The Top 10 Michael Powell (And Emeric Presburger) Films

I do not know if any director has had as formative an influence on the films I love than Michael Powell and his creative partner, Emeric Pressburger. The film that sits in the number-one slot on the list that follows radically altered what I look for in movies, and it remains my favorite of all time. On his own, Michael Powell was an extraordinarily gifted director, an innate visual genius and a conservative in the Fordian mode, reflected in films that looked fondly on a traditional Britain but also displayed an ambivalence, even borderline acceptance of the nation’s fading importance in the 20th century. (His breakthrough, The Edge of the World, recalls Ford’s How Green Was My Valley in its wistful but clear-headed appraisal of a secluded hamlet eroding to modernity for ill and good.)

With Pressburger, though, Powell crafted not only some of the most sumptuously beautiful films of all time, but some of the most resonant as well. Their propaganda films are anything but, and their postwar work celebrates the preservation of their beloved country even as it offers firm, and sometimes critical, assessments of what needs to be done to maintain Britain’s spirit. Even at their most troubling, however, the filmmakers communicate such vivaciousness of life through some of the greatest Technicolor work in history that an optimism blazes to the surface on their aesthetic mastery. The films below are not merely some of the best ever made, they are also some of the most endlessly, exuberantly entertaining.

The Top 10 Roman Polanski Films

Paranoia runs deep under Roman Polanski's work, an obvious feature of a man who has lived under the pressure of social scrutiny since childhood. The main reason he attracts that scrutiny today serves as the elephant in the room for any discussion of Polanski's work, not least because of how often the paranoia of his films manifests itself through rape and sexual violation. His grotesque ties to that subject matter make his considerable empathy almost disturbing: what does is say about the general state of commercial filmmaking that a convicted rapist is one of the great directors of women?

As a stylist, Polanski is almost without peer, with lighting, blocking and camera placement always timed for maximum impact. Perhaps the most famous example of this can be found in Rosemary's Baby, in which he had cinematographer William Fraker frame Ruth Gordon partially behind a door frame, causing audiences at the time to crane their necks as if it might help them look around the block and see all of her. This exacting formal perfectionism turns skewed genre fare into enduring works of pure cinema, which gives even his slightest work an aesthetic and thematic rigor. It also makes ranking his films a hell of a task, and by limiting this list to 10 films I leave out several unjustly underrated features like the excellent Ninth Gate, the muscular Frantic, the neorealist and brutal take on Macbeth, even the deeply personal The Pianist. But the 10 that remain showcase the immense skills of one of the great filmmakers of the modern era, and one who can still shock longer after he broke nearly every taboo you can name.

David Lynch's features, ranked

For October's favorite director ranking, I thought I would choose one of my two favorite directors of horror films that are not exactly horror films. (The other is Roman Polanski, whom I bumped last month to cover Tony Scott and who will receive his spotlight later this month.) Lynch's work digs under the image of postwar American society—parenthood, bourgeois suburbia, the glamor of Old Hollywood—to find the terror beneath, which is itself usually rooted in grotesque exaggerations of classic pulp. Lynch exists always in the past and on the forefront, sublimating noir and melodrama of the '40s and '50s into an ambitious, massively influential television program and an exploratory use of the capabilities of DV. Nearly all of his 10 features are great, and despite the occasional characterization of his work as weird for its own sake, they reward multiple viewings rather than suffer from them. A year ago, it would not have occurred to me to rank Lynch among my favorite filmmakers, but after viewing and revisiting the gems below, he now sits near the top of my list.

The Top 10 Tony Scott Films

[This is an entry in my Favorite Directors Blogathon.]

It can sometimes be difficult to separate out Tony Scott's gifts as a populist filmmaker when stacked against less skilled "cacophonists" like Michael Bay who followed in his wake and whom he left in the dust with his late-career reinvention. But in Scott's films are a care for his actors wholly absent for so many of today's blockbusters, and his movies consistently offered up some of the finest, most sincere performances to be found in action films. Scott's unabashed affection for working-class heroes forced to rise to the occasion gives his films a humanity that makes even his wildest efforts (and most savage, like Man on Fire) are not merely meat grinders. Not everything Scott turned to gold, but until his tragically truncated end, he found ways to turn the inherent excesses of blockbuster filmmaking into aesthetic statements rather than wan spectacle. He will be missed, but at least we still have his work, of which these 10 stand out as highlights:

The Top 10 Steven Soderbergh Films

[This is my August entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon.]

Steven Soderbergh operates so far under the radar that, for all his auteurist tics and varied filmography, I never thought to rate him among my favorite filmmakers until I took a step back one day and realized how many great films bore his credit. Sometimes it seems as if the film industry looks at him the same way. Soderbergh primarily operates as a workman, though he balances out commercial properties with a series of experimental works that often get folded back into his mainstream gigs, making him ever more idiosyncratic even as he gets trusted with bigger projects.

Soderbergh jump-started the Miramax era of the American indie with his Palme D’Or-winning feature debut sex, lies, and videotape, a film about a man who can only achieve any kind of arousal by watching recorded tapes of others detailing their own sexual desires and experiences. In a way, it is prophetic of his entire canon, in which action unfolds only through its own deconstruction and process becomes the driving force and the principal agent of subverted expectations. This fixation has made the director a member of the digital vanguard, the literal programming of visual information well-suited to his entire approach to storytelling.

Amazingly, he has applied this anti-narrative style to commercially successful properties. What other director in Hollywood today can so routinely boast massive casts populated entirely by A-listers without reducing them to wan rom-com drivel à la New Year’s Eve? And if anyone else could compare to Soderbergh in that respect, how many of them could turn around and make something like Bubble? A studio hand for the postmodern era, Soderbergh has made many fine works, but none better than these 10:

Charles Chaplin's 11 Features

[The following is an entry in the monthly Favorite Directors Blogathon. A master list of my choices for all 12 filmmakers (with links updated as they are posted) can be found here.]

It is all to easy to undervalue Charles Chaplin, something that can be seen even in some early reviews for this site. His camera style, primitive even by the standards of the silent era, offers few thrills for the aesthetically minded. His infamous sentimentality becomes the focal point of critical distrust and a convenient excuse to attack a sacred cow. And as a comic, he lacks the technical dazzle of Keaton, the epic audacity of Lloyd, often suffering when placed in (meaningless) competition with his peers.

And yet, the Tramp endures. Chaplin may not be, as Shaw once said, the only genius to come out of the movies, but he was certainly the first, and still the greatest. Repeated viewing reveals his basic camerawork as a means of prioritizing his perfectionist set design, which often lends itself both to gags and insights into those who move within it. More importantly, Chaplin cedes attention to the acting which, in contrast to Chaplin's reputation as a shameless manipulator, is among the earliest examples of carefully composed naturalism in cinema. And unlike the other silent clowns (save Laurel and Hardy, whose use of slapstick as a form of silent dialogue somewhat future-proofed them), Chaplin weathered the transition to talkies superbly, however reluctantly and belatedly he made the switch. His sound features also double as clarifications and critiques of his silent Tramp figure, the more forthright political and autobiographical content not an intrusion but merely a more visible display of what was always there. Because of this sustained level of quality, all 11 of Chaplin's features rate a mention, and most of them a place in any canon. As for which are all-time masterpieces and which must settle for the faint praise of "merely" masterful, read on:

Favorite Directors Blogathon

My blogging buddy Carson Lund recently told me about a meme started by Loren Rosson that highlights a favorite director each month and ranks his or her best work. Given that I already had a good 10 or so documents on my computer keeping track of rankings for some of my favorite filmmakers, I did not require much incentive to throw my own hat in the ring. Loren (and, I think, Carson) are covering their 12 favorite directors, but I might take a slightly different tack. Many of my top 12 would overlap with both Loren's and Carson's choices, and while it would be fun to compare what floats our particular boats with certain filmmakers, I'd rather spotlight a few other choices I love just as much as, say, Malick or Kubrick. There will still be some shared choices (I think all three of us will cover David Lynch), but this way it won't all just be the same picks.

Anyway, here's my list:


July: Charles Chaplin (The Full 11 Features)

August: Steven Soderbergh (Top 10)

September: Tony Scott (Top 10) [NOTE: I've bumped Roman Polanski to pay tribute to Tony Scott. Polanski list to come later]

October: David Lynch (Top 10), Roman Polanski (Top 10)

November: Martin Scorsese (Top 10)

December: Michael Powell (Top 10)

January: Howard Hawks (Top 10)

February: Abbas Kiarostami (Top 10)

March: Jean-Luc Godard (Top 20, maybe 25)

April: Claire Denis (Top 10)

May: Eric Rohmer (Top 15)

June: Ozu Yasujiro (Top 15)