Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner, 1928)

This is probably the film I'd choose for someone who has never seen Buster Keaton and wants to know what all the fuss is about. It's not as neatly paced and well-balanced between comedy and action as The General (Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926), but it's non-stop funny. It contains what is perhaps Keaton's greatest gag, the scene in which the facade of a house falls around him, neatly landing with Keaton in the dead center of its open attic window. It also centers on the quintessential Keaton persona: the misfit who triumphs, stoic but determined, even in the face of parental scorn or the forces of nature, both of which supply most of the film's plot. For me, the iconic Keaton is the one who faces down the winds of a tornado, leaning in at a 45-degree angle, getting blown off his feet but rising to fight again. Of all the great comic personae, Keaton's was the most inner-directed. He never resorts to self-pity or pleads for pathos, as Chaplin sometimes did. When his father (Ernest Torrence) tries to replace his Eastern college wardrobe with something more befitting a Mississippi River steamboat captain's son, Keaton resists by slyly, repeatedly replacing the paternal choices with his own, a great crescendo of stubbornness and exasperation. Virtually all the elements of the Keaton persona are present in Steamboat Bill Jr., with one exception: the porkpie hat. But even it gets a brief cameo in a sequence in which Keaton tries on a sequence of hilariously inappropriate hats, modeling each one with the exception of the porkpie he is handed, which he rejects with disgust. (Pauline Kael suggests that Keaton parodies different movie stars of the era with each hat change, but this probably is lost on most contemporary audiences -- at least, it was on me.) Although the direction is credited to Charles Reisner and the screenplay to Carl Harbaugh, both were primarily the work of Keaton.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)

City of God is an exceptionally involving docudrama that employs non-professional actors to stunning effect. The only experienced professional in the cast was Matheus Nachtergaele, who played the drug dealer known as "Carrot." The rest were mostly recruited from the streets and slums of Rio, and put through several months of training, largely under the supervision of Lund, who also worked with the cast during filming and is billed as "co-director." Lund had become familiar with Rio's slum-dwellers through her work on music videos and documentary films. The shape of the film, including its flashback structure and use of quick cutting and hand-held camera, is largely that of Meirelles, whose most recent work includes coverage of the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio. And that reliance on flashy camerawork and narrative tricks is, I think, the greatest flaw of City of God. It detracts from some of our involvement in the lives of its characters, turning away from documentary-like reality into sheer "movie-making." Nevertheless, the film successfully immerses us in the violent lives of the people of the favelas. It was a significant critical and even commercial hit, earning four Oscar nominations, a rare feat for a foreign-language film. It wasn't submitted by Brazil for the foreign-language Oscar, but instead was nominated for best director, best adapted screenplay (Bráulio Mantovani from the novel by Paulo Lins), cinematography (César Charlone), and film editing (Daniel Rezende). Some controversy arose when only Meirelles was cited in the directing nomination, but the Academy has strict eligibility rules, and Lund's credit of "co-director" was judged to be a disqualifier. Given my reservations about Meirelles's use of the camera, I think maybe Lund deserved the nomination more than he did.

Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Veronika Voss, the last film released before Fassbinder's death, is a somewhat campy melodrama with overtones of Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950). Veronika (Rosel Zech) is a faded star, whose career began during the Third Reich. There are rumors that she was sexually involved with Joseph Goebbels, which is one reason for her career decline in the postwar era -- the film is set in Munich in 1955.  She accidentally meets a sportswriter, Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), who has no idea who she is -- a fact that fascinates Veronika, who retains delusions of her celebrity. Krohn in turn is fascinated by Veronika, and sets out to learn more about her, with disastrous consequences for him, his girlfriend Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), and Veronika herself. Veronika is a virtual captive of Dr. Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer), a neurologist who keeps her supplied with morphine. Dr. Katz's household is an odd one indeed, consisting of a woman named Josefa (Doris Schade), who is apparently the doctor's assistant and perhaps her lover, and an African American GI (Günther Kaufmann), who seems to be a household factotum and wanders around the clinic/apartment singing snatches of American pop songs of the era. There is a film noir element to the movie, photographed in black and white by Xaver Schwarzenberger, although sometimes it becomes film blanc -- Fassbinder likes to revert to dazzling white sets and starburst filters, especially in scenes where Dr. Katz's villainy is manifest. The result is a film in which style often overwhelms content, but with intriguing results. There is, as I suggested, a prevalent note of camp, especially in scenes involving the doctor and her household and when Veronika sings a torchy, baritonal version of the old Dean Martin hit, "Memories Are Made of This," in the manner of Marlene Dietrich.

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in High Noon

Marshal Will Kane: Gary Cooper
Amy Fowler Kane: Grace Kelly
Harvey Pell: Lloyd Bridges
Helen Ramirez: Katy Jurado
Jonas Henderson: Thomas Mitchell
Percy Mettrick: Otto Kruger
Martin Howe: Lon Chaney Jr.
Sam Fuller: Harry Morgan
Frank Miller: Ian MacDonald
Jack Colby: Lee Van Cleef
Mildred Fuller: Eve McVeagh
Dr. Mahin: Morgan Farley
Jim Pierce: Robert J. Wilkie
Ben Miller: Sheb Wooley

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Screenplay: Carl Foreman
Based on a story by John W. Cunningham
Cinematography: Floyd Crosby
Production design: Rudolph Sternad
Film editing: Elmo Williams, Harry Gerstad
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

High Noon, as has often been noted, is a movie of almost classical simplicity, adhering to the unities of place (the town of Hadleyville) and time (virtually, with perhaps only a little fudging, the runtime of the film). There are no flashbacks -- the only expository moment involves a shot of an empty chair -- and no preliminaries or codas: It begins with the wedding of Will Kane and Amy Fowler, and ends with a shot of them riding out of town. It's what makes the movie enduringly satisfying, but also what once seemed to make people want to superadd a layer of significance by interpreting it as a parable about blacklisting. That would have been inevitable anyway, since screenwriter Carl Foreman had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and left the country before the film was released. But it strains the tight confines of the film's narrative. Not surprisingly, High Noon took some hits from critics on the right like John Wayne, but it was also stigmatized for a long time as "pretentious." Andrew Sarris called it an "anti-populist anti-Western," but that, too, seems to me to burden the film with too much message. (Anyway, aren't Westerns, with their emphasis on wandering loners, essentially "anti-populist"?) Sixty-five years later, it's possible to view High Noon as nothing more than a neat and tidy narrative about simple heroism, which is not at all "anti-Western," a phrase that suggests far more psychological complexity than the movie possesses. Will Kane is still the good guy and Frank Miller and his gang are black-hearted baddies. If you want moral complexity, go watch The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) or The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969). It's true that High Noon was overpraised at the time, winning four Oscars -- for Cooper, film editors Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad, composer Dimitri Tiomkin for the score and, with lyricist Ned Washington, the song "High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin')" -- and nominations for best picture, director, and screenplay. But that the Academy should even have acknowledged the virtues of a Western, a genre it typically looked down upon, is significant -- even though it reverted to its usual indifference to the genre a few years later, when it entirely ignored The Searchers.

Omar (Hany Abu-Assad, 2013)

Omar is an involving thriller that earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, and currently has a 90 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But a few critics think it goes too far in depicting its Palestinian characters as good guys and the Israelis as villains -- the word "agitprop" has been used. Which goes to show once again that art and politics are uneasy, if necessary, companions. The film was made with Palestinian money, and the country submitting it for the Oscar was Palestine (whose designation as a country itself stirs controversy), but it was filmed in the Israeli city of Nazareth as well as in the West Bank city of Nablus. Omar (Adam Bakri) is a young man who, after being tormented by Israeli soldiers, joins with his friends Tarek (Eyad Hourani) and Amjad (Samer Bisharat) in retaliation. They sneak up on an Israeli encampment and Amjad (though reluctantly) shoots one of the soldiers. When Omar is captured and tortured, he is tricked by an Israeli officer, Rami (Waleed Zuaiter), posing as a Palestinian, into saying "I will never confess," which the military courts recognize as tantamount to a confession. But Rami persuades Omar to take a deal: He can go free if he will work to lead them to Tarek, whom they identify as the leader of the group. What follows is a complex story of betrayal and retribution, complicated by Omar's love for Tarek's sister Nadia (Leem Lubany). Omar stays just shy of sinking into pure melodrama, thanks to director Abu-Assad's screenplay, his well-handled action sequences of the pursuit of Omar through the narrow streets and across the rooftops of Nazareth, and some effective performances by attractive young actors like Bakri and Lubany. The glimpses of a culture too often seen through the lens of geopolitics also strengthen the film. The film may be politically biased, but it's also a tale of the strong vs. the weak, which may be why so many of us can ignore the complexities of the actuality underlying it.

Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

The raw pathos of Broken Blossoms has probably never been equaled on film, thanks to three extraordinary performers. Lillian Gish is a known quantity, of course, but it's startling to see Donald Crisp as one of the most odious villains in film history. Crisp, whose film-acting career spanned more than fifty years, from the earliest silent shorts through his final performance in Spencer's Mountain (Delmer Daves, 1963), is best known today for fatherly and grandfatherly roles in How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941), Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943), and National Velvet (Clarence Brown, 1944), but his performance as Battling Burrows is simply terrifying. As the cockney fighter, he displays a macho strut that might have influenced James Cagney. Richard Barthelmess is no less impressive as Cheng Huan, known in the film mostly as The Yellow Man. We have to make allowances for the stereotyping and the "yellowface" performance today, but Barthelmess (and Griffith) deserve some credit for ennobling the character, running counter to the widespread anti-Asian sentiments and fear of miscegenation in the era. Barthelmess, who became a matinee idol, makes The Yellow Man simultaneously creepy and sympathetic. And then there's Gish, who as usual throws herself (almost literally) into the role of the waif, Lucy. It's an astonishing performance that virtually defined film acting for at least the next decade, until sound came in and actors could rely on something other than their faces and bodies to communicate. True, some of her gestures lent themselves to parody, as when Buster Keaton steals Lucy's trick of pushing up the corners of her mouth to force a smile in Go West (1925), but parody is often the sincerest form of flattery.

A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014)

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year

Abel Morales: Oscar Isaac
Anna Morales: Jessica Chastain
Julian: Elyes Gabel
Andrew Walsh: Albert Brooks
D.A. Lawrence: David Oyelowo
Peter Forente: Alessandro Nivola

Director: J.C. Chandor
Screenplay: J.C. Chandor
Cinematography: Robert Levi, Bradford Young

In a movie that might have been called "Do the Most Right Thing," Oscar Isaac plays yet another ethically challenged protagonist. Abel Morales is not as cranky as Llewyn Davis or as politically savvy as Nick Wasicsko, the beleaguered Yonkers mayor of the 2015 HBO series Show Me a Hero, but he's another little guy who deserves better than the forces opposed to him will allow. He's no moral paragon: He couldn't have built a successful heating oil company in New York City without bending a few of the rules -- and without the help of his less-scrupulous wife, Anna. It's 1981, and Morales is on the brink of a big deal, purchasing property on the East River that will enable him to eliminate some of the middlemen in the business. But then everything starts going awry: His trucks are being hijacked and the district attorney has decided to make him a target in his exposé of corrupt practices in the heating oil business. It's a gritty urban tale, the kind that the movies haven't seen much of lately, demanding an audience that doesn't ask for a lot of glamour and knows how to wait patiently for things to unfold. As director and screenwriter, J.C. Chandor resists the temptation to reveal too much too swiftly, building a quiet tension as we begin to bring the story into focus. He also handles action well, as the title suggests, although much of the violence is latent. Best of all, he showcases some fine performances, not only from Isaac and Chastain and Oyelowo, but also from Albert Brooks as Morales's attorney, Elyes Gabel as one of the victimized truck drivers, and Alessandro Nivola as one of Morales's mobbed-up competitors. There are moments when the script's depiction of Morales's determination to go as straight as possible seems a little too much like forcing him into the good-guy role, and the climax is too melodramatic, but on the whole it's a solid movie.

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

Preston Sturges, who was a screenwriter before he became a hyphenated writer-director, has a reputation for verbal wit. It's very much in evidence in The Lady Eve, with lines like "I need him like the ax needs the turkey."  But what distinguishes Sturges from writers who just happen to fall into directing is his gift for pacing the dialogue, for knowing when to cut. What makes the first stateroom scene between Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) and Charles (Henry Fonda) so sexy is that much of it is a single take, relying on the actors' superb timing -- and perhaps on some splendid coaching from Sturges. But he also has a gift for sight gags like Mr. Pike (Eugene Pallette) clanging dish covers like cymbals to demand his breakfast. And his physical comedy is brilliantly timed, particularly in the repeated pratfalls and faceplants that Fonda undergoes when confronted with a Lady Eve who looks so much like Jean. Fonda is a near perfect foil for gags like those, his character's dazzled innocence reinforced by the actor's undeniable good looks. There's hardly any other star of the time who would make Charles Pike quite so credible: Cary Grant, for example, would have turned the pratfalls into acrobatic moves. The other major thing that Sturges had going for him is a gallery of character actors, the likes of which we will unfortunately never see again: Pallette, Charles Coburn, William Demarest (who made exasperation eloquent), Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, and numerous well-chosen bit players.  

Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, 2015)

The look of Aardman Animations' stop-motion characters hasn't changed much in the years since the first Wallace and Gromit short in 1990, though the humanoid characters have become more diverse. We now see people of color, including a Muslim woman wearing a hijab, on the street. And the basic slapstick humor hasn't changed, either. It still has that essentially British overtone, even in Shaun the Sheep Movie, which has no intelligible dialogue. I doubt, for example, that Pixar, even though its films are perceptibly influenced by Aardman, would venture into the kind of fart jokes and the gags based on the anus of a pantomime horse that are on display in this movie. And all of that is to the good. For what the Aardman films do so well -- especially the ones by Nick Park, who created Shaun and his colleagues, and is listed as executive producer on this film -- is revive the fine art of Sennett and Chaplin and Keaton and Arbuckle, the masters of silent slapstick comedy. Aardman has the advantage that its actors are clay and not flesh, so they can undergo assaults that would obliterate even so resilient an actor as Buster Keaton, but it succeeds in making its characters believable by putting limits on the mayhem. We know that the actors are putty in the hands of the animators, and yet somehow we wince at their peril when they're trapped by the villain on the edge of what a sign describes as "Convenient Quarry." (One of the delights of the movie, which makes you want to watch it again, are the blink-and-you-miss-it gags on the fringe of the action, like that sign.) Shaun the Sheep Movie was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar, but lost to Pixar's brilliant Inside Out. These are grand times indeed for animation.

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

The technology used in it may have dated, but The Conversation seems more relevant than ever. When it was made, the film was very much of the moment: the Watergate moment, which was long before email and cell phones. Julian Assange was only 3 years old. What has kept Coppola's film alive is that he had the good sense to make it a thriller about the consequences of knowledge. The real victim of Harry Caul's snooping is Harry Caul himself, the professional whose delight in what he can do with his microphones and tape recorders begins to fade when he realizes that technology is not an end in itself. It is one of the great Gene Hackman performances from a career crowded with great and varied performances. Ironically, the film that The Conversation most reminds me of today is The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 film about eavesdropping by the Stasi in East Germany, which was praised by conservatives like John Podhoretz and William F. Buckley and called one of "the best conservative movies of the last 25 years" by the National Review for its account of surveillance by a communist regime. But Harry Caul is a devout Roman Catholic and an entrepreneur, making his living with the same technology and the same techniques as the Stasi spy of Donnersmarck's film -- capitalism alive and well. The film is something of a technological marvel itself: The great sound designer and editor Walter Murch was responsible for completing it after Coppola was called away to work on The Godfather, Part II, and the texture of the film depends heavily on the way Murch was able to manipulate the complexities of sound that form the key scenes, especially the opening sequence in which Caul is conducting his surveillance of a couple in San Francisco's crowded and busy Union Square. It's true that Murch cheats a little at the ending, when the line, "He'd kill us if he got the chance," is repeated. Caul had extracted it from a distorted recording, and took it to mean that the couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) were in danger from the man who commissioned the surveillance. But at the end, the line is heard again as "He'd kill us if he got the chance," an emphasis that reveals to Caul, too late, that they are the killers, not the victims. It's unfortunate that so much depends on the discrepancy between the way we originally hear the line and the later delivery of it. Still, I don't think it's a fatal flaw in a still vital and gripping movie.