Europa '51 (1952)

Rossellini and Bergman made a version of Joan of Arc together that I haven't seen, but it seems like it would be a great companion piece to Europa '51. In it, Bergman plays Irene Girard, a wealthy wife and mother who enters the movie fussing about a party she and her husband are throwing. Her young son Michel yearns for her attention, but she's more devoted to her guests. He falls down the steps and injures himself, and it comes out that he may have tried to kill himself. He dies later in the hospital, leaving Irene totally distraught. read more...

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Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

This brilliant, gutsy film features a nervy script by David Mamet andcareer-topping performances by Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, EdHarris, Kevin Spacey, Jonathan Pryce and Alec Baldwin. The men play realestate salesmen on the verge of losing their jobs and forced to contendwith outdated leads. When a snazzy new batch of leads turns up, some ofthe men consider breaking in and robbing the office to save their ownhides. Mamet and the underrated director James Foley (At Close Range,After Dark, My Sweet) opened up Mamet's play and turned it into anextraordinary cinematic experience using bold colors, rain and apowerful use of space within the widescreen frame. read more...

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• Rules ▶ Rigid or strongly constrained
• Innocence ▶ Seasoned, Savvy, Streetwise

They Shall Not Grow Old (2019)

Director Peter Jackson's assembly of restored footage, colored, rendered in 3D, and with added sound effects, voices, and narration, is an astonishing achievement, a direct distillation of war itself. read more...

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• Rules ▶ Rigid or strongly constrained
• Overall Depth ▶ Deep or penetrating

Autumn Sonata (1978)

Ingrid Bergman began making movies in her native Sweden in the 1930s. She came to Hollywood around 1939 for a remake of one of her Swedish movies, Intermezzo. She quickly became a star in movies like Casablanca (1942), Gaslight (1944), and Notorious (1946). She received seven Oscar nominations over her career and won three Oscars. read more...

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• Overall Depth ▶ Deep or penetrating

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)

I am a huge music nerd and Nirvana is perhaps my favorite band of all time. Like an earlier generation and JFK, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I learned that Kurt Cobain was dead, and it affected me deeply; like many others of my age, I had connected with his music in a profound way. (And, yes, I own an old CD of Bleach.) So it's not easy for me to watch a documentary like Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck lightly. But I will say that I liked what I saw. It made me appreciate Kurt's music and artistry anew. Morgen was given access to tons of intimate home movie footage -- so intimate that it shows Courtney Love naked -- and deals openly with Kurt's drug use, mainly as a way to kill his undiagnosed stomach pain. As with Morgen's Chicago 10, the filmmaker also uses animated sequences to flesh out Kurt's audio recordings. We see Kurt bristling at interviewers' questions, and dealing with the music biz. But, ultimately, the movie manages to paint a portrait of a man so very lonely and brilliant that your heart breaks every time he creates something. Morgen uses interviews sparingly, and mainly focuses on Love an Kurt's bandmate Krist Novoselic (who goes all the way back to the beginning of Nirvana), and the movie also serves to exonerate Love from her image as Kurt's destroyer (Kurt clearly loved her very much). The movie includes a ton of amazing music, from well-known and less-known Nirvana recordings to Kurt noodling around with the Beatles' "And I Love Her." read more...

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