Tiago's brain dump

It's hard to explain why, but I really like courtroom dramas. Maybe it's the figure of the prosecution attorney trying his best to bring justice to the table (see Paul Newman in the excellent The Verdict ), or the defense attorney fighting with all his might to release the defendant we as the audience know is innocent (e.g. Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird , a movie loved by many, many people -- myself included --, but clearly not by Ebert), or maybe the battle of wits between both sides (check out Spencer Tracy and Fredric March in the superb Inherit the Wind ). Well,  Sidney Lumet 's 12 Angry Men has nothing of the above. Well, not explicitly, at least. Based on a 1954 teleplay by Reginald Rose, the movie starts when the trial per se is over, with the judge addressing the jurors before their deliberation. The accusing parties seem happy, as if a guilty verdict was certain; the defense lawyer, leaving the courtroom, seems to have had a difficult time durin...

Roger Ebert started his Great Movies selection by writing about Casablanca ; therefore, I think it is suitable for me to do the same :-) Such is the impact Michael Curtiz's Casablanca has had in Western culture that its story is known even to people who may have never really watched it: Rick ( Humphrey Bogart ), a bitter man who "sticks his neck out for nobody", owns a cafe in Casablanca, French Morocco, a gateway to America during World War II. One night, "of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world", Ilsa ( Ingrid Bergman ), the woman who broke his heart, walks into his cafe, accompanied by her husband Laszlo ( Paul Henreid ), a Resistance leader. He needs to flee to America, and for that, he needs some Letters of Transit that happen to be in Rick's possession. Rick must then choose between his love for Ilsa, or helping her and her husband flee to America, so that they can keep fighting against the Nazis. With a simple Google searc...

In here, I have compiled all of Roger Ebert's Great Movies (named by their international titles and sorted by director), with links to my reminders for the ones I've watched. Also, if a movie belonging to a trilogy or series was included but the whole series wasn't, it will be marked with an asterisk. If you are not accessing this blog via a smartphone , the table below is sortable and filterable. Click on a column header to sort the table using that column as reference (click again to change the order of the sorting operation - ascending or descending). Type something in the textboxes under the headers to filter the table content. Filtering is not case sensitive (uppercase and lowercase letters are dealt with as if they were the same), and special characters are treated as their ordinary counterparts (" ä" is regarded as "a",  " è" as "e" and so on ). Title Director Year Cléo from 5 to 7 Agnès Var...