Not to say he wouldn’t make better films later in his career, but Michael Mann’s feature debut Thief showcases an auteur born with a clear vision. With the meeting of crime and high art aesthetics it is hard not to mention Jean-Pierre Melville as a comparison. Mann is smart to set the film in a familiar spot- it is shot on location in Chicago, and Mann is from Chicago. Mann’s vision combines a bit of gritty street realism detail with this sleek sheen view of the neon lit streets. Mann had to admire William Friedkin.- apparently Mann wanted either

From 1973 to 2011 Malick made only five (5) films—all of them either outright masterpieces or very close to the border—and all were rather simple narratives set in the past. Malick then made three more modern day films : To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song of Song. These were no longer historical epics (it is different shooting a Sonic chain restaurant than a Austrian Mountain landscape with mist rising up)— they had a hint of Antonioni’s ennui territory (this is description, not a criticism). Well…Malick is back to a period piece (World War II, set in Austria) and

Robert Altman’s California Split (1974) often gets unfairly lost in the shuffle with all the magnificent films he made in the early 1970s. It is an all-time great gambling film and one of the era’s better two-handers (George Segal and Elliott Gould here are sublime). I’d listen to an argument that it is superior to George Roy Hill’s The Sting from 1973 Pay attention to the opening credits, the Lions Gate 8-track sound system- Altman’s genius with audio is on full display. This was the first non-Cinerama film to capture the 8-channel recording while shooting. This is the year

Robert Ryan plays Jim Wilson in Nicholas Ray’s One Dangerous Ground. Wilson is a rough cop that bends the rules (paving the way for Russell Crowe’s Bud White in L.A. Confidential maybe) and has seen too much of the streets. There is a great scene of Wilson’s two partners picking each other up by laying in the horn outside of their apartments. When a stool pigeon tells Ryan’s Wilson that he (the stool pigeon) is sick, and that he doesn’t feel good, Ray (and Ryan) tell you everything you need to know about the Wilson character by his lack

John Ford was a great director for decades, but the greatest single stretch during that long, distinguished career, was from 1939-1941 with Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. Ford did not open up often to talk about his work but on occasion he would call this his favorite of his own films. How Green Was My Valley won five (nominated for ten) Academy Awards (including best picture and best director). It often gets brought up among cinephiles as the film that beat Citizen Kane and is seen in that context. But this is not

Shiva Baby is a frightful, and often painfully funny, delight. Director Emma Seligman works with composer Ariel Marx and it is scored like it a horror movie matched with the anxiety-riddled scenes in Punch-Drunk Love. Rachel Sennott plays Danielle. Danielle spends 70 of the 77 minutes at a shiva (Jewish period of mourning following a burial) with her parents (who seem to be trying to grind her down into a fine powder), her current lover, his wife and kid, her ex-lover, and a bunch of vultures in the form of family and friends. Shiva Baby is a 77-minute-long high

Lilith is Robert Rossen’s (All the King’s Men, The Hustler) last film. He would pass away in 1966. It features both Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg as beautiful, budding stars (each well under 30 years old here) and if you had to pick which one would go on to stardom after watching Lilith, the answer is easily Seberg. Lilith is set in a mental institution- a different kind than the one Sam Fuller featured in an expose style in 1963’s Shock Corridor. Marvelous title design by Elinor Bunin Seberg’s Lilith is a captivating sort of predator- beauty

Austrian director Götz Spielmann starts Revanche (translates to revenge) with a gorgeous static camera shot capturing both a body of water and its reflection. The shot is held, Spielmann is patient. A rock is thrown in with ripples echoes and there is his metaphor. the opening shot Johannes Krisch plays Alex and Irina Potapenko plays Tamara. She works in the sex trade and Alex is a sort of errand boy at the brothel where she works. Spielmann finally moves the camera (a track to the right) at the firing range as he breaks from the Alex and

Eminem is no great actor, but he confidently plays himself here in 2002’s 8 Mile The crew assembled to tell the rapper’s story help make the film work. Curtis Hanson was on a hot streak in 2002 coming off of L.A. Confidential in 1997 and Wonder Boys in 2000. Future Scorsese collaborator Robert Prieto is the cinematographer and Philip Messina does the production design just two years removed from working on 2000’s Traffic. Detroit and southeast Michigan are perfectly captured – overcast, abandoned buildings, automobile manufacturing. Eminem was the highest selling musical artist of the entire 2000s decade and this

The Blue Angel from Joseph von Sternberg is both one of cinema’s great tragic melodramas, and an exemplary early landmark of the rich possibilities of cinema mise-en-scene. Most reviews focus on the colossal performances of Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich and they are not misguided in heaping an abundance of praise on the two. These are two of the towering performances of the early sound era. Jannings’ Professor Immanuel Rath is the tragic (operatic almost) arc of the film. Jannings is marvelous. He is so studied accentuating every adjustment of his glasses or the particular way he pours his