Peter Ibbetson (1935) Semi-obscure and precious as a pearl, this woozy mid-Depression projectile is filmed like an old maid’s opium daydream, but the story is what makes your head spin: after being separated as children, Gary Cooper and Ann Harding meet again with a husband between them, and after he’s accidentally killed, Cooper’s unpretentious architect goes to prison for life – but as the couple ages, they literally meet, forever young, in their dreams. For decades. French critic Georges Sadoul wrote about this in his famous 1965 reference volume Dictionnaire du films, saying that "it is difficult to discuss this film without tending to invent certain details more than 25 years after being burnt by its flame." He didn’t invent much in his synopsis, but the flame is very real.

Wuthering Heights (1939) Whatever can be said about Wuthering Heights as a romantic experience fit for Valentine’s Day or any other day to kindle powerful emotions, it can’t possibly be enough. This is it, the seminally cosmic love story of all time, of Cathy and Heathcliff, of a yen so powerful it can transcend the grave and jealousy and fate. Samuel Goldwyn, director William Wyler and screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur worked up a Bronte reduction sauce, story-wise (the movie stops at chapter 16, which is fine, because the next generation never mattered anyway). But the combined natural forces of Merle Oberon (not a skilled actress, but a galvanic movie star), a young Laurence Olivier, the moors (actually Los Angeles County), and Bronte’s fierce storytelling make this a larger-than-life experience. Ignore the few stodgy details, and submerge into its self-destructive passions.

Ninotchka (1939) On the lighter side, this Ernst Lubitsch comedy is a bliss-out, a paean for Parisian mad love-&-fun, pitched by hedonistic American expat Melvyn Douglas to steely, humorless Soviet comrade Greta Garbo, who’s in town on a matter of state business (goofy Russian agents distracted by the Gallic pleasure principle). Of course, Garbo is masterful as the comically grim maiden in a gray suit, barely disguising a warm heart and yearning for love that we can always see beating beneath the Marxist-Leninist ideology. A little champagne, a little Paris skyline, a little woo from the rather satyric Douglas, and she opens like a lily (figuratively speaking, at least; this is 1939). It doesn’t hurt that Lubitsch had the subtlety and timing of a Hollywood Mozart, and Ninotchka’s screenplay, mostly by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, is one of the wittiest and gentlest of the entire Golden Age.

Casablanca (1942) Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco called it not "a movie," but The Movies, and yet that still doesn’t explain the deathless allure and hypnotic dramatic slam of this greatest Hollywood concoction, as much of a still vibrant myth system as it is a super-romantic wartime soap. Persistently popular for decades after its premiere, Casablanca ran the natural risk of becoming over-familiar, a storehouse of cliches and fabulous dialogue snippets that have, by now, found their way into the language without very many of us knowing where they came from ("I’m shocked, shocked..."). But, today, it rarely has occasion to show up on TV anymore, and Humphrey Bogart is no longer a teen-hip, counter-culture icon. Never mind: it’s still the quintessential mating dance between tough-guy cynicism and hearttugging love fable, between self-satisfaction and self-sacrifice, be it in the context of saving the world from Nazis or limning a love affair, or, as in this film, both. Which means it is not, like so many of today’s romances, strictly a "chick flick" – the sensibility at work here, primarily the voice of a remarkable screenplay written and rewritten a day at a time as the movie was being shot, acknowledges, caters to and converses with both genders. Bogart is virtually the 20^th century’s first definition of a man’s man: ugly and short, but indescribably charismatic and so cool he can run into his lost love (a daydream-inducing Ingrid Bergman), spar with Nazi officers, crack jokes and subtly reveal a lifetime of bitterness and desire, all at exactly the same time. Bergman, for her part, is both intelligent, gentle and fantastically desirable, the despairing hub around which the battle for the free world revolves. That’s what makes it ideal St. Valentine’s Day viewing – no one’s indulging anyone else, and yet everyone is focused on the tragic intercourse of love and history.

Lola (1960) New Wave romantic Jacques Demy takes to the streets of Nantes in his first café love tangle, in which Anouk Aimee is a luscious cabaret singer flitting above a messy but congenial web of lust and love, waiting for her true, idealized love to return to her.

Heaven Can Wait (1979) Warren Beatty’s remake of the pretty-swell Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) is a wonderfully lighthearted love story of an aging quarterback who is plucked up to heaven’s way-station before his time – and before his final Superbowl. Too late to go back among the living as his old self, he gets temporary custody of a millionaire’s body, becoming smitten with an Englishwoman (Julie Christie) in the bargain. Beatty and co-writer/director Buck Henry cut the sweetness with plenty of satire – and watch Charles Grodin’s every duplicitous move. Hardly a moment in the movie that isn’t a pleasure.

Shakespeare in Love (1998) A light-hearted and lovely tale of Shakespeare’s own unrequited love story, which proved the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet (and Twelfth Night), as light on its feet as the play is weighty with tragedy. The comic timing is impeccable, from a large and buoyant cast, and the lovable energy of the movie is embodied in Shakespeare himself (Joseph Fiennes), who never seems to sleep and is in constant athletic motion. The players deliver masses of Shakespearean dialogue, sometimes disguised, with complete conviction, wit and speed, and there’s enough heat between Fiennes and Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow to warm the home fires.

Serendipity (2001) John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet during a holiday shopping tug-of-war for a pair of cashmere gloves at Bloomingdale’s and then continue their flirting over the famous frozen hot chocolate at nearby Serendipity III, following up with skating in the snow at Wollman Rink. Is it fate? She thinks so, to an almost psychotic degree, and so decides to test it, and thus the movies carries on through several years and many monstrous dalliances with destiny, before the inevitable hook-up.

Before Sunset (2004) The setting is Paris, the archetypal hub of romance, and we rejoin Celine and Jesse nine years after they left each other at the train station, swearing to meet in Vienna six months later, in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. (Look for that in the "Dating" chapter of Flickipedia.) Clearly, we were supposed to wonder if they’d actually meet up – and, just as clearly, we weren’t supposed to know for sure either way. But this sequel, coming a decade later, with a decade’s wear and tear having accumulated on the actors and the characters, gives us a St. Valentine’s Day-style answer we had no right to expect. It’s both intelligent and sexy and whether you sigh dreamily over the notion of love at first sight or scorn it, the screenplay approaches it in such an original way you won’t have the heart to scoff: Celine and Jesse share humorous, off-beat musings on life while they meander around Paris in the late-afternoon sun the same way they wandered Vienna, but avoiding – and then not being able to avoid – the paths their lives have taken, because, no, they never reunited as they’d promised. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have invested so much in these characters that they share screenplay credit with director Richard Linklater; hard-bitten realists, the three of them are dogged about not letting anyone off the hook romantically-speaking, and yet the movie comes booby-trapped with the sneakiest happy ending ever, a slow dawning as Delpy sashays around her apartment, impersonating Nina Simone. Irresistible.


                         

It’s too cold to go outside, isn’t it? If you lean toward counteracting the months of frost with a blast of tropicalia, see the "Summer" section of FLICKIPEDIA. But we’ve found that if you’re hunkered down in the warmth of your home, all the better to punctuate the extreme weather outside, from a comfortable distance, of course. Here're just a few of our Christmas-to-February recommendations:

South (1919) Forget the recent movies, IMAX and otherwise, that recreate the doomed Shackleton Endurance expedition of 1914-16 to the South Pole; this astonishing film was shot on the spot by one Frank Hurley, who stood there stranded on the ice with the rest of the crew, watching the ice shelves crush the ship, not knowing whether he was in fact doomed or not, and yet still filming, beautifully. All other movies about polar survival are pretenders by comparison.

The Chechahcos (1924) Amateur Alaskan filmmaker Lewis S. Moomaw’s silent film is an extraordinary Klondike melodrama shot in the northern wilderness and featuring stunning on-location glacier footage. The story is antique, but there’s no denying the veracity of the on-location action. Available on a DVD set titled Treasures from American Film Archives: 50 Preserved Films.

SOS Iceberg (1933) This early sound epic is a prime example of the 1920s-30s specie of German adventure film known as "the mountain film," invented and primarily directed by one Dr. Arnold Fanck, and starring primarily one Leni Riefenstahl, just a few years away from being the Third Reich’s most famous propaganda filmmaker. The key attraction is the copious amount of location footage – when Riefenstahl and her comrades are scouring the Arctic circle for lost comrades, it’s no studio set. Of course, man’s triumph over nature’s adversities is just one shading of the ubermensch obsession that fired the Nazis. Other terrific examples available on disc are The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929) and Storm Over Mont Blanc (1930).

Portrait of Jennie (1948) After Gone with the Wind, producer David O. Selznick’s career project was largely taken over with erecting large, crazy movie-poems in honor of his beloved wife Jennifer Jones, and this unashamedly naive phantasia might be the most lovesick. Joseph Cotten plays a struggling artist in a New York where it’s nearly always snowing, and Jones is a girl that appears to him – and only to him – with a ghostly backstory of her own, inspiring him with her inner light.

Doctor Zhivago (1965) Boris Pasternak’s Russian-revolution love story, done up in ‘60s-epic style by grandmaster David Lean, about a good-hearted doctor-poet (Omar Sharif) swept up in a political storm he cares nothing about. In fact, he’s passive about pretty much everything, including his torn love for both his gentle, devoted wife and legendary beauty Lara (Julie Christie). This is Russia, so the springtimes feel like winters in Minnesota, even if this was shot almost entirely in Spain (!), and the subarctic ambience is completely fabricated out of white wax. Fake or not, the swirling flurries are relentless, and there are moments where you feel like you’re watching the story unfold from inside a snow globe. Doctor Zhivago is over-wrought and visually constipated (so much massive history, so many small rooms), but the Zhivago-Lara-stranded-in-the-ice-house set-piece has a cozy-wintry chill that’s hard to beat.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) This moody, fur-bundled frontier odyssey might be the best Robert Altman film of all. Warren Beatty plays a entrepreneurial rogue who sets up business in a muddy northwestern mining town (it looks, no kidding, as if it were shot in 1830), and eventually teams up with an opium-smoking madam (Julie Christie) looking to set up a whorehouse. Trouble sets in when gangsters try to squeeze the pair out, and resort to authentic prairie ethics to get their way. This movie teems with life like beehive; nobody was better than Altman in filling movies up with believable inhabitants and texture, and here the misty, greasy, snowy reality of range life is evoked like nobody’s business. No chicanery here – this was how Rocky Mountain life (shot in Vancouver) without utilities were like. Even the relentless Leonard Cohen songs begin to get under your skin. The movie is also a dead-lift triumph of the American New Wave – those years between 1966 and 1977 in which Hollywood went out of its way to make gritty, truthful, challenging films you could believe in.

Promised Land (1988) Michael Hoffman’s neglected, "personal" drama tracks the post-school lives of two Utah kids: Keifer Sutherland’s shy, geeky damaged goods, and Jason Gedrick’s basketball star-turned-local sheriff. Meg Ryan co-stars, launching her fledgling career with her portrait of a bipolar nightmare very far from the upturned-nose sweetheart she became famous for. The landscape is frozen, and the characters are lost.

Edward Scissorhands (1990) They have winter in Florida, too, and this lovely, melancholy Tim Burton fantasy is for the Southern-most snow-deprived of Americans. Anyone who’s had rolls of cotton wadding stapled to their hot roof as fake snow will treasure this eagle-eyed film for its satiric take on postwar suburban chintz, but in the end there’s snow after all – born of misfit heartbreak and devotion.

Archangel (1991) A genuine whatzit, this second feature by hermetic Canadian avant-gardist Guy Maddin comes in the guise of a scratched, faded, forgotten movie circa 1930, set in the eponymous Soviet city after WWI, but quite obviously shot on cardboard sets and more believably taking place in Maddin’s movie-crazed headbone. The cheapjack surrealisms and crazy non sequiturs are the joke, covered in fake snow and subject to the harshest winds fans can produce.

Fargo (1996) A poker-faced slalom through the icy fields of true-crime docudrama, Joel & Ethan Coen's cascade of frozen Minnesotan cops and crime is probably the loopiest based-on-fact murder drama ever made, something like In Cold Blood reimagined by Dave Barry. Somehow, the filmmakers tell the snowbound saga of a tumbling-dominoes 1987 permafrost bloodbath – featuring nerve-frayed scam source William H. Macy, wired hired gun Steve Buscemi, and serene pregnant policewoman Francis MacDormand (an Oscar) – as cold realism and yet retain their trademark absurdism and larky rhythms. Having grown up in a Minneapolis suburb, the Coens know the vernacular inside and out; though it often feels like a snarky plummet down a long flight of stairs, the movie ends up being a celebration of quiet banality. By the time we reach the woodchipper, we're as thankful as MacDormand’s Chief Marge that there's a mittened world full of idiotic pleasantries and all-you-can-eat restaurants to go back to.

The Ice Storm (1997) At its heart, this Ang Lee adaptation of the Rick Moody novel is a humane, sane, hilarious and rich-as-mousse dispatch on the woes, risks and costs of the all-American family, climaxing in the very real 1973 winter storm of the title and its largely symbolic fallout. The multiple character study encompasses an affable Dad (Kevin Kline) equally bewildered by his affair with a trendy neighbor (Sigourney Weaver) and his slowly disintegrating family, a haunted Mom (Joan Allen) lost somewhere between girlhood and disillusionment, a rebellious daughter (Christina Ricci) experimenting with shoplifting and mock sex with the neighbor’s boys (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), and a sweet-natured pothead son (Tobey Maguire) impassively grappling with puberty. But the real subject is vain, media-drunk modernity itself, and how it leaves us unprepared for the worst things in life, things that can happen at night when everything’s frozen over.

Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (2001) The first film shot in Inuktitut, this 2 1/2-hour epic about Inuit love, family and betrayal is all Arctic, all the time, shot with a wholly convincing native cast on digital video. Primal, enthralling and very cold.

                  

    "The mother of all holidays," is how Jean Shepherd put it in his narration of A Christmas Story, and true enough – but Christmas is also the year’s most demanding day (or fortnight, really) in terms of atmosphere, emotional temperature and point of view. We don’t feel a need to get all colonial or even terribly grateful on Thanksgiving; nobody talks about "getting into the spirit" of Mother’s Day, Veterans Day or even Independence Day. But for Christmas, there is a pervasive compulsion to summon reserves of tolerance, generosity, congeniality and child-like upbeat-ness, and we go to extraordinary cultural lengths to make it happen. Hence, the phenomenon known as the Christmas movie, all of which serve as narrative windows into that edenic space where cold hearts are warmed, charitable love dawns on the greedy, and, most of all, the childhood memories and the purest notions of home become easier to grasp and hold. Old movies – closer to the idealized past from which all adult ardor for the holiday flows – are best; crassly commercial contemporary parables about crass commercialism (Jingle All the Way, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Christmas with the Kranks, et al.) are not, and we’ve largely left them behind. The season is short, after all. Here, we've left out the reflexive favorites everyone knows, though rest assured we vet them in Flickipedia.

The Night Before Christmas (1905) This fabulously arthritic Edison production from the infancy of film history – directed by narrative pioneer Edwin S. Porter – is a dusty dream of Victorian faerie-ism, opening with Santa feeding a herd of real reindeer and teeming with antiquey landscape paintings and pre-tech toys. It’s also the climactic short on Kino’s DVD A Christmas Past, a collection of silent, "vintage holiday films" that includes D.W. Griffith’s fiercely moralistic A Trap for Santa (1909), the utterly lovely Edison film of realistic snowfall frolicking A Winter Straw Ride (1906), and Santa Claus (1925), an amateur film proudly shot on and around the Alaskan glaciers. A hypnotic time capsule and an effective pre-modern weapon in the war against shopping and accumulation for their own sakes.

Scrooge (1935) It’s a tiring parable, but Charles Dickens’s chestnut A Christmas Carol is all but unavoidable. Preachy, sure, but it’s such an overused story that you can hardly watch an hour of November television without being pelted by a commercial’s reference to it. Better to go to the source – reading! – or this first sound version, British-made, starring stage vet Sir Seymour Hicks as Scrooge. A creaky, attic-webby beaut, choked with shadow and fog.

Remember the Night (1940) An overlooked screwball masterpiece from Hollywood’s Golden Age, written by bad-boy satiric genius Preston Sturges and directed by premier woman’s director Mitchell Leisen, in which whimsical bachelor-DA Fred MacMurray takes sexy shoplifting tramp Barbara Stanwyck with him to his homestead for Christmas. Sturges’s dialogue, volleyed by these pros four years before Double Indemnity, is mint, but the idiosyncratic comedy slowly, organically seeps into melancholy. The film is as smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate, and Sturges’s fat heart comes through in ways that are unique in a Christmas film. The characters’ feet are planted in the real world, and the season’s triumph is rescue from the memory of a poisoned childhood.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940) An fiercely odd septuagenarian Christmas tale from the authoress of Love Affair, this forgotten dilly concerns three bachelor fogeys (buoyant Charles Winninger, crusty/affable C. Aubrey Smith, dyspeptic Harry Carey) who die and return as ghosts to facilitate the seemingly doomed romance of young ‘uns. The character-actor star-power alone makes it worth seeking out, but the story is a fabulous lark. Sometimes retitled Beyond Christmas.

Holiday Inn (1942) Possibly the best movie to watch while wrapping presents. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are a pair of showman who decide to open a country inn that celebrates every holiday with song and dance. That’s it for story. As you’d expect, most of the film is caught up with other seasonal occasions; Christmas is just one page on the calendar. It just so happens that the movie’s endearingly canned studio winter and Irving Berlin’s "White Christmas" are the most memorable things about it. That’s fine: you’re looking for tape. Anyway, from today’s perspective, there’s something inherently Christmasy about the hat-wearing, crooner-loving, homefront ‘40s, isn’t there?

The Holly and the Ivy (1952) A cozy, mature and rarely-seen British heartwarmer in which an aging parson and widower (Ralph Richardson) convenes with his three adult children and other relatives on their cozy village homestead for the holidays - to reminisce about the war, remember dead loved ones, and to lay bare a few family secrets. Director George More O’Ferrall is no Frank Capra, but there’s a lot of genuine warmth to go around.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) Baby-boomers know this puppet-animated fable’s scary oddnesses inside and out: the Burl Ives snowman in a plaid vest, the icy toy mansion in the snow, the feverish anxiety about reindeer employment, the Island of Misfit Toys’ winged lion-king, the too-chilling Abominable, complete with giant shark teeth and autonomously mobile fur. Forgive us if we think this decades-old kid’s fodder more than a little strange, from the song lyrics ("We all pretend the rainbow has an end," the key ballad says, "and you’ll be there my friend someday...") to the ending credits, when a sleigh-riding elf, distributing umbrellas to the toys and then tossing them overboard, figures a toy bird can do without and drops him, not knowing it’s a Misfit Toy alum and cannot fly. But that is all decidedly beside the point; for most intents and purposes, because we grew up with it being broadcast every year, it’s an annual must-see. Of course, the Rankin/Bass animation mill rapped out other seasonal staples, all to some degree essential: The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Frosty the Snowman (1969), Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), and others far less memorable. But Rudolph is the genre’s greatest head-trip, a weird dream within which we all remain bewildered children.

Comfort and Joy (1984) Scottish director Bill Forsyth is – or perhaps was, since his only film since 1993 was never released in the U.S. – a master of gentle discombobulation, and his Christmas movie is appropriately wacky, but in a quiet, generous way. The holiday here is experienced by a middle-aged Glasgow radio personality (Bill Paterson), whose sexy kleptomanic girlfriend walks out on a mysterious whim, and whose subsequent Christmastime loneliness is abated only by his involvement in a turf war fought between two rival ice cream vendors. With Forsyth it’s all in the details and rhythms, and the movie has a thoughtful, ruminative personality that could do wonders, as the titled implies, for the sad-sacked and lonesome.

Gremlins (1984) A nasty, fantastically clever antidote-film for those of us who think that Christmas commercialism has gotten completely out of hand. Here, seemingly innocent Christmas presents have a Hyde side, take on carnivorous lives of their own and hunt down their recipients. The mayhem of Joe Dante’s badtime-dream – in which adorable Muppet-ish furball creatures, once introduced into suburbia as gifted pets, transform into raving homunculi – might be the most astute metaphor for holiday capitalism ever devised; what seems at first an ordinary act of giving becomes a bloodthirsty battle to the death. (Is there a more triumphant moment in all of ‘80s Hollywood than the hero’s mom, faced with a kitchen full of malevolent harpies, gearing into combat mode and dispatching the cackling creatures in the blender and the microwave?) Should we all have to fight our gifts? We’d certainly give the exchange, and the intent behind it, a lot more thought.

The Dead (1987) Director John Huston may have been close to dying, but apparently no one else was going to film James Joyce’s most famous short story, and make it an indelibly mournful, Old-World Christmas experience. Two spinster aunts host a Christmas dinner in turn-of-the-century Dublin, when ladies wore long skirts and high lace collars and guests entertained each other with stories, songs and dancing. Outside, horse-drawn carriages glide gently through the snow; inside, the holiday feast is an occasion to discuss scandals and politics before setting aflame the Christmas pudding. That is, before a plaintive singing of a sad Irish ballad, and suddenly the past returns and the present begins to decay and the season’s marking of time and age inspires a deep and universal melancholy. Something of a family affair (Huston’s son Tony wrote the ingeniously expanded screenplay, and daughter Angelica stars as the wife with a secret story), this dreamy adaptation refuses to be hurried, and Joyce’s prose (narrated by Donal McCann, as the husband) is surpassingly eloquent. With logs for the fire and a toast in hand, it’s a salve for those hungering for a more literate, and subtly powerful, holiday film.

Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1987) It may be one of America’s best kept secrets: we don’t really like the ballet of The Nutcracker very much, and resent having to ingest it every year as if it were a citizenship requirement. Most of us would be surprised to learn that the original E.T.A. Hoffmann tale has precious little to do with sugar-plum fairies and all to do with a rather vicious war between toys and monster mice. Filming ballets has always been a bad move in any event, but this Carroll Ballard film version has a few saving graces, beyond the score: it’s designed by Maurice Sendak, and it has a bewitching opening act, in which the Drosselmeier figure embarks on his epic toymaking, shot in intricate close-up. Then there’s dancing.

Elf (2003) Christmas sappiness plus flatout contemporary yucks, with Will Ferrell making himself a bankable star as a human-raised-as-North-pole-elf who gets detoured, in Miracle on 34^th Street-slash-Big fashion, to the new New York – which isn’t all that different from the old New York of our Christmas movie memories, down to Ferrell’s employment at Gimbel’s (shot, it seems, in the survivor of the department store giants, Macy’s). An unexpected surprise is Zooey Deschanel crooning "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" in a voice rich enough to rival the original Esther Williams version. 

                             

Zero de Conduite (1933) As much as this Jean Vigo mini-masterpiece may be helpful in terms of "Parenting Tweens & Teens," it’s also a vivid snapshot of grade-school rebelliousness – you may’ve forgotten what it was like to spitball a teacher in 5^th grade, or what it felt like to want to, but this visionary little gem jacks you into that universal spirit in no time flat, and at the same acts out your craziest preadolescent wishes of ridiculous chaos.

The Curse of the Cat People (1944) One of the quiet miracles of ‘40s B-moviemaking, this is a dream-like journey into an eight-year-old girl’s fantasy world, as the daughter of Kent Smith, the hero from Cat People now remarried, is visited by the ghost of his first wife (Simone Simon). Shadowy, gentle, and captivating.

The 400 Blows (1958) This semi-autobiographical French New Wave landmark by Francois Truffaut is as potent a vehicle for an adult’s autobiographical ruminations as it is a guide to the new adolescent’s storming terrain. Watch Jean-Pierre Leaud as he watches grown-ups, steals happiness in their absence, and warily regards the world that grates against him at every turn.

If... (1969) British critic-turned director Lindsay Anderson made his mark with this boarding-school diatribe, which remade Zero de Conduite down to the rooftop climax, but in the process cut the English disciplinarian education system to ribbons. It was, also, a generational anthem-film, ill-mannered and furious, and it made Malcolm McDowell enough of a key figure to make him Stanley Kubrick’s inevitable casting choice the next year for A Clockwork Orange.
 
Small Change (1976) Truffaut returns to early adolescence, in a tapestry film depicting an array of suburban French children, overcoming ordinary adversities and embracing life’s simple glories in ways that are alien to grown-ups. Invigorating and hope-generating.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) If you don’t remember the killing fields of the seventh grade, this movie’s a reminder, opening in the Theater of Cruelty of the junior high school cafeteria, where finding somewhere to sit and someone who will let you sit with them has all the shivery dread of being lost in a police state without ID. The camera slowly circles around the 11-year-old Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), standing there holding her tray and surveying the combat zone, her bespectacled face a knot of huddled horror. You’ve been there.


            

Morocco (1930) A Legionnaire (Gary Cooper) dallies with a world-weary desert-oasis diva (Marlene Dietrich), who isn’t exactly as cynical and experience-toughened as she thought. The first, epochal American Marlene Dietrich-Josef von Sternberg film is the muggiest, woozy with hot, moonlit Saharan nighttime. Of course it was all done on the Paramount lot, with shadows – according to von Sternberg’s uproariously self-aggrandizing memoir, the Pasha of Marrakech asked him years later why the filmmaker had not visited him when making the film in Morocco, which he’d recognized first-hand. Von Sternberg maintained he’d never been to the country, and Cooper, in his forward to the book, doubts the windy director could’ve found the nation on a map.

Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et La Bete) (1946) Jean Cocteau’s definitive incarnation of the fairy tale, and a supremely dreamy July daydream, shot with silvery shimmering by Henry Alekan, and infused with nursery wonder. Jean Marais’s leonine Beast is fab, but Josette Day’s serene maiden is close to an ideal.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) Ingmar Bergman, summery? This famous art-house favorite isn’t the Swedish moper’s only comedy, but it is his funniest, largely restricted to intertwining boudoir farce reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and reinvented decades later as Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music), but occasionally embracing love in a haystack at dusk.

The Blob (1958) An alien jelly-mold has invaded Eisenhower-era, drive-in-crazy Middle America, and only honest teen Steve McQueen (who was actually 28) can save us. There’s something quintessential here, a potent feel for small towns at night when everyone’s home looking toward bed except the pesky teenagers – those kids! – and the amused, lazy cops manning the local station.

Black Orpheus (1959) The most evocative tropical film ever made, this peacock of a movie transposes the Orpheus-Eurydice myth to Rio amid Carnivale, and the heavy dose of South American colors, non-stop samba music, sweat, dancing, copulating and Brazilian zest can make you dizzy. The tale is tragic, of course, but one-hit-wonder director Marcel Camus determinedly turns on the juice, and in the end it’s spectacularly life-affirming.

Planet of the Apes (1968) Before there was "the summer blockbuster" (a label on movies now that describes their box-office intentions, not their actual success), there was the matinee movie, meant as a respite from summer heat for pre-video kids with nothing to watch at home and brainpans overflowing with Marvel comics, Aurora models and backyard G.I. Joe scenarios. This beautiful, conceptually fearless piece of all-American pulp – forget the Tim Burton remake – remains resonant and unforgettable, but also invokes an entire decade of summers (what with its frequent sequels and re-releases) for a lucky generation of kids, whose cerebellums are permanently branded with the image of Charlton Heston kneeling on the beach, before the wrecked Statue of Liberty. Ah, to be lost on this desert planet once more...

Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) Director Sergio Leone virtually invented the Italian-made "spaghetti western," and this hot, sweaty mastodon of a movie may be its crowning exemplar: it's the most overwrought, supercool, breathtakingly lavish, preposterously lyrical western ever made. The sets are huge (farmhouses appear to have 12 or more rooms), the story absurd, the music rapturous, the faux-desert sun hot. Every aspect of it is swooning with the love for Movies – every scene is a western standard jacked up into a feverish fit. The incredible opening credits sequence alone (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, a fly, a deserted train station...) is worth the rental fee, and, like the rest of this super-widescreen mock-opera, must have given the video transfer guys serious headaches. The story involves the westward push of the railroad, a mail-order bride (Claudia Cardinale), a rogue outlaw (Jason Robards), a mysterious man-with-no-name bent on avenging his father's murder (Charles Bronson), and Henry Fonda marvelously countercast as the vilest western villain of all time. As exaggerated and berserk and self-conscious as it is, it's also profoundly sad – Ennio Morricone's crescendoing music makes the loss of the Old West seem a heartrending reality.

The Other (1972) Thomas Tryon’s corn-belt-Gothic thriller about a well-off country family in the ‘30s plagued by twin sons (the remarkable Chris and Martin Udvarnoky), one of whom is dead (and a ghost?) and the other of whom may be crazy. A helluva yarn with a nasty taste for Grand Guignol, it’s also an intensely humid film (thanks to director Robert Mulligan), exploring the kid spaces on a summer-scorched farm, before there were Gameboys and day camps.

Chinatown (1974) The film that first reincarnated the detective-film noir, Roman Polanski’s majesterial movie is all about L.A., so it’s not shadowy and expressionistic – it’s blistered by July sunshine, and no less affecting for the turnabout. One of the unarguable gems in the American canon, this film can and should be seen for a variety of reasons, but the glare-&-heat seasonal mood is impressive, particularly in view of how the hero – Jack Nicholson’s supercool private dick Jake Gittes – rather hedonistically spends his sweltering mid-days: hanging out, avoiding authority, kinda like a kid.

Jaws (1975) If you were there, in the theaters in the summer of ‘75, you’ve got this movie in your DNA. Truly communal movie experiences like it haven’t come by since – everyone saw it, twice, and everyone had a new relationship with the beach. But put the man-eating giant monster shark aside for a moment, and you’ve got full-on, real-to-the-touch Atlantic beach community life, back when people listened to transistor radios in the sand and used suntan oil. The actors’ clothes even seem creased with sand and salt air.

Phantasm (1978) Perhaps the only effective summertime horror film, Dan Coscarelli’s hallucinogenic original deals with a mysterious mortuary with profoundly weird things going on deep inside of it, but investigated by a lonely kid (Michael Baldwin) in the dead of deeply shadowed, suburban July nighttimes. This is what we imagined all of that staying-out-late during summer vacation might’ve amounted to.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) It’s possible that no American movie has been as besotted with the sensual realities of summertime as this overlooked and in fact infinitely repeatable Woody Allen comedy, in which three early-century couples gather in a to-die-for Victorian house in the country for a balmy weekend, and endure various mate-swapping peccadilloes. Light on its feet, soundtracked by Felix Mendelssohn, and blessed with the effervescence of Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty, Allen’s movie goes for broke in terms of seasonal glamour: sunlit meadows, firefly swarms, moonlit brooks, rendezvous in the night forest, dining al fresco, daydreaming in cotton dresses, suspenders and straw hats, all of it shot with Vermeerian sublimity by Gordon Willis. It’s time this honey got a reappraisal.

Stand By Me (1985) The search for the dead body in the woods in this Stephen King-derived hit is merely a MacGuffin – the four tweens (Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell) could’ve been hunting for mushrooms. What’s really at stake here is the recreation of early-‘60s childhood summers, before parents began micromanaging their kids’ lives. Once, when summer was summer, not just an excuse for air-conditioning, you could roam into the next county, along the train tracks, through the leechy swamps, into treehouses, and across mad-dog-guarded junkyards, and nobody thought twice about it.

Summer (1986) Or, as Eric Rohmer originally titled it, "Le Rayon vert," referring to the Jules Vernian green ray that a setting sun is supposed to create at the instant of disappearance – Rohmer’s heroine here (Marie Riviere) is a secretary suddenly alone on vacation, trying different places and strategies, but maddeningly unable to enjoy herself or find fulfillment. Given such a structure, the movie can be frustrating, too, but only if you make the mistake of needing Riviere’s nowhere girl to do what you would do. At the same time, it’s a potent character portrait, a philosophical parable, and a tour of French summer choices, from Cherbourg to the Alps to the beach at Biarritz.

Point Break (1990) One of the few genuine camp romps of the Reagan-Bush era, this goofball, directed in high, silly style by Kathryn Bigelow, has studly fed Keanu Reeves infiltrate Patrick Swayze’s clan of extreme-sports, surfin’-bird, parachutin’ bank robbers. Idiotic and faux-philosophical, it exudes a thrill-seeking vibe that’s hard to skip, especially when it’s apparent that the stars actually jumped out of airplanes.

Belle Epoque (1993) This Spanish hit has a timeworn vacation-movie story – a well-intentioned boob (Gabino Diego) deserting during the Civil War in the ‘30s takes shelter with a family made up of one crotchety old man (Fernando Fernan Gomez) and his four tempestuous daughters (among them, Penelope Cruz and Y Tu Mama Tambien’s Maribel Verdu), all of whom seem in need of a good schtupping. But even though it’s set off-season, it’s still Spain, and it’s got the vibe: Mediterranean heat-beaten stone buildings, Spanish palm trees, beautiful women in sleeveless blouses wandering around thinking about sex even when they don’t think they’re thinking about it. Nothing too artful, but lovely.

                                        

School's out, 4-eva, high school, middle school or college -- here're some rentable recommendations from Flickipedia, capturing or recapturing that tingliest of seasons...

The Graduate (1967) A generational emblem more than a movie, this Mike Nichols classic is about lostness, anomie and social incompleteness as only movies made in the late-60s-early-70s can be. Dustin Hoffman became a star in the unlikeliest of circumstances: as an aimless college grad who cannot get a fix on what he wants out of life. He is seduced by a family friend (Anne Bancroft), and is then pressured into dating her daughter (Katherine Ross); as life gets more complicated, he searches madly for any reason at all to choose one destiny over another. Credit is due to 1967 audiences, who saw themselves in this ambivalent portrait, and dared to ask big questions of themselves and their movies. Picture, if you can, the new millennium’s freshly graduated degree-holders with the same choice.

American Graffiti (1973) The first coming-of-age ensemble comedy in American movies? George Lucas’s sublime evocation of a midwestern 1962 of cars, rock ‘n roll radio and lost sub-adults certainly established the timeless stereotypes of that post-graduation summer night that everyone experiences: the high school sweethearts confronting college and separation (Ron Howard and Cindy Williams), the itchy smart kid who doesn’t know if college is what he wants (Richard Dreyfuss), the hopeless dweeb looking only to score (Charles Martin Smith), the cool dropout hood who cannot adjust to the real world (Paul LeMat). Roaringly funny and bittersweet.

Fandango (1985) A narrow but rueful valentine to the college grads of the ‘Nam era, introducing the world to Kevin Costner, as the larky leader of a motley gang of sullen jerks either embracing the war, running from the draft, getting married or merely remaining drunkenly unconscious. Costner’s energy keeps it afloat.

Dazed and Confused (1993) This is what the beginning of summer, with school a fading memory already a day later, felt like for director Richard Linklater, whose milieu here was Texas in the late ‘70s. Trailing after a dozen or more recently freed high schoolers as they search for a party, contemplate their dubious role in the social order, and inflict/escape from the hazing rituals that may be particular to Austin suburb schools, the film is dense with detail, one-liners, deft performances and astutely observed reality – though it may take two viewings to mesh with the movie’s unique rhythms. It’s also something of The Outsiders of its generation, more or less introducing the world to Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt, Rory Cochrane, Joey Lauren Adams, Parker Posey, etc.

Kicking and Screaming (1995) Here was the late-century’s generational anthem film, except no one seemed terribly interested in identifying with it. Writer/director Noah Baumbach’s debut, the movie is a rueful portrait of four preppy, Ivy League-ish friends living off-campus, suddenly left in the weird afterworld where graduation has marked them as grown-ups but the indulgent, trivia-obsessed allure of college life maintains its grip. Baumbach poured a hundred college careers’ worth of ironic humor into the script, and Chris Eigemann, Josh Hamilton and Carlos Jacott are a dry riot. Eric Stoltz almost steals the movie in an improvised role as a philosophical bartender, but it’s hard not to fall for Olivia d’Abo as an impulsive creative-writing major conscious of her braces.

Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) An overlooked gem among a hundred cretinous teen-party comedies, in which another dozen or so easily recognizable high school types flounder their way through a single night of epiphany, melodrama, humiliation, socialization, and beer. The film’s pulsing, forgiving heart and sharp ear (courtesy of writer/director team Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont) are responsible for the movie’s distinction; the joyous chaos of teenage parties are not easy to depict, but this movie gets it, with a title from an old Replacements song no less. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Ethan Embry are the mismatched hottie-&-nerd, but funnier and more believable are Lauren Ambrose’s quasi-goth cynic, Peter Facinelli’s monster jock, and Charlie Korsmo’s ultra-geek.

Ghost World (2001) The pioneering film portrait of a distinctive, universal and heretofore ignored teenage social class: the bitter, frumpy, snobbish, willfully unpopular "weirdos," self-defined only in disdainful opposition to their peers. It’s a state that often provides for a certain amount of lostness after graduation, which is what the heroines of Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel and Terry Zwigoff’s acerbic movie struggle with: the vacuum left once they’re left to their own devices. Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson are pitch-perfect in what amounts to an act of modern anthropology – rescuing a lovable misfit teen type from obscurity.

Independence Day approacheth -- parades and fireworks and barbecues – but what if it rains? And what about the evening of the 3^rd? You can’t count on the movies for accurate history, but they can contextualize the party.

Janice Meredith (1924) A pulpy silent romance in the D.W. Griffith tradition that positions its heroine, played by Hearst protege Marion Davies, as helping out with both Paul Revere’s ride and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Extremely rare, with a sensational cast that also included W.C. Fields (as a drunken Brit officer), Tyrone Power Sr. (as Lord Cornwallis), Fatty’s cousin Macklyn Arbuckle (as Davies’ father), and, as Marie Antoinette, one Princess Marie de Bourbon, a popular model and sole living relative of King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, in one of only two known film appearances.

Ah, Wilderness! (1935) Small-town, turn-of-the-century life by way of Eugene O’Neill, so depression, alcoholism and prejudice cuts the sun-dappled optimism to some degree. But it’s set on and around a 19^th-century-style, midwestern 4^th of July celebration, and the exuberant, creaky, cracker-barrel priorities are in line, with Mickey Rooney and his little-rascal buddies setting off firecrackers underneath the grown-ups’ various melodramas.

Lafayette (1961) A little-seen French historical pageant about the revolutionary hero, good for old-fashioned European attention to period sumptuousness, as well as a spot-the-star cast of internationals, including Orson Welles as Benjamin Franklin, Jack Hawkins as Cornwallis, vet character star Howard St. John as George Washington, and Vittorio de Sica as Edward Bancroft, Franklin’s double agent.

1776 (1972) Easily the most thorough-going War of Independence film ever made in Hollywood – there aren’t many competitors – this silly anachronism is also a eager-to-please Broadway musical put on film, which says something about how truly interested Americans have been about their own history. Still, it has its devotees, and besides, the facts are there, a good deal of the dialogue is attributed quotes, the cast is game, and the anti-conservative number "Cool, Cool Considerate Men" is now included on video versions, after being initially cut by studio chief Jack Warner at the behest of President Richard Nixon.

Blow Out (1981) Brian De Palma’s tribute to Antonioni’s Blow Up, Chappaquiddick, Watergate, JFK, sound engineering and Philadelphia, all rolled into a crazy political-assassination plot that the hero (John Travolta, engagingly relaxed) may or may not have accidentally recorded on audio tape. The background of a berserk City of Brotherly Love during the July 4^th fete is as central, visually and ironically, as Hitchcock’s use of national monuments. All in all, a smashing, thoughtful, stirring piece of pulp, and probably the best movie for the holiday.

Revolution (1985) A rare attempt by the Hollywood studios to make a serious film about the Revolution, but boy, the engine dropped out of this lemon straight from the factory. Which makes it something like a comedy now, what with Al Pacino’s meant-to-be-historical Brooklyn accent, Annie Lennox stalking around as "Liberty Woman," a sound mix that literally loses 50% of the mumbling dialogue, a stupefying lack of history or action, and an impressive visual pallette that runs from umber to sienna.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) Though Michael Mann’s buckskin-sex, tomahawk-to-the-head take on James Fenimore Cooper isn’t about the Revolutionary War or national independence, it evokes as few films do the real wilderness of the time, as both homestead, battlefield and frontier. Log cabins, cannon-stocked forts, gunsmoke and mud, eating venison by real candlelight – this may be the closest an American film will ever come to capturing the period. Plus it has Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe as star-crossed lovers amidst the warfare, making the most convincingly hot movie pair of the ‘90s.

                                                        

Is it that time, time for weddings?! You've got months and months of preparation, and yet do you have any idea what you're in for? Moviemakers heart this familiar social rite like no one's business, and the movies could be ceremony-jitter foot-rubs, fair warning shots across your bow, etc., but remember, they're someone else's story, not yours.

The Philadelphia Story (1940) A famous pre-nup crash-and-burn: Katherine Hepburn is the proud, self-righteous bride-to-be wanting to be knocked down from her pedestal ("I don’t want to be worshiped, I just want to be loved."); Cary Grant is the sarcastic ex determined to make her feel guilty and stop the wedding; Jimmy Stewart the class-conscious society reporter thrust into the maelstrom. General wedding planning tizziness abounds. The comedy is high, and this stable of racehorses all run in peak form – even if the thrust seems to be that women should forgive men their boyish faults, whether drinking, adultery, or just the pinching fingers of the slightly creepy Uncle Willie (Roland Young). Though overrated, this may be a good movie to watch upon engagement if only because it stirs up every doubt and second thought you should have before tying the knot.

The Forgotten Man (1941) (on DVD Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin) The old jokes about the bride’s father, milked dry and ignored and sidelined throughout the protracted wedding-preparation process, began here with this vintage Robert Benchley short. No one did or has ever done befuddled paternalism as well as Benchley.

Father of the Bride (1950) The grandad of all Hollywood wedding comedies, this story begins at the end: an exhausted father in the aftermath of his only daughter’s wedding, sitting among the wreckage of his home, rubbing his aching tootsies. If you’re contemplating a simple home wedding, this movie will give you pause – there’s nothing simple about it and you’ll be left cleaning up after the newlyweds have hopped their plane to Bermuda. Spencer Tracy at his comical best as the ineffectual dad will make you glad if you’re the father of the groom, who seems to get a free ride. Then again, the costs Tracy incurs will seem free by comparison with today’s price tag: $3.75 a head! If only.

Cousin, Cousine (1975) Bubbly French rom-com: two cousins-by-new-marriage, already unhappily wed to sluts, link up and have an affair, which causes problems in subsequent family gatherings. Sexy and light, with Marie-Christine Barrault holding it together with the easiness of her smile and the lilt in her voice.

Moonstruck (1987) Romance and Italianate comedy in a kind of dreamy, magical hunk of brownstone Brooklyn, with Cher’s widowed frump dubiously accepting the proposal of Danny Aiello’s dumb momma’s boy and then falling for his troubled, one-handed brother (Nicolas Cage). Luckily, the margins of the movie are filled to the brim with witty character actors, slabs of comedic nonsense, behavioral detail, and a sense of warm-heartedness toward the follies of humankind. Here, John Patrick Shanley captured a cartoon-paisan flavor, and though it dates, it’s a far better submersion in Mediterranean-emigre boisterousness than My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

True Love (1989) Nuptial planning, Bronx Italian style, including tacky bridesmaid gowns (rainbow), tawdry wedding halls that serve mashed potatoes dyed to match the color of the gowns, opinionated friends, interfering relatives, and a bride and groom who are swept along with the idea of marriage as something you ought to do and so convince themselves that they want to do it. Ron Eldard’s groom is hopelessly immature and unromantic but Annabella Sciorra ignores the fact that her marriage is doomed before it starts; she can’t help it, she’s too busy wiping fingerprints off her back. This is probably a lot funnier if you’ve witnessed this Noo Yawk behavior up close; otherwise, it may all just seem completely crazy.

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) A band of single friends, led by the shyly charming Hugh Grant, chase each other around England, attending weddings in various states of disarray and embarrassment. Star-crossed amour and funny wedding mishaps abound but this international smash sucked in its audience and an Oscar nomination with the grace of its execution – a brilliantly witty screenplay, perfectly staged and acted, and a pervasive fondness for even the bit characters and background extras.

Walking and Talking (1996) Nicole Holofcener’s chick flick depends absolutely and generously on the verve and candor of Catherine Keener and Anne Heche as lifelong buddies negotiating their own mutating friendship as one faces marriage and the other faces loneliness. The film has the easy rhythm of a three-hour girl talk phone call, and all the actors run like linebackers with their unpredictable and witty (but not too witty) characters. Keener is particularly radiant and raw, in a way that justifies the whole movie – a dozen things can happen on her face at once. Watching her come up with something to say in an embarrassing situation is like watching a Japanese table-tennis pro play himself.

Black Cat, White Cat (1998) Anyone familiar with the films of Sarajevo-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica knows what they’re in for with this unrestrained absurdism, about a Rom enclave on the banks of the Danube, a festering nest of stray animals, sniping neighbors, grifters, crooks, and layabouts, as it primes for a particularly troublesome wedding. Car-eating pigs, humping dogs, begging gypsies, dwarf brides, gold-toothed paraplegic mobsters, hidden corpses: you’ll never be bored. Kusturica’s stories (and this movie could hardly function with just one) don’t always work, and his humor is often crude, but his films intend on being filthy, hungry parades of life and they succeed. It can get exhausting – picture a 2+-hour-long Serbian Little Caesars commercial – but who’s going to complain about a movie with too much stuff in it?

Meet the Parents (2000) This brutally comic hit found the lurking fears of every young lover meeting their prospective in-laws for the first time, and lit them up good – Ben Stiller is just, well, Ben Stiller, but his fiancee’s father (Robert De Niro) isn’t just a controlling, disapproving patriarch, he’s actually a semi-retired intelligence ramrod, with only his little girl now to serve and protect. Every step is the wrong step, every action is scrutinized mercilessly, Stiller’s anxious gaze of disbelief as each new mishap befalls him is a wonder, and De Niro flexes all of his dead-eyed menace. 

                                              

A perfect example of Flickipedia's utility -- Memorial Day? Some actually honor the war dead, most of us just barbecue -- but wouldn't the right movie hit the balanced note between reverence and long-weekend recreation? But some war movies are tosh, and many are just jingoistic sensationalism. Here are a few selected recommendations:

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Erich Maria Remarque’s ubiquitous WWI novel gets an Oscar-winning, early-talkie treatment from director Lewis Milestone, and if the drama is clumsy, the trench-warfare battle scenes are horrifying and traumatic.

The Fighting Sullivans (1944) One of WWII’s saddest stories, dramatized in this low-budget propaganda piece: five stick-together Iowa brothers, Navy enlistees after Pearl Harbor, all go down in the Pacific together. Naturally teary beyond belief, and the tale that prompted the core story of Saving Private Ryan.

A Walk in the Sun (1946) Lewis Milestone returns to the battlefield, but with a difference: this stylized, grunt’s-eye-view follows a standard motley assortment of soldiers through Italy, from landing to nondescript farmhouse destination, their dialogue (and often monologues) a form of repetitious, singsong battle poetry. The enemy is never seen.

The Burmese Harp (1956) A haymaker of an anti-war film from Japanese moviemaker Kon Ichikawa, in which a soldier escapes death in Burma by masquerading as a Buddhist priest, and then finds himself transformed by the horrors of war into a holy man dedicated to burying the countless dead.

The Dawns Here Are Quiet (1972) This patient Soviet propaganda movie was nominated for a 1972 foreign-film Oscar and then summarily forgotten, but it might just be the only war film in which the beleaguered infantry is made up entirely of women. The horny male soldiers at a lonely outpost during WWII are replaced by ably trained female volunteers, all of them eager, fresh-faced comrades, each with her own fragile hopes for the future. Soon, a Nazi party presses them into armed conflict, with their avuncular C.O. torn between duty and guardian-guilt. For the Soviets, an inspiring ending meant martyrdom, not salvation.

Overlord (1975) A low-budget British film comprised of half archival WWII footage and half low-budget, low-key dramatics, Stuart Cooper’s all-but-forgotten film (a winner, nonetheless, at the Berlin Film Festival) echoes All Quiet on the Western Front in structure and tone, but the very real sequences of bombing raids and smoldering urban craters leave their own welts.

A Midnight Clear (1992) It’s Christmas, 1944, the Germans have nearly lost and everyone knows it. Six mostly inexperienced soldiers (Ethan Hawke, Frank Whalley, Gary Sinise, etc.) are selected for special assignment because of their high I.Q.s, so we know we’re in for a thoughtful movie – no kill-the-Kraut heroism here. After stumbling through the darkened snowy forest and holing up in an abandoned mansion wondering what to do; the Germans they meet feel likewise, and for a while, but not forever, it seems they won’t exchange fire more dangerous than snowballs. Unjustly overlooked, from a William Wharton novel.

The Thin Red Line (1998) The true WWII masterpiece from ‘98, Terrence Malick’s comeback film, after a 20 year silence, takes place during and around the battle of Guadalcanal but is in reality far more concentrated on the emotional experience of battle, and the impact, poetically invoked, of human warfare upon individuals and upon nature. Essentially a three-hour, non-narrative experiment, in which there are no main characters – just an ensemble of thirty or more figures – and no story, just impressions, experiences, feelings (the complex weft of narrational voices often do not synch up with on-screen personas) and astonishing images. Oh yeah, it’s based on James Jones’s 1962 novel, though you’d never know it.


                  

Mrs. Miniver (1942) The peerlessly lovely Greer Garson is unjustly notorious as merely the prototype of genteel, stiff-upper-lip British resolve in wartime. That’s may be why she won an Oscar for this homefront melodrama, but today her character is a revelation – a wife and mother of three radiating lusty playfulness, real-woman warmth and pre-feminist strength. Luminous, almond-eyed and honey-voiced, Garson never sounded the acting trumpets like Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis did; she just was, and here she’s the ultimate Mom, confident and unruffled by chaos and yet still stirringly sexy and sweet. William Wyler’s movie is, otherwise, laced with propaganda and hokum, but between Garson’s maternal light and Teresa Wright (another Oscar) as her grown daughter, the movie veritably glows.

I Remember Mama (1948) The story of a dead-poor Norwegian immigrant clan living in San Francisco circa 1910, whose matriarch is wise, firm, funny, loving and, of course, self-sacrificing. The family could just as well have been Scottish or Asian or shtetl-Jewish – mothers want more for their children the world over and why should they have a new coat when the children need books? Irene Dunne, in her last significant role, flashes that ironic smile as she bustles about with her brood, but she’s fully committed to the woman’s limitations and the feeling of family intimacy. There’s no defense from tearjerking once she sneaks into a hospital children’s ward pretending to be a nurse, just so she can to croon to her sick daughter, and, helplessly, the other sickbed kids as well.

Italianamerican (1974) Early in his career as New York’s signature movie voice, Little Italy-bred Martin Scorsese shot this 49-minute beauty featuring little more than a plastic-wrapped-couch interview with his aging parents in their apartment on Elizabeth Street, in which they detail their lives as second-gen Sicilian-Italians, and life in the lower neighborhoods during the first decades of the century. The movie, like the Scorsese family itself, defers to gregarious, no-nonsense Mama Catherine on most counts, and that includes the credits, which feature her recipe for spaghetti sauce. Mrs. Scorsese appeared in several of her son’s films, but this document is as thorough and priceless as portrait of mother-son love as any ever made.

The Joy Luck Club (1993) Amy Tan’s multi-generational saga about Chinese mothers, Chinese daughters, and Chinese-American daughters gets a compressed-shorthand Hollywood treatment, but the actresses are all dynamite, and the dramatic circumstances of their travails – feudal-era oppression, betrayal, infanticide, abuse, you name it – is a tell-your-Mom-you-love-her emotional bludgeon in any package.

Rugrats ("Mother’s Day," 1997) Chuckie, you will recall if you were lucky enough to have children when this brilliantly inventive and eloquent cartoon series first ran, is the lisping, bespectacled scaredy-cat whose mother died – and in this episode, which can hit you like a truck if you let it, the toddlers try to find, amid the Mother’s Day gift-giving, a mom for Chuckie, until it is realized that she is all around them already, in the garden she planted before she got sick. Whew.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) As European settlers took to slowly decimating Aboriginal society in Australia, what began as just one manner of oppression – kidnapping Aboriginal children from their families "for their own good" and training them as servants – became, in the case of "half-caste" children, official state policy. This program persisted, astonishingly, into the 1970s, but Philip Noyce’s film, based on a true story, is set in 1932, when three girls, aged 14, 10 and eight, were snatched from their family and sent to a slave camp 1200 miles away. Indignantly, they escaped, hellbent on returning to their mothers, walking for months back north along the continent-dividing fence, one step ahead of the law. Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a primal trial, visually arresting and sociopolitically devastating.

Lovely and Amazing (2002) A caustic film about a family of insecure women plagued with the same flaws and body-image hang-ups nearly every woman has. The mother (Brenda Blethyn) subjects herself to liposuction while fantasizing about the dishy doctor, while each of the daughters flounders in their own lives: the eldest (Catherine Keener) has a disastrous with a teenager, the middle child (Emily Mortimer) is helplessly vulnerable to anorexia and male criticism, and the youngest daugher, an adopted African-American (the painfully genuine Raven Goodwin), overeats to assuage her confusion with life. The film is aptly titled, because it boils down to the mother-daughter bonds keeping everyone’s head happily above water.

Since Otar Left... (2003) A Georgian film, shot in Tbilisi (apparently, the Frenchest city in the ex-Soviet regions), and a vivid portrait of a cultured, all-woman family (cranky, reactionary grandmother; bitter, pragmatic mother; rebellious teen daughter) struggling to survive in the new nation after the clan’s son/brother/uncle hightailed it to Paris. Between the three women (in masterful performances across the board), every love-hate tangle we’ve ever had with our mothers is hashed over and healed.