Jonathan Rosenbaum

Comments

Spring in a Small Town

Along with Mix-up, the most neglected great film on my list, at least in the Western world.

IVAN GROZNI II BOYARSKI ZAGOROV

Like Welles’ equally worthy Touch of Evil, a monument to hyperbolic excess.

Vagabond

Like Resnais’ Providence and Romand’s Mix-up, a masterpiece of magisterial juxtapositions.

Sátántangó

Like Greed, a superb illustration of the principle that film is literature by another means.

Artificial Intelligence A.I.

A collaboration between a dead director and a friend who survived him seems appropriate for a meditation on the differences between human and nonhuman, living and dead that comprise an allegory about cinema itself.

Further remarks

I’ve omitted Chaplin (City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux) and Hitchcock (Rear Window, North by Northwest) as 'goes without saying'. But it’s also painful to have to exclude, among others, Antonioni, Bergman, Brakhage, Bunuel, Cassavetes, Costa, Denis, Dovzhenko, Feuillade, Ford, Godard, Hawks, Muratova, Murnau, Oliveira, Renoir, Rivette, Rossellini, Sembene, Snow, Preston Sturges, Tarkovsky, Jacques Tourneur, Visconti, and Wiseman – not to mention all of Iranian and Japanese cinema.