The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Director: Rober Wiene
1919

The film tells the story of the deranged Doctor Caligari and his faithful somnambulist Cesare and their connection to a string of murders in a German mountain village, Holstenwall. Caligari presents one of the earliest examples of a motion picture "frame story" in which the body of the plot is presented as a flashback, as told by Francis. Friends Alan and Francis visit a carnival in the village where they see Dr. Caligari and Cesare, who Caligari is displaying as an attraction.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the first modern Horror Film and it influence a number of contemporary productions.

A real classic!

Rashomon

Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura, Minoru Chiaki
1950

In ancient Japan, a woman is raped and her husband killed. RASHOMON is played out by giving us four stories with every story revealing different points of view. The question remains - just which version is the truth?

As each account is revealed, what seemed black and white turns to various hues of gray, leading to surprising--and confounding--relevations. A landmark of international cinema, Rashomon won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, bringing both Kurosawa--and Japanese film in general--to the attention of Western audiences. From the rain-soaked opening sequence to its moving conclusion, the film is a stunning examination of truth and human nature. The entire cast is pitch-perfect, with regular Kurosawa lead actors Mifune and Shimura giving typically outstanding performances. While critics and cinephiles debate over exactly how many masterpieces Kurosawa directed, Rashomon stands as one of the revered filmmaker's indisputably brilliant motion pictures. In fact, the film's influence is so pervasive that it has inspired everything from a high profile Hollywood remake (The Outrage starring Paul Newman) to numerous tributes in movies such as Courage Under Fire and The Usual Suspects.

Rashomon is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice.
It remains one of the truly great films of the 20th century.

This is "one of the most philosophical and briliant film of all time" - Arts Movies Reviews

Life of Brian

Directed by Terry Jones
1979

Casts: Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese

Life of Brian tells the story of a man (Brian) born in Bethlehem around 4 BC, hailed as a religious leader during his brief ministry in his 30s, and crucified by the Romans for his trouble.

Blissfully sacrilegious and completely irreverent, The Life of Brian was banned in a number of places upon its initial release. It is an intoxicating celebration of the bizarre, outlandish, and unthinkable. Or, simply put, it is Monty Python at their ridiculous best. It's subtle; it's anarchic; and it's possibly still banned in other countries. This is classic seamless comedy at its best. 10/10.

Dancer in the Dark

Directed by Lars von Trier
2000

Cast: Bjork,Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare, Cara Seymour, Joel Grey, Vincent Paterson, Vladica Kostic, Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier, Zeljko Ivanek

Masterpiece or masquerade? Lars von Trier's digicam musical split the critics in two when it debuted at Cannes in 2000. There were those who saw it as a cynical shock-opera from a manipulative charlatan, others wept openly at its scenes of raw emotion and heart-rending intensity. There is, however, no in-between. Dancer in the Dark is that rarest of creatures, a film that dares to push viewers to the limits of their feelings.

In her first and most probably last screen performance (she has foresworn acting after her bruising on-set rows with von Trier), brittle Icelandic chanteuse Björk plays Selma, a Czech immigrant living in a folksy American small town with her young son, Gene. Selma is going blind and so will Gene if she does not arrange an important operation for him. To cover the expense, Selma works every hour she can, cheating on her eye tests so she can keep working at the local factory long after her vision has become too unreliable to work safely. She sublets a house from a local cop, Bill (David Morse), and his wife, Linda (Cara Seymour). When nearly bankrupt Bill asks Selma for a loan, she refuses, but he later returns and steals the money, which she demands back in a furious confrontation. In the ensuing melee, Bill is fatally shot and Selma is arrested and put on trial. Will justice prevail?

Von Trier's passionate, provocative film runs all our emotional resources dry with suspense, giving us occasional flashes into Selma's gold heart and mind with superb song-and-dance numbers she conjures to banish the nightmare (Björk also wrote the score). At some two-and-a-half hours, it's not for lightweights, but anyone bored with today's smug, "ironic" cinema will relish this as an astonishing assault on the senses and a stark reminder of von Trier's uncompromising talent. --Damon Wise

Awards:
2000 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress
2000 Cannes International Film Festival Best Actress
2000 Cannes Film Festival Palme D'or
2000 Cannes International Film Festival Palme d'Or
2000 Cannes Film Festival Best Female Performance
2000 European Film Awards People's Choice Award: Best Actress
2000 European Film Academy Best European Actress
2000 European Film Awards Best European Actress
2000 European Film Awards People's Choice Award Best Director
2000 European Film Academy Best European Film
2000 European Film Awards Best European Film
2000 Jameson People's Choice Award Best European Director
2000 Jameson People's Choice Award Best European Actress
2000 Independent Spirit Award Best Foreign Film
2000 National Board of ReviewBest Musical Performance
2000 National Board of Review

8 1/2

Directed by Federico Fellini
1963

Casts: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée

Master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. Marcello Mastroianni delivers a brilliant performance as Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque."

It isn't possible to place `8 ½' in any simple category. It is a comedy and a tragedy, a satire and a celebration, a movie about love and about the lack of it, a movie about making art and a movie about living, an autobiography and the most challenging kind of fiction, a masterpiece of style and a movie that's really about something. It's not for everyone, but it should be, and it's quite possibly the single greatest movie one would have ever seen.

`8 ½' won an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival, and was one of the most influential and commercially successful European art movies of the 1960s.

11 out of 10!

Psycho

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
1960
Casts:
Anthony Perkins .... Norman Bates
Janet Leigh .... Marion Crane
Vera Miles .... Lila Crane
John Gavin .... Sam Loomis
Martin Balsam .... Detective Milton Arbogast
John McIntire .... Sheriff Al Chambers
Simon Oakland .... Dr. Fred Richmond
Vaughn Taylor .... George Lowery
Frank Albertson .... Tom Cassidy
Lurene Tuttle .... Eliza Chambers

Psycho is a suspense/horror film directed by auteur Alfred Hitchcock, from the screenplay by Joseph Stefano about a psychotic killer. The film shows the encounter between a secretary, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who is in hiding at a motel after embezzling from her employer, and the motel's owner, the lonely Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).

It initially received mixed reviews but outstanding box-office returns, prompting a re-review which was overwhelmingly positive and led to four Academy Award nominations. Regarded today as one of Hitchcock's best films and highly praised as a work of cinematic art by international critics, Psycho is also acclaimed as one of the most effective horror films. It was a genre defining film, and almost every scene is legendary, and many have been copied or parodied. The film spawned several sequels and a remake, which are generally seen as works of lesser quality.

"The Shower Scene" has been studied, discussed, and cited countless times in print and in film courses much with debate focusing on why it is so terrifying and how it was produced, including how it passed the censors and debate over who actually directed it.

Olympia

Directed by: Leni Riefenstahl
1938

Olympia is a 1938 film by Leni Riefenstahl documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The movie was produced in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil - Fest der Völker (Festival of Peoples) and Olympia 2. Teil - Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty). It was the first documentary film on the Olympic Games ever made. Many advanced motion picture techniques, which later became industry standards but which were groundbreaking at the time, were employed, including unusual camera angles, smash-cut editing techniques, extreme close-ups, setting the railway tracks on the stadium to shoot the crowd and the like. The techniques employed are almost universally admired, but the film is controversial due to its political content.

There has been much discussion of whether this film should be classified as a Nazi propaganda film, unlike her earlier Triumph of the Will, which is widely thought of as such. While the entire 1936 Olympics has been derided as the "Hitler Olympics" and was unquestionably designed primarily to showcase the alleged accomplishments of the Third Reich, and to this extent any film accurately documenting the proceedings would come off as something of a propaganda film, Riefenstahl's defenders have pointed to her close-up shot of the expression on Hitler's face when Jesse Owens, an African-American, won a gold medal, as showing a tacit dissent from Nazi racial supremacy doctrines. Other non-Aryan winners are featured as well.

Olympia set the precedent for future films documenting and glorifying the Olympic Games, particularly the Summer Games. The "Olympic Torch Run", now revered as a seemingly-ancient tradition, was devised by Riefenstahl for these games and this film in conjunction with the German sports official Dr. Carl Diem. In 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best films of the last 80 years.

MOTHER AND SON (Mat i syn)

Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov
Starring Aleksei Ananishnov, Gudrun Geyer
1997

This film is about the relationship between a sick mother and her son. Surely, this isn't for the average viewer: narrative is slow, events nonexistent; the film consists mostly of painting-like "still-lives" with very little dialogue. The mother and son walk along the beautiful sceneries (the film is done on the island of Rügen, by the coast of Germany), approach each other, take contact by embracing and hugging.

Nick Cave, the rock singer, said somewhere that this film is the most beautiful he has ever seen. I agree that it is maybe Sokurov's best: the twisted images of the landscapes, great camera work and almost meditative feeling are something I love to see in the cinema - if nothing else, just as an attempt this is a great film, instead of all the run-of-the-mill "narratives" we come across.

Awards:
1997 Moscow International Film Festival
Andrei Tarkovsky Award
Russian Film Critics Award
Special Jury Prize