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After last month kicked off with Sight and Sound unveiling of their once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll, detailing the 100 films that made the cut that were led by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, they’ve now unveiled the full critics’ top 250. While the discourse up until now has featured many wondering why certain directors were totally absent and why other films that previously made the top 100 were left out, more clarity has arrived with this update.

Check out some highlights we clocked below, the full list here, and return on March 2 when all ballots and comments will be unveiled.

The films closest to making the top 100 were Rio Bravo, The House Is Black, and Vagabond, which tied for #103. Four directors absent in the top 100––Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jacques Demy––have two films each in the top 250: The Tree of Life...

A funeral procession emerges from the pitch-black center of a walled cemetery outside of Lisbon. Mourners move past the camera, but no one speaks of the deceased or of anything else. For the first 10 minutes of Pedro Costa’s latest, “Vitalina Varela,” wordless sound design and an immersive darkness settle in, the storytelling restricted to the aftermath of sickness and an unknown man’s last days.

Costa’s films often star first-time or other nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves, with storylines reflecting their real lives, elements of fiction and documentary forming a seamless whole; as such Vitalina Varela plays “herself.” And as the film opens, and Vitalina arrives, she’s three days too late. The funeral was for Joaquim, the husband who abandoned Vitalina years earlier, and this three-day passage amounts to an anti-resurrection. Here, the dead stay dead.

Vitalina positions herself in the shadowy, crumbling hovel where Joaquim lived and died,...

In 1997, Pedro Costa (above), at the age of 38, began a trilogy exploring Portugal's impoverished, an undertaking that would continuously draw raves from the more erudite critics around the world. First came Ossos, which was pursued by In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006). These films, often showcasing the same characters, are sublimely visual, meditative masterworks that paint within shadows the seemingly plotless lives of the drug-addled inhabitants of a ghetto that is slowly being dismantled.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center last week had a retrospective of these early works plus other tidbits of Costa's oeuvre, a sort of celluloid foreplay leading to the release of Costa's latest effort,  Horse Money. The accompanying press release for this tribute notes that "Costa is now widely regarded as one of the most important artists on the international film scene," and the Film Society's Director of Programming, Dennis Lim, added, "Simply put, nobody makes...

After a lengthy absence from the slums of Fontainhas, the physical setting of his trilogy on impoverished marginalized humanity personified by Cape Verdean immigrants —"Ossos" (1997), "In Vanda's Room" (2000), "Colossal Youth" (2006)— Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa returns with "Horse Money." We re-connect with Ventura, the window to the souls of 'youth,' who appears physically and psychologically drained since we've last seen him, resting peacefully on Vanda's bed. The familiarity of the setting, Ventura's screen presence as magnanimous and magnetic as ever, and Costa's pictorial mise-en-scène, are stalwart reminders of the same universe. But something is undeniably, remarkably and a touch frighteningly different in the air. "Horse Money" is situated on some metaphysical plane, twice removed from the ramshackle physicality of its three predecessors, but through Ventura, newcomer Vitalina, a stupendous musical montage and a...

Horse Money is astonishingly beautiful in its visual poetry! Pedro Costa, who wanted to capture the life in Lisbon's ghetto area called Fontainhas in the late 90s, made a beautiful film called Bones (Ossos). During the shoot, he saw much beauty in the place and got to know its poor, working class, immigrant inhabitants. He decided to immerse himself in their lives, abandoning his huge 35mm film equipment, elaborate lighting setups and a big crew and started documenting their lives with small video camera. The experience bore him two more extraordinary films, In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, starring the inhabitants of the slum, which are remarkably immersive fictional films bordering on documentary territory. The three films became later known as The Fontainhas Trilogy.  Fontainhas has since...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Read More: Watch: Hypnotic Trailer For Pedro Costa’s 'Horse Money' & 74-Minute In-Depth Talk With The Director Pedro Costa, the acclaimed Portuguese director of "In Vanda's Room" and "Colossal Youth," is retuning to theaters later this month with his new drama, "Horse Money." The film won Costa the Best Director Prize at last year's Locarno Film Festival. To mark the upcoming release, distributor Cinema Guild has released a gorgeous new poster for the film. The official synopsis reads: "'Horse Money' is a mesmerizing odyssey into the real, imagined and nightmarish memories of the elderly Ventura, a Cape Verdean immigrant living in Lisbon. The time is now, a numbing and timeless present of hospital stays, bureaucratic questioning, and wandering through remembered spaces… and suddenly it is also then, the mid ’70s and the time of Portugal's Carnation Revolution, when Ventura got into a knife fight with his friend Joaquim.

After a lengthy absence from the slums of Fontainhas, the physical setting of his trilogy on impoverished marginalized humanity personified by Cape Verdean immigrants —"Ossos" (1997), "In Vanda's Room" (2000), "Colossal Youth" (2006)— Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa returns with "Horse Money." We re-connect with Ventura, the window to the souls of 'youth,' who appears physically and psychologically drained since we've last seen him, resting peacefully on Vanda's bed. The familiarity of the setting, Ventura's screen presence as magnanimous and magnetic as ever, and Costa's pictorial mise-en-scène, are stalwart reminders of the same universe. But something is undeniably, remarkably and a touch frighteningly different in the air. "Horse Money" is situated on some metaphysical plane, twice removed from the ramshackle physicality of its three predecessors, but through Ventura, newcomer Vitalina, a stupendous musical montage and a...

Horse Money is astonishingly beautiful in its visual poetry! Pedro Costa, who wanted to capture the life in Lisbon's ghetto area called Fontainhas in the late 90s, made a beautiful film called Bones (Ossos). During the shoot, he saw much beauty in the place and got to know its poor, working class, immigrant inhabitants. He decided to immerse himself in their lives, abandoning his huge 35mm film equipment, elaborate lighting setups and a big crew and started documenting their lives with small video camera. The experience bore him two more extraordinary films, In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, starring the inhabitants of the slum, which are remarkably immersive fictional films bordering on documentary territory. The three films became later known as The Fontainhas Trilogy.  Fontainhas has since...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

The Moon, the opposite of the sun, hovers over us by night, the opposite of day. 

In F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), Reri, the sacred maiden of the small island of Bora Bora, writes this to her lover Matahi: 

And indeed, when Matahi chases after her, the moon spreads its path on the sea.

He runs and swims after her, moving faster than a normal human being, defying the laws of gravity. 

Miraculously, he catches up to the boat. 

Thus, he must die, sinking back into a void…

…while ghost ships linger on in the distance…

…carrying another hopeless romantic, and a moving corpse—A second Nosferatu.

The moon is absent in Murnau’s earlier film, made nearly ten years before Tabu, but it is in the one he made nearly five years after Nosferatu, when George O’Brien leaves his wife for a midnight rendezvous with another woman. 

And indeed,...