Stereoactive Movie Club

The Stereoactive Movie Club is discussing some of the greatest movies ever made. Who says? Sight and Sound magazine says. Every ten years, since 1952, Sight and Sound has surveyed critics and directors to determine which films, according to those surveyed, might be considered the best. The five film-loving friends take turns picking movies that have appeared on the list and then dig into them with...

It’s Jeremiah’s Round 6 Pick: Beau Travail , the 1999 film directed by Clair Denis. Beau Travail , which is something of a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, was commissioned by a European culture channel Arte as a film about foreignness. It updates the classic novella to feature French Legionnaires stationed in the East African nation of Djibouti, which at the time of the film’s pr...

It’s Alicia’s Round 6 Pick: Wild Strawberries , the 1957 film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Wild Strawberries was Ingmar Bergman’s 18th feature film in eleven years. It was written while he was in a hospital for stress and gastric issues, then quickly produced as his personal life was in disarray. Critics in Sweden pretty much loved the film, while its reception in the United States was...

It’s Stephen’s Round 6 Pick: Modern Times , the 1936 film starring, written, and directed by Charlie Chaplin. Modern Times marked at least the 60th appearance of Charlie Chaplin in a film as the Little Tramp – and depending on whether you think the barber character in The Great Dictator is also the Tramp, Modern Times may be the last time Chaplin played the character. And while his previous film,...

It’s Mia’s Round 6 Pick: Battleship Potemkin , the 1925 film directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Divided into 5 acts, Battleship Potemkin, in commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of what is known as the First Russian Revolution of 1905, tells the story of a mutiny aboard the titular Russian naval vessel In the film’s telling, the crew’s refusal to eat borscht made from maggot-infested meat is the firs...

In our next batch of movies, we'll be traveling from the Soviet Union to Florida with stops in Sweden, Hollywood, and Djibouti along the way... So, listen up as we reveal our picks for what we’ll be watching in Round 6 of the podcast!  Also, we introduce a special guest who’ll be joining us for all of Round 6! Produced by Stereoactive Media

It’s Jeremiah’s Round 5 Bonus Pick: Boyhood , the 2014 film directed by Richard Linklater. Boyhood tells the story of a young boy, his slightly older sister, their divorced parents, and the people who come in and out of their lives over the course of 12 years, from the time the boy is 6 until he’s 18. Step-parents come and go, or even stay. Many moves are made. And we see the ways in which the par...

It’s Alicia’s 5th pick: Apocalypse Now , the 1979 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola’s fellow New Hollywood/Movie Brat filmmaker, John Milius first conceived of adapting ‘Heart of Darkness’ as a Vietnam War movie sometime in the late ‘60s. The original plan was for Milius to write, Coppola to produce, and for George Lucas to direct. Eventually, as Lucas became busy with other projects,...

It’s Lora’s 5th pick: Raging Bull , the 1980 film directed by Martin Scorsese. The film is a character study of boxer Jake LaMotta, who himself is presented as questionable in character but pure in talent. It is considered one of the best films of its decade and quickly became legendary for DeNiro’s feat of gaining weight for the later scenes. It also basically introduced Joe Pesci and Cathy Moria...

It’s Stephen’s 5th pick: Pierrot le Fou , the 1965 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Godard himself said the film was "connected with the violence and loneliness that lie so close to happiness today. It's very much a film about France." And with its fourth wall breaks, often jarring editing style, and tendency to internally jump among mass culture and/or pop art references in both extr...

The 2022 edition of Sight And Sounds magazine’s polls of the “greatest films ever made” were released last week, and since our entire podcast is about movies that have been on these decennially updated lists, we got together to share our reactions to the new ones. Here is the top 10, as decided by 1639 critics : Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Vertigo (1958) Citizen Kan...

It’s Mia’s 5th pick: The Grapes of Wrath , the 1940 film directed by John Ford. The film is based on John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, which was also the best-selling novel of that year and was cited as a major part of the basis on which Steinbeck was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The politics and story of the book were potentially thorny enough that Daryl F. Zanuck, t...

It’s Jeremiah’s 5th pick: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans , the 1927 film directed by F.W. Murnau. Based on a 1917 short story called “The Excursion to Tilsit,’ written by Hermann Sudermann, the film was Murnau’s first in the United States, after he was brought over from Germany by William Fox to make something for Fox Film Corporation like the expressionist work he’d produced in his home country –...

Listen up as we reveal our picks for what we’ll be watching in Round 5 of the podcast! Spoiler alert: we have two bonus picks this time around, so we’ll be watching 7 films total. And, as referenced in the episode, here is the list of all movies released after 1980 that appeared in the top 100 of the Sight & Sound critics and directors surveys in 2012: 1982 - Blade Runner (Ridley Scott / USA)...

It’s Lora’s 4th pick: Pather Panchali, the 1955 film directed by Satyajit Ray. Pather Panchali, which translates as “Song of the Little Road,” is based on the 1929 novel of the same name, which is the semi-autobiographical work of author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Satyajit Ray was a graphic designer working on illustrations for a 1944 abridged edition of the book when it was suggested to him th...

It’s Stephen’s 4th pick: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , the 1964 film directed by Stanley Kubrick. Often cited as one of the best comedy films of all time – as well as simply one of the best films generally – this was Kubrick’s follow-up to Lolita, released two years before in 1962.Its making began with the director’s desire to produce a movie about a nuclea...

It’s Mia’s 4th pick: Persona , the 1966 film directed by Ingmar Bergman. Persona is a film that is open to much interpretation about its themes, meaning, and maybe even its plot. In the most basic way, it’s the story of a well known Swedish actress who suffers an emotional shutdown and is put in a hospital. It’s explained that there is nothing wrong with her either mentally or physically, but she...

It’s Jeremiah’s 4th pick: The Rules of the Game , the 1939 film directed by Jean Renoir. ‘The Rules of the Game’ was the most expensive film ever made in France at the time of its production and came on the heels of a series of successful films that had made Renoir one of the top French directors. After initial preview screenings that began in June of 1939 and a premier in July that met with low b...

It’s Alicia’s 4th pick: Hiroshima Mon Amour , the 1959 film directed by Alain Resnais. With ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, explore the intersection where tragedy and trauma meet history and memory. The film was released on May 8, 1959 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize. Among its other accolades was recognition by...

Listen up as we reveal our picks for what we’ll be watching in Round 4 of the podcast! Spoiler alert: it’s our most international round yet! Produced by Stereoactive Media

Singin’ in the Rain was a product of MGM’s so-called “Freed Unit,” named for the person who headed it -- Arthur Freed. Before this film, Freed worked on many of the best known musicals, both historically and of their respective days: The Wizard of Oz, Babes in Arms, Meet Me in St. Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, Easter Parade, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, and An American In Paris. It was a...

It’s Mia’s 3rd pick: The Godfather Part II , the 1974 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather Part II both continues the story begun in the first film and also deepens it by depicting what came before. We watch as Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone continues in the family business, building his empire while trying to hold on to his family, both actual and figurative. This is crosscut with a...

It’s Jeremiah’s 3rd pick: 8 ½ , the 1963 film directed by Federico Fellini. 8 ½ was Fellini’s feature film follow-up to 1960s La Dolce Vita – with a segment for an anthology film produced in the interim. La Dolce Vita had been something of an international sensation when it came out, so perhaps the pressure of following that up led him to produce a film about the pressure on a director to make his...

It’s Alicia's 3rd pick: ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ the 1962 film directed by David Lean. The film is adapted from the autobiographical account of T. E. Lawrence, ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ which was first published in 1926 and told the story of his involvement with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks, from 1916-1918. Over the decades, many filmmakers – chief among them legendary silent and ea...

It’s Lora’s 3rd pick: ‘Vertigo,’ the 1958 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Considered by an increasing number of people to be the director’s masterpiece, the film relies on an against-type performance by Jimmy Stewart and a complex, multi-faceted performance by Kim Novak. It first appeared on the Sight & Sound magazine poll of the greatest films ever made in 1972, as a runner up. It’s then a...