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Trader Horn 1931
Hollywood, with its growing passion for "jungle movies", perhaps felt a deep gratitude to Trader Horn at the time of its release. Despite receiving no other nominations, it filled one of the five slots for Best Picture nominees that year over the likes of Von Sternberg's Morocco, Murnau's Tabu (winner of Best Cinematography), LeRoy's Little Caesar, Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (winner of Best Original Story), Wellman's The Public Enemy, Brown's A Free Soul (winner of Best Actor, nominated for Best…
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The Finishing Line 1977
The public service announcement equivalent of Peter Watkins' Punishment Park, with an even larger body count to stoke the flames of its message: "Don't play on the train tracks." Cold-blooded and remarkably tense, resulting in a number of awards and withdrawal from television broadcast until 2001 after two years of traumatizing the British youth outright.
The wide remembrance of The Finishing Line, if I had to guess, is not simply down to its brutality (though it is among the most…
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Mirror 1975
Tarkovsky is a bit different from other slow cinema artists that dominate other parts of the world. Like filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz, Tarkovsky holds shots for long periods of time, perhaps with more camera movement than the others, yet when Tarr and Diaz move their shots, they match the mood out of necessity. Their films are slow, so their camera movements are slow as well, makes sense, and they do it spectacularly. Tarkovsky moves his camera…
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Marketa Lazarová 1967
Sátántangó may be this film's only rival in terms of quality, yet they are near polar opposites, with Sátántangó achieving mood through slow, sprawling, dense story-telling, and Marketa Lazarová punching with every scene of action and dialogue; as flashy and bombastic as possible.
Of course this is all a personal perspective, but if I were to visualize a potential "peak" of film perfection, Sátántangó and Marketa Lazarová are the only films that seemed to attempt that jump. Neither film is…
