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Recommended Reading

May 2012

° The Nation A charismatic chameleon: on Luis Buñuel.

° The Moving Arts Film Journal Stanley Kubrick: master of contradictions.

° Moving Image Source Good Neighbors: art and cinema in Buffalo's 1970s avant-garde.

° Senses of Cinema "Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am…": an Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 1).

° Time Out The 100 best horror films.

° A.V. Club Composer Danny Elfman on his long collaboration with Tim Burton.

° Sight & Sound Garlands and cobwebs: Vincente Minnelli's ecstatic vision.

° Cinema Scope Film criticism after film criticism: the J. Joberman affair.

° Film Comment Discomfort zone: the films of Bobcat Goldthwait.

° Film International That hurtful mask - in memory of Erland Josephson (1923-2012).

Previous recommended reading.

Ain't Nobody's Blues But My Own

We've updated - for the first time since 2010 - our list of mostly unloved, and in many cases, extremely obscure films. If you're sick of cinematic fare that most people like, then try these films on for size.

The Shooting Gallery

...Or the 100 Most Fortunate Actors in Film History?

Who are the most important film actors of all-time? Is it those who had the biggest star-power, those who won the most awards or accolades, those who grabbed the most headlines? Or, was it those performers who actually worked - for whatever reason - with the best filmmakers and subsequently ended up appearing in many of the screen's finest films?

See what They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? think, and prepare to be mildly surprised with some of our inclusions and also by many of our omissions (last updated during February 2011).

The 1,000 Greatest Films

The 1,000th Greatest Film of All Time... Jean Renoir's "Toni"

TSPDT's annual update of the 1,000 Greatest Films is now online. 49 changes to the list and for the first time Fritz Lang leads the way with 16 films. Please take a look for yourself and please email us your thoughts.

The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films

The 250th Most Acclaimed Film of the 21st Century: Jafar Panahi's "Crimson Gold"

The seventh edition of our 21st Century list is up-and-running, and incorporates many of 2011's critics' ballots. Unsurprisingly, Terrence Malick's Tree of Life leads the 2011 bunch. And, yes, it's still in pink. View

The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films | January 2010 Version

Shooting from a different gun...

Behind the scenes, we are currently undertaking a rebuild/refresh of They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? After nine years, I'm sure you will agree that the site is desperately in need of a facelift. Therefore, due to our focus on getting the new site up-and-running, there will only be minimal updates (in other words, about the same as usual!) to the current site. We expect They Shoot Pictures, Don't They Redux? to be online before the end of 2012.

Recent Viewings

Approach with Caution: "Shack Out on 101"

° Shack Out on 101 (Edward Dein/1955/USA) "Lee Marvin is Slob in this trash classic about the efforts of hash slinger Terry Moore to combat Communism while juggling the lecherous advances of nearly all her co- stars. Absolutely one of a kind, with most of the action taking place on a single shabby set (Keenan Wynn's beanery)." - Leonard Maltin Film Guide → TSPDT: Approach with Caution

° Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi/1936/Japan) "Kenji Mizoguchi departed abruptly from his earlier sentimental films into a world of acute realism with Osaka Elegy. Boldly critiquing the position of women in contemporary Japanese society, the film examines a young woman’s victimization and descent into prostitution. Together, Mizoguchi’s direction and Isuzu Yamada’s powerful performance create sorrowful, timeless poetry." - Barbara Scharres, The Criterion Collection → TSPDT: Recommended

° Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Dusan Makavejev/1967/Yugoslavia) "One minute clinically detached and the next winsome, Love Affair nevertheless doesn’t feel scattered; it’s all unified in what Makavejev called "kind of a staged documentary." Despite such genre-flouting contradictions, Makavejev’s mix-and-match aesthetic creates visual and thematic harmony rather than Dadaist discord." - Michael Koresky, The Criterion Collection → TSPDT: Recommended

° Patti Smith: Dream of Life (Steven Sebring/2008/USA) "Photographer Steven Sebring is a longtime friend of Smith's, and he spent 10 years piecing together Patti Smith: Dream Of Life, a fans-only document of rock's premier poet. But while Sebring gained amazing access to Smith's world tours and family life, very little about the finished product suggests it should've taken a decade to make. The film is loose to a fault, dropping a little biography and too little concert footage between long scenes of Smith hanging around her apartment, talking about pop and literature." - Noel Murray, The A.V. Club → TSPDT: Approach with Caution

° Incendies (Denis Villeneuve/2010/Canada-France) "Love it or hate it—and there are plenty of reasons to land on either end of that spectrum—Canada’s 2010 Best Foreign Language Film nominee Incendies is hard to forget. In part that’s because it’s an agonizingly well-crafted slog through a series of shocking emotional extremes. In part, it’s because its final twists are so profoundly unlikely that they not only beggar belief, they call the whole project into question. Viewers may walk away from the film feeling unnecessarily manipulated, but that manipulation tends to be bitterly effective." - Tasha Robinson, The A.V. Club → TSPDT: Worth a Look

° Shame (Steve McQueen/2011/UK) "Who is the audience for this aggressively unsexy movie about a man who engages in empty sex and feels numb? About a woman so hungry for love that a look can bruise her? Pretty much anyone who has unresolved family issues, which includes a significant part of the population old enough to see it. McQueen finds the exquisite tension between the brother wanting to disconnect and the sister longing for connection. To paraphrase a line of Sissy's, it's a good movie that comes from a bad place." - Carrie Rickey, The Philadelphia Inquirer → TSPDT: Worth a Look

° Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog/2011/USA-UK-Germany) "On one level, Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss is an appeal to end capital punishment, but it's not the kind of documentary that drives policy change. The thoughtful helmer's probing death-row doc offers no statistics, no dramatic reenactments, no angry ultimatum lobbed at lawmakers -- just testimony from convicted killers, the victim's families and several cogs in Texas' criminal justice system... These days, true-crime docs are a dime a dozen, and yet, returning to the In Cold Blood analogy, Into the Abyss dares to plumb the dark hole in America's soul. Herzog's investigation may not work as an anti-death-penalty editorial, but its findings are undeniably profound." - Peter Debruge, Variety → TSPDT: Recommended

° Who Killed Teddy Bear? (Joseph Cates/1965/USA) "The acting isn't great, the plot is rather predictable, but where this scores is in the offhand manner with which it handles quite salacious material, and the period detail: Sal Mineo's trip round the fleshpits of 42nd Street shows then new books by Burroughs, Selby and others next to magazines with lurid titles such as Shame Mates and Dance-Hall Dykes." - Phelim O'Neill, The Guardian → TSPDT: Worth a Look

° Planet of the Vampires (Mario Bava/1965/Spain-Italy) "Planet of the Vampires is an outerspace thriller that has almost nothing in common with similarly plotted pictures, like Curtis Harrington's Queen of Blood. In the standard space epic, hardware and special effects are everything. Here on the ghastly planet Aura, they take third place to Bava's signature lighting and atmospheric effects. Explaining what's so special about this picture requires one to say what it isn't: Planet of the Vampires doesn't have a well-written script or interesting characters. The action is repetitive and the plot plods along to a rather unexciting conclusion. Its appeal lies in director Bava's creation of an eerie and unsettling alien world that is its own reason for being." - Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant Review → TSPDT: Approach with Caution

° Diamonds of the Night (Jan Nemec/1964/Czechoslovakia) "A remarkable directorial debut by 27-year-old Jan Nemec. Nemec's film is a bleak, alternately realistic and hallucinatory examination of four days in the lives of two young escapees from the Nazis—and its mood of desperation and paranoia works a grim magic." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader → TSPDT: Recommended

° Backfire (Vincent Sherman/1940/USA) "It is no surprise that Backfire was a box office nonstarter, offering too little, too late in the wake of George Marshall's The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947), both of which offered returning veteran protagonists and antagonists and more incendiary conflicts. In The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther dismissed the film as "without style or suspense... listless" but it is better than its reputation." - Richard Harland Smith, Turner Classic Movies → TSPDT: Approach with Caution

° Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean/2010/Romania) "It's hard to think of a better way to take the joy out of Christmas than for a husband to tell his wife that he's having an affair with another woman... Marital infidelity is hardly a new cinematic topic. But this film is far from cliched, thanks to the literate script and a trio of sensitive performances: Mimi Branescu as Paul; his real-life wife, Mirela Oprisor, as his screen wife, Adriana; and Maria Popistasu as the dentist. They breathe originality into an oft-told story." - V.A. Musetto, New York Post → TSPDT: Worth a Look

° Chains (Raffaello Matarazzo/1949/Italy) "Chains would be the first of many Matarazzo tales of temptation, religious salvation, and female self-sacrifice, themes that underpin De Benedetti’s screenplay but come fervidly to the fore under Matarazzo’s direction.... Chains established the hallmarks of Matarazzo melodrama: naturalistic performances, unadorned cinematography, spiritual rapture (here indicated by a Christmas made melancholy by the pain of familial separation yet imbued with hopeful prayer), and absurdly spiraling misfortune." - Michael Koresky, The Criterion Collection → TSPDT: Recommended

The 2012 Sight & Sound poll is fast approaching. It will have a massive impact on our own 1,000 Greatest Films and 21st Century lists. Over at indieWIRE, Kevin B. Lee curated a discussion examining, amongst other things, the poll's significance. Part I / Part II / Part III

▫ Peter Howell risks 2 fists to list top 10 films of all time.

▫ The Criticwire Survey: The Sight & Sound Greatest Film Poll. Plus, more notes.

▫ The Pinocchio Theory: Steven Shaviro's top ten.

▫ Roger Ebert's The Greatest Films of All Time.

▫ The Mark of Kane: David Thomson ponders whether Citizen Kane will – or should – retain its top spot.

In the Press