New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

4. Robert Altman

Altman’s brilliant career spanned over six decades and netted him five Best Director nominations, but zero wins. A pity, for at least three of those movies - M*A*S*H*, Nashville, and Gosford Park - are already timeless classics.

Unlike stylized directors like Burton or Aronofsky, Altman’s style was always more mundane in the sense that it relied much less on the showier aspects of filmmaking, and much more on dialogue, a strong rapport between the cast, and intelligent, witty story lines. Altman was, in a nutshell, one of the greatest modern masters of satire that ever lived. Thus, from satirizing something as seemingly meaningless as army corps medics to the more purportedly relevant political criticism of Nashville, or the critic of Victorian (but, really, of modern 1% mentality before that was even a thing), Altman’s range and depth are unequaled. He truly touched upon many aspects of human society.

Of course, in addition to the trifecta of classics, few of his movies are more relevant or hit closer to home than The Player, a brilliant satire of Hollywood itself. Like his other movies, in The Player, Altman also showed off his impressive abilities to work with multifaceted tasks consisting of over a dozen top-billed stars and countless other cameos. Thus, the movies take on a sense of additional fiction but also additional reality: by exposing us to a parade of familiar faces, the satire increases along with the untruth of the storyline, but the viewer is at the same time led to a place of comfort in the known faces.

In the end, Altman is to me one of the best directors to have ever lived, and perhaps one of the most underrated at this time and since his death.

3. Stanley Kubrick

I hope that as soon as the parameters for this A-List were established, you thought of Kubrick as the obvious choice to make an appearance. With due respect to Altman and Aronofsky, the gap between the fourth and third slots today is gargantuan. Altman may have impressive range in his ability to satire different aspects of society, and Aronofsky is quite imaginative and diverse in his analysis of mental conditions. But Kubrick’s versatility spans genres and time periods, and transcends simple commentary on human nature.

From unabashed and controversial criticism of war (In Paths of Glory, my personal favorite, or Dr. Strangelove), to satire and commentary about modern anxieties (A Clockwork Orange), to an epopee to the meaning of life itself and to our collective anxieties to the age old question of whether we are alone out there (2001: A Space Odyssey), Kubrick’s master is arguably unparalleled in the 20th Century. He has been rightly called one of the most influential directors of all time.

And in the preceding paragraph I didn’t even touch upon impressive costume behemoths like Spartacus and Barry Lyndon, or one of the all-time horror classics, The Shining. To explore in depth Kubrick’s contributions to cinema - both stylistically (consider his innovative cinematography techniques in Barry Lyndon or 2001) and thematically (witness the cutting commentary of Paths or Dr. Strangelove) - would take hours and pages and pages.

Kubrick’s masterful career is perhaps best left to simply be enjoyed rather than discussed - very little anyone could ever say would do real justice to the pure genius of his work.

Continued:       1       2       3       4