Street Kings, David Ayer, 2008

The plot of Ayer's film is pure Ellroy (the author gets story and screenplay credits), with Keanu Reeves' renegade cop Tom Ludlow drunkenly shooting up half of South Los Angeles to uncover inter-departmental corruption. As with much of filmed Ellroy, though, nuance is non-existent and the narrative tension seems hyper-compressed and, as such, flat. Further, Ayer's truly random supporting cast of John Corbett, Jay Mohr, Hugh Laurie, Cedric the Entertainer, and Common seem ill-at-ease in such white knuckle territory.

Hunger, Steve McQueen, 2008

The strength and presence inherent in McQueen's compositions is undeniable. In fact, the excruciating final third of Hunger is certainly not for the faint of heart and borders on unwatchable. That said, McQueen's presentation of IRA prison protest tactics and Bobby Sands' hunger strike is somewhat non-contextual, leaving the viewer struggling to find some expository grounding for the emotions elicited by McQueen's brutal set pieces.

Pocket Cinephile Westen Essentials # 4. Red River, Howard Hawks, 1948

Hawks' grand epic sets the bar unreachably high for the cattle drive western and offers the stolid presence of John Wayne's Thomas Dunson and his iconic Red River D pitted against the feverish, fiery youth of Montgomery Clift's Matt Garth in one of cinema's great tete-a-tete's.

Zach and Miri Make a Porno, Kevin Smith, 2008

Some fifteen years on from the gael force buzz of his lo-fi debut, Clerks, Kevin Smith finds himself in a world where Judd Apatow has made the multiplex safe for overtly raunchy, pop culture obsessed comedy. This film, his entry into the raunch-com derby (starring Apatow muse Seth Rogen), is competent, likable, and decidely unremarkable.

Pocket Cinephile Western Essentials - #5. The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah, 1969

Peckinpah's film is, to appropriate the term in its purest from, a punk Western, loud, furious, violent, and necessarily subversive. What's more, the film counts among its cast Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, and Strother Martin, as fine a trio of character actors as have ever stalked the West.

Also, as Kris Kristofferson puts it (here with a little help from Donnie Fritts): "Sam Peckinpah era un hombre for sure."

Pocket Cinephile Western Essentials - #6. Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly), Sergio Leone, 1966

Leone's wildly popular film is highly stylized, utterly sprawling, and nothing if not indelible. Many of the film's masterstrokes, such as the director's hard cut close ups and Ennio Morricone's unforgettable theme, have become familiar to the point of parody, which says something of the impact and effect of this nearly 3 hour, entirely dubbed masterpiece.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In), Tomas Alfredson, 2008

Alfredson's is a very well-conceived and generally well executed tale of modern vampirism. The director has a sure hand in composing no small amount of striking, Kubrick-inspired frames, and is likewise deft at teasing information from within the world he's created. That said, the film's only misstep may be that its genuine, bloodcurdling chills are too few in number.

Pocket Cinephile Western Essentials - #7. Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood, 1992

Eastwood's is a dark and relentless film, with an emphasis on the psychology of heroism, villany, and justice that makes it easily the finest modern western and a pillar of the genre.

Pocket Cinephile Western Essentials - #8. The Calvary Trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande), John Ford, 1948/1949/1950

Over the course of these three films, Ford, John Wayne, and a protean stable of stars (Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara) and character actors (Ward Bond, Ben Johnson) established the blueprint for the War-Western, with Wayne's protagonists confronting themes of pride, duty, family, and aging against the striking tableau of Monument Valley.

Pocket Cinephile Western Essentials - # 9. Winchester '73, Anthony Mann, 1950

It's entirely possible to craft an essential Westerns list comprised solely of Anthony Mann films (and more will indeed appear higher on this list), but this concept driven film nudges onto the list ahead of equally rough hewn Mann films such as The Far Country (1954), The Furies (1950), and Bend of the River (1952) based almost solely on the strength of its epic final shootout, which ranks as the best of the genre and possibly in all of cinema.

Pocket Cinephile Western Essentials

Due to the overwhelming response to last Fall's Horror Essentials (and while we're in the post-Holiday, post awards season doldrums), we thought we'd take the next couple of weeks and pontificate on that most enduring of all genres by listing our 10 favorite PC-approved Westerns.

Pocket Cinephile Western Essentials - # 10. Day of the Outlaw, Andre de Toth, 1959

Finally available on DVD courtesy of Criterion, de Toth's film is a tense tour de force, playing striking compositions and a truly masterful final set-piece against the classic "stranger comes to town" motif, with no less a lion than Burl Ives as the stranger.

Pocket Cinephile Horror Essentials - The Complete List

# 1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, 1974
Hooper's film is dark, deliberate, unnervingly naturalisitc, and, as such, an unimpeachable masterpiece. The final word in horror.

#2. The Shining, Stanley Kubrick, 1980
Kubrick's fever dream telling of Stephen King's haunted hotel ghost story is a pitch perfect marshalling of sight and sound where every passing moment is grossly more unsettling than the last.

# 3. Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski, 1968
Polanski's film, a giant in any discussion of horror, translates the taut, hard-driving pyschological suspense of his best early works (Knife in the Water, Repulsion) into a classic American spine-tingler.

# 4. Suspiria / Inferno, Dario Argento, 1977 / 1980
These first two installments of Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy stand as the epitome of hyper-stylish horror. The plotting is superfluous, but the director's setpieces are awe-inspiring master strokes.

# 5. Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968
Romero has built a career, and an extensive filmography, from mining the socio-political possibilities of the un-dead. This, his staggering first film, plays that card first and best and with startling immediacy.

# 6. Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau, 1922
Murnau's proto-expressionist vampire film is quite simply the template for castle-bound, blood sucking terror. Later retold admirably by Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski (Nosferatu-Phantom der Nacht, 1979), and reinvented by E. Elias Merhige (Shadow of the Vampire, 2000), the film is one of the pillars upon which any house of horror is built.

# 7. The Exorcist, William Friedkin, 1973
Friedkin's film is by now synonymous with "real world" horror. With a mood that manages a resolute naturalism even while invoking the supernatural, the film's effects subsequently range from creeping uneasiness to out and out hide-your-eyes terror.

#8. Freaks, Tod Browning, 1932
Browning's sideshow horror fable is a marvel of early cinema. Eminently watchable depsite, and more likely because of, its cast of non-professional actors, the film is truly unsettling and nothing if not lasting.

# 9. Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi, 1987
Raimi's horror comedy sequel-cum-remake of his own no budget film is a gritty tour-de-force, fueled by Bruce Campbell's incendiary lead performance and a gaggle of gloriously DIY special effects.

# 10. Don't Look Now, Nicholas Roeg, 1973
Roeg's film is an immensely stylish, neo-gothic head scratcher that deploys minions no less impressive than the Church, the Elderly, and the Color Red in service of its considerable chills.

Dung che sai duk redux (Ashes of Time Redux), Wong Kar Wai, 1994/2008

Wong's film is a balletic vision of a cinema, playing the simple, classic themes of loss, pride, and memory against a masterful melange of light and sound.

Pocket Cinephile @ Film Comment Online

Film Comment has again excerpted Pocket Cinephile's year-end coverage in their 2008 Year End Reader's Poll, including our reviews of Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon. You can check out the feature here.