Art:
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) "It says that man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise; something better (i.e., non-human) is coming, and it's all out of your hands anyway. Kubrick's story line—which accounts for evolution by an extraterrestrial intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time." — Pauline Kael
"The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies,2001 is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe." — Roger Ebert
"A milestone film: space travel is placed into context of man's history, from first confrontation with a Greater Power to future time warp where life cycle has no meaning." — Leonard Maltin
La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) "The theme of Federico Fellini's spiritual fable is that everyone has a purpose in the universe ... Even if one rejects the concepts of this movie, its mood and the details of scenes stay with one; a year or two later, a gesture or a situation suddenly brings it all back." — Pauline Kael
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) "The Orson Welles film is generally considered the greatest American film of the sound period, and it may be more fun than any other great movie. Based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, it's an exuberant, muckraking attack on an archetypal economic baron." — Pauline Kael
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) "H.G. Wells called this German silent 'quite the silliest film'; Hitler was so impressed by the conception that many years later he tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade its director, Fritz Lang, to make Nazi movies ... One of the last examples of the imaginative—but often monstrous—grandeur of the Golden Period of the German film, Metropolis is a spectacular example of Expressionist design (grouped human beings are used architecturally), with moments of almost incredible beauty and power (the visionary sequence about the Tower of Babel), absurd ineptitudes (the lovesick hero in his preposterous knickerbockers), and oddities that defy analysis (the robot vamp's bizarre, lewd wink). It's a wonderful, stupefying folly." — Pauline Kael
"One of the great achievements in the silent era, a work so audacious in its vision and so angry in its message that it is, if anything, more powerful today than when it was made." — Roger Ebert
Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936) "After City Lights, which was silent, with a musical accompaniment and sound effects, Charlie Chaplin was absent from the screen for five years; he returned in triumph with this rambunctious comedy in which he still doesn't speak, although he uses background sounds and, as a singing waiter in a crowded cabaret, he does a wonderful jabberwocky patter song that you can't get out of your head. (It is, of course, a demonstration of how unnecessary words are.)" — Pauline Kael
Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927) "Abel Gance originally made it as a 6-hour silent film, in color (the prints were tinted and toned by a dye process), and with sections designed to be run on a triple-width screen, by a process called Polyvision. His conception was far more complex than what directors later did with Cinerama, since Gance frequently used the images at the left and right of the central image for contrapuntal effects—history became an avalanche of armies, battles, and crowds. The film is both avant-garde and old-fashioned." — Pauline Kael
8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) "A long, difficult, but fascinating film, overflowing with creative and technical wizardry. Certainly one of the most intensely personal statements ever made on celluloid." — Leonard Maltin
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937) "In form, Grand Illusion is an escape story; yet who would think of it in this way? It's like saying that Oedipus Rex is a detective story. Among other things, this film is a study of human needs and the subtle barriers of class among a group of prisoners and their captors during the First World War." — Pauline Kael
Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) "To watch F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself. Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in cliches, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires." — Roger Ebert
"The original, superbly loathsome German version of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is a concentrated essay in horror fantasy, full of weird, macabre camera effects. Though ludicrous at times (every horror film seems to become absurd after the passage of years, and many before—yet the horror remains), this first important film of the vampire genre has more spectral atmosphere, more ingenuity, and more imaginative ghoulish ghastliness than any of its successors. The movie often seems more closely related to demonic painting than to the later, rather rigid vampire-movie genre." — Pauline Kael
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) "Perhaps the most likable of all Westerns, and a Grand Hotel-on-wheels movie that has just about everything—adventure, romance, chivalry—and all of it very simple and traditional." — Pauline Kael
"One of the great American films, and a landmark in the maturing of the Western, balancing character study ... and peerless action. . ." — Leonard Maltin
The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963) "Magnificent—a sweeping popular epic, with obvious similarities to Gone With the Wind, and with an almost Chekhovian sensibility." — Pauline Kael
Fantasia (Walt Disney, 1940) "Initially, the film was a box—office failure, but it proved successful in revivals, especially in the early 70s, when it became a popular head film, because of such ingredients as the abstract first section, the mushroom dance during 'The Nutcracker' (one of the liveliest sequences), and the overly bright—somewhat psychedelic—color. 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice,' featuring Mickey Mouse, and parts of other sequences are first-rate Disney, but the total effect is grotesquely kitschy." — Pauline Kael
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) "It somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don't. Is that because we see it first when we're young? Or simply because it is a wonderful movie? Or because it sounds some buried universal note, some archetype or deeply felt myth?
"I lean toward the third possibility, that the elements in ``The Wizard of Oz'' powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.
This deep universal appeal explains why so many different people from many backgrounds have a compartment of their memory reserved for The Wizard of Oz.'' — Roger Ebert
"A genuine American classic ... Just as good the fifteenth time as it is the first time." — Leonard Maltin
The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951) "It's a minor classic, a charmer." — Pauline Kael
Little Women (George Cukor, 1933) "There are small flaws—a few naïve and cloying scenes, some obvious dramatic contrivances—but it's a lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel." — Pauline Kael
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That was it: 45 good suggestions! I hope you enjoyed them and, of course, comment with some of your own!
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