Edouard Molinaro’s La Cage aux Folles wasn’t exactly scathing social commentary, but beneath its cheerful, star-like exterior, there are depths you can overlook while distracted by wackiness and madness. . Williams and Lane’s sequined antics. In fact, not only is it boisterous and witty, but, as with many of Robin Williams’ film roles, The Birdcage has a serious streak in which there is a genuine investigation into non-public identity and hypocrisy. , acceptance, snobbery and, Above all, the individual style of each one. of “drag” (and hey, we all have one, even if we don’t express it by putting on false eyelashes and singing a Sondheim song) is brought out for a much-needed examination. —Amy Glynn

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F. W. Murnau’s sublime riff on Dracula has been a component of the genre for so long that justifying its position on this list turns out to be a waste of time. Magnificent in its strange, austere atmosphere and visual eccentricities, the film invented much of the fashionable vampire. culture as we know it. This is a must-see once a year, most rewarding. —Sean Gandert

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Stanley Kubrick is one of the few filmmakers in the history of the medium who has several masterpieces to his credits; however, among those masterpieces, it is Barry Lyndon who is the most masterful and the least appreciated. Barry Lyndon embodies everything we can imagine about Kubrick. Identify today as “Kubrickian”: his rigorous construction, his attention to detail, his sheer ambition, while providing the polite argument that history does not give him adequate credit for his acting talent. This is possibly because most of Kubrick’s other films rely not so much on wonderful performances as on proper skill and screenwriting (although that’s not a hope-off argument; see The Shining, for example). Barry Lyndon is an acting scene, charmingly, intentionally, and impeccably constructed for the sake of Kubrick’s cast: it’s a film designed to cede the spotlight to stars Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, and others, while making sure they paint in the most charming setting possible. . –Andy Crump

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The Navigator acts as an ocean liner for both of them and for the joke. Keaton plays a rich and distraught young man who finds himself stranded on a giant boat adrift with the rich and distraught young woman who has rejected him as her only company. These two spoiled upper-class idiots don’t know how to open cans, let alone ship a shipment, and they’ll have to hilariously improvise to regain control. The scene in which the two characters suspect that there is someone else on the ship, but they do not locate anyone. Otherwise, it plays out in classic Keaton style: with perfectly timed wide shots that make it more plausible that the two will continue to miss each other. The most productive time can be a scary evening where the characters give them goosebumps. . —Jeremy Mathews

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There are Buster Keaton two-reelers with more ambitious special effects, more epic stunts, and more elaborate chase scenes, but in my experience, none generate more laughs than The Scarecrow. The film never stops to catch its breath as it moves from place to place, creating and rewarding new laughs. The best moments come with an artfully designed one-room house, an appearance by the wonderful dog Luke, and some truly divine encounters between Keaton, Joe Roberts, and Keaton’s father, Joe. —Jérémy Mathews

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Bernie is about both the city of Carthage, Texas, and its famous resident Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the town’s gravedigger and prime suspect in the murder of one of its most despised citizens, Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine). Unlike Nugent, everyone visibly enjoys Bernie. When he wasn’t helping direct the best musical in school, he taught Sunday school. Like a well-interpreted mystery, Linklater’s funny dark (and true) story is interspersed with tantalizing interviews with the community’s population. East Texas is used by other people to play the roles, a device that moves a maximum productive balance in the face of the drama that leads to Bernie’s fatal encounter with a widow’s dog. The comedy is sharp, with some of the film’s productive peak lines coming from those city dwellers. —Tim Basham

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Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film and also his last silent film, since Blackmail made in both formats. While the sound edit is known for Hitchcock’s experiments with the new generation (most notably a scene emphasizing the word “knife”), the silent edit is much softer. And Donald Calthrop’s portrayal of the blackmailer is even more terrifying, as only his face and his body language do the job. —Jérémy Mathews

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Watch the anthropomorphized arrogance: Arnold Schwarzenegger, 28, vying for his sixth Mr. Olympia title, waxes effortlessly poetic about his overall excellence, his litanies about the similarities between orgasm and weightlifting, and/or that eating between bouts of weight lifting and/. or flirting with women, he can wrap his biceps like little meat burritos. He is the embodiment of the human form and almost tragically inhuman, so physically productive that his body is unattainable and his reputation as a weightlifting prodigy is one of a kind. And yet, in the other corner, a wiry young Lou Ferrigno prepares his equally giant body to usurp Arnold’s title, but without the magnanimous swagger and arrogance that the long-time Hollywood icon doesn’t attempt. disguise. Schwarzenegger understands that weightlifting is a mind game (like any sport), underpinned by a healthy sense of vanity and privilege, and managers Fiore and Butler exploit Arnold’s afterlife enough to guess where he inherited such egocentrism. . He contrasts this attitude with Ferrigno’s almost morbid shyness, and Pumping Iron becomes a desirable vision of the kind of sociopathy required of living gods. —Dom Sinacola

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Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film and one of his greatest achievements, The Kid tells the story of an abandoned boy and the life he builds with The Little Tramp. Chaplin battled strong opposition from studios to create a film more serious than his previous work. However, The Kid features as much slapstick humor as his previous shorts, but set in a larger, more dramatic context. —Wyndham Wyeth

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There’s no genuine desire to delve into the influence of George Romero’s first zombie film on the genre and horror itself: it’s one of the most important horror films ever made, and also one of the most important independent films. The question is more precisely: “how are things going today?” » and the answer is “good”. Unlike Dawn of the Dead (not on Shudder), Night is pretty placid most of the time. The conventions of the tale are old and the black-and-white cinematography still looks excellent, but some performances are downright irritating, particularly that of Judith O’Dea as Barbara. However, Duane Jones more than makes up for this by banking on the heroic Ben, in a very self-contained and parochial story: just a small organization of other people in a house, with no genuine insight into the world at large. This is a must-see horror film for any student of the genre, which is easy considering the film remains in the public domain. But in terms of entertainment value, Romero would far surpass the genre in his next endeavors. Also recommended: The 1990 remake of this film by Tom Savini, unfairly ridiculed just for being faithful to its source. —Jim Vorel

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It is difficult to overstate the enormous influence that Ghost in the Shell exerts not only on the cultural and aesthetic evolution of Japanese animation, but also on the shaping of science fiction cinema as a whole in the 21st century. Adapted from Masamune Shirow’s original 1989 manga, the film is set in the mid-21st century, a world populated by cyborgs with synthetic body prosthetics, in the fictional Japanese city of Niihama. Ghost in the Shell follows the story of Major Motoko Kusanagi, commander of a national special operations task force known as Public Security Section 9, who begins to question the nature of her own humanity surrounded by a synthetic world. When Motoko and her team are tasked with capturing the mysterious Puppet Master, an elusive hacker and one of the most damaging criminals on the planet, they set out to track down a series of crimes perpetrated through the Puppet Master’s unwitting pawns. possible unrelated men. The occasions merge into a trend that boils down to a single person: the Major himself. Everything about Ghost in the Shell oozes refinement and depth, from the dilapidated markets and claustrophobic hallways buoyed by the image of Kowloon Walled City, to the sound design, dazzling in Kenji Kawai’s mournful score, to the undeniable punch of every bullet fired across the screen. Oshii took Shirow’s origin curtain and arguably surpassed it, transforming an already heady sci-fi action drama into a proto-Kurzweilian fable about the dawn of synthetic intelligence. Ghost in the Shell is more than a cornerstone of cyberpunk fiction, it’s a story about what it means to create yourself in the virtual age, a time in which the concept of fact is as fickle as the web is vast and infinite. . —Toussaint Egan

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Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend proved notoriously difficult to adapt while keeping its concepts intact, however, compared to the later edition of Omega Man or the 2007 edition of I Am Legend starring Will Smith, it is probably the most productive global edition in history. Some have called it Vincent Price’s most productive film, with wonderful all-gothic settings set in Rome, where the last huge man on Earth wages a nightly war against the “infected,” who have assumed the characteristics of ancient vampires. It doesn’t devote itself entirely to the protagonist/antagonist inversion of the source material, but it does use Price’s magnetic presence on screen and his ability to monologue. No one watches a Vincent Price movie and thinks, “I wish there were less Vincent Price there,” and The Last Man on Earth offers a spectacle for the actor at the peak of his powers. Night of the Living Dead director George Romero said that without The Last Man on Earth, the trendy zombie would never have been conceived. —Jim Vorel

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How many times can they capture, release, and recapture Randolph Scott? In Buchanan Rides Alone, the answer turns out to be “as many times as it takes to complete 80 minutes. ” Adapting Buchanan from Jonas Ward’s The Name, this daring western sees the shredded oak of one man (Scott) resist the ax blows of a corrupt, family-oriented town. Agry and his extended eponymous family show no emotion toward the strong, silent Texan, and only become more violent when he intervenes to protect Juan De La Vega (Manuel Rojas), a Mexican who takes revenge on a drunken young Agry for raping him. to her sister. No intelligent act goes unpunished, especially when the sheriff, the hotel manager and the judge are also named Agry. Peter Whitney (as the hotel manager) is the dumbest of the group, suffering from such boisterous physical functionality that it complements, and even fuels, Scott’s inflexible morality. This touch of humor helps keep the repetitive plot alive (remember, they’re constantly imprisoned), and his sense of duty to the greedy little tyrants is refreshing. L. Q. Jones’ henchman steals some scenes while a fellow Texan gets trapped under Scott’s gravitational pull. A handful of too-tight close-ups and a final showdown over wallets full of cash allow Boetticher to deploy his bag of economical cinematic tricks, all in the service of a strangely endearing story of honorable outsiders as opposed to gluttonous insiders. smell

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Without words, The Red Turtle is an attempt to locate new tactics to express old truths, or new old tactics, tactics that seem new but are not. There is a word in The Red Turtle, but its isolation among the noisy non-language of the rest of the film: the omnipresent somnambulant waves; the wildlife of the film’s small “deserted” island; Laurent Perez del Mar’s music, adapted to the herbal rhythm of the global that emerges in the animated film through Michaël Dudok de Wit, leads us to wonder if it is actually a word. “Hey!” our unnamed main character shouts, differently following a lifetime of subverbal communication, but he speaks it in such a way amid Witt’s painstakingly constructed soundscape that it’s not so unlikely that the director will convince you that there are no words in his film. . Perhaps a man of Dutch and British descent, de Wit finds language to be a barrier between the audience and the emotional breadth of his (admittedly quite archetypal) story, further encouraged by the French-Japanese inversion of the film’s wife and by the fact that he Absolutely abandons the dialogue. the fact that if there is a feature film medium that is most forgiving of the lack of words, it is animation. Consider this undeniable example of the film’s power: Just as The Red Turtle can make you doubt whether a word you’ve known your entire life is really that word, it also leaves you with a lot of doubt. I wonder: if all animated films could be so charming, so careful, so dazzling, the paintings of a user who gave everything for a single story because he might never get the chance to do so again. —D. S.

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Pretty much predating all the tropes you’d expect from a genre called keeping the audience in suspense, The Lady Vanishes is hilarious and a by-the-numbers introduction to how to create a perfect quasi-thriller. Far from being Hitchcock’s first foray into suspense, the film follows a soon-to-be-married woman, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), who becomes embroiled in the mysterious cases surrounding the disappearance of the titular lady aboard an exercise crowded. No shot of the film is superfluous, no discussion is obligatory; Even the secondary characters, who play only a minimal role beyond complicating Iris’ search for the truth, are essential to creating the tension necessary to make the disappearance of said lady plausible. . The film is a testament to how, as early as 1938, Hitchcock stripped each of his films down to its most empirical elements, in order to create some of the most important genre pictures of the 1950s. —Dom Sinacola

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Apparently, at one point in his burgeoning cult following, director Richard Kelly admitted that even he didn’t fully understand what was going on in Donnie Darko, going so far as to release a “director’s cut” in 2005 aimed at clarifying a component of the film. problem. The heaviest thing in cinema. Yet another example of a low-budget movie squeezed for every penny, Kelly’s first film combines love, weird science, jet engines, superhero mythology, wormholes, armchair philosophy, giant rabbits, and Patrick Swayze (no less). than like a child molester). ) in a movie. It should be celebrated more for its audacity than for its coherence. It also helps that Jake Gyllenhaal leads a stellar and absolutely hilarious cast. In Donnie Darko the only transparent thing is Kelly’s attitude: cinema is fundamentally the art of manifesting the incredible, of doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. —Christian Becker

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In what might be Charlie Kaufman’s most productive story, boy meets girl, unaware that they may be experiencing an eternal, doomed recurrence. A brain-wiped company allows its consumers to erase decisions about other people or occasions from their memories. It turns out that Joel (a repressed Jim Carrey) and Clementine (a colorful Kate Winslet) have already done it. Technology is a wonderful enabler and, perhaps, destroyer of secrets, unless the sci-fi aspect of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is just an adjunct to the basic dynamics of dating. Devoid of fantasy, the film’s theme is not a Luddite warning, but rather an undeniable melancholy of human dating. That’s how it’s always been. We are very smart when it comes to failing each other. . . and ourselves. There’s nothing more damning than this statement in Eternal Sunshine, a film about watching and crying over a broken-down fantasy circus. It immerses us in Joel’s mind, Gondry’s camera effects and the almost experimental editing immerse us in the increasingly tragic procedure of Clementine’s elimination. When I first saw this movie in the theater in 2004, I swore I would never do what Joel does to cure himself, however, I have lived a bound life since then and now I am not obligated. I can say the same. . I started deleting phone numbers and photos on Facebook, spent about a month separating myself carefully; I’m rarely afraid to even glance at my feed. Regardless of the social environment, humans will use everything they can to relieve pain, especially emotional pain. But we rarely desire what we wish to get rid of; There is no achievement without vulnerability, without threat and, inevitably, without harm. The final shot of Eternal Sunshine lingers in my memory, looping throughout: Joel and Clementine, tripping while playing away from the camera, on a snowy Montauk beach. This comes off as an extrapolation of the final shot of 400 Moves: “Stuck in stasis” has become “stuck in rehearsal. ” And yet, in this photo there is acceptance, even hope. There are no flawless minds, but perhaps some can still shine. —Chad Betz

In a career of impeccable films, Paprika is arguably Kon’s greatest achievement. Adapted from the 1993 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui (whose other notable novel, The Girl Who Gone Time, would form the basis of Mamoru Hosoda’s 2006 film of the same name), Kon couldn’t have asked for more source material adapted to its thematic idiosyncrasy. as director. Paprika follows the story of Atsuko Chiba, a psychiatrist who uses a revolutionary psychotherapeutic remedy involving the DC Mini, a device that allows the user to record and play back their dreams in a shared simulation. By day, Atsuko maintains a ruthlessly unforgiving exterior, but by night, she works as the film’s main protagonist: a vivacious dream detective who consults with clients on her own terms. When a pair of DC Minis are stolen and unleashed on the world, causing an avalanche of havoc that manifests the collective subconscious into the waking world, it’s up to Paprika and her colleagues to save the day. Summing up Kon’s ten-year career as a director, Paprika is a cinematic trompe-l’oeil of psychedelic colors and exquisite animation. Kon’s transitions are memorable and mind-blowing, the allusions to his immense palate of cinematic influences are spot-on, and his appeal to the multiplicity of the human experience is as thoughtful and moving as ever. Unfortunately, Paprika turned out to be Kon’s best film, as he tragically died in 2010 from pancreatic cancer. One fact remains evident when looking at his life’s work: Satoshi Kon was and remains one of the greatest anime directors of his time. He will be greatly missed. –Toussaint Egan

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Whether an homage to the antics of the youth of the ’80s (with stalwarts like John Hughes and Cameron Crowe) or an attempt to take the genre to its blandest extremes, Heathers is a hilarious look at the festering core of the young girl’s identity. all sunglasses, cigarettes, prison bait and misunderstood kitsch. Like any teen soap opera, much of the film’s appeal lies in its flaunting of taste over substance (inventing entire talking, dressing, and behaving tactics for an impressionable generation raised on Hollywood tropes), but Heathers embraces its taste as an indispensable cornerstone. of cinema, seeing that even the most inflated melodrama can be sold through a well-maintained image. And some photographs of Heathers are indelible: J. D. (Christian Slater) brandishing a gun at school bullies in the dining room, or Veronica (Winona Ryder) passively lighting her cigarette with the flames licked by her ex-boyfriend’s explosion. It makes sense that Daniel Waters originally sought out Stanley Kubrick to direct his screenplay: Heathers is a filmmaker’s film (for young people). —Dom Sinacola

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