"The Conversation": Coppola's quiet, contemplative and underrated masterpiece

He'd kill us if he got the chance."

Although the topic of “bests” in film will always be hotly debated in most circles inhabited by those souls so inclined to talk about cinema, whether it’s specific or overly broad—arguments over the best actors, genres and decades—there’s little point in questioning certain truths. One of those truths is that the New Hollywood era—a time when a group of young American filmmakers rose to prominence and broke the molds of the old studio system and its censors in a fashion similar to the French New Wave, producing culturally critical, sometimes exceptionally violent, and unusually anti-establishment productions all while fully-funded by big brass at Columbia, Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers—is one of the most important times in cinematic history. It just is, largely because of the directors who led the charge and how they changed movies forever.

“Hugo” is Marty’s magnificent, magical masterwork

Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz in Hugo

"Come, and dream with me."

Between 1896 and 1914 French filmmaker George Méliés directed more than 500 films. At one point—because Méliés, like many early film pioneers, failed to adequately preserve his work—nearly all of them were thought to be lost (many of the film negatives were melted down during World War I to make rubber heels for the boots of French soldiers). A magician by trade, Méliés was fascinated by the advent of motion pictures, which allowed him to further hone his craft through time lapse photography, stop-start editing, and other forms of cinematic trickery like double exposure. While inventors Auguste and Louis Lumiére saw movies as little more than a passing fad—and were merely interested in producing short documentaries like the 50-second The Arrival of a Train at La Coitat Station (1895), which, as the title tells the viewer, showed nothing more than a train pulling into a station—Méliés understood that movies could entertain and delight through their ability to manipulate reality.