Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli

When I make my rankings, I like to feel some comfort from the fact that because I have written reviews of everything in the ranking, people reading them can feel confident that, at a minimum, the ranking is seriously considered. I have seen everything, and in doing the ranking it's coming from a place of…

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The Wildcat

#24 in my ranking of Ernst Lubitsch's filmography. It really is obvious at this point that Ernst Lubitsch needed dialogue to shine. I don't think he'd made a bad film yet (well, except for The Eyes of the Mummy which I've mostly pushed out of my brain), but he was consistently held back by the…

Anna Boleyn

#34 in my ranking of Ernst Lubitsch's filmography. Am I the only one who thinks it's kind of weird that none of the intertitles re-Anglicize the names of Anne and Mary, leaving them as Anna and Marie, in this German rendition of the story of Anne Boleyn? It's just kind of weird. Anyway, Ernst Lubitsch…

Sumurun

Ernst Lubitsch made a handful of historical epics in a row in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and Sumurun is the second of the four. It is more fully a melodrama than Madame DuBarry was without the benefit of real history to help inform its dramatic and tonal swings. It also boasts a rather…

Madame DuBarry (or, Passion)

Another romantic historical film in the line of Carmen, Ernst Lubitsch adapted Memoirs d'un medicin by Alexandre Dumas and told the story of Louis XV's mistress, Madame DuBarry, bringing along his regular female star Pola Negri to lead the film. It's a story with a lot of moving parts and a lot of characters, but…