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Late period work by any director usually gets met first with disappointment then respectful reappraisal, rarely with wild acclaim.

Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is so conscious of the usual trend of diminished quality that he continues to assert his next movie (currently in pre-production), his 10th, will be his last. A keen study of how filmmographies go, Tarantino intends to go out on top with a bullet proof body of work. No surprise, he has also started a family now and may want to be the kind of present father and husband many directors are not.

So it’s with some surprise that in revisiting three of Hitchcock’s final four films-1966’s Torn Curtain, 1972’s Frenzy (the megahit of the trio), and 1976’s final bow Family Plot (the discovery for any Hitchcock fan who has not yet seen it), this writer found himself impressed with just how much gas Hitchcock had left in the tank. These final movies, while flawed at varying levels, find a moviemaker…

Twenty five years after the at first maligned, now celebrated David Lynch movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), David Lynch and Mark Frost returned in 2017 to Twin Peaks with their 18 hour Showtime limited series TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN. Though no one had expected it, they had basically promised us they would do this in both the very first 1990 episode (Season 1 Episode 1’s European pilot), the 1991 Season 2 finale, the 1992 feature film, when Laura Palmer tells FBI Agent Dale Cooper in the Red Room “I’ll see you in 25 years”. At the time, everyone mostly thought this was just some Grade A level David Lynch weirdness.

It turned out to be a promise.

This itself was the equivalent of a batter who points out they’ll be back in 25 years to hit a grand slam, then returns 25 years later and hits that grand slam at the appointed time.

Although the series was released…

One of the great catalysts for 21st century moviemakers is the reality that masterworks, every square inch as good as anything made, are being produced. There’s still cinema frontier yet to be explored. There are still filmic peaks yet to scale.

Like everything in art, there are the objective masterworks and then one’s own personal favorite masterworks. There’s an overlapping ven dot diagram of intersection to be sure. But the two lists are different beasts.

Today, this writer would like to discuss (with pith! with brevity!) a list of personal selections for greatest movies of the 21st century. These include Catch Me If You Can (2002), Children of Men (2006), No Country for Old Men (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Zodiac (2007), Un Prophete (2009), Melancholia (2011), The Act of Killing (2012), Hard to be a God (2013), Boyhood (2014), Twin Peaks The Return (2017-though this will passed over as it will be written about in depth across the next few weeks), Into the Spiderverse (2018), Lover’s Rock (2020), and The Worst Person in the World (2021)….

David Lynch and Mark Frost came back from their own respective feature film projects (Wild at Heart for Lynch, Storyville for Frost) to try and salvage their TV creation Twin Peaks, which had one foot in the cancellation grave for most of 1991. Lynch and Frost returned the series to its roots and even deepened the mystery with a Season 2 finale “Beyond Life and Death” that managed the impossible by becoming one of the series’ greatest episodes ever. They ended that spectacular episode on a cliffhanger in the hopes of big enough ratings to convince ABC to allow them a third and final season to tie up loose ends.

ABC cancelled the show anyway.

So fans and audience members were left with the horrible final scene of truly decent spiritual FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Machlachlan) seemingly possessed by the horrific malevolent embodiment of evil BOB (Frank De Silva).

However a potential deux ex machina came when word got out that Lynch was directing a Twin Peaks feature film. Surely this cliffhanger would be resolved. Surely…

Rewatching a movie or TV series is a beautiful new experience. Now that you’re familiar with the material, you enter a new level of engagement. Rewatching the first two seasons of David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks which aired in 1990-1991 on ABC, a tension becomes very clear.

There are aspects of the show which clearly obsess Lynch and Frost, namely the murder of Laura Palmer, spiritual straight shooter FBI agent Dale Cooper who comes to investigate the murder, a kind of interrogation of small town community, and the complex nature of good and evil deeds with a belief that travels into the transcendent. .

But then you also notice there are aspects of…

Over the last seven plus years, you may have heard me opine about how I think there are traceable lineages in cinema. It can almost be biblical if you want. German expressionist genius F.W. Murnau (The Last Laugh, Sunrise, Nosferatu) begat John Ford who begat Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman who begat Spielberg. . .

Then recently another lineage seemed to pop its way into my consciousness. And I was embarrassed I’d never really put it together. The other German expressionist maestro Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse, Metropolis, Die Nibelungen) begat Alfred Hitchcock who begat Brian De Palma and David Fincher who begat. . .

And I thought that was it. No more begatting.

But then it hit me. I’d left an entire genealogy on the table that was so clear it had been staring me in the face just inches away from my nose.

Russian montage master moviemaker Sergei Eisenstein (Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky)…