Month: September 2020

The Seattle Screen Scene Top 100 Films of All-Time Project

~ Sean Gilman

When the new Sight & Sound poll came out in 2012, Mike and I each came up with hypothetical Top Tens of our own. For the next few years, we came up with an entirely new Top Ten on our podcast, The George Sanders Show, every year around Labor Day. The podcast has ended, but the project continues here at Seattle Screen Scene.

The idea is that we keep doing this until the next poll comes out in 2022, by which time we’ll each have a Top 100 list. Well, I will. Mike will have only 98 because he repeated two from his 2012 list on the 2013 one.

Here are Mike’s Top Ten Films of All-Time for 2020:

To-Be-or-Not-to-Be

1. To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)

tokyostory

2. Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu, 1953)

5000fingers

3. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (Roy Rowland, 1953)

shree-420

4. Shree 420 (Raj Kapoor, 1955)

aguirre

5. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

monty-python-and-the-holy-grail

6. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, 1975)

raging bull

7. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

om_shanti_om

8. Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007)

thelimitsofcontrolmoviestil

9. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)

Master

10. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

And here are Sean’s Top Ten Films of All-Time for 2020:

1. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

2. Mughal-e-azam (K. Asif, 1960)

3. Yearning (Naruse Mikio, 1964)

4. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Bill Melendez, 1966)

5. Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)

6. The Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986)

7. Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007)

8. Dusty Stacks of Mom (Jodie Mack, 2013)

9. The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, 2014)

10. Liz and the Blue Bird (Yamada Naoko, 2018)

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

~ Sue Lonac

Criterion’s new 4K restoration of Claire Denis’ remarkable 1999 film looks absolutely gorgeous—stark, luminous, vividly colorful, and precise in every fine line and minute detail. That precision suits the film’s subject: a tightly disciplined French Foreign Legion troop under the demanding leadership of an obsessive sergeant. A loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and a quasi-sequel to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1960), the film tracks the gradual psychological unraveling of Chief Master Sergeant Galoup as he develops a jealous fixation on a new recruit, Gilles Sentain, whose beautiful face and ineffable cool make him a favorite both with the other legionnaires and with Galoup’s superior, Commander Forestier. Envy, repressed desire, and festering rage commingle in Galoup’s deteriorating mind, and the innocent Sentain suffers for it. As the film proceeds, we are inexorably drawn into the inevitable tragedy of their story, even as we revel in the startling beauty of Denis’ extraordinary vision.

Continue reading “Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)” →