TOKYO STORY (1953)
I programmed Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story for my college film society because I knew of its reputation and had always wanted to see it. I was still in thrall to the idea that great movie direction was about the legerdemain of elaborate camera angles and tracking shots. Here was a movie so profoundly human in its rigorous simplicity that the camera didn’t need to move at all. It was a valuable lesson.
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)
Even seeing Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter for the first time on daytime TV, pockmarked by commercials, I was poleaxed by its originality. The best movies usually vibrated with a single pitch—scary, funny, romantic, melodramatic—and yet Laughton somehow stirred those disparities into a ghastly, unified whole. Added bonus: it was scripted by James Agee, our greatest film critic and a personal hero of mine.
WEEKEND (1967)
When it came to rejiggering the medium, Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s was ahead of the pack. His inventiveness was dizzying, even when I wasn’t sure what he was inventing. For Godard, the film frame was a portal into a world as distinctively his as, say, Bergman’s or Buñuel’s. Weekend’s traffic-gridlock sequence is one of the great flourishes in cinema—a 10-minute tracking shot that encompasses in its inexorable sweep the entirety of the human comedy.
McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
It always bothered me that actors in the movies, even the so-called realistic ones, rarely talked over one another. Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller was not only a visual marvel; it also revolutionized the way we experienced the buzz and hiss and hum of how people actually interact. I listened to this movie as fervently as I watched it.
Read Peter Rainer’s “A Film Critic Takes Direction“
Peter Rainer is film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He was a finalist in 1998 for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and is editor of the essay collection Love and Hisses and the author of Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era. He was the writer and co-producer of the A&E Biographies on Sidney Poitier and the Hustons. A former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, he has served as film critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine, New Times, and New York magazine, and his work has also appeared in such publications as the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Vogue. He is a three time winner of the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award for best online critic. He has taught and lectured on college campuses worldwide and was on the main jury for the Venice and Montreal film festivals.
