A Whirlwind Month

When I began this blog seven years ago (!) I had two thoughts in the back of my mind. First, I assumed I would be blogging almost daily. Second I figured I could keep doing this for maybe five years at most.

I would say something about turning it into a source of occasional income, but that would be three strikes and out.

On the positive side, one of the major reasons I have found it hard to keep up with even a weekly schedule recently is that I have so much paying work as a film critic and lecturer that the fun stuff -- and make no mistake about it, this is fun -- has suffered. No apologies. Just an explanation of sorts.

That said, it has been a turbulent month of film news and releases, made more complicated for me by minor surgery and its after-effects (something good, I promise). It has been a month in which the film world Les Blank, Roger Ebert and Bigas Luna, among others. It has been a month in which the Tribeca Film Festival has opened, and the 38th annual Iras have taken place. I've been up to my fanny in speaking engagements about which more momentarily, and there have been some interesting movies to be seen.

Let's get to work.

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 Speaking of paying work lecturing on film, let me pull your coat to a couple of my upcoming appearances. As frequent readers of this blog will know, one of my occasional gigs is as a speaker at the Rockland County Jewish Film Festival. The final weekend of that estimable event is coming, and I will be introducing a screening of an excellent Israeli feature, Naomi, on Saturday night, April 20. You can find all about it here.

I'm even more excited about my next upcoming gig. I'll be teaching my film appreciation class, "How to Watch a Movie" at the 92nd St. Y, beginning in early May. The Y's website is a tangled maze, so you might be better off phoning them at 212-415-5500. It's a seven-session class and I'll be showing some great films, including Griffith's True Heart Susie, Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange, Sirk's Written on the Wind, Hitchcock's Psycho and Welles's Touch of Evil. Nothing ground-breaking perhaps, but how can you go wrong with the classics?

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About two-thirds of the way through Smyrna: The Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City, 1900-1922, an historian recounting the terrible atrocity in which hundreds of the city's Greek residents were forced into the waters of the harbor by the burning of the city and violence of the Turkish troops rampant there adds a vignette of Turkish boys swimming amongst the corpses, cutting off ears and fingers in order to steal jewelry. It is a chilling detail, but one that I found as I watched the film just one step too far from what had been, up to that point, a compelling and comprehensive documentary film about a tragedy about which I knew very little. The story may very well be true, but in a context that is fraught with controversy, claims and counter-claims among Greek sources, Turkish sources and many others, it feels like the infamous images of the Boche bayoneting Belgian babies, Iraqi troops throwing Kuwaiti babies to their deaths in order to steal incubators, and countless other manufactured atrocity stories. There is virtually no gainsaying the tragic truth of what happened to Smyrna, that the city, once a citadel of cosmopolitanism, was reduced to ashes by Turkish troops and its substantial Greek population killed or driven into exile. And Maria Iliou's documentary film recounts this story briskly, effectively and movingly. But this one detail seems to raises a warning flag for me, a warning flag that could easily disrupt the power of this otherwise admirable piece of filmmaking.

 Smyrna's harbor in happier times

Perhaps I'm being over-sensitive, with my natural sympathies being infiltrated by the cyncism that is bred by the antics of pernicious PR liars like Hill & Knowlton, who were responsible for the incubator story, in case you've forgotten. At any rate, I offer this cautionary tale as a caveat. Otherwise, Smyrna is an excellent example of how a filmmaker can recreate an historically significant moment through the judicious use of source materials, highly intelligent and engaging historians and period photos and footage. Thge story is a profoundly tragic one and, with that one little proviso, well told. The film is playing at the Quad Cinema in New York City.

Also playing at the Quad are a pair of Jewish-related films, one documentary, the other a rather fizzy but insubstantial comedy, which I reviewed in Jewish Week. The Revolutionary is well worth a look, Paris-Manhattan rather less so.

While we're on the subject of Jewish Week reviews, let me draw your attention to a new documentary by Marian Marzynski, the director of Shtetl. His new film, Never Forget to Lie, is having a sneak preview at the Museum of Jewish Heritage next Sunday and will be shown by PBS on Tuesday, April 30. It isn't as ambitious as the three-hour Shtetl, but much more personal and quite lovely.

And, as noted above, the Tribeca Festival opened this week. My first piece in Jewish Week on the event can be found here. I'll be blogging from the festival intermittently over the next couple of weeks. Each year the event gets a little bit better but the one thing that has been consistent in the time I've covered it is the graciousness with which the festival staff treats working journalists. It may mean nothing to my readers but, understandably, it matters to me. (Actually, it should matter to you; these nice people make it easier for us to see movies, which means I can tell you more about what's playing, etc.)

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A few quick links to bring you up to date on events I mentioned at the outset.

My friend and colleague Ed Sikov has one of the best of the many appreciations of Roger Ebert right here.

Speaking of fellow Ira voters, we held our celebration of all things cinematic in Provincetown last month,and a good time was had by all, of course. As I have noted in earlier posts, we selected our 100 best films of the 1950s this year, in addition to the 2012 awards, and the results were certainly interesting. You can read all about it, thanks to Michael Giltz, with whom I share tabulating duties on the decade lists (he supplies the math genius, I contribute the mistakes). Michael has been good enough to post a veritable history of the Iras, well, all the winners anyway, on his own blog, Popsurfing. He also lists our 1950s choices in order of group preference.(Hey, it's not my '50s list, but it's pretty good.)

Speaking of my lists, at long last here's my 2012 list, based 88 new films seen (one of my slower years, admittedly).

The stark beauty of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the best film of 2012

  1.  Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – Nuri Bilge Ceylan

  2.  This Is Not a Film – Jafar Panahi and Mohjtab Mirtazeh

  3.  The Miners’ Hymns – Bill Morrison

  4.  The Kid with the Bike – Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

  5.  Abendland – Nikolaus Geyrhalter

  6.  The Loneliest Planet – Julia Loktev

  7.  The Forgotten Space – Allen Sekula and Noel Bűrch

  8.  Habemus Papam – Nanni Moretti

  9.  Footnote – Joseph Cedar

 10. The Rabbi’s Cat – Joan Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux

Honorable Mention: Amour (Michael Haneke),  Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari), Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman), Bernie (Richard Linklater), The Deep Blue Sea (Terrence Davies), Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg), Hitler’s Children (Chanoch Ze’evi)

Not a great year, perhaps but a year with some great films. I like to approach that question in the spirit of Marty Blake, the former NBA head of scouting who died a few weeks ago; when I was still a sportswriter and interviewing him in a year of a "weak" pro draft, he told me, "There are Hall of Famers in this year's draft; there always are. We just don't know who they are right now. Take another look in ten or fifteen years."

Two Important Live Events and a Significant DVD

If you are looking for something to do this evening, Saturday, March 16, let me pull your coat to two live events that are worth a trip into the winter weather.

I have a longstanding relationship with the Rockland Country Jewish Film Festival, having been a guest speaker there many times. Circumstance precludes my repeating that role this year, regrettably, but I want to draw your attention to their April schedule, which is one of their strongest ever, and to a special World Premiere they are having tonight at 8:30 p.m of  Twenty Million Minutes, a new documentary that retraces the story of the local Jewish Community Center's attempt to get the International Olympic Committee to authorize a minute of silence at last summer's London games in recognition of the fortieth anniversary of the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. It's a great topic and an uphill battle and, given the constant and utterly undeserved encomia to the 'Olympic ideal' in the U.S., a nice corrective. You can find more information on their website.

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 Ironically, my own Washington Heights Film Class is holding the first of this year's four "Meet the Filmmaker" nights at almost the exact same time, albeit a few miles south, and we'll be having what amounts to a New York public premiere of Adam Orman's Fifth Form.

Fifth Form: The joys of being a senior

Fifth Form iis a wry look at adolescence and identity, with Josh (Jonah Rosenthal) a bright Jewish teen entering his first year at a posh boarding school as US is poised on the edge of the first Gulf War. He becomes involved in a series of Animal House-type antics that quickly escalate beyond the playful. The resulting disaster forces him to take a hard look at who he is becoming and what he wants to be. I like this film (even though the director is a friend of mine!). Adam mixes moods quite deftly, the comedy is funny without being gross, and the denouement is thoughtful and deeply felt.


The screening will take place at our usual lemonade stand, the Social Hall of Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation (Ft. Washington Avenue and 185th St.) at 7 p.m. Needless to say, Orman will be present to take questions and talk about the exigencies of indie film production.(Given that Adam is a fellow Ira voter, there is a chance that other fabled members of the Brethren will be in attendance.) Admission will be $15, but it's free for class members and you can join on the spot at the pro-rated price of $70/50 for seniors.

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 As I have said here before, 2012 was an excellent year for documentaries, and you'd have to look hard to find a better example than Chanoch Ze'evi's Hitler's Children. The film, which played theatrically in New York City in November (and is on offer at the Rockland event next month), is distributed by Film Movement and, as is their practice, will be available to their subscribers on DVD shortly, accompanied by an appropriate short.

When the film came out I wrote the following in Jewish Week:

The Torah enjoins us to honor our parents. But if your family were monstrous criminals who killed hundreds of thousands, even millions, what is your responsibility? As Katrin Himmler, Heinrich Himmler’s grand-niece, says in the new documentary film “Hitler’s Children,” “At what point does it become impossible to love those parents?”

The film, directed by Israeli documentarian Chanoch Ze’evi, is as cunningly structured as a good thriller, and just as taut. Ze’evi moves deftly between five descendants of infamous Nazis, parceling out revelations judiciously. Aided in no small part by the crisp editing of Arik Lahav Leibovitz, “Hitler’s Children” is a much needed and too brief look at the Shoah from a different point of view. The film opens Friday, November 16.

The five subjects of the film are Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, the head of the occupation government of Poland; Himmler, grand-niece of the head of the SS and Gestapo and one of Hitler’s closest associates; Bettina Göring, grand-niece of Herman, the head of the Luftwaffe and a central figure in the Nazi regime; Rainer Hoess, grandson of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf; and Monika Hertwig, daughter of Amon Goeth, the commander of the Plaszow concentration camp, and a central figure in “Schindler’s List.” While their reactions to knowledge of their families’ dark past is uniformly negative, ranging from strong distaste to outright revulsion and loathing, those reactions manifest themselves in wildly different ways.

Frank was eight years old when his father was executed after being found guilty at the Nuremburg tribunal.  He has written a scathing book about his father and his crimes; he travels across Germany and Austria giving readings and talks to school groups. Frank by nature as well as name, he is blunt, even profane in his denunciation of the Nazis and his father’s role. Yet one comes away from the film with a strong sense that his compulsive need to re-enact this denunciation has gradually transformed itself from an ethical crusade into a ritual of self-cleansing and self-abasement. 

Niklas Frank with students in Hitler's Children

By contrast Göring, who now lives in Santa Fe, NM, seems to have sought out a kind of refuge in a mixture of New Age isolation combined with a nostalgia for an older German folk culture untainted by the events of the 1930s and ‘40s. Both she and her brother chose to be sterilized rather than carry on the family name. “I inherited their s**t,” she says bluntly. “There won’t be any more Görings.”

Himmler, like Frank, has written and published a family history, “The Himmler Brothers.” Also like Frank, her publication divided the surviving family members, but probably no more so than her marriage to an Israeli son of survivors.

Hertwig seems deeply haunted by the gradual process of learning about her father. More than any of the other participants in the film, she seems a badly damaged adult, a reality that is emphasized by Ze’evi’s pitiless close-ups of her deeply lined face with its death-haunted, staring eyes and her tremulous voice and quivering lips. She seems to relish recounting stories of confiding her identity to a local bar owner who was a victim of her father’s sadism, and her shocked reaction to Spielberg’s vision of her father as casual tormentor.

Perhaps the central figure of the film, though, is Rainer Hoess who is obsessed with a package of photos left by his father that show the apparently idyllic childhood he enjoyed in the commandant’s villa adjoining Auschwitz. There is a photo of a gate that leads to the camp, “the gate to Hell,” Rainer calls it, a particular talisman for Rudolf’s grandson. “They must have looked through that gate,” he says of his father and his aunts. “What did they see? What did they know?” He goes to Auschwitz to find some kind of answer, accompanied by his friend Eldad Beck, the Berlin correspondent of Yediot Ahronot, a third-generation survivor,  many of whose family members were murdered there. In the course of their trip to the death camp, Rainer finally looks through that gate himself. He also meets a group of young Israeli students and, when asked what he would say to his grandfather today, he replies, “I would kill him myself.”

The great achievement of “Hitler’s Children” is not merely a cinematic one, that Ze’evi manages to keep the film moving between its five protagonists so gracefully without short-changing any of their stories. That is a considerable feat itself, but the real triumph of the film is in its larger thematic quest, a pitiless attempt to show what happens to people who are forced by to try to normalize and understand the uniquely atrocious circumstances of their upbringing, to examine what Niklas Frank calls “a happy childhood in a sea of blood.”

As Frank bitterly tells the filmmakers, “We really must do justice to parents like that, yes.”

A highly recommended film indeed. 

Lots of Good Things Coming Up

Goodness. Where to begin?

How about this? Playboy is now going to publish a Hebrew-language edition. Perfect for the khevre who read it for the articles.

On a more serious but very pleasant note, some new and recent films worth your attention.

Hava Nagila: The Movie, a new documentary by Roberta Grossman, starts out in the smart-alecky tone that seems to have become de rigeur for lightweight docs these days. Certainly the song is the epitome as kitsch Judaica, although it didn't start out that way, as the film makes clear. Slowly, though, Grossman reveals a refreshingly serious agenda as she touches on the battle for the hearts and minds of Jewish-Americans between Zionists and Yiddishists. Anyone who has read my music writing in Jewish Week knows which side of that fight I come down on, at least musically. (Politically, it's a lot more complicated.) The result is a film that is both sprightly and amusing but with a serious subtext that gives it some heft.

The magnificent Mr. B, splendidly ageless

 At the very least, it's worth it just to see Harry Belafonte, who still looks downright God-like at 86. You can find current showings here.

On the DVD front, I have three quick recommendations to pass along.

Ross McElwee, as some readers know, is a great favorite in our house. The BW and I are fond of his casual, slightly self-deprecating tone, his honesty and his seemingly offhand but actually quite rigorous filmmaking practice. His most recent film, last year's Photographic Memory, was shorter than usual at a mere 87 minutes and, perhaps as a result, felt a little like a throwaway. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine two narrative threads that could possibly be closer to McElwee's (right-on-his-sleeve) heart than a his differences with his son, and a return to the scene of first loves in Brittany. As usual, he manages to integrate the seemingly unconnected materials in inventive and satisfying ways, making fine use of older footage and offering mordant commentary throughout. Photographic Memory isn't a major achievement on a par with Sherman's March or Time Indefinite, his masterpieces, but it's full of lovely grace notes and certainly deserves to find a wider audience. You can find it here.

Pip Chodorov is one of the unsung heroes of independent film. I don't mean the crap that Indiewire spends too much of its time extolling, films that are basically smarter versions of studio stuff with smaller budgets. I mean films that you are not likely to see at all unless you are fortunate enough to live somewhere that there's a venue where experimental film is regularly programmed. The people whose work he supports through 
various film co-ops in his adopted home of Paris are the ones I'm talking about. He pays homage to those folks in his recent documentary, Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film, which is coming out on DVD this month. It's a delightful, warm and funny piece of filmmaking, focussing on filmmakers who have influenced Chodorov's own thinking about cinema, including some of the usual suspects like Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, but also some less expected ones, like Hans Richter and Maurice Lemaitre. I did an interview with Chodorov when the film played Anthology last summer, which you can read here. And you can find the DVD here. Highly recommended.

When Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, Sophie Fiennes's film about Anselm Kiefer, came out last year, I wrote of it:

Anselm Kiefer’s enormous canvases, sculptures and installations are considerably better known in the United States than Svetlana Geier’s translations [subject of another documentary released at the same time]. Born in Germany a month before the end of the Second World War, he has been exploring images redolent of, and frequently inspired by, the poetry of Paul Celan, stark works of art that evoke the ashes of the Shoah, haunted by echoes of Lurianic kabbalah, of which he speaks elegantly during Over Your Cities. In 1993, Kiefer left Germany and settled in the French town of Barjac, where he bought an abandoned silk factory and its considerable grounds. Since then he has transformed the place into a huge, complex art space housing his gigantic works. But more than that Barjac is itself an environmental art piece, an intricate collection of tunnels, underground passages, corridors and bunkers, eerily echoing the half-remembered images of the camps and the Reichsbunker, and the poetic images of shattered and buried cities of the prophetic writings.

Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph, who clearly has a very different artistic agenda) reveals this quite frankly astonishing site in a series of hypnotically rigorous camera movements through these spaces, calling on viewers to drink in the range of textures and materials, forms and spaces and, most tellingly, Kiefer’s subdued palette of grays and browns. These sections, brilliantly scored by sound designer Ranko Paukovic using the music of Gyorgy Ligeti and Jorg Widmann, are sharply contrasted by equally absorbing footage of Kiefer and his team of artisans crafting the exhibits that fill the many buildings on the location. The film also features a long, fascinating interview with Kiefer by a visiting German journalist in which he invokes the broken vessels of the Creation (via Luria) and speaks affectionately of kabbalistic numerology: “they count the letters of the words, they lose their original meaning, and it becomes completely religious.”

Above all else, though, Over Your Cities is a visually lush experience that must be seen on a big screen, with a big sound system and none of the distractions of a living room and DVD player. I doubt if there will be a more dazzling and beautiful-looking film released this year.

I must confess that the DVD is quite lovely and having it merely firms up my resolve to upgrade our home media center pronto. If you already have state-of-the-art equipment, you need this DVD. If not, you need to buy better tech and then get this DVD. You won't regret it. 

Finally, the estimable Agnes Varda will be in my town with a bunch of her films on Sunday, March 9. I received an e-mail to that effect earlier today and pass it along for your information:

 

 

	March 05, 2013
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	Agnès Varda at e-flux Saturday March 9, 7pm e-flux 311 East Broadway NY 10002 T  212 619 3356 www.e-flux.com
	Join us for a special evening of screenings and conversation with the legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda, introduced by Molly Nesbit. As the only female director of the French New Wave and a key member of the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) cinema movement, Agnès Varda became a force in art cinema. She describes her style as cinécriture (writing on film), and conceived many of her films as political and feminist statements, often crossing genres as she proceeded, always formally daring her viewer to look where before they had only overlooked. The results, whether fictional or actual, produce radical documents of unforgettable people. Her most well-known works include: Cléo from 5 to 7, Happiness (Le Bonheur – Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival), Vagabond (Sans Toit Ni Loi – Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival), Jacquot (Jacquot de Nantes), and the autobiographical documentaries; The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse – Golden Prize Chicago) and The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d'Agnès). In the past decade she has turned as well to installation work and has been exhibited widely. Molly Nesbit is Chair and Professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College as well as a contributing editor of Artforum. She has written the books Atget's Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000), and since 2002, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Molly Nesbit has tri-curated Utopia Station, an ongoing book, exhibition, seminar, website and street project. Her new book, The Pragmatism in the History of Art, will be published this spring by Periscope Press. I

There's Baseball in Florida and the Spring Arts Preview in Jewish Week

Must mean spring is here, a good sign. (At any rate, this is my 400th entry on this blog, and that is probably a good thing.)

It also means that your humble servant is busy, busy, busy. For starters, here are the two components of my spring film preview, short pieces on two events/movies well worth your time, and a list of upcoming films and events that you should mark on your calendar. In addition, if you are in town this evening, you should consider dropping into Anthology Film Archives for the monthly New Filmmakers showcase, which I've written about here .

I was at the Cinema Club branch in Madison, CT, this weekend, where they showed Lore. A few things of interest. First, the film holds up on a third viewing quite admirably. In my review for Jewish Week, I had remarked on the fairy-tale quality, but this time I noticed another visual/thematic motif, the presence in the first five minutes of each of the classical 'elements," water, air, earth and fire. For a film that is about stripping people down to their most elemental components, it's a significant choice. Second, the Madison Art Cinema, which hosts the club, has gone over to DCP and, to my surprise and delight, the digital projection had excellent visual quality.

A quick and sad acknowledgement of the passing of Donald Richie. I suspect I'm not the only film critic or fan whose first exposure to Japanese film came courtesy of his quiet intelligence.

Finally, on the Iranian repressed-filmmakers front, check out this item from MUBI's daily notebook:

Jafar Panahi had a new film at the Berlinale this year, Closed Curtain, co-directed by Kambuzia Partovi, and which Adam Cook wrote about during the festival. Like his previous film, this new one was not only not allowed to be made but also not allowed out of the country; Iran, understandably, has responded angrily. The Tehran Times reports, quoting Iran Cinema Organization Director Javad Shamaqdari, "There are some people who make films illegally and submit the unauthorized productions to foreign festivals, but all the cineastes know that producing a film in Iran and screening it in the foreign events must be authorized beforehand."

Needless to say, my heart bleeds for the Iran Cinema Organization. What a shame that those darned filmmakers can't keep their mouths shut and their minds blank.

 

Back Again . . . .

As you might expect, after another silence of almost two months, there's a lot of catching up to be done.
Let me start by pointing you towards the best film of 2013 so far. Granted, it's only mid-February, but this one should be on my ten-best list come next spring, unless this is a year of great filmmaking.

The film is Lore, Cate Shortland's long-awaited second feature follow-up to Somersault, it's a tough piece of work, bleak and disturbing. My review can be read here.

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Those of you with long memories will no doubt recall that this spring's Ira gathering will feature our wrangle over the 100 best films of the 1950s. I'm not going to spoil even a tiny bit of the fun for you by telling you which 100 films made the big cut; you'll find out when we've voted the final listing, 1-100, in March. But I will give you my top 100 of the decade. I don't mind saying that this was harder than the all-time top 100 that we did last year. There are a lot of films and filmmakers whose impact over the middle-distance of a decade -- especially this decade -- was greater than their staying power over an entire career. It comes down to the split between what baseball maven Bill James calls 'peak value' and 'career value.' On the other hand, there are plenty of artists with both whose peak came between January 1, 1950 and December 21, 1959. That said, here is my list of the hundred best films of the 1950s, in alphabetical order:

1. 1.    3:10 to Yuma – Delmer Daves
   2.       Ace in the Hole – Billy Wilder
   3.       Actress, The – George Cukor
   4.       Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The – Luis Bunuel
   5.       Affair to Remember, An -- Leo McCarey
   6.       Anatomy of a Murder – Otto Preminger
   7.       Attack! – Robert Aldrich
   8.       Bad Day at Black Rock – John Sturges
   9.       Band Wagon, The – Vincente Minnelli
   10.   Beau Serge, Le – Claude Chabrol
   11.   Big Combo, The – Joseph H. Lewis
   12.   Big Heat, The -- Fritz Lang
   13.   Big Knife, The – Robert Aldrich
   14.   Bigger Than Life -- Nicholas Ray
   15.   Bob le Flambeur – Jean-Pierre Melville
   16.   Bonjour Tristesse – Otto Preminger
   17.   Brothers Rico, The – Phil Karlson
   18.   Comanche Station – Budd Boetticher
   19.   Curse of the Demon – Jacques Tourneur
   20.   Day of the Outlaw – Andre DeToth
   21.   Diary of a Country Priest -- Robert Bresson
   22.   Early Spring – Yasujiro Ozu
   23.   Early Summer – Yasujiro Ozu
   24.   Elena et les hommes -- Jean Renoir
   25.   Empress Yang Kwei Fei, The -- Kenji Mizoguchi
   26.   Europa 51 – Roberto Rossellini
   27.   Floating Clouds – Mikio Naruse
   28.   Flowers of St. Francis, The – Roberto Rossellini
   29.   Forty Guns – Samuel Fuller
   30.   French Can-Can -- Jean Renoir
   31.   Genevieve – Henry Cornelius
   32.   Girl Can’t Help It, The – Frank Tashlin
   33.   Gun Crazy – Joseph H. Lewis
   34.   Hiroshima Mon Amour – Alain Resnais
   35.   Imitation of Life -- Douglas Sirk
   36.   In a Lonely Place – Nicholas Ray
   37.   Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Donald Siegel
   38.   Johnny Guitar – Nicholas Ray
   39.   Kanal – Andrzej Wajda
   40.   Kiss Me Deadly -- Robert Aldrich
   41.   Ladykillers, The – Alexander Mackendrick
   42.   Late Chrysanthemums – Mikio Naruse
   43.   Lola Montes – Max Ophuls
   44.   Lust for Life – Vincente Minnelli
   45.   M. Hulot’s Vacation – Jacques Tati
   46.   Madame de . . .  -- Max Ophuls
   47.   Man Escaped, A  – Robert Bresson
   48.   Man from Laramie, The – Anthony Mann
   49.   Man in the White Suit, The – Alexander Mackendrick
   50.   Man of the West – Anthony Mann
   51.   Marrying Kind, The – George Cukor
   52.   Mister Arkadin – Orson Welles
   53.   Mon Oncle – Jacques Tati
   54.   Naked Dawn, The – Edgar G. Ulmer
   55.   Naked Spur, The -- Anthony Mann
   56.   Night and the City – Jules Dassin
   57.   Night of the Hunter -- Charles Laughton
   58.   North by Northwest – Alfred Hitchcock
   59.   Olvidados, Los – Luis Bunuel
   60.   Ordet -- Carl Dreyer
   61.   Park Row – Samuel Fuller
   62.   Pat and Mike – George Cukor
   63.   Phenix City Story, The – Phil Karlson
   64.   Pickpocket – Robert Bresson
   65.   Pickup on South Street – Samuel Fuller
   66.   Quiet Man, The – John Ford
   67.   Rancho Notorious – Fritz Lang
   68.   Rear Window – Alfred Hitchcock
   69.   Rebel Without a Cause – Nicholas Ray
   70.   Ride Lonesome -- Budd Boetticher
   71.   Rio Bravo -- Howard Hawks
   72.   Rio Grande – John Ford
   73.   Riot in Cell Block 11 – Donald Siegel
   74.   Ruby Gentry – King Vidor
   75.   Saga of Anatahan, The – Josef von Sternberg
   76.   Sansho the Bailiff – Kenji Mizoguchi
   77.   Screaming Mimi – Gerd Oswald
   78.   Searchers, The -- John Ford
   79.   Senso -- Luchino Visconti
   80.   Seven Samurai, The – Akira Kurosawa
   81.   Silver Lode – Allan Dwan
   82.   Slightly Scarlet – Allan Dwan
   83.   Smiles of a Summer Night – Ingmar Bergman
   84.   Some Came Running – Vincente Minnelli
   85.   Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder
   86.   Springfield Rifle – Andre DeToth
   87.   Steel Helmet, The – Samuel Fuller
   88.   Sun Shines Bright, The – John Ford
   89.   Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick
   90.   Tales of the Taira Clan – Kenji Mizoguchi
   91.   Tall Men, The – Raoul Walsh
   92.   Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu
   93.   Touch of Evil – Orson Welles
   94.   Vertigo -- Alfred Hitchcock
   95.   Viaggio in Italia -- Roberto Rossellini
   96.   Vittelloni, I – Federico Fellini
   97.   Wagon Master – John Ford
   98.   Where the Sidewalk Ends – Otto Preminger
   99.   While the City Sleeps -- Fritz Lang
   100. Written on the Wind – Douglas Sirk
   
   
   Finally, it comes as a complete shock to me to discover that this blog has now been in business since 
   January 2006. Hopefully the next seven years will be more productive and easier.