The best Jules Dassin’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Jules Dassin’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Jules Dassin.
Rififi
8.1/10
Out of prison after a five-year stretch, jewel thief Tony turns down a quick job his friend Jo offers him, until he discovers that his old girlfriend Mado has become the lover of local gangster Pierre Grutter during Tony's absence. Expanding a minor smash-and-grab into a full-scale jewel heist, Tony and his crew appear to get away clean, but their actions after the job is completed threaten the lives of everyone involved.
Phaedra
6.8/10
A retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra. In modern Greece, Alexis's father, an extremely wealthy shipping magnate, marries the younger, fiery Phaedra. When Alexis meets his stepmother, sparks fly and the two begin an affair. What will the Fates bring this family? Alexis's roadster and the music of Bach figure in the conclusion.
Never on Sunday
7.3/10
An American scholar in Greece sets about improving the prostitute with whom he is infatuated.
Filmmakers in Action
7/10
What is the state of cinema and what being a filmmaker means? What are the measures taken to protect authors' copyright? What is their legal status in different countries? (Sequel to “Filmmakers vs. Tycoons.”)
Balkan Landscapes: The Gaze of Theo Angelopoulos
Theo Angelopoulos recalls the defining moment in 1964 that led to him to live his entire life in Greece, and explores the concept of borders in his work - as the limits of existence, of life and death, of language and communication. “Narrowing down the borders narrows the communication, stretches the differences, magnifies oppositions, magnifies reasons for war, magnifies the refugees, magnifies the internal exile... In reality a civil war leaves behind wounds which cannot easily be healed and they revive, like ghosts, or like recurrent nightmares, during the long nights which have dogged Greek society for years.”
The Long Haul of A.I. Bezzerides
7.3/10
Filled with humor and defining experiences in both his own life and in the lives of some of his closest friends, William Faulkner and Robert Aldrich, as well as on his late wife, screenwriter Silvia Richards, Mr. Bezzerides offers colorful reflections as to why he and his typewriter unabashedly need to keep creating honest characters, worlds, and stories. Through recently discovered boxes of photographs, film clips, the haunting music by Fugazi, interviews (including Jules Dassin, Mickey Spillane and Barry Gifford) and testaments to his progressive creativity from other writers, Fay Lellios' straight-ahead documentary gives us a start in discovering this 97-year-old proletariat storyteller, and the meaning of his favorite phrase by Carl Jung, "There can be no birth of consciousness without pain."
