The end is in sight.  After pushing hard through the holidays, we have now reached the magical 950 mark. With 50 films to go, I am poised to complete this project (assuming I can find access all the remaining titles) by the end of the year, at the rate of one film per week. There’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to keep that pace through the entire year (despite averaging two a week for the past two months), but it’s a reasonable goal for the year.

What’s heartening is that despite the recent binge of viewing and reviewing for the project, I feel that my ability to describe something vital and essential about each film has held.  Posting my latest entry on Elia Kazan’s Wild River prompted me to revisit my entry on Kazan’s America, America from over a year ago, to see if there have been any developments in my writing.  The Wild River write-up is longer than my usual entries; lately I’ve taken a lot of pleasure in packing as much evocative detail into as few words as possible. But one thing I hope is evident by comparing the two reviews is a moving away from auteurist assumptions, reading into films as saying something about their maker, as if I were their shrink.  I’m much more interested these days in getting to concrete descriptions about how a film works and how it feels to watch it.  The third paragraph of the Wild River review is what I want to do more of, trying to get as precise as possible with what’s happening. It may very well eventually lead to just writing about moments as opposed to films. We’ll see.

I haven’t posted a video essay lately, partly because of the increased pace of text entries, but I certainly have not been idle on the multimedia front. This week there will be four video essays posted here, one on a recent film entry and the other three as the video version of a critics roundtable in which I recently participated.  And I’m hoping that the video content will get more interesting and unique as the year goes on.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share the films that are remaining on the project (barring another shuffling of the deck by the list master). There may come a point when I ask for assistance in locating some of these titles.  Stay tuned…

TSPDT Rank – Title – Director

511    -    Hart of London, The    -    Chambers, Jack
610    -    Heimat [TV]    -    Reitz, Edgar
646    -    Hitler: A Film from Germany    -    Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen
683    -    Limite    -    Peixoto, Mario
740    -    Lusty Men, The    -    Ray, Nicholas
798    -    Plácido    -    Berlanga, Luis García
829    -    Under the Bridges    -    Kaütner, Helmut
865    -    Getaway, The [1972]    -    Peckinpah, Sam
866    -    Rocker [TV]    -    Lemke, Klaus
897    -    Yesterday Girl    -    Kluge, Alexander
898    -    Starship Troopers    -    Verhoeven, Paul
900    -    Lucifer Rising    -    Anger, Kenneth
903    -    Devil in the Flesh    -    Autant-Lara, Claude
905    -    Shin heike monogatari    -    Mizoguchi, Kenji
907    -    Sur, El    -    Erice, Victor
909    -    Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, The    -    Buñuel, Luis
910    -    My Apprenticeship    -    Donskoi, Mark
915    -    King of the Children    -    Chen Kaige
919    -    Bienvenido Mister Marshall    -    Berlanga, Luis García
920    -    Luna    -    Bertolucci, Bernardo
925    -    Female Trouble    -    Waters, John
926    -    Bad Timing    -    Roeg, Nicolas
928    -    Second Breath    -    Melville, Jean-Pierre
930    -    Song of Ceylon    -    Wright, Basil
931    -    Pillow Book, The    -    Greenaway, Peter
934    -    My Friend Ivan Lapshin    -    Gherman, Alexei
939    -    Sign of Leo, The    -    Rohmer, Eric
944    -    Heaven Can Wait [1943]    -    Lubitsch, Ernst
945    -    Moonrise    -    Borzage, Frank
947    -    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers    -    Donen, Stanley
948    -    Tout va bien    -    Godard, Jean-Luc & Jean-Pierre Gorin
950    -    Passion of Anna, The    -    Bergman, Ingmar
955    -    Maskerade    -    Forst, Willi
957    -    Letter to Three Wives, A    -    Mankiewicz, Joseph L.
958    -    Far Country, The    -    Mann, Anthony
962    -    Lost Horizon    -    Capra, Frank
964    -    Dark Eyes    -    Mikhalkov, Nikita
965    -    Blast of Silence    -    Baron, Allen
966    -    Central Station [1998]    -    Salles, Walter
968    -    California Split    -    Altman, Robert
971    -    One, Two, Three    -    Wilder, Billy
970    -    Ladies’ Man, The    -    Lewis, Jerry
974    -    Strangers When We Meet    -    Quine, Richard
975    -    Toute une nuit    -    Akerman, Chantal
978    -    Bells of St. Mary’s, The    -    McCarey, Leo
986    -    White Shadows in the South Seas    -    Van Dyke II, W.S.
991    -    People on Sunday    -    Siodmak, Robert & Edgar G. Ulmer
994    -    Time to Love and a Time to Die, A    -    Sirk, Douglas
995    -    Dracula [1958]    -    Fisher, Terence
999    -    My Love Has Been Burning    -    Mizoguchi, Kenji