The Essentials
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The Playlist15 commentslike22tweet25
The Essentials: The 5 Best William Friedkin Films
The decent opening weekend for the NC-17 "Killer Joe" should be celebrated for a number of reasons, but perhaps most notably, it marks something of a comeback for director William Friedkin. The helmer was, for a brief period in the 1970s, the most powerful filmmaker in Hollywood, but a series of cri...
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The Playlist7 commentslike3tweet14
The Essentials: 5 John Schlesinger Films You Can't Miss
He’s not a name that many young filmmakers reference these days, but British director John Schlesinger quietly managed a career spanning five decades, with a small fistful of classics to his name. A former actor, Schlesinger moved into documentaries in the late 1950s, graduating to features soon aft...
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The Playlist25 commentslike55tweet26
The Films Of Christopher Nolan: A Retrospective
We can all agree at this point that a certain sub-set of Christopher Nolan's fans are out of hand, what with the death threats to critics and all. But even if we were one of those who didn't like "The Dark Knight Rises," or indeed the rest of Nolan's output, we suspect that we'd still be glad he exi...
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The Playlist6 commentslike164tweet72
The Films Of Jim Jarmusch: A Retrospective
There's no one in independent film quite like Jim Jarmusch, one of American cinema's most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Born to Episcopalian parents in Ohio in 1953, the director fell in love with B-movie double bills his mother left him in as a child, and fell into counter-culture arthouse movies in hi...
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The Playlist1 commentlike24tweet10
The Films Of Cameron Crowe: A Retrospective
It may be hard to believe, but Cameron Crowe is 55 today. The eternally boyish journalist turned writer-director feels, perhaps because of his alter-ego in "Almost Famous," as though he'll always be seventeen. But for a certain generation, he's been a figurehead for his journalism (at Rolling Stone ...
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The Playlist6 commentslike10tweet15
The Essentials: 5 Of The Best Peter O'Toole Performances As The Great Actor Announces His Retirement
We have a story about Peter O'Toole. We can't remember where we first heard it, and like many such stories, it could well be apocryphal. Supposedly, O'Toole, at the height of his 1970s drinking, met a few friends for lunch at a restaurant in London's Soho. As was his custom, a bottle of wine was ord...
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The Playlist6 commentslike10tweet15
The Essentials: The 5 Best John Frankenheimer Films
Few filmmakers these days name John Frankenheimer as an influence. He was never particularly trendy, never embraced by the auteurists or overtly paid homage by those who came after. In part, it's because of some of his later projects; the commercial failure of thriller "Black Sunday" in 1977 drove h...
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The Playlist8 commentslike7tweet10
The Essentials: The Films Of Rob Reiner (Before He Forgot How To Direct Movies)
Maybe it's just a particular hang-up of this writer, but we find one of cinema's greatest mysteries to be the question of what happened to Rob Reiner. The sitcom star, and son of the great Carl Reiner ("Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid," "The Jerk"), became a film director in the early 1980s, and had an ex...
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The Playlist16 commentslike13tweet27
The Films Of Oliver Stone: A Retrospective
Oliver Stone loves his country, but he is also its loudest critic. Whether tackling history head-on in films like "Platoon" or "Born On The Fourth Of July," or profiling presidents in "JFK," "W." and "Nixon," and even in seemingly genre-centered material like "Natural Born Killers" or "Any Given Sun...
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The Playlist20 commentslike8tweet13
The Essentials: The 5 Best Tom Cruise Performances, On The Star's 50th Birthday
Tom Cruise turns 50 today, and he's probably had better birthdays. His latest film, "Rock Of Ages," was a box office disappointment, and on Friday, it emerged that Katie Holmes, his third wife, and mother of his daughter Suri, was filing for divorce. Just as things were seemingly starting to get bac...
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