Stereoactive Movie Club

It’s Jeremiah’s Round 6 Pick: Beau Travail, the 1999 film directed by Clair Denis.

Beau Travail, which is something of a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, was commissioned by a European culture channel Arte as a film about foreignness. It updates the classic novella to feature French Legionnaires stationed in the East African nation of Djibouti, which at the time of the film’s production had only recently, relatively...

It’s Alicia’s Round 6 Pick: Wild Strawberries, the 1957 film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Wild Strawberries was Ingmar Bergman’s 18th feature film in eleven years. It was written while he was in a hospital for stress and gastric issues, then quickly produced as his personal life was in disarray.

Critics in Sweden pretty much loved the film, while its reception in the United States was more mixed. But its influence has been...

It’s Stephen’s Round 6 Pick: Modern Times, the 1936 film starring, written, and directed by Charlie Chaplin.

Modern Times marked at least the 60th appearance of Charlie Chaplin in a film as the Little Tramp – and depending on whether you think the barber character in The Great Dictator is also the Tramp, Modern Times may be the last time Chaplin played the character. And while his previous film, 1931’s City Lights, featured synchron...

It’s Mia’s Round 6 Pick: Battleship Potemkin, the 1925 film directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

Divided into 5 acts, Battleship Potemkin, in commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of what is known as the First Russian Revolution of 1905, tells the story of a mutiny aboard the titular Russian naval vessel

In the film’s telling, the crew’s refusal to eat borscht made from maggot-infested meat is the first domino in a series of events that le...

It’s Jeremiah’s Round 5 Bonus Pick: Boyhood, the 2014 film directed by Richard Linklater.

Boyhood tells the story of a young boy, his slightly older sister, their divorced parents, and the people who come in and out of their lives over the course of 12 years, from the time the boy is 6 until he’s 18. Step-parents come and go, or even stay. Many moves are made. And we see the ways in which the parents’ decisions and actions affect th...

It’s Alicia’s 5th pick: Apocalypse Now, the 1979 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Coppola’s fellow New Hollywood/Movie Brat filmmaker, John Milius first conceived of adapting ‘Heart of Darkness’ as a Vietnam War movie sometime in the late ‘60s. The original plan was for Milius to write, Coppola to produce, and for George Lucas to direct. Eventually, as Lucas became busy with other projects, Coppola became the project’s directo...

It’s Lora’s 5th pick: Raging Bull, the 1980 film directed by Martin Scorsese.

The film is a character study of boxer Jake LaMotta, who himself is presented as questionable in character but pure in talent. It is considered one of the best films of its decade and quickly became legendary for DeNiro’s feat of gaining weight for the later scenes. It also basically introduced Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty to the world in star-making turns...

It’s Stephen’s 5th pick: Pierrot le Fou, the 1965 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard himself said the film was "connected with the violence and loneliness that lie so close to happiness today. It's very much a film about France."

And with its fourth wall breaks, often jarring editing style, and tendency to internally jump among mass culture and/or pop art references in both extremely metatextual and self-referential...

The 2022 edition of Sight And Sounds magazine’s polls of the “greatest films ever made” were released last week, and since our entire podcast is about movies that have been on these decennially updated lists, we got together to share our reactions to the new ones.

Here is the top 10, as decided by 1639 critics:

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. Citizen Kane (1941)
4. Tokyo Story (1953)
5. In ...

It’s Mia’s 5th pick: The Grapes of Wrath, the 1940 film directed by John Ford.

The film is based on John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, which was also the best-selling novel of that year and was cited as a major part of the basis on which Steinbeck was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The politics and story of the book were potentially thorny enough that Daryl F. Zanuck, the famed producer at 20th Century Fox...

It’s Jeremiah’s 5th pick: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the 1927 film directed by F.W. Murnau.

Based on a 1917 short story called “The Excursion to Tilsit,’ written by Hermann Sudermann, the film was Murnau’s first in the United States, after he was brought over from Germany by William Fox to make something for Fox Film Corporation like the expressionist work he’d produced in his home country – Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, and Faust ...

Listen up as we reveal our picks for what we’ll be watching in Round 5 of the podcast!

Spoiler alert: we have two bonus picks this time around, so we’ll be watching 7 films total.

And, as referenced in the episode, here is the list of all movies released after 1980 that appeared in the top 100 of the Sight & Sound critics and directors surveys in 2012:

• 1982 - Blade Runner (Ridley Scott / USA)
• 1982 - Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, F...

It’s Lora’s 4th pick: Pather Panchali, the 1955 film directed by Satyajit Ray. Pather Panchali, which translates as “Song of the Little Road,” is based on the 1929 novel of the same name, which is the semi-autobiographical work of author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Satyajit Ray was a graphic designer working on illustrations for a 1944 abridged edition of the book when it was suggested to him that the stoy’s depiction of rural li...

It’s Stephen’s 4th pick: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the 1964 film directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Often cited as one of the best comedy films of all time – as well as simply one of the best films generally – this was Kubrick’s follow-up to Lolita, released two years before in 1962.Its making began with the director’s desire to produce a movie about a nuclear accident during the Cold War. As he...

It’s Mia’s 4th pick: Persona, the 1966 film directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Persona is a film that is open to much interpretation about its themes, meaning, and maybe even its plot. In the most basic way, it’s the story of a well known Swedish actress who suffers an emotional shutdown and is put in a hospital. It’s explained that there is nothing wrong with her either mentally or physically, but she is completely unwilling to move or sp...

It’s Jeremiah’s 4th pick: The Rules of the Game, the 1939 film directed by Jean Renoir.

‘The Rules of the Game’ was the most expensive film ever made in France at the time of its production and came on the heels of a series of successful films that had made Renoir one of the top French directors. After initial preview screenings that began in June of 1939 and a premier in July that met with low box-office and mixed reviews, a series...

It’s Alicia’s 4th pick: Hiroshima Mon Amour, the 1959 film directed by Alain Resnais.

With ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, explore the intersection where tragedy and trauma meet history and memory.

The film was released on May 8, 1959 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize.

Among its other accolades was recognition by Cahiers du Cinéma on its list of the to...