Two years ago, I made a Top 150 Films of All-Time list. That wasn’t enough, so last year, I came up with a Top 250. This year, I had to stop at 600. The idea of ranking 600 movies is, of course, ridiculous. But look, cool pictures!

1. Seven Samurai

2. Chungking Express

3. Casablanca

4. Singin’ in the Rain

5. Annie Hall

6. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

7. The Red Shoes

8. The Searchers

9. Days of Heaven

10. Duck Soup

11. The Rules of the Game

12. The Big Lebowski

13. Pierrot le fou

14. Manhattan

15. Playtime

16. Millennium Mambo

17. Touch of Evil

18. The New World

19. Bringing Up Baby

20. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

21. The Shop Around the Corner

22. Miller’s Crossing

23. Rear Window

24. Citizen Kane

25. Rio Bravo

26. All About Eve

27. Black Narcissus

28. A Woman is a Woman

29. Ugetsu

30. Vertigo

31. Stranger than Paradise

32. The Docks of New York

33. A Canterbury Tale

34. Mulholland Dr.

35. City Lights

36. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

37. A Matter of Life and Death

38. North By Northwest

39. Stagecoach

40. The General

41. Ran

42. It’s a Wonderful Life

43. Once Upon a Time in the West

44. The Quiet Man

45. Late Spring

46. M. Hulot’s Holiday

47. Two-Lane Blacktop

48. The Big Sleep

49. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

50. The Adventures of Robin Hood

51. Dead Man

52. Hard-Boiled

53. Make Way for Tomorrow

54. Tokyo Story

55. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

56. Psycho

57. Three Colors: Blue

58. The Philadelphia Story

59. The Royal Tenenbaums

60. I Am Cuba

61. All That Jazz

62. Gone with the Wind

63. Zulu

64. Voyage in Italy

65. L’Eclisse

66. Morocco

67. The Wind That Shakes the Barley

68. Out of the Past

69. Punch-Drunk Love

70. House of Flying Daggers

71. Funny Face

72. Swing Time

73. Last Year at Marienbad

74. Dazed and Confused

75. Celine and Julie Go Boating

76. Pulp Fiction

77. The Godfather Part II

78. Andrei Rublev

79. Rushmore

80. Histoire(s) du cinema

81. Only Angels Have Wings

82. The Third Man

83. Apocalypse Now

84. Satantango

85. 2046

86. The Band Wagon

87. The Birds

88. Sherlock Jr

89. Au hasard Balthazar

90. Sans soleil

91. The Pirate

92. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

93. The Lady Eve

94. Slacker

95. Fallen Angels

96. An American in Paris

97. Johnny Guitar

98. Miami Vice

99. My Night at Maud’s

100. Japanese Girls at the Harbor

101. Raiders of the Lost Ark
102. 2001: A Space Odyssey
103. To Have and Have Not
104. 8 1/2
105. In a Lonely Place
106. Trouble in Paradise
107. Rashomon
108. Gunga Din
109. Day of Wrath
110. LA Story
111. Steamboat Bill Jr.
112. Young Mr. Lincoln
113. Jaws
114. Chimes at Midnight
115. Red River
116. The Lion in Winter
117. L’Atalante
118. Tabu
119. In the Mood for Love
120. Lola
121. Contempt
122. Double Indemnity
123. All That Heaven Allows
124. The Princess Bride
125. F For Fake

126. My Darling Clementine
127. Hiroshima, mon amour
128. Ivan the Terrible Part 1
129. Eyes Wide Shut
130. Fitzcarraldo
131. 7 Women
132. Cat People
133. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
134. Kill Bill Vol. 1
135. The Empire Strikes Back
136. Tropical Malady
137. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf
138. Intolerance
139. Hannah and Her Sisters
140. Boogie Nights
141. The Manchurian Candidate
142. The Battle of Algiers
143. Harvey
144. Unforgiven
145. Do the Right Thing
146. The Thin Red Line
147. Top Hat
148. M
149. Ikiru
150. L’Avventura

151. Dr. Strangelove
152. Chinatown
153. Battleship Potemkin
154. The Passion of Joan of Arc
155. Mean Streets
156. The Awful Truth
157. Trainspotting
158. A History of Violence
159. Lawrence of Arabia
160. There Will Be Blood
161. Airplane!
162. Dragon Inn
163. Charade
164. Rome, Open City
165. Taxi Driver
166. Heaven’s Gate
167. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
168. The Life of Brian
169. Three Times
170. The Leopard
171. Shoot the Piano Player
172. Throne of Blood
173. The Lady from Shanghai
174. Don’t Look Back
175. Kicking and Screaming

176. Oxhide II
177. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
178. Last Life in the Universe
179. The Godfather
180. Some Came Running
181. Kiss Me Deadly
182. Unfaithfully Yours
183. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
184. The Lady Vanishes
185. Ghost Dog
186. Ashes of Time
187. The Gang’s All Here
188. The Seventh Seal
189. Pennies from Heaven
190. Shanghai Express
191. Sleeping Beauty
192. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
193. Inglourious Basterds
194. The Man with a Movie Camera
195. The Double Life of Veronique
196. Blow-Up
197. The World
198. Stromboli
199. The Wizard of Oz
200. Notorious

201. Ivan the Terrible Part 2
202. A Touch of Zen
203. Vampyr
204. Cranes Are Flying
205. His Girl Friday
206. Children of Paradise
207. WALL-E
208. Sansho the Bailiff
209. The Steel Helmet
210. The Last of the Mohicans
211. Ruggles of Red Gap
212. Big Night
213. Sunset Blvd.
214. Cabaret
215. Fantasia
216. Claire’s Knee
217. The Outlaw Josey Wales
218. Yojimbo
219. Glengarry Glen Ross
220. Wild Grass
221. My Winnipeg
222. The Blue Angel
223. Written on the Wind
224. Taste of Cherry
225. Sita Sings the Blues

226. Park Row
227. Letter from an Unknown Woman
228. The Passenger
229. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
230. Hero
231. Walkabout
232. Early Summer
233. Jezebel
234. Some Like it Hot
235. Star Wars
236. Laura
237. Rosemary’s Baby
238. Frankenstein
239. La Danse
240. Now, Voyager
241. Nights of Cabiria
242. A Christmas Tale
243. Underworld
244. The Green Ray
245. Still Life
246. Orlando
247. The Right Stuff
248. Zelig
249. Reservoir Dogs
250. Platoon

251. Paths of Glory
252. City Girl
253. Dangerous Liaisons
254. Kiss Me Kate
255. Alien
256. Fight Club
257. I’m Not There
258. Mogambo
259. Spirited Away
260. The Gold Rush
261. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
262. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
263. The Exterminating Angel
264. The Young Girls of Rochefort
265. The Great Escape
266. Don’t Look Now
267. Scarlet Street
268. New Rose Hotel
269. Cleo from 5 To 7
270. Hallelujah, I’m a Bum
271. The Big Red One
272. Brief Encounter
273. Sanjuro
274. The 400 Blows
275. Madame de. . .

276. Six Degrees of Separation
277. The Matrix
278. The Naked Spur
279. Henry V (1989)
280. Anchorman
281. Days of Being Wild
282. Going My Way
283. Lost Highway
284. Night of the Living Dead
285. Metropolitan
286. Wagon Master
287. Kill Bill Vol. 2
288. Ratatouille
289. The River (1951)
290. Kings and Queen
291. The Atomic Café
292. Three Colors: Red
293. Le Samourai
294. Alexander Nevsky
295. Godzilla
296. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
297. Yi yi
298. Winchester ’73
299. The Departed
300. The Road Warrior

301. Broken Blossoms
302. Syndromes and a Century
303. The Age of the Medici
304. Rebecca
305. The Palm Beach Story
306. This is Spinal Tap
307. Badlands
308. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
309. Ninotchka
310. On Dangerous Ground
311. Devil’s Doorway
312. Platform
313. Stalker
314. They Were Expendable
315. The Tai Chi Master
316. Pickpocket
317. Twentieth Century
318. The Girl Can’t Help It
319. Groundhog Day
320. The Long Goodbye
321. Quiz Show
322. Police Story
323. The Fellowship of the Ring
324. King Kong (1933)
325. The Killer

326. Night of the Hunter
327. The Purple Rose of Cairo
328. The Sword of Doom
329. There’s Always Tomorrow
330. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
331. Scarface
332. Muriel
333. Amadeus
334. Hell in the Pacific
335. Meet Me in St. Louis
336. The Last Days of Disco
337. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
338. The Limits of Control
339. Under the Roofs of Paris
340. Midnight
341. Exiled
342. Detour
343. Breathless
344. Ghostbusters
345. The Maltese Falcon
346. The Scarlet Empress
347. The Wind Will Carry Us
348. Suspicion
349. The Grand Illusion
350. Age of Consent

351. Petulia
352. Come Drink With Me
353. New York, New York
354. Judge Priest
355. Once Upon a Time in China
356. Waterloo Bridge
357. Kind Hearts and Coronets
358. Leave Her to Heaven
359. High and Low
360. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
361. Dodsworth
362. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
363. On the Waterfront
364. The Thing from Another World
365. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail
366. What Time is it There?
367. Kung Fu Hustle
368. Fantastic Mr. Fox
369. Happy Together
370. Gun Crazy
371. Nanook of the North
372. The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums
373. Three Comrades
374. The Blues Brothers
375. Tokyo Twilight

376. Drunken Master II
377. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
378. The Bells of St. Mary’s
379. The Puppetmaster
380. The French Connection
381. Centre Stage
382. The Set-Up
383. My Own Private Idaho
384. Modern Times
385. Barry Lyndon
386. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring
387. Caddyshack
388. The Last Waltz
389. Ordet
390. Paisan
391. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
392. The English Patient
393. PTU
394. The Ox-Bow Incident
395. Week End
396. The Mission
397. Sleeper
398. Pi
399. Die Hard
400. The Best Years of Our Lives

401. The Shining
402. Mr. Arkadin
403. Harakiri
404. Bull Durham
405. 42nd Street
406. Archangel
407. Fort Apache
408. Mon Oncle
409. The Dawn Patrol
410. Barton Fink
411. Almost Famous
412. Seven Men From Now
413. Point Blank
414. Tokyo Chorus
415. Killer of Sheep
416. Man of the West
417. Our Daily Bread
418. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days . . .
419. Aguirre: The Wrath of God
420. Empire of the Sun
421. Pickup on South Street
422. I Walked with a Zombie
423. Starship Troopers
424. Destry Rides Again
425. Jackie Brown

426. How Green Was My Valley
427. Goodbye South, Goodbye
428. The Last Laugh
429. The Conformist
430. The Ghost & Mrs. Muir
431. April Story
432. Seventh Heaven
433. Princess Raccoon
434. Morvern Callar
435. Lola Montes
436. I Know Where I’m Going!
437. The Thin Man
438. Joe vs. the Volcano
439. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
440. Orphans of the Storm
441. The 39 Steps
442. Summer Hours
443. Magnolia
444. Sabrina
445. Irma Vep
446. Gilda
447. Flight of the Red Balloon
448. Air Force
449. You, the Living
450. The Wild Bunch

451. The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk
452. It Happened One Night
453. The Big Heat
454. The Shanghai Gesture
455. Wee Willie Winkie
456. No Country for Old Men
457. Blissfully Yours
458. Fist of Legend
459. Heaven Can Wait (1943)
460. Love and Death
461. Like You Know it All
462. Grindhouse
463. The Killing
464. The Flowers of Shanghai
465. Shutter Island
466. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
467. Le Cercle rouge
468. Le Million
469. Nosferatu, the Vampyre
470. Le Jour se leve
471. American Graffiti
472. Red Cliff
473. Stolen Kisses
474. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
475. Lancelot du lac

476. The Tall T
477. 24 City
478. Baby Face
479. Donovan’s Reef
480. True Romance
481. Masculin feminin
482. Predator
483. Bottle Rocket
484. Climates
485. The Sweet Smell of Success
486. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
487. Out of Africa
488. Shadow of a Doubt
489. Full Metal Jacket
490. Floating Weeds
491. Bend of the River
492. Anatomy of a Murder
493. Grizzly Man
494. Limelight
495. Red Dust
496. Fucking Åmål
497. Nashville
498. Run Lola Run
499. Shock Corridor
500. Blade Runner

501. Alice in Wonderland (1951)
502. A Bridge Too Far
503. Broadcast News
504. Early Spring
505. Magnificent Obsession
506. Reds
507. Private Fears in Public Places
508. Picnic at Hanging Rock
509. Thieves’ Highway
510. Jour de fete
511. Army of Shadows
512. Brigadoon
513. True Heart Susie
514. Spring in a Small Town
515. A Letter to Three Wives
516. Café Lumiere
517. Patton
518. Stray Dog
519. Woodstock
520. La Strada
521. The Deer Hunter
522. Sisters of the Gion
523. Odd Man Out
524. Gates of Heaven
525. Before Sunrise

526. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
527. Love Affair
528. Goodfellas
529. The Big Parade
530. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
531. Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior
532. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
533. Existenz
534. Seven
535. A Time to Love and a Time to Die
536. Bigger Than Life
537. The Magnificent Ambersons
538. My Life to Live
539. The Devil is a Woman
540. The Phenix City Story
541. The Letter
542. To Be or Not To Be
543. The Tarnished Angels
544. The Hidden Fortress
545. Still Walking
546. The Black Stallion
547. Aliens
548. I Married a Witch
549. Every Man for Himself and God Against All
550. The Conversation

551. The Color of Pomegranates
552. The Asphalt Jungle
553. Bonnie and Clyde
554. Alphaville
555. After Life
556. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
557. 3 Bad Men
558. Simon of the Desert
559. Monsieur Verdoux
560. The Story of a Cheat
561. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
562. I Love Melvin
563. The Taking of Power by Louis XIV
564. Fireworks
565. A Story of Floating Weeds
566. The Adventures of Prince Achmed
567. Othello
568. Europa ’51
569. Night and the City
570. Animal House
571. A Clockwork Orange
572. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
573. The Life of Oharu
574. The Last Command
575. Tout va bien

576. Ishtar
577. The Verdict
578. Waltz with Bashir
579. Wings
580. You Think You’re the Prettiest but You Are the Sluttiest
581. Mirror
582. I Was Born But. . .
583. Greed
584. AI: Artificial Inteligence
585. Street of Shame
586. Earth
587. The Last Temptation of Christ
588. The Hitch-Hiker
589. The Jerk
590. My Blueberry Nights
591. Close-Up
592. Babes in Arms
593. The Iron Horse
594. Passion
595. The Spirit of the Beehive
596. The Last Emperor
597. Crimes and Misdemeanors
598. Solaris
599. Woman on the Beach (2006)
600. The Kid

Broken Embraces – This latest, and as far as I’ve seen, which isn’t much, the least of Pedro Almodovar’s films is a noirish story about a blind director and the Penelope Cruz he once loved. It’s told mostly in flashback, as the director, back when he can see, casts Cruz in his movie as she happens to be the girlfriend of the film’s financier. They fall in love with disastrous results. As you’d expect, the film is ravishingly beautiful (and I don’t just mean Cruz). But that isn’t quite enough to transcend the bland characters and pedestrian melodrama of their situation. What is cool is that the movie they’re making is like a funhouse version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, though it also serves to remind us what a really great Almodovar movie is like. The #33 film of 2009.

The Blue Angel – The legendary first teaming of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg is nearly stolen by Emil Jannings, a major star of the 20s who I’d nonetheless never warmed to (despite the obvious awesomeness of The Last Laugh and his performance therein). Dietrich is wonderful of course, finding a nuance in her character that most actresses (and directors) would not even attempt. She plays a showgirl (“Lola”, naturally) who tantalizes and ensnares a stuffy English professor. Her effect on him is narcotic and soon he’s abandoned his own life to marry her and join her show as a pathetic clown. Jannings excels in this fall into grateful debasement: nothing is too humiliating as long as he’s got her. He’s less theatrical than I’ve seen before, more grounded and more believably human. Her feelings are much more complex: she seems genuinely fond of the professor, simultaneously protective, indulgent adoring and disgusted. A lesser actress and director would make Lola an cold, calculating and unfeeling monster. But that’s why Von Sternberg and Dietrich were geniuses. The #4 film of 1930.

The Story of a Cheat – The first film from Criterion’s new Sacha Guitry set is also the first of his films that I’ve seen, though I’ve been curious about him since the mid-90s, when I read my first real film book, François Truffaut’s The Films in My Life, wherein he recalled Guitry fondly enough for me to wish his films were somehow available in the suburban backwater I called home. It’s easy to see why on the basis of this film, which Guitry directed, stars in and wrote, adapting his own novel: it has the kind of light, world-weary and scandalous charm that Truffaut would occasionally reach for, but which more properly belonged to Ernst Lubitsch. Guitry’s character here, a roguish raconteur narrating his memoirs in flashbacks (and I do mean narrating, most of the movie is literally in Guitry’s voice), recalls the types of characters Maurice Chevalier played for Lubitsch in the early 30s, only not as cloyingly smarmy as Chevalier often was, and with none of the singing. It’s often quite funny, but more than that, it’s the kind of movie that makes you smile for 90 minutes. The #3 film of 1936.

Orphans of the Storm – Grand scale melodrama with a historical backdrop from DW Griffith, who may as well have patented the genre. Coming in 1921, the rest of the cinematic world was rapidly leaving him behind, but nonetheless Griffith is in peak form here, deftly weaving the separation of two sisters into the chaos of the French Revolution. Lillian and Dorothy Gish play the sisters, one of whom is blind (naturally enough). The help out Danton and cross Robespierre and there’s a last minute rescue from a guillotine. It’s isn’t as ambitious as Intolerance, nor as ahistorical as Birth of a Nation. But neither is it as deeply characterized and emotionally resonant as True Heart Susie. And while it’s very well put together, directors like Murnau and Chaplin were already hard at work turning Griffith into a dinosaur barely a decade after he pretty near invented cinema as we know it. The #1 film of 1921.

Return to the 36th Chamber – A pretty much unnecessary sequel to one of the greatest martial arts films of all-time, this film reunites the star (Gordon Liu) and director (Lau Kar-leung) of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Less a sequel than a remake, though one taking place after the first film and played mostly for laughs. Liu plays a conman who poses as the character he played in the first movie (the founder of the 36th Chamber), gets beat up, and tries to enter the chamber and learn kung fu for real, all to protect his friends and family who work in the local textile-dying plant, lately run by a bunch of Manchurian tough guys who enact pay cuts across the board. Less an examination of the art and spirituality of kung fu than the first one, more a joke about how martial arts can be an effective substitute for unionization. The #12 film of 1980.

Toy Story 3 – The latest in Pixar’s relentless assault on our collective tear ducts reunites the gang from Andy’s Room as their owner is about to head off to college. Through a series of comical mishaps, most of the toys end up in a nightmarish day care center, imprisoned by a giant bear and his henchman Ken. The bulk of the film is highly enjoyable light comedy, building to dual climaxes, one horrifying and as moving as anything in film over the last few years (at least since the last Pixar film), one shamelessly playing us for saps. Of course, I didn’t fall for it. However, there appears to be a serious dust problem in our multiplexes these days. Someone should do something about that. By the way, I saw it in 2D. Looked great, can’t imagine 3D making it better.

The Green Ray – After earlier this year watching Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, I picked up another DVD set that had all of the next series he made, Comedies and Proverbs. This is the first one of those that I’ve watched, though it was the fifth of the six films in the series (it was so highly praised that I decided to disregard chronological order). It’s about a pretty, well-meaning, but slightly annoying woman who can’t decide what to do on vacation. Seems the friend she was going to Greece with ditched her at the last minute. She spends some time in the country with another friend’s family (freaking them out with her freaky vegetarianism) goes back to Paris and mopes, heads off to the mountains and immediately leaves, and ends up on the coast watching the sunset. It’s less verbal than the Moral Tales, which all feature male protagonists who non-stop talk themselves into and out of infidelities. Instead, we get a female protagonist, one who occasionally communicates in conversations, but just as often overhears other conversations, or simply walks alone through the various environments she finds herself in. Nature is more vital here than any of the other Rohmer’s I’ve seen, as it should be given its title, a peculiar and potentially life-changing atmospheric phenomenon. Rohmer is great at endings, and the one here is as beautiful and epiphanic as any in cinema. The #2 film of 1986.

Scarlet Street – It’s as if Fritz Lang realized what a copout the ending of The Woman in the Window really was and reassembled his cast (Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea) to make a really nasty film noir. It’s an adaptation of La Chienne, a French novel that had previously been filmed by Jean Renoir (and which I haven’t seen yet). Robinson (in one of his best performances) plays a bank clerk who paints in his spare time and allows himself to be bullied by his nightmarish wife (his apron-wearing while doing the dishes is one of the iconic images of noir). He meets Bennett on the street, getting beat up by her boyfriend Duryea. She thinks he’s rich and pretends to like him in order to siphon money off him. She and Duryea play him for a sap, going so far as to take credit for his paintings, which turn out to be quite good. He finds out, people die but Robinson gets away with it. Or does he? The film’s final sequences are haunting, the first instance I can think of in noir wherein the hero commits the crime, escapes the law but is punished far more harshly than he would have been by the legal system. It has all the trap-closing inevitability of the best of Fritz Lang. The #3 film of 1945.

Les Vampires – I actually watched the first eight parts of this ten part serial by French director Louis Feuillade a year ago, but only recently finished it. We were going to run it as part of last fall’s Metro Classics series, but the money didn’t work out. It’s about a fabulous criminal gang terrorizing Paris, and the crusading journalist who, at first, is the only one who believes they exist, and in the end, is famous for capturing or killing their many leaders. The star of the series, though, is Musidora as the top ranking woman in the group, Irma Vep, one of the most iconic figures of pre-1920 cinema, not quite The Little Tramp, but up there. The serials basically follow the same pattern: the Vampires come up with a complicated evil scheme, a theft or assassination or scheme to kill the journalist (poisoned rings, hypnotism, false closets etc); they enact their scheme but through bad luck the journalist and his comic relief crony somehow manage to foil them. It’s not quite the kind of Worst Detective In The World thing we got in Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, but they’re pretty bad. What makes it so great, and so watchable almost 100 years after it was made, are the small moments of hallucinatory imagery that are still hauntingly magical. Black-clad Irma Vep climbing the walls of Paris or crawling out of a painting while a woman is sleeping below, a cannon being assembled piece by piece in a hotel room to fire across town, a villain crawling out of a cabinet while everyone looks the other way, a bourgeois party knocked unconscious by gas attack and more. These strange and wonderful films should be seen alongside the films DW Griffith was making at the same time, their approaches forming one of the earliest strains in the not really real but fun to think about nonetheless prose vs. poetry opposition in cinema. The #1 film of 1915.

La danse – Director Frederick Wiseman’s documentary about the about the Paris Opera Ballet surely can’t be called verité: it’s too damned pretty for that ugly moniker. The film follows several dancers and choreographers as they plan and perform several different ballets. Wiseman’s hands-off approach results in near total confusion in terms of who is doing what and when, you know, all those irrelevant things that so often seem like the sole purpose of narrative film. With nary a narrator to tell us what’s going on, we’re instead forced to focus on what we are seeing, namely, the dance itself. Almost devoid of context (we do hear a little of the conversations between choreographer and dancer, which sometimes provides motivation but is just as often baffling to the untrained observer), we take in the movements of the dancers on the most visceral level: it’s the human body in motion in its purest form, and purity of the image of that motion is the purity of cinema itself. More than just being a neutral observer, however, Wiseman consistently finds the most striking of angles in which to frame his long takes, using the mirrors and clutter of the studios to full effect, as well as adopting any angle but the straight-ahead proscenium view for the performances. It’s one of the best pure documentaries I’ve seen in quite awhile and it has forever ruined So You Think You Can Dance for me. The #5 film of 2009.

Artists and Models – I think I just don’t think Jerry Lewis is funny. Sorry. I’m more than willing to admit that it must by my own failing. I do like director Frank Tashlin quite a bit, but this Lewis and Dean Martin comedy just didn’t work like I wanted it to. Martin’s a struggling painter and Lewis is his mentally disabled roommate who dreams up fabulous scenarios for comic books. Martin gets a job turning those dreams into actual comics, but tries to hide it from Dorothy Malone, who also draws comics (exploiting her roommate (Shirley MacLaine) in the process. There are also spies a Gabor and Anita Ekberg. Zaniness (but not much aactual hilarity) ensues. I thought MacLaine stole the movie: she managed to be both funny and likable, her singing of “Innamorata” to Lewis on a staircase is easily the highlight of the movie. The #23 film of 1955.

The Last Airbender – It’s really not that bad. I saw it in 2D, Roger Ebert’s 1/2 star review seems mostly to be a critique of the crappy 3D. The rest of the reviews I’ve seen, seem to be about the TV show. As I’d never heard of the show until a couple weeks before the film’s release, I don’t have anything to say about that. As a film, it’s fine. Really choppy and full of exposition, it feels very much like a movie targeted at little kids, attention span-wise. The child actors are generally pretty bad, they say every line with exclamation marks, but the adults are OK. Shyamalan keeps things interesting visually through most of the film, with his standard slightly off-kilter set-ups and angle choices and generally mellow editing (which I always appreciate in an action film). The action sequences are often pretty cool, especially at the climax, and the effects are decent enough, though nothing spectacular. There’s only one scene I thought was poorly shot (a bit of conversational exposition between three of the kids that’s inexplicably shot in alternating extreme close-ups) and there’s certainly nothing as audacious as some of the camera movements in Unbreakable or The Happening.

In the end, I think the source material overwhelmed him, or at least the running time. There’s obviously way too much to fit into 90 minutes and consequently it all feels rushed and worst of all, impersonal. Slowness of pace is one of Shyamalan’s hallmarks as a director: his films always know how to breathe. This one suffocates under the amount of story it feels it has to tell, the plot just never lets up. The result feels weirdly impersonal for such an idiosyncratic filmmaker. Maybe if in the next one the Avatar journeys to the Philadelphia area. . . .

I was hoping for something along the lines of The Happening or Speed Racer, movies that were trashed by critics at their opening but that I really liked (and one of which has grown a kind of cult following). It’s not that good, but neither is it as bad as The Mummy 3 or Quantum of Solace. As mainstream movies go, it’s about the level of Spiderman 3 or a Fantastic Four movie. Not terrible, but I’d hoped for better from Shyamalan.

Predators – Solid, retro action filmmaking, well put together, scripted and acted but it’s missing both the originality and mystery of Predator and the sense of environment and horror from Predator 2 (I might be the only person who likes that one). The cast is great: Adrien Brody, Danny Trejo, Laurence Fishburne, Alice Braga, Topher Grace, Walton Goggins and Louis Ozawa Changchien are a weird but really cool mix. In the end, it’s harmless.

Inception – Meh, it was alright. Like the rest of Christopher Nolan’s films, the thematic confusion is masked by piles of narrative and exposition. It is an improvement editing-wise, for him, though most of the action scenes are still cut pretty badly. That can be explained away in the first two chase scenes by the dream nature of the environments (assuming the first chase (where Saito rescues Leo) is a dream as well), but the snow sequence is just a mess.

The fight sequence with Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in the rotating hotel is easily the best thing Nolan’s ever done. I think the hotel’s rotating too fast according to the established physics of the world, then again, Nolan ignores that physics whenever it’s convenient (remember when Leo says the van has 20 seconds, JGL 3 minutes and the rest of them 60 minutes? Then five minutes later he says they have 30 minutes and JGL has “a couple”, then JGL spends at least 15 minutes setting up the elevator? Yeah, physics.)

The film’s big accomplishment, as far as I can tell, is that it didn’t piss me off as much as the rest of Nolan’s films have. It was mercifully free of the kind of misanthropic nastiness that made Memento and The Prestige so unpleasant, the acting and editing was much better than Batman Begins and it wasn’t nearly as sloppy in theme or filmmaking as The Dark Knight. So I guess he’s improving.

As for the end, I don’t think the film really makes sense whether it’s all a dream or not. That’s OK for an action/heist movie. I don’t think the film works emotionally, with it all being about Leo’s guilt. Maybe that’s because of Shutter Island, which as everyone has said is pretty much about the same thing and which I think does it better in just about every way. But it might also be because the guilt he feels rests on all these piles of technomumbojumbo about dream technology that doesn’t make any real sense. Your wife killing herself because you convinced her her world was not real and that death was the only way to escape it is not a particularly relatable dilemma. At least not for me, your mileage may vary.

PTU – Another extraordinary Johnnie To film, perhaps the one I’ve seen that is most definitive of his visual style. This story set over the course of one night as a cop (Lam Suet) tries to find his gun while covering up the fact that he lost it and his friends in the Police Tactical Unit (led by Simon Yam) do what they can to help him (and occasionally cross the line into outright brutality) while also trying to solve a murder is fairly straightforward, at least considering the narrative strangeness the later Milky Way films explore. The look is one of the better attempts at a color analogue to film noir I’ve ever seen, with brilliant white lights highlighting pitch-black frames. To’s not the only one to use that style, nor is this the only time he does it, but I don’t recall seeing the trope utilized as relentlessly as it is here. It’s nothing less than stunning. The #7 film of 2003.

Return of the One-Armed Swordsman – Jimmy Wang Yu returns as the titular amputee in director Chang Cheh’s followup to his masterful 1967 film. Leaving behind much of the dramatic intensity of the first film (when the hero lost his arm and had to struggle to relearn his martial arts skills), this time there’s a flimsy motivation for heaps of bloody violence. Bad guys want to prove they’re the best so they start killing everyone else. TOAS doesn’t want to fight anymore, but when his wife is kidnapped he turns into a one-armed killing machine. Good times. The #12 film of 1969.

Assault on Precinct 13 – About as perfect as action movies get, John Carpenter’s classic is a little bit Rio Bravo and a whole lot of Night of the Living Dead with a fair amount of Zulu thrown in. A small group is trapped in an about-to-close police station as an unending army of gang members tries to kill them all. Spare and precise, Carpenter slowly builds character and location through the first half which completely pays off in the second, where the lack of effects or budget are unnoticeable through the unrelenting suspense. Even Carpenter’s score is amazing: it sounds like the Platonic version of every 1980s electronic score. I shudder to think what the remake is like. The #3 film of 1976.

Tarzan, the Ape Man – In retrospect, it was obvious, but I’d never really noticed just how kinky the Tarzan stories are. But then, this is really the first one I’ve sat down and watched from beginning to end in a very long time. Good Victorian girl Jane goes to visit her pops in Africa, gets lost and rescued/kidnapped by a brutish swimmer (Johnny Weissmuller, a very handsome man) who takes her to his treetop lair, introduces her to his monkey family and makes her yodel. This film version ups the ante by making Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane more of a flirty flapper to begin with, so her sexual transformation moves her even further away from the Puritan ideal. The action sequences here are really good, with both actual animals and guys in animal suits (my favorite: a wounded Tarzan is attacked by and barely defeats a lion, only to be attacked moments later by. . . another lion!) Would I be crazy to call it Tabu: A Story of the South Seas meets King Kong? The #7 film of 1932.