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Rosenbaum Shorts
Favs/dislikes: 6:1. All of the short films featured in Jonathon Rosenbaum’s book, Essential Cinema. -
1939: Hollywood's Golden Year
Favs/dislikes: 7:0. From the book of the same name by Ted Sennett -
Academy Award "Best Story" Winners
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. The Academy Award for Best Story was given out from 1928-1956. (No award given in 1929 and 1930) -
Alternate Oscars (Danny Peary) - Best Actor
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. These are the movies with performances that film critic Danny Peary picked as his “best actor” choices from 1927-28 to 1991 in his book “Alternate Oscars” from 1993. Note that Peary selected two “best actors” for 1951. -
Alternate Oscars (Danny Peary) - Best Actress
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. These are the movies with performances that film critic Danny Peary picked as his “best actress” choices from 1927-28 to 1991 in his book “Alternate Oscars” from 1993. Note that Peary selected two “best actresses” for 1942. -
Alternate Oscars (Danny Peary) - Best Picture
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. These are the movies that film critic Danny Peary picked as his "best picture" choices from 1927-28 to 1991 in his book "Alternate Oscars" from 1993. Note that Peary selected no films to win for 1963. -
AMC Filmsite List of Epic Films
Favs/dislikes: 10:0. Epics-Historical Films often take an historical or imagined event, mythic, legendary, or heroic figure, and add an extravagant setting and lavish costumes, accompanied by grandeur and spectacle and a sweeping musical score. Epics, costume dramas, historical dramas, war film epics, medieval romps, or 'period pictures' are tales that often cover a large expanse of time set against a vast, panoramic backdrop. In an episodic manner, they follow the continuing adventures of the hero(s), who are presented in the context of great historical events of the past. -
Best Old Movies For Families
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. Movies listed in Ty Burr's Book 'The Best Old Movies for Families' - delightful list of movies to watch with your children. -
Bob Dorian's Classic Movies
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. List of films from the book "Bob Dorian's Classic Movies: Behind the Scenes of 100 Great Movies from Hollywood's Golden Years" (1990). -
BYU Great Works List - Film
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. -
Classics of the Silent Screen
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. From the book of the same name by Joe Franklin. -
Criterion Collection Themes - America, America
Favs/dislikes: 3:0. Call it star-spangled skepticism—there’s a whole host of movies in the collection that celebrate the United States by taking a hard, clear-eyed look at it. Uncompromising documentaries, historical dramas, surreal countercultural head trips: these are films that wrestle with the idea and reality of America, from the Civil War (Ride with the Devil) to the bicentennial (Dazed and Confused) to the contemporary political landscape (Tanner ’88). -
Criterion Collection Themes - Amour Fou
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. At Criterion, we’re as fond of a good romance as anybody. But it’s the twisted, obsessive ones that really set our hearts ablaze. Love will make you do the damnedest things—just take it from the adulterous, ultimately murderous couple in Oshima’s Empire of Passion; the runaway lonely-hearts lovers in The Honeymoon Killers; the snakeskin-jacketed Marlon Brando and unleashed Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind; or Alida Valli’s countess, operatically mad for Farley Granger’s tight-trousered lieutenant in Senso. These are heedless, self-destructive affairs to remember. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Animals!
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. Predators, prey, objects of study, companions: The lives of the other creatures with which we share the planet are so interwoven with our own that it’s only natural they would put in appearances in our cinema from time to time. Some of the animals in the Criterion menagerie are documentary subjects (Koko: A Talking Gorilla); others operate almost purely as metaphor (Au hasard Balthazar). All reward visitors. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Avante-Garde
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Surreal, structural, et cetera: A handful of visionary, largely nonnarrative works belong to the collection, from some of the most important experimental film artists around the world—Jean Painlevé, Kenneth Macpherson, Stan Brakhage, and Chantal Akerman among them. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Blue Christmases
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. It’s not that we don’t get into the holiday mood at Criterion, but our carol of choice is less likely to be “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” than “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Our titles have Christmas celebrations that are marred by dysfunction (A Christmas Tale) or poverty (Mon oncle Antoine), lavish parties tinged with morbid melancholia (Fanny and Alexander) or adolescent anxiety (Metropolitan)—and what would Christmas be without some passive-aggressive gift giving (All That Heaven Allows)? Don’t even get us started on Lulu’s grisly yuletide at the climax of Pandora’s Box. Check out the titles below—they may not offer Miracle on 34th Street warm and fuzzies, but they do propose their own undeniable brand of Noel spirit. -
Criterion Collection Themes - British Realism
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. The tradition of social realism in British film is often said to have begun with the Free Cinema movement of the mid-1950s. The aim of these documentaries—shown at the National Film Theatre in London from 1956–1959, and made by the likes of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson—was to bring to the screen authentic representations of the working class, largely absent from the conservative mainstream British culture of the day. In the early sixties, this rebellious sensibility was transposed to narrative cinema in the form of rough-edged, often black-and-white character pieces, often referred to as “kitchen-sink dramas,” such as Anderson’s major success This Sporting Life. At the end of the decade, Ken Loach, a political filmmaker with a background in television, took realism even further with the groundbreaking Kes, a grimy, unsentimental portrait of a boy in a Northern England mining town, featuring nonprofessional actors. Today, the legacy of British social realism continues to be felt in the work of many filmmakers, including Mike Leigh, Lynne Ramsay, and Andrea Arnold. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Cannes's Big Winners
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Since its inception in 1946, cinephiles have counted on the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious annual film program in the world, to keep up with the medium’s most important artists and movements. Its star-studded red carpets and glorious French Riviera scenery may get as much attention as the carefully selected films in its competition showcases, but the true legacy of Cannes has always been the masterpieces that premiered there—and especially those that have emerged as winners. The festival’s top award was originally called the Grand Prix, and the trophy for it designed each year by a different artist. Then, beginning in 1955, it became the Palme d’Or, with a new trophy modeled after the city of Cannes’s coat of arms. (The festival continues to bestow a Grand Prix, although it’s a second-place honor now.) At Criterion, we’ve collected many titles that have won the festival’s highest award, hailing from many nations of the world, Russia (The Cranes Are Flying), Italy (The Leopard), Japan (Kagemusha), and the U.K. (If….) among them. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Classic Hollywood
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Oh, those movies from the dream factory. There’s nothing quite like them. Products of a streamlined studio system, classic Hollywood films have always had a peculiar magic. With their clearly delineated cause-and-effect narratives, invisible continuity cutting style, and glamorous stars, these movies were designed to go down as easy as champagne. Yet we now recognize the directors, writers, cinematographers, and technical craftspeople behind the studios’ effervescent entertainments as artists, and the style they forged is one of the most distinct, beautiful, and important in cinema history. Here are the comedies, romances, melodramas, thrillers, and fantasies in the Criterion Collection that hail from those golden years of Hollywood, commonly defined as 1917 to 1960. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Comedies
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. From the sparkling witticisms of the golden age of Hollywood comedy to some of the best in contemporary wisecracks, Criterion has a satisfying selection of cinema’s biggest laughs. Longing for the Lubitsch touch? We’ve got you covered. Wondering “O Sturges, where art thou?” Look no further. Want to purchase a one-way ticket to Tativille? Step right this way. Want to split your sides with some Ozu? Uh . . . okay. Whether satire or slapstick, eliciting giggles or guffaws, a vast array of farcical flicker shows await you. It’s enough to make even the sourest cinephile smile. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Compare and Contrast
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. For some of our releases, one take is not enough. A number of Criterion titles feature as supplements some kind of alternate version of the main event, whether it’s a different cut (Terry Gilliam’s Brazil includes the infamous, unreleased, studio-edited “Love Conquers All” version of the film); an iteration in a different language for foreign audiences (as with our editions of Visconti’s Senso and The Leopard, in which you can see and hear their American stars delivering their lines in English); an original short that was the basis for the feature (Bottle Rocket); earlier or later versions of the same story by entirely different filmmakers (the mammoth 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz comes with the ninety-minute 1931 adaptation of the source novel); the original book or novella in its entirety (The Earrings of Madame de . . .’s source novel, Madame de, by Louise de Vilmorin, in the release booklet); or a radio adaptation (My Man Godfrey, The 39 Steps). -
Criterion Collection Themes - Cult Movies
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. Though many drive-ins have been shut down, and the practice of screening midnight movies in theaters has waned considerably from its heyday in the early 1970s, the thrill of sharing boundary-testing films in the dark can now be enjoyed just as well while curled up on the couch—no accompanying cult required. From the whiff of exploitation emanating from Roger Vadim’s sensational And God Created Woman to the touch of snuff in Michael Powell’s voyeuristic Peeping Tom, these films delicately ride the line between pulp and art, always landing firmly in the latter camp. Who better to challenge cinematic standards than Samuel Fuller, with his unforgettable B melodramas Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, or Brian De Palma, whose wonderfully nasty Sisters ushered in a new era of thrilling post-Hitchcock stylish excess? These films stubbornly refuse to be marginalized, lower budgets and lack of Hollywood gloss be damned. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Documentaries
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. “Life caught unawares”—that’s how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov expressed the principle and art of documentary in the 1930s. But the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it would be oversimplifying to call it merely the recording of reality. From its anthropological origins in the works of Robert Flaherty, the documentary has come to encompass Soviet and fascist propaganda of the thirties; the Direct Cinema and cinema verité of the sixties; the populist social-reform tradition of today; and so much more. What all great documentaries have in common is the ability to capture a place and time so vividly as to equal the imagery and storytelling of the best fiction. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Dysfunctional Families
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are all alike: they’re really boring to watch on-screen. Thus, cinema is besotted with deliciously unhappy families. Below, scan Criterion’s collection of miserable moms, depressed dads, and their sullen offspring, nestled as uncomfortably in the houses and yards of the suburbs of Connecticut as in the apartments of the side streets of Paris. -
Criterion Collection Themes - Faith on Film
Favs/dislikes: 5:0. Joyful professions of belief, self-flagellating admissions of guilt, and heretical abnegations of religion seem to sit alongside one another a bit more easily on the shelves of cinephiles than they do in the world at large. This list includes some films that engage matters of faith as their raison d’etre and others that deal with them more glancingly or derisively, but taken as a whole, it underlines both the compulsion of humankind to ask itself the eternal questions and the paradoxical power of a visual medium to capture the intangible.
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