Ten great movies that turn 50 in 2023 to watch on platforms

Boldness, solidity, demystification.

The cinema was in the year 1973 in one of the best moments in its history, particularly the American one, at the top of the New Hollywood.

A place where the brightest young people from the first film schools had met, the seasoned veterans who had found a vein in a new stage of freedom and daring, set between 1967 and 1980, and directors from television who, after their jump to the big screen, had endowed the cinema with their experience, their firmness in the narration and their committed vision of a liberal society.

Outside the United States, Italy and France lived off the great sociopolitical movies and the echoes of the

and its drifts, while in the rest of the world green dogs appeared like Alejandro Jodorowsky, with

.

In this piece, the films that can currently be seen on platforms take precedence, which has meant that fundamental titles such as

,

or the clairvoyant

.

And perhaps one of the most extraordinary things about this memory is that, 50 years later, three of these filmmakers are still making movies: Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Víctor Erice.

A Long Goodbye

, by Robert Altman

Along with

, produced the following year, the great representative of the demystification of classic film noir, although Altman's came before.

This gritty, gritty neonoir heralded a new kind of private detective, so despite adapting Raymond Chandler's famous novel, the slyly and brashly played Philippe Marlowe by Elliot Gould lacks glamour.

Even the smoke from the cigarettes, perpetually stuck to his mouth, which makes him mumble his dialogues rather than declaim them, has ceased to be a symbol of elegance, both for the smoker and for the image itself.

Altman begins the story of him with Marlowe trying to trick his cat and the animal refusing his disgusting food, set in his contemporary 1970s and Vilmos Zsigmond, his famous cinematographer,

it composes a cold image with hardly any saturation in which the colors are almost confused.

Dispassionate fatalism and violence more explicit than ever.

Available in Filmin.

The Exorcist

, by William Friedkin

Few films in the history of cinema are more influential, more copied and even more parodied.

The myth of Father Karras, that of the green vomit and that of not a few phrases installed in popular culture, headed by the immortal "Have you seen what your filthy daughter has done?"

Faced with terror, essential of course, but which did not appear until well into the story (for the better), a chilling aspect of the story was made up of the pain of a woman due to the physical deterioration of a daughter and the remorse of the priest for abandoning his his elderly mother.

Friedkin presented in 2000 a director's cut that, however, made the original worse in some aspects: easy devil holograms;

a supposedly spectacular descent down the stairs of the Regan girl, narratively deplorable;

and introduction of music in moments in which the silent cold and the night breath dominated in the original.

Available on Amazon Prime Video.

The Coup

, by George Roy Hill

One of those rare examples of a movie that everyone likes, generation after generation.

The average viewer and movie buff, the addict to have a good time and the intellectual.

The reason: it's brilliant while being light;

she is artistic without being convinced of it all the time, and she has the gift of beauty and charisma, which is also essential in certain cinema.

Robert Redford and Paul Newman, no less, who also came from making

four years earlier, also with Roy Hill directing.

You have to be very straight, or very ashen, to pass by this ode to the intelligence of scams and the nobility of well-crafted racketeering.

A jewel from the seventies that recalled cinematographic techniques from the thirties, including the bumpers between sequences, winner of seven Oscars, including best film.

And, incredible as it may seem, Robert Redford's only Best Actor nomination in his entire career.

Available in Filmin.

The American Night

, by François Truffaut

Truffaut's art to achieve intellectual films with the flavor of popular cinema.

Cinema as a way of life.

Movies as a changing entity.

And the people in the trade of putting together film stories as whimsical human beings, concerned above all with themselves.

The French director does not use his alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud this time because he uses himself for the role of director, and the always formidable Georges Delerue leaves a few musical compositions for the story.

, a love letter to the cinema of those that are so popular now, could well be a film by Lubitsch shot after the appearance of the nouvelle vague.

The greatness of lightness.

Godard, perched on his vantage point, was annoyed by how Truffaut described the artistic process and accused him of selling himself out to the general public.

The controversy ended their friendship.

Available on Amazon and Filmin.

Shadow Menace

, by Nicolas Roeg

“In cinema there is no right way and wrong way to do things;

there is only one right way, and another way.

So let's give the other way a chance," wrote the magnificent British director in his memoir and film didactic

.

Roeg applied it with a memorable montage technique from literature whereby some sequences, or even entire films, were broken into a thousand pieces, acquiring a new meaning or a different reading that they would not have had if they were ordered in a chronological and conventional sense. .

The paradigm is the historic sequence of love and sex between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in this masterpiece of terror, mystery and doom, based on a fabulous tale by Daphne du Marier.

A married couple sees their young daughter die and wakes up from a shock in the most ghostly Venice, among the worst omens and a master lesson in how to use the color red as a destabilizing and symbolic element.

Available in Filmin.

American Graffiti

, by George Lucas

Popular youth culture was born at the crossroads between the 1950s and 1960s, and Lucas returns to that point to recall his adolescent doubts, give away the best high school prom movie ever, and transcend, from his United States, his idealism. and its suburban culture, to any town in any Western country who dreamed of leaving behind in pursuit of a better or, at least, a more fun future.

The nostalgia of the adult, in a period of decline, turns bitter and gloomy despite the colorful packaging, the effervescence of the party and an extraordinary soundtrack in which no more hits fit.

Lucas, who had already shown in

that he could make superb adult sci-fi, was lost forever in any sense other than that of

for the rest of his career.

We gained a myth, but perhaps we lost a director with eclectic possibilities to endure in more ways.

Available in Filmin.

Serpico

, by Sidney Lumet

Lumet, the great filmmaker of corruption —political, business, judicial, religious, even mafioso— deals here with the corruption in the New York police department and with the integrity of the "weirdest guy who has ever gone through a police station." ”, a bearded Italian-American hippie who imprints the methodology of the Actors Studio Al Pacino.

In the words of Lumet himself, the story of a "true rebel with a cause."

The director, methodical and organized to perfection during filming, only allowed himself one freedom: allowing his interpreters to improvise some dialogues.

Based on real events and characters, the real Frank Serpico asked Lumet to go to the set and see how Pacino put himself in his shoes, but the producers forbade it because it could destabilize the actor's concentration.

, released two years earlier, Lumet's seemed like a specimen of the counterculture.

Available in Filmin.

Amarcord

, by Federico Fellini

Dedicated to the Rimini of Fellini's adolescence,

It is symbolic right from its title: reinvention of the phrase “a m'arcord”, which in the Romañol dialect means “I remember”.

The director's (and co-writer Tonino Guerra's) memories, in the form of successive sketches of emotional and, above all, sexual growth.

In Rimini there is a whole school of fanatics, commentators and interpreters who try to identify characters and sets, and to find a historical basis for the various sequences.

Something that the creator Fellini abhorred, as Tullio Kezich recounts in his biography about the filmmaker, since in a certain way he underestimates his ability to create universes and dreams.

He is sure that many have speculated on the real existence in those thirties of a robust tobacconist who put the boys between her udders so that they sucked and they, so inexperienced, insisted on blowing.

Mean Streets

, by Martin Scorsese

Now it is a practice that is the order of the day, almost ad nauseam, but the fact that Scorsese illustrated his mafia adventures with songs from American popular music was a fantastic novelty.

Set in the New York neighborhood of Little Italy, where the director grew up, those bad streets of the title are also the turbidities of the soul, especially those of the Catholic with a gloomy shade of guilt played by Harvey Keitel.

The fight in the billiards, with

, from The Marvelettes, thundering in the background and Robert De Niro displaying his dangerousness on the tables and even his madness has gone down in history due to the energy of the camera on Scorsese's shoulder, who goes back and forth between the corridors and the punches like a character more.

Did any of the privileged people who saw it premiere at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes think that 50 years later its director would be considered a living myth?

Available on Amazon Prime Video, Movistar Plus+ and Flixolé.

The Spirit of the Beehive

, by Víctor Erice

The only Spanish film installed among the 100 best in history in the famous and prestigious survey carried out every decade by the British magazine

(ranked 84th).

Erice's symbology, her visual writing together with Ángel Fernández-Santos, Luis Cuadrado's honey-colored photography with Rembrandt tones, Ana Torrent's huge eyes, Isabel Tellería's whispers and, of course, Frankenstein.

The one from the myth of James Whale and the metaphorical one of the wounded maqui that the girl Ana helps. The marginalized monster of the Spanish postwar period.

Produced by a totemic figure like Elías Querejeta, Erice bequeaths to the remains a handful of imperishable images and her lyrical breath crosses the screen to become an experience close to the mystical.

That in just a few months we will have a new film by Erice, unfortunately not so prolific, falls within the happy chapter of the unexpected.

Available on Flixole and HBO.