In a lot of ways, Batman represents fairly pedestrian blockbuster filmmaking. The pacing is slow, the plotting occasionally incoherent. Too many of the action scenes are people wearing black clothes fighting in the dark, and you can’t see shit. There are plenty of sharp, fun character moments, but the movie still feels like it’s lumbering along to its inevitable explosive conclusion—a problem that’s haunted superhero movies ever since. But the thing that makes the movie stand out—the thing that all the critics at the time immediately commented on—was how the movie looked. Because no movie had ever really looked like that before. [Tom Breihan]

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To really enjoy Batman Returns, which is not exactly a difficult thing to do, you have to give yourself over to its triumphant silliness. Before a single word is spoken in the movie, we see an infant Penguin eat a cat as Pee-Wee Herman himself, Paul Reubens, takes a long, resigned drink. Selina Kyle, in her pre-Catwoman harried-secretary guise, has a giant pink-neon “hello there” sign in her apartment—something that could only exist so that she can, in her transformation, smash a couple of letters and turn it into “hell here.” When Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck meets his death by electrocution, he comes out looking like an Iron Maiden cover art. There is nothing about Batman Returns that even nods in the general direction of realism, and that’s why the movie is great. [Tom Breihan]

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In The Batman, Matt Reeves’ slick, overlong, majestically moody superhero spectacular, Robert Pattinson really puts the goth into Gotham City’s chief protector. His eyes slathered in mascara like Robert Smith (or The Crow, another nocturnal winged avenger), this version of the DC crime fighter zips around town on a motorcycle to the non-diegetic accompaniment of Nirvana’s album-closing downer “Something In The Way.” He also narrates the film in hushed voiceover that teeters, gargoyle-like, over the edge of self-parody. “They think I’m hiding in the shadows,” he whispers. “But I am the shadows.” These musings sound like diary entries—and it turns out that’s exactly what they are. At last: a Batman who journals!

The Batman is as much a plot machine as the Christopher Nolan movies (the exposition could be stacked into twisting skyscrapers), but it moves differently, crawling and slinking over its extended running time instead of racing through it like a bat out of hell. And if we didn’t exactly need another Batman movie, there’s a charm to seeing one relatively steeped in the language of the original medium… even if a part of that language is a portentousness suitable only for tortured costumed orphans or goth kids of all ages. [A.A. Dowd]

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Are truth and objectivity sufficient to create a masterpiece? Some think so, certainly—The Battle Of Algiers regularly shows up on lists of the greatest war movies ever made (and sometimes shows up on lists of the greatest movies ever made, irrespective of genre). Dramatically, the film suffers a bit from the same shapelessness that afflicts biopics and other heavily fact-based pictures, registering as a succession of loosely connected events, rather than as a discrete object sculpted from the clay of history. Pontecorvo’s choice to mimic the visual aesthetic of documentaries—at which he succeeded so well that the original American distributor made a point of boasting that not a frame of newsreel footage appears—was both revolutionary and hugely influential; most of today’s roughhewn docudramas have some Algiers in their DNA. It’s that formal genius, along with Ennio Morricone’s anxious, staccato score, that truly endures, and will continue to do so long after heated debates about the phrase “radical Islam” have finally died. [Mike D’Angelo]

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The historical mistreatment of Sergei Eisenstein’s agit-prop classic Battleship Potemkin demonstrates how movies made for express political purposes can be buffeted by the winds of change. Upon its release in 1925, Potemkin was hailed as a masterpiece, as much for the way it dramatized the emotions behind the communist revolution as for its innovative use of montage. But Eisenstein told the story of a sailors’ revolt maybe too well, with too much artistic detail. In a depressed pre-Nazi Germany, officials worried that the film would foment revolt among the military and police. In the Soviet Union, the powers that be gradually whittled away Eisenstein’s original vision by mandating the inclusion of more patriotic music, and the exclusion of quotes by disgraced political leaders. And in the U.S., unadulterated prints were hard to come by, since American distributors could only deal with European companies that had made their own alterations. [Noel Murray]

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The Academy had no separate category to recognize foreign-language films until 1956, so it’s no surprise that Jean Cocteau’s visually striking magical romance Beauty And The Beast went unrecognized. Cocteau, who cut his teeth with such avant-garde fare as The Blood Of A Poet, elevates the classic tale of tormented Belle and cursed Beast by bathing every frame with Freudian imagery or otherworldly opulence. To quote the late Roger Ebert, “Blood Of A Poet was an art film made by a poet,” whereas, “Beauty And The Beast was a poetic film made by an artist.” [Leonardo Adrian Garcia]

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Steven Soderbergh’s Behind The Candelabra is, like many Soderbergh films, made up of a great many things. There are elements of wry comedy here—particularly from a plastic surgeon played by Rob Lowe—just as there are heartbreaking moments of relationship drama, scenes where Scott (Matt Damon) and Liberace (Michael Douglas) tear each other’s throats out. Yet what’s most impressive about the film is how it creates a sustained argument about the progress of the gay rights movement in the United States. With no actual, legal connection between Scott and Liberace, the two are forced into ever more complicated convolutions, and when the relationship inevitably crumbles, Scott has no legal protection when the pianist takes everything. This is a story about two men who were in love, then gradually fell out of that love, but it’s also a story about how the lack of legal protection for them (as well as Liberace’s terror of how society would react if he were outed) hounded them every step of the way. It’s pitched between quiet, intimate scenes with Scott and “Lee,” as he likes to be called, lounging around, enjoying each other’s company, and that old woman’s stare, with everything that hides behind it. [Emily St. James]

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From the outside, Catherine Deneuve’s protagonist in Belle De Jour has everything a Parisian woman of the 1960s could want. She’s married to a comically handsome man (Jean Sorel) whose career as a surgeon allows her tremendous comfort and seemingly endless leisure. They vacation in luxury and enjoy each other’s company. Sex, however, is another matter. He wants it. She doesn’t. Or at least that isn’t all she wants. Directed by Luis Buñuel, Belle De Jour begins by dramatizing one of Deneuve’s fantasies. Riding in a carriage with Sorel, she rejects his advances. He responds by tying her to a tree, flogging her, then telling her coachmen to have their way with her. The expression on her face reveals that the degradation has stirred something deep inside her. Then she wakes up to the less-satisfying real world. [Keith Phipps]

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For Michael Keaton, Birdman is some kind of gift from the movie gods, a license to have his cake and messily devour it too. It’s the casting coup of the year: aging former movie star who once played a winged superhero returns as an aging former movie star who once played a winged superhero. The role, custom-fitted to Keaton’s true Hollywood story, allows him to toy with his own faded celebrity and to step back (however briefly) into the vulcanized rubber of a crime-fighting getup. Invisible quotation marks flutter like bats around the actor’s head, fortifying his performance with context and subtext. Cursed/blessed with terrible facial hair, and always walking or yelling or arguing with himself, Keaton hasn’t seemed this alive in years. Maybe ever. Same goes for Alejandro González Iñárritu, unlikeliest of directors to tackle a playful, self-consciously meta, showbiz comedy. Under his stewardship, Birdman is less a movie than a kind of grand magic trick, designed to dazzle and delight and make the audience feel exceptionally clever, but not to hold up to too much scrutiny. Beyond the incredible stunt casting, there’s a shamelessly impressive formal gimmick: Most of the film has been shot to resemble a single, unbroken take, the great Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Children Of Men) masking cuts under cover of backstage darkness. This creates a sense of perpetual urgency, and for all the potshots it takes at Hollywood’s superhero obsession, Birdman has the crowd-pleasing instincts of a studio blockbuster.[A.A. Dowd]

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If one includes works made for German television, The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 13th feature… which is damn remarkable, given that he’d only gotten started three years earlier, in 1969, and was still busily working in theater at the time. Indeed, Petra Von Kant is adapted from Fassbinder’s stage production, which had premiered the year before; like the play, the movie is set entirely in its protagonist’s apartment, mostly within a few feet of her bed. Nonetheless, this is arguably Fassbinder’s first film to take full advantage of cinema’s unique qualities—so much so, in fact, that it’s sometimes difficult to imagine how it could have worked onstage. It functions reasonably well as a straightforward, agonized melodrama, but it’s first and foremost a master class—co-taught by famed cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Quiz Show), who got his start with Fassbinder—in the dynamic visual use of a constricted space, and proof that a tiny budget is no excuse. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Ousmane Sembène’s debut feature, Black Girl, is commonly cited as the first major film to come out of Sub-Saharan Africa, despite the fact that much of the movie is set in France. Its place in film history has less to do with its production (which was French enough to qualify for France’s Prix Jean Vigo, which Black Girl won in 1966) than with its perspective.

Black Girl was the first feature made in Senegal, and the first feature about black Africans to have been written and directed by a black African. No other national or cultural cinema started as confidently. The movie—about a young woman who takes a seemingly cushy job as maid and nanny to a French couple in Dakar, and then accompanies them back to France—is at once a humanist drama, a portrait of Senegalese life in the 1960s, a study of race relations in France, and a personal statement on post-colonial Africa’s relationship to Europe and the rest of the world. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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In his memoir A Life In Movies, the late British director Michael Powell explained that after WWII, he became interested in the concept of the “composed film,” and began shaping his pictures to have the abstract emotional resonance of great music, rather than the plainness of narrative. His first clear nod in that direction was 1947's Black Narcissus, a spiritual melodrama that climaxes in an exaggerated incident of violence which Powell assembled, he writes, as “an opera, in the sense that music, emotion, image, and voices all blended together into a new and splendid whole.” Black Narcissus was the 11th collaboration between Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, and the sixth of 12 films that the men would release under the production credit “The Archers.” It remains a rapturous, near-indescribable work of cinematic art, spun from a simple story about nuns who travel to the Himalayas to start a school and a hospital, only to have mountain winds and native mysticism weaken their confidence and their faith. [Noel Murray]

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It isn’t often that a movie commences with a perfect summary of its own appeal. But that’s exactly what Black Orpheus does. Marcel Camus’ 1959 melodrama opens on a marble statue of its mythological namesake, a tableau of Greek tragedy set to the gentle strum of an acoustic ballad. But after no more than 10 seconds (and immediately following the appearance of the title), this black-and-white image seems to shatter into a hundred star-shaped shards. They fall away to reveal the film’s next and much more illustrative image: men smiling, dancing, and playing music under the Brazilian sun. The first shot prepares you for a funeral. The second one announces a celebration. [A.A. Dowd]

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Whatever its flaws as a film, a none-too-scary monster chief among them, The Blob is a uniquely compelling monster movie. The decision to shoot in Technicolor, largely on real locations in Pennsylvania, invests it with a high-’50s feel money couldn’t buy. The remarkable seriousness the actors, particularly method disciple Steve McQueen, bring to the material makes the film difficult to dismiss as mere camp. So does a finale that unites the entire town, teens and grown-ups alike, in an all-metaphors-aside fight against an alien threat, a moment that seems to confirm historian Bruce Eder’s description of The Blob as “like watching some kind of collective home movie of who we were and who we thought we were.” Or maybe it’s simply the best film ever to pit hot-rodding teens against a mass of silicone. It delivers the goods any way you look at it. [Keith Phipps]

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Imagine two brothers who’ve never set foot on a feature film set showing up on your doorstep and saying, “Hello, we’ve got this trailer, can we project it on your wall? Then maybe you’ll invest in our darkly comic thriller starring an actress you’ve never heard of.” Would you say no? If so, you just missed out on Blood Simple. This trailblazing neo-noir would be significant for its funding strategy alone, but it also launched the careers of Carter Burwell, Barry Sonnenfeld, Frances McDormand, and, yes, the Coen brothers. All off the strength of a trailer for a movie that didn’t exist yet. It boggles the mind. [Allison Shoemaker]

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An unsettling mix of fleet-footed comedy, mismatched romance, and casual, soul-sapping violence, Bonnie And Clyde has lost none of its unsettling power. Arthur Penn and his star Warren Beatty had studied the New Wave well; their appreciation was apparent in their previous project, 1965’s Mickey One, a paranoid comedy set in Chicago. Here they turned homage into the beginnings of a new American approach to film. It’s the movie without which any of the maverick classics to come couldn’t have happened, but its greatness is all its own. [Keith Phipps]

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It’s hard to remember now, but Lars Von Trier had a radically different reputation back in 1996, when Breaking The Waves premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. His previous features, from The Element Of Crime (1984) to Europa (1991, released in the U.S. as Zentropa), had been audacious exercises in pure style, offering viewers little in the way of an emotional foothold. Breaking The Waves, made shortly after Von Trier collaborated on a TV miniseries called The Kingdom (1994), was an act of deliberate reinvention—his experiment to see what would happen if he deprived himself of every cinematic tool he’d relied on throughout his career. This somewhat monastic approach became known as the Dogme 95 movement, but Breaking The Waves isn’t technically a Dogme film (his follow-up, The Idiots, would be); it breaks many of the rules, particularly in its use of breathtakingly artificial chapter stops. All the same, it’s very much in the Dogme 95 spirit, and introduced the world to a Lars Von Trier who was capable of subordinating everything to heart-wrenching truth. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Herk Harvey is said to have directed more than 400 movies in his three decades of filmmaking. Almost all of them, however, were educational and industrial training films, which he shot, on time and under budget, for the Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas. The chief exception—and Harvey’s only feature—was 1962’s Carnival Of Souls, an eerie, low-budget horror yarn that’s become a bona fide cult favorite in the half-century since it was first released. The film, about a church organist (Candace Hilligoss) haunted by leering specters after a car accident, approximates the feeling of a nightmare that won’t end. Both David Lynch and George Romero have cited it as an influence on their own early, shoestring shockers, while the twist ending anticipated several decades of climactic rug pulls. But like a lot of cult classics, Carnival Of Souls—a recent inductee of the Criterion Collection—was unappreciated in its own time. Audiences ignored the movie, the distributor went bankrupt, and Harvey returned to his day job, never to make a full-length film again. Centron’s gain was our loss; surely, there were better uses of the director’s talents than warning kids about the dangers of cheating. [A.A. Dowd]

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Cut and pasted from the texts of five different plays (plus snippets of Holinshed’s Chronicles, the Bard’s main source on English history), Chimes At Midnight puts larger-than-life John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s most popular comic role, center-stage, only to dwarf him with cathedral and castle interiors. Orson Welles made innovative use of low angles in his debut, Citizen Kane, reinventing ceilings as backdrops; here, in his final trip into the corridors of power, they seem so far above as to be unreachable. Even Chimes At Midnight’s brutal, celebrated Battle Of Shrewsbury sequence—a hurricane of medieval violence that has remained a key Hollywood reference point for decades—finds time to cut back to Falstaff, wobbling around in a suit of armor like a lost astronaut roaming the moonscape of history. A big chunk of Welles’ body of work could be divided up into movies about power (e.g. Citizen Kane, Macbeth) and movies about powerlessness (e.g. The Lady From Shanghai, The Trial), and Chimes At Midnight fits squarely into the latter category. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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As an exercise in classical scare tactics, delivered through an escalating series of primo set pieces, The Conjuring is often supremely effective. Not content simply scaring the bejesus out of moviegoers, it also fancies itself a kind of biopic. The film dives into the real-life case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, married paranormal investigators whose biggest claim to fame was the Amityville incident. That angle, intriguing though it is, sometimes works against the film’s fear factor: Once the ghostbusters enter the picture, ready to deliver a professional diagnosis, their clinical detachment seeps into the proceedings. (Providing hostile spirits with motivation almost always robs them of their dread-inducing mystique.) And despite the script’s efforts to give the Warrens a thematic arc, one based on their belief that God brought them together for a reason, the scenes between Farmiga and Wilson just end up feeling like dramatic distractions. Perhaps that’s because the true star of The Conjuring isn’t either one of them, but the man on the other side of the camera. Toying with on- and offscreen space and delivering each big scare like a perfectly timed punchline, director James Wan abolishes any traces of his “torture porn” origins. Now that’s an exorcism. [A.A. Dowd]

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Constance Wu stars as Rachel Chu, a practical NYU economics professor who’s shocked to learn that the man she’s been dating for the past year is basically Singaporean royalty. Hunky boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding) isn’t just rich; he’s the 1 percent of the 1 percent. And since he’s set to inherit the family’s real estate empire and expected to marry the right sort of woman to sit by his side, there’s a metric ton of pressure on Rachel’s shoulders when she joins Nick in Singapore for his best friend’s wedding and meets his family for the first time. Nick’s intimidating mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), immediately disapproves of her son’s choice. And Rachel—who was raised in the U.S. by a hard-working Chinese immigrant single-mom—is treated to a crash course in cultural differences, not just between the rich and the middle class, but also between Asian and Asian-American cultures. There’s a version of this film that holds Nick more accountable for thrusting Rachel into an overwhelming world without much in the way of guidance. Crazy Rich Asians doesn’t take that route. Instead, Nick remains a dashing Prince Charming (Golding more than fits the bill), and the threats to his relationship with Rachel are external rather than internal. There are plenty of heartwarming, tearjerking romantic moments to keep rom-com fans happy, but Crazy Rich Asians is first and foremost the story of Rachel struggling against the complex dynamics of Nick’s insular family. It’s also a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on wealth and womanhood. [Caroline Siede]

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Federico Fellini favorite Marcello Mastroianni stars in Divorce Italian Style as a Sicilian baron undergoing a midlife crisis. He feels smothered by his wife Daniela Rocca, a lightly mustachioed woman with a witchy laugh and a ravenous sexual appetite, and he still sees himself as a desirable catch, able to turn young ladies’ heads with his wealth and good looks. Mastroianni is especially attracted to his teen cousin Stefania Sandrelli, but being Catholic, he can’t do much about it. His best bet is to catch his wife with another man, kill her, and plead “crime of passion.” So he goes looking for a man who might want to sleep with Rocca. That plot description could fit farce or noir, and Divorce Italian Style is a little of both, with the noir elements coming through Mastroianni’s whispered flashback narration and dark fantasies. [Noel Murray]

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The key statement made by Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 masterpiece Stranger Than Paradise, one which defined and resonated through independent cinema for years afterward, was that American films don’t have to be defined by propulsive stories, or even by dynamic characters. It was achievement enough simply to evoke a small corner of the world as specifically and flavorfully as possible, preferably one that the audience rarely gets a chance to see. In this respect, Jarmusch’s superb 1986 follow-up Down By Law can be described as many things–a minimalist fairytale, a modern twist on ’30s prison dramas, an existential comedy–but it’s memorable first and foremost as a richly textured look at old New Orleans and the enchanted bayou surrounding it. With music and songs by stars John Lurie and Tom Waits, and stark black-and-white photography by the great Robby Müller (Paris, Texas), the film breaks off from the tourists on Bourbon Street and finds inspiration in the city’s decaying underbelly–”a sad and beautiful world,” as Waits neatly poeticizes it. [Scott Tobias]

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Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy, [Ryusuke] Hamaguchi’s first feature of 2021, was an anthology film comprised of three short segments involving missed and fraught connections. His second, Drive My Car, adapts a short story (this one by Haruki Murakami) into a three-hour melodrama. Despite its mammoth running time, Drive My Car doesn’t spread its source material too thin. Instead, Hamaguchi expands what’s on the page into a patient meditation on life after loss, examining the unconventional ways damaged people embrace despair to hold onto cherished memories.

In Drive My Car, he asks his viewers to gaze into the characters’ passions and regrets without looking away. At one point late in the film, Hamaguchi briefly cuts out all sound and leaves an eerily quiet moving image. It’s almost as if he’s checking in with his audience’s resolve, testing their willingness to remain in the moment. [Vikram Murthi]

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What Denis Villeneuve’s sleek new adaptation [of Frank Herbert’s novel] gets right, immediately, is the galactic, millennia-old scale: gigantic architecture, humongous spacecraft, vast landscapes, big ugly sandworms. No other recent film has looked quite so huge.

It’s worth noting here that the actual onscreen title of Villeneuve’s film is Dune: Part One. The script (by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, and Eric Roth) covers only the first half of Herbert’s novel, and the result ultimately feels like half of a movie. Fortunately, it’s an ambitious one, made with the same stylistic intelligence that Villeneuve brought to Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, his earlier forays into smart sci-fi. Having come a long way from his arthouse roots, he has emerged as one of our most reliable and talented directors of suspense and effects. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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For Mary and Paul Bland, the protagonists of Eating Raoul, the world never stops offending. A sexless but happily married couple played by former Warhol star Mary Woronov and her frequent on-screen partner Paul Bartel—the film’s director and co-writer with Richard Blackburn—the Blands dream of opening an old-fashioned country restaurant, but can’t seem to get ahead, held back by bills and unexpected unemployment. (Turns out the corner liquor store employing Bartel didn’t need a healthy supply of expensive French wine.) So they’re stuck instead in their tastefully retro apartment in the middle of one of Los Angeles’ most tasteless corners, surrounded by swingers who, gasp, even invite them to loosen up and join their party. But when one violates their home, and attempts to violate Woronov, they kill him, pick his pockets, and hit on an idea: Why not take out an ad in a sleazy local newspaper to attract sexual perverts and repeat the process until they have money enough to get out? After all, who’s going to miss a few swingers anyway? [Keith Phipps]

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Shot in moody black-and-white, with occasional flashes of vibrant color, Europa sends an American do-gooder, Leopold (Jean-Marc Barr), to snowy postwar Deutschland, where he secures a position aboard the newly revived Zentropa train line. It’s here, in his capacity as an overnight engine driver, that he becomes torn between two opposing factions: the new German government, eager to forget the sins of the recent past and comply with the American military, and a pro-Nazi, anti-occupation terrorist group, the Werewolves. Complicating matters further is the young man’s romance with the mysterious Katharina (Barbara Sukowa), a femme fatale of the Marlene Dietrich variety. [A.A. Dowd]

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When it was released on American screens, Georges Franju’s elegant 1960 horror film Eyes Without A Face was re-titled The Horror Chamber Of Dr. Faustus and paired with something called The Manster, the macabre tale of a half-man/half-beast with two heads. Beyond the fact that Franju’s film includes neither a horror chamber nor a villain named Dr. Faustus, the double feature must have seemed curious to the drive-in crowd, who had to wonder what these two films could possibly have in common. Yet Eyes Without A Face owes more to the American horror tradition than to French art cinema, which was slow to acknowledge the genre’s legitimacy, much less its potential. Caught between cultures, the film was greeted with scandal in its home country and mistreatment in the U.S., but it endures as a gorgeous fusion of opposing sensibilities, a lyrical monster movie with visceral thrills and moments of unforgettable visual poetry. [Scott Tobias]

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