Samuel Fuller
1963

Constance Powers x awkwardest striptease EVER + feather boa + racist black guy + nympho attack! + fake incest / electroshock therapy x 60s asylum + murder + Pulitzer Prize = AWESOME

Michael Mann
1981

There's some crazy pacing issues with this. I noticed the same thing with The Insider. Mann is very intent, but it always feels like his movies are much longer than they actually are. The story of this (and say, something like Collateral) aren't really that different from any other Hollywood stuff, it's just the way it's presented.
The score, by (seriously) Tangerine Dream, hasn't aged well, making it feel even more like a product of its time.
Everyone's really good in it: James Caan is always good, Tuesday Weld is his wife and Willie Nelson plays his prison "father-figure." (I think there's some homoerotic subtext there.)

Alfred Hitchcock
1954

I had, of course, seen this one a million times or so, so it wasn't exactly new.
I'd forgotten how good it was though.
Those fight scenes at the very end are so gritty for 1954.
Grace Kelly is radiant. (I love the dynamic of her relationship with Jimmy Stewart, even at the end. And the way he's so much more interested in her once she gets into the whole "Let's solve a crime!" caper.)
Everything, as with Hitchcock always, is just so.

(Hitch will always have a special place in my heart. If it weren't for him, I never would have read Robin Wood in high school and I might not be doing what I am now.)

Sam Raimi
2004

Everyone keeps saying how this one was so much better than the first one.
It was really good; hit all the right notes; etc.

I guess I just liked the narrative sweep of the first one better. Felt more classical.

Still, rock on, Tobey.

Haskell Wexler
1969

I'd somehow totally forgotten I'd seen this.

I've watched in two classes now, both in the context of political engagement in film. (There's a bunch of actual footage of the 1968 DNC in Chicago where a bunch of protesters got killed that's pretty gripping.)
It's actually mostly about a news cameraman who considers himself outside the subjects he's filming and his growing sense of responsibility.
I don't know, it was better the second time around.

Richard Franklin
1983

I was reluctant to include this in a log of movies I'd actually watched because of the amount of time I spent while this was on discussing Meg Tilly's hairstyle (which we decided looked good on 4 people: Meg Tilly, Pat Benatar, Karen O, and that girl who cut my hair last time) with my brother and/or drifting off to sleep.
But I chose to.
We started watching this because we were changing channels and saw the beginning of the shower scene. "Hey, this is Psycho," we said after about two seconds because we've both seen it many many times.
Then after the murder some credits flashed. "Anthony Perkins in..." etc.
It was bizarre because this director had obviously seen the original about a million times. He kept quoting shots from it. Let's just say Meg Tilly takes a really similar shower.
The plot is Norman gets out of the crazy house and tries to live a valuable life. Then he starts getting weird notes and phone calls from his mother. And people start dying. Is Norman really losing it or is there something more sinister at hand?
The twist ending was pretty weak and, actually, when I think of it, better in concept than it was on film. (I won't tell because I don't want to spoil it for you.)

It actually wasn't that bad. If it hadn't been called Psycho II it would have been a fairly well-executed little thriller with some pacing problems and overly obvious stigmata symbolism. (He gets cut! On his hands! What do you think the director is trying to say?) As opposed to feeling a little like sacrilege, which for a film geek it basically is.

Jim Jarmusch
1986

What I like about Jarmusch is that he throws together these people who don't even seem to come from the same world and then throws them all together and they just talk. (Best example: GZA and RZA meet Bill Murray in Coffee & Cigarettes.)
The weird part is how totally similar the Waits and Lurie characters are. One's named Jack and one's name Zack; the Benigni character is constantly mixing them up. The opening sequence shows them mirroring each other right away. Both are with a woman who's in bed and pretends to be asleep and then opens her eyes as the music comes back in. The way the camera moves across town makes them seem to be somehow connected. Also, then each woman basically gives a (fairly stagey, in both cases) monologue about how stupid the guy is. Plus they exchange jackets and head down symmetrical paths at the end.
I love to look at Jarmusch movies. There's something so clean about the black and white cinematography and so unique about his eye that everything looks a little otherworldly. I could watch the camera pan across the buildings to transition from Jack to Zack in the opening sequences all day.
The scene where Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni and John Lurie start dancing around their jail cell chanting "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!" is one of my new favourites ever.
Lurie starred and did the soundtrack, which was spare and jazzy. And it opens and closes with Tom Waits songs. So for music, Down By Law gets A+.
The actual movie gets somewhere around a B. I liked the first probably two-thirds, but the last part (basically everything following the jailbreak) was touch-and-go for me. (Though it was hilarious when they found the cabin that looked exactly like their jail cell.) It might have been because I was dog-tired but whatever.

John Cassavetes
1959

The whole movie's improvised. The actors even use their real names for added realism. You can see how influential it was, especially in American independent film. It came out around the same time as Breathless.
It's sort like if Kerouac wrote a movie where women were allowed to actually have personalities.

Samuel Fuller
1964

A melodrama about a prostitute who decides to turn her life around in a small town.
It's got sort of a 60s "social problems" film feel, but it's really interesting to look at it in contrast with Written on the Wind, which was a much more mainstream example from a couple of years earlier.
Only instead of hinting at homosexuality, nymphomania and pseudo-incest, The Naked Kiss is like "This is a prostitute. This is a pedophile." It's very honest.
There are some really striking scenes. The opening, where she totally beats her pimp senseless and takes the money she owes him to this wild jazz score, then it cuts to her putting on her wig and fixing herself up in the mirror with this normal normal score, is killer.
There is some dialogue that sounds painfully cheesy, also, but I think that judging something this obviously melodramatic by realistic standards is totally useless. Because it's dealing with a dark world, but it's not exactly the real world and it's so well put together you can't help but like it.

Terry Jones
1979

Totally saved my day from being the most horrible ever.