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 245  8.4  7.9  Von Stroheim wanted to make McTeague into a film without sacrificing what he saw were necessary plot details, because he wanted to reproduce the book on film, with ambitions probably partially inspired by Griffith. He created a masterpiece, but studio heads decided to cut the film to around two hours. Von Stroheim said the film he previously worked on, Foolish Wives, became, "only the skeleton of my dead child," and unfortunately Greed suffered the same fate.   A blog post about the influence of paintings in Greed. Jonathan Rosenbaum: Fables of the Reconstruction Roger Ebert's Review Original Length: 9 hours (a lost film) Edited Length: 2 hours, 20 minutes (the only surviving complete copy) Restored Legnth: 4 hours (film stills or production photos were used to restore the film with the directors' notes). Mr. Saturn's rating:
 
163 9.4 9  DekalogStanley Kubrick's opinion about The Decalogue. Jonathan Rosenbaum's comparison of The Decalogue to Fargo. Roger Ebert's review - it's one of his favorite films. Length: Ten films about one hour each. Mr. Saturn's rating:
421 8.7 8.1  This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we've come to expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a stirring climax in color. - Jonathan Rosenbaum You should watch the blu-ray version (it has English subtitles, but was only released in Russia). Length: 165 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
205 8.3 7.8  Bresson is perhaps the only man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand. I know of no other artist as consistent as he is in this respect. His guiding principle was the elimination of what is known as expressiveness, in the sense that he wanted to do away with the frontier between the image and actual life; that is, to render life itself graphic and expressive. No special feeding in of material, nothing laboured, nothing that smacks of deliberate generalisation. - Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (taken from TSPDT) Jonathan Rosenbaum's article The Last Filmmaker Roger Ebert's review Robert Bresson's Filmography Length: 95 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
828 8.1 7.9  As a critic, I already thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still consider myself a critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one than before. Instead of criticism, I make a film, but that includes a critical dimension. I consider myself an essayist, producing essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays: only instead of writing, I film them. - Jean-Luc Godard, 1962 Roger Ebert's Review Length: 90 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
2028 8.5 8.7  In the earliest days of cinema, the Russian director Kuleshov performed a famous experiment in which he juxtaposed identical shots of a man's face with other shots. When the man was matched with food, audiences said the man looked hungry, and so on. The shots were neutral. The montage gave them meaning. - Roger Ebert According to the famous “Kuleshov experiment” in silent Russian cinema, the same close-up of actor Ivan Mozhukhin seen by separate audiences with a bowl of soup, or a coffin, or a little girl automatically conjured up a hungry man, or a mourner, or a pervert. - Jonathan Rosenbaum Length: 112 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
951 8.4 8.2  …this lovely, moody film, for all its intense emotionalism, makes some tough intellectual demands. For its evident contemplations of a singular…transfer of personality between an older mental patient and her pretty, lonely nurse is rich in poetic intimations of subconscious longings and despairs, and it is likely to move one more deeply as poetry than as thought... - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times Roger Ebert's review Length: 85 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
214 8.3 8.1  Children Of Paradise is the ultimate theater-as-life movie, rich in historical allusions past and present, a landmark production that overcame constant harassment by the Germans and stands as a key testament to the spirit of the French Resistance. But apart from mere dissertation fodder, the film remains an exemplary piece of popular entertainment, full of vibrancy and wit, with unforgettable characters and a delicate, bittersweet tone that considers their emotions in balance. - Scott Tobias, A.V. Club Roger Ebert's review Length: 163 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
 
262 8.1 7.9  He's the Shakespeare of cinema. Period. Watch his films and you'll know instantly. - Werner Herzog, Rotten Tomatoes - 5 Favorite films (Listal) ...the film launched ideas about associative editing that have been essential to the cinema ever since, from Soviet montage classics to recent American experimental films; and for the sheer generating of suspense through crosscutting and action the film’s climax hasn’t been surpassed in 77 years. - Jonathan Rosenbaum Length: 163 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
639 8.1 8  Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? - Sergei Eisenstein Potemkin…has achieved such an unholy eminence that few people any longer dispute its merits. Great as it undoubtedly is, it's not really a likable film; it's amazing, though -- it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message…[It] looks astonishingly like a newsreel, and the politically naïve have often taken it as a 'documentary.' The more knowing have a graceful euphemism: Eisenstein, they say, 'sacrificed historical facts for dramatic effect.' - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (1992) Roger Ebert's review Length: 75min Mr. Saturn's rating:
40 7.8 7.2  One problem with inventories is that they suggest a formless succession of “beautiful moments,” when The Long Day Closes is anything but that; indeed, the careful placement of each moment is essential to this film’s beauty. If Sergei Eisenstein’s quip about Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s writing — “a string of pearls without the string” — seems applicable here, it’s only because most of us are so hooked on a single kind of string called narrative. We still have to learn how to identify and describe other kinds — emotional, thematic, visual, and musical, among others — that can work independently of a story. The love between Bud and his mother (Marjorie Yates) is one such string in this movie; thematic continuities between classroom, church, and movie theater are another. The movement of thought itself is what composes the “action,” but it’s not the kind of thought that can be translated into prose; the film thinks in sounds and images. - Jonathan Rosenbaum Length: 85 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
376 8.5 8.3  The film Man with a Movie Camera represents Roger Ebert's review Length: 68 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
353 6.6 7  Erich von Stroheim, one of Griffith's assistants, said that he was the pioneer of filmdom. The first to put beauty and poetry into a cheap and tawdry sort of amusement. - Martin Scorsese, from A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies Martin Scorsese on Griffith from A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies . Length: 3 hours, 10 minutes Mr. Saturn's rating:
187 7.6 7.7  The film [Welles] was working on was then called Hoax, and he said it had something to do with the art forger Elmyr de Hory and the recent scandal involving Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes. “A documentary?” “No, not a documentary—a new kind of film,” he replied, though he didn’t elaborate. Length: 89min Mr. Saturn's rating:
448 7.8 7.7  Almost exactly 33 years ago... the critical reception of Jean-Luc Godard’s widest American release of his career and his most expensive picture to date was overwhelmingly negative. But now that Contempt... is being rereleased as an art film — in a brand-new print that’s three minutes longer — the critical responses have been almost as overwhelmingly positive... Length:103 min Mr. Saturn's rating:
225 7.8 7.5  Major spoilers: The greatest controversy about the film is Kiarostami's Brechtian decision to show us that we saw was only a film; after the moving shot of the protagonist laying to die, the audience sees Kiarstami filming the movie, and some critics may have found the experience jarring (I did). Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay Shouts and Murmurs, a response to Ebert's criticism Then along came Angelopoulos from Greece and Kiarostami from Iran, with their fashionably dead films in which shots last forever, and grim middle-aged men with mustaches sit and look and think and smoke and think and look and sit and smoke and shout and drive around and smoke until finally there is a closing shot that lasts forever and has no point. - Roger Ebert Mr. Saturn's rating:
 
267 7.9 7.9  Films are more harmonious than life, Alphonse, there are no bottlenecks in films, no dead-time, films keeps rolling forward, like trains, you understand, like trains in the night. People like you and me, you know, are only happy in our work, our work in the cinema. - Ferrand, Francois Truffaut's character Godard and Truffaut's letters to each other; they had a fall out over this movie. Mr. Saturn's rating:
42 6.8 7.7 As a film-maker, I am taking a stand for the politics that have been practiced by some of the artists of my generation who believe that more essential, positive contributions to the upholding and furthering of the best in humanity, have been made, say, by John Cage or Albert Camus, and not by the great political figures of the 20th century. Elvis Mitchell, New York Times Length: 5 hours, 20 minutes 
592 8.3 8.1  Roger Ebert's review Jonathan Rosenbaum said he didn't see Fanny and Alexander and thought Persona was his best film, despite never seeing the film many crtics consider to be Bergman's masterpiece (source), before writing Scenes From an Overrated Career; Roger Ebert responded with Defending Ingmar Bergman. Full TV Version: 5 hours, 12 minutes 
75 9 8.3  To listen to this, and to meditate on it, will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin, and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and butter. - Alfred Döblin, in the preface to the book Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf an essay on Criterion Length: 14 hours, 28 minutes Mr. Saturn's rating:
339 8.8 8  Length: 7 hours, 30 minutes Jonathan Rosenbaum: The Importance of Being Sarcastic and his response to Béla Tarr's request to write for Sátántangó's 15th anniversary. 
132 7.7 7.7  An obsessive-compulsive filmmaker and clearly a tormented one who wound up dying by his own hand, Eustache was clearly experimenting with his variations as well as goading viewers into examining their own reactions to them. - Jonathan Rosenbaum Roger Ebert's review Length: 3 hours, 40 minutes 
44 7.1 7.2 Well over a decade in the making, this eight-part, 264-minute video (1998) is Jean-Luc Godard’s magnum opus, but it’s never been widely seen... - Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonthan Rosenbaum's Essay 
180 7.3 7.1  One of Jonathan Rosenbaum's favorite films. Feuillade is today arguably a good deal more entertaining than Griffith, and unquestionably much more modern: his mastery of deep-focus mise en scene is astonishing, and its influence on Fritz Lang as well as Luis Buñuel and other Surrealists remains one of his major legacies... I can’t recommend it too highly. - Jonathan Rosenbaum The Birth of a Notion by Jonathan Rosenbaum Length: 6 hours, 39 minutes Note: maybe buy the bluray 
32 9.4 8.2  A cinematic event...a massive, nearly 16-hour chronicle of life in Germany, from 1919 to 1982, as reflected in the fluctuating fortunes of the members of one family, initially peasant-farmers, in the fictitious village of Schabbach in the Rhineland....In spite of its intimidating length, Heimat is immensely, easily watchable, an extraordinary succession of mostly ordinary events and characters -- history seen from ground level -- vividly acted by a huge cast of both professional and nonprofessional actors. - Vincent Canby, New York Times One of Stanley Kubrick's favorite TV shows. Length: 15 hours, 24 minutes Here's a trailer for the entire Heimat trilogy - Note: I'm waiting for the restoration. 
32 6 7.4  I choose “Out” as the opposite of the vogue word “in”, which had caught in France and which I thought was silly. The action of the film is rather like a serial which could continue through several episodes, so I gave it the number “One”. - Jacques Rivette Length: 12 hours, 9 minutes 
17 8.5 7.2  Though many of his films were popular successes when they came out, Barnet is known among cinephiles mainly as the greatest forgotten master of the golden age of Soviet cinema. - Jonathan Rosenbaum Length: 98 min 
122 8.5 7.7  "Kings of the Road" is a film of great depth and beauty, and its black and white photography is worthy of comparison with John Ford's. But it is rarely played commercially, maybe because of its three-hour length... Length: 3 hours, 15 minutes 
91 8.6 7.8  ...A Brighter Summer Day is probably the greatest Taiwanese film ever made... - Jonathan Rosenbaum Length: 237 min 
26 8.4 7.7  Among the subjects addressed are Vietnam, political battles throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, Che Guevara, Nixon, and Eisenstein’s Potemkin; the images are drawn mainly from rarely shown footage shot by others, chiefly outtakes from other documentaries. This is often thoughtful and informative, but it assumes a grasp of political struggles of the period that some American viewers won’t share. Marker’s poetic notations are generally quite effective... - Jonathan Rosenbaum Length: 4 hours |
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Lol, Ebert gave Rosenbaum a royal spanking for his berating of Bergman. Anymore like that? I recall Rosenbaum dishing out his own brand of punishment when Ebert crucified the works of Theo Angelopoulos and Abbas Kiarostami. Maybe you can make a list out of it.