This movie is one of cinema’s most dazzling exercises in style — in art direction, in lighting, in cinematography, in choreographing movement for and by the camera, in creating seductive cinematic spaces.

Paradoxically all this aesthetic beauty serves a grim and depressing story.  The film says at once that the world is a shabby, brutal place and also a place of endless sensual enchantment.  It’s hard to know if this was an exercise in irony on Bertolucci’s part or a symptom of schizophrenia, exposing the divided heart of a man torn between rigorous political commitment and unmediated artistic self-indulgence.

Not that it matters when you’re watching the film — its contradictions are dissolved in its cinematic virtuosity and its irresistible erotic undertows, because these are the things that ultimately define the film, that ultimately defined Bertolucci at the time he made it, in spite of himself or not.

I hesitate to call it a great movie but it has some of the greatest passages in any movie ever made — passages which by themselves justify and exalt the medium beyond judgement or praise.

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It’s hard to convey how good this movie looks on Blu-ray.  Digital technology makes it possible to align the elements of a three-strip Technicolor negative more precisely than was ever possible before, creating a clarity in the image that’s dazzling.

You can certainly make valid criticisms of the film itself, for its pious romanticizing of the antebellum South and slavery, for its distressing (if well-intentioned) patronizing of its black characters.  What you can’t deny is that it’s one of the grandest entertainments ever concocted by anyone in any medium.

A fine cast, a literate and amusing script, sure-footed direction and the deployment of studio craftsmanship on a stupendous scale result in a film of breathtaking virtuosity — part soap opera, part melodrama, part epic, part lyrical romance, part tragedy.

Producer David Selznick put the package together with canny calculation and good taste but director Victor Fleming invested it with life, made the elements cohere into a timeless work of popular art.  His direction of the film ranks among the highest achievements of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

It’s just the damnedest thing.  The Blu-ray of Gone With the Wind belongs in every civilized home.

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You may not have a special taste, as I do, for the cycle of classic Universal monster movies, but they were a potent cultural force.  They created a mythology which has become a part of American mythology, and they influenced several generations of filmmakers who shaped American cinema in the latter part of the 20th Century, most especially Steven Spielberg.

Bride Of Frankenstein is the best of the cycle — visually elegant, wry and amusing, powerful on many levels.  The image of The Bride, incarnated by Elsa Lanchester in a surprisingly brief appearance on screen, resonates as powerfully as the image of Dracula or Frankenstein’s Monster or The Mummy or The Wolfman.

She is an amazing cinematic creation — a vision of woman as an electric, elemental force too powerful to accommodate, to control, to accept.  She must be destroyed — but she cannot be destroyed.  She is an eternal accusation against the presumption of mere men.

The Blu-ray edition of Bride Of Frankenstein, magnificently restored, belongs in every home.

It’s a shame that Citizen Kane has a reputation as “the greatest movie ever made”, as a pinnacle of cinematic art.  It’s not an art film at all — it’s a grand entertainment, a rattling good melodrama, a work of meticulous craft and wit and joy in the multifarious resources of movies.  When you’re watching it, its reputation becomes quite irrelevant because it’s just so damn much fun.

It uses every technique in the cinematic handbook — back-screen projections, matte paintings, stock footage, miniatures.  Its greatest glories are its magnificently lit, long-playing, deep-focus, elegantly choreographed studio shots, which are the things most people remember because they’re so beautiful and so involving that you feel you’re inhabiting the imaginary spaces they conjure up.

Those shots constitute the real art of the film, but they’re always in service to the story, to the theatrical but finely calculated and consistently engaging performances.  There’s nothing pretentious about the film at all — it’s built to please, to amuse and to move.  It has made generations of young people want to become filmmakers, if not always to be great entertainers of the public, because it makes filmmaking look like the best way in the world to have fun, to create magic.

It’s a throwback to the pre-modernist notion that the greatest art is popular art, accessible art, the highest form of entertainment — a notion that informs the works of Homer and Shakespeare and Dickens.  That’s its true distinction and the source of its enduring stature in the culture.  The Blu-ray edition of it belongs in every civilized home.

As Pauline Kael once noted, some of the greatest of all movies have been follies — grand, overly ambitious projects that teetered on the edge of chaos yet became enduring monuments to the possibilities of cinema.

Intolerance was such a folly, and so was Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed, though only a fragment of the latter survives.  Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was another.

Coppola mortgaged almost everything he owned to make his Vietnam war epic.  He headed off to The Philippines without a finished script, hoping to find an ending for his movie somewhere in the course of shooting it, which took him over a year, during which production costs spiraled out of control amidst disastrous weather conditions and Coppola’s gradual mental meltdown.

He was lucky to get out of it alive, and he never quite found his ending.  He threw everything he could think of at the wall, hoping something would stick — a bit of T. S. Eliot, a Doors song, the on-screen slaughter of a water buffalo — but none of it really did. The drama just sort of implodes at the end without really resolving.  But the journey to that amorphous denouement is one of the great cinematic adventures of all time, breathtaking to look at, with passages as powerful as any ever created by any director.

The film was a hit, Coppola got his investment back and a personal profit of about $15 million.  Things rarely end that well for the directors of grand cinematic follies.

There are two versions of the film currently available on DVD and Blu-ray — the original release version and a re-release version from 2001 which restores about 49 minutes of footage that Coppola cut prior to the original release.  I think the original release version is distinctly superior — the cut scenes, while fascinating, slow down the film’s momentum, lessen the suspense, and don’t accord with the tone of the ending Coppola settled on, drawing undue attention to its deficiencies.

In any case, the Blu-ray of Apocalypse Now belongs in the home of anyone who’s passionate about movies.

For my money only three series in the history of television can be called masterpieces — The Twilight Zone, Upstairs, Downstairs and Breaking Bad.

The Twilight Zone, being an anthology show, is the most uneven of the three, with many different writers and directors and actors contributing content over the run of the series.  It featured several types of genres, from sci-fi to the supernatural.  Even so, the quality of the work is consistently high, and quite often brilliant.

Almost all of the episodes, of whatever genre, deal with subterranean modern anxieties, centering on the themes of personal isolation and the inherent, bewildering threats of advancing technology — themes that continue to haunt contemporary life.  These themes give the series a rough sort of coherence and an enduring relevance.

You can buy the whole series in a wonderful new Blu-ray edition, packed with supplements.  It belongs in every civilized home.

The first of the Godfather films cost 6 million dollars and has to date grossed 133 million dollars, making it one of the most profitable films of all time. It was the highest-grossing film in its year of release and in adjusted dollars it’s among the top 25 highest grossing films in the history of movies.

Its sequel, The Godfather Part II, cost 13 million dollars and has to date grossed 57 million dollars.  It was the fifth most successful film in its years of release.  Not in the same box-office league as its predecessor, but it has still earned the studio which made it a clear profit of at least 13 million dollars on an investment of 13 million dollars. In most businesses, that would qualify as a killing.

The Godfather Part II is one of the greatest of all films.  It is intelligent, impeccably crafted, visually stunning, profound in its insight into American culture — and wildly entertaining.  The idea that an intelligent, impeccably crafted, profound, visually stunning film could be a high-grossing film today is an almost surreal fantasy.  The film came out 40 years ago.  40 years is a long time, but it’s not that long a time.

What has happened to Hollywood, to our culture, in those four decades?  Has there ever been a more complete and more catastrophic collapse of values, virtue and taste in the whole history of human civilization — apart from cultures ravaged by war or financial apocalypse?

This is a subject worthy of the most serious meditation.

Meanwhile, the Blu-ray edition of The Godfather Part II belongs in every civilized home.

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This is the second greatest American film of the 1970s, but second only to its sequel The Godfather, Part II. Both rank among the greatest American films ever made.

I found it astonishing when it first came out, but it feels even more astonishing today, in a time when films of its scope and craft and taste and power and daring are no longer conceivable in Hollywood. Shot for shot the film explodes with Coppola’s creative energy and filmmaking mastery.

It is in one sense a deeply conservative film, stylistically — rooted in Coppola’s respect for the genius of the old studio system. It is in other ways wildly radical. Its brilliant cinematography by Gordon Willis combines elegant old-school lighting with more than a passing nod to the look of old 16mm color footage from the period the film is set in.

It introduces shockingly explicit sexuality and violence seamlessly into an older Hollywood tradition which treated these subjects more obliquely.  Its vision of the utter, profound corruption of American society seems more and more prophetic.

The film is partly the apotheosis of the classic Hollywood gangster movie, partly a riveting family melodrama, partly a timeless fairytale (“There was a king who had three sons . . .”)  It is a masterpiece that works on many different levels at once and grows in stature with every passing year.  The Blu-ray edition of the film belongs in every American home.

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Forty years (!) after its release, after a deluge of explicit pornography has washed across and nearly drowned our culture, this film has lost its capacity to shock as it once shocked, with its sexual frankness embedded a well-made film starring a Hollywood icon.

What still startles and unsettles is the emotional nakedness of the performances by Brando and Schneider, the conceptual daring of Bertollucci, questioning the very possibility of portraying an authentic and humane erotic love in movies . . . assuming such a thing is even possible anymore in real life, perverted as real life has become by the diseased clichés of movies.

It’s one of the most interesting, not to mention one of the greatest, films ever made, and one of the most beautifully shot — which is why it joins that list of films which justify buying a Blu-ray player just to be able to watch it in that format.