Auteurs Five by Five

It all seemed so simple.  The “Auteurs Five by Five”.  The plan was to watch five semi-randomly chosen films by five different auteur directors in five days.  For instance, my Monday thru Friday could consist of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, with reviews/analyses of each one.

Well, that’s a lot of film watching—maybe it’s not for you, but it certainly is for me.  Thus, the idea was inconceivable.

But now I’ve got a better idea.  Instead of five films by five different directors in five days, how about: random auteur films, good or bad, with no time constraints at all!  That’s far more feasible and something I’m happily obliged to do.

But the Auteurs Five by Five moniker sticks.  It’s too catchy to let it go by the wayside and simply call this section “Film Reviews”.  Nay, I’m sticking with auteurs, even if the “Five by Five” has no inherent meaning anymore.  Also, it can be shortened to Auteurs 5×5, which is extremely catchy and fun to say.

The raison d’etre of Auteurs 5×5 (or maybe even A5x5, when shorthand is necessary) is that I not only look at the masterpieces—the Clockwork Orange’s and the Vertigo’s of the world—but I also want to see the auteur-in-question’s lesser known back catalogue as well (the Fear and Desire’s and Rope’s of the world).  Hey, if you watch “masterpieces” all the time, then things that are merely “good” or “great” will eventually seem like crap, and that’s a terrible thing to do.  How do you know if something is good if you’ve never seen something bad?

Hence, Auteurs Five by Five: perceived cinephile snobbery with a kick-ass title.

Link to all Auteurs 5×5 reviews

Director List

Nicolas Winding Refn

Terry Gilliam

David Cronenberg

Brian De Palma

John Carpenter

DW Griffith

Charlie Chaplin

Buster Keaton

FW Murnau

Fritz Lang

Carl Theodor Dreyer

Sergei Eisenstein

Jean Renoir

John Ford

Howard Hawks

Alfred Hitchcock

Billy Wilder

Luis Bunuel

Orson Welles

Yasujiro Ozu

Akira Kurosawa

Kenji Mizoguchi

Roberto Rossellini

Federico Fellini

Nicholas Ray

Douglas Sirk

Robert Bresson

David Lean

Stanley Kubrick

Ingmar Bergman

Jean-Pierre Melville

Michelangelo Antonioni

Preston Sturges

Jean Cocteau

John Huston

Satyajit Ray

Francois Truffaut

Jean-Luc Godard

Alain Resnais

Andrei Tarkovsky

Jacques Tati

Luschino Visconti

Samuel Fuller

Sam Peckinpah

John Cassavetes

Martin Scorsese

Francis Ford Coppola

Robert Altman

Woody Allen

Werner Herzog

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Sydney Lumet

Steven Spielberg

Louis Malle

Krzysztof Kieslowski

Hayao Miyazaki

Spike Lee

David Lynch

Terrence Malick

Ridley Scott

The Coen brothers

John Hughes

Steven Soderbergh

Quentin Tarantino

David Fincher

Robert Zemeckis

Michael Haneke

Spike Jonze

Alexander Payne

Christopher Nolan

Wes Anderson

Richard Linklater

Paul Thomas Anderson

Alfonso Cuaron

Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu

Dennis Villenueve

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