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Cabaret (25th Anniversary Special Edition)
: essential video:Winner of eight Academy Awards, including Best Director (Bob Fosse), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey), Cabaret would also have taken Best Picture if it hadn't been competing against The Godfather as the most acclaimed film of 1972. (Francis Ford Coppola would have to wait two years before winning Best Director, for The Godfather, Part II.) Brilliantly adapted from the acclaimed stage production, which was in turn inspired by Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and the play and movie I Am a Camera, this remarkable musical turns the ...
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Death in Venice
: :Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of a 14-year-old boy while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Visconti has turned Aschenbach into a composer, which accounts for the lush excerpts from Mahler on the soundtrack (Bogarde is meant to look like ...
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Playing for Time
: :Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of a 14-year-old boy while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Visconti has turned Aschenbach into a composer, which accounts for the lush excerpts from Mahler on the soundtrack (Bogarde is meant to look like ...
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Barry Lyndon
: :In 1975 the world was at Stanley Kubrick's feet. His films Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, released in the previous dozen years, had provoked rapture and consternation--not merely in the film community, but in the culture at large. On the basis of that smashing hat trick, Kubrick was almost certainly the most famous film director of his generation, and absolutely the one most likely to rewire the collective mind of the movie audience. And what did this radical, at-least-20-years-ahead-of-his-time filmmaker give the world in 1975? A stately, three-hour costume ...
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Sins
: :In 1975 the world was at Stanley Kubrick's feet. His films Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, released in the previous dozen years, had provoked rapture and consternation--not merely in the film community, but in the culture at large. On the basis of that smashing hat trick, Kubrick was almost certainly the most famous film director of his generation, and absolutely the one most likely to rewire the collective mind of the movie audience. And what did this radical, at-least-20-years-ahead-of-his-time filmmaker give the world in 1975? A stately, three-hour costume ...
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Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud
: :In 1975 the world was at Stanley Kubrick's feet. His films Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, released in the previous dozen years, had provoked rapture and consternation--not merely in the film community, but in the culture at large. On the basis of that smashing hat trick, Kubrick was almost certainly the most famous film director of his generation, and absolutely the one most likely to rewire the collective mind of the movie audience. And what did this radical, at-least-20-years-ahead-of-his-time filmmaker give the world in 1975? A stately, three-hour costume ...
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S.O.B.
: :It's been years since Blake Edwards made a funny film, and this 1981 effort may have been one of his last consistent laugh producers. Richard Mulligan plays a Hollywood producer who realizes that his career may be over when the public sees his latest film: a big-budget musical that lands on test audiences with a thud. In a moment of madness, he hits upon the idea of reediting it to include soft-porn reshoots--including a shot of his movie-star wife (Julie Andrews), who has a squeaky clean public image, baring her breasts (which the ...
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Notorious
: :It's been years since Blake Edwards made a funny film, and this 1981 effort may have been one of his last consistent laugh producers. Richard Mulligan plays a Hollywood producer who realizes that his career may be over when the public sees his latest film: a big-budget musical that lands on test audiences with a thud. In a moment of madness, he hits upon the idea of reediting it to include soft-porn reshoots--including a shot of his movie-star wife (Julie Andrews), who has a squeaky clean public image, baring her breasts (which the ...
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Cabaret
: essential video:Winner of eight Academy Awards, including Best Director (Bob Fosse), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey), Cabaret would also have taken Best Picture if it hadn't been competing against The Godfather as the most acclaimed film of 1972. (Francis Ford Coppola would have to wait two years before winning Best Director, for The Godfather, Part II.) Brilliantly adapted from the acclaimed stage production, which was in turn inspired by Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and the play and movie I Am a Camera, this remarkable musical turns the ...
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White Hunter Black Heart
: :Unjustly overlooked in Clint Eastwood's oeuvre, this critical examination of the hubris of machismo predated Unforgiven by just two years and meditated on similar themes. Eastwood plays a macho movie director, in Africa ostensibly to shoot a movie, but more pressingly (to his mind, anyway) to bag an elephant. The story is based loosely on the true story of John Huston's behavior while making The African Queen; Eastwood's Huston imitation (the character here is named Wilson) will no doubt prove distracting to some--he drawls out vowels to the point of breaking--but he captures ...
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