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This writer found Ukranian moviemaker Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 released EARTH, often hailed as his masterpiece, inscrutable.

In a glorious way.

That's not to say that there isn't a clear story and viewpoint here. There is. EARTH, a silent Soviet movie in the idea-based editing montage tradition of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and others, tells the story of a Ukranian village that commits to farming collectivization. The people, lead by enthusiastic young true believers turn to communist ideals of progress and technology while repudiating old systems of orthodox religion and oppression at the hands of rich landowners.

Yet, there's something else going on in EARTH. The movie starts with a sequence…

This is a movie that hits you different once you have children. You have to sit there and ask "What if this had been my child?" "What if this had been my loss?"

Spike Lee's documentary 4 LITTLE GIRLS deals with the horrific 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little girls in the basement who were getting ready to go to Sunday school after play outside.

The documentary is one of Lee's best works but the making of it must have been frought with trip wires. 

How do you make a movie about such a horrific topic with any kind of objectivity or critical analysis?

And how does a moviemaker like Lee find a through line, stay true to his vision and voice, but not overcomplicate or harm the work with unnecessary stylistics or imposed thematic overlays?

To everyone's credit…

DAYS OF BEING WILD (wri & dir by Wong Kar Wai, cinematography by Christopher Doyle, w/Leslie Cheung, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung, Hong Kong, 94mns, 1990)

*Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

We've written about Wong Kar Wai's full "Love" trilogy (DAYS OF BEING WILD, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, 2046) in our IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE review. Today, we want to focus in on just the first movie (which is also our personal favorite) DAYS OF BEING WILD.

DAYS OF BEING WILD was, in many ways, the movie that launched Wong Kar Wai on the international cinema scene. Only his second film as director, DAYS bears all the hallmarks of Kar-Wai's mature style-only with zero affectation or mannerism.

Once CHUNGKING EXPRESS and IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE exploded like firecrackers on cinema screens everywhere, Kar Wai started…

*Part of Martin Scorsese's WORLD CINEMA project which is currently streaming many of its titles as of this writing (Nov 2025) on the Criterion Channel.

MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT, based on the 1965 novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoes, proves that cinema can communicate nuance, indeterminancy, and illuminate that vast gray continent in which most of us live our entire lives.

38 year old Sergio, a Cuban bourgeois, decides to remain in Havana after the 1959 revolution, while the rest of his upper middle class family, including his wife, immigrates to the USA. Alone in his nice apartment, Sergio wanders the streets, has an affair with Elena, a young Cuban woman who wants to be an actress, thinks about his wife and other lovers, and watches the events of history unfold around him.

Sergio, played with impressive power and precision by…

If Hong Kong master movie makers had sibling days with western moviemakers, you might pair John Woo with Sam Peckinpah, Tsui Hark with Steven Spielberg, and Johnnie To with either David Fincher or Howard Hawks.

While Woo and To often get compared to French police & gangster auteur Jean Pierre Melville (Le Samuroi, La Cerc Rogue, Un Flic, etc), I'm not quite sure that's right. Melville's spare, laconic style of masculine codes can sometimes be almost mannered. 

Woo, Hark, and To have discernible stylistic trademarks but their pictures more comfortably traffic in popcorn and crowd-pleasing. These are movies MEANT to be enjoyed even more than analyzed.

Still, there's a crisp sly undercurrent of question asking beneath …

Movies like Costa-Gavras STATE OF SIEGE and Z are part of a high watermark for political cinema from the mid 1960's through the late 1970's. Filmmakers like Gavras, Francesco Rosi, Fassbinder, Paddy Chayevsky among many others were making movies that met the moment head on.

While many (if not almost all) of the moviemakers' political sentiments lean left, there is still a journalistic rigor and clarity that defines this era's work. Agree or disagree with the implied conclusions, viewers almost always feel like they understand better the situation, the stakes, and the moving parts of these complex political moments.

These movies challenge us. Never have such political movies been more necessary than our current moment. Who will stick their neck out to try and document and understand the world-shaking events occurring right now?

Greek-French moviemaker Costa-Gavras made several masterpieces in the political genre…

Edward Yang's YI YI is an elusive movie. In the best possible way.

Like a pond you go to swim in only to realize its depth is much deeper than anticipated. Maybe you're even swimming in something oceanic. So far below your treading feet as to evoke a kind of cosmic fear. 

Yang, along with Hou Hsiou Hsien and others, formed the Taiwanese new wave that produced a host of complex masterpieces in the 1980's-2000's. 

YI YI tells the story of the modern-day Jian family who live in Taiwan's capital, Taipei. We specifically see how the stories of NJ, the soft-spoken father, Ting-Ting, the good hearted elder sister, and Yang-Yang, the curious, mischievous youngest son weave in strange ways that imply an abstraction or transcendence.

The movie often seems like it's going to be…

Cut to the chase-this is an incredible movie. It doesn't fully work for reasons we'll get into. But in terms of its most important ambition-to be a hard nosed, edge of your seat action-suspense movie-it's wild in its success.

William Friedkin's SORCERER, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic 1953 French thriller, finds four nothing to lose men in a dangerous Latin American town agreeing to a suicide mission to drive explosives 200 miles through impossible jungle for a payout that will let them start new lives.

Friedkin deviates the most from the original at the very start when he…

On June 7th of 2025, the AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE hosted — as a part of their famous, now worldwide festival BLEAK WEEK (a screening series focused on deep, dark, and heavy, aka, feel-bad cinema) — a screening of Carl Dreyer’s 1943 masterpiece, DAY OF WRATH.

Filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and set in the seventeenth century, it’s focused on the second wife of a pastor who falls in love with her stepson amid paranoia and witch hunts. If it sounds like a melodrama — trust me, it isn’t.

The screening, on a hot LA summer day at 1:00 PM, was sold out, and seats were filled with filmmakers such as Rian Johnson, Karina Longworth, my mentor and friend Larry Karaszewski, among many others.

Before the film started, Deborah Stoiber — collection manager in the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman Museum — introduced the rare nitrate print in a way that caught my attention and set me up for an unforgettable viewing experience.

So as part of my mission with SECRET MOVIE CLUB…

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MATTHEW GENTILE: George Stevens Jr. is with me today. He has worn many hats as a producer, director, screenwriter, the founder of the American Film Institute, the creator of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and the co-creator of the Kennedy Center Honors. For his achievements in cinema and television, Mr. Stevens Jr. has won 14 Emmys, two Peabody Awards, eight Writers Guild of America Awards, as well as a Humanitas Prize, an honorary Oscar in 2012, which was presented to him by his collaborator, Sidney Poitier. In January of this past year, Mr. Stevens Jr. was honoredby President Joe Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest honor for a civilian. In 2022, he released his captivating memoir, My Place in the Sun, Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington, which tells the story of him and his father, George Stevens Sr., who directed copious classics such as A Place in the Sun, Giant, and Shane, among many, many others. Mr. Stevens Jr.’s revered documentary about his father, George Stevens, A Filmmaker’s Journey, has been newly restored this year and is now streaming on Max.

GEORGE STEVENS JUNIOR: Yes, well, I’m really happy to be here and looking forward to…

American independent cinema's parallel 20th century story is as rich and varied as that of its bigger budgeted Hollywood sibling.

Barbara Loden's 1970 WANDA about a restless working class woman's life and relationship with a small time agitated thief is one of American independent cinema's lodestones. 

Most courses or series trying to take someone through key indie American works would probably include the works of John Cassavettes, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, and WANDA among others.

Before independent cinema itself got coopted into something different, these movies were truly made by moviemakers who couldn't or didn't want to be a part of the system.

Renegades, iconoclasts, contrarians. Real independents. Like Barbara Loden.

Loden, an actor known to many…

Italian 1960's landmark movie FISTS IN THE POCKET is one of those movies that's hard to figure out divorced from its time's context and deeper research into what made it such a lightning rod movie.

Watched as just a movie in 2025, it's unsettling and mysterious. What is Bellocchio trying to communicate in this unconventional story of an Italian family frustrated and unsatisfied?

The movie centers around possibly sociopathic Sandro, the middle brother of a mostly homebound Italian family, as he lusts after …