This large volume describes one moment in seventy one different movies, complete with stills that capture that scene. David Thomson is one of the great authorities of cinema, and I already have posted my views on two of his other books. The first film is by Eadweard Muybridge from 1887 and is titled "One Woman Standing, Another Sitting and Crossing Legs". Although Thomson tells us it "is not a movie, yet it is a series of sequential stills". The next "seems like a big jump" to 1928 and Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" and so on through the years. Ending with The Coen Brothers "Burn After Reading" from 2008.
Typically, we get a couple of pages describing the moment and why it feels important. What it has done is to get me to look out for the following films, some for the first time, some that I haven't seen for a while:
"Touch of Evil" by Orson Welles 1958
"Anatomy of a Murder" by Otto Preminger 1959
"Blow Up" by Antonioni 1966
"Don't Look Now" by Nicolas Roeg 1973
"China Town" by Roman Polanski 1974
"Taxi Driver" by Martin Scorsese 1976
"Blue Velvet" by David Lynch 1986
"One False Move" by Carl Franklin 1992
"The Piano Teacher" by Michael Haneke 2001
"In the Cut" by Jane Campion 2003 "One of the great films of the twenty-first century"
"Birth" by Jonathon Glazer 2004
"A History of Violence" by David Cronenberg 2005
"Zodiac" by David Fincher 2007
"Burn After Reading" by Joel and Ethan Coen 2008 "One of the funniest films made this century"
There are obviously many great films missing from my list, but they are far too familiar to watch before those above. Such as "Citizen Kane", "Gone with the Wind", "Strangers on a Train", "The Godfather", "Psycho" to name but a few. And of course the film of the cover photo: "Sunset Boulevard".
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