Friday Night Seitz
Woody Allen’s greatest films
Slide show: In a career with more stages than Coachella, these 10 movies are the director's finest SLIDE SHOW
Woody Allen, whose career will be celebrated next week by PBS’ documentary series “American Masters,” has been making films for so long that it’s a wonder the program didn’t profile him sooner. With 47 directing credits, 68 screenwriting credits, and let’s-not-even-start-totaling his Oscar wins and nominations, he’s a gray-haired machine who gets more done in a decade than most artists accomplish in a lifetime.
When I decided to pick my favorite Allen films for a slide show, I thought it would be easy. After all, he tells “American Masters” that he’s pursued a quantity-over-quality strategy, making as many pictures as he can and hoping his batting average stays solid over time. Filtering out the really horrible titles wasn’t tough — so long, “Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” “Celebrity” and “Hollywood Ending.”
But picking the best took longer than I expected, because while most filmmakers are lucky to have one career phase, Allen has had at least five. There was the “earlier, funny phase,” the late-’70s American urban artiste phase, the 1980s chameleon entertainer phase, the post-Soon-Yi-scandal 1990s phase in which his scripts got a lot angrier and more profane, and most recently a European phase — one that delivered his top-grossing feature, 2011′s “Midnight in Paris.” And in between phases he’s had slumps so dispiriting that some people figured he was done.
I decided to be tough and limit my list to 10. That leaves 37 titles to plug into the sentence, “Hey, what about ‘X’?” Have at it — and if you want to know how Allen’s morality studies “Crime and Misdemeanors” and “Match Point” got omitted, I’ll explain my reasoning in the Letters section, where I hope we can swap favorite lines as well. My selection process was totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but I kept going through it because I needed the eggs.
Movies for a desert island
What if you could only watch the same 10 films and TV shows forever? Compare your list to these classics SLIDE SHOW
You don’t need much of a setup for this one: It’s a Desert Island List of visual media that I’d like to have with me if I were shipwrecked.
Here are the rules:
1. This list is composed solely of motion pictures and TV shows. Music, books, paintings and other media are not included. It is assumed that you’ll have an indestructible DVD player with a solar-recharging power source, so let’s not get bogged down in refrigerator logic, mm’kay?
2. You can list 10 feature films, one short and a single, self-contained season of a TV series.
Continue Reading Close2011′s best TV episodes
It's easy to rank the year's best shows. But what were the individual episodes you need to see? SLIDE SHOW
(Credit: Monkik via Shutterstock/Salon) This is the top half of my year-end list of the 20 best individual episodes of scripted TV dramas and comedies. This slide show covers items 10 through 1. To read 20 through 11, which ran last week, click here.
TV’s best episodes in 2011
Set your DVR: In the first of a two-part slide show, we count down the top 20 specific shows of the last year SLIDE SHOW
(Credit: Monkik via Shutterstock/Salon) If most sports is a game of inches, most TV is a game of episodes. That’s why, at year’s end, I always feel a bit weird compiling a list of the year’s best series: Even a great series can have a bad episode, or a string of them, and even inconsistent or mostly mediocre series can produce memorable, even great installments.
Back in 2005, when I was a TV critic for the Newark Star-Ledger, I started publishing a yearly list of the best individual episodes of scripted TV shows. I’m continuing that tradition here at Salon with a citation of my 20 favorite episodes of scripted comedies and dramas.
For suspense’s sake, we’re breaking my 2011 list into two installments. This week’s covers items 20 through 11 on my list; next Friday we’ll count down the top 10.
The best TV shows of the year
Slide show: From "Breaking Bad" to "Homeland" and with a surprise at No. 1, cable dominates the best shows of 2011 SLIDE SHOW
We’re living in some kind of new Golden Age of scripted TV, and this year’s best offerings were amazing. I decided to be rigorous and restrict myself to just 10 entries. It wasn’t easy.
These 10 picks represent what I think were the most creative and consistently satisfying scripted comedies and dramas that aired on American TV during 2011. If I’d expanded the list to account for shows that were somewhat more erratic but that produced terrific individual episodes, this list would have had 30 or maybe even 40 titles on it. If anybody’s curious, I may post the expanded list in the comments section.
You may see some of the runners-up cited next week, when I will present a slide show honoring the best individual episodes of scripted series. There might be an article listing the best nonfiction programs as well.
Secret agenda: 20 classic spy movies
As "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" receives a stylish update, we survey our favorite espionage films, then and now SLIDE SHOW
There’s one big problem with compiling a list of great spy movies: How exactly do you define a “spy movie”? Do the spies have to be employed by a government agency? Does the action have to be international, or can it be domestic, even local? Do the characters have to engage in deception and/or information-gathering, or can they mainly be assassins, like James Bond or Jason Bourne? Is the “assassin film” its own separate genre? If movie characters have nothing to do with international politics but engage in surveillance and deception and other classic spy activities, can their story be grouped within the “spy movie” category?
Continue Reading ClosePage 1 of 11 in Friday Night Seitz
