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To watch all of Romero’s films close together is to discover that earnestness is their binding quality for both better and worse, as they transcend their variable individual parts. Romero’s films are frequently shaggy, finding weird humanity amid the contrivances of bureaucracy. The filmmaker’s search for community and meaning informs even his lesser efforts with a fascinating obsessiveness. Like many of his protagonists, Romero is torn between inner yearning (to be a broader artist) and outer social expectation (to fulfill his mantle as the godfather of the zombie film). The living dead were very good to this man, enabling a gifted and incalculably influential artist to free himself from self-consciousness. Obligation ironically allowed Romero room to riff, as constriction is a potential gateway to freedom.

The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers, a disastrously inept adaptation of James’s classic novella of psychological gamesmanship and literary obsession. The filmmakers have leached the richness, sophistication, and suspense from the novella and replaced them with inert melodrama and desperately gratuitous sex scenes. Despite the presence of James Ivory as an executive producer, the whole thing feels less like an erudite and emotionally complex Merchant-Ivory literary adaptation and more like a high school theatrical production directed by Zalman King.

Pre-CGI, of course, the sequence remains one of the most exciting chases in movie history… possibly because of its lack of computer-generated imagery. Every horse, every spectator, every mangled body… this stuff is all happening in the real world, and you can feel it every gallop and crunch of the way. It is a thing of beauty.

As is true of a great deal of the films that have been adorned with the best picture Oscar in the past two decades, John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love is a thunderous mediocrity, a beautifully costumed and designed mess, as ultimately amiable as it is nonsensical. The greatest voice the theater has ever seen, the author of an unequaled canon that serves as inspiration for nearly all narrative works in the modern age, William Shakespeare is here portrayed by Joseph Fiennes as an egotistical cad—a loathsome, unrepentant scoundrel and bum who’s capable of uttering “Damn, I’m good!” after finishing the first act of a play he’s weeks late on. Indeed, the screen’s contempt for its chief architects remains as potent and unyielding as it is largely thoughtless and despicable. Hollywood has never been very comfortable, or perhaps capable of, depicting great writers successfully—or, for that matter, taking their struggles seriously and their triumphs sincerely. As Shakespeare in Love unfolds, the penning of Romeo and Juliet is seen as near-accidental, spurred by the Bard’s misguided lust for a costume girl. And yet, as the film proceeds through its weedy narrative, focused mainly on the romance between Shakespeare and Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the first production of Romeo and Juliet, the unenviable task of believing that Shakespeare was a genius of tremendous insight and imagination, despite the production’s eager insistence that he was simply a jealous coward stricken with luck, becomes an exhausting exercise of imagination. Chris Cabin

Many were shocked to recently learn that Dustin Hoffman slapped co-star Meryl Streep on the set of Kramer vs. Kramer. Hoffman’s reputation as an actor who relies heavily on the crutch of ridiculous head games to reach some sort of emotional truth has been around as long as his Marathon Man co-star Laurence Olivier threw him the most magnificent shade: “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?” But the fundamental disrespect for women embodied within what Hoffman thought was a helping hand isn’t absent from the film itself. At the start of Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep’s Joanna Kramer leaves her husband and son in order to find herself, and the film bends over backward to show that it’s actually Hoffman’s Ted Kramer who is doing all the finding within himself, as he first awkwardly then whole-heartedly embraces his role as a single parent. And when Joanna comes back into the picture, her dramatic function is solely to serve as antagonist to the newly enlightened Ted. The world having outgrown the film’s pedagogic function, all that’s left really is soap operatics and courtroom melodrama. Eric Henderson

Steve McQueen, as is his wont, is largely content to craft images and sounds that strongly convey atmosphere and evoke great horrors but are less visualizations of human feeling than artistic posturing. Take 12 Years a Slave’s opening shot, an artfully framed overhead of a plate containing a drab piece of meat and bread and a few blackberries whose juices the educated Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who’s warned to feign illiteracy for the sake of his survival, will use to craft a letter to potential saviors back in New York. McQueen only implies Solomon’s realization of how he can repurpose the blackberry juice as ink, transfixing us instead with the beauty with which the juice circles around the plate as Solomon tilts it from side to side. This manner of giving primacy to the fastidiously composed image over human emotion is repeated when Solomon, after his intentions have come to light, burns the letter he’s written, the embers of the flame suggesting a vast universe’s dying stars. It’s an impossibly gorgeous image, poetic in its implications, though it isn’t preferable to the one that was meticulously left off screen: the dissolving of hope from Solomon’s face. Gonzalez

The film unfolds as a series of long, drawn-out dialogue scenes in which the characters rhythmlessly banter back and forth, interrupted by laughably smoldering flashbacks in which Aspern and Juliana (played as a young woman by Alice Aufray) screw each other in overheated softcore sex scenes—some featuring a third participant, identified in the credits only as “Second Romantic Poet” (Nicolas Hau)—that feel wildly out of step with the bland chamber drama of the rest of The Aspen Papers.

Russ Quinn shares how his son wanted to drive a special tractor in a National FFA Week event that encouraged FFA members to drive their…

Roy Batty is one such replicant, whose only wish is to extend his limited life-span. As he comes to the grim realisation that his days are numbered, and as his life-force slips away, Batty saves Deckard’s life before launching into one of the most famous speeches in film history.

To watch all of Romero’s films close together is to discover that earnestness is their binding quality for both better and worse, as they transcend their variable individual parts. Romero’s films are frequently shaggy, finding weird humanity amid the contrivances of bureaucracy. The filmmaker’s search for community and meaning informs even his lesser efforts with a fascinating obsessiveness. Like many of his protagonists, Romero is torn between inner yearning (to be a broader artist) and outer social expectation (to fulfill his mantle as the godfather of the zombie film). The living dead were very good to this man, enabling a gifted and incalculably influential artist to free himself from self-consciousness. Obligation ironically allowed Romero room to riff, as constriction is a potential gateway to freedom.

Blind Spots: La Boheme (King Vidor), For Heaven’s Sake (Sam Taylor), The Strong Man (Frank Capra), So’s Your Old Man (Gregory La Cava), So This is Paris (Ernst Lubitsch), The Black Pirate (Albert Parker), Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice), Sparrows (William Beaudine), Tell It to the Marines (George W.Hill), Don Juan (Alan Crosland), Torrent Monta Bell), The Holy Mountain (Arnold Fanck), Carmen (Jacques Feyder), Brown of Harvard (Jack Conway), The Bat (Roland West), The Boob (William A. Wellman), Nana (Jean Renoir), Exit Smiling (Sam Taylor), The Blackbird (Tod Browning), The Student of Prague (Henrik Galeen), What Price Glory (Raoul Walsh), Beau Geste (Herbert Brenon), Mantrap (Victor Fleming), By the Law (Lev Kuleshov)

Clouzot is aware of the perils of his “cheating” against the strictures of his concept, as these violations are as much his subject as Picasso’s process. At one point, after Picasso’s art has continually materialized on the screen with seemingly little effort, Clouzot says to the artist that audiences will think he created a composition in a matter of minutes, even though they’ve been filming for five hours. This admission casts the film in a startling new light, underscoring our naïveté, as we’ve indeed been seduced—by Clouzot’s sleek techniques, by the general pop-art mythologies of the artist as a mystic conjurer—into believing that Picasso is casually knocking off one canvas after another over the course of a few glasses of wine.