Movies about Twentieth century
OK, as long as the simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have shaken the foundations of the pantheon and got us debating canons — again: Near the end of the last millennium, I decided to do something difficult and convoluted and thoroughly silly. On this particular occasion I determined to figure out which 100 movies were the most highly regarded at the close of the century. I think this was in late 1998 or early 1999. But more recent films wouldn’t have registered very high anyway, because I was using a larger historical sampling to compile the results.
I came up with some complex point scale for rating the movies by the awards and honors they had received, using a mixture of domestic and international, popular and critical sources. I no longer have any recollection of the formula I used, but I’m sure it was at least as complicated as the one for Coca-Cola. I know (given my personal bent) that I weighted, for example, the «Sight & Sound» international critics’ poll more highly than, say, the Oscars. And I tried to find a mathematical way to properly consider and weigh American with non-English-language films (given the restrictions and biases of some sources), and older films with newer ones. The sources I used were (in no particular order): Academy Awards, «Sight & Sound» polls (1952, ’62, ’72, ’82, ’92), the first AFI 100 list, the National Film Registry (American films selected for preservation in the Library of Congress — which had to be at least 10 years old), the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards (1975 — ), the New York Film Critics Circle (1935 — ), and the National Society of Film Critics (1966 — ).
Although it seems inconceivable to me now, I actually put together several charts (spreadsheets!), so you could view the lists and the movies’ individual honors, not only by rank, but by director, title (alphabetically), year/decade, — and a comprehensive list of the 400+ titles that came under consideration, given my sources.
I doubt — and I hope — I will never be that anal again. But what I liked about the results was that they reflected a mix of «art films» («The Passion of Joan of Arc,» «The Bicycle Thief»), silents («Greed,» «Intolerance,» «The Gold Rush») and popular titles («West Side Story,» «Annie Hall,» «Schindler’s List»). I was also pleased with the distribution over the decades, a little more balanced than you usually see in polls: two films from the 1910s; six from the ’20s; 19 from the ’30s; 16 from the ’40s; 29 from the ’50s; 19 from the ’60s; 21 from the ’70s; 13 from the ’80s; and 14 from the ’90s (which weren’t quite over yet).
Point of interest: Bergman had three films on the list: «Persona» (22), «Wild Strawberries» (66), and «Fanny and Alexander» (84). Antonioni had one: «L’Avventura» (8).
Welles and Chaplin each had two films in the top 25. Other directors represented in the upper quarter include: Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Sergei Eisenstein, Stanley Donen, Steven Spielberg, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Vittorio De Sica, Woody Allen, Erich von Stroheim, Elia Kazan, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Robert Wise, D.W. Griffith, Jean Vigo, and Michael Curtiz.
The Big List begins like this:
1 «Citizen Kane» 2 «The Rules of the Game» 3 «Vertigo» 4 «8 1/2» «The Battleship Potemkin» 6 «Singin’ in the Rain» 7 «The Gold Rush» 8 «City Lights» «L’Avventura» 10 «Schindler’s List» 11 «The Searchers» 12 «2001: A Space Odyssey» 13 «The Bicycle Thief» (aka «Bicycle Thieves») 14 «Annie Hall» 15 «Greed» 16 «On the Waterfront» 17 «The Passion of Joan of Arc» 18 «All About Eve» 19 «The Magnificent Ambersons» 20 «The Best Years of Our Lives» 21 «West Side Story» 22 «Intolerance» «L’Atlante» «Persona» 25 «Casablanca»
100 All-Time Favorite Movies of the 20th Century
Must-see movies: Get to know cinema’s greats Take a journey through the makers and shapers of celluloid history. From horror to romance, noir to slapstick, adventure to tragedy, western to new wave, this selection gathers the greats of 20th century cinema into one indispensable guide to movie gold. The collection is arranged chronologically and in an extra-handy format. Film entries include a synopsis, cast/crew listings, technical information, actor/director bios, trivia, and lists of awards, as well as film stills, production photos, and the original poster for each film From Metropolis to Modern Times, A Clockwork Orange to Bunuel’s The Young and the Damned, from the blockbusters to lesser-known masterpieces, thumb through and transform a quiet evening into an unforgettable screen encounter.
Sale price €21,95 Regular price (/)
Přidat do košíku
Sale price €21,95 Regular price (/)
One of the few silver linings amidst this year of lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been the opportunity for extensive self-reflection. The historical myths so often taken for granted in American classrooms have been upended, while our own capacity for change had been tested like never before. Perhaps no country has produced satires more fitting for this interminable period than Canada, which broke records at this year’s Emmys with the sixth and final season of its soul-cleansing sitcom, “Schitt’s Creek,” featuring career-best work from Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. Serving as a 21st century spin on fellow SCTV alum Harold Ramis’ classic film, “Groundhog Day,” the show centers on privileged family members who are forced to live together in a cheap motel once they’ve lost their fortune. Only after enduring a purgatorial series of humiliations do these characters begin evolving into better people, and their newfound humanity is portrayed with disarming sincerity. Of course, redemption is easier for individuals to achieve than an entire nation, and in Matthew Rankin’s captivatingly surreal debut feature, “The Twentieth Century,” the less admirable and frequently glossed-over aspects of Canadian identity are lampooned with dazzling ingenuity. Regardless of one’s whereabouts or knowledge of the Great White North, viewers will likely find this comic fable chillingly relatable, as the world teeters on the brink of totalitarian collapse.
Though the film is ostensibly about the early years of William Lyon Mackenzie King that preceded his three non-consecutive terms as Canada’s prime minister, it is less of a biopic than a daydream had by a bored high school student in history class, as his thoughts heedlessly shift toward far more diverting memories of Monty Python. To those unschooled in his legacy, King may seem like an odd choice for ridicule, considering he successfully led his nation through World War II while forming crucial social welfare programs. However, a closer look at his life reveals numerous eccentricities—his lack of social skills, his status as a potentially closeted bachelor, the influence of séances on his political decisions—and more than a few potentially catastrophic blind spots. He failed to take the Great Depression seriously, disliked President Roosevelt’s New Deal, barred Chinese immigrants and Jewish refugees from entering his country and even predicted in the 1930s that Adolf Hitler would one day be considered a hero on the order of Joan of Arc. “He is really one who truly loves his fellow-men, and his country, and would make any sacrifice for their good,” King naively wrote in his journal, assuming he could help guide Hitler, and Germany as a whole, to a place of peace. This staggering level of hubris affirms that the prime minister had his head at least partially lodged in the clouds, which makes this film’s aesthetic drenched in heightened artifice entirely appropriate.
Inspired by the aching vulnerabilities voiced by King in his own diaries, “The Twentieth Century” takes the form of a dizzying portal into the politician’s subconscious, casting real people from his life into roles that are either fictional or composites, just as King himself recast Hitler as Joan of Arc. For example, Lord Minto, an amateur sports enthusiast, is transformed here into Lord Muto (Séan Cullen, channeling Jim Broadbent in “Moulin Rouge!”), a monstrous dictator spewing hateful lies about the Boer people of South Africa whom he hopes to exterminate, claiming they are half-man, half-elephant. Rankin has particular fun with Dr. Wakefield (Kee Chan), a sinister character that the director admitted at the film’s TIFF premiere was inspired by John Harvey Kellogg’s alleged plan for his popular cornflakes cereal to prevent its consumers from masturbating. King’s sexual shame and repression, which may have been fueled by the feelings he supposedly harbored for his appointed Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir, are manifested in a foot fetish that threatens to become “a crime against national dignity.” Wakefield places an alarm on King’s genitals that will sound whenever he’s aroused, resulting in one of many uproarious set pieces. As portrayed by the sublimely funny Dan Beirne, King comes off as a petulant momma’s boy who is so thoroughly clueless, he continuously mistakes a harp for a trumpet. His idea of cheering up an ailing girl (Satine Scarlett Montaz) at the Institute for Defective Children is to gift her a mass-produced badge displaying his face, while handing her a flimsy handkerchief when she coughs up blood.
Every frame of this picture is an absurdist marvel, with its expressionist sets, ill-fated puppets and ejaculating cactuses. Not only does the film’s compressed aspect ratio and old-fashioned visuals warrant comparison to the work of fellow Canadian visionary Guy Maddin, Rankin also nails the celebrated filmmaker’s distinctive brew of humor, irony and nagging melancholia. In true Pythonesque form, various actors are cast against gender, including frequent Maddin collaborator Louis Negin as King’s mother, whose derisive cackle would fit snugly into Room 237 at the Overlook Hotel. Dany Boivin’s art direction makes striking use of a triangular motif, seen in everything from romantic ice flows to desolate hills peppered with tree stumps. Whether this imagery is meant to represent the “North Atlantic triangle,” which notes the dependency of Canada on strong relations with the U.K. and U.S. (and may have spurred the country’s support of British oppression during the Second Boer War) is left up to one’s interpretation. Of course, such a scholarly approach to describing this picture fails to convey just how funny it is throughout, especially when the characters’ antics are at their most ridiculous. One of the film’s funniest sequences finds the candidates for prime minister being tested on leadership skills such as ribbon-cutting, butter-churning, endurance tickling and waiting your turn (King is praised for exuding the valued Canadian trait of passive-aggression).
Like the ensemble of “Schitt’s Creek,” King does eventually flirt with making noble life decisions that aren’t determined by the creaking wheel of destiny. As he becomes disillusioned by the corruption in his society, he considers running away with the infatuated French Nurse Lapointe (Sarianne Cormier), who fuses together the real-life identities of King’s long-time lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, and a nurse whom he became briefly entangled with (“We could conjugate French verbs together!” he sighs). Yet it is King’s passive obedience and tendency to settle for middle-of-the-road mediocrity that Rankin’s anti-establishment farce aims to skewer most of all, and by the time it arrived at its deliberately disquieting conclusion, I found myself too unsettled to crack a smile. It’s impossible not to think of certain modern-day fear-mongering tyrants when Lord Muto observes, “Give the people hope and there will be endless disappointment, but fill them with nightmares, and they will follow you straight into hell.” Sometimes the most useful thing a satire can do is deliver laughs that are so scathing, they become lodged in your throat and may take a while to digest. At a time when normalcy has routinely backflipped into a pool of insanity, “The Twentieth Century” makes perfectly perverse sense.
Nyní se hraje ve virtuálních kinech.
Matt Fagerholm
Matt Fagerholm je literární redaktor na RogerEbert.com a je členem Chicago Film Critics Association.
We collect Movies about Twentieth century rating based on ratings and reviews on popular services. To collect Movies about Twentieth century we analyze rendition, popular services, comments, people reviews, forum comments and make our own rating. If you think there is a movie missing in the selection, you can leave a comment with the name of the movie that should be included in the selection. Let’s make a rating Movies about Twentieth century together!
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/last-of-us-streaming-8d93d5bc3ace46eea8cb15eea75320a5.jpg?w=350&resize=350,250)
