Here is a perfect case of a small gem of a film by Frank Borzage being overshadowed by his most famous silent work, Seventh Heaven. I remember being bowled over by this film during the 1992 Le Gionate del Cinema Muto festival in Pordenone, which included a Borzage retrospective. Lost until a print was discovered in 1970, Lazybones was a revelation. It’s a simple story of an utterly unambitious young man in a small town, played by the amiable cowboy star Buck Jones. He secretly does a great kindness that makes him the pariah of the town and loses him the love of his life. Swiss film historian Hervé Dumont described it well, writing that it was “revealed as the most poignant–and the most accomplished–of Borzage’s works before Seventh Heaven.” – Kristin Thompson

For me, Wes Anderson’s films divide into “Before and after Fantastic Mr. Fox.” I don’t care nearly as much for the before films as I do for the after ones. My theory is that Anderson didn’t quite know how to write a script early on. FantasticMr. Fox was his first adaptation of a literary work. Mr. Fox and Roald Dahl seem to have taught him how to create a script with cohesion and complex, sympathetic characters. Animation also injected the charm that the earlier films lacked. His next film was Moonrise Kingdom, David’s and my favorite of his, with its combination of humor and emotion. The rest of his films reflect the lessons he learned from Fantastic Mr. Fox. – Kristin Thompson

La règle du jeu goes on my list of the top ten masterpieces of world cinema. But Monsieur Lange is a delightful film that should not be overlooked. I have fond memories of David and me teaching it in an introductory film class in the mid-1970s. Now it is virtually forgotten in the USA, where it is no longer available for viewing in any format, apart from short clips on YouTube. Luckily this seems not to be the case in Europe. I was recently able to purchase an imported French DVD and finally see it again. As critic and theorist André Bazin, wrote, “In any case it is, along with the sublime A Day in the Country, one of the most ’charming’ of Renoir’s films." – Kristin Thompson

During the 1920s in Soviet Russia, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were the leading members of the FEKS (“Factory of the Eccentric Actor”) filmmaking group. As the name suggests, the practitioners aimed not at realism, but at the grotesque, the comic, and the appeal of popular rather than high art. New Babylon deals with the Paris Commune of 1871, a brief period when workers took over the French government. It was seen as a forerunner of the Soviet Revolution. The title refers to a giant Parisian department store, which also seems to be in the business of putting on patriotic operettas about the current war with Germany. The store’s owner and patrons, as well as the performers in the operettas represent the bourgeoisie, while the workers who staff the store eventually rebel and join the doomed revolutionary government. The lengthy opening section of wild reveling in the store is the best example of the eccentricity that distinguished their films. – Kristin Thompson

I shall never forget seeing Passion for the first time in 1982 and wondering how the simple shots of an ordinary jet-trail that open the film could be so beautiful. Jean-Luc Godard made so many films, and they were typically divided into many periods across his career. I think of Passion as coming in a period when Godard was less overt in displaying his politics and created features that had reasonably comprehensible though somewhat confusing plots that still had a distinct political undercurrent. Sauve qui peu (la vie), his previous feature falls into the same category. That wasn’t a particularly beautiful film, but much of Passion is gorgeous as a result of a plot-line in which a film director is staging Rembrandt’s The Night Watch using actors. It’s still a challenging film for many people, but I must admit, I like challenging films. – Kristin Thompson

Racial tensions in Ramallah may not seem like a promising topic for a comedy. Seemingly influenced by Jaques Tati in his filming style and by Buster Keaton in his acting style in the lead role (both of which he denies), Palestinian director Elia Suleiman manages it. The simple story involves two lovers, one living in Jerusalem and one in Ramallah, who must repeatedly pass through a checkpoint to see each other. Working within Israel has limited his production to four feature films from 1996 to 2019. Of those features, this is my favorite. Recent violence in Palestine has led to Suleiman to suspend his filmmaking career. – Kristin Thompson

Ozu Yasojiro’s breakthrough film in the West was Tokyo Story, and it has unfortunately gained the reputation as his best film. In fact he made numerous equally brilliant films. David’s favorite was Early Summer, a good choice. I remember thinking Equinox Flower was gorgeous the first time I saw it (it was his first color film) but rather light-weight. A comedy, it centers around a strict father who does not approve of his daughter resisting an arranged marriage while he urges a friend of hers to marry whom she wants. Every time I see it, it seems better, as touching as Ozu’s other films dealing with fathers and daughters. And the motif of a bright red tea kettle is one of many indications that he was one of the great masters of color. – Kristin Thompson

From 2016 to 2023, David and I, along with our colleague Jeff Smith, created a series of video essays for the Criterion Collection’s streaming service. The Criterion people wanted us to cover aspects of cinema from our textbook, Film Art. Fairly late in the series our producer pointed out to me that we had never dealt with costumes in a film. That focus had never occurred to us, but as it was my turn to create a video, I pondered what film would be interesting for such a topic, I naturally thought of Roberto Rossellini’s first historical drama, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, which I hadn’t seen since my graduate-school days. It turned out to be quite delightful and an excellent choice for a costume drama in which costumes were actually central to the plot. – Kristin Thompson

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s gorgeous Technicolor films of the 1940s are the flashiest and most popular with many audiences, especially The Red Shoes. I must admit that Black Narcissus is my favorite, but the more modest, black-and-white I Know Where I’m Going! is a close second. There is a delightful humor to the opening establishment of the heroine and her stubborn belief that her happiness will lie in marrying a wealthy older man who lives on an isolated Scottish island. Of course we know that she’s wrong and watch with pleasure as obstacle after obstacle keeps her from reaching her goal. These include a gale at sea and a dangerous whirlpool, as if nature itself is warning her to change her mind. Wendy Hiller gives a marvelously performance as the stubborn heroine. – Kristin Thompson

Viktor Sjöström was the leading director of the Golden Age of Swedish cinema in the 1910s and early 1920s. The Phantom Carriage is an extraordinarily sophisticated film for 1921, full of flashbacks and impressive special effects. It opens on New Year’s Eve with Edit, Salvation Army volunteer, dying. She unexpectedly begs her caregivers to fetch the town drunk, David Holm, to her bedside. Meanwhile Holm sits drinking in a graveyard and telling two drunken friends the legend of the phantom carriage, the vehicle that carries away the souls of the newly dead; it is driven each year by the last person to die at the end of the previous year. Holm then dies at midnight, and the carriage arrives, with its current driver ready to turn the job over to him. Flashbacks enact both the circumstances of how the heroine met Holm and the happy family whom Holm had alienated. It’s a deeply affecting story, wonderfully acted and staged. The famous superimpositions that portray the carriage and the dead are highly ambitious and impressively executed—an all executed in the camera rather than through lab work. – Kirstin Thompson

One of Mizoguchi Kenji’s latest films, Chikamatsu Monogatari (“Story from Chikamatsu,” the famous playwright from whose work the film was derived) has long been overshadowed by The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu Monogatari, and Sansho the Bailiff, all prize-winners at the Venice film festival and often thought of as a sort of trilogy. When I finally got a chance to see Chikamatsu Monogatari in a 35mm screening, I was surprised that it was not considered alongside the earlier films. I suspect that the original American release title, The Crucified Lovers, suggesting a sensational film not associated usually associated with Mizoguchi. Like his more famous films, however, it deals with the cruelties, particularly against women, in earlier eras of Japanese history. Set in 1700, when adulterers were paraded through the streets and crucified, a faithful and sympathetic worker in a printing firm is falsely accused of having an affair with his wealthy boss’s wife. The two are forced to flee, and the rest of the film focuses on their growing love and the ruthless pursuit that drives them onward. The beauty of the cinematography and the rest of the film’s style are similar to those of the more famous films, and it deserves to be considered a comparable masterpiece. – Kristin Thompson