I Am Cuba: Mikhail Kalatozov

To read this review, go to: http://www.unseenfilms.net/2018/10/nate-hood-declares-i-am-cuba-1964-nyff.html.

Rating: 10/10

The Passion of Joan of Arc: Carl Theodor Dreyer

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/the-passion-of-joan-of-arc-a-meditation-on-three-soundtracks/.

Rating: 10/10

Tampopo: Juzo Itami

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/the-man-who-shot-tampopo-food-porn/.

10/10

Jammin' the Blues: Gjon Mili

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/jammin-the-blues-and-some-other-stuff/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=Jammin%27%20the%20Blues%20(and%20some%20other%20stuff).

10/10

Paris Is Burning: Jennie Livingston

Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning could serve as a crash course for every 101 college course on LGBTQ+ intersectionality with regards to race, class, gender, and culture. Though tight in its official purview--the golden age of New York City balls--it's a stunning glance into the birth of fashion, behavior, lingo, dance, and style that would dominate not only LGBTQ+ communities but eventually mainstream culture as well. As a straight while male, I'm obviously the least qualified person on the planet to talk about its merits. But I can say that the film affected me deeply on a human level. Here are groups of marginalized human beings who, in the face of oppression I can't begin to imagine, created authentic families together, created a brand new culture all of their own. I read somewhere that gay culture essentially had to recreate itself from scratch in the wake of the 1980s AIDS crisis. Paris is Burning is a heart-breaking yet soul-uplifting portrait of just some of the people and culture we lost in that inferno.

10/10

The Battle of Algiers: Gillo Pontecorvo

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/2016-nyff-battle-algiers/?utm_content=buffer55bc9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer.

10/10

Swallowtail Butterfly: Shunji Iwai

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/nyaff-round-up-6-tetsuo-the-iron-man-1989-swallowtail-butterfly-1996-all-about-lily-chou-chou-2001-tekkonkinkreet-2006/82463.

10/10

Tetsuo: The Iron Man: Shinya Tsukamoto

To read this article, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/nyaff-round-up-6-tetsuo-the-iron-man-1989-swallowtail-butterfly-1996-all-about-lily-chou-chou-2001-tekkonkinkreet-2006/82463.

10/10

Overlord: Stuart Cooper

[Revisit Review]

Stuart Cooper's Overlord isn't really about the Normandy Landings. It isn't even really about war, although it uses World War Two as a framework. It's about the feeling of dread and inescapable fate, of the inevitability of death, of the meaninglessness of life's totality. Perhaps that's why I connect with it so much at this time in my life when I'm so unhappy with where I am emotionally, financially, and mentally.

10/10

Adaptation.: Spike Jonze

[Revisit Review]

In addition to being Spike Jonze's supreme triumph, his 2002 film Adaptation. remains quite possibly the definitive cinematic rumination on the art of writing. If not for his later masterpiece Synecdoche, New York (2008), I would also trumpet Adaptation. as the pinnacle of Charlie Kaufman's genius. Endlessly creative, clever, and brave, the film is a sublime Gordian Knot of artistic anxiety, inspiration, and aspiration.

10/10

Amarcord: Federico Fellini

Rewatching AMARCORD (1973). How can anyone watch this film and not feel love? Love for people, love for joy, love for sorrow, love for love.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) January 13, 2016

Even though Amarcord is deliberately less focused than 8½ (1963), I feel like it's still somehow more focused and direct than that film ever could be. Maybe it's the sheer beauty of the cinematography, maybe it's the melancholy wistfulness, maybe it's the spectacle of scenes like Mussolini's head and the steam ship...but I will always like this film more than 8½ (1963).

10/10

Fail Safe: Sidney Lumet

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/b-roll-sidney-lumets-fail-safe-1964/.

10/10

Bonnie and Clyde: Arthur Penn

[Revisit Review]

The first time I watched Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, I wasn't ready for it. Titillated by promises of its notoriety as a stepping-stone in cinematic violence, I expected an action film. But now, several years later, I can appreciate the film for the masterpiece that it is: stylistically daring; stunningly acted; fascinated with the battle between fact, legend, and myth in American popular culture. It is, quite simply, damn near perfect.

10/10

Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller

I had the pleasure of seeing George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road opening night. But I have hesitated to actually write and post my review for the film until now. The simple reason being that it has taken me this long to fully comprehend and analyze just what the hell I had watched. The simplest answer is the most tempting one: the best damn action film I have seen since John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992). But that leaves me feeling unsatisfied. The truth is that it left me in a hazy, logy delirium: shell-shocked, stumbling, exhausted. The film is a symphony of scrooping engines; a ballet of twisting, desiccated metal; a gasoline opera; a singular cinematic event. Now, we have all seen plenty of car chases, explosions, gun battles, and other time-honored Stations of the Action Movie Cross. But the difference is that Mad Max: Fury Road seems determined to throttle its audience with images that they have never seen before. In a way, this is similar to the grandiose excess of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). Everybody has seen sci-fi starfighters before, but not ones literally shaped like X’s and Y’s. Everybody has seen post-apocalyptic, off-road vehicles (mostly thanks to Miller’s previous Mad Max films), but not Volkswagen Beetles affixed with giant metal hedgehog spikes. Everyone has seen imposing space villains, but not a towering figure in a black suit and samurai helmet. Everyone has seen hordes of filthy, animalistic wasteland warriors, but not an army of them led by a bugler playing a flame-throwing guitar. Quite simply, both Miller and Lucas showed their audiences worlds that had never been shown before on screen. However, the original Star Wars will always have the upper hand on Mad Max: Fury Road simply because it didn’t just introduce its audiences to one world, but to several; not just to space knights, but to space wizards, cowboys, fascists, and princesses. But Mad Max: Fury Road is astounding in its single-minded devotion to fleshing out its sole planet in all of its awe-inspiring madness and lunacy. It brings the humanity back to the action genre as well as the most face-melting practical effects since Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy. If the world is just, this film will be the first nail in the coffin of modern Hollywood CGI blockbusters which are more green-screen than real-world sheen; more machine now than man.

10/10

Aparajito: Satyajit Ray

[Revisit Review]

I legitimately puzzled over whether I should give Satyajit Ray's Aparajito a 10/10 score. After all, I had already given the first entry in the Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955) (WHICH I RE-WATCHED A FEW MONTHS AGO BUT FORGOT TO EITHER WRITE A REVIEW FOR IT OR MARK IT IN MY MOVIE-WATCHING SCHEDULE), a 10/10. But re-watching it, I was struck by how sublimely Ray composed his images and handled the film's themes and tone. If Pather Panchali was the work of a gifted amateur, Aparajito was the work of a master making his first great statement.

10/10

Jaws: Steven Spielberg

[Revisit Review]

Two things really hit me the second time around watching Steven Spielberg's Jaws. First, the cinematography blew me away: his use of long takes with people walking into and out of different planes of focus; his moving camera; the amazing scene shot from below where Brody and the Mayor talk about closing the beach in front of the vandalized billboard. The other thing was the...odd musical choices John Williams sometimes made. His Jaws Theme is rightfully the stuff of legend. But I had never noticed that at several points during the final shark hunt the music becomes upbeat and cheery, more akin to Star Wars (1977) or any of this music for Indiana Jones. It really drives home the fact that Jaws isn't just a horror film, it's an adventure film as well.

10/10

Walkabout: Nicolas Roeg

[Revisit Review]

Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout is one of those blessed few films that can literally change the way you look at the world. Roeg's cinematography, his sensational use of intellectual montage, and his themes of what binds and divides the human species make Walkabout not just a film, but an experience. I have to say, though, I don't remember the film being so damned melancholy. But that's a good thing. Walkabout is an adventure and its ending should be treated as one: with sublime remembrances and pained memories of chances taken and not taken.

10/10

The Killer: John Woo

[Revisit Review]

To read, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/the-film-canon-the-killer-1989/49721.

10/10

Yo Yo: Pierre Étaix

Pierre Étaix's Yo Yo is not a silent film. But it might as well be. Here is a film that operates using the visual language pioneered and perfected by American silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But Yo Yo is more than a mere homage: it utilizes their techniques to tell a story of loss and redemption, melancholy and joy that belongs solely to Étaix. To compare him to one of his cinematic countrymen, Étaix is Tati stripped of his distanced curiosity with modern society and technology. Yo Yo exists totally within a world of social conventions and expectations. Yet it isn't stifled by them. Instead, they enhance the genius of his comedy. If Tati had directed a sequence where a crowd of rich socialites converged on a giant mansion, one can't help but imagine that it would end in innocent chaos. But Étaix believed too much in manners and proper behavior to allow that. And there is his genius: his is a world of chaos manifesting itself within societal expectations, not without or in defiance of them.

10/10

Rififi: Jules Dassin

[Revisit Review]

How funny, then, that perhaps the greatest French crime film ever made was done by an American? Of course, Jules Dassin was in exile when he made Rififi. And the film is most certainly a synthesis of American and French crime genre tropes into something bold and new[ish]. Maybe it wasn't the apotheosis of the "French Cool." That honor would definitely go to Jean-Pierre Melville with his films Bob le Flambeur (1956), Le Doulos (1962), and Le Samouraï (1967). And maybe Jacques Becker had stylistically beaten Dassin to the punch with films like Touchez pas au grisbi (1954). But it hardly seems to matter. There is a purity of theme, character, and narrative in Rififi that almost puts those other classic films to shame.

10/10