CINEMANIA:

Dogtooth (Greece, 2009, Giorgos Lanthimos)

For a change of pace, Dan begins:

In Dogtooth, Giorgos Lanthimos’s third feature film, the Greek director employs some of the chilly mis-en-scene of his Austrian contemporary, Michael Haneke, often placing the camera at a comfortable distance from his actors throughout the film’s most uncomfortable passages. However, it is when Lanthimos taps into his inner Kubrick in the movie’s darkly comic moments, where violence and cruelty slam up against naivete and ignorance, that Dogtooth moves beyond the merely clinical and approaches something closer to art. Ultimately, the film’s barbed and darkly comic commentary on human folly achieves a ruthlessness that is almost punishing.

Sabrina (USA, 1954, Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder's Sabrina has an explicit fairy-tale quality (it begins with the words "once upon a time") that betrays its Cinderella roots. Based on Samuel Taylor's stage play, the movie suffers occasionally from feelings of staginess and windiness. It is, at times, obviously formulaic and predictable, but, alas, such is the nature of most romantic comedies. Which is to say, Sabrina, much like its characters, follows conventions rather than challenges them.

Used Cars (USA, 1980, Robet Zemeckis)

Director/writer Robert Zemeckis works with much of the same team that contributed to Steven Spielberg's bloated bomb 1941, as well as Zemeckis' own charming and wacky directorial debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand to produce Used Cars, a low-brow comedy boasting easy targets (used car salesmen) and irresistibly attractive cruelty.

The Good Earth (USA, 1937, Victor Fleming)

An epic tale of love, duty, greed, and revolution, MGM's The Good Earth was an artistic and commercial success. The film's story is a stage adaptation of the successful Donald and Owen Davis production. The struggles of the empoverished farmers whose lives are constantly challenged by personal weaknesses, social pressure and natural disasters is epic in scope, though intimate in effect.

Frankenstein (USA, 1931, James Whale)

James Whale's Frankenstein is a film that works in important ways that Todd Browning's Dracula, released earlier the same year, does not. While the two films were responsible for ushering in the Horror Era at Universal Studios,  the poignancy of Frankenstein's heartbreaking tragedy and it's consistency of tone help to separate it from its only intermittently engaging predecessor.

City Lights (USA, 1931, Charlie Chaplin)

Unwilling to bend to the winds of change, which saw the introduction of the spoken word in movies three years earlier, Chaplin's is a silent film. However, he does use music and sound effects cleverly throughout, even employing them pointedly to satirize "the talkies." Other familiar targets are the hypocrisy, prissiness, and arrogance of wealthy "polite society" and cruelty to society's less fortunate, lovable outcasts like The Little Tramp himself.

Elmer Gantry (USA, Richard Brooks)

This once scandalous adaptation of the trenchant Sinclair Lewis novel may now seem a little dated, but it still has much to recommend it. It pulls few punches in its story of the hypocrisy, materialism, and opportunism at the heart of the evangelical world of Bible-thumping barnstorming revival troupes, an industry that professes to be about spiritual salvation.

Local Hero (Scotland, Bill Forsyth)

This warm-hearted fish-out-of-water tale highlights the cultural differences (and underlying similarities) between a big city American capitalist and small town Scottish villagers. Bill Forsyth directs the film with wry understatement and has gentle affection for all of his characters.

Paul Riegert plays Mac, an oil company executive sent to the quaint seaside Scottish village to encourage the townsfolk to sell out to the corporate interests.

Little Women (USA, 1933, George Cukor)

One of Hollywood's original "chick flicks" by one of Hollywood's original chick flick directors (George Cukor), this faithful adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's sentimental Civil War-era novel focuses almost exclusively on the ambitions, desires, and emotions of the titular four sisters.

The New England lasses at the centre of this tale are played with verve and pluck by Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennet, Frances Dee and Jean Parker.