Yes, it turns the true story of the Von Trapp Family Singers into the squarest of romantic fairy tales, yet the songs lift the film into the heavens, and so does Andrews’ beaming belief in every note. The whole movie makes goodness into something larger-than-life. Yet if you really watch her in “The Sound of Music,” you’ll see that Julie Andrews has her own sublime and saintly incandescence. Julie Andrews is most famous for two movies, “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music” (made in 1964 and ’65), and her character in the latter film - a nun-turned-governess who looks after the seven Von Trapp children, teaches them to sing and brings them to life, all under the watchful gaze of their stern military father (Christopher Plummer) - is such a goody-two-shoes that her stardom, on occasion, gets mocked and dismissed. Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection Read the original Variety review for “Malcolm X” here, and stream the film on HBO Max or Paramount+. Denzel Washington is there at every step, working with his director - who fuses prestige-movie gravitas with his own curveball style - through the seismic shifts of a man who had the courage of his fury, but ultimately sought a greater enlightenment. Every bit as impactful as the assassination sequence is the montage that precedes it, which evokes all that could have been as Malcolm drives to the Audubon Ballroom, haunted by the perception that martyrdom would be his final evolution. Malcolm X was an undeniably controversial and widely misunderstood figure, and Lee dedicates no fewer than 201 minutes to capturing the deep introspective complexity of a man who was constantly leveling up in his pursuit of justice, from teenage criminal to Muslim convert to Black nationalist leader and beyond. Then the studio and bond company pulled the plug, so he solicited donations from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, a strategy that allowed Lee to make the film as he saw fit. Lee won that fight, with severe restrictions. The studio initially wanted Norman Jewison to direct this monumental biopic of the human rights activist, but Spike Lee lobbied hard for Warner Bros. These film writers and critics contributed suggestions for movies: Manuel Betancourt, Clayton Davis, Peter Debruge, Matt Donnelly, William Earl, Patrick Frater, Steven Gaydos, Owen Gleiberman, Dennis Harvey, Courtney Howard, Angelique Jackson, Elsa Keslassy, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Richard Kuipers, Tomris Laffly, Brent Lang, Joe Leydon, Guy Lodge, Amy Nicholson, Michael Nordine, Naman Ramachandran, Manori Ravindran, Jenelle Riley, Pat Saperstein, Alissa Simon, Jazz Tangcay, Sylvia Tan, Zack Sharf, Adam B. We invite you to find out how many films from the list you’ve seen on this poll. But our hope is that in looking at the films we did choose, you’ll see a roster that reflects the impossibly wide-ranging, ever-shifting glory of what movies are. No doubt you’ll say: How could that movie have been left off the list? Or this one? Or that one? Trust us: We often asked that very same question ourselves. We invited prominent filmmakers and actors to contribute essays about the movies that are significant to them, and that passion comes across in all that they wrote. That’s the nature of the beast - the nature of the kind of protective passion that people feel about their favorite movies. The very spirit of cinema is that it has long been a landscape of spine-tingling eclecticism, and we wanted our list to reflect that - to honor the movies we love most, whatever categories they happen to fall into.ĭo we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. We don’t just mean different genres we don’t just mean highbrow and lowbrow (and everything in between). (We invented box office reporting, in addition to the words “showbiz” and “horse opera.”) And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the beautiful, head-spinning variety of the moviegoing experience. Variety, which recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is a publication as old as cinema. The hard part was deciding which movies to leave out. As we learned, coming up with which movies to include was the easy part. Our choices were winnowed from hundreds of titles submitted by more than 30 Variety critics, writers and editors. A great deal of ardent discussion and debate went into the creation of this list. Think about it: You get an average of one film per year. But they’re just old enough to make compiling Variety’s first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once might have been. That still makes them a young medium, at least in art-form years (how old is the novel? the theater? the painting?). The movies are now more than 100 years old.
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