Tagged: Wings of Desire

Top Ten Favorite Opening Sequences of All Time

melancholia
Wow, that doesn’t sound like an ambitious title at all. It’s actually more like “ten of my favorite opening/title sequences that I can thing of right now in chronological order”, but that’s not really a catchy title. During the last couple days, after watching Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, I’ve been thinking about my favorite movie endings. Since those are difficult to discuss without spoilers, I thought I’d take a moment to mention a few of my favorite beginnings. I am going to post a clip for every movie I mention, unfortunately some of those are in really low quality, but it’s more “just in case” anyway.  Continue reading →

Top Ten Title Cards

This week Criterion asked about our favorite title designs on Facebook. After thinking about it and reading other people’s responses and trying to remember if my favorite films had a title card at all I narrowed it down to ten I think are pretty awesome. Some filmmakers consistently think their title sequences through like Sofia Coppola, Lars von Trier or Sono Sion, so I just picked one of theirs, but I’m not even sure it’s their best, but that’s what I was able to find on the good ole internet. At this point I’d also like to mention Woody Allen who has consistently kept same identical opening titles for his entire career, I won’t count him in this list, but y’all know his signature font, so..

These are my favorite title cards in chronological order, because I’m not good at ranking stuff.

Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick)
8½ (1963, Federico Fellini)
Der Himmel über Berlin (1987)
Funny Games (1997, Michael Haneke)
The Virgin Suicides (1999, Sofia Coppola)
Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch)
The Fall (2006, Tarsem Singh)
Black Swan (2010, Darren Aronofsky)
Guilty of Romance (2011, Sono Sion)
Melancholia (2011, Lars von Trier)

Top Ten Post-1960s Black & White Films

Here’s a chronological list of my favorite and most gorgeous looking Black & White films produced since the 1970s. These are all films made after the Black & White era. They’re nostalgia fueled pictures, romantic and of course incredibly beautiful.

The Last Picture Show (1971)
10. The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich)

Eraserhead (1977)
9. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)

Manhattan (1979)
8. Manhattan (1979, Woody Allen)

Raging Bull (1980)
7. Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese)

Rumble Fish (1983)
6. Rumble Fish (1983, Francis Ford Coppola)

Down by Law (1986)
5. Down By Law (1986, Jim Jarmusch)

Wings of Desire (1987)
4. Der Himmel über Berlin (1987, Wim Wenders)

Schindlers List (1993)
3. Schindler’s List (1993, Steven Spielberg)

Pi (1998)
2. Pi (1998, Darren Aronofsky)

The White Ribbon (2009)
1. Das Weisse Band (2009, Michael Haneke)