Lucha Underground S2 E9: Aztec Warfare II | Polygon Bellow Covers<br />

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot Distributor: Milestone Films Running Time: 78 min Rating: PG Year: 1956

The town has three stoplights, hundreds of smoke-spewing chimneys and spotty cellphone service. During its long winters, residents rely on logs they’ve harvested, filling wood-burning stoves to survive the season. Sparta serves as the seat of Alleghany County, which produces more Christmas trees than almost anywhere in the country, and claims North Carolina’s third-highest suicide rate.

George C. Scott is Patton. In a career-defining performance, Scott embodied the controversial U.S. general in ways that have been equaled but never surpassed in the history of American biopics. Scott gets all of Patton’s rage, self-pity, arrogance, doubts and seemingly every other human emotion across in discreet chunks and sometimes all at once, capturing the modern-day gentleman warrior’s quixotic bravura, self-love, and misanthropy in equal measure. The screenplay, co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, has Shakespearean overtones, from soliloquies delivered in iambic pentameter on the eternal nature of war to ruminations on the difference (or lack thereof) between acting and being. This formal complexity is matched by the sheer scale and power of the battle scenes, which capture the brutality and amorality of the battlefield and hold up better than most war films from the time. But Patton is also a strange work for its time, an essentially pro-war film released at the height of the Vietnam War that glorifies an egomaniacal general precisely for his disregard for humanitarian notions like the wellbeing of his soldiers. It also glosses over his deep and abiding racism, particularly his anti-Semitism, as well as his dangerous warmongering after WWII. This out-of-placeness gives the film an uncanny quality, its undeniable visceral power masking an ethically retrograde core. Oleg Ivanov

Pauline Kael once claimed that Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), the folksy tin-pot despot at the center of Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men, “might just make you feel better about the president you’ve got.” If only! In fact, Stark’s political graft, double-dealing, and sexual indiscretions all look a bit quaint in comparison to the shameless lies, bald-faced corruption, and vicious race-baiting of our current grafter in chief. But that doesn’t mean this pared-down adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel lacks for insight into the warped psychology of U.S. politics. On the contrary, the film remains a compelling and surprisingly ambivalent study of a uniquely American demagogue: a hayseed bootstrapper turned thuggish autocrat who bellows populist slogans at throngs of whooping yokels like a cracker-barrel Mussolini. Crawford’s thunderous performance brings Stark to life, but it’s Rossen’s direction—which draws influence from the murky cynicism of film noir and the refractive realism of Citizen Kane—that ultimately makes the character so gripping. Rather than resolving the contradictions of Stark’s character, Rossen prefers instead to gape at him with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Keith Watson

Although not one of William Wyler’s most accomplished films, Mrs. Miniver is by all means a fine Hollywood product, wringing compelling, if increasingly overwrought, drama from its homefront story of a British family broken apart by World War II. The film’s first third is especially lively as it explores the superficial interests of Kay (Greer Garson), who spends her days purchasing hats and other accoutrements that, she worries, will upset her more frugal husband, Clem (Walter Pidgeon). Once the war hits, however, Mrs. Miniver drops much of its class concerns for a more typical wartime narrative of potential loss and recovery, exploiting the time in which it’s made as much as it explores said time. A concluding scene featuring a refrain of “Onward Christian Soldiers” finally places the film within the realm of spiffily made propaganda, capping a story that’s by turns endearing and noxious. Dillard

With that in mind, the true emotional climax of the film comes as Furiosa, Max and their companions finally arrive at what they think will be an idyllic paradise, untouched by the post-apocalyptic hell that’s consumed the rest of the planet. Instead, Furiosa discovers that there is no "Green Place," and that she risked life and (remaining) limb on a fool’s errand.

The Mystery of Picasso is less concerned with watching Picasso paint—which would’ve been more than enough to justify the film’s existence—than with pitting Clouzot and Picasso against one another. Clouzot is testing his medium against that of a master, seeing if he can fashion a dynamic film out of the act of almost literally watching paint dry. And Picasso, that wily icon, is correctly certain that the film will bolster his reputation whatever the result.

Honorable Mention: Mexican Bus Ride (Luis Buñuel), Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa), The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli), Waiting Women (Ingmar Bergman), Okasan (Mikio Naurse), The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer), Forbidden Games (Rene Clement), Sudden Fear (David Miller), The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujirô Ozu), Monkey Business (Howard Hawks), and A Woman Without Love (Luis Buñuel)

Psychiatric-ward rebel R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is eventually broken by Nurse Ratched’s regime, and is cruelly lobotomised to the horror of the Chief Bromden.

With Michael Ballhaus’s coiled, constantly roving cinematography bringing a measure of unease to the underworld action, The Departed jumps out of the gate like a caged lion freed into the wild, delivering a rapid-fire primer on the congruent paths of state police academy trainees Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), an intelligent recruit desperate to reject his family’s criminal past, and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a careerist with political dreams and deep-seated ties to Costello. Sullivan is Costello’s mole in the police department and Costigan is the cop infiltrating Costello’s crew, and both are soon ordered to discover the other’s identity, a dueling-rats conceit William Monahan’s screenplay embellishes with trademark Martin Scorsese preoccupations: Catholicism, double lives, issues of honor, honesty, and deceit, and the bond shared between fathers and sons. Faithful to premise of Infernal Affairs, Scorsese’s adaptation nonetheless substitutes the original’s sleek, cool demeanor with a feverish, foul, funky energy that’s layered with a thin coating of sexual deviance (epitomized by Nicholson’s porn-theater dildo antics) and dysfunction (with Sullivan cast as the impotent son to Costello’s seriously virile papa). Deftly employing classic rock for clever commentary—never more so than with adjacent Nicholson and DiCaprio love scenes subtly linked by Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”—and swiftly crosscutting between multiple subplots, Scorsese’s film, for much of its 150 minutes, rocks violently, passionately, urgently. Schager

Yes, there’s guilt in some of the emotions I played, but it’s not a guilt that has to do with religion. It’s more guilt from the feeling of being betrayed by someone. Also, he betrayed the woman he’s now with, and his vineyard. There’s a lot of guilt there, but I wouldn’t say that guilt is his most important motivation. Guilt is very religious, in my point of view. Spain is very connected to feelings of guilt, which is something I know lot about, by the way [laughs].

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