This Mexican film is widely known for its outright blatant criticism of the Catholic Church In its defense, the movie isn’t the case of Catholic bashing that is often thought to be. In fact, this rather unfocused, all-over-the-map movie would be a lot better if it pared down its plots and characters to a few rather than dozens or if it were subtler or if it had a sense of humor. The title character is a headstrong, 24-year-old priest who’s been sent to Los Reyes, where he’s supposed to aid aging parish priest Father Benito.

At first, Father Benito is happy to guide and train the younger priest. But he’s horrified to witness a mutual attraction between Father Amaro and Amelia, a devoted teenage parishioner. Not that Father Benito should be worried. Not only does he have close ties to a local drug lord, but he’s also been carrying on for years with Amelia’s mother. That’s probably enough material for any movie, but the screenwriter decided to also throw in subplots about a religious fanatic, the town’s overly ambitious mayor, Amelia’s jealous ex-boyfriend and others. All of which waters down the main message. Director Carlos Carrera seems to have a problem keeping the story focused, but the cast does turn in some fine performances. Overall, the main message in the movie in grasped by the viewer however the randomness of the movie with all of its loosely focused scenes water down the theme. If the movie however removed some silly scenes which lack focus at directed more attention towards the main theme I believe this film would be extremely better.

The Milky Way is unique in Bunuel’s film history and resonant with his ideas and beliefs. Starting off, two pilgrims are traveling on the road from Saint Jacques in Paris to Santiago in Spain. It is the traditional plain format of the down and out, surviving as road bums. It is also even more similar to the traditional tales of the knight and his squire who search for faith and honor. By blending all the following concepts, Bunuel created a filmic time space. The pilgrims are contemporary however, time and space accompany them constantly. The protagonists of heresy and orthodoxy act out their beliefs in ancient Palestine and in early medieval Europe. There are many instances within Milky Way such as the Holy Virgin, her son Jesus and Christ’s kid brothers duel the Jesuit dressed as a rock star, a bleeding child by the wayside, a wildly stiff child and her robotic pupils, the pope facing a firing squad. Such scenes in itself are a grasping of Hollywood’s parodies.

As Bunuel gives visual reality to these theological abstractions, he does so with vast resources of wit and humor. But along with the comedic sense, Buñuel is here grappling with the contradictions between faith and faithlessness. The young heretic who wears the hunter’s item and shoots at the rosary receives it back from the hands of the Virgin Mary and lets tears stream down his face. Also, as Pierre tells Jean when lightning strikes, God knows all, but we don’t know what he knows. Bunuel brings all of these meanings into a seamless visual continuum respecting the mystery of the orthodox while denouncing the groupthink ideas present at the time..

Within In the Mood for Love Wong chose to transform an old hospital for British soldiers that was left vacant. He did so perhaps because both buildings resembled the type of buildings in the 1950s. Mr Chow and Mrs Chang may or may not have given sensual expression to their affair in room 2046. Within the movie the hotel room is never given a location or geographic location of where it’s located therefore it’s non-existent essentially. Room 2046 was originally rented by Mr Chow to pass time while writing his martial art stories and also waiting for Mrs Chang. The number “2046” is also a sign for both the future and the past. Strangely enough, the next film by Wong was named 2046 which can be related to the fictional, futuristic non-location concept he was trying to capture. With a unknown hotel room and a frustrated love affair, In the Mood for Love became a vessel for 2046’s obvious scenes which incorporated multiple styles.

The impermanence of the moment and the instant when change takes hold, are topics of endless fascination for Wong. A clear, even heartbreaking example in this film is when Mr Chow explains to Mrs Chang the feelings can creep up “just like that”. And just like that, their dead relationship turns into a story of an impossible love affair. In keeping with the present culture views and his own Wong underlines his sense that “love is a matter of timing”. And though his characters meet in the perfect orchestration of coincidence just at the right moment mistiming otherwise kills their encounter.

Stories containing swordplay have been a way of Japanese cinema for a long time holding the same place in the cultures of the audience that the western did for Americans. Akira Kurosawa, a well-known director who had created an international reputation in the 1950s was an avid user of the Hollywood method in cinema and saw an opportunity to fashion a high adventure along the western lines. It is no surprise that Seven Samurai could so easily be remade as The Magnificent Seven (1960) because it draws so much of its plot and character from the Wild West.

The film opens with some plot groundwork. A farmer overhears a group of bandits agreeing to hold off a raid on a village because the peasants will not have had time to harvest their crops since the last attack. They promise, however, to return after the harvest. Here, Kurosawa one-ups Hollywood. Before 1954, even the most epic American adventures featured a lone hero or two rivals. But here Kurosawa invented the idea of a heroic leader assembling a team of specialists to meet a challenging task.

This cinematic gather of members to overcome a challenge ultimately drew his film to a wide audience clueless to the heroic team concept. By incorporating his culture and using a variety of cinematic cues such Kurosawa directed a masterpiece. Through culture adaptations and cinematic cues Kurosawa created a marvelous cinematic film using western culture as a motif for his Hollywood production. Ultimately, his film became a huge success because of his incorporation of Hollywood production concepts and inserting within his own culture.

Completed in 1955, Satyajit Ray’s astonishing debut, Pather Panchali creates a wonderfully detailed picture of a Bengali village where a mother gets into debt while raising a daughter and a small son and caring for an ancient aunt without much help from her husband, a dreamer, who thinks his education has placed him above physical norms. She’s irritable, worn down by work and injured pride, and though resilient, she eventually gives in and moves to the city with her family after the daughter’s death and the destruction of their home in a storm. The picture is made with subtlety and imagination. Its images by first-time cameraman Subrata Mitra are as memorable as anything in the movies of De Sica and Kurosawa he foreign directors Ray admired.

Most of what transpires is shown through the eyes of either Sarbojaya or Durga, and, as a result, we identify most closely with these two. Harihar is absent for more than half of the movie, and before the final scene, Apu is a mere witness to events, rather than a participant. Until the closing moments, we don’t get a sense of the young boy as a fully formed individual, since he’s always in someone else’s shadow. With its poetic black-and-white images and heartfelt method of storytelling, Pather Panchali speaks intimately to each member of the audience. This tale, as crafted by Ray, touches the souls and minds of viewers, transcending cultural and language barriers. In Pather Panchali, each scene builds upon what has come before. This is the kind of motion picture that will stay with you for hours, or perhaps even days, after you’ve left the theater, and that’s a rare characteristic for any movie.

After being unemployed for two years, Antonio Ricci gets offered a job putting up posters on the walls of post-war Rome, but only if he has a bicycle. Attaining one is extremely difficult, but he succeeds, and his wife Maria and his young son, Bruno, are thrilled for him. However, on his first day at work Antonio’s bicycle is stolen and he spends the rest of the film trying to get it back. This tale ends up having the emotional resonance of classic tragedy by capturing the awful effect of how one mans life is destroyed before your eyes. For most, a bicycle is a cheap item that at worst case can be replaced if lost or stolen. However, for Antonio he doesn’t have the money or means to purchase himself a new bicycle. By being stuck in the grips of poverty the movie grips the hearts of the audience tugging at the emotional strings. The Bicycle Thief places us right in the action, allowing us to live what turns out to be a cruel experience with these people, letting us feel for them in a deep and caring way that is almost beyond describing. The difference in this film setting it apart from films at the time were the hints of neorealism, a movement that took place in Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The film is beautifully captured by Carlo Montuori and De Sica who put every scene together for maximum effectiveness. The realistic approach into the lives of Antonio along with the cinematic cues used by De Sica create a marvelous neorealism film.

Metropolis illustrates what many great films do by creating a time, place, and characters so abstract that they become fixed in our array of images for picturing the world. The ideas of Metropolis have been widely absorbed into pop culture so much that its cruel future city is feared by viewers. Lang filmed for nearly a year being driven by creativity. The result was astonishing for its time. Without all of the digital tricks of today, Metropolis fills the imagination. Today the effects look like effects, but that’s their appeal. Metropolis is actually an atypical movie in the career of Fritz Lang, who was normally known for his crime films and dark themes of cruel fate. Yet there’s no question that the visuals in Metropolis are among the greatest in movie history, and they do not fail to impress.

Metropolis catches it’s audience off guard by bringing them into a surreal world. Through the over-bearing children who all cling to the lady or the main character himself disguising himself as a worker the movie has many cinematic feats which it surpasses. One of the things that has to be accepted about Metropolis is the exaggerated passions and emotions expressed by the actors. This highly stylized way of performing is not the usual attempts to look for naturalism however it was extremely effective.With its plot fully restored, this new Metropolis stands revealed as a film that is about more than its celebrated science fiction look. It’s one of the most outstanding silent films at its time, powered by a torrent of narrative energy.

Francois Truffaut’s first film The 400 Blows  was an autobiographical film. It is one of the well-known examples of cinema in the first-person. Through telling the life of the young rebel Antoine Doinel, Truffaut was moving both towards the future and back to the past by remembering his own experiences as a child yet while also creating a film aspect that would become more popular throughout the 60s. The 400 Blows is derived from Truffaut’s childhood. Born in Paris in 1932, he spent his early years with his grandmother, as his parents didn’t care much for him. After his grandmother passed, he returned home . Being an only child whose mother hated him, Truffaut found comfort in reading and later in developing cinema.

Antoine’s unhealthy relationship with his adoptive father reflects that of the director. Throughout his early childhood Francois experienced abuse quite often from his father and had a terrible relationship with him. After young Francois committed minor robberies as a child, his father turned him over to the police. It’s no surprise that one of the more relevant motifs throughout Truffaut’s work is paternity. By inserting the mellow-dramatic scenes of Antoine and his “always busy” father he can insert a glimpse of what his life was like as well. In The 400 Blows, the common question is “Where is the father?”, a phrase which resonates both within the film and in the director’s life as well. Through aspects of paternity Truffaut crafted his childhood into a cinematic piece which depicts his early childhood magnificently.

This film is extremely focused on the new possibilities of cinema ultimately filled with new ideas, stuffed with energy and screaming glimpses of the New Wave. Throughout there are trick-shots, split-screens, stop-motions, slo-mo and speeded up action scenes. The title itself describes what is happening, we watch the cameraman record the images we are presented. The film ultimately depicts a man with his camera tripod rushing about all sorts of scenes to capture his shots. Vertov shows machinery and factories and insights that this is real cinema. Presenting such images he reflects his idea that the mass production and consumption of image is true cinema. The people in the film ride buggies and trains, they are married, give birth, mourn, and do many other human acts in an continuous wave of movement. Ultimately, the pace revolutionized cinema by disrupting the contempt audience unknown to wild movement. The people in this film are seen twirling and dancing yet even without sound you can still hear them. The film’s self-reflexivity gives Vertov the ability to capture life itself in what seems to be a fast-paced nonstop rushing of images to the naked eye. However, for all its glory this is not an image of a fake world, it’s Vertov’s way of showing what the world might be in a different reality. By doing this, Vertov can reach into the future and grasp of what could be by creating ideas within his movies. By doing this his audience as well as the cultures within the movie can elevate themselves to newer heights.

In a world where regular people are grounded down by a machinery beyond their understanding or control, anonymity is key. The realistic cast, in the sense of everyday man, laid the groundwork for one of the greatest cinematic pieces in film history, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers. The director wanted to acknowledge the uprising that had prevailed after pushing the French from Algeria in July 1962. That event triggered a wave of movements across the Third World, which served as a portrait of freedom and as a lesson by ruling violent means necessary to win. The Battle of Algiers helped to unify such struggles by uniting the revolutionary idealists. Pontecorvo’s work therefore can be recognized as an apogee of cinema which ultimately paved a foundation in the war for social change.

Pontecorvo laid the foundation with extreme detail by traveling to Algiers to interview witnesses. The Algerians issued a political campaign in response to a social experience of injustice. With policies deemed excessively strong-armed, there was the obvious tradition of neorealism. The repeated shots of individuals mourning and the Muslim women’s cries heard throughout created a tide of unstoppable hatred.

The narrative captures the treacherous tactics such as police shootings and terrorist bomb­ings. In this sense, it’s the French who appear remote, dead, unfazed, and unified in their police uniforms. Aside from Colonel Mathieu, they’re denied personality and given zero close-ups. The Algerians however are given families, personality, and faces. In doing so, the French are shown as just doing their jobs, while the lives of the Algerians are swept away hidden from sight.

Such is seen in the unforgettable sequence where a group of Algerian women plant bombs at various locations in the French quarter. In another context, they would be evil beings looked down upon for such cruel acts. However, we have been made to rationalize with their perspective realizing that innocent people are about to be slaughtered. In this moment, the French settlers are given actual personalities with vivid snapshots of teens dancing, men drinking, and idly chatter throughout. By agreeing with the treacherous acts of the Algerian women who we’ve come to terms with, Pontecorvo has penetrated our western ideology. Therefore, The Battle of Algiers offers a vivid image of how the boomerang effect can be applied on both sides of the spectrum even when one class is deemed evil.