The Top 10 Michael Powell (And Emeric Presburger) Films

I do not know if any director has had as formative an influence on the films I love than Michael Powell and his creative partner, Emeric Pressburger. The film that sits in the number-one slot on the list that follows radically altered what I look for in movies, and it remains my favorite of all time. On his own, Michael Powell was an extraordinarily gifted director, an innate visual genius and a conservative in the Fordian mode, reflected in films that looked fondly on a traditional Britain but also displayed an ambivalence, even borderline acceptance of the nation’s fading importance in the 20th century. (His breakthrough, The Edge of the World, recalls Ford’s How Green Was My Valley in its wistful but clear-headed appraisal of a secluded hamlet eroding to modernity for ill and good.)

With Pressburger, though, Powell crafted not only some of the most sumptuously beautiful films of all time, but some of the most resonant as well. Their propaganda films are anything but, and their postwar work celebrates the preservation of their beloved country even as it offers firm, and sometimes critical, assessments of what needs to be done to maintain Britain’s spirit. Even at their most troubling, however, the filmmakers communicate such vivaciousness of life through some of the greatest Technicolor work in history that an optimism blazes to the surface on their aesthetic mastery. The films below are not merely some of the best ever made, they are also some of the most endlessly, exuberantly entertaining.

Honorable Mention: The Thief of Bagdad

Left off the list proper only because its laundry list of credited and uncredited directorial credits makes attribution to any one filmmaker unwise. But the auteurial quagmire makes no difference on the film itself, one of the most rousing adventures ever put to the screen. Mounted on a vast scale and an extravaganza for pioneered special effects, The Thief of Bagdad also makes great use of its leads, especially Sabu as a plucky, whip-smart thief and Conrad Veidt as the manipulative grand vizier. This film announces to the audience that it intends to go wild from its first shots of a ship painted in surreal, vivid colors, and it only gets more vibrant and astonishing from there. Show this to children, not Disney’s racist, attention-deficit ripoff Aladdin.

10. The Tales of Hoffmann

It may feel like something of a rehash of the Archers’ superior dance movie, but The Tales of Hoffmann may stand as the Archers’ most brazenly stylish work. Bouncing between the vignettes of its adapted opera, Powell and Pressburger wildly vary sets, mood and movement (of dancers and camera) in a fit of orgiastic style. The whole may not equal the sum of its parts, but the film’s pleasures are so overwhelming in its isolated moments that it still manages to awe almost as much as their more cohesive displays of perfectly ordered excess.

9. A Canterbury Tale

It seems so fitting that the first major work of literature in the English vernacular is a foundational text in British humor, and somehow it makes sense that Powell and Pressburger would take look to it for their own view of England. In updating and reworking the material, the Archers offer an amusing look at the ways people are divided by a common language, and how they come together and remain apart in certain areas. The local man who goes about gluing ladies’ hairs to remind them of their fealty to their British boyfriends, the frequently alienated Oregonian sergeant suddenly finding a common tongue with fellow woodworkers as other Brits look on cluelessly. All of these glimpses of country life, and more, shade in a subtle celebration of British spirit, self-effacing, even a bit resigned at times, but proud and noble. Powell and Pressburger always approached propaganda from an odd angle, but never one so delightful as this.

8. The Small Back Room

Mixing the harrowing portrait of alcoholism of The Lost Weekend with a thriller narrative, The Small Back Room trades the Archers’ visual bombast for a confined view of a self-medicating alcoholic who must help defuse a new, booby-trapped German bomb being dropped on the island. But no bottle can stay corked around a sot for too long, and the expressionistic camerawork common to the filmmakers’ other movies soon rears its head in the form of withdrawal hallucinations and the mounting stress of its climax. One of the pair’s most straightforward works, The Small Back Room is nevertheless a good a showcase for their effortless perfectionism as any.

7. 49th Parallel

49th Parallel points to the remarkably subversive and un-propagandic propaganda films the Archers would make during the war. Much as the film depicts the Nazis stranded by the destruction of their U-boat a degenerate killers, it also bothers to dig into the beliefs of the Germans as they struggle toward the border into then-neutral United States. Nearly all in the group openly express dissent with the ideals they are forced to accept or are visibly hollowed out in order to make space for that horrid code. Here is a propaganda movie that remains with the enemy, that stays with them long enough to erode their ideology until only the unbending, grotesque rock is left. Like any truly British propaganda film, its chief weapon is dark, subtle irony: when one of the remaining Germans hesitates over selling an executed comrade’s field glasses for food, another replies, “They belong to the Fatherland. It wouldn’t let us starve, would it?” Even the ending, a hilariously rousing fade-out from a certain ass-whooping, only counts for so much nationalistic cheer in the face of its human contention with the other side.

6. I Know Where I’m Going!

Not many idyllic, romantic traipses around the Scottish countryside begin with a social climber’s dream of eroticized industrial imagery to show her equation of sex and capital. But then, not much about this film fits the mold: its technical exercises prevent the film from lapsing into pre-neorealism, while it makes an early pushback against the coming postwar influx of capitalism by favoring the quiet, emotional aspects of British life over the promise of a powerful and strategic union (hint hint). The Archers may have done their share to make sure Americans were welcomed by British soldiers, but this romance marks a subtle but firm push to keep Great Britain’s spirit.

5. Peeping Tom

Released just before Psycho, Powell’s solo effort Peeping Tom is in some ways the more disturbing film. Its conceit of a serial killer driven to murder through his recorded voyeurism is one of the first explicit critiques of the exploitative properties of filmmaking, and the shots of the camera inching toward the victim make the audience shockingly complicit for a film released in 1959. It still gets under the skin, too, and it only ever becomes more disturbing the more one delves into Powell’s other work, so rich in the humanism that has been conditioned out of this film.

4. Black Narcissus

If Powell/Pressburger’s postwar films communicated their fervent wish for Britain to live up to its incredible sacrifice, Black Narcissus is their darkest and most unsettling instruction, turning outward from emotional repair and strengthening bonds with allies to the question of the nation’s now-openly hypocritical imperialism. The conceit is brilliant—nuns sent to civilize the wilds of India find themselves driven to despair and madness by a land they do not understand—but the execution more so. One of the handful of films that could lay credible claim to the greatest use of color, Black Narcissus brims with such expressive force that something as small as the application of lipstick nearly resembles a Grand Guignol flourish.

3. A Matter of Life and Death

Who has watched The Wizard of Oz and not wondered why Dorothy would ever want to return to the dreary monochrome of real life after living in lush Technicolor? A Matter of Life and Death inverts its color schemes, portraying the real world in joyous color while heaven, for all its splendor and glory comes across in stiff compositions and black-and-white. With the world still wallowing in death, the film does not glorify the afterlife but this plane of existence, where wrenching but euphoric things like love mean even more now that so many could not enjoy them ever again. Set during the dying days of the war, A Matter of Life and Death sets its sights on new causes worth fighting for, not national conflicts worth dying for but human achievements that give us a reason to live.

2. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The blustering, reactionary face of an aged Colonel Blimp that opens this film reflects the satire of the comic strip it adapts. Then, the Archers move deeper, probing the life of extraordinary social, political and national upheavals that made that pompous old man who he is. The result is the greatest tribute to, and gentlest critique of, the British Empire, embodied by a man who lives equally by brashness and honor, who epitomizes nationalistic fervor but forms his closest friendship with an “enemy” who seems so unlike the faceless Other conjured by propaganda and xenophobia when met as a person. So many of Powell’s films, with and without Pressburger, display a capacity for multitudes, but never was the Archers’ ability to be shamelessly sentimental and brutally, unflatteringly honest more pronounced.

1. The Red Shoes

The best of the Archers’ work is pure cinema, and they don’t come any purer than The Red Shoes. It is a cinema of elegant but ebullient subjectivity, carefully ordered and formal but dizzying in its impact. An impresario fears life may interfere with art, and the artist under his thumb sacrifices her own for her art. Dance, a communication beyond words and sound, perfectly fits Powell’s visual gifts. Indeed, though there have been many more superior dance sequences in other films, no other film has filmed dance so cinematically, with key edits, daring effects work, and subjective superimpositions. It is the ultimate celebration of artistry, and the ultimate testament to the despair it can create.

The Top 10 Roman Polanski Films

Paranoia runs deep under Roman Polanski's work, an obvious feature of a man who has lived under the pressure of social scrutiny since childhood. The main reason he attracts that scrutiny today serves as the elephant in the room for any discussion of Polanski's work, not least because of how often the paranoia of his films manifests itself through rape and sexual violation. His grotesque ties to that subject matter make his considerable empathy almost disturbing: what does is say about the general state of commercial filmmaking that a convicted rapist is one of the great directors of women?

As a stylist, Polanski is almost without peer, with lighting, blocking and camera placement always timed for maximum impact. Perhaps the most famous example of this can be found in Rosemary's Baby, in which he had cinematographer William Fraker frame Ruth Gordon partially behind a door frame, causing audiences at the time to crane their necks as if it might help them look around the block and see all of her. This exacting formal perfectionism turns skewed genre fare into enduring works of pure cinema, which gives even his slightest work an aesthetic and thematic rigor. It also makes ranking his films a hell of a task, and by limiting this list to 10 films I leave out several unjustly underrated features like the excellent Ninth Gate, the muscular Frantic, the neorealist and brutal take on Macbeth, even the deeply personal The Pianist. But the 10 that remain showcase the immense skills of one of the great filmmakers of the modern era, and one who can still shock longer after he broke nearly every taboo you can name.

10. Death and the Maiden

In some ways, Polanski's adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's play about the scars left by South American dictatorships is a deeper exorcism of his Holocaust demons than The Pianist. By parsing out its revelations throughout the film, Polanski shows us revenge isolated from its motive, which makes it only violence, then asks how we feel about it when the full extent of Paulina's (Sigourney Weaver) trauma is made clear. Her thirst for justice is further complicated by the doubt cast over whether her captive (Ben Kingsley, in a beautifully, and literally, restrained performance) is really the person she believes he is. But then, the need for revenge can override such trivialities as fairness. In the film's most striking exchange, Paulina's husband impotently protests, "What if he's innocent?" to which she replies, "If he's innocent, then's he's really fucked." Has there ever been such a succinct, blackly comic summary of the grotesque hypocrisy of reprisals against dictatorial crime?

9. Knife in the Water

I cannot think of a more appropriate feature debut for Roman Polanski. It is not a landmark, seismic event like, say, Citizen Kane or Breathless, yet the perfectly composed, contained psychosexual thriller shows how innately Polanski understood how to hook a crowd and how to casually display technical mastery. With only three characters (and only two of them named), Polanski crafts a rich triangle of sexual competition, sociopolitical commentary (the unnamed, virile outsider is a working class schlub alternately enervating and energizing the bourgeois couple) and repressed violence. The deep focus shots give a greater sense of claustrophobia than even shallow focus would have allowed, giving the yacht-confined characters nowhere to hide even within the frame, much less the lake. Watching this, there could be no doubt that Polanski would become one of the great Hitchcock disciples, and one of the few to add anything of his own to the master's legacy.

8. Cul-de-Sac

A little bit of everything about Polanski is in this film. Transgressive sexual terror, an isolated setting, a smattering of noir parody, and much more filter in and out of this loopy, indescribable funhouse of a movie. Time seems to freeze on the tide-surrounded home where Donald Pleasance's cross-dressing, submissive husband and his wife (played by Catherine Deneuve's sister, Françoise Dorléac) find themselves held captive by a stranded, bleeding out gangster (Lionel Stander, voice made of pure gravel) as his partner slowly dies. Gradually, however, the tables turn, and that which was already odd becomes full-on madness. Even by the director's standards, this is loopy, yet its character tics, location types and extreme sexual comedy would reverberate through Polanski's entire career.

7. The Ghost Writer

A music box of a film, a throwaway trifle that, upon closer inspection, reveals the intricacy of great craftsmanship that makes its simple pleasures possible. Hell, with Alexandre Desplat's glockenspiel-heavy score (his quirkiest work to date), it even sounds like a music box. Polanski takes to the political content of Robert Harris' book with relish, stressing every hypocrisy of international crime the United States commits (and its lack of recognition of the ICC) with just a hint of self-justifying scorn for the country that turned on him so massively. But these wisps of self-martyrdom cannot overpower the peevishness with with Polanski approaches the War on Terror, brilliantly casting Pierce Brosnan not only as a stand-in for Tony Blair but a vague extension of his post-Cold War Bond, ostensibly liberal but still spoiling for a fight somewhere, anywhere. With the former prime minister's war crimes widely publicized, Ewan McGregor's titular writer finds himself caught up in an even more sinister cover-up, and Polanski's stately but uncomfortable compositions never fail to give the impression that McGregor is powerless, constantly watched and one too-bold move away from meeting the same fate of his predecessor. Among the director's most delicate gems.

6. Tess

Tess’ stately frames lack the darkness aggressively eating away at Polanski's filmography to this point, but the tranquil foliage that delicately frame subjects of interest also have the effect of surrounding the characters, imprisoning them and blocking off the light of day. Polanski keys into the vicious satire of a poor man who finds he has old, irrelevant ties to an ended line of nobility and instantly puts on airs, even sending his daughter try and marry into another branch of the line. Instead, she is raped and left to uncaring judgment of the world, finding it even in the arms of her next lover, whose sense of honor is so ironically misogynistic that he can only look his beloved in the eye when she murders the man who used her. And through it all, Tess is cursed with the ability to see this system for what it is. “Once victim, always victim. That’s the law,” she says. And as the brutally removed dénouement reveals, she was all too right.

5. Rosemary’s Baby

As a horror film of a woman bearing the child of Satan. Rosemary’s Baby is a shiver-inducing work of icy formal precision, in which even inanimate objects loom over Mia Farrow’s titular character in judgment and domination. But the movie becomes even more terrifying, and terrifyingly relevant even today, as an allegory for the manner in which society forces victims to carry their rapists’ babies to term. Rosemary’s husband is named Guy, his name making him a stand-in for men in general. As played by John Cassavetes, Guy savages the actor’s macho tics: following the film’s straightforward depiction of Guy as an actor who literally sells his wife’s soul to gain fame, we can see the man as someone who still holds the view of spouses as property and objects to be used for their own gain. But when Guy casually takes credit for the scrapes on his wife’s body when she awakens from her “dream” of being raped by Satan, he suggests a dark alternate reading of Guy himself being the demon figure that takes his wife, and the doctors, neighbors and friends who won’t listen to Rosemary become an entire system of misogynistic thought that punishes women well after their humiliation. Nothing churns the stomach like Rosemary being goaded into caring for the demon spawn at the end. “You’re trying to make me be his mother,” she exclaims in disgust. “Aren’t you his mother?” the man replies, sealing the poor woman’s fate.

4. The Tenant

It is so easy to read the personal in Polanski's work that the final film of his Apartment Trilogy, starring Polanski himself as the psychologically assaulted tenant, almost seems a reaction against the media firestorm around his rape even though the film came out a year before his crime. Macabre humor pervades the trilogy, but The Tenant is the funniest of the series, its circular, nonsensical story played for uncomfortable laughs. Yet of the three films, this has the closest connection to reality, its tension based not in the constant threat of sexual invasion nor the careful monitoring of equally violating satanists but instead the relatable (if comically exaggerated) irritations of asshole neighbors. Slowly, the banality of their demands drives him insane. A scene in The Pianist of a woman spotting Adrien Brody's character in a complex and screaming "Jew!" may hold the key to this movie, a lavishly absurd analogy for the fear Polanski might have felt every day as a child that the normal pettiness of people sharing the same space might at any moment get him killed. The director loves to laugh in the face of his hardships, and The Tenant laughs hardest to beat back the memories.

3. Chinatown

Only Polanski could take the bleakness of noir and create a revisionist work that painted the genre as too soft in comparison. Most L.A. movies establish the town's seediness through Hollywood via ironic self-flagellation, but Polanski and Robert Towne dig into the city as innately corrupt, created out of a perversion of the natural order by bringing water to the desert and immediately spawning greed and manipulation. The film features one of Jack Nicholson's most controlled, nuanced performances, as if the sheer, awesome madness of the microcosm around the actor managed to cow his own showy instincts in meek fear. Jake's arrogance is a smokescreen that quickly evaporates as he sinks into a morass of murder and incest that leaves him rattled and as catatonic as Nicholson would be after a lobotomy in perhaps his most famous role. Subversive casting choices occasionally pepper Polanski's work, few better than the casting of John Huston, maker of the "first" noir, as the gruff and deceptive kingpin of this fever dream. Many of the director's films build in claustrophobic intensity as they approach their climaxes, but Chinatown impressively does this against the backdrop of one of the nation's largest cities, shrinking the whole place until it is small enough to fit into the palm of its true owner, who promptly crushes it like a bug.

2. Bitter Moon

Chamber horror is Roman Polanski's speciality, with his Apartment Trilogy setting the high-water mark for claustrophobic terror. Bitter Moon isn't confined to one location, though its story visually springs from a tale told in a confined ship cabin to a man held captive by propriety and his own morbid curiosity. The twisted sexual nightmare that Polanski paints takes his sexual dynamics to their extreme, with lust and heartbreak turned from inward pains to outward torture. The noose ever tightens around the smattering of characters, one couple grotesquely joined but divided by their perversion uniting for one last hurrah, the corruption of a stiff, bourgeois couple who individually find themselves lured into the couple's sick openness until they get in too deep. How does one even describe this film's protracted, abhorrent joke, strung along by Polanski at his stylistic peak to make everything as unwittingly irresistible as Oscar's sad saga? A shagging dog story?

1. Repulsion

Polanski entered the English-speaking world with a shockingly confrontational thriller that paid no never mind to any sense of propriety. In fact, {Repulsion} is all about the ways that social conditioning and an obsession with maintaining good reputations do not overcome the evils of the world but mask them and allow them to move more freely. Catherine Deneuve plays Carol as a woman who has fallen prey to these evils and is thus broken from the society that shrouds them. She can therefore see those forces moving freely even within the supposed "castle" of one's home, and the total lack of any secure, safe ground gives the film its primary drive. This gives maximum impact to its demented sexual hysteria, with its nightmare visions of hands always groping, figures always intruding, fissures always forming, and time literally rotting away as the protagonist withdraws ever more in a futile attempt to hide.

David Lynch's features, ranked

For October's favorite director ranking, I thought I would choose one of my two favorite directors of horror films that are not exactly horror films. (The other is Roman Polanski, whom I bumped last month to cover Tony Scott and who will receive his spotlight later this month.) Lynch's work digs under the image of postwar American society—parenthood, bourgeois suburbia, the glamor of Old Hollywood—to find the terror beneath, which is itself usually rooted in grotesque exaggerations of classic pulp. Lynch exists always in the past and on the forefront, sublimating noir and melodrama of the '40s and '50s into an ambitious, massively influential television program and an exploratory use of the capabilities of DV. Nearly all of his 10 features are great, and despite the occasional characterization of his work as weird for its own sake, they reward multiple viewings rather than suffer from them. A year ago, it would not have occurred to me to rank Lynch among my favorite filmmakers, but after viewing and revisiting the gems below, he now sits near the top of my list.

10. Dune

You know you're in for a mess when the director credit not only lists "Alan Smithee" but reads "A Alan Smithee Film" rather than "An Alan Smithee Film." Dune, in theory, might have been perfect for Lynch to explode the scope of his weirdness on blockbuster scale. Instead, it is a work of profound soullessness, weighed down at every turn by impersonal sets and a dreary slog of expositional dialogue. To mention that the film has expositional dialogue, though, is to suggest it ever has dialogue of any other kind. Indeed not, and the endless tedium (not to mention bewilderment) of listening to every single character explaining every single thing in excruciating, unnecessary detail offers no respite from the big emptiness of the sub-Star Wars production design. The best that can be said of the whole affair is that Lynch himself clearly must have endeared himself with some of the actors, as performers like Kyle MacLachlan and Dean Stockwell would return for later, better films.

9. The Elephant Man

Had Dune been a commercial success and a fulfilling project for Lynch, would the rest of his career departed from this smash sophomore effort rather than the magnificent mulligan that was Blue Velvet? If works in the mawkish, stilted vein of The Elephant Man might have been the true groundwork for a commercially successful Lynch, it is hard not to be glad the director soon moved far away from this brand of filmmaking. Buoyed by two strong performances by Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt, The Elephant Man nevertheless suffers for its oppressively static construction, suffocating in a way that could be intentional but does not matter either way because it saps the film of any impact. Occasionally, Lynch cuts away to the roaring underbelly of the hospital where Hopkins makes Hurt a glorified prisoner, and these jarring blasts of noise and symbolic imagery, like the jolts in Haydn’s “Surprise,” are the cleverest, most engaging bits of the whole work.

8. The Straight Story

Moving past the aforementioned two stinkers, ranking Lynch’s filmography becomes nearly impossible, as the remaining eight features are all of exceptional quality and striking vision. That is true even of this stylistic departure, a movie so pared down from Lynch’s usual weirdness that practically everyone sees the title more as an admission on the director’s part than a description of the subject. Yet the most remarkable aspect of The Straight Story is not the absence of Lynch’s weirdness but its application toward a positive, even wholesome narrative. Try not to fall in love with Alvin Straight, the old, broken man forced to take the oddest transportation imaginable to see his even more decrepit brother. Filled with an assortment of endearing characters but powered by Richard Farnsworth’s quiet, real performance, The Straight Story is not an outlier in Lynch’s canon so much as the uncovered heart that pumps blood through even his most despairing work.

7. Blue Velvet

One of the greatest films of the 1980s, Blue Velvet got Lynch back on track after two disappointing Hollywood features threatened to kill his early promise. Refining Eraserhead’s psychological surrealism into a broader social portrait of weirdness, Blue Velvet peeked out from the freakish individuals that dotted earlier work to suggest that society itself was twisted. In light of what came after this, Lynch’s first feature-length immersion into the underworld of Rockwellian suburbia seems relatively conventional, gas-huffing psychopath Hopper and icy, Golden Oldies voguer Stockwell included. This may be Lynch’s most satiric work: MacLachlan and Dern blatantly look too old to be in high school (probably intentional, as Dern looks younger in Wild at Heart, made four years later). Meanwhile, Hopper’s sadistic relationship with Isabella Rosselini’s tormented torch singer, however frightening, is absurdist farce, Frank regressing to infancy as he bites her blue robe and slides his hand up her (Freudian) slip. A gaudy, and gauzy, counterpoint to visions of middle class Shangri-La in Reagan’s America.

6. Eraserhead

For some, Lynch never topped this 1977 feature debut, made with the AFI's assistance and surely the greatest student film ever made. With an impressive grasp of film technique, young Lynch set about breaking all the rules he understood so innately. The sound design and carefully ordered but...off mise-en-scène establish Lynch’s stylistic foundations and his penchant for drawing almost unbearable tension from ordinary objects. In fact, take out all the grotesque people and effects Lynch inserts into the film and you still get one of the most chillingly effective horror films of all time. No wonder Stanley Kubrick studied it so judiciously when making The Shining, another movie in which interiors are the true villain.

5. Lost Highway

Noirish elements creep into many of Lynch’s films, but none dives into the genre’s black soul like Lost Highway, which seems to take the POV of film noir itself. Of particular note to Lynch, who has often given the most weight and nonjudgmental affection for his women characters, is the misogyny subtly put on parade in the movie’s shape-shifting narrative. The extended middle section, filled with all the seedy details that riddle Lynch’s sub-suburban nightmares, is the self-justifying projection of Bill Pullman’s character, who murders his frigid wife in paranoid delusion and attempts to run away from himself for the rest of the film and the cycle it promises to restart at the end. Plenty of filmmakers have had fun with the femme fatale archetype, but Lynch suggests that it is a fabrication by men to justify their own sexism, so that even the woman who refuses to be a victim is made a victim of male thought control. Through it all, Lost Highway makes the case for David Lynch coming the closest of perhaps any filmmaker to even partially replicating the effect of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another work about sexual guilt that it always morphing and yet fundamentally cyclical.

4. Mulholland Dr.

Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks won Lynch legions of fans he spent the ‘90s gradually bleeding out, their interest in his trippy surrealism hitting the wall when they saw in his first three ‘90s movies how far Lynch could go with that style. The Straight Story won back some acclaim but seemed a departure more than a comeback. Then came Mulholland Dr. Collecting all the aspects of his ‘90s movies that appeared in such raw form, Mulholland Dr. distills all the weirdness into easily the director’s most focused work. Lynch repurposes the obliterating guilt of Lost Highway; into a cloud of denial over unrequited love and, perhaps worse, the realization of one’s lack of talent. As such, this poisoned love letter to Hollywood may be Lynch’s most tongue-in-cheek film, but as filtered through Naomi Watts’ performance and the lush formalism that meshes with its hazy dreamscape, it is also one of his most gripping and affecting.

3. Wild at Heart

I figured out Wild at Heart when Nic Cage’s character upstaged a show by speed metal band Powermad and led the group in a sudden cover of Elvis Presley. Up to that point, Wild at Heart is a mad jumble of freaks cranked up to 11 to show all Lynch’s post-Blue Velvet admirers what they were in for. It is still all of that after this moment, of course, but this scene acts as a skeleton key that reveals the film as a swirling collage of 20th century pop culture, where Elvis and Wild One-era Brando flow in and out of thrash metal and gaudy snakeskin. It also revamps The Wizard of Oz and reworks it to make dull, repressive home life the evil force it always should have been in that story and the thought of permanently escaping it the greatest wish one could ask from a ruler who could grant anything. Nic Cage has never been more attuned to the subject matter of one of his movies, and Lynch has never so casually touched metal to a raw nerve.

2. INLAND EMPIRE

The Joycean aspects of David Lynch’s filmmaking reach their pinnacle with INLAND EMPIRE, in which the temporal simultaneity of Wild at Heart and Möbius-strip cycles of Lost Highway are laid together, joined by mortar made from the ground-up shards of Lynch’s entire filmography. Lynch’s other films contain tendencies of Finnegans Wake, but this is the full thing: a basic plot rendered insensible and inexplicable through a stacking of time, space, even dimensions of reality into one simultaneously, flowing moment. Trading Irish national guilt for American pulp and a sense of complicity in the misogynistic exploitation he abhors, Lynch delivers perhaps his ultimate statement on the bonds of abuse that ground our loftiest fantasies, and how he perpetuates that as much as anyone. Laura Dern handles the constant slip between realities and places better than anyone could be reasonably expected to do, and Lynch finds in DV the smeary grime he wanted film to have all along. Indeed, INLAND EMPIRE, with its raw lighting and expansiveness of visual scope, is perhaps the quintessential visualization of digital as a different method of image capture than film, not merely in the ease of shooting but how that image is programmed and saved.

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

If one views Fire Walk With Me solely as a narrative link to Twin Peaks, it will seem an unnecessary (and unnecessarily obtuse) rehash of a story we all know. Laura Palmer’s inevitable death, and the sufficient piecing together of her life’s horrors on the series proper, admittedly saps the tension of the piece. As an emotional landscape, however, the film displays Lynch at his best. Featuring an early, half-formed bifurcated structure that Lynch would later refine, Fire Walk With Me opens with the director’s most abstract, surreal, alienating humor before switching gears to plunge into the heart of the depravity and despair that lurks beneath the surface of all Lynch’s films. As the director ignores the wishes of fans and throws out narrative closure for the sake of honing in on a detail they already know, he provides a more resonant sense of emotional clarity to the show for those paying attention. No other Lynch film so plainly makes the case that the director’s schtick isn’t just easy, cynical irony. He really cares about his characters, even—especially—when he puts them through the worst hell.

The Top 10 Tony Scott Films

[This is an entry in my Favorite Directors Blogathon.]

It can sometimes be difficult to separate out Tony Scott's gifts as a populist filmmaker when stacked against less skilled "cacophonists" like Michael Bay who followed in his wake and whom he left in the dust with his late-career reinvention. But in Scott's films are a care for his actors wholly absent for so many of today's blockbusters, and his movies consistently offered up some of the finest, most sincere performances to be found in action films. Scott's unabashed affection for working-class heroes forced to rise to the occasion gives his films a humanity that makes even his wildest efforts (and most savage, like Man on Fire) are not merely meat grinders. Not everything Scott turned to gold, but until his tragically truncated end, he found ways to turn the inherent excesses of blockbuster filmmaking into aesthetic statements rather than wan spectacle. He will be missed, but at least we still have his work, of which these 10 stand out as highlights:

10. Spy Game

Perhaps Scott’s coldest film since his debut, Spy Game serves as one final, “conventionally” hyperactive workout before his entering into his abstract painter late career. Low lighting and muted color palettes stress a gritty realism uncommon to all his work but especially was what coming down the line. A recurring element of Scott’s work concerns the knotty, ass-covering procedures of bureaucracies, whether transportation services or military hierarchies. Spy Game devotes its time so thoroughly to the titular mechanisms of intelligence work, centered on Robert Redford’s CIA agent hoodwinking his own colleagues through a distracting series of flashbacks and subtle misdirects, that one almost forgets he does all this to prevent a friend and comrade’s impending execution. Like a handful of other Scott films, this is deceptively inert, only occasionally livened by an actual action setpiece yet still visceral thanks to judicious editing and kinetic camerawork.

9. The Hunger

Tony Scott’s first feature takes its cues from big brother Ridley, all metallic color tones and carefully ordered chill. The opening montage, juxtaposing Bauhaus’ performance of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” with two vampires lasciviously stalking their prey and a lab monkey shrieking in a bloody rage, puts Scott’s admiration of Nicolas Roeg on equal display. Casting Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as emotionally removed, sexy bloodsuckers was a coup, and seeing Deneuve play a kind of Lady Bathory role, creating vampiric lovers only to drain away their lives to remain young. The plot convulsions are wild enough for a later Scott film, and it does not always mesh well with the completely-locked down style, but {The Hunger} is nevertheless a strikingly formal debut for a director who would become one of its great populist aesthetes.

8. The Last Boy Scout

Scott’s capacity for finding nuance in ostentation can be clearly seen in nearly every frame of The Last Boy Scout, in which a smoky haze coats even exterior shots. The ultra-cool cigarette smoke of classic noirs thus becomes a carcinogen fog, asthma-inducing just by watching the movie. That disgusting mist visualizes Shane Black’s cynical screenplay, best seen in the stunning opening scene that fell prey to some censorship but still emerged one of the most disturbing, sick jokes on action film audiences ever filmed. Yet the easy rapport between Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans tempers the black-comic vision as much as Scott’s outsized action, and the same football field that provides the backdrop for the horrifying open hosts the almost parodic goofiness of the triumphant ending, which takes such a silly pleasure in violence that it may actually be bleaker than the start.

7. Enemy of the State

A prototype for Scott’s later forays into post-postmodern realms of multi-platform image collages and the feeling of a camera always watching the characters, Enemy of the State finds Will Smith at the top of his game as an almost Hitchcockian wrong man pursued by U.S. intelligence forces trying to cover up their clandestine activities. Scott’s film fits with several of Brian De Palma’s mid-to-late-‘90s works about an overinflated military turning on its country in the wake of the Cold War, and its vision of a citizen pursued with every means at the government’s disposal is eerily prescient of a country that now operates according to its Constitution seemingly only at its convenience. Smith shows a vulnerability here he too rapidly abandoned in his carefully planned (and successful) quest to become king of the box office, and his chemistry with Gene Hackman (all but openly playing off his seminal role in The Conversation) is so believable, tense and ultimately respectful that the movie also emerges 10 times the buddy film the Men in Black series ever offered.7.

6. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

For some, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 might represent Scott’s emperor’s-new-clothes moment. For his supposedly breakneck, visceral style, the director’s remake of one of the tautest action-thrillers of the 1970s is absolutely languid in comparison, stylish add-ons and all. Yet where the original focus with impeccable precision on its story, Scott's film explores the contours around the plot. John Travolta's Ryder adds a level of pulp commentary, a Wall Street trader busted for illegal practices and seeking vengeance in his unstoppable arrogance. Pit against him is a man in hot water for his own fiscal crimes, albeit of the sort that stem from desperation, not greed. Denzel Washington's character is the sort of person that people like Ryder ruined with their reckless betting, and as unexpectedly poignant as the film's "romance" between its conflicting figures is, there is a bit of a crowd-pleasing element to the sight of a working-class stiff putting a slug into the macho-bluffing demon soul of Wall Street.

5. Crimson Tide

An obvious urgency underscores Crimson Tide, with its fears of international nuclear war exacerbated by divisions within each side. The Russians attempt to prevent fanatical members of their own citizenry from launching nukes, while the American submarine on which the film takes place soon splinters among those favoring a preemptive strike and those unwilling to risk nuclear holocaust. Indeed, the principal conflict of the film does not concern the standoff between the U.S. and Russia but the stalemate between Gene Hackman’s submarine captain and Denzel Washington’s executive officer. With canted angles capturing the tight quarters of the submersible and a play of blue, green and red lights dancing over characters faces, Scott adds visceral intensity to what is primarily a film about a moral stand-off rather than an armed one. “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it,” Hackman chastises Washington early in the film, a statement that becomes the basis for the film’s conflicts of tough ethical choices and how a chain of command can weigh on them. In essence, Crimson Tide is an action film about the need for due diligence, even inaction.

4. Domino

Perhaps the most avant-garde summer movie ever made, Domino followed through on the aesthetic reinvention of Man on Fire with a free-for-all. Narratively and thematically unfocused, Richard Kelly’s emptily heady screenplay leaves wide gaps Scott fills with techniques so ancient they become new and innovative all over again. Superimpositions, multiple exposures, hand-cranking and more tear even the faintest amount of traditional biopic structure to shreds, leaving only an impressionistic abstract of saturated color and collage. Bonus points for getting Keira Knightley’s best performance to date, worlds removed from her day job as a glorified corset model and eliciting a nastiness from her that has been sadly underused since. The image of her snarling, crooked teeth illuminated in bursts of muzzle flash as she takes furious, despairing revenge for her lost comrades is one of the single great images of Scott’s career. Or is it many images in one?

3. Unstoppable

If “pure cinema” can be said to exist, few films qualify for the term like Unstoppable. Forced into linearity by its very conceit, the film sharpens Scott’s kaleidoscopic late career into what has (tragically) become the ultimate send-off. In some ways it is the Platonic ideal of Tony Scott movies: Denzel Washington at his most working-class, bureaucracy at its most noxious, a setting that allows no let up in the action, and character drama that requires no more than one brief monologue for each lead and a series of nuanced interactions that builds mutual respect and admiration. Indeed, Unstoppable is as much a film about two like but separate men becoming friends as it is their united effort to save a town from a disastrous chemical spill. Unstoppable won Scott the best reviews of his career, a shame in retrospect that so many did not finally get him until it was too late.

2. True Romance

Nowhere does Scott’s way with actors shine like it does in True Romance. Aided by Quentin Tarantino’s superb script (which Scott actually managed to improve by straightening out its chronology and giving this demented fairy tale the happy ending it needed), the director always grounds the characters front and center despite all the visual flourishes. Not until Tarantino wrote the first scene of Inglourious Basterds did he top the infamous “eggplant” scene between a sinisterly off-the-cuff Christopher Walken and a doomed Dennis Hopper, a scene so perfectly written that Scott demonstrates a careful restraint and cedes all power to the actors. Elsewhere, the film makes for a more controlled companion piece to Wild at Heart, a pop-culturally hip, oneiric bedtime story for the ‘90s. The climactic firefight, complete with pillow stuffing billowing in the air à la Zéro de conduite, is so nice Scott used it twice when a variant popped up in Enemy of the State.

1. Déjà Vu

Until Pedro Almodóvar made The Skin I Live In, Déjà Vu stood as the only film to not only successfully replicate some of the dense identity crises of Vertigo but to credibly build upon them. Scott’s time-travel thriller uses the hero’s maddening quest to save a doomed woman as a microcosmic wish for saving all of New Orleans, where the film was filmed in the wake of Katrina. The film stands as Scott’s purest pursuit of a happy ending, shattering the physical properties of space-time just to let the guy get the girl. It also allows the director to fully engage in his love of multiple, layered images, culminating in the ingenious car chase in which half the frame shows the pursued car in the past as the other half shows the present-day chase after the vehicle. The current cinematic trend toward aesthetic bewilderment has been nigh-unbearable, but here it is elevated into pure virtuosity.

The Top 10 Steven Soderbergh Films

[This is my August entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon.]

Steven Soderbergh operates so far under the radar that, for all his auteurist tics and varied filmography, I never thought to rate him among my favorite filmmakers until I took a step back one day and realized how many great films bore his credit. Sometimes it seems as if the film industry looks at him the same way. Soderbergh primarily operates as a workman, though he balances out commercial properties with a series of experimental works that often get folded back into his mainstream gigs, making him ever more idiosyncratic even as he gets trusted with bigger projects.

Soderbergh jump-started the Miramax era of the American indie with his Palme D’Or-winning feature debut sex, lies, and videotape, a film about a man who can only achieve any kind of arousal by watching recorded tapes of others detailing their own sexual desires and experiences. In a way, it is prophetic of his entire canon, in which action unfolds only through its own deconstruction and process becomes the driving force and the principal agent of subverted expectations. This fixation has made the director a member of the digital vanguard, the literal programming of visual information well-suited to his entire approach to storytelling.

Amazingly, he has applied this anti-narrative style to commercially successful properties. What other director in Hollywood today can so routinely boast massive casts populated entirely by A-listers without reducing them to wan rom-com drivel à la New Year’s Eve? And if anyone else could compare to Soderbergh in that respect, how many of them could turn around and make something like Bubble? A studio hand for the postmodern era, Soderbergh has made many fine works, but none better than these 10:

10. Contagion

I gave Contagion a mixed review on its original release last fall, infatuated with its editing and cinematography but disconnected from its flow by poor plot threads, particularly the borderline offensive handling of Hong Kong, the caricatured blogger played by Jude Law and Matt Damon's awkward, mourning cuckold (a shoehorned bit of sentiment for an otherwise deliberately cold film). Those issues still irk me, but the overall effect of the movie only gets more powerful with a rewatch. Barring those distracting subplots, the general connection of shots, be it the progression of unsettling extreme close-ups or the broader patchwork of globe-trotting leaps, never fails to create a mood of invisible, unpredictable death. I still get goosebumps when I hear a cough right after watching.

9. Magic Mike

Come for the waxed asses, stay for unexpectedly intelligent overview of post-recession life, where millennials work whatever jobs they can, motivated by insipid, futile dreams that seem a sad, wistful relic of Generation X and its slacker luxury. Soderbergh finds unorthodox framings for the strip numbers even as he cuts against the grain of contemporary dance filming and actually lets the audience see the actors move. And for a male stripper movie that features more topless women than pants-less men, Magic Mike still offers the rare glimpse at the objectified male, which has caused a hysterical amount of hand-wringing among men with no grasp of irony.

8. Che

A two-part epic about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century, Che’s very construction reflects its subjects revolutionary zeal. A pioneering showcase for the Red digital camera, Che used guerilla filmmaking to depict the world’s most notorious guerilla. Likewise, the two aesthetically distinct halves of the film reflect the state of the protagonist: the first uses wide, populated panoramas that suggest Che even thought in Communist propaganda, while the paranoid second half crushes and dims the frame to show his support and resolve crumbling. Process, as ever, is key, and Soderbergh avoids commentary on the man by way of focusing solely on how he led one revolution to success and ended another in failure both literal and (judging from his lavish watch) ideological. It is troubling that Soderbergh completely omits Che’s ruthless side, his death panels and savagery, but in the broader context of the director’s elliptical style, these omissions work. Besides, such absences do not make for a lionized portrait of Che: consider the black and white sequence when Che visits New York and the UN, celebrated by the bourgeois scum he despises and revealing contradictions and inanities in his admirers and himself. So many biopics about symbolic figures attempt to reach the person beneath the image; Che brilliantly focuses only on the image, ironically saying more about its subject than most “tell-all” biographies.

7. Schizopolis

Soderbergh wasted no time playing against any and all expectations, following up the oddity of his debut with a series of thematically and stylistically disparate films that shared one basic trait: their unprofitability. This stage of Soderbergh’s career reached a head with 1996’s Schizopolis, a work so resolutely weird and self-absorbed it instantly gives off the impression of having been meant to serve as a farewell for a filmmaker depleting the last of his backers’ goodwill. This three-act act of mass deconstruction breaks apart communication through blunt statements (such as a character saying “Hello” as “Generic greeting”), colliding foreign tongues and finally, gibberish code. God only knows how Soderbergh managed to get himself Out of Sight after this. But if this movie has nothing in common with the string of mainstream successes that would follow over the next few years, it nevertheless proved that Soderbergh had vast reserves of talent begging to be used.

6. Ocean’s 12

If every mainstream Soderbergh film upends convention in some manner, Ocean’s 12 comes off as downright confrontational. As much a middle finger as Schizopolis, this openly glib sequel games the studio system into paying for the director and his cast to take an extended vacation at George Clooney’s villa. That the film does everything in its power to make this obvious does not make the joke any easier to swallow for some, but I just cannot help but love this epic piss-take of a movie, right down to the inclusion of corpsed takes and the hilariously self-involved meta-joke with Julia Roberts.

5. The Girlfriend Experience

Soderbergh’s best experimental feature prefaced Magic Mike’s social situation with a visceral plunge into the heart of the financial collapse. Sasha Grey’s stilted performance has been the butt of many a joke, but it is, in fact, she who gets the last laugh, portraying the wry simplicity of her supposedly elaborate services. She advertises the ability to be more than just a sex toy, but all her clients need out of her before they get her out of her clothes is a shoulder to cry on and someone just smart enough to agree with them without seeming vacant. In other words, it is not her own lack of depth being projected, it is the men’s. An ingenious breakdown of objectification, one made funnier by the lingering objections of many viewers (even professional critics), that Soderbergh never shows the former adult star having sex. And it will never cease to be amusing that the film depicts the architects of our financial ruin needing some level of capitalistic comfort so badly that they retreat into the arms of the world’s oldest, stablest profession.

4. Solaris

One might have expected Soderbergh to dismantle the notion of a remake as he used Ocean’s Twelve to mock the sequel as a concept. On the contrary, he uses his Solaris movie to refine a specific strand of Lem’s source novel while also projecting his own imagistic themes onto their broadest canvas. The corporeal projection of the protagonist’s dead wife allows Soderbergh to probe the philosophical underpinnings over how one processes the Other as an image. Furthermore, if Soderbergh offers any deconstructive angle, it is of the patriarchy of the previous iterations of this story by giving more weight to the significance that Natasha McElhone’s specter is defined completely by the memories George Clooney’s character has of the real Rheya. When McElhone despairs of this fact and Clooney can only carry on about using this copy to get a do-over with his lost love, not even the ending can match its haunting, revealing irony.

3. Out of Sight

Oh, Out of Sight, you exquisite gem, you. A romantic-comic thriller so light on its feet that its various stylistic quirks hardly even register the first few viewings. Featuring George Clooney at his most effortlessly charming (that is saying something) and Jennifer Lopez in a surprisingly beautiful performance, Out of Sight manages to throw about three different kinds of film together and make the result more fluid than the most straightforward of genre movies. Add to that montages of asynchronous sound and image, giddy freeze frames and immaculate cinematography and you get the first American film to expand upon and deepen Pulp Fiction’s sense of tossed-off New Wave cool. And Soderbergh doesn’t even need the parade of hip references.

2. King of the Hill

Shot by Elliot Davis in golden, gorgeous tones and boasting production design seemingly impossible under the budgetary and time restraints of the shoot, King of the Hill suffers inexplicably from neglect. Adapted from A.E. Hotchner’s Depression-era memoir, Soderbergh’s third feature lacks the postmodern tics of his other work, yet it makes up for this by routinely contrasting the sumptuous, warm beauty of the frame with the horrific conditions that weigh down Aaron (Jesse Bradford, giving a child performance beyond reproach). This is an overplayed trick, but Soderbergh does not play the juxtaposition for easy irony, instead letting each scene convey all its tiny joys, heartbreaks and bits of mordant humor. It is one of the best films of its kind (both as a Depression drama and a coming-of-age tale), and if Soderbergh does not break the movie down as he does elsewhere, he settles for doing the real thing better than just about anyone.

1. The Limey

Many of Soderbergh’s films work as companion pieces to others, but it is admittedly a stretch to link Out of Sight and The Limey. Their shared elliptical un-thriller structures provide a starting point, but what truly distinguishes Soderbergh’s back-to-back, end-of-the-‘90s works as a linked pair for the way in which they use similar stylistic tics to opposite effect. The former’s lilting delicacy and celebration of cool is matched here by fragmented agony and a breakdown of the charming anti-hero. Using everything from jumbled flashbacks to clips of Terence Stamp at the start of his career, Soderbergh gradually strips away the protagonist’s righteous fury and hard slang until all that’s left is a cracked shell. Soderbergh typically breaks down a situation or genre: the heist film, the martial arts movie, even the extended monologue. The Limey uses all of his techniques and flourishes to deconstruct a person.