Moonfleet

#37 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Sometimes you see an entry on a list that boggles the mind. There's no accounting for taste, for sure, but when I read that Cahiers du Cinema placed Fritz Lang's Moonfleet at number thirty-two on its list of greatest films of all time I was simply confounded.…

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Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

#12 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Fritz Lang dealt with Germany’s present in Dr. Mabuse, and now he turns his eyes to its past, its myth, and its legends. It’s also a rollicking good time of grand adventure, magic, and bravery. It’s a triumph of physical production combined with a wonderfully engaging mythic…

The Spiders Episode 2: The Diamond Ship

#38 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. The first Spiders movie was a relatively small and focused adventure. The second is bigger and far less focused, moving from one to location to the next in an amorphous mystery that doesn't so much escalate with increasing stakes but just kind of lurches from one thing…

The Spiders Episode 1: The Golden Sea

#30 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. German critics were apparently dismissive of this, Fritz Lang's third feature film (and first surviving one), deriding as sensationalism and nothing more. I don't disagree, but I also don't really see much wrong with it. The narrative and thematic ambitions are modest, focused more on purely entertaining…

Superman Returns

#5 in my ranking of the theatrically released Superman films. Batman Begins came and went to great fanfare, and Warner Brothers needed someone to help them reboot the long-neglected Superman franchise. Who better than Bryan Singer, the man who made the well-received first two X-Men movies? It helped that he was a big fan of…