Metropolis

Woman in the Moon is a sophisticated, successful synthesis of action with ideas, suspense with humor, and grand design with minute detail

It is never easy to look at Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as anything other than what Dr. Anthony Santoro quite rightly calls a “supreme propaganda film.” As that, it is nearly unparalleled in the dubious annals of film history.

In just two collaborations, the German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst and the Kansas-born Louise Brooks created a screen personality that left a permanent mark on the history of film.

Every decade has their cinematic science fiction obsessions which speak to its concerns of the age; in the 1950s films such as Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Them! capitalised on fears of alien invasion and nuclear proliferation. In the 1960s films like Barbarella and Ikarie XB-1 captured the hopes and dangers of space exploration …

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, as much as it now stands as a cinematic phenomenon and as one of the most astonishing visual releases of the silent era, was, nevertheless, something of an enigma even in its own time.

For a while, Lady Gaga was one of the most fascinating music stars that had come in a while, primarily because of her unapologetic bombast. Too often, though, she may have been written off as “weird”, from her odd fashion decisions, her performance art appearances on TV, and, of course, her music videos. Gaga, née Stefani …

What’s difficult about making this list is finding a balance between a successful Kubrickian film that either predates or pays homage to Kubrick and, for lack of a better term, is a ripoff. Now that we’ve hit the apex, it’s clear that these are, regardless of influence, quality films. What sets them apart is their …

When looking at film locations it would be shameful if the settings in the infamous German Expressionism movement were to be overlooked. A number of movements and directors over the years have Expressionism to thank. There is so much to say about this movement from the wonderful films that were born out of it, to …

Meaning of Robots Written and directed by Matt Lenski USA, 2011, imdb, RIDM My favourite film of Montreal’s International Documentary Film Festival, RIDM, so far is a poetic four minute film about an obscure New York film miniature builder and animator named Michael Sullivan. Sullivan’s New York city studio apartment looks like the before picture …

We know the greats; movies like Metropolis (1927), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977). And there are those films which maybe didn’t achieve cinematic greatness, but through their inexhaustible watchability became genre touchstones, lesser classics but classics nonetheless, like The War of the Worlds (1953), Godzilla (1954), …