I am an annoying film-watching partner. I demand to sit front and center so as to be fully immersed in the movie and not distracted by the real world or any people who might be moving in my line of sight. Depending on the tone of the movie, I often allow nothing in the way of whispered asides, and I functionally ignore you. (We are having parallel experiences of the same film, not one communal experience. But, again, films with a gonzo or comedic tone, for example, usually allow for communal and communicative viewing.) Perhaps the most baffling behavior I exhibit in cinemas is watching the entire film, from studio logo to studio logo.

In other words, I watch the credits.

Even the theatre personnel find this unaccountably annoying. I once actually chose to take transit home in a new city (which took long hours and much confusion) instead of ride in the car I came in with the people who had been reentering the screening room every thirty seconds to tell me the movie was over.

But that’s just the thing: the movie was not over. The credits are part of the movie. You, too, should watch the credits whenever (at the very least) you have gone to the cinema to see a film. Why? Glad you asked.

Attention must be paid.

This, the recurring refrain in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, is the most important thing to keep in mind.

Hundreds of people worked very hard under bad conditions with horrible corporate oversight to make the film you just watched. They often put in more hours for a longer period of time than any of the actors. Their jobs are often more relevant to your enjoyment of the film than the onscreen talent. Watch one badly-edited movie, and you will never forget to thank the editor of a film whose cutting was invisible to the ordinary eye.

You will not know these names. The more you watch credits, however, the more you will get to know them. If you don’t recall seeing the names Ellen Lewis or Ellen Chenoweth, you have been spectacularly bad at reading the credits. But—just think—wouldn’t it be nice to have some familiarity with the names of the majority of the winners on Oscar night? Wouldn’t it make you care about them and what they do more? Wouldn’t you soon know what composers, directors of photography, etc. you liked? Wouldn’t that help you choose films more shrewdly in the future?

I won’t let you off with rhetorical questions, though. Just imagine putting all your energy and sanity into a project for three years and not getting any…credit. You can’t read every name. You won’t catch every job. But you will have given those spectacularly gifted people five minutes of your time in exchange for their toil.

The credits are a transitional activity.

I don’t know how anyone can pull their brain, soul, and body out of a film with one jerk and walk away. I trust that some personality types can do this more easily, but I need time to transition out of the artwork and back into the physical world. If the film is good enough, the credits don’t even allow the time needed for this transition. At times, I have driven half an hour home before I become aware of what I’m doing. Better to sit it out, talk it out, cry it out…

Again, imagine you have used years of painstaking training to prepare an elaborate and perfect dinner for someone. Now, watch them nibble your food as they talk about nothing. Watch them get up mid-entrée to go to the washroom. Watch them hop up from the table and stride away without finishing, without a nod in your direction. They haven’t experienced the dinner you made for them. Yes, food is almost essentially social, and I’m not saying that you can’t fellowship while you eat. But take the time to taste the food you paid for.

With the average film, the time it takes to watch the credits is almost exactly the time it takes to rejoin reality. Avail yourself of it. Watch the film as long as you’re able, and then let your head clear while what you have experienced sinks in.

You want some of the information.

Yes, you will see information you will otherwise go look up on IMDb. The best example of this is the song credits toward the end of the scroll. Oh, that song was by her? When did they play that one? Look, the director wrote the lyrics for that! You may not care who did craft service, but there will often be something you’re glad to have seen.

The credits can be fun.

It is always a great time to scan the job titles and names as they scroll past. You will see some ridiculous examples of each. You will see your uncle’s name randomly appear. You’ll say, “That film had a honey wrangler?” There is so much richness that you miss skipping the credits. I love to say certain names aloud, roll them around in my mouth. I love to learn the strange little jobs that are involved in the making of a movie. I love to see that the grip’s nickname is Monkeybox. And that’s just the serious credits.

Many films have what I call “wink credits.” These may be straight-out jokes and puns. They may be creative job titling. They may be callbacks to the movie’s themes or lines. Just last night, I rewatched No Country for Old Men and discovered that someone is credited as “The Only Right Tool” (a line from Javier Bardem’s villain).

Sometimes the wink is unintentional. Have you met the conservation officer, Mr. Lovegreen? He exists. One impactful coincidence is in Hirozaku Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, which is about four children abandoned to fend for themselves. As it turns out, the actress who played their mother goes by the single name, “You.” In Japan, this is pronounced differently and means something different, but for English-speaking audiences, we are unexpectedly faced with the indictment that we are all culpable for a society in which the smallest lives get overlooked and wasted.

The credits are part of the movie.

Sure, it has become rather common to put stinger scenes or bloopers at the end of the credits. But even without them, you will not get the full movie experience as intended by the director without watching the credits. Listen to the music—or lack thereof. Sometimes, as in Children of Men or Inception, essential sounds emerge that change the understanding of the film. Think about these choices. Let the music shape your takeaways. There is little as satisfying as the way a film folds together in image, time, and sound as the credits end. Don’t miss that beauty.

Here we are, twenty years after The Devil Wears Prada movie earned Meryl Streep her 14th Oscar nomination, solidified Anne Hathaway as an adult movie star, made us all fall deeply in love with Stanley Tucci, and announced the arrival of a force of nature known as Emily Blunt. Well, they’re all back—and basically sharing co-star status—in the new film, The Devil Wears Prada 2.

Hathaway’s Andi Sachs finds herself back at the Vogue-stand-in magazine, Runway, ruled over by the beastly Miranda Priestly (Streep). Tucci is still the heart of that operation as a visionary stylist, and Blunt’s Emily (must have made things easier on set) is now in a semi-rival position as a Dior bigwig. (Got that?)

While the original film made the convincing argument that runway fashion is relevant and echoed in even the most thrifty of trends (Who can forget that simple but perfect monologue by Streep on the shade of blue Andi is wearing?), the sequel makes a statement that journalism—while it needs to please readers to survive—should uphold standards of integrity that seem to have fallen by the wayside, where they’ve been picked up by bullies in order to beat other bullies. On the fashion front, the new film fights with the parallel tension between content and ads, fashion experts and fashion vendors.

It’s light as a pastry and probably as good as the original…but I don’t pledge my soul on that. There are, of course, a good number of subtle callbacks to the first film, but they are discrete and delivered lightly. This makes the first film nonessential viewing, but everyone has seen it, anyway. A new generation of characters, played by people like Simone Ashley and Broadway’s Helen J. Shen, populate the magazine…which is trying to remain an industry leader in a digital iteration. They’re fine, but only Ashley makes a real mark, playing Miranda’s current long-suffering assistant.

New actors join in smaller roles, namely B. J. Novak, Lucy Liu, and Justin Theroux, who are the wealthy dummies that must be courted to raise money to keep Runway afloat. They are meant to be annoying, mostly, but I could have done with a little more shading in their characters.

Of course, the movie aims to put new catchphrases into the multiverse…and sometimes it gets a good one. Others fail to launch. And I fail to remember any of them 24 hours later. Likewise, there are (apparently) cameos in the dozens by (fashion) people I don’t know and certainly wouldn’t recognize. (I did catch Donatella Versace, because who else looks like Max Schreck?) The fashion, likewise, is baffling and impossible to spot. Apparently, this middle-aged guy has fully lost grip on the fashion industry and can’t tell chic from meek.

As for the film’s overall quality, it does suffer a little from the attempts to give Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci all full story arcs. But the story doesn’t seem to matter all that much. This is a movie meant for fun, comedy, nostalgia, and fashion envy. For me, it hit about two of those. But I will still happily spend an evening with these four actors, all of whom are especial favorites of mine.

Nashville

Robert Altman’s masterpiece of a movie is a relevant and incisive slice of the two-hundred-year-old American pie. One of the best examples of postmodernism in film, it weaves together the lives of twenty-four characters over a few days in the title city. One critic explains the reason for this choice by suggesting that in 1976, the country music scene was one of the communities that most ardently and unanimously identified itself with the United States, almost by definition. Indeed, I don’t know if I have heard many pop or rock songs from the time that were written especially for the bicentennial, the way that Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton’s “The Freedom Train” clearly was. In Nashville, Henry Gibson takes up the torch with his character’s jingoistic “200 Years”…just in case you doubted that the film was an intentional State of the Union address. His character’s name? Haven Hamilton.

For all its baked-in patriotism, the crowds in Nashville/Nashville are celebrating that most American of things: their right to achieve their dreams. That is, themselves…and the money that might be made by commodifying the same. We see it in the heartbreaking scene of Sueleen’s humiliation when that undercurrent rises to the surface. We see multiple characters shaping, guarding, and exploiting the person(a) of Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely). We see characters inventing themselves on the fly, like Shelley Duvall’s “L. A. Joan.”

Here, the very idea of ‘America’ is shattered into endless subgroups and fame-hungry hordes. It is interlinked with sex, religion, and violence. No film made in the mid-seventies could escape the startling rise of violence as the national pastime, with a seemingly endless string of assassinations and the battle of and around the Vietnam War all recent traumas. What is most telling about the film’s treatment of violence? That after a brief panic, an ambitious unknown singer can get the people singing together again, repeating the timely refrain, “You may say I ain’t free. It don’t worry me.”

Rocky

If you’ve never thought of Rocky as a film about bicentennial America, consider the following facts. It is palpably set in 1976 Philadelphia (where the whole thing began). The plot is basically “poor boy has a (violent) dream that he can achieve at any cost.” Rocky’s climactic showdown is with a powerful Black man dressed as Uncle Sam.

So, what does it all coalesce into? We have the clichéd American Dream plot approached from two sides. In this corner, the liberated Black man who has won the right to literally represent the embodiment of his country. In this corner, the downtrodden child of immigrants who can marshal his willpower and convert it into muscle. Now, let’s watch them punch each other!

I don’t want to get too wrapped up in dissecting Rocky’s symbology of the USA, but I do want (like the movie) to lay out the important elements and allow the viewer to think about where they themselves might fit in this story of the clash of American Dreams. Apollo Creed is a flag-wrapped celebrity, and Rocky Balboa (consider the import of these names on your own time) is a never-say-die kid with a humble dream of kissing the girl from the pet shop and learning how to accept defeat on the way to victory (after victory after victory…I never watched any of the sequels). Perhaps most importantly, both of these men are inspirational characters of “coming from nothing,” and they only interact in the form of aggressive battle in front of a cheering coliseum…er, room.

Network

(Is there meaning in the fact that all of these films gather a wide variety of people under one-word titles? What do you think?)

One of the greatest American films ever made, Network also holds the distinction of perhaps being the most eerily prescient movie from Hollywood, ever. Are Americans getting tired of hearing bad news every evening? When newscaster Howard Beale (Peter Finch) decides he feels the same way, his on-air screed draws record ratings. What to do? Remake him as “the mad prophet of the airwaves” and the center of a (here’s that word again) fractured news program built as entertainment, not information. Under the guidance of Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen (another name that links a classical god to Christian lingo), “The Network News Hour” becomes a whirlwind of “acts” like Sybil the Soothsayer and the sensationalized carnage of the Ecumenical Liberation Front.

The effect of watching the film today is something along the lines of “America took a cautionary tale and made it aspirational. How very American.” Once again, all of this is tied into politics, sex, and violence. Ned Beatty’s astounding monologue near the film’s end lays out his vision of the world (and our current reality): “There is no America! There is no democracy! There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”

Of course, Network is also very much about the way television shapes the country. Diana is equated with the medium of TV several times, finally being called “television incarnate.” She doesn’t care about truth, human life, or the welfare of the nation. She only cares about ratings, rattling through viewership statistics in bed with her lover as she works her way to a minuscule and perfunctory orgasm, only to immediately continue her report. That lover is the same man she arranges to have killed…for ratings.

What will our anthem be?

Now we find ourselves fifty years on, at the country’s 250th birthday. And what are the films that will mark this occasion? Who is making the defining American films of today?

I heartily welcome your suggestions.

With certainty, I can say that 2025’s Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another, will go down in history as one of those milestone pictures. Others, who set out to capture the zeitgeist, like Eddington, failed to capture the audience. Will they be unearthed fifty years from now and embraced as “before their time”?

As of today, I have only seen six films released in 2026, and, since this is the actual year of celebration, I assume that the second half of the year will bring us one or two more films to put in this category…but I don’t know what they will be. I look over lists of the upcoming movies, and none of them seems like a particularly good candidate.

But, then, what would such a film tackle? Not much has changed in fifty years, so fracture, multiplicity, dichotomies, violence, and entertainment remain musts. I expect that the truly defining films of this year will carry an intense fear and uncertainty. They may very well be horror films. I could predict some level of nihilism or hopelessness. They will be films that present an irreparably broken world. They may be about the aggressive clash of two extreme powers. But maybe we’re too close to it now to know what the hallmarks of our time are. Francis Ford Copolla’s Megalopolis covered a lot of relevant ground, but it didn’t hold together as a film. (But, then, is that what will show it to be most appropriate?)

Please, take some time to comment. I’d like to start a conversation about this.

One of the strongest films of the past decade is writer/director David Lowery’s The Green Knight, in which Dev Patel’s Sir Gawain seeks to be worthy of a beautiful halo-shaped crown. Finally, Lowery is back with Mother Mary, in which Anne Hathaway plays a pop megastar whose signature look is the same sort of halo headdress. One might even say that she, too, is trying to prove worthy of the headwear.

I entered the Vestal AMC theatres on my birthday (Saturday) ready for this film to become my newest obsession. Recent films that held the same promise have sorely disappointed (Joker: Folie à Deux, Love Hurts, even the film adaptation of my beloved musical Mean Girls), and so I was also ready for deflation. But hope was foremost in my thoughts as I settled in to watch Hathaway’s Mother Mary face off against ex-bestie fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) in what promised to be an unexpected and twisty pas de deux. (“Are you making me a hate dress?” Mother Mary asks in the trailer. “Maybe,” Sam replies.)

Rather than extend the suspense any longer, I will tell you that I wandered out of AMC that afternoon in a slow-motion, unreal world and then sat in my car for an hour and cried over the beauty and perfection I had just been swept up in. Lowery for the landslide win.

Mother Mary is a superstar we could dub Taylor Gaga. Both inspirations are clear, and yet she achieves an unbroken uniqueness of both sound and image. Yes, the Virgin Mary is her schtick, and she always—always—performs with some sort of (gorgeous) halo. Her clothes are also icon-inspired, playing with the white of purity, the red of a bleeding heart, and the silhouettes of armor and sainthood alike. Her music is mesmerizing and like nothing I have heard before. Her stage presence is commanding, as she struts and dances with the impressively toned body such exercise requires. Her voice is ethereal and earthy at once, befitting her name. And her wardrobe is unceasingly inventive and beautiful.

However, when MM (We’re never told her actual name.) shows up uninvited at Sam Anselm’s breathtaking barn-cum-studio, she is wearing sweats, and her hair is a mousey wet tangle. She lurches through the atelier, shouting for her ex-best friend (of course, they have coded it to be read as a romantic relationship if that’s what one wants to read it as) and manically/brokenly demands a dress. Mother Mary has been going through a mysterious media-tracked rough spot, and it’s written in every millimeter of her body and soul. She knows that the only person who truly knows her—the friend she betrayed a decade ago—can design an outfit that will acknowledge and shed all of that in a triumphant return to the stage. She has only one caveat: no red.

Sam “can feel her coming miles away” and steels herself for the reckoning with the woman whose brand she created…who cast her off casually…whom she hates as much as she can muster…the hate for whom has propelled her to become one of the top fashion designers in the world. Michaela Coel is radiant in every way. She is styled to understated perfection, her stunning eyes and cheekbones carrying the inscrutable emotions locked inside. She projects such an aliveness on screen that makes her an easy match for the bedraggled, humbled popstar at her doorstep. She holds such palpable power with such a light hand. It makes her enchanting and terrifying. It also makes us feel that she is the one in the right in this grudge.

Most of the film puts these two actresses alone in the vast space of Sam’s studio, verbally sparring as their past is slowly revealed. This electrifying faceoff is broken by flashbacks to MM onstage, confident and glamorous as she belts out strangely sad and angry songs with a deceptively slinky beat. Both these worlds are fully embodied and seem like little Edens, although they are stark opposites. Interestingly enough, each woman is the snake in her own garden. Or—she thinks—the other one is the true Deceiver.

Several amazing scenes follow (which you must discover for yourself), including a genuinely haunting dance done by Hathaway in the open barn to demonstrate how she needs to move in the desired dress. The catch: Sam refuses to listen to her music, and so the increasingly erratic dance is performed in silence. Only the grunts and gasps of Hathaway’s well-trained-but-still-taxed body accompany what soon begins to look like a possession or an exorcism. Eyes wide, Sam calmly asks in a tone of half-hidden victory, “My, how can you sing while doing all of that?” Mother Mary returns a curt, “Practice.”

This scene is the center of the film and marks a definite shift in the direction of the narrative. But the point is clear: each of these women must exorcise the other if they hope to live with themselves. This entire film is a ritual cleansing of years of painful history, a stripping off exactly like MM desires for her upcoming performance attire, a shedding of old skin and a starting anew—but maybe forever apart.

Lowery released an opening day statement which mentioned that this was his third picture with the hot studio of the moment, A24. Previously, he made A Ghost Story and The Green Knight with them. I cannot shake the implication that this is a loose trilogy of sorts. Each film moves at a slightly faster pace, starting with the glacial rhythms of A Ghost Story, and progressing through the slow-but-inexorable pans of The Green Knight, to the more conventionally timed (but still unhurried) march toward heaven or hell that Mother Mary and Sam Anselm walk together. I have mentioned the halo connection that seems to bind the latter two films. The posters for Mother Mary provide a clue to its relationship with the former, declaring “This is not a ghost story.”

I have to get back into this film as soon as possible, and maybe I will be able to glean more evidence for this three-film cohesion. Perhaps not. But no force, natural or supernatural, real or metaphorical, will keep me from another rendezvous with Mother Mary and the career-best work of its two stars. (And, obviously, although I just typed “two stars,” this film is getting the full five.)

Stephen Frears’s 1990 film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel, The Grifters, might not show its true identity right away, but it’s a long con well worth falling into. Thompson is (in)famous as the preeminent pulp novelist of American soullessness. His is the world that has given rise to an entire genre of entertainment, from Sin City to Pulp Fiction. Undoubtedly neonoirs, his novels exist on a separate level of corruption, sex, and betrayal. His big swings and rug-pull moments swirl in a lurid world of sudden, all-too-real violence and a stylized flavor of nihilism that lays bare the empty core of the American Dream.

If you know Frears as the director of such films as The Queen and Florence Foster Jenkins, he may not seem like the correct choice for working with such grim—and essentially American—material. At the time, however, he was fresh from making a splash with his film of Dangerous Liaisons, and the trip from Valmont and Merteuil to the blackhearted trio at the heart of The Grifters is almost entirely one of time and place. Producer Martin Scorsese selected him for this project, and it was clearly an inspired choice.

The novel existed in a mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles, and even though the film moves the action to a vaguely contemporary setting, it maintains all the dangerous glamor of Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame. In fact, it would be hard to find better analogues for Angelica Huston and Annette Bening here than those two noir icons. Both actresses put in what very well may be their absolute best work as sparring femmes fatales conniving over the soul and body of John Cusack’s small-time conman. Cusack is good, but, at 23, he can’t always put over the work’s hardboiled dialogue with the necessary style. (And the script—much taken verbatim from the novel—is a real highlight of noir poetry.)

The film begins with a series of quick and distinct tonal shifts. First, we get an oddly unnecessary epigraph from “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and then an overpowering blast of Elmer Bernstein’s score that suggests the most dire drama. Just as suddenly, Scorsese’s voice gives a tonally displaced two-sentence voiceover about racetrack betting before the score shifts into an impish theme that cries “comic caper!” And, indeed, for the first act, that’s exactly what it seems like we’re watching, as Frears pulls out all of the comedy in the establishing events. It’s all ice-cool Danny Ocean energy until we see Huston’s jarringly visceral reaction to the arrival of her mob overlord. What follows is as harrowing and effective a scene as any I know, in which Huston’s elegant self-possession disappears in an instant, creating a true sense of terror about what may be about to happen. And then it happens. And that’s the first time The Grifters tips its hand, answering the ricocheting tones of its opening with a definitive landing on the side of menace, violence, and unpredictability. Still, we may be lured into the lighter tone again by the bright colors, Bening’s hilarious Marilyn Monroe schtick, and the sheer desire that levity will win the day. But it’s a con, people. Everything is a con.

The film contains several shocking outbursts of abusive violence that signal the plot’s unraveling (through the unraveling of its characters), but it manages to top itself in the arenas of surprise and deadly betrayal again and again, before leaving us on the perfect visual equivalent of the novel’s chilling final sentence: “And then she went out of the room and the hotel, and out into the City of Angels.”

And if that doesn’t pull you in, come for the astonishing visuals that simultaneously celebrate and mock the dream-quality stylization of noir films. The exact color of a wig. The cut of a dress. The threatening stillness of roadside motels. It’s all perfectly calibrated for maximum cool. And still, Frears manages to make visual jokes and overt callouts to films like Psycho without upsetting the precarious tonal balance of the film.

(Did I just talk myself into a full five-star rating?)

French director Alain Resnais currently occupies the twelfth spot on my Favorite Directors list. That may seem low, but it’s a crowded and competitive group. He is one of the best of all time. And I have finally watched all of his feature films (some of which have been near-impossible to track down)!

My concluding film was his 1993 two-movie film Smoking/No Smoking, which swept France’s César Awards, winning Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay. (Only three films have achieved the same feat at the Oscars.) That double-film, split into two films (can you guess their titles?), adds up to almost three hundred minutes and features only two actors—Resnais staples Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi. The film(s) is from the second half of Resnais’s career, in which he frequently explored questions of reality and artifice through adaptations of plays by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, as he does here.

Set in a small Yorkshire village, Smoking/No Smoking is a branching-reality film in which we see small choices play out across five years with vastly different results. (Ah, the nineties, when every filmmaker wondered how small decisions change our lives in big ways. So, maybe it started in 1987 with Blind Chance, but the following decade gave us Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors and Smoking/No Smoking. And likely others.) Ostensibly, these choices have to do with a cigarette being lit or not lit in the film’s opening scene…but I fail to see the connection. Nonetheless, it presents multiple versions of the story of the interlocking lives of three couples [who are distributed in multiple pairings over the course of the film(s)]. The two actors play ten characters, with Azéma portraying six women and Arditi playing four different men. There is no screen magic here, such as split screens or doubling. Only two characters can be on the screen at any one time.

I like the premise of these two wonderful actors playing all the roles, and they do a great job. The characters are interesting, for the most part, and some sequences are quite lovely. I definitely prefer No Smoking—especially the scene set in dense fog. If these are archetypes representing humanity, I have a feeling I am “a Miles.” He is certainly the one whom I cared about most.

The “anyone could end up with anyone else” romantic tangle is a bit odd...more in keeping with French culture than English. I wonder if Resnais enhanced that bit from Ayckbourn’s play. Can all these people play musical beds with so little drama? Not in Yorkshire, methinks.

As with all of Resnais’s ‘second era’ films, there is little attempt to court realism. Perhaps, however, there is a bit too much. As he progressed, his artifices became starker, ending with Life of Riley’s mere suggestions of setting. I don’t necessarily want that level of bare theatricality here, but something in between.

Sadly, it is impossible to overlook the fact that both Smoking and No Smoking are too long, let alone when seen as one film...which they really are. I love Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditit, but I don’t want to spend this much time with them, no matter how many characters they play. Between the two films, I watched this in four installments because it just felt never-ending. And what does the smoking do to change who enters Celia’s garden? It’s a weak choice for the title (and not Ayckbourne’s).

But these later Resnais films are more experiments than declarations, and I appreciate that choice on his part. When he began his feature film career, Resnais specialized in difficult and intellectual memory plays in which times and spaces and facts changed often. These very poetic stream-of-memory films play with form in extreme ways and therefore can demand a lot of a viewer who wants to fully “understand” them. I suggest you under-stand them, as you would a beautiful sky, allowing them to shift and exchange beauties while complicating the concept of “facts” in a past that is always remembered through fickle and finite human brains. Some of this disavowal of objectivity is also at the center of his later films, which play with staginess and distancing techniques meant to disrupt the audience’s suspension of disbelief, forcing them to consider that they are watching a fictional world.

Here, then—at last—is my (current) ranking of Alain Resnais’s films (with Smoking and No Smoking listed separately), including his documentary shorts and one anthology film in which he cooperated with other directors.

1. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

2. Hiroshima mon Amour (1959)

3. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (2012)

4. Providence (1977)

5. I Want To Go Home! (1989)

6. My American Uncle (1980)

7. Statues Also Die (1953)

8. Private Fears in Public Places (2006)

9. Wild Grass (2009)

10. Night and Fog (1956)

11. The Song of Styrene (1958)

12. Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963)

13. Far from Vietnam (1967)

14. L’Amour à Mort (1984)

15. No Smoking (1993)

16. The Mystery of Workshop 15 (1957)

17. Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983)

18. All the World’s Memory (1956)

19. Not on the Lips (2003)

20. Smoking (1993)

21. Mélo (1986)

22. Life of Riley (2014)

23. Same Old Song (1997)

24. The War Is Over (1966)

25. Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime (1968)

26. Stavisky… (1974)

27. Guernica (1951)

28. Gauguin (1950)

29. Van Gogh (1948)

30. Visite à Oscar Dominguez (1947)

31. Visite à Hans Hartung (1947)

    B. A. D. Reviews is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Every few months, I catch you up with my review feed over on Letterboxd. Most of the films I see are not well-suited for the full critical treatment. These sometimes get a short blurb on my Letterboxd page. Let’s take a look at what I’ve been watching since the last Pellet Reviews post on January 19th.

The Long, Long Trailer (1954) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Filmed in the …

Read more

The Drama is (I am told) the first of three films this year starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. It is also, ironically, best labeled as a comedy, albeit a very dark one. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this comedy only has your amusement in mind. This film is about a lot of heavy and vital stuff that needs to be discussed…but I can see th…

Read more

I think I speak for most of my generation (Gen X) when I say that I have a negative bias against the biblical epics of the 1950s. I’m not entirely sure why that is, but it has something to do with their sheer numbers and something to do with my image of overly earnest fifties melodrama. Well, it was Easter yesterday, and I finally watched The Robe, base…

Read more

One review I read of the new sci-fi film Project Hail Mary said that it desperately wanted to be a film from the seventies or eighties. After seeing it, I totally get where that sentiment comes from, but I want to be quick to point out that it is simply a way to give you a sense of the film and not a negative criticism. Yes, in many ways, the movie trad…

Read more

Today starts Holy Week, and it’s usually a wonder/full but draining experience. Already, I haven’t been posting at my usual rate. (I’ve been devouring early Myrna Loy performances…and there’s not a lot to say about many of those movies except, “They did not feel comfortable with sound quite yet!”) So, this is fair warning that I have no idea what the en…

Read more

Before Pixar brings us the FIFTH installment of Toy Story, they have released Hoppers. The film feels like minor Pixar to me, but it’s not bad. In some ways, it’s your basic Pixar film (in good ways), and in some ways it’s quite different (in good ways). But do I have reservations? Thank you for asking, and yes, I do.

Remember that dumb television show, …

Read more

Florence Pugh is undoubtedly one of the greatest actors of her generation. Turning thirty this year, she has shown not only talent but the stewardship thereof, continually putting in stronger and more impressive performances. From her debut in 2014’s The Falling, through her Oscar-nominated role in Little Women and her sadly overlooked tour de force in …

Read more

See the visual version of the list HERE on Letterboxd.

1. Chicago

2. Schindler’s List

3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

4. Annie Hall

5. Casablanca

6. …

Read more

5 Lessons we learned this Oscars season

An alternate ballot for the 2026 Academy Awards

Making a case for each Best Picture nominee

An…

Read more

I recently posted my Posties (see where the name came from?), which are my two cents on the best of film in 2025. Someone invariably asks me, though, “Who will win at the Oscars this Sunday?” Mostly, they want to know for petty workplace gambling. But, whyever you may want to know the best bets come Sunday night, here’s what I can tell you.

Best Picture:…

Read more

I saw a headline that ran, “The Bride! Earns Its Exclamation Point Like No Film Since Moulin Rouge!” I was amused, because just two weeks ago, I began my piece on Moulin Rouge!’s 25th anniversary by saying it “still deserves its exclamation point.” However, that other reviewer was correct: if ever another movie deserved that terminal punctuation, it is …

Read more

Presenting the 2025 Posties, my awards for the best in film! To see my ranking of all 53 eligible movies, Click Here!

Read more

Every year, sometime before the Academy Awards broadcast, I award my Posties—the best in film from the past year, according to me. This year, I saw fifty-three Oscar-eligible films. (They are listed below.) These make up the official pool from which the Posties are put together.

The 2025 film slate was one of unusual bounty! Each year, I have about four …

Read more

Read more