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Movie Review: East of Eden
Ranking: #81/111 Director: Elia Kazan (USA) Genre: Socio-Psychological Drama East of Eden shows the power of cinematic story-telling at its most intense, especially as some of the actors, including James Dean, were operating at the peak of their powers of expression....
Movie Review: Wild Strawberries
Ranking: #80/111 Director: Ingmar Bergman (Sweden) Genre: Socio-Psychological Drama This is perhaps Bergman’s greatest existential drama. That alone would make this film a milestone in the post-modern phase of cinematic...
Movie Review: The Train
Ranking: #79/111 Director: John Frankenheimer (USA-France) Genre: War Drama This is a first-rate war drama created by a director who was uniquely gifted at capturing action on the big screen, while able, at the same...
Movie Review: The Bicycle Thieves
Ranking: #78/111 Director: Vittorio De Sica (Italy) Genre: Neo Realism Drama James Monaco has pointed out that following the fall of fascism in Italy at the end of World War 2, there was a “flood of politically active, aesthetically revolutionary films known...
Movie Review: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf)
Ranking: #77/111 Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany) Genre: Satirical Social Drama/Romance Fear Eats the Soul is a gem of the New German Cinema. This movement flourished as a result of the founding of the Filmverlag der Autoren distributorship in 1971,...
Movie Review: Yellow Sky
Ranking: #76/111 Director: William A. Wellman (USA) Genre: Western Yellow Sky is one of cinema’s greatest Westerns. Some have seen it as the first noir Western, drawing on themes and stylistic elements common to Film...
Movie Review: Devi (The Goddess)
Ranking: #75/111 Director: Satyajit Ray (India) Genre: Satirical Social Drama Devi (The Goddess) is a most unusual and profound drama from the master Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. It’s about a false cult based on a mistaken belief that a demure young lady...
Movie Review: Three Colours: Blue
Ranking: #74/111 Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski (Poland) Genre: Psychological Drama Three Colours: Blue is an aesthetically pleasing and well-constructed drama on the theme of finding healing after the grief of severe human loss. It is the first in a trilogy by Polish...
Movie Review: The Sound of Music
Ranking: #73/111 Director: Robert Wise (USA) Genre: Musical Drama The Sound of Music succeeded in becoming an intensely positive and uplifting movie without straying into sentimentality or melodrama. This is because the director, Robert Wise, kept the music, dialogue,...
Movie Review: The End of Summer
Ranking: #72/111 Director: Yasujirō Ozu (Japan) Genre: Social & Psychological Drama Yasujirō Ozu is a legendary Japanese filmmaker who developed his own distinctive style of shooting and editing a film. You always know when you are watching a film by Ozu. For...
Movie Review: When You Read This Letter
Ranking: #71/111 Director: Jean-Pierre Melville (France) Genre: Film Noir Drama This is European Film Noir at its best. Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre is a dark social drama shot in stark black-and-white tones, with its on-location scenes filmed on the southern coast of...
Movie Review: Breaking Point
Ranking: #70/111 Director: Michael Curtiz (Hungary/USA) Genre: Crime Film Noir Based on a searing story from Ernest Hemingway, turned into a powerful screenplay that ripples with narrative tension, Breaking Point is one of the finest works of Film Noir in...
Movie Review: High Noon
Ranking: #69/111 Director: Fred Zinneman (Austria/USA) Genre: Western High Noon is an uncompromising Film Noir Western which has stood the test of time. It still has a vividness and immediacy which seven decades haven’t erased. It’s underpinned by a...
Movie Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Ranking: #68/111 Director: Elia Kazan (USA) Genre: Social Drama This is a stunning debut feature film and period piece by one of cinema’s greatest story-tellers, Elia Kazan. It recreates the hardship of financial struggle for an American-Irish family in a...
Movie Review: The Ascent
Ranking: #67/111 Director: Larisa Shepitko (Ukraine/Soviet) Genre: War Drama Ukrainian-Soviet film director, Larisa Shepitko, died tragically young in a car accident but not before she’d made a...
Movie Review:Tokyo Story
Ranking: #66/111 Director: Yasujiro Ozu (Japan) Genre: Social Drama Although I don’t think Tokyo Story is anywhere near the greatest film of all time, as is sometimes proposed, it is a richly nuanced social drama which has a subtle, but...
Movie Review: No Regrets for our Youth
Ranking: #65/111 Director: Akira Kurosawa (Japan) Genre: Political Drama No Regrets for our Youth is a profound political drama based on a real incident at Kyoto University in 1933 when a law professor was suspended and later fired by the Education...
Movie Review: Sansho the Bailiff
Ranking: #64/111 Director: Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan) Genre: Historical Period Drama Sansho the Bailiff is a classic Japanese moral folk tale masterfully made by Kenji Mizoguchi and filmed in black-and-white, using a predominantly soft grey palette. It’s a beautiful,...
Movie Review: Black Narcissus
Ranking: #63/111 Director: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (Britain) Genre: Psycho-Social Drama/Fable Black Narcissus is one of the greatest British studio films ever made. Visually majestic and thematically rich, it’s both emotive and evocative. I was...
Movie Review: Khartoum
Ranking: #62/111 Director: Basil Dearden (Britain) Genre: Historical Drama Khartoum isn’t just a compelling historical drama: it’s a visual spectacle, on the scale of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. And, like Lean’s masterpiece, it is a desert epic which is steeped...
Movie Review: The End of St Petersburg
Ranking: #61/111 Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin (Russia) Genre: Political Drama Russian director Vsevolod Pudovkin was one of the most influential of the so-called “montage” directors of the Soviet school (“Editing is the language of...
Movie Review: The Hands of Orlac
Ranking: #60/111 Director: Robert Weine (Austria) Genre: Science Fiction Horror/Romance This underrated film is just as much a masterpiece of Expressionism as Weine’s better known film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. As a psychological thriller in the genre of science...
Movie Review: I am Cuba
Ranking: #59/111 Director: Mikhail Kalatozov (Georgia/Soviet) Genre: Poetic Political Drama I am Cuba represents poetic cinema at its best. It is also a most unusual political drama. Highly experimental in nature, the film...
Movie Review: Lawrence of Arabia
Ranking: #58/111 Director: David Lean (Britain) Genre: Historical Drama David Lean’s fictionalised account of the career of archaeologist, army officer and writer T. E. Lawrence, famous for his role in the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918 against the Ottoman Empire, shouldn’t...
Movie Review: On the Waterfront
Ranking: #57/111 Director: Elia Kazan (USA) Genre: Socio-Political Drama/Film Noir Like David Lean, Elia Kazan is one of cinema’s greatest story-tellers. This story is set in the late 1940s in the tough...
Movie Review: Charulata (“The Lonely Wife”)
Ranking: #56/111 Director: Satyajit Ray (India) Genre: Social Drama/Romance The great Indian film director, Satyajit Ray, another cinematic story-teller of the highest order, considered this film to be his best (The Oxford...
Movie Review: The Spirit of St Louis
Ranking: #55/111 Director: Billy Wilder (USA) Genre: Historical Aviation Drama Whenever I watch The Spirit of St Louis,I think to myself: “This is why we watch movies!” This atmospheric film has it all: drama, suspense, stunning cinematography, an inspiring true...
Movie Review: Brief Encounter
Ranking: #54/111 Director: David Lean (Britain) Genre: Romance Drama David Lean’s Brief Encounter is a poignant, timeless love story that seems so genuine and so human it hurts just to watch it. Such tonal and emotional brilliance is rare in romance dramas on the Big...
Movie Review: Ran
Ranking: #53/111 Director: Akira Kurosawa (Japan) Genre: Shakespearean Period Drama/Tragedy In Ran, Akira Kurosawa has engineered a highly imaginative merging of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy King Lear with a Japanese parable about a 16th Century warlord called Mōri...
Movie Review: Earth
Ranking: #52/111 Director: Alexander Dovzhenko (Ukraine/Russia) Genre: Poetic Social Drama Earth is an intense poetic drama which is one of the masterpieces of the Soviet silent era. It forms part of Dovzhenko's "Ukraine Trilogy" and distils the director’s own...
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