Best Films - 2003
A painter and his househelper-turned-subject find an unexpected spiritual and sensual bond by way of their mutual sensibility to light and color. A fictionalized account of the creation of one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous paintings, Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring perfectly evokes the 17th-century Netherlands of dark brick buildings, dirty streets, and [...]
Best Films - 2002
A man is dead. Who among the greedy, ruthless, amoral singing-and-dancing suspects stuck in the snowbound countryside mansion has done it? 8 women is an acquired taste, bien sûr. What seems silly the first time around becomes increasingly wittier and funnier — though no less bizarre — with each repeated viewing. Beautifully shot by Jeanne [...]
Best Films - 2001
A long, bizarre dream turns into a horrific nightmare once our warped heroine wakes up. David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is part psychological drama, part suspense thriller, part black comedy, part horror, part tragedy, and all brilliance. It is the most merciless attack on Hollywood and on the pursuit of the so-called "American Dream" since Sunset [...]
Best Films - 2000
While most film directors struggle — and fail — to create screen magic, Laurent Firode succeeds beautifully with his romantic-existential comedy Le Battement d’ailes du papillon / Happenstance. The key is Firode’s lighter-than-air touch. Even Ernst Lubitsch would have been impressed. Audrey Tautou, however, looks somewhat puzzled. She has been having problems with her roommate, [...]
Best Films - 1995
A mysterious con job that seems to be a cover for something ominously more dangerous forms the basis for director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie’s complex suspense thriller The Usual Suspects. Had the film been released after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, pundits would be describing it as the inevitable artistic offspring of [...]
Best Films - 1994
One of the masterworks of world cinema, Trois couleurs: Rouge / Three Colors: Red is the final segment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs trilogy — the other two being Bleu / Blue (1993) and Blanc / White (1994). Each film is supposed to represent (quite loosely) the three colors of the French flag: liberty, equality, [...]
Best Films - 1993
Jane Campion’s hauntingly beautiful The Piano is one of the rare successful attempts to bring the Gothic sensitivity of the Brontë sisters to the screen. Holly Hunter is superb as the Scottish widow Ada, a (self-imposed) mute and mother of a strange little girl, who finds herself stranded both physically and emotionally in the wilds [...]
Best Films - 1992
Forget Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and anything else he and his myriad imitators have done. C’est arrivé près de chez vous / Man Bites dog is the real thing. Directed by Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, and André Bonzel; written by this trio plus Vincent Tavier, and starring Poelvoorde himself as the coolest serial killer [...]
Best Films - 1991
Before he set out to make only ugly, tedious trash like G.I. Jane (1997), Gladiator (2000), and Black Hawk Down (2001), Ridley Scott directed at least three cinematic gems: Alien, probably the best monster movie ever; Blade Runner, one of the very best science-fiction films; and the character-driven Thelma & Louise, which leaves most road [...]
Best Films - 1990
A film by one of the world’s best directors, Gianni Amelio, the Academy Award-nominated Porte aperte / Open Doors tells the harrowing story of an assistant judge who tries to save a murderer from the death penalty in 1937 Palermo. As a bonus, the picture offers outstanding performances by veteran Gian Maria Volonté, as [...]
Best Films - 1985
Winner of the 1985 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award, Luis Puenzo’s La História oficial / The Official Story is deeply disturbing in its unflinching depiction of the evil lurking inside respectable members of society. Paradoxically, this Argentinian production is also deeply moving in its unsentimental portrayal of the human struggle for justice, however painful the [...]
Best Films - 1984
Despite a not too convincingly debauched Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, played with itsy-bitsy-cutesy flair by Academy Award nominee Tom Hulce, the visually stunning Amadeus is an intriguing treatise on the coexistence of heavenly talents and earthly desires within the same human mind.
F. Murray Abraham is an impressive Antonio Salieri, the self-important but morally corrupt second-rank [...]
Best Films - 1983
Cinematographer Carroll Ballard’s second directorial effort (following The Black Stallion in 1979), Never Cry Wolf is a stunningly beautiful meditation on nature and on life itself. Based on the true story of Canadian researcher Farley Mowat, this semi-documentary tells the story of a scientist who is sent to the far north to study the "dangerous" [...]
Best Films - 1982
Costa-Gavras made a reputation for himself as a director of provocative, controversial political thrillers. His 1969 anti-Greek junta film, Z, became the first non-English language film in more than thirty years to receive an Academy Award nomination as Best Picture. Missing, Costa-Gavras’s first film in English, also garnered a Best Picture nod — and deservedly [...]
Best Films - 1981
A superb cast that includes Academy Award nominee Fernanda Montenegro (Central do Brasil / Central Station) brings to life the conflicted characters of Eles Não Usam Black-Tie / They Don’t Wear Black-Tie, director Leon Hirszman and star Gianfrancesco Guarnieri’s adaptation of Guarnieri’s own play about a working-class family torn apart by labor struggles. During a [...]
Best Films - 1980
Once upon a time, before becoming involved in bloated mainstream Hollywood productions, Jonathan Demme directed a little gem called Melvin and Howard (as in Hughes, the oil millionaire-turned-film producer-turned-total nut that has been incarnated by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator).
Bo Goldman’s witty, funny, and poignant screenplay dealt with the search for the [...]
Best Films - 1975
1975 is the only year in which all films nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award also figure in our Best of the Best list. The five films are: Barry Lyndon, an 18th-century morality tale; Dog Day Afternoon, a very 20th-century tale of media irresponsibility, urban violence, and inner angst; Jaws, the gripping tale of [...]
Best Films - 1974
"You may think you know what you’re dealing with," one character admonishes sleazy private detective Jake Gittes, "but believe me, you don’t." Released shortly after the end of the Watergate hearings, Chinatown is Roman Polanski’s masterpiece and arguably the best mystery thriller ever filmed, a ruthless amorality tale about a putrid society in which corruption, [...]
Best Films - 1973
Throughout most of his career, Greek-born director Costa-Gavras has set his sights on political themes. With the Academy Award-winning Z (1969), he attacked the right-wing military junta that seized power in his native country; with L’Aveu / The Confession (1970), he attacked the totalitarian ways of the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia; and with État de [...]
Best Films - 1972
Musicals tend to be either vacuous and light as air (e.g., An American in Paris) or vacuous and heavy as lead (e.g., Doctor Dolittle). Cabaret fits into neither category. Set at the dawn of the Nazi era, Bob Fosse’s best film is a socio-political-psychological musical. If it’s not the first of its kind, it surely [...]
Best Films - 1971
Veteran actress-screenwriter-playwright Ruth Gordon enjoyed a major film career renaissance following her Oscar-winning devilish turn in Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. In Harold and Maude, the 75-year-old Gordon had her first starring role in a motion picture. Her offbeat performance as the free-spirited Maude helped turn this quirky, anti-establishment comedy into one of the major cult [...]
Best Films - 1970
Quite possibly Bernardo Bertolucci’s best film, Il Conformista / The Conformist is a first-rate psychological thriller that associates fascistic tendencies with repressed sexuality. Politicians everywhere should take a good look at it. Bertolucci, who also wrote the screenplay from a Alberto Moravia novel, focuses on the story of a Fascist-in-the-making, brilliantly played by Jean-Louis [...]
Best Films - 1965
Set in the amoral Swinging London of the 1960s, Darling is a morality tale that holds up surprisingly well. Julie Christie plays a beautiful model who sleeps her way to the top of London’s fashion world, while juggling along the way both Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. At the end, the young lady gets more [...]
Best Films - 1964
On paper, there is precious little that is innovative about Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg / The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It’s just your usual story of a handsome boy and a beautiful girl who are madly in love, and who are eventually separated by the outside world — in this case, both the Franco-Algerian [...]
Best Films - 1963
After Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), Robert Wise’s The Haunting is the best haunted house story ever filmed. But is the house really haunted or is everything taking place inside the head of sexless, neurotic spinster Julie Harris? The stage-trained Harris (East of Eden, The Member of the Wedding) delivers a phenomenal tour de force, [...]
