Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

I often have a hard time defending my admiration for Brian De Palma. In this country he's often been considered a rip-off artist who pillages from Hitchcock, Kubrick, Antonioni and Michael Powell, as well as a misogynist and a violent creep. It gets especially difficult when discussing such admittedly obvious turkeys as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and last year's Mission to Mars. But in France he's considered an auteur, a visual stylist of the first degree (the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema voted his film Carlito's Way the best film of the 1990s).

If one can get past the shaky plots of some of his films (Snake Eyes, for example), he proves he's a man wrestling with some serious demons on film, even more so than Hitchcock ever did. He's obsessed with voyeurism, sneaking peaks at stuff we're not supposed to see, and with the movies themselves a voyeuristic medium, he's a natural born filmmaker.

Reviewer: Glenn Heath Jr.
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Mike Leigh's rapturous Topsy-Turvy, now on a lovely new DVD from Criterion (supervised by cinematographer Dick Pope), isn't so much an argument against auteurism, but a concurrence for the beauty of collaboration. Over the course of the sweeping multi-character narrative, Leigh mixes performance, practice, and discourse with effortless precision, showing the "symptoms of fatigue" concerning the artistic process, but also the power of sudden inspiration.

W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent), Sir Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner), the troupe of actors led by Richard Temple (Timothy Spall), the costume designers, set decorators, choreographers, producers, and couriers all make a substantial impact on the gloriously textural production of "The Mikado", yet no one artist can claim sole ownership. Leigh's methodical pre-production methodologies (often made up of months of rehearsals) literally appear in front of the camera, and avenues of disappointment and possibility seem organically woven into the mise-en-scene.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

The essayist Phillip Lopate came up with a perfect phrase for Luchino Visconti's style: operatic realism. Like his contemporaries Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Visconti experimented with a realistic style, though it can be argued that he made only one genuine "Italian Neo-Realist" film, La Terra Trema (1948). Visconti was interested in adding personal flourishes to his films in addition to the realism and the social commentary, and his films eventually grew bigger and showier through the decades, while focusing on more personal themes.

It can be argued that 1954's Senso (1954) is the culmination of Visconti's work, the perfect collision of style, themes and look --and perhaps his greatest film.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

In 2002, the "restored" version of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis was released on big screens. That version had been expanded using notes and research to add text cards that filled in the holes in the story. But even though the visuals remained very impressive, they seemed to serve nothing more than a simplistic, flat, overwrought story. Cut to 2008, when an almost complete 16mm copy of Metropolis was discovered in Argentina, containing some 25 minutes of footage that had been given up for lost. (It's still shy about five minutes.) If there was any fear that the extra footage could not possibly fix the movie's inherent flaw, the story, this new, "complete" Metropolis puts those fears to rest.