Josef von Sternberg
1930

This is pretty stunning, visually. Doubly so since early sound film is so often stagey and horrible because of the technology issues. (They had to have cameras in, like, booths to mask the sound. It took awhile to make cameras quiet enough that they could get back to the point where they could shoot with a totally mobile camera.) I think it works because von Sternberg is such a mise-en-scène director. It probably would have worked better if it hadn't been such a shitty 16mm print.
That said, I've been really getting interested in melodrama lately. I used to just find it annoying, but I'm beginning to think that it has a lot more possibilities than I thought.
The prof who introduced this called it a "decadent film."

John Ford
1946

Now I see what all the fuss is about John Ford.
Probably the best studio-era Western I've seen.
(What's weird is that Open Range is practically a remake, only without that whole shootout at the OK Corral thing going for it.)
It has all the iconic cinematography and Henry Fonda and Victor Mature being all dissipated as Doc Holliday (who looks a lot like a 1940s version of Chris Noth).

(The only thing that really dates this is how it's totally racist (and sexist). Luckily, it's not a "fight the Indians" Western, so there's only the part where Wyatt Earp proves his strength and rightness for the job of Marshall by knocking out a drunk Indian and then kicking him on the butt and telling him "Get out and stay out, Indian!" And where he catches Chihuahua (seriously), the "Bad Woman," cheating at poker and throws her in a trough of water and tells her that if he catches her again, he'll send her back to the Apache reservation, where she belongs. Even though she's clearly supposed to be hispanic, seemingly Mexican. Of course, she is bad. And dies.)

The thing about Westerns of this era is that they're great filmmaking, but you sort of have to ignore the politics. But seriously. Great.

Esther Shub
1927

What she did, was she looked through thousands of metres of film. Then she picked the bits she wanted and compiled them into a Marxist historical narrative.
This was the first compilation film. Ever.
Shub was friends with and influenced both Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, who film classes are obsessed with. How had I not heard of her? Oh yeah, because practically nothing has been written about her in English.

John Waters
1981

This is so weird and hilarious and uncomfortable to watch and I'm kind of glad I read the article that asserted that Waters was "queering heterosex" so I could maintain some intellectual distance.
Not that that's all he's doing.
I totally want to see more of his stuff. Maybe not Pink Flamingos.
Great. Like I need another director to start looking up.

Eric Schaeffer
1996

I mainly watched this because Sarah Jessica Parker was in it and I wanted to see if I felt my hating her before Sex & the City was valid.
Since she was the best part of this, way above the material, I guess it was unjustified, or perhaps justified in the fact that she picked shitty, total Gen-X romantic stereotyped material. Blah, they live in a loft, they go to Starbucks (HOW HIP IS THAT?), etc. etc. Her wardrobe is totally good though.
It tries to be all edgy by having a "Let's jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if we're not married by 30" pact instead of a "Let's get married" pact, but you never think either of them actually plans to kill themselves, which I guess is what is supposed to generate the suspense, so it really just exaggerates the usual classic Hollywood deadline plot by having a calendar painted on the wall of a key set.
It also brings the classic Hollywood "plot with a deadline" to new obviousness. Which would be clever if there was anything else interesting about this movie or if the jokes were actually funny.
Actually, Ben Stiller is hilarious ("I...art") but absolutely impossible to take seriously as a rival for the romantic hero (who is the director), so Sarah Jessica Parker's character loses crediblility (she's supposed to be smart) by not getting how over-the-top a joke this guy is.
Also, mini-Scarlett Johansson is in this! So weird.

Ronald Wilson
1994

I didn't really watch the whole thing of this, because I was flipping to something else, but I found myself alternately fascinated and repelled by its rigourous use of girl-coming-of-age clichés.
It was apparently produced for TV, which might explain a lot of how commonplace everything looked.
It was also apparently based on an Alice Munro novel, so it's possible that she made up the clichés.
Tanya Allen was quite good.

Gene Saks
1968

This was really weird for me to watch because I assistant stage managed a version of this in high school, which means I knew the play inside and out. It sort of messes with that whole suspension of disbelief deal. Also I kept saying "I like the way they played that line. Much subtler than we did."

Also, I don't like Neil Simon as much as I used to. Still love Jack Lemmon though.

(Am posting this retroactively because I just remembered I watched it and never posted it.)

Kevin Costner
2002

Boy, those cowboys sure do talk about their feelings a lot.
Really pretty though - it was shot near Calgary, in the foothills of the Rockies.

Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack
1925

Still in the bullshit ethnography vein. This one was the least painful.
The film follows this huge Persian Nomadic tribe as it makes this insane journey across these mountains. I've gotten really cynical about this sort of thing, but they couldn't have staged most of this stuff and they shot it gorgeously.
And they actually went on the trip too.
Could have done without a lot of the cutesy intertitles though.

Edward S. Curtis
1914

(Original title: In the Land of the Headhunters)

I fell asleep during this. You can tell the director came from photography because there are some gorgeous compositions where you see landscape and whatever. Then there are really dull ones where everyone just sits and talks for endless intervals.
Bah.