"Last Year at Marienbad" - Alain Resnais, 1961

To call Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad a masterpiece of surrealism is accurate, but like trying to explain the film through conventional means (narrative, characters, dialogue, setting), it misses a lot of the major points of the film. Simultaneously, to chock it up to much more than that or to try to find any of these "points" and objectively define them is not in keeping with the thrust of the visceral experience. What is a critic to do? Recount his or her experiences.
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"Three Colors" - Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993-1994

Yesterday, some friends and I watched through the entire Three Colors trilogy. I compiled some quick thoughts about the trilogy film by film, the resulting blurbs of which are posted below. As a whole, the triptych is among the greatest cinematic achievements to which I've yet been a witness. The incredibly dynamic and varied films are helped by their marginal attachment to one another, allowing each work room to breathe as an individual piece, but always feeling better together.
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"Slacker" - Richard Linklater, 1990

Call it premature separation anxiety, but I've been seeking out resonant portraits of sub/urban malaise (tedium, more accurately) lately. I've been everywhere from Green Day'sAmerican Idiot (still in my car) to Titus Andronicus's The Monitor (never has been) to a Daniel Clowes graphic novel, Caricature. I think in Slacker, I've finally found the perfect fit. It might be all in the timing, but this is one of the most splendid films I've seen, and the fact that Linklater films keep getting that feeling out of me makes me think I need to keep on this stuff. It's mainly the blase nature of the interaction: there's a big discussion to be had about how "stagey" dialogue can get, and in a picture driven by dialogue almost exclusively, it's great to see it never get too melodramatic. That goes for all of his films that I've seen to this point.
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"This Is the End" - Seth Rogen / Evan Goldberg, 2013

A film that completely exists in the present moment, relying on the audience's submersion in the cultural lexicon from which it pulls its material and personalities, This Is the End is, like most summer comedies, a piece of cinematic ephemera. This isn't a problem in itself, though it does make recommending the film heartily difficult. Besides this, there's also the excessive runtime for the content here and the grinding halt that the film comes to around the time that the apocalypse begins.
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"Black Orpheus" - Marcel Camus, 1959

Black Orpheus is a very unique aesthetic experience. It won the Palme d'Or on the back of its daring combination of Greek tragedy and the upbeat sound of Brazilian bossa nova and other musics played in the background of the exuberant Caranaval. It remains a treat for eyes and ears, but many minds might find politics to take issue with here.
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"Examined Life" - Astra Taylor, 2008

Examined Life essentially starts with a disclaimer as filmmaker Astra Taylor backpedals to stay facing the first full interviewee of the sort-of-philosophy-travelogue, Avital Ronell. She poses the question (something that will be done by every subject of the film consistently for the next roughly 80 minutes) of whether or not film can really clasp down on philosophy the way a book can. She specifically doubts her own structure right from the beginning; that is, eight ten-minute conversations with philosophers captured by a camera. Unfortunately, she might be correct in her misgivings.
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"Scorpio Rising" - Kenneth Anger, 1963

I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, to be perfectly honest. Kenneth Anger's 1963 short, a film steeped in controversy (going so far as to inspire judicial literature on freedom of artistic expression in film after an altercation with neo-Nazis at its premiere), is limited in its contemporary subversion only by how effectively it and the counterculture to which it belonged shifted perceptions throughout the sixties of sexuality.
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