Paul Clark's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. BELLE DE JOUR (1967)
2. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) 
3. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)



The greatness of The Passion of Joan of Arc stems from the fact that director Carl Th. Dreyer knew what it was that made Joan’s story important- not that she believed that God had tasked her to save France, but that she was so steadfast in her faith that she thought it better do die than to deny it. Consequently, Dreyer’s version of Joan’s story has no battle sequences and no heavenly visions, merely a powerful retelling of Joan’s final days, her trial and execution. The world of this film is an unsparing- one might say godless- one, full of evil and underhanded men who are more than willing to sacrifice Joan for their own political gain. This serves to throw into sharp relief the power of Joan’s faith, by heightening the pain and suffering she endured up to the end for the God in whom she so resolutely believed. Falconetti’s performance, then as now, is a wonder, and it’s only fitting that she never appeared onscreen again- how could she have possibly lived up to it?

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Here’s the pitch: a young man, reeling from the death of his father, drives across country with the brother he never knew who, as it happens, is autistic. Cast one of Hollywood’s most respected actors as the autistic brother and its hottest leading man as the younger brother, and even today the pitch sounds like something straight out of high-concept hell. Yet despite its premise, which jazzed up the bankable but disreputable formula of the road movie with a mental-illness twist, Rain Man was not only the most popular movie of 1988 but also one of the most acclaimed Hollywood releases of the year, winning both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the only film ever to win both of these prestigious awards.

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NEW YORK: An inspiration to late bloomers everywhere, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (born in December, 1908) made his first film in 1938 and managed to make a dozen more pictures over the course of the next forty years, but he started to buckle down in 1979, when he made his breakthrough with Doomed Love. He's made more than thirty works since then, and has churned out a movie a year since 1990. "The Talking Pictures of Manoel de Oliveira" (March 7-30) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is an ambitious retrospective salute to the remarkable career and little-seen work of this distinctive and filmmaker as he apprroaches his centennial.

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