The Man in the White Suit

Out of the Ealing Studio comedies I've seen, this is probably my favorite. There's always a gentle undercurrent of satire to them, but this is the one with the sharpest edge, all while still packaged as a zany mid-century British comedy full of gentle humor. It's a delightful mix that manages to cast a wonderfully…

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Apocalypto

Mel Gibson decided to make an action movie in Mayan America, in Mayan. He really is a crazy person, and he's the exact kind of crazy person who should be getting tens of millions of dollars to make movies, because he took one of the weirdest ideas for a relatively large budgeted action movie and…

Overlord (1975)

Born from an idea to document some embroidery to commemorate Operation Overlord in World War II, Stuart Cooper's Overlord tells the story of the months leading up to the famed D-Day invasion from the very tight perspective of a single soldier, Tom. Intercut with extensive footage from the Imperial War Museum's archives, Cooper created a…

Ivan’s Childhood

#7 in my ranking of Andrei Tarkovsky's films. Andrei Tarkovsky made seven feature films over his life, and they are all assured works of an artist in full command of his craft. He started here, though, with Ivan's Childhood, a small film (his shortest by far) based on a novella that Tarkovsky himself didn't like…

Samurai Rebellion

#1 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Masaki Kobayashi was a great Japanese filmmaker who's been overshadowed by Akira Kurosawa over time. He worked in the samurai genre several times, much as Kurosawa did, but he was far more political. His work functioned as scathing critiques of contemporary Japanese life, in particular the propensity…