Tara Brady

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The Searchers

It's no accident that Ford's masterpiece has inspired countless retellings, including Scorsese's Taxi Driver. It's the grandest mythical cinema space.

The Ascent

Soviet-era allegories and fables are endlessly fascinating and varied, from the swooning, romantic agitprop of The Forty-First to the spectacular, swashbuckling Scarlet Sails. The Ascent's account of sacrifice during the Great Patriotic War is a dark parable that can be meaningfully perused from any number of ideological perspectives. An invaluable counterpoint to the singular Western protagonist, the film presents heroism as a collective experience and selfish individualism as eternal damnation.

Au hasard Balthazar

The patron saint of cinema finds, in a little donkey, a religious icon worthy of his attentions. Among Bresson's films, The Devil, Probably may look and feel like more like religious iconography, but it's Balthazar that communicates the sensation of moving through the Stations of the Cross.

All about Eve

Mankiewicz's script is as ruthlessly efficient as Anne Baxter's scheming ingénue and more than seven decades after the film premiered, Bette Davis's performance is still cause to "fasten your seatbelt".

Barry Lyndon

An imperfect rogue in a perfect space. Cinema is seldom as exquisite as when viewed by cinematographer John Alcott through Carl Zeiss's Planar 50mm lens.

Andrei Rublev

A superficially episodic structure masks the most carefully calibrated dialectic in film history.

All That Heaven Allows

The most bitingly subversive of Sirk's sneakily inflammatory melodramas.

Yojimbo

Forget the Johns - Wayne and Travolta - Toshiro Mifune's Yojimbo has the most imposing strut in movie history.

His Girl Friday

Quotable. Fast. Funny. Fast. Thrilling. Fast. Grant and Russell. Perfect.

La Belle et la Bête

Cocteau the poet at his most poetic. "Il était une fois..."