IT ALWAYS COMES down to this: Movies you must experience versus movies that threaten to diminish you. That’s the point of making a Better-Than List rather than pretending that the typical over-hyped product constitutes a consensus of worthwhile movies. Most of these high-profile films insult one’s intelligence, while the year’s best movies vanish from the marketplace for lack of critical support. This tragedy is exemplified by the scary acclaim for the year’s worst: The atrocious Slumdog Millionaire and Pixar’s hideous Wall-E, the buzz-kill movie of all time. Trust no critic who endorses them. Read more Read it in print

IN SCOTT KIRSNER’S recent book, Inventing the Movies: Hollywood’s Epic Battle Between Innovation and Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the author breaks down the forces behind the technological progress of the movie business into three categories: innovators, preservationists and sideline-sitters.The innovators continuously seek new ways to create and disseminate movies, while the others either resist change or sit back to watch the world go by.These days, however, we don’t need Hollywood executives to tell us if movies are transforming. Anyone unafraid of a mouse and keyboard watches videos online.Three years after the birth of YouTube, the general public has rediscovered its primal fascination with the moving image, and filmmakers have been taking notes. Read more Read it in print

I’ll just go ahead and say it: Without Preston Sturges, modern movies wouldn’t be funny. The first Hollywood screenwriter to become a successful writer-director, Sturges assembled the screwball comedy formula as high art and bawdy entertainment in a neatly arranged package. The 10 features playing at Film Forum’s Essential Sturges series from Dec. 24 to Jan. 1 contain the highlights from his speed run in the 1940s, illustrating the seeds of virtually every mainstream comedy. The imperfections of the imitators, however, merely illustrate the near-perfection of Sturges’ carefully calibrated skill. Read more

Director Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 breakthrough Old Joy is the kind of deceptively simple, meditative film where nothing appears to happen, yet so much does. Two friends, the free-spirited Kurt (Will Oldham) and the more reserved Mark (Daniel London), head out for a weekend in the woods to hike, smoke some weed, bask in a hot spring and hopefully reconnect with each other. At first blush, almost nothing of major consequence occurs. But in this lyrical, melancholy portrait of modern male friendship, what the two men grapple with along the way—regret, competition, heartache and alienation—is as profound and moving as everyday life. Reichardt’s latest, Wendy and Lucy, opens Dec. 10 for a two-week run at Film Forum and follows in a similarly subtle and contemplative vein. But in comparison, the new film is almost action-packed. There’s criminal activity, conflicts with authority, and the desperate search for a missing dog. Michelle Williams plays Wendy Carroll, a lost soul driving to Alaska seeking work and a fresh start in life. Traveling with her dog Lucy, Wendy’s resilience is tested when her car breaks down in Oregon and her dwindling finances force her to make a series of difficult—and heart wrenching—decisions. Read more

Milos Forman's first color film, The Firemen's Ball, contains several shades of gray. A sensational comedy of mismanagement, the 1967 classic — a fresh print of which screens at BAMcinématek from December 12 - 18 — would become the director's final feature in his native Czechoslovakia. As such, it has become a post-mortem of his time there, but only for those who choose to read it that way. Forman didn't, but the country's communist government did; deriding the central plot of the titular festivity gone awry for "ridiculing the working man," officials banned it forever, prompting Forman's resettlement in America. Their loss was our gain, but the record on that accusation still needs to be straightened, because Forman clearly adored his subjects. Read more

which fits Minnellis cinemascope compositions and the extraordinary deep-focus of Joseph Ruttenbergs camerawork. Studying Minnellis unsurpassed expression of character through setting can start here. The opening Bois du Boulogne sequence evokes Proust, raising the stakes of a musical about a girl (Leslie Caron) being trained as a courtesan. Read more Read it in print

As an unabashed horror fan, the impulse to hold out on the convoluted, ultra-solemn contemporary splatter pic in favor of the older, dubbed bit of grindhouse nonsense is a nobrainer. Read more Read it in print

Abel Ferrara earned his indie cred and auteur status with Bad Lieutenant, King of New York and Dangerous Games as a pioneering post-noir practitioner of Bad Guy is Good/Good Guy is Bad. Bad Good Guy frequently is despicable but is always cynical or a hypocrite and less pure persona-wise. Bad Good Guy professionally plods forward in the Man’s army, but he resents his pawnhood and pitiful paycheck. Ferrara tends to surround these character-reversal studies with copious doses of shock, awe and gore. In the process of making over 20 features in the last two decades, Abel has fully indulged himself with Autuerism’s perks—such as stylistic filmmaking, critical genre analysis coverage and final-cut approval. And he makes people wait for him, sometimes in vain. Read more

Chuck Palahniuk didn’t want to be an author. In fact, as a child he had his sights set on the priesthood. “I thought, ‘Wait, you just sit there, and people come in and tell you these horrific things?” he says. “You just sit there, and they entertain you all day long.’” These days, however, the cult-favorite writer of Lullaby and Fight Club is the one doing the entertaining. Palahniuk is promoting Choke, the film version of his 2001 book that premie Read more

It was 10 a.m. on a Wednesday in 2006, and I had cut class to attend a press screening of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. I rushed into the already packed auditorium, eager to catch the filmmaker’s bratty jab at costume dramas—despite all the negative buzz that was already in the air—as well as attend my first New York Film Festival screening. I walked into the theater and stared in horror; shocked because I was the youngest Read more