Okay, two sentences each, let’s make this happen, ready, hike.

1. Force of Evil, 1948, dir. Abraham Polonsky / America’s commitment to leftist filmmaking runs shallower than you’d find in many other countries, but that’s not Polonsky’s fault. His first feature (made not long before he was blacklisted) puts everyman John Garfield in a decent suit, trying to convince/browbeat his brother into benefiting from an exploitative financial scheme.
2. Call Me Miss Cleo, 2022, dir. Celia Aniskovich and Jennifer Brea / There was a point in our documentary filmmaking where Pennebaker-Hegedus or Maysles Brothers-Zwerin were the key influences. Now it’s absolutely MTV-VH1, which this doc is indebted to down to the need to explain a recent decade the way locals give directions to lost tourists.
3. Witchhammer, 1970, dir. Otakar Vavra / The thing about this movie that’s lasted longest for me is my inability to say the title without saying it the way Peter Gabriel would. Not to sound like a freak, but what Witchhammer doesn’t quite grasp is that if you’re going to torture someone in a movie, it ought to hurt your audience’s souls as much as it’s hurting the characters on screen.
4. The Exiles, 1961, dir. Kent Mackenzie / The Exiles, like a lot of so-called plotless movies, has a structure that you don’t understand fully until you feel it constricted around your neck. There are no real personal expressions in this film until they have a couple hours of brief and but for the camera unremarked-upon dancing, which itself is broken up by some expressionless brawling.
5. Altered States, 1980, dir. Ken Russell / Everyone’s favorite scene in Network now that we glassy-eyed consumers know that corporations exist is not the “mad as hell” scene but the Ned Beatty scene. “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Dr. Jessup, and I won’t have it!” transfers over pretty well, especially when you consider that Arthur Jensen has been replaced by God.
6. Viva Las Vegas, 1964, dir. George Sidney / My summary of this movie follows thus: VIVA LAS VEGAS! VIVA, VIVA, LAS VEGAAAAAAAS
7. Army of Darkness, 1992, dir. Sam Raimi / There’s a six-year-old somewhere playing with action figures and army men who came up with the basic plot of this movie all by himself (knights, zombies, chainsaw). That Army of Darkness does the bare minimum to elevate this to say, a nine-year-old’s level of plotting and dialogue is what makes this movie such a delight.
8. Tetris, 2023, dir. Jon S. Baird / Like all right-thinking people, I love Tetris. This movie is a would-be thriller about licensing agreements, which, as all right-thinking people can guess, doesn’t work so hot.
9. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, 1971, dir. Dusan Makavejev / An irreverent collage, like if you took Godard from Pierrot le fou, Godard from Histoires du cinema, and Godard on that PCP clam chowder from the Titanic wrap party. I liked it, even if the noisiness of the picture is a little too much the point.
10. Kolberg, 1945, dir. Veit Harlan / I watched this one because it excerpted significantly in The Russians Are Coming, and I was absolutely floored when it turned out to be in color. It was a perfect film to put in The Russians Are Coming, that anti-life film, for Kolberg is also an anti-life film but with Hollywood pretensions.
11. Young Dr. Kildare, 1938, dir. Harold S. Bucquet / Compared to the next two Kildare movies I’m going to write about, Young Dr. Kildare is practically sane. Jimmy Kildare, handsome, bright, and idealistic, is not merely an aspiring diagnostician but also trying to psychoanalyze and play detective for blonde broads on the ward.
12. Calling Dr. Kildare, 1939, dir. Harold S. Bucquet / In my day-to-day, I rely heavily on my vibes to make decisions, read situations, and generally make things work. What Kildare does based on his vibes about the prime suspect in a murder case and also Lana Turner made me uncomfortable.
13. The Secret of Dr. Kildare, 1939, dir. Harold S. Bucquet / In the same year where Bette Davis’s sudden blindness triggered the tear ducts of millions, The Secret of Dr. Kildare accidentally discovers that someone who isn’t really blind being “cured” of their blindness is not nearly as compelling as a time bomb of a brain tumor. For me, worth watching because Sara Haden’s got a decent part in this picture while she was also getting the most screen time she’d get in the concurrent MGM series of Andy Hardy movies (see The Hardys Ride High, but like, don’t really see that movie, it’s even worse than The Secret of Dr. Kildare).
14. Petite maman, 2021, dir. Celina Sciamma / Your mileage will vary with this one depending on whether you’d define the average episode of The Twilight Zone as “essential art on the hypothetical and unexpected” or “consistently engrossing serial with obvious high points.” If you said the first one, you might just be a voter in the latest Sight and Sound poll.
15. Runaway Jury, 2003, dir. Gary Fleder / Probably has more in common with the John Grisham of Christmas with the Kranks than the John Grisham of The Pelican Brief, but much, much more fun than either. I really enjoyed a movie with such an early, grandiose twist, and even if you don’t enjoy it, the cut Runaway Jury takes is worthy of some respect.
16. The Atomic Cafe, 1982, dir. Pierce Rafferty, Kevin Rafferty, and Jayne Loader / I’ve never forgotten an offhand comment I read online that said that the Oscar for Best Editing should go to a documentary every year. The Atomic Cafe, which approaches the seemingly inevitable nuclear armageddon of the ’50s and ’60s with the well-deserved nail-chewing of the late ’70s, combines two aspects I didn’t think belonged together: mild-mannered and chilling.
17. A Married Couple, 1969, dir. Allan King / Only the second Allan King movie I’ve seen, after Dying at Grace, so I don’t want to go overboard, but is every movie I see by this guy going to be the saddest movie I’ve ever seen? The bridge of Morrissey’s “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get” could be the soundtrack for every second of this picture: “It’s war, it’s war, it’s war, it’s war, it’s war, war, war, war, war, war…”
18. The Media Project, 1991, dir. Peter Watkins / The worst of the three documentaries I crammed into this one day, which means I’m probably a little bit unfair to it because it was merely good. I have all kinds of respect for Peter Watkins, but the basic structure of this doc, a dinner party argument about the Gulf War, just didn’t work.
19. All the Money in the World, 2017, dir. Ridley Scott / We all know that Derek Jarman’s groundbreaking Blue is the way it is because Jarman’s eyesight, as a result of his AIDS, was in bad shape. What’s Ridley Scott’s excuse for making a movie that looks like it’s got an inky PowerPoint filter over every frame?
20. Fletch Lives, 1989, dir. Michael Ritchie / More reliant on the silliness of Chevy Chase dressing up in a number of ludicrous costumes than Fletch was, which definitely gets old faster than ripping off one-liners. A better movie for understanding the South than Steel Magnolias.
21. Honeysuckle Rose, 1980, dir. Jerry Schatzberg / The musical performances are universally great, but even Willie Nelson can’t make a midlife crisis interesting. While we’re just sitting here throwing shade at movies people like, this is a better movie about a band being on the road than Almost Famous.
22. Marked Woman, 1937, dir. Lloyd Bacon / Not one of the better performances from Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart, which dooms the movie from the outset. Nonetheless this is a pretty exact representation of the “crime does not pay” picture from the period, down to the fact that Bogie is playing a barely concealed version of Thomas Dewey.
23. American Pop, 1981, dir. Ralph Bakshi / Glad they could get the budget for all of these popular standards, which even for 1981 feel particularly braindead. Yes, I still like “Maple Leaf Rag,” “California Dreamin’,” and “Take Five,” but that’s not going to convince me the movie is good.
24. Underground, 1995, dir. Emir Kusturica / I broke one of my personal rules watching this, which is always to watch the television version of a movie if there is one; I watched the film cut, and I was still completely spellbound the whole way. This is the kind of obsessively transgressive film that Milos Forman would have killed to make, though even if he’d managed to make a movie this funny and absurd, he never would have been able to face up to the cosmic ending Underground easily walks into.
25. The Man Who Came to Dinner, 1942, dir. William Keighley / This is probably Josh Lyman’s favorite holiday movie. Shows off its dialogue with the joy of a six-year-old trying to get a visitor’s attention while he shows up his favorite toys, and with a similar sense of garbled self-satisfaction.
26. Evening Primrose, 1966, dir. Paul Bogart / I got a call from one of those Potential Spam numbers, and the robot on the other side said that if I didn’t watch this movie, I would be in jeopardy of losing my Sondheim snob card. It’s also a genuine amuse-bouche even if the “Now/Later/Soon” dialectic Sondheim would be writing up in the coming years isn’t something you’ve been obsessing over for fifteen years.
27. Remember My Name, 1978, dir. Alan Rudolph / Surely Shakespeare wasn’t the first one to connect ambition to “lean and hungry,” but doubtless he would have been proud of whoever recruited Geraldine Chaplin and Anthony Perkins, who have a combined BMI lower than what Slim Pickens was carrying. Chaplin’s steady, menacing performance as a lapsed killer wins the day here, emphasized by Tak Fujimoto more than a decade before he emphasized Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.
28. Blind Spot, 1981, dir. Claudia van Alemann / Van Alemann and Anita Brookner have that Newton-Leibniz thing going on, although Van Alemann’s film is not as much about sexual inadequacy amidst professional success but the search for an antecedent in the ether of a place. Kitty Maule in the abbey church at the tail end of Providence is like Elisabeth looking at maps of old Lyon.
29. Open Water, 2003, dir. Chris Kentis / Outstanding use of digital photography, and I prefer the camcorder aspect the film uses to the crisper shots they’d have gotten from GoPro or an iPhone twenty years later. Somehow it seems more respectful to chronicle a pair of inevitable deaths without sharp edges, because a universe with sharp edges wouldn’t turn a married couple into the smudges you leave on the wall when you snuff out a silverfish.
30. The House Bunny, 2008, dir. Fred Wolf / I watched ninety-two movies in June, and I cannot think of a single moment in any of them that took me by surprise as successfully and magnificently as this one. It doesn’t even matter that literally no one else in this movie is giving a performance to match Faris, unless it’s the All-American Rejects needledrops every time Tyson Ritter (remember him? I kind of didn’t!) shows up.
31. Something Wild, 1961, dir. Jack Garfein / If Belladonna of Sadness had been literal and grimy but retained every ounce of its sympathy and heartache, then Eiichi Yamamoto would have come up with Something Wild. Few movies treat the aftermath of rape with the cloudy, inexpressible recognition that this picture leans into for its entire first act.
32. Yours, Mine, and Ours, 1968, dir. Melville Shavelson / Spent a fair amount of the movie taking note of Gary Goetzman’s performance because of Licorice Pizza, which is a thought that I don’t think you could have explained to someone in ’68. Squares abound in a movie which has several more LOLs than I was planning to get.
33. In a Lonely Place, 1950, dir. Nicholas Ray / The closest thing Hollywood has every done to The Shining, racking up claustrophobia as a suspicious man without self-control pins his gal into a smaller and smaller space. Gloria Grahame is one of the most serendipitous casting choices ever in this film, a person who was in the right place at the right time.
34. Raining in the Mountain, 1979, dir. King Hu / The movie starts with promise as the several characters with their several plans for securing a single scroll descend on a monastery. The slog starts almost immediately afterwards.
35. Shock and Awe, 2017, dir. Rob Reiner / American films are so behind on the political events of the 21st Century that it’s hard to believe that they’ll ever catch up, and Shock and Awe, a movie made up of castoff bits from Jon Stewart’s most moral pleas on The Daily Show, gives me no hope that they’re going to stay on the treadmill. Reiner’s so ineffectual here I was mouthing “Meathead” at him about halfway through.
36. American Pain, 2022, dir. Darren Foster / An essential Florida man story for the present time, where Chris George is to the opioid crisis what Gaetan Dugas was supposed to be for AIDS. Handled without the desperate attention-seeking in what passes for documentary film the past few years.
37. Devotion, 2022, dir. J.D. Dillard / Just one Jonathan Majors away from being the kind of movie that every male history teacher in America wants to show in its entirety so he doesn’t have to teach for a couple days. At least those Eyewitness videos they carted in for science class had that killer intro, which this movie is definitely missing.
38. Portrait of Jennie, 1948, dir. William Dieterle / Has some really wonderful photographic effects to treasure. Otherwise, this movie about a painter connected mysteriously to a mysterious woman who seems mysteriously to have arrived from a mysterious past for mysterious reasons is margarine to the butter of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Lydia, and Rembrandt.
39. Love Field, 1992, dir. Jonathan Kaplan / I expect I would have gone my entire life without knowing this movie existed if I hadn’t discussed Michelle Pfeiffer’s Oscar history on Sub Titles. I don’t know that it would have made me happier to live in that ignorance, precisely, but I do know that this movie is entirely too bizarre for being some of the most transparent Oscarbait of the 1990s.
40. Eegah, 1962, dir. Arch Hall, Sr. / Marilyn Manning is honestly not that bad in Eegah, which is a famously awful picture. She’s supposed to be playing Annette Funicello but more neatly calibrated for the horny fantasies of preteens, and she kills it.
41. Glen or Glenda, 1953, dir. Edward Wood / Wood skips the confessional and just makes a movie about himself instead. As raw and personal as the documentaries of Michael Moore or Ross McElwee, and far braver than anything those two (great!) filmmakers have ever done.
42. The Room, 2003, dir. Tommy Wiseau / Eric Chase, according to IMDb, has edited fifty-seven features and shorts in his career; I have heard of exactly one of those movies. The Room has the reputation it has because it’s sickeningly watchable, but whether the uncomfortable pacing is more a function of Wiseau’s screenplay or Chase’s edit is a question I’d love to know the answer to.
43. Space Mutiny, 1988, dir. David Winters / The best-known film from apartheid-era South Africa, Space Mutiny reminds me of the movie that Albert Brooks is working on in Modern Romance where they cut the Hulk’s footsteps and yelling into the sound mix for a scene where George Kennedy is running down a hallway. If you believe, like Walt Whitman did, that “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” then you’re going to love this movie where people who have been killed in earlier scenes just show up again later on.
44. Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz / Katharine Hepburn, trapped in her mansion with her memories of a son with whom she would have had a full-on incestuous relationship if he wasn’t a homosexual, wants to trap Elizabeth Taylor outside of her memories by having her lobotomized. Nearly my favorite of Monty Clift’s late-career roles for how cool and contained his Dr. Cukrowicz must be, always on the other side of a monologue.
45. Yentl, 1983, dir. Barbra Streisand / I have two basic takeaways from this movie. The first is that it (hold on to your hats) doesn’t benefit from any fo the musical numbers, and the second is that Mandy Patinkin might have been the hottest dude in Poland.
46. Victor/Victoria, 1982, dir. Blake Edwards / Watched this because I’d just watched Yentl and figured hey, we may as well watch the early ’80s gender-bender musical starring one of the most popular Broadway figures of the 1960s. I wish I hadn’t done that; Victor/Victoria has no idea what to do with Julie Andrews and James Garner has no idea what to do with his limbs.
47. Underworld, 1927, dir. Josef von Sternberg / Sometimes I think that we’re due for a story which puts Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot into some present day setting. Then I remember that Underground exists, that George Bancroft plays mobster Arthur with a rousing common dignity, and that the rough decency of Bull Weed makes him the most moving Arthur I’ve ever seen onscreen.
48. Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case, 1940, dir. Harold S. Bucquet / Oh, like Dr. Kildare hasn’t had a strange case before, c’mon. Narratively hamstrung by the same problems which buffeted my Andy Hardy viewing a couple summers back, namely that in order to have more Dr. Kildare movies, there can be no real substantive changes.
49. Reign of Fire, 2002, dir. Rob Bowman / This has to be a truly unique apocalyptic film, because there’s no way that the reason the world ends in any other movie has this much to do with dragons. Matthew McConaughey channels most of the cast of Apocalypse Now (obviously Robert Duvall, a little Marlon Brando, Sam Bottoms post-drug haze, and secret ingredient Christian Marquand) and gives what is very possibly my favorite performance of his.
50. Fire Maidens from Outer Space, 1956, dir. Cy Roth / I would like to take legal action against whoever named this movie, because the maidens of this picture are emphatically non-flammable. Seriously, please tell me who I can sue, I need this.
51. Petulia, 1968, dir. Richard Lester / When you go back and look at critics’ lists for 1968, Petulia (which is not forgotten, exactly, but which hardly has the reach of many other ’68 features) comes in very high. The despair which suffuses the film is not unattractive on the whole, but there’s a difference between a movie about fundamentally static people and a fundamentally static movie.
52. Padre Padrone, 1977, dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani / The fact that this is based on a true story definitely makes Padre Padrone stand out out a little bit, but when you make a movie about an Italian proletarian, you’re surrounded by any number of classics to compete with. It’s a movie with some really nice technical work and a few tough scenes, but I’d rather watch Bitter Rice again.
53. Inspector Ike, 2020, dir. Graham Mason / A non-exhaustive list of other comedies I’ve rated 1.5 stars on Letterboxd which made me laugh at least once: Pottersville, Cat Ballou, Space Jam, Crocodile Dundee, Noelle. All of these have at least one single laugh over Inspector Ike.
54. Secret Honor, 1984, dir. Robert Altman / Altman’s career isn’t overflowing with adapted plays, but he’s someone any director who wants to adapt a play should be looking at. Like Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Altman has his usual alchemy with actors interacting with his innate sense that a crowded, tight space ought to create more movement, not less.
55. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, 2023, dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers / When David O. Selznick meddled mercilessly with a movie, at least he got Gone with the Wind out of it. We all know that Phil Lord meddled with this thing malevolently by now, and this movie which has a lot of stuff reminds me most of Hoarders.
56. Piranha 2: The Spawning, 1982, dir. James Cameron / Cameron is already a mean-spirited hero, but he could be even more legendary if he made Payakan 2: The Spawning. The fact that the piranhas in this movie straight up fly makes it worth the watch, even if you’re not trying to be a Cameron completist.
57. Space Truckers, 1996, dir. Stuart Gordon / This is like the opposite of Fire Maidens from Outer Space, because if I told you to imagine what a movie about space truckers directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Dennis Hopper was like, you’d be able to visualize specific scenes from this movie. The second half of this thing is a total mess, but I’m not going to forget Charles Dance’s lascivious cyborg any time soon.
58. The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, 1957, dir. Roger Corman / See, you’d think this is the opposite of Fire Maidens from Outer Space because the title is so literally accurate, but in fact it’s so long that the specificity becomes sarcastic. It’s not good, but I’d rather see a remake of this (with a below-average budget!) than watch something like The Northman again.
59. Wife vs. Secretary, 1936, dir. Clarence Brown / Down to the unrealistic and absolutely stunning ending, this is a very modern movie despite the general dearth of secretaries in our society. Flits around like an especially noisy housefly in that gray zone where no one is exactly doing anything wrong but it’s not for lack of feeling.
60. Un chant d’amour, 1950, dir. Jean Genet / There’s a good project to do about the sexiest moments, gestures, lines in film history. Two men in prison breathing the smoke of the same cigarette through the walls isn’t the discussion of Kathleen Turner’s stained blouse in Body Heat, but it’s pretty darn close.
61. River’s Edge, 1986, dir. Tim Hunter / Crispin Glover, you’ve just been the co-star of a fabulously popular movie in which you play an awkward but adorable hobbledehoy: what are you going to do next? Clearly, the answer is to give a terrifically offbeat performance in this teen movie, which is saved from anonymity entirely by the “what planet is this guy on?” work that Glover is doing.
62. Kaatskill Kannibals, 2020, dir. Michael X. Rose / The most “I made this at home with my friends from middle school” movie I’ve ever seen, but I do want to give it credit for an incredible premise. Huguenots driven to cannibalism in upstate New York who preserve the practice in cult secrecy for centuries to come is a fantastic idea for a movie, but maybe for people who have seen more than three movies before.
63. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, 2022, dir. Anthony Fabian / We all side with Mrs. Harris in that moment where that snobby Frenchwoman steals the dress she wants from underneath her, even if we know that somehow Mrs. Harris will wind up with the dress she really desires in the end. A little unnerving to watch a movie that hates creative people and their process with the fervor Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris does, especially as every media company in the world is praying AI will let them fire their writers and artists.
64. Coming Home, 1978, dir. Hal Ashby / I hadn’t watched this in several years, and it was such a pleasure to return to the film for the same reason it was a remarkable first watch: Bruce Dern. “I don’t know what it’s like, I only know what it is,” he says while he’s on leave, and from there it’s only a matter of time until he gets to swim out into the Pacific and drown peacefully.
65. The Magic Sword, 1962, dir. Bert I. Gordon / The lyrics of “The House of the Rising Sun” were running around more than fifty years before this movie was released, and I think that Basil Rathbone must have had some of those lines in his head as he made The Magic Sword. “Oh, Mother, tell your children/Not to do what I have done/Spend their late career in sin and misery/Directed by Bert Gordon.”
66. Bully, 2001, dir. Larry Clark / No pleasure but meanness, unless the pleasure is in planning the most grandiose murder that teenagers can imagine. What makes Bully exceptional is not the way that the conspirators recognize the enormity of their fantasy once it comes true, but the way the movie hates them for their insincerity and weakness in the face of their fell deed.
67. The Great Rupert, 1950, dir. Irving Pichel / I watched this movie because I understood that it was about a squirrel who danced. I was not prepared for the squirrel to be sidelined so entirely by Jimmy Durante and guys thirsting for Terry Moore, but then again, I wasn’t expecting the squirrel to be the greatest American socialist hero since Eugene V. Debs.
68. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962, dir. Robert Mulligan / Forgive me for being a little pedantic here, but you wouldn’t call him “Jesus Christ” if you didn’t believe he was the Messiah. To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as its harshest critics, sees Atticus as a white savior, but who, precisely, did he save?
69. Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000, dir. Bela Tarr / In the beginning of the movie, Janos creates the heavens and the earth when he demonstrates to the drunks after closing time how eclipses work. He is not God, which he learns most vididly when, like Job, he realizes that he couldn’t create a leviathan.
70. Hercules Unchained, 1959, dir. Pietro Francisi / More than most of your true B-movie crap Hercules Unchained looks pretty good. The sets have real quality, and the setting is attractive, and then the list of compliments I can pay this movie fall off a precipitous cliff indeed.
71. Deathtrap, 1982, dir. Sidney Lumet / There’s this episode of Arthur in which Sue Ellen tries to join Buster’s “Reading Comic Books Under the Blanket Club,” only to give up on it when she discovers “there’s no air under here!” That’s a pretty good one-sentence critique of Deathtrap.
72. Berkeley Square, 1933, dir. Frank Lloyd / There’s a worthwhile line of inquiry in the first piece of Berkeley Square: what drives our nostalgia for a past that even our ancestors don’t remember, and can we ever learn enough to understand those situations as those people did? The problem is that the movie itself is not all that interested in that line of inquiry, and so we’re subjected to a number of identical scenes where people say things like, “Wow, this guy is acting so unusually, what do you think his deal is.”
73. Maidens of Fetish Street, 1966, dir. Saul Resnick / An orgy (just a little wordplay there, there aren’t actually any orgies in this movie) of sexual self-loathing which just gets the film erect again. In this film, also called The Girls on F Street, women are the unquestioned wielders of carnal power much to the chagrin of helplessly engrossed men.
74. Welfare, 1975, dir. Frederick Wiseman / Here’s my list of American documentaries I feel confident in saying are better than Welfare: Koyaanisqatsi. Exhaustion is a luxury, and the wearied and buffeted people trying to get government assistance meet tired social workers and middlemen who act like they’re worse off than the people they send to Social Security and who Social Security sends back to them.
75. Lust for Life, 1956, dir. Vincente Minnelli / I was not at all prepared for this movie to begin with Van Gogh in ministry to miners, humbled by an agnostic parishioner who challenges him to really live like the miners. Van Gogh is a flawed man, egoistic and quick-tempered, but upon receiving this challenge he cuts away the bullshit from his work like a surgeon scalpels a tumor.
76. Lovers and Lollipops, 1956, dir. Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin / Not nearly as fun as Little Fugitive, and that’s why it has one-eighth of the logs on Letterboxd despite being readily available. Part cautionary tale for anyone who wants to marry someone’s parent without preparing to be someone’s new parent, part knee-high diary of a girl who is desperate for someone to prove that she’s lovable.
77. The Rack, 1956, dir. Arnold Laven / In the same year as Forbidden Planet, Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis timorously welcome a profoundly traumatized Paul Newman home with the same trepidation with which they welcomed Leslie Nielsen. The Manchurian Candidate is the entertaining and spectacular POW-Korea story, but The Rack twists the gut much more.
78. Early Spring, 1956, dir. Yasujiro Ozu / Society is committing suicide with slow pleasure in this picture, where the adulterers cannot even be adequately chastised by their friends, who take more pleasure in the feeling of moral intervention than they take responsibility for trying to do the right thing. The men and women who were just old enough to be actively involved in World War II turn out to be limp survivors, seeking fast food and booze-soaked nights in lieu of actual challenge.
79. Aparajito, 1956, dir. Satyajit Ray / When Apu’s father dies, there’s a great drama in it; his fever comes on suddenly, seems to decrease, and then returns with an instantaneous vengeance. When Apu’s mother dies, she doesn’t do it dramatically enough to steal his attention and so we learn a lesson about how we should die for our children that none of us actually want to employ.
80. Calle Mayor, 1956, dir. Juan Antonio Bardem / Like Early Spring, Calle Mayor tells the story of insensitive, bored people who act arrogantly for their own fleeting pleasure. A handsome man pretends to be romantically interested in an old maid, and when it finally occurs to him that he’s doing something wrong, the butterfly wings of conscience can only beat noiselessly against the bars of his need to escape the situation.
81. Rodan, 1956, dir. Ishiro Honda / It’s much more difficult to ascribe a tragic metaphor to Rodan than it is to Gojira, and Rodan suffers for it. I’m definitely interested in any movie which hypothesizes subterranean Pterodactyl eggs which then open up to reveal gargantuan monsters capable of supersonic flight, but alas that the whole thing is not merely the Rodans going ZOOM.
82. 7 Men from Now, 1956, dir. Budd Boetticher / A dark little movie about the two poles of manhood: impotence and venality. The hero, so to speak, lies between these two poles, and so we witness Randolph Scott trying to live by some kind of moral code while guiltiest of two nasty sins.
83. The Burmese Harp, 1956, dir. Kon Ichikawa / Only has a few great moments, but they’re worth the price of admission. I’ll stay in Burma until I’ve buried every Japanese corpse is an outstanding pledge, especially when we remember how Mizushima awoke from his unconsciousness surrounded by hundreds of corpses, the men he was unable to bend towards reason.
84. Commando, 1985, dir. Mark L. Lester / The face of cinematic Stockholm Syndrome does not belong to Belle from Beauty and the Beast but to Rae Dawn Chong in this picture. Ahnold is fine here, but you can tell he’s only quasi-molded his screen persona; “John Matrix” is just a brute.
85. Mission to Mars, 2000, dir. Brian De Palma / There’s a world out there where this movie is an enormous hit and Gary Sinise becomes what Johnny Depp became because of his based-on-a-Disney-ride film. We don’t live in that world, and maybe if the first half of this thing wasn’t so anticlimactic we could.
86. The Front Runner, 2018, dir. Jason Reitman / I’ve had nightmares less unsettling than the hellish combination of “screenplay by a political columnist, a policy wonk, and Jason Reitman.” It’s a shame, because Hugh Jackman isn’t half-bad in this and the Gary Hart-Donna Rice story deserves a fair shake, but this makes The Ides of March look like a Costa-Gavras film.
87. On the Bowery, 1956, dir. Lionel Rogosin / The way that this is shot, with its insistence on close-ups and shame of hopeless alcoholics, is fairly interesting. This thing had me once some guys start making a Sterno cocktail in the street, which is not merely hopelessness but self-abandonment.
88. By the Bluest of Seas, 1936, dir. Boris Barnet / I’ve never been told to cool my jets in my advances towards a woman because I should think about how I’d feel if I had a sweetheart I left behind while I was serving in the Pacific Fleet, but then I’m hopelessly bourgeois. Occasionally funny, often sad, it’s got more than a little Tom Sawyer in its DNA.
89. Look Away, Look Away, 2021, dir. Patrick O’Connor / A not at all bad documentary about the symbolism of the Confederate battle flag, especially in its place in the late state flag of Mississippi. For anyone who believes that the best ability is availability, O’Connor’s commitment to being at a number of meaningful events across the Southeast is laudable.
90. Dead Asleep, 2021, dir. Skye Borgman / I haven’t seen anything that Dinesh D’Souza has made, but leaving him and his ilk out of it, I feel pretty confident saying that Borgman is America’s worst director. Dead Asleep is another example of her work which refuses to take on a controversial subject in good faith, choosing instead to sensationalize and mock a situation which deserves an adult’s consideration.
91. High Noon, 1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann / Everyone who bails on Will Kane is infuriating, but the one who really puts the knife in his back is the mayor, Jonas Henderson. Other men are afraid for their lives in the face of the gang out for Kane’s blood, which I think anyone can empathize with; Henderson is afraid for the potential business interests the town might lose out on, which makes him a weasel with a belly perpetually scraping the ground.
92. A Walk to Remember, 2002, dir. Adam Shankman / Millennial Love Story, fine, but at least Love Story understands that the guy has to be the prissy one and the girl has to be tough. I knew that the people in youth group with me had all seen this movie, but I was still not prepared for the sheer amount of proselytizing in this movie, least of all by a character with bangs like Mandy Moore was stuck with.