Will I return to this site? "Ikiru" (Akira Kurosawa) Moravia’s title echoes Clerici’s expressed desire to fit in, to be “normal,” a desire with roots in Clerici’s isolated, aristocratic upbringing, and also in a mysterious episode of childhood sexual abuse in his past. And Paul tells me, let's wait for the right role. Bad news: "Amelie" made the list (though only at #92). A less kind and gentle Nora Ephron; Ira Sachs' favorite movies about love; Google Glass in film schools; Marlon Brando as cinema's Raging Bull; the impossibility of being literal. a2a_config.linkurl = "http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/"; With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio. The two men sit on a bench in the bottom foreground of a basement room decorated with brightly colored Chinese lanterns, with street-level windows along the top of the frame, through which we can watch women’s legs pacing back and forth, waiting for someone. And Marlon told me about that, too. You did? Marcello is going to Paris on his honeymoon and his bosses have an assignment for him there. My top choice was Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho Dayu" (which came in at #46 and is available on a Criterion DVD), about which I wrote: Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? . No, the insurance. "Ran" (Akira Kurosawa) On screen, she seems open and guileless and sometimes feisty, but she is clearly in over her head at several points in the narrative. As he waits in the meeting place (is it a bordello? Most of the film involved just two actors, and Schneider held her own with Brando in a stunning confrontation with sex and death. . So far you've been in two movies with two top directors, Bertolucci and Antonioni . (Trintignant’s dialogue was presumably dubbed into Italian by another actor, a common practice of the time.). Tim Parks’s essay in The Guardian, “The Conundrum,”  is the most interesting I’ve come across so far. You see how wrong that sounds? Bertolucci spent a long time in Hollywood in the 1980s trying to get a film done of Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest,” and surely this must have been very frustrating, but he re-emerged to take the Best Picture Oscar for “The Last Emperor” (1987), another epic, this time set in China, that was best in its small, intimate moments. The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides. Six movies. 16. Schneider was less able to cope. The car Marcello and his decadent mother take to visit his father in the insane asylum; the car that picks up Marcello when he is a boy, the car into which Marcello shoves Giulia so he can visit Anna alone, and of course, the car Quadri and Anna take to the countryside and the car in which Marcello and his fellow fascist, Manganiello (Gastone Mochin, Fanucci in “Godfather II”), follow them in order to supervise their assassinations. I signed myself into an asylum for a friend of mine. . 13. The all-new home entertainment section, Lounge, is the ultimate one-stop-shop for everything you should care about in the churning world of DVDs, books, videogames and, occasionally, film-related novelty furniture. Michael Mann (#28) is on the list, but Anthony Mann is not. A. Copeland writes: "The name comes, of course, from the great Indian director who failed to land any of his acclaimed works on the final list of 122 nominees. He has written for "New York Magazine," "Film Comment," "Sight and Sound," "Time Out New York," "The L Magazine," and many other publications. While the fashions and cars and hairstyles are all period-correct, and no one since Leni Riefenstahl had captured the modernist architecture of the Fascist era as Storaro did, you’ll only get frustrated if you expect the kind of dense historical drama that explains the social and political context of Fascist Italy. Andrew O'Hehir is executive editor of Salon. The one-two punch of “The Conformist” and “Last Tango in Paris” set Bertolucci up, and he took advantage of this to shoot “1900” (1976), a novelistic all-star epic that ran over five hours. (The Beatles, who in 1964-'65 were the most popular youth phenomenon on the planet, even wanted Antonioni to direct their second feature, after "A Hard Day's Night"!) Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." Because in fact the dialog is often re-recorded later in movies like this (for superior sound, or because there was too much ambient interference), the synching becomes an issue. This is almost enough. The story's so good, I want to make the film. Bertoluccci's great film "The Conformist" is discussed by Charlie Schmidlin, a new addition to my Far-Flung Correspondents. Marcello wavers between contempt and disillusionment. There are whole scenes, lasting just seconds, that are breathtaking not only for the setting (or the sets) but for the way it's composed, a pair of figures in one place, a different scenario (and light) in the background. The latest on Netflix and Blu-ray, including three fantastic Criterion releases. Looking for some great streaming picks? I don't know how "arty" it seemed in 1968, but it plays almost like classical mainstream moviemaking today. For "The Passenger." On his way out, he is exhorted to make it “quick and decisive.” Marcello wheels around and in a pantomime of threatening someone with a gun, poses dramatically, pointing it first to the right, then to the left, then at his own temple. It's not the only film on my list that gives me goosebumps whenever the title is mentioned, but I don't believe there's ever been a greater motion picture in any language. (Well, I thought I wasn’t going to. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Or like. Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho Dayu" (aka "Sansho the Bailiff"). After "Tango" came out, I amused myself at interviews by saying scandalous things, thinking they were funny. Dan Callahan is the author of "Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman" and "Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave." Her confession seems both completely artificial and utterly sincere, as it is the only way of behaving she can imagine. Another visual motif is the cars, all black, that accumulate: cars driving, cars stopped, cars being entered and exited. That the end result is pretty fabulous is a testament to making some odd pieces fit, or not fit, perfectly.What doesn't become clear for some time is the point of the title, which is the moving, significant point of the movie: the main character survives Fascist Italy and then post-War, anti-Fascist Italy, but "conforming," which is to say, he doesn't have particular beliefs, but he knows what will get him to survive. Marcello’s obsession to appear “normal” leads him to volunteer to keep an eye on an old professor, Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). It stayed in my mind all night. Where’s my hat? He's calling it "The Satyajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Non-English Language Films." 10. "Playtime" (Jacques Tati) She left a lasting impression on many other prominent film critics, including Armond White, whose reviews are similarly non-conformist,[4] and Roger Ebert, who once said that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades." Marie writes: The countdown to Christmas officially begins the day after Halloween, which this year lands on a Wednesday. Not an artistic one—Marcello doesn’t have any obvious interest in art, either. The Top 100 is here -- accompanied by comments from people who chose them. "Tokyo Story" (Yasujiro Ozu) 3. His interlocutor attempts to ferret out Marcello’s motive in volunteering for the job, and eliminates the usual suspects of faith, money, and fear.