Richard Brody

film critic
USA

Voted for

FilmYearDirector
King Lear1987Jean-Luc Godard
Shoah1985Claude Lanzmann
The Last Laugh1924F.W. Murnau
The Gold Rush1925Charles Chaplin
ZANGIKU MONOGATARI1939Kenji Mizoguchi
Citizen Kane1941Orson Welles
Playtime1967Jacques Tati
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1975Chantal Akerman
Faces1968John Cassavetes
Daughters of the Dust1991Julie Dash

Comments

This time around, I found myself thinking of greatness in terms of difficulty—not necessarily practical difficulty, which many filmmakers of varying achievement face, but conceptual difficulty, the combination of production and direction that enables a filmmaker to push the art of cinema drastically and definitively ahead, to blow a hole in the history of the aesthetic and to confront that history, and history itself, at the same time.