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Film/Music Recommendations
The BIG BIG DVD List!    
Numbered Titles thru Letter E    
     
Here are the cream of the DVDs we’ve recommended over the past few years. We hope the list will serve you as a reference for building (or refurbishing) your DVD collection. Note that DVDs with asterisks before their titles are unusually good transfers. Also note that the best DVDs of 2004 will be announced a future issue.

Jonathan Valin
and the TPV Film Staff

    
     
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Stanley Kubrick, director. Warner.
Yes, it’s part shaggy god story (as John Simon once called it), but it’s also mesmerizing, musical, even poetic. The special effects—though almost 35 years old, long antedating CGI, and the work of just a handful of artists—are simply awesome. Also available as part of the Kubrick Collection.
(Fred Kaplan, Issue 40, Sci-Fi)
    
     
8 1/2 (1963).
Federico Fellini, director. Criterion.
Comic compassion infuses every frame—a stone masterpiece about a film director suffering a creative block.
(Paul Seydor, Issue 42, Drama)
    
     
8 Mile (2002).
Curtis Hanson, director. Universal.
Though its premise is all too familiar, what saves 8 Mile is a fine cast, the intelligent directing of Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), and the acting debut of hip-hop artist Eminem, who is immensely appealing in this semibiographical role.
(Wayne Garcia, Issue 49, Drama)
    
     
13 Conversations About One Thing (2001).
Jill Sprecher, director. Sony.
A chamber-music-like meditation on the search for happiness—and what to do with it when we find it. Extremely well acted, with Alan Arkin a standout as a spiteful insurance company manager.
(WG, Issue 48, Drama)		    
     
15 Minutes (2001).
John Herzfeld, director. Infinifilm.
Two movie-loving immigrants make an indie-style documentary film of their crime spree and sell the videotapes to a tabloid TV show. A hilarious and terrifying riff on just about everything that’s awry in our media-mad culture.
(Jonathan Valin, Issue 39, Noir)
    
     
*About a Boy (2002).
Chris & Paul Weitz, directors. Universal.
A surprisingly pleasant adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1998 novel about a shallow Londoner (Hugh Grant) who, pretending to be a single dad to pick up single moms, meets a 12-year-old boy (Nicholas Hoult) whose plight gradually touches his heart.
(WG, Issue 48, Comedy)
    
     
The Adventures of Antoine Doinel: The 400 Blows (1959), Antoine and Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), Love on the Run (1979).
François Truffaut, director. Criterion.
The 400 Blows follows a 13-year-old boy yearning for escape. The boy is Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, and rarely has a tale of troubled youth been told with so much warmth and so little sentimentality. Truffaut grew so smitten with the boy’s fate that he made four sequels over the next 20 years. All five films are joined together in this box set.
(FK, Issue 50, Drama/Comedy)
    
     
*The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
Michael Curtiz & William Keighley, directors. Warner.
The best of all ’30s swashbucklers. As usual, Errol Flynn brings inimitable physical grace, dashing good looks, and utter insouciance to Robin, and Olivia de Havilland is suitably and beautifully maidenly as Marian. The villains (Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains) are equally delightful.
(JV, Issue 51, Action/Adventure)
    
     
Une affaire de goût [A Matter of Taste] (2000).
Bernard Rapp, director.
Tla Releasing.
A handsome young waiter named Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Lorit) is hired by a very rich businessman named Frédéric (Bernard Giraudeau) to be his food-taster. Slowly, Nicolas gives up his own identity to become a double willing to “taste” all of life’s pleasures for Frédéric. Very creepy.
(JV, Issue 50, Noir) 		   
     
Afterglow (1997).
Alan Rudolph, director. Columbia TriStar.
Like his mentor Robert Altman, Rudolph offers a take on human relationships that is broadly cynical but also, sometimes, heartbreaking. This is certainly true of Afterglow. whose final sequence is one of the saddest in cinema. Nick Nolte and Julie Christie are outstanding.
(Royal S. Brown, Issue 52, Drama)
    
     
Ali (2001).
Michael Mann, director. Columbia.
Will Smith as Muhammad Ali in the best big-budget biopic in a decade or more.
(JV, Issue 43, Drama)
    
     
Alien (1979).
Ridley Scott, director. Fox.
The scariest sci-fi movie ever made.
(JV, Issue 51, Horror)		    
     
All About Eve (1950).
Joseph Mankiewicz, director. Fox.
Eve has one of the most flawless scripts conceived for the screen. Famously droll performances from Bette Davis as aging stage-diva Margo Channing and Anne Baxter as the serpentine ingénue who pretends to be her protégé.
(Harry Pearson, Issue 48, Drama)
   
     
*All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Lewis Milestone, director. Universal.
A classic war film about an idealistic young German (Lew Ayres) who loses heart and hope while serving on the Western Front in World War I, with cinematography, editing, and direction worthy of Eduard Tisse and Sergei Eisenstein (both of whom clearly influenced Milestone). Still enormously powerful, seventy-five years after its release.
(JV, Drama)
    
     
Amadeus: Director’s Cut (1984).
Milos Forman, director. Warner.
A deft, amusing serio-comedy about the deadly rivalry between Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Salieri (F. Murray Abraham). Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Abraham).
(JV, Issue 45, Drama)
    
     
Amores Perros (2000).
Alejandro González Iñárritu, director. Studio S.
A long, grim, mesmerizing film about three people in Mexico City whose tragic interlocking stories end on a note of redemption.
(FK, Issue 41, Drama)
    
     
The Andromeda Strain (1970).
Robert Wise, director. Universal.
Four scientists fight against time to identify a deadly virus brought back to Earth in a satellite flytrap designed for that very purpose. Exciting, scary, and (unfortunately) timelier than ever.
(HP, Issue 49, Sci-Fi)
    
     
Animal House (1978).
John Landis, director. Universal.
The frat boys of Delta House are the college kids your parents warned you about. They seduce the dean’s wife, corrupt the mayor’s daughter, pillage the town—and they’re hilarious.
(FK, Issue 52, Comedy)
    
     
The Anniversary Party (2001).
Alan Cumming & Jennifer Jason Leigh, directors. New Line.
An ill-fated anniversary gathering among less-than-luminary Hollywood types has an emotional honesty rarely seen in American filmmaking today.
(WG, Issue 42, Drama)
    
     
À nous la liberté (1931).
René Clair, director. Criterion.
A boffo left-leaning political satire that equates life in the modern world with life in prison—a tremendously influential (and often very funny) musical comedy.
(JV, Issue 45, Comedy/Musical)
    
     
*Apocalypse Now (1979).
Francis Ford Coppola, director. Paramount.
Coppola’s Vietnam War film, based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, is two-thirds masterpiece and one-third nonsense. Despite the overreaching ending, the good parts are so good one wouldn’t want to be without them.
(JV, Issue 48, War/Drama)
    
     
L’Atalante (1934).
Jean Vigo, director. New Yorker Video.
An undisputed masterwork. A young barge captain (Jean Dasté) brings his luminous young bride (Dita Parlo) aboard his boat, and they shove off on the shaky adventure of marriage. When she and her husband become separated, Vigo uses some of the most haunting images ever put on film to show us their longing for each other.
(Stephanie Zacharek, Issue 49, Drama)
    
     
Atlantic City (1981).
Louis Malle, director. Paramount.
A near-perfect comic melodrama filmed among crumbling Atlantic City shops and hotels being razed to make room for new casinos. With Burt Lancaster as an old numbers-runner with a streak of gallantry, and Susan Sarandon as the troubled young croupier he champions.
(Michael Sragow, Issue 51, Comedy)
    
     
Audition (1999).
Takashi Miike, director. Chimera.
A gruesome but hypnotic horror film about a Japanese widower searching for a new wife who hooks up with Ms. Incredibly Wrong.
(RSB, Issue 44, Horror)		    
     
L’Avventura (1959).
Michaelangelo Antonioni, director. Criterion.
A woman disappears mysteriously, her friend and her lover search for her, new alliances are formed, the missing woman is forgotten, life goes on, and nothing is explained. Dream-like, beautiful, subtle, and sad. A masterpiece.
(WG, Issue 40, Drama)		    
     
The Awful Truth (1937).
Leo McCarey, director. Columbia.
Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are a married couple who’ve split up for silly reasons, and while they entertain the notion of second marriages to egregiously unsuitable partners, they keep leaning in each other’s direction. McCarey’s work with the two stars and sharp-witted supporting cast is sensational.
(Steve Vineberg, Issue 49, Comedy)		    
     
Bagdad Café (1987).
Percy Adlon, director. MGM.
Wonderful characters and vivid visual textures exactly reflect the human comedy being played out in this desert-stop romance.
(HP, Issue 44, Comedy)		    
     
Ballad of a Soldier (1959).
Grigori Chukhrai, director. Criterion.
Deeply affecting Russian film that makes battlefield sacrifice real by showing us all that is left behind when men go to war.
(JV, Issue 44, Drama/War)
    
     
Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) (1964).
Jean-Luc Goddard, director. Criterion.
The New Wave’s Pulp Fiction. Two delinquent boys and the girl who loves them (adorable Anna Karina) plan and botch a robbery. Sort of a film noir, sort of a romantic comedy, sort of a musical, Band of Outsiders is, at bottom, about being Jean-Luc Goddard—young, smart, hip, French, and in love with the movies.
(JV, Issue 47, Drama)
    
     
Barbershop (2002).
Tim Story, director. MGM.
Comedies often deal with social issues more effectively than serious dramas do, and Barbershop is a near-perfect example, riffing sharply on the idea that a sense of community is one of the most enriching components of everyday life.
(SZ, Issue 48, Comedy)		    
     
Barton Fink (1991).
Joel and Ethan Coen, directors. Fox.
The funniest film ever made about writer’s block, Barton Fink traces the Hollywood adventures of its eponymous hero—a playwright (John Turturro) who fancies himself the champion of a leftist theater for and about the “common man,” when, in fact, he is as far removed from the common man as a human being can get. (JV, Issue 49, Comedy)
    
     
Beau-père (1981).
Bertrand Blier, director. Fox Lorber.
A genuinely unconventional movie about incest—at once tender, odd, painful, unsettling, and triste.
(Mark Lehman, Issue 45, Drama)		    
     
*A Beautiful Mind (2001).
Ron Howard, director. Universal.
Russell Crowe wondrously captures both the boldness of genius and the insecurity of a madman in this liberty-taking biopic about Nobel Prize winner John Nash. Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director.
(FK, Issue 44, Drama)
    
     
Beauty and the Beast (1946).
Jean Cocteau, director. Criterion.
Cinema has been good to fairy tales, but never better or more magical than it is here. When Jean Cocteau’s Beast (Jean Marais) dies at the close and is transmuted into Prince Charming, it is said that a woman in the opening night audience cried out, “Give me back my Beast!” That is the spell this movie casts on grown men and women alike.
(JV, Issue 48, Fantasy)
    
     
Bend it Like Beckham (2002).
Gurinder Chadha, director. Fox.
Corny, predictable, and stocked with more ethnic clichés than a Cost Plus store, Bend it Like Beckham has one terrific thing going it for it—the delightful Parminder Nagra as Jess, the daughter of Punjabi immigrants living in a London suburb, who, at an age when most Indian girls should be focused on marriage or the university, is a soccer fiend.
(WG, Issue 52, Comedy)
    
     
The Big Heat (1953).
Fritz Lang, director. Columbia.
Expertly made, unusually hard-boiled policier about a cop (Glenn Ford) seeking revenge for his murdered wife. Gloria Grahame is a standout as the hussy who helps him—and gets a pot of boiling coffee thrown in the face for her trouble.
(JV, Issue 41, Noir)		    
     
*The Big Lebowski (1998).
Joel and Ethan Coen, directors. Polygram.
The funniest and most lovable (and quotable) of all Coen brothers’ films, about an unregenerate hippie nicknamed The Dude who is mistaken for a reactionary Republican businessman, whose ex-porn-star wife, Bunny, has been kidnapped by nihilists. Some kind of classic.
(JV, Issue 25, Comedy)
    
     
Big Wednesday (1978).
John Milius, director. Warner.
John Milius’ best film turns the California surfing life into a metaphor for the turmoil of the ’60s.
(Shane Buettner, Issue 45, Drama)
    
     
Bitter Moon (1992).
Roman Polanski, director. New Line.
In flashbacks, Polanski paints a fairytale Parisian romance that slowly evolves into something out of an erotic Brothers Grimm. Superb performance by Peter Coyote. (WG, Issue 51, Drama)
    
     
*Black Hawk Down (2001).
Ridley Scott, director. Columbia/Tri-Star.
A riveting war film about the catastrophic “Mogadishu incident,” with a revisionist moral that couldn’t be more timely or unsettling.
(JV, Issue 45, Drama/War)
    
     
The Black Marble (1980).
Harold Becker, director. Anchor Bay.
An alcoholic cop (Robert Foxworth) and his new partner (Paula Prentiss) tackle a case of dog-napping. A dark, loopy classic.
(HP, Issue 49, Noir)
    
     
Black Sunday (1977).
John Frankenheimer, director. Paramount.
John Frankenheimer’s adaptation of the eerily prescient first novel by Thomas Harris (better known today as the creator of Hannibal Lecter) about a pair of terrorists who set out to kill 80,000 people at the Super Bowl.
(ML, Issue 52, Thriller)
    
     
*Blood Simple (1984).
Joel and Ethan Coen, directors. Universal.
The Citizen Kane of indie films. A dark, bloody, ingenious thriller in which each of four protagonists suspects that the others are up to no good, but can never quite figure out who’s done what to whom.
(JV, Issue 40, Noir)
    
     
Bloody Sunday (2002).
Paul Greengrass, director. Paramount.
A nerve-shattering, thrillingly complex recreation of the Derry, Northern Ireland, civil rights march of January 30, 1972—which left 13 unarmed civilians dead and 14 wounded from the guns of British troops.
(MS, Issue 50, Drama)
    
     
Blue Car (2003).
Karen Moncrieff, director. Miramax.
Devastating drama about a deeply troubled teenage poet (Agnes Bruckner) who is mentored and then taken cruel advantage of by her high-school poetry teacher (David Strathairn). One of the best films of 2003.
(ML, Issue 53, Drama)
    
     
Blue Velvet—Special Edition (1986).
David Lynch, director. MGM.
An improved transfer of Lynch’s dark, unforgettable Freudian allegory about a young man coming to grips with evil. A stone masterpiece.
(JV, Issue 37, Noir/Drama)
    
     
Bob Hope: The Tribute Collection (2003).
Mitchell Leisen, Raoul Walsh, et al., directors. Universal.
In movies, Bob Hope remains a figure to reckon with, and this Tribute Collection contains many of his best films, including the Road pictures with Crosby and Lamour.
(Gary Giddins, Issue 46, Comedy)
    
     
Bob le Flambeur (1956).
Jean-Pierre Melville, director. Criterion.
Witty, hard-boiled film noir about a French gambler down on his luck who decides to rob a casino.
(FK, Issue 43, Noir)
    
     
Bonnie and Clyde (1968).
Arthur Penn, director. Warner.
Tragicomic tour de force about the two famous outlaw lovers who terrorized the Southwest in the early ’30s. One of the seminal films of the sixties, B&C changed the tone, subject, and direction of American filmmaking.
(JV, Crime/Drama)
    
     
Breathless (1960).
Jean-Luc Godard, director. Fox Lorber.
This caustic, frenetic fantasia about a French thief and his faithless American girlfriend helped redefine cinema.
(SV, Issue 41, Drama/Noir)
    
     
Bridget Jones’s Diary (1999).
Sharon Maguire, director. Miramax.
A very entertaining adaptation of Helen Fielding’s novel, with stellar performances from Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, and, especially, Renée Zellwegger as the pouldy Cinderella of this latter-day fairy tale.
(WG, Issue 40, Comedy)
   
     
Broadway Danny Rose (1984).
Woody Allen, director. MGM.
A Broadway agent with losers for clients falls for a Mafia moll—Allen’s first film to draw full-blown human characters and treat them with empathy.
(FK, Issue 41, Comedy)
    
     
The Browning Version (1994).
Mike Figgis, director. Paramount.
The second screen version of what is probably the best known of Terence Rattigan’s plays about a classics instructor at a ritzy English boys’ school. Albert Finney leads us straight into the emotional decay of the man.
(SV, Issue 52, Drama)
    
     
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).
Robert Weine, director. Elite Entertainment.
A surrealist masterpiece, Caligari is not just a great horror film; it is also an allegory of the German nation, hypnotized by its leaders and made to commit murder in its sleep.
(JV, Horror)
    
     
Cape Fear (1962).
J. Lee Thompson, director. Universal.
An extraordinarily well-made thriller that boasts the single best villain in noir flicks. Robert Mitchum’s unforgettably evil Max Cady is one for the (dark) ages.
(JV, Issue 40, Noir)
    
     
*Casablanca (1942).
Michael Curtiz, director. Warner.
As everyone knows, Casablanca is the story of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart)—who loses his soul when he loses The Woman He Loves (Ingrid Bergman) and finds it again when, out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into his.
(JV, Issue 51, Drama)
    
     
Casualties of War (1989).
Brian De Palma, director. Columbia.
A profoundly upsetting and terrifying exploration of morality and group dynamics in wartime.
(SV, Issue 40, Drama/War)
    
     
*Catch Me If You Can (2002).
Steven Spielberg, director. DreamWorks.
This old-fashioned chase comedy—based on the true story of teenage con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr.—is the least pretentious and most entertaining film Steven Spielberg has directed in what seems like forever.
(JV, Issue 50, Comedy/Drama)
    
     
*Chicago (2002).
Rob Marshall, director. Miramax.
Terrifically entertaining adaptation of Bob Fosse’s stage musical about two murderesses in Roaring Twenties Chicago, who beat their raps thanks to a silver-tongued lawyer, a cynical press, and their own moxie. Starring the fabled song-and-dance team of Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger, and Richard Gere.
(JV, Issue 50, Musical)		    
     
Children of Paradise (1945).
Marcel Carné, director. Criterion.
An epic story of 19th century French theater life with the dramatic sweep and bittersweet sting of L’Education sentimentale—often voted one of the ten best films.
(GG, Issue 42, Drama)		    
     
Chinatown (1975).
Roman Polanski, director. Paramount.
Though, like so many other Paramount titles, the DVD cries out for a redo, Chinatown is such a great movie that it doesn’t matter. One of the Top Ten American films of the sound era. Deeply affecting performances from Jack Nicholson as the P.I. Jake Gittes and Faye Dunaway as his tragic lover, Evelyn Mulwray.
(JV, Noir)		    
     
ChunGking Express (1994).
Wong Kar-wai, director. Miramax.
A Hong Kong action flick that combines the energy of early Godard with the charm of middle Truffaut.
(FK, Issue 44, Drama)
    
     
*Citizen Kane (1941).
Orson Welles, director. Warner.
The finest American film of the sound era about a newspaper tycoon who gains the world and loses his soul.
(JV, Issue 40, Drama)
    
     
*City of Industry (1997).
John Irvin, director. MGM.
Extremely hard-boiled L.A. crime story about a gangster (Harvey Keitel at his toughest) out to revenge his brother’s murder and recover the loot that another member of the gang has stolen.
(JV, Issue 38, Noir)
    
     
*The Civil War (1990).
Ken Burns, director. PBS Home Video.
Arguably the best documentary yet aired by PBS—unforgettable, riveting American history.
(Catherine Cella, Issue 45, Documentary)		    
     
The Claude Chabrol Collection: Les Biches (1968); La Femme infidèle (1969); Que la bête meure (1969); Le Boucher (1969); La Rupture (1970); La Décade prodigieuse (1972); Nada (1974); Les Innocents aux mains sales (1975).
Claude Chabrol, director. Pathfinder.
It would be a vast understatement to call this eight-DVD set an embarrassment of riches. At age 73 French “New Wave” filmmaker Claude Chabrol has slowed down only slightly as he continues to turn out films, which start off as upper-middle-class dramas that, coolly and quietly, pull the viewer into a psycho-social darkness never fully explained away.
(RSB, Issue 50, Noir)		    
     
*Clay Pigeons (1998).
David Dobkin, director. Polygram.
Joaquin Phoenix as hapless Clay Bidwell and Vince Vaughn as Clay’s psychotic nemesis Lester Long are delights in one of the best film noirs of a very good decade for noir. A black-comic gem.
(JV, Noir)
   
     
A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Stanley Kubrick, director. Warner.
One of Kubrick’s finest—a devastating satire that deftly questions the morality of social engineering. Malcom McDowell gives an inspired performance as the ultra-violent droog, Alex. Based on the Anthony Burgess novel.
(JV, Comedy/Drama)		    
     
*Closely Watched Trains (1966).
Jiri Menzel, director. Criterion.
Though set during WWII, this Czech New Wave picaresque, which traces the adventures of a young railroad worker during the Nazi occupation, is about a more eternal struggle—coming to manhood. By turns, as funny, sad, sudden, and final as life itself sometimes is.
(JV, Issue 40, Drama)
   
     
The Complete Monterey Pop Festival (1968).
D.A. Pennebaker, director. Criterion.
Symbolically, Woodstock remains king of filmed concerts, but for substance and importance, Monterey is the touchstone. This lower-profile gathering opened the gates to innovative music, alternative culture, and unlimited possibilities. Filmed by D.A. Pennebaker.
(Bob Gendron, Issue 47, Musical)
    
     
Contempt (1963).
Jean-Luc Godard, director. Criterion.
Jean-Luc Godard’s most mournful film, Contempt is an examination of the disintegrating marriage of a failed screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) and his gorgeous wife (Brigitte Bardot). What makes the film so heartbreaking is the way it makes us long to pretend this fractured relationship isn’t nearly as hopeless as it seems.
(SZ, Issue 47, Drama)
    
     
Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate) (1981).
Bertrand Tavernier, director. Criterion.
A brilliant, hilarious, and disturbing movie about a passive provincial police chief in French colonial Africa, who, spat upon by the power brokers one time too many, sets out to exact revenge and justice. One of Tavernier ‘s most spirited works.
(FK, Issue 39, Noir)
    
     
Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon (1957).
Jacques Tourneur, director. Columbia.
A genuine hair-raiser from horror-film pioneer Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie) about a skeptical scientist (Dana Andrews) who comes to Britain and tangles with a magus, who sics a demon on him.
(HP, Issue 46, Horror)
    
     
Cutter’s Way (1981).
Ivan Passer, director. MGM.
Jeff Bridges is great as the shallow lothario and part-time yacht salesman, Richard Bone, whose one talent is running away. And John Heard is equally wonderful as the angry, disfigured, self-destructive Vietnam vet, Alex Cutter, who leads them both into desperate straits. One of the saddest and more trenchant stories about America after Vietnam.
(JV, Issue 39, Drama)
    
     
Dark Blue (2003).
Ron Shelton, director. MGM/UA.
Kurt Russell gives a phenomenal performance as Eldon Perry, Jr., an ace cop in L.A.’s Special Investigations Squad, who’s convinced that his wife (Lolita Davidovich) and new partner (Scott Speedman) still find his macho bravado charming.
(MS, Issue 50, Noir)		    
     
The Day of the Jackal (1973).
Fred Zinnemann, director. Universal.
A terrific thriller about a plot to assassinate De Gaulle. Masterful direction by Zinnemann and memorable performances by Edward Fox as the assassin and Michael Lonsdale as the inspector whose job it is to stop him.
(JV, Thriller)
    
     
Day of Wrath (1943).
Carl Dreyer, director. Criterion.
Sexual repression, the tyranny of conformism, and the powers of good and evil mix in a Hawthorne-like allegorical drama set in 17th century Denmark about a young woman who marries a kindly but repressive older man. That Dreyer finds a way to realize a human spirit that we can never see in what is, after all, a medium devoted to what we can is a constant amazement.
(JV, Issue 40, Drama)		    
     
Dead of Winter (1987).
Arthur Penn, director. MGM.
A relentlessly dark and clever thriller about a woman (Mary Steenburgen) hired to impersonate a murdered woman (Steenburgen again) in order to blackmail the murdered woman’s sister (Steenburgen encore).
(RSB, Issue 47, Horror)
    
     
Death and the Maiden (1994).
Roman Polanski, director. New Line.
A trio of characters—a woman who was tortured by a South American death squad (Sigourney Weaver), her idealist husband (Stuart Wilson), and a stranger who may have been the woman’s chief torturer (Ben Kingsley)—confront each other in a dark psychological suspense thriller of considerable power.
(MD, Issue 50, Drama)
    
     
The Devil’s Backbone (2001).
Guillermo del Toro, director. Columbia/Tristar.
A thoughtful ghost story set in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War that suggests that the real “ghosts” are human beings who have become fixated on the past.
(HP, Horror)		    
     
Dick Tracy (1990).
Warren Beatty, director. Touchstone.
A phantasmagorical live-action comic strip, with fabulous make-up and sets.
(RSB, Issue 43, Musical/Comedy)
    
     
Die Hard: The Ultimate Collection (Die Hard [1988], Die Hard 2: Die Harder [1990], Die Hard With a Vengeance [1995]).
John McTiernan, Renny Harlin, directors. Fox.
For Detective John McClane/Bruce Willis compleatists, here, indeed, is the ultimate Die Hard collection—and as action-movie franchises go it’s a pretty fair package. The first and, especially, the third Die Hard—the John McTiernan entries—are your best bets.
(JV, Issue 39, Action/ Adventure)		    
     
Dirty Harry (1971).
Don Siegel, director. Warner.
The first and still the best of the Dirty Harrys. Cool, vicious, and chillingly nihilistic, with an iconic performance by Eastwood.
(JV, Issue 41, Noir)
    
     
Double Indemnity (1944).
Billy Wilder, director. Image.
One of the pantheon noirs, from a script by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (based on the novel by James M. Cain), with Fred MacMurray as the insurance agent who gets in too deep, Barbara Stanwyck as the femme fatale, and wonderful Edward G. Robinson as the voice of conscience and reason.
(JV, Noir)
    
     
Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001).
Stacy Peralta, director. Columbia.
A ravishing documentary about the L.A. boys who perfected the sport of skateboarding.
(SV, Issue 45, Documentary)
    
     
Don’t Look Now (1973).
Nicholas Roeg, director. Paramount.
One of the most elegant horror movies. An architect expert in restoration (Donald Sutherland), working on a decaying church in a very creepy Venice, is unwittingly led astray by his own gift of second sight. With Julie Christie as his sexy, credulous wife. Nicholas Roeg’s finest film.
(RSB, Issue 51, Horror)
    
     
Down By Law (1986).
Jim Jarmusch, director. Criterion
A charming, off-beat comedy about three convicts who escape a Louisiana jail. With Roberto Benigni, the Jerry Lewis of European comedy, as an infuriatingly cheerful Italian prisoner.
(FK, Issue 51, Comedy)
    
     
Down From The Mountain (2000).
D.A. Pennebaker, et al., directors. Artisan.
A concert of music from the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(WG, Issue 42, Documentary)
    
     
*Down With Love (2003).
Peyton Reed, director. Fox.
Set deliciously in the Manhattan of 1962, Down With Love involves a playboy journalist (Ewan McGregor), who tries to expose a proto-feminist (Renée Zellweger) as a phony by making her fall in love with him. Down With Love is cotton candy, but that’s all it wants to be.
(WG, Issue 52, Comedy) 		   
     
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
Stanley Kubrick. Columbia.TriStar
Nuclear brinkmanship has never been more hilarious (or catastrophic). With a perfect cast, led by Peter Sellers in three roles—Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and, of course, the wheel-chair-bound Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove—Sterling Hayden as Brig. General Jack D. Ripper, whose obsession with the purity of his bodily fluids initiates apocalypse, and George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, who, though he hates to judge before all the facts are in, concedes that “it looks like General Ripper exceeded his authority” when he launches an all-out nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R. Kubrick’s best film.
(JV, Noir/Comedy)		    
     
Drumline (2002).
Charles Stone III, director. Fox.
Nick Cannon plays a young hotshot snare drummer who lands a marching band scholarship. The story of how he grows, as a man and as a musician, by learning teamwork is more ancient than the Mississippi. But director Charles Stone III tells it as if it’s the first time we’ve heard it.
(SZ, Issue 50, Drama)		    
     
The Duellists (1977).
Ridley Scott, director. Paramount.
Ridley Scott’s phenomenal 1977 debut film is a wry, volatile, gorgeous-looking romantic adventure filled with extravagant swordplay. Its central characters—two soldiers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) locked in a perpetual duel of honor over an insignificant slight—remain partial mysteries, as they should be for warriors at once absurd and mythic.
(MS, Issue 47, Drama)
    
     
The Elephant Man (1980).
David Lynch, director. Paramount.
Deeply moving, virtually flawless film about Victorian England’s famous, severely disfigured “Elephant Man,” John Merrick.
(RSB, Issue 41, Drama)
    
     
Empire of the Sun (1987).
Steven Spielberg, director. Warner.
This excellent adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel about a British boy who survives the ordeal of wartime Shanghai was the first film to show that Steven Spielberg could tell a story for grownups. A little overlong, but tough and moving.
(FK, Issue 40, Drama)
    
     
Enigma (2001).
Michael Apted, director. Universal.
A romantic, traitor-in-our-midst World War II spy story that mixes the top-secret work a group of Oxonians are doing on the “Enigma” decryption machine with the disappearance and possible murder of an enigmatic young woman.
(SZ, Issue 51, Drama/War)
    
     
Eraserhead (1977).
David Lynch, director. Available from www.davidlynch.com.
Described by Lynch as “a dream of dark and troubling things.” The dreamer in this case is one Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a young man dressed in your basic engineer-geek tie and jacket and sporting an improbable, foot-high coiffure that looks like, well, an eraser topping a rather pudgy pencil. Eraserhead is an exercise in humor so black that we don’t know whether to laugh or shriek.
(RSB, Issue 49, Horror)
    
     
Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1946, 1964).
Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel, directors. Criterion.
In a neat bit of marketing, Criterion offers the two most famous film versions of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated 1927 short story “The Killers,” in a single box set. The Siodmak version is the more Hemingway-like, but the Siegel version is nastier, with Lee Marvin as a guy so noir he knocks a blind woman cold.
(JV, Issue 48, Noir)
    
     
eXistenZ (1999).
David Cronenberg, director. Alliance.
Cronenberg’s latest take on the way technology is refashioning our souls, about a computer-game designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who is forced to flee when a fatwa is issued against her by an anti-computer-gaming sect of “realists.” If you’re into role-playing computer games, you will be delighted by the witty way they are here parodied.
(JV, Horror)
    
     
The Exorcist (1975).
William Friedkin, director. Warner.
When a little girl named Regan (Linda Blair) is possessed by You Know Whom, two priests are called in by the girl’s mother (Ellen Burstyn) to perform an exorcism. Fine performances from Burstyn, Max von Sydow, and, especially, Jason Miller, and wonderfully atmospheric, free-form direction by Friedkin make this famous horror movie a creepy classic.
(JV, Issue 43, Horror)		    
     


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