Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (1993)

One of Shyam Benegal's best films - one in which he has experimented a lot, and successfully so. A narrator tells of another narrator who tells stories of love, with different shades, with a clear distinction between the way male and female protagonists deal with love. The stories are intertwined, with the narrator also getting involved - sometimes as an observer, sometimes as a protagonist himself. The same events get depicted from different perspectives in different stories. A superb sense of environment and mood, unlike that found in most Indian films.

The Phantom of Liberty (1974) - Luis Buñuel

One of a group of monks drinking, using religious relics as poker chips: "I'll open with a virgin"

"Everyone is always someone else's barbarian."

“Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later. If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies, it would be for The Phantom of Liberty, because it tries to work out just this theme.” (Buñuel, 1983)

The Edukators (2004) - Hans Weingartner

'If you're under 30 and not a liberal, you've got no heart. If you're over 30 and still a liberal, you've got no brains.'

Cantata (1963) - Miklós Jancsó

If you are blinded by the Sun, don't blame the Sun; blame your eyes.

A doctor undergoes a spiritual crisis when caught between a co-operative, communist ideal in which a group is more important than the individual, and very strong individuals that seem to contradict this ideal. Echoes of Antonioni's La Notte.

Zardoz (1974) - John Boorman

"I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived 300 years, and long to die. But death is no longer possible; I am immortal. I present now my story - full of mystery and intrigue. Rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep within a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. But they may! Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale I am a fake god by occupation, and a magician by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented, too, for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?"

Not the best John Boorman film perhaps, but the tongue-in-cheek humour amidst all the philosophizing seems to parody its high-handed, stylized, overrated, cult, sci-fi pre-cursor - '2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) and can even serve as a parody of stupider things to come - such as Star Wars (1977).

Shame (1968) - Ingmar Bergman

'What do you think will happen when the person who has dreamed us wakes up and is ashamed of his dream?'

Munich (2005)
Steven Spielberg

I don't doubt Spielberg's intelligence, thanks to some of his better films; however, while making a particular film, he needs to decide whether he is making a commercial film or a serious film; whether he is a showman or a serious artist. He often seems to try combining both, and ends up achieving neither. In Munich, the same pattern repeats. It seems confused between a normal action thriller and a predictable political statement (which I agree with, but which need not help make a film better) about violence begetting violence, or an eye for an eye making the world go blind. The structure is interesting enough, too, with gradually rising graphs of the personal rising up to present an opposition to the political, against its simplistic aim of serving 'them' right, or that of the righteous assassins seemingly behaving more and more like the evil terrorists they are supposed to eliminate, and of the existential questioning that arises in any sensitive human as a result thereof. The film fails on two counts: the script is almost mathematical, where even human emotions are delivered in a carefully measured manner, as in a recipe. Then, there is the attempt to make it an edge-of-the-seat thriller, with ploys like the little girl who picks the telephone, or the Dutch woman who turns from seductress to assassin to assassinated, or the car in New York that seems to tail Avner, but turns out to be harmless. Such an action-packed narrative leaves little room for developing the characters of the assassins or the haunted, unless you call one line about the 'narrative of the survival' by a translator of the Arabian Nights just before he gets killed as character development (but it did make me think that perhaps the original book was not so banal). The frequent mini-climaxes also leave little time to reflect on the serious theme the film seems to want to develop. Moreover, taking a cute action hero (used to playing The Incredible Hulk, or Hector in a cloyingly simplistic version of the Iliad) as the central character Avner also mars the film, because he is woefully inadequate in convincing us of the doubts and fissures that develop in his character over the course of the film. I also found it unintentionally funny of Spielberg when he resorted to clichés like the Eiffel tower to show that we are in Paris, or the rain in London, and a French Godfather discussing cheese, all of which create a sense of kitsch instead of lending any dignity to the already predictable narrative.