The Top Ten Movies of 2025

MOVIES I LIKED A LOT: 

"Eddington" (2025)

"Nouvelle Vague" (2025)

"Sinners" (2025)

"The American Revolution" (2025)

"Begonia" (2025)

"Companion" (2025)

"I'm Still Here" (2024)

"No Other Land" (2024)

"Overlord" (1975)

"American Ultra" (2015)

MOVIES I MIGHT WATCH AGAIN SOMETIME:

"Weapons" (2025)

"A House of Dynamite" (2025)

"F1" (2025)

"I Really Hate My Job" (2007)

"One Battle After Another" (2025)

"Never Let Me Go" (2010)

"The Congress" (2013)

"Joe" (2013)

"Womb" (2010)

"Triangle" (2009)

SECRET TREASURES:

"Otley" (1969)

"Cattle Annie and Little Britches" (1980)

"Just Visiting" (2001)

"Seven Footprints To Satan" (1929)

BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN:

"Dogma" (1999) 

"Linda Linda Linda" (2005)

FOUR FROM THE VIDEO VAULT:

"Blazing Saddles" (1974)

"Breathless" (1960)

"Return To Glennascaul" (1952)

"The Battle of the Century" (1927)

TOXIC WASTE:

"I Was a Teenage Strangler" (1997)

The Hit List: Laurel and Hardy

 

             "You have to learn what people will 

               laugh at, then proceed accordingly."

                Stan Laurel

    Like most people my age or younger (which is most people these days), my introduction to Laurel and Hardy didn't come in a movie house, but on television. Local stations in the 1950s had a lot of air time to fill, and one thing they filled it with was old movies. Assembly-line westerns from the 1930s were a staple, along with comedies from the same era produced by Hal Roach, and Hal Roach meant Laurel and Hardy. 

    Stan Laurel (born in England in 1890) and Oliver Hardy (born in Georgia in 1892) both had comedy careers in silent films before they teamed up, but their chemistry together made them more than the sum of their two parts, and from the time they joined forces working for Roach, they were a team. Laurel (the thin one) was the idea man and the creative force behind their best movies. (He'd come to America as Charlie Chaplin's understudy in a traveling stage company.) But the material really clicked because Hardy (the heavy one) knew exactly what to do with it and played along. 

    From the 1920s to the 1950s, they made more than 100 movies together - silents and talkies, two-reelers and features. The more notable ones include these:

Shorts:

"The Battle of the Century" (1927 / Clyde Bruckman 

and Leo McCarey)

A legendary two-reeler, long lost but lately restored, starting with Stan in a boxing ring getting knocked cold, and ending with the screen's most spectacular pie fight. 

"Big Business" (1929 / James W. Horne and Leo McCarey)

The boys play door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen. James Finlayson (a frequent foil) plays a reluctant customer. They demolish his house. He destroys their car. 

"Double Whoopee" (1929 / Lewis R. Foster)

Stan and Ollie play the footman and doorman at a luxury hotel, where a prince who resembles Erich von Stroheim falls down an elevator shaft and a teenaged Jean Harlow famously loses her skirt. 

"The Music Box" (1932 / James Parrott)

Stan and Ollie try to move a piano up a long, long, long flight of stairs. The movie won an Academy Award.

"Busy Bodies" (1933 / Lloyd French)

Laurel and Hardy go to work in a sawmill, a setup that's as funny as it is terrifying.

Features:

"Sons of the Desert" (1933 / William A. Seiter)

The boys tell their wives they're going to Hawaii for Ollie's health, but sneak off to a lodge convention in Chicago instead. Naturally, the wives find out. The international society of Laurel and Hardy enthusiasts took its name from the title of this film. 

"Babes In Toyland" (1934 / Gus Meins 

and Charley Rogers)

Stan and Ollie play toymakers in a Mother Goose story that used to show up on TV every year at Christmastime. Alternate title; "March of the Wooden Soldiers".

"Way Out West" (1937) / James W. Horne)

This movie contains two of Laurel and Hardy's most famous routines: the soft-shoe dance number in front of the saloon (with backup from Chill Wills and the Avalon Boys) and a vocal duet to "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine".

"Swiss Miss" (1938 / John G. Blystone and Hal Roach)

Stan and Ollie play mousetrap salesmen in Switzerland. They're trying to move a piano (again) across a suspension bridge, when they meet a gorilla . . .

"A Chump At Oxford" (1940 / Alfred J. Goulding)

The boys somehow end up in college in England. A window drops down and hits Stan on the head, turning him into a stuffy academic. A rare chance to see Laurel play something other than his usual dim-witted self. 

Bonus Feature:

"Stan & Ollie" (2018 / Jon S. Baird)

A biopic tracking their last music-hall tour of the UK in 1954. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly play Laurel and Hardy. They're good.

    Some Laurel and Hardy fans insist that their silent short films are their best, but sound gave them another dimension to work with, and longer running times gave them more room to expand and perfect their slow-building routines. 

    A typical Laurel and Hardy gag would start with something trivial or accidental, but feathers would be ruffled and somebody would be offended, and an escalating game of tit-for-tat would end in apocalyptic chaos. Stan and Ollie did that better than anybody.

    They made all their best movies for Roach. In the 1940s, they move to Fox and MGM, where they had less creative control and their work noticeably declined. Their last movie, "Atoll K" (1951) was a critical and commercial failure, and by then, age and health issues were starting to catch up with them. 

    Stan died 60 years ago and Ollie died in 1957, but their films are still out there. You can find a lot of them on YouTube. 

    Stan, looking confused (and being confused) and Ollie's long-suffering stares into the camera. Ollie twiddling his tie and Stan ruffling his hair. The visual jokes that are twice as funny because you can see the punchline coming, and funnier still when something else immediately tops that. The bowler hats and the "Cuckoo Song". The essential innocence and childlike simplicity of their characters, and their underlying devotion to each other. All trademark Stan and Ollie. 

    The world's not always an amusing place, especially these days, but you can bet it'd be even sadder without Laurel and Hardy.

"Here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."

     Oliver Hardy to Stan Laurel

     in "Atoll K"

     (Hardy's last words on screen)

Listomania / Take 15

 

Movies directed by Peter Fonda:

"The Hired Hand"

"Idaho Transfer"

 "Wanda Nevada"

Movies directed by Jack Nicholson:

"Drive, He Said"

"Goin' South"

"The Two Jakes"

Movies directed by Dennis Hopper:

"Easy rider"

"The Last Movie"

"Out of the Blue"

"Colors"

"Backtrack"

"The Hot spot"

"Chasers"

The Top Ten Movies of 2024

The following list was scraped together from the movies I saw last year, either for the first time ever, or for the first time in years. Some I managed to see on a big screen. Others were on Kanopy, or YouTube, or DVDs I watched with friends. Some were rentals from Scarecrow, Seattle's only remaining video store. 

MOVIES I LIKED A LOT:

"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" (2024)

"Love Lies Bleeding" (2024)

"Driving Madeleine" (2022)

"Bad Times At the El Rloyale" (2018)

"A Complete Unknown" (2024)

"The Substance" (2024)

"Empire Records" (1995)

"Incident By a Bank" (2010)

"The Zone of Interest" (2023)

"Strange Darling" (2023)

SECRET TREASURES:

"Lourdes" (2009)

"Lawless Heart" (2001)

"Picture Claire" (2001)

"Murder At Yellowstone City" (2022)

GUILTY PLEASURES:

"Backtrack" (1990)

"Maxxxine" (2024)

"L0nglegs" (2024)

"Carry On Don't Lose Your Head" (1967)

MOVIES I MIGHT WATCH AGAIN SOMETIME:

"Conclave" (2024)

"Blitz" (2024)

"Kill Your Darlings" (2013)

"Gasoline Rainbow" (2023)

"The Burning Sea" (2021)

"Lucky Luke" (2009)

"Wicked" (2024)

"Horizon: Chapter 1" (2024)

"Gladiator II" (2024)

"The Outrun" (2024)

SILENTS, PLEASE:

"Filibus" (1915)

"Running Wild" (1927)

"Beverly of Graustark" (1926)

BACK ON THE BIG SCREN:

"Time of the Heathen" (1961)

"Strongroom" (1962)

"Black Tuesday" (1954)

FOUR FROM THE VAULT:

"The Moderns" (1988)

"Starman" (1984)

"One of Our Aircraft Is Missing" (1942)

"Raggedy Man" (1981)

TOXIC WASTE:

"Gorp" (1980)

The Movie Buzzard 100

 

    Undaunted - well, maybe a little bit daunted - by the fact that subjective lists of anything are arbitrary, here's an arbitrary list of the Movie Buzzard's top 100 films, subject to change at any time. 

    Some of these titles are iconic. Some are idiosyncratic choices that probably wouldn't turn up on any other list. All are movies I wouldn't want to head into the future without. 

"A Trip To the Moon" (1902/Georges Méliès)

"Intolerance" (1916/D.W. Griffith)

"Nosferatu" (1922/F.W. Murnau)

"Sherlock Jr." (1924/Buster Keaton)

"Metropolis" (1927/Fritz Lang)

"Napoleon" (1927/Abel Gance)

"The Passion of Joan of Arc" 

  (1928/Carl Theodor Dreyer)

"Dracula" (1931/Tod Browning)

"The Mummy" (1932/Karl Freund)

"Duck Soup" (1933/Leo McCarey)

"Tarzan and His Mate" (1934/Cedric Gibbons)

"Bride of Frankenstein" (1935/James Whale)

"Modern Times" (1936/Charlie Chaplin)

"Way Out West" (1937/James W. Horne)

"Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" (1939/Frank Capra)

"The Wizard of Oz" (1939/Victor Fleming)

"Citizen Kane" (1941/Orson Welles)

"The Wolf Man" (1941/George Waggner)

"Casablanca" (1942/Michael Curtiz)

"The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943/William Wellman)

"My Darling Clementine" (1946/John Ford)

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951/Robert Wise)

"The African Queen" 1951/John Huston)

"High Noon" (1952/Fred Zinnemann)

"Singin' In the Rain" 

  (1952/Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen)

"The Crimson Pirate" (1952/Robert Siodmak)

"Roman Holiday" (1953/William Wyler)

"Pickup On South Street" (1953/Samuel Fuller)

"Sabrina" (1954/Billy Wilder)

"Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1959/Ed Wood)

"The Mouse That Roared" (1959/Jack Arnold)

"Psycho" (1960/Alfred Hitchcock)

"Charade"  (1963/Stanley Donen)

"Dr. Strangelove" (1964/Stanley Kubrick)

"The Train" (1964/John Frankenheimer)

"A Fistful of Dollars" (1964/Sergio Leone)

"The Flight of the Phoenix" (1965/Robert Aldrich)

"Blow-Up" (1966/Michelangelo Antonioni)

"The Professionals" (1966/Richard Brooks)

"Where Eagles Dare" (1968/Brian G. Hutton)

"The Wild Bunch" (1969/Sam Peckinpah)

"Easy Rider" (1969/Dennis Hopper)

"The Magic Christian" (1969/Joseph McGrath)

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" 

  (1969/George Roy Hill)

"M*A*S*H" (1970/Robert Altman)

"The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1971/Sam Peckinpah)

"The Godfather" (1972/Francis Ford Coppola)

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" (1973/Peter Yates)

"The Taking of Pelham 123" (1974/Joseph Sargent)

"Young Frankenstein" (1974/Mel Brooks)

"Chinatown" (1974/Roman Polanski)

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" 

  (1975/Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones)

"Nashville" (1975/Robert Altman)

"All the President's Men" (1976/Alan Pakula)

"Sorcerer" (1977/William Friedkin)

"Animal House" (1978/John Landis)

"Days of Heaven" (1978/Terrence Malick)

"Alien" (1979/Ridley Scott)

"All That Jazz" (1979/Bob Fosse)

"Apocalypse Now" (1979/Francis Ford Coppola)

"Airplane!" (1980/Jim Abrahams, David Zucker 

  and Jerry Zucker)

"Stripes" (1981/Ivan Reitman)

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981/Steven Spielberg)

"Blade Runner" (1982/Ridley Scott)

"The Big Chill" (1983/Lawrence Kasdan)

"The Right Stuff" (1983/Philip Kaufman)

"Trouble In Mind" (1985/Alan Rudolph)

"The Princess Bride" (1986/Rob Reiner)

"Wings of Desire" (1987/Wim Wenders)

"Radio Days" (1987/Woody Allen)

"The Navigator" (1988/Vincent Ward)

"Field of Dreams" (1989/Phil Alden Robinson)

"The Civil War" (1990)/Ken Burns)

"Life Is Sweet" (1990/Mike Leigh)

"Thelma & Louise" (1991/Ridley Scott)

"Pulp Fiction" (1994/Quentin Tarantino)

"The Usual Suspects" (1995/Bryan Singer)

"Fargo" (1996/Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)

"Lone Star" (1996/John Sayles)

"Bandits" (1997/Katja von Garnier)

"Run Lola Run" (1998/Tom Tykwer)

"Dogma" (1999/Kevin Smith)

"Divine Intervention" (2002/Elia Suleiman)

"Mystic River" (2003/Clint Eastwood)

"A History of Violence" (2005/David Cronenberg)

"Good Night, and Good Luck" (2005/George Clooney)

"V For Vendetta" (2005/James McTeigue)

"Linda Linda Linda" (2005/Nobuhiro Yamashita)

"The Brave One" (2007/Neil Jordan)

"Rumba" (2008/Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon 

  and Bruno Romy)

"Hugo" (2011/Martin Scorsese)

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014/Wes Anderson)

"The Dressmaker" (2015/Jocelyn Moorhouse)

"Spotlight" (2015/Tom McCarthy)

"La La Land" (2016/Damien Chazelle)

"The Shape of Water" (2017/Guillermo del Toro)

"They Shall Not Grow Old" (2018/Peter Jackson)

"The Old Man and the Gun" (2018/David Lowery)

"1917" (2019/Sam Mendes)

"Poor Things" (2023/Yorgos Lanthimos)

The Hit List: Louise Brooks

                   "There is no Garbo!

                     There is no Dietrich!

                     There is only Louise Brooks!"

                                                          Henri Langlois  

 

    Like James Dean, Louise Brooks had an impact on popular culture that transcended her relatively brief career. Unlike Dean, Brooks lived a long time after her movie career was over. 

    She was born into a middle-class family in Kansas in 1906. Her father was a lawyer. A precocious kid and a dancing prodigy, she was shipped off to New York at 15, and performed with a modern dance company before moving on to George White's Scandals and the Ziegfeld Follies. She was also a party girl, a fun-loving flapper whose sexual adventures included a legendary encounter with Charlie Chaplin while he was in New York to promote "The Gold Rush". 

    She started getting small parts in films, and the parts were getting bigger when Austrian director G.W. Pabst spotted her and decided she'd be perfect to play Lulu, the self-destructive heroine in "Pandora's Box". She made two pictures for Pabst in Berlin and another movie in Paris, but when she got back to Hollywood, she found she'd burned a few too many bridges and nobody would hire her. She played bit parts and made a couple of B westerns, and in 1938, she quit. 

    On screen, with her trademark helmet hairdo and uninhibited sexuality, she was incandescent, and her acting stands out in the silent era for its instinctive minimalism. She appeared in about two dozen movies. In some, her roles are so tiny, they hardly matter, and some of her pictures are lost. Here's a selection:

"The Show Off"  (1926/Malcolm St. Clair)

Brooks has a key supporting role in a comedy starring Ford Sterling, the former Keystone Kop.

"It's the Old Army Game"  (1926/A. Edward Sutherland)

Brooks shares the screen with W.C. Fields, her pal from the Ziegfeld Follies. Fields remade this in the sound era as "It's a Gift".

"Beggars of Life"  (1928/William Wellman)

Brooks plays a woman on the run from the law, riding the rails and memorably disguised as a boy.

"A Girl In Every Port"  (1928/Howard Hawks)

Robert Armstrong and Victor McLaglen play sailors. Brooks plays the carnival artist who comes between them. This is the movie that made Pabst cast Brooks as Lulu.

"The Canary Murder Case"  (1929/Malcolm St. Clair)

Brooks plays a blackmailing showgirl in a murder mystery starring William Powell as Philo Vance.

"Pandora's Box"  (1929/G.W. Pabst)

Brooks plays Lulu, a seductive free spirit whose life spirals down through a series of reckless relationships, the last of them with Jack the Ripper. Her signature role. 

"Diary of a Lost Girl" (1929/G.W. Pabst)

Brooks goes through even more hell in her second movie for Pabst.

"Prix de Beauté"  (1930/Augusto Genina)

An early French sound film with Brooks as a typist who wins the Miss France beauty contest. Quentin Tarantino reworked its ironic conclusion toward the end of "Inglourious Basterds".

"Windy Riley Goes Hollywood" (1931/Roscoe Arbuckle)

A dismal two-reel comedy with Louise as a movie star whose tabloid life off-camera could derail her career. She and her director could both relate to that.

"Overland Stage Raiders" (1938/George Sherman)

Brooks' last screen appearance, a routine, low-budget western starring John Wayne.

    After Hollywood, things fell apart. She toured as a dancer, married and divorced, opened a dance studio in Wichita, and eventually found herself back in New York, working as a sales clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue. She became a recluse and slipped into a marginal existence whose main components were alcohol and prostitution, a dark period that lasted several years. (When Pabst predicted that Brooks would end up like Lulu, he wasn't far off the mark.)

    Then, in the mid-1950s, the French rediscovered her movies, and eventually the word reached the States. The film historian James Card tracked her down and got her to move to Rochester, New York, where she embarked on a new career, writing about film. Her writing was sharp, and her book of essays, "Lulu In Hollywood", is a classic. 

    Several documentaries have been made about Brooks. "Looking For Lulu", written by Barry Paris and narrated by Shirley MacLaine, is a good one. Her life story would be great material for a biopic, but except for "The Chaperone", a 2018 film about her early days in New York, nobody has tried to do that, and finding an actress who could bring to the screen what she did would be tough. 

    It's been said that there are no second acts in American life, but Louise Brooks contradicts that. She died in Rochester in 1985. She was 78.

          "I learned how to act by watching Martha 

            Graham dance, and I learned how to 

            dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act."

                                                                        Louise Brooks

Listomania / Take 14

 

More actors with at least two Academy Awards:

Spencer Tracy

Ingrid Bergman

Gary Cooper

Bette Davis

Jason Robards

Katharine Hepburn

Jack Nicholson

Peter Ustinov

Luise Rainer

Walter Brennan

Michael Caine

Listomania / Take 13

Some actors who have won at least two Academy Awards:

 Tom Hanks

Jodie Foster

Daniel Day-Lewis

Cate Blanchet

Sean Penn

Meryl Streep

 Denzel Washington

Hilary Swank

Robert De Niro

Emma Stone

The 10 Best Movies of 2023

 

The following list was scraped together from the movies I saw last year, either for the first time ever, or for the first time in years. Some I managed to see on a big screen. Others were on Kanopy, YouTube, or TCM. Some were rentals from Scarecrow, Seattle's only remaining video store.

MOVIES I LIKED A LOT:

"The Quiet Girl" (2022)

"Poor Things" (2023)

"LOLA" (2022)

"Scrapper" (2023)

Saltburn" (2023)

"Oppenheimer" (2023)

"Killers of the Flower Moon" (2023)

"Fallen Leaves" (2o23)

"Pearl" (2022)

"Dead For a Dollar" (2022)

SECRET TREASURES:

"Tag" (2015)

"Breaking Surface" (2020)

"Moon Garden" (2022)

"The Ballad of Lefty Brown" (2017)

GUILTY PLEASURES:

"Renfield" (2023)

"The Pope's Exorcist" (2023)

"Loaded Weapon 1" (1993)

"Lobster Man From Mars" (1989)

MOVIES I MIGHT WATCH AGAIN SOMETIME:

"A Love Song" (2o22)

"Full Time" (2021)

"In a Valley of Violence" (2016)

"The Holdovers" (2023)

"Godzilla Minus One" (2023)

"Asteroid City" (2023)

"Tár" (2022)

"Mystery Road" (2018)

"Living" (2022)

"The Lost King" (2022)

FOUR FROM THE VAULT:

"Blast of Silence" (1961)

"The Last Picture Show" (1971)

"Pink Flamingos"(1972)

"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)

TOXIC WASTE:

"Wet Wilderness" (1975)

Desert Island Women / Take 3

 

Movies become more interesting 

when these women show up in them:

Rosamund Pike

Eva Green

Saoirse Ronan

Emma Stone

Kristen Stewart

Samantha Morton

Michelle Rodriguez

Amy Adams

Carey Mulligan

Noomi Rapace

Desert Island Characters / Take 2

 

More actors who had notable careers in (mostly) supporting roles: 

                             John Vernon

                             Claude Akins

                             William Schallert

                             Lloyd Nolan

                             Lionel Stander

                             Harry Morgan

                             Akim Tamiroff

                             Simon Oakland

                             Murray Hamilton

                             Harry Dean Stanton

The Hit List: Richard Burton

"I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have 

  somewhere to go in the morning." 

  Richard Burton

    The first time I saw Richard Burton in a movie was probably when I watched "Demetrius and the Gladiators" on television in 1961. He's actually not in that one, except for a brief flashback clip of the scene at the end of "The Robe", where the mad emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson) sends Burton and fellow martyr Jean Simmons off to be executed. 

    The first time I saw Burton on a big screen was in "The Longest Day", Darryl Zanuck's epic recreation of D-Day, in which he plays a downed aviator whose wounds have been stitched together with safety pins. 

    After that, he seemed to turn up a lot, sometimes in good movies, sometimes in great ones, and sometimes in junk where the main point of interest is wondering how much the actor was drinking during the shoot. Here are a few of the better ones:

"The Robe" (1953/Henry Koster)

Burton's a Roman soldier who ends up with the robe Christ wore to the Crucifixion. The first movie in CinemaScope.

"The Longest Day" (1962/Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki)

Burton's sardonic fatalism stands out in a movie loaded with star cameos. 

"Becket" (1964/Peter Glenville)

Burton and Peter O'Toole face off as Thomas à Becket and Henry II.

"The Night of the Iguana" (1964/John Huston)

Burton's a defrocked priest on the skids in Mexico, in the company of Ava Gardner, Sue Lyon and Deborah Kerr.

"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" (1965/Martin Ritt)

Cold War cloak-and-dagger work, from a novel by John le Carré. The anti-james Bond.

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966/Mike Nichols)

"The Taming of the Shrew" (1967/Franco Zefirelli)

Mr. & Mrs. Burton in an Edward Albee psychodrama and a Shakespeare comedy. 

"Where Eagles Dare" (1968/Brian G. Hutton)

Burton, Clint Eastwood and a million rounds of ammo. A great guilty pleasure. 

"Anne of the Thousand Days" (1969/Charles Jarrott)

Genevieve Bujold plays Anne Boleyn. Burton plays Henry VIII.

"Villain" (1971/Michael Tuchner)

Burton plays a vicious gangster in a movie Guy Ritchie must've watched once or twice.

"1984" (1984/Michael Radford)

Burton persuades John Hurt to love Big Brother.

    As a young stage actor, Burton's intensity and charisma, along with a magnificent voice, earned him comparisons to Gielgud and Olivier. On screen, he didn't always bother to scale it back, but he could be devastating when he did. 

    He was famously married to Elizabeth Taylor (twice), and for a time was probably known as much for that and an extravagant lifestyle as he was for his film and theater work. 

    The years and a lifelong affection for alcohol caught up with him eventually, and in some of his later films, he looks ravaged. Yet even then, his haunted presence makes you want to watch. And he has that voice. 

    Burton died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 5, 1984. He was 58.

The 10 Best Movies of 2022

 

The following list was scraped together from the movies I saw last year, either for the first time ever, or for the first time in years. Some I managed to see on the big screen. Others were on Kanopy, YouTube, or TCM. Some were rentals from Scarecrow, Seattle's only remaining video store. 

MOVIES I LIKED A LOT:

"The Banshees of Inisherin" (2022)

"All Quiet On the Western Front" (2022)

"Belfast" (2021)

"Bullet Train" (2022)

"Forsaken" (2015)

"X" (2022)

"Little Women" (2019)

"See How they Run" (2022)

"Running Scared" (2006)

"C'était un Rendezvous" (1976)

SECRET TREASURES:

"Colewell" (2019)

"Ray Meets Helen" (2017)

"Interstate 60" (2002)

"Mystery, Alaska" (1999)

GUILTY PLEASURES:

"Assassination Nation" (2018)

"Benedetta" (2021)

"Mandy" (2018)

"The Corpse of Anna Fritz" (2015)

MOVIES I MIGHT WATCH AGAIN SOMETIME:

"Hell Drivers" (1957)

"Strangers In Paradise" (1984)

"Chicago 10" (2007)

"The Northman" (2022)

"The Man Who Sued God" (2001)

"Somewhere In the Night" (1946)

"The Good Liar" (2019)

"Lisbon Story" (1994)

"A Long Way Down" (2014)

"The Night My Number Came Up" (1955)

FOUR FROM THE VAULT:

"Airplane!" (1980)

"Absolute Power" (1997)

"Slap Shot" (1977)

"Tarzan and His Mate" (1934)

TOXIC WASTE:

"Demented Death Farm Massacre" (1971/1986)

The Hit List: Clint Eastwood

               "Whatever success I've had is due 

                 to a lot of instinct and a little luck."

    It seems unlikely that anybody watching "Rawhide" on CBS way back when would've predicted that the young actor playing cowpoke Rowdy Yates would become one of the screen's most accomplished filmmakers and one it its most iconic stars. But here's Clint Eastwood 60 years later, still making movies and sometimes starring in them, a testament to talent, longevity and luck. 

    He was born in San Francisco in 1930, and his family moved around a lot, which might've contributed to his affection for road movies. (He's made a lot of them.) He paid his dues in small parts and on "Rawhide", where he learned about directing by watching everything that was going on. He got his big break when he took a chance and went to Spain to make "A Fistful of Dollars" for Sergio Leone, and he's been working on the big screen ever since, behind the camera and in front of it. 

    To get a sense of what he's done, and the curious way his movies sometimes match up, consider these Eastwood double features. All were directed by Eastwood, unless otherwise noted. 

"A Fistful of Dollars" (1964) 

"For a Few Dollars More" (1965)

Both directed by Sergio Leone

Eastwood, Leone and composer Ennio Morricone team up and invent a new genre: the spaghetti western.

"Where Eagles Dare" (1968)

"Kelly's Heroes" (1970)

Both directed by Brian G. Hutton

World War Two was never like this. 

"The Beguiled" (1970/Don Siegel)

"Play Misty For Me" (1971)

A Civil War soldier and a radio jazz DJ discover the perils of promiscuity.

"Dirty Harry" (1971/Don Siegel)

"Sudden Impact" (1983)

Do you feel lucky?

"High Plains Drifter" (1973)

"Pale Rider" (1985)

Ghost stories (Spoiler Alert!) with Clint as the ghost.

"The Outlaw Josey Wales" (1976)

"Unforgiven" (1992)

Two westerns. Quintessential Clint.

"Bronco Billy" (1980)

"Honkytonk Man" (1982)

Road movies revolving around a favorite Eastwood theme: surrogate familes. 

"Absolute Power" (1997)

"Space Cowboys" (2000)

Escapist entertainment with Clint as a jewel thief who witnesses a murder, and an ancient astronaut. 

"Mystic River" (2003)

"Million Dollar Baby" (2004)

Movies from the dark side. Two of Clint's best.

"Flags of Our Fathers" (2006)

"Letters From Iwo Jima" (2006)

The war in the Pacific, from both sides.

"Gran Torino" (2008)

"Trouble With the Curve" (2012/Robert Lorenz)

Clint plays a retired autoworker and a baseball scout losing his eyesight. Not bad for an old guy.

    Clint turns 92 this year. His latest picture, "Cry Macho", was released last September. There's virtually no precedent for a filmmaker directing movies and playing leads in them simultaneously at that age. 

    Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who died in 2015, was still making films at 100, and it wouldn't be a total surprise if Clint were to get there, too. He works quickly and efficiently. He's famous for getting what he wants in one or two takes. His movies generally make money. And he seems to know how to pace himself. A career like Eastwood's doesn't happen purely by accident. 

    One thing's for sure: He's come a long way from "Rawhide" and Rowdy Yates.

Desert Island Characters

 

What would movies be without a few supporting players?

Royal Dano

Grady Sutton

George Chandler

Strother Martin

Whit Bissell

Percy Helton

Oscar Homolka

Franklin Pangborn

Leo G. Carroll

Eric Blore

The 10 Best Movies of 2021

 

The Movie Buzzard has watched more old movies than new ones lately. The following list reflects that.

MOVIES I LIKED A LOT:

"Lamb" (2021)

"Blancanieves" (2012)

"Le Femme et le TGV" (2016)

"Obit." (2016)

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" (1973)

"Bacurau" (2019)

"Hairspray" (1988)

"Stormy Weather" (1943)

"The Nutty Professor" (1963)

"Titane" (2021)

SECRET TREASURES:

"Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President" (2020)

"All Together" (2011)

"Suck" (2009)

"Showdown At Boot Hill" (1958)

GUILTY PLEASURES:

"Carry On Girls" (1973)

"Volcano" (1997)

"The Suicide Squad" (2021)

"The Last Castle" (2001)

MOVIES I MIGHT WATCH AGAIN SOMETIME:

"Criss Cross" (1949)

"The French Dispatch" (2021)

"Ghostbusters: Afterlife" (2021)

"Bad Reputation" (2018)

"Last Night In Soho" (2021)

"Welcome To the Sticks" (2008)

"No Time To Die" (2021)

"Cutter's Way" (1981)

"Our Town" (2003)

"The Wave" (2015)

FOUR FROM THE VIDEO VAULT:

"Chinatown" (1974)

"The Taking of Pelham 123" (1974)

"Roman Holiday" (1953)

"Frankenstein" (1931)

TOXIC WASTE:

"The Oscar" (1965)

Listomania / Take 12

 

Some women whose movie careers 

have lasted more than 50 years:

                                     Charlotte Rampling
                                     Geraldine Chaplin
                                     Vanessa Redgrave
                                     Sophia Loren
                                     Helen Mirren
                                     Jane Fonda
                                     Claudia Cardinale
                                     Faye Dunaway
                                     Eva Marie Saint

                                     Catherine Deneuve

Listomania / Take 11

 

Some actors whose careers have lasted more than 50 years:

                                      Michael Caine

                                      Clint Eastwood

                                      Donald Sutherland

                                      Robert Duvall

                                      Dustin Hoffman

                                      Alan Arkin

                                      Robert Redford

                                      Warren Beatty

                                      Harrison Ford

                                      Bruce Dern