Blog

*Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

When you experience a towering creative work like Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA, you sometimes start to try to figure out what sets it apart.

So many able talented skilled moviemakers have made films about a strange co-dependent psychological relationship between two or three people. Why does PERSONA rise to Mt. Olympus levels?

A few key thoughts hit right away:

-The style. Bergman, already twenty plus years into his career, had honed his craft. He had a true magic bag of cinema tricks and he used many of them here in exhilarating new ways. The movie opens with…

Some movies work on the sheer force of their conviction. Their righteous indignation.

BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK finds WWII vet John J.MacReedy (Tracy) coming into a small one street Californian western town in 1945 to deliver a medal to the Japanese farmer father of a man who died saving MacReedy's life in Italy. Macreedy soon discovers the Japanese father was killed in an act of drunken racism and the guilty men of the town would rather kill MacReedy than let him get out of town alive with the secret.

It's a nasty morality play of a movie. As MacReedy realizes …

This is a moving, deeply thought out piece of cinema. 

Gustav, an absentee film director father (Skaarsgard) returns to the lives of his two adult daughters to direct a movie in their childhood home dealing with trauma that affects them all.

Nora, Gustav's eldest daughter, is an acclaimed stage actress but refuses her father's request to play the starring role in the movie. Agnes, Gustav's younger daughter finds herself mediating between the two estranged artists. American star Rachel Kemp (Fanning), a fan of Gustav's work, agrees to step in. 

This is a kind of movie that already starts in a hole. A movie about movie people making a movie to deal with their undealt realities can be a self-important pretentious groaner.

And yet, strangely, it's a genre that has worked a surprising amount of times. Think …

COVER-UP, for this writer, is the first necessary movie of 2025. 

It's a documentary about, and with the participation in interviews of, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who has broken stories from the 1968 Vietnam Mai Lai massacre to the 2000's Abu Grahib Iraq prison tortures. If the documentary is presenting its most recent footage correctly, it appears Hersh is currently working on stories about Israel's potential war crimes in Gaza.

Hersh is 88 years old.

Something happened to American cinema in the 1980's that accelerated in the 1990's and feels full blown in the 2020's-a retreat from dangerous topical work.

Of course there have been masterpieces. Of course there have been hard hitting movies. But our culture, as a whole, feels like it wants to celebrate past accomplishments without …

This writer found Ukranian moviemaker Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 released EARTH, often hailed as his masterpiece, inscrutable.

In a glorious way.

That's not to say that there isn't a clear story and viewpoint here. There is. EARTH, a silent Soviet movie in the idea-based editing montage tradition of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and others, tells the story of a Ukranian village that commits to farming collectivization. The people, lead by enthusiastic young true believers turn to communist ideals of progress and technology while repudiating old systems of orthodox religion and oppression at the hands of rich landowners.

Yet, there's something else going on in EARTH. The movie starts with a sequence…

This is a movie that hits you different once you have children. You have to sit there and ask "What if this had been my child?" "What if this had been my loss?"

Spike Lee's documentary 4 LITTLE GIRLS deals with the horrific 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little girls in the basement who were getting ready to go to Sunday school after play outside.

The documentary is one of Lee's best works but the making of it must have been frought with trip wires. 

How do you make a movie about such a horrific topic with any kind of objectivity or critical analysis?

And how does a moviemaker like Lee find a through line, stay true to his vision and voice, but not overcomplicate or harm the work with unnecessary stylistics or imposed thematic overlays?

To everyone's credit…

DAYS OF BEING WILD (wri & dir by Wong Kar Wai, cinematography by Christopher Doyle, w/Leslie Cheung, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung, Hong Kong, 94mns, 1990)

*Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

We've written about Wong Kar Wai's full "Love" trilogy (DAYS OF BEING WILD, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, 2046) in our IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE review. Today, we want to focus in on just the first movie (which is also our personal favorite) DAYS OF BEING WILD.

DAYS OF BEING WILD was, in many ways, the movie that launched Wong Kar Wai on the international cinema scene. Only his second film as director, DAYS bears all the hallmarks of Kar-Wai's mature style-only with zero affectation or mannerism.

Once CHUNGKING EXPRESS and IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE exploded like firecrackers on cinema screens everywhere, Kar Wai started…

*Part of Martin Scorsese's WORLD CINEMA project which is currently streaming many of its titles as of this writing (Nov 2025) on the Criterion Channel.

MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT, based on the 1965 novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoes, proves that cinema can communicate nuance, indeterminancy, and illuminate that vast gray continent in which most of us live our entire lives.

38 year old Sergio, a Cuban bourgeois, decides to remain in Havana after the 1959 revolution, while the rest of his upper middle class family, including his wife, immigrates to the USA. Alone in his nice apartment, Sergio wanders the streets, has an affair with Elena, a young Cuban woman who wants to be an actress, thinks about his wife and other lovers, and watches the events of history unfold around him.

Sergio, played with impressive power and precision by…

If Hong Kong master movie makers had sibling days with western moviemakers, you might pair John Woo with Sam Peckinpah, Tsui Hark with Steven Spielberg, and Johnnie To with either David Fincher or Howard Hawks.

While Woo and To often get compared to French police & gangster auteur Jean Pierre Melville (Le Samuroi, La Cerc Rogue, Un Flic, etc), I'm not quite sure that's right. Melville's spare, laconic style of masculine codes can sometimes be almost mannered. 

Woo, Hark, and To have discernible stylistic trademarks but their pictures more comfortably traffic in popcorn and crowd-pleasing. These are movies MEANT to be enjoyed even more than analyzed.

Still, there's a crisp sly undercurrent of question asking beneath …

Movies like Costa-Gavras STATE OF SIEGE and Z are part of a high watermark for political cinema from the mid 1960's through the late 1970's. Filmmakers like Gavras, Francesco Rosi, Fassbinder, Paddy Chayevsky among many others were making movies that met the moment head on.

While many (if not almost all) of the moviemakers' political sentiments lean left, there is still a journalistic rigor and clarity that defines this era's work. Agree or disagree with the implied conclusions, viewers almost always feel like they understand better the situation, the stakes, and the moving parts of these complex political moments.

These movies challenge us. Never have such political movies been more necessary than our current moment. Who will stick their neck out to try and document and understand the world-shaking events occurring right now?

Greek-French moviemaker Costa-Gavras made several masterpieces in the political genre…

Edward Yang's YI YI is an elusive movie. In the best possible way.

Like a pond you go to swim in only to realize its depth is much deeper than anticipated. Maybe you're even swimming in something oceanic. So far below your treading feet as to evoke a kind of cosmic fear. 

Yang, along with Hou Hsiou Hsien and others, formed the Taiwanese new wave that produced a host of complex masterpieces in the 1980's-2000's. 

YI YI tells the story of the modern-day Jian family who live in Taiwan's capital, Taipei. We specifically see how the stories of NJ, the soft-spoken father, Ting-Ting, the good hearted elder sister, and Yang-Yang, the curious, mischievous youngest son weave in strange ways that imply an abstraction or transcendence.

The movie often seems like it's going to be…

Cut to the chase-this is an incredible movie. It doesn't fully work for reasons we'll get into. But in terms of its most important ambition-to be a hard nosed, edge of your seat action-suspense movie-it's wild in its success.

William Friedkin's SORCERER, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic 1953 French thriller, finds four nothing to lose men in a dangerous Latin American town agreeing to a suicide mission to drive explosives 200 miles through impossible jungle for a payout that will let them start new lives.

Friedkin deviates the most from the original at the very start when he…