186. US directors Frank Perry’s and Sydney Pollack’s “The Swimmer” (1968): Social satire on the typical WASP US male, an abstract morality tale, rewinding in time, presented with intelligence, rarely encountered in Hollywood cinema

Short stories have made interesting feature films. In the UK, short-story writer Alan Sillitoe adapted his short story The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner into a film screenplay to make a film classic—Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long-distance...

185. Soviet/Russian maestro Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot” (completed in 1946, released in 1958): Cinematic art beyond a veiled critique of Stalin

The early works of Sergei Eisenstein such as The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1928) were indisputably testaments of the visual power of montage, crowd scenes and camera angles on a viewer that are, even almost...

184. US director Bennett Miller’s “Foxcatcher” (2014): Transcending the sport and the true events

Foxcatcher is an amazing work of cinema from USA that recalls the quality of evolved filmmaking that one associate with Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) or Ridley Scott’s British directorial debut film The Duellists (1977)....

183. Russian director Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s US film “Runaway Train” (1985): An unusual Hollywood film that intensely deals with philosophy and the choices one makes in life

Lady Anne:  “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity” King Richard: “But I know none, therefore am no beast.”              --a conversation from Shakespeare’s Richard...

182. Indian director Anand Gandhi's debut film “Ship of Theseus” (2012): A remarkable thought-provoking, non-commercial film from India

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had 30 oars, and was preserved by the Athenians, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became...