By Rachel Thibault

Bill Cunningham New York – 2010 – dir. Richard Press

Who is Bill Cunningham? To start, he’s an enigmatic octogenarian and fixture of the streets of New York. He’s obsessed with the wild styles and bold colors of New Yorkers, yet wears a simple blue smock and a pair of khakis while photographing fashion’s flashiest.He rides a Schwinn around town (his 29^th; the first 28 were stolen), sleeps on a cot in a cramped tiny Carnegie Hall studio, and mends his plastic raincoats with black duct tape. He doesn’t speak of favorite designers and refuses the pate and cocktails offered to him at the galas he photographs.

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By William Benker

13 Assassins – 2010 – dir. Takashi Miike

13 Assassins is visually stimulating, philosophically compelling, and dripping with gore, but just in the right places.  Takashi Miike’s prolific career in the Japanese film industry has given him the freedom to do his fair share of genre bending, but this time he’s kept it contained.  While all the elements of the samurai epic are there, Miike’s gruesome touches are found only in the grisly efforts of the evil heir to the Akashi Clan, Naritsugu.  An easy indication of good versus evil is presented early on, yet in the execution of the story is where the real eloquence lies.

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By Allison Racicot

Beginners – 2010 – dir. Mike Mills

Some movies are meant to make viewers feel as though they’re intruding on the lives of the characters, that it’s an invasion of privacy, and they shouldn’t be able to see what’s happening. In many aspects, this is true for Beginners—the new film from director Mike Mills based partially on his own life and relationship with his father.

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By Brandon W. Irvine

Beetlejuice - 1988 – dir. Tim Burton

You often hear that movies are a “visual medium,” but a list of the most popular movies that emphasize the power of what is seen would start off with animated children’s films, comic book adaptations, and Transformers. Though at times their avid visual invention can become glorious spectacle, ideologically these movies usually limit themselves to reiterating conventional bromides about love and loyalty winning the day or tolerance being a virtue.

But what would a film be like if it reveled in dazzling entertainment without also resorting to moral comfort food?

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By Adam Shalvey

Badlands – 1973 – dir, Terrence Malick

In 1972 Terrence Malick ran out of money while editing Badlands, his first feature film, and with no studio backing or distribution deal, he turned back to freelance scriptwriting to drum up the last $35,000 he needed for 10 extra months of postproduction editing and sound rerecording. This was the second cash infusion that Malick personally invested into the feature, having earned about half of the initial funding for principle photography from his stint as a scriptwriter after graduating from the AFI Conservatory in 1969.
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