Robinson, then stalks her daughter Katharine Ross to campus and breaks up her wedding by screaming like a banshee. One that showcases the new spirit of antisocial passion in a socially acceptable — and divinely infectious — way. How elemental — and riveting — is this: an entire courtroom drama set inside the jury room, where Henry Fonda, as the only member of the jury who suspects that a teenage defendant might not be guilty of murder, questions, cajoles and gradually convinces his fellow jurors to look more closely at the evidence.
You never forget your first. Here she plays a voice-over artist whose co-worker and lover is leaving her. The director gathered artists — on camera and on the set — who became his go-to company and underlined his wholly original sensibility. Stream the film on Prime Video. Several scenes later, an alien fetus erupts right out of his belly, and the cinema would never be the same. Director Ridley Scott, drawing on the imagery of H. R Giger, staged a kind of Skinner box sci-fi nightmare that left audiences in a state of primal shock.
Richard Lester, drawing on cutting-edge film techniques that are still bracing, fulfilled his assignment of directing a Beatles movie at the dawn of Beatlemania by staging it all as a day in the life of the Beatles as they really were. Instead, the studio fired him, so he went to work for the Graphics Group at Lucasfilm. Practically every surface looked fake, like plastic, which made a buddy comedy starring a bunch of toys ideal for the new medium.
Bugs and fish and monsters would follow, but even as the technology evolved — liberating the heretofore hand-rendered form — nothing has surpassed that first toon, thanks to great writing and voice work that, even more than the CGI, brought Woody, Buzz Lightyear and their pals to life. With most comedies, audiences are lucky to get one hall-of-fame set piece.
The film is available to stream on Peacock. Long before Tarantino, Jean-Pierre Melville obsessed about movies, admiring American directors and absorbing their codes. Melville made crime movies mostly, taking the essence of film noir from Hollywood and filtering it through his own streetwise sensibility. Eat your heart out, P. Yet his great searing drama about the experience and meaning of divorce carries none of that literary burden. Bergman, tearing into the very meat of middle-class experience, made what now looks like the defining cinematic statement about how modern marriages live and die.
