Paulina Borsook's "Movies for Adults"

List creator: GreenCineStaff Created on: November 27, 2005 - 12:10 PM PST Description: A list to accompany "Movies for Adults." All comments are Paulina's...

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	movie title	related list	average rating	MPAA rating	watch	rent	buy
	Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)
Ok, it's a tearjerker and co-stars a stunningly young Robert DeNiro and it's about baseball and death and you'll never forget the last lines. Michael Moriarty plays a crafy ballplayer who sells insurance against the day his time in the majors is over.
	The Battle of Algiers (Criterion Collection) (1966)			Not Rated
Political agitprop so good that you can't believe it's not journalism. US military personnel still watch it to see how guerrilla terrorist cells function.
	Bite the Bullet (1975)
A postmodern Western sans sentimentality far more three-dimensional than Unforgiven<. No Peckinpah-inspired beauty of violence. And oh, the female character is neither hooker nor girlfriend (only in place to demonstrate the lead is het) nor mother.
	Black Sunday (1977)
Complex, beautifully-photographed thriller (Arab terrorists! Superbowl Sunday!).
	Blow-Up (1966)			Not Rated
Antonioni's 'yes but what does it mean' sinister/eerie/gorgeous photomontage set in 60s London. One of the most perversely sexy scenes ever filmed: Vanessa Redgrave being asked to move in opposition to the music being played on a record...
	Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Beautiful outlaws and fine character actors robbing banks and larking about through Depression-era US. Before Warren Beatty got soft in the head...
	A Boy and His Dog (1975)
Snarky dystopian sci-fi in which, yes, the dog is smarter than the boy.
	A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Panoramic World War II epic lacking Spielbergian sappiness.
	Bullitt (1968)
Not only the El Cid of San Francisco car chases, but a quiet policier with surprising plot twists.
	Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
A cowboy/outlaw/buddy flick that never took itself seriously yet ends up exalted.
	The American Film Theatre: Butley (1974)
Alan Bates as you've never seen him: a nasty morally failed academic with an ex-wife prob and a boyfriend prob.
	Cat Ballou (1965)			Not Rated
Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin (as dissolute cowboy) in a comic Western, back in the day where even an attractive actress like Fonda isn't there only because she's a hooker/girlfriend/lonely career girl.
	The China Syndrome (1979)
Nuclear power examined, and media politics excoriated, weirdly and utterly coincidentally released when Three Mile Island blew.
	A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Kubrick brilliance; the movie is better than the book and poses the question, which is worse, the sexy thugs or the totalitarian government that goes after them.
	Cutter's Way (1981)
Dark Marxist teaching-story/fable set in 1970s Santa Barbara. Whatever happened to Lisa Eichorn's career?
	The Day of the Jackal (1973)
Espionage/paid-assassin thriller against a backdrop of mid-century French politics.
	Day for Night (1973)
Truffaut's absolutely loving and sly homage to movies, all movies, with as many cinematic references/in-jokes as in a Pynchon novel.
	Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Gritty New York crime caper, set a time when Al Pacino hadn't become a rococo screaming self-parody and the issue of gender-reassignment wasn't considered either smirk-worthy or celebratory.
	Don't Look Now (1973)
Nicolas Roeg's beautiful/scary love/poison-pen letter to the creepiness of Venice, a ghost story with perhaps the best het sex scenes ever filmed (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie: hot damn!)
	The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck (1967)			Not Rated
Horror-movie parody! Sharon Tate! Roman Polanski! 'Nuff said!
	The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)			Not Rated
Endurance in the desert; man against the elements; ripping good yarn in the boys' own survival tradition.
	Georgy Girl (1966)			Not Rated
So sophisticated compared to the well-known song that came from it; memorable scene: Charlotte Rampling as classical cellist, snorting about her audience "It's Beethoven night, the pigs!"
	The Haunting (1963)
From the Shirley Jackson novel, scary movie in the best sense because you never really see the things that are going bump in the night.
	The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
On how all nice Jewish Boys want shiksa ice princesses instead of zaftig nice Jewish girls who get egg salad in their teeth and are never ever named Kelly...
	Hiroshima Mon Amour (Criterion Collection) (1959)			Not Rated
Alain Resnais on the heartbreak of war, intertwining the love between a French girl and a German soldier during Occupation, and her later affair with a Japanese man dealing with the aftermath of Hiroshima.
	The Ipcress File (1965)			Not Rated
Classic 60s Cold War spy flick, sort of the anti-Bond, in that its world is grim and grimey and kind of working class and keeps good company with the gray world of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
	La Guerre Est Finie (1966)			Not Rated
Another Resnais on the heartbreak of war, only this time its radical politics and a weary sheriff, the Communist struggle against Franco, and how things fall apart. Oh, and a love triangle.
	The Last Picture Show (Criterion) (1971)
Set in a small dying Texas town, a story about staying on and getting out - or giving up. It's the reason director Peter Bogdanovich's name will live forever.
	The Last Wave (Criterion Collection) (1977)
Peter Weir's mystical magical-realist tale of aboriginal and European-descendant fate in Australia.
	The Lion in Winter (1968)
"Give out? Give up? Give in?" Witty adult story of nasty geopolitics in medieval France and England, with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn giving as good as they get.
	The Longest Day (1962)
Like Saving Private Ryan, only better.
	McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
"Money and pain, money and pain", a Robert Altman exercise not in ensemble performance but in situation ethics: what does it mean for a miner who loves a madame to pay for their lovemaking? The scene with Julie Christie smoking opium is a fine thing.
	Medium Cool (Criterion) (1969)
Genius cinematographer Haskell Wexler's fact-and-fiction blend evoking the apocalyptic look and feel of the late 60s state of the union, set in and amongst the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention and its police riots. "Cool it, Haskell, this is for real!"
	Mississippi Mermaid (1969)
Complex plot inspired by a short-story by Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote Rear Window, and while mostly forgotten now, was sort of a Raymond Chandler/Elmore Leonard figure for decades in American publishing.
	Mr. Klein (1976)
An understated performance from pretty-boy Alain Delon in a story of how a Frenchman struggles during the Occupation to establish that his ancestry is, indeed, Alsation and not Jewish - and the fat lot of good it does him. A subtle Holocaust story.
	Morgan! (1966)			Not Rated
Zaniness, madness, gorilla masks and hanging out by Karl Marx's London grave in the 1960s. Features David Warner before he started getting cast as all those villians; directed by Karel Reisz, a fabu guy with a camera.
	More (1969)
Drugs, sex, and an amoral femme fatale in early scenes of decadence on Ibiza in the late 1960s.
	My Brilliant Career (1979)
Early Judy Davis/Sam Neill signifier of the world breakout of Australian cinema, based on the classic feminist novel of the same name. How can I be who I need to be and still have this guy love me? A perennial problem.
	My Night at Maud's (1969)
The first and best of Eric Rohmer's moral tales, about the woman you're drawn to versus the woman you are supposed to be with. Lots of conversation, no sex, but all the truer for it.
	Nashville (1975)
Altman's stunning ensemble movie, about both the Nashville scene and the larger, mid-70s American zeitgeist, with a phenomenal cast, those merging/overheard conversations, and some great musical performances.
	Night Moves (1975)
Private detective Gene Hackman gets in way over his head as a private eye ostensibly on a missing-person case. Darker and more complicated with each passing minute.
	Our Man Flint (1965)			Not Rated
James Coburn as a self-mocking American-equiv to James Bond - as urbane, but he and the plot are totally without self-seriousness.
	Padre Padrone (1977)
About the preciousness of language, how brutality gets passed down from father to son, sheepherder culture - and Italy.
	The President's Analyst (1967)			Not Rated
Satire about US politics, back when satire was allowed to exist. Godfrey Cambridge matters here, because it was a first glimpse of a black man cast not for reasons of heroic uplift but because his character (the government functionary who vets Coburn) is the best man for the job.
	Eclipse Series 33 - Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr. (Criterion) (Disc 2 of 2): Putney Swope / Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight (1969)
Satire about what happens when the token black takes over an advertising agency in late 60s New York and all radical hell breaks loose: howzabout that Hells' Angels-looking-guy with the Mensa jacket?
	Red Desert (Criterion) (1964)			Not Rated
Another suggestive hermetic Antonioni tone poem, with the striking Monica Vitti.
	Robin and Marian (1976)
Sean Connery/Audrey Hepburn vehicle about the graying out/afterlife of Robin Hood and Maid Marion: he's burnt out from the Crusades, and she's joined a nunnery, and they are beautiful, rueful adults gazing at mortality.
	Saint Jack (1979)
Peter Bogdanovich's second best movie, about the struggle to conform to his own best self-concept of an American pimp in Singapore, played by Ben Gazarra. Nothing at all like the gangsta/pimp culture of hip-hop.
	Shakespeare Wallah (1965)
Very early Merchant/Ivory production about a fading, fraying group of traveling actors in post-colonial India.
	The Shop on Main Street (Criterion Collection) (1965)			Not Rated
Part of the brilliant Czech cinema of the 60s, another quiet Holocaust tale about small choices and small acts of heroism. An example on the small side of the scale of Stalin's dictum that "a single murder is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."
	Soldier of Orange (1978)
Tragic Dutch movie about a small group of young men and how they survive/battle/lose against the Occupation.
	The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Criterion) (1965)
The first Le Carré adaptation, deeply unsentimental about how there were hardly any more good guys on the Western side of the espionage Cold War than behind the Iron Curtain. Bleak, with that good Le Carré plotting.
	Sunday Bloody Sunday (Criterion) (1971)
Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch both love and lose the same perfidious beautiful young man. Kind of like Manhattan, only the story exists in the larger societal context of the liberal architect-class and the misconnections seem melancholy, rather than creepy and/or about self-deception.
	Teorema (1968)
Pasolini's version of what happens when a beautiful ephebe (Terence Stamp) shows up to have it off with everyone in an upper-crust Italian family.
	The Tin Drum (Criterion Collection) (1979)
Terrific adaptation of the black comic Günter Grass novel about Germany during and just after the reign of the Third Reich.
	True Grit (1969)
Fine Western featuring a plucky young woman and John Wayne redeeming himself as a mangy old cowboy, not a macho asshole.
	Walk on the Wild Side (1962)			Not Rated
Forgotten beauties Laurence Harvey and Capucine in this naughty tale about a 1930s bordello; Barbara Stanwyck as a lesbian madame, and young Jane Fonda thrown into the mix. Written by gritty realists Nelson Algren and John Fante.
	Who'll Stop the Rain? (1978)
Smashing adaptation of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, about drug-dealing and running and post-Vietnam America. Few people have the ear for dialogue of screenwriter Judith Rascoe. Tuesday Weld, Nick Nolte, Michael Moriarty, and Anthony Zerbe: woohoo!
	Woman in the Dunes (1964)			Not Rated
Adaptation of the Japanese novel of the same name, ultimately an allegory about how we often choose to stay in our cages and like that escape from freedom.
	The World of Henry Orient (1964)			Not Rated
It's almost beside the point that this was a perfect role for Peter Sellers (seedy adulterous concert pianist); it's the miracle of a movie about two young teenaged-girls, their friendship, and their capers: neither bowheads nor nymphets but people.
	Costa Gavras' Z (Criterion) (1969)
The mother of all political thrillers (about the former Greek dictatorship) - with that famous score/theme music.