What's the most beautiful movie ever made?

boing
21

Samsara i liked all of it except the clay face office drone.

This list is missing Belly and Do The Right Thing though.

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22

Last Emperor - freaking beautiful

Recently re-watched one of my old time faves, A Place in the Sun. Rewatching it, this time I really noticed the cinematography. It reminded me a lot of The Night of the Hunter.

23

The Fall IS just ridiculous, it’s one of the first I thought of when I saw the subject. I’ve seen about 1/2 on the big screen and can’t argue against any of them but Kurasawa’s RAN should be on the list.

A few others that come to mind: Singh’s The Cell isn’t as good as The Fall, but still gorgeous, City of Men, Ultraviolet, House of Flying Daggers

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24

I haven’t seen samsara. I enjoyed Baraka, but I preferred Baraka’s predecessor Koyaanisqatsi.

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25

It’s on Netflix right now.

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26

It was so lush and beautiful and then the story fell so flat for me that it ruined it.

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27

The Quatsi trilogy is amazing viewing; Koyaanisqatsi is more of a ‘pointed’ film in its imagery and more focused than Baraka. But for images of sheer beauty, Baraka and Samsara are visual feasts. I actually agree that Samsara is more beautiful – it’s a visual coffee-table book – but seemed more random and the music didn’t move me the way the Baraka soundtrack did.

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28

Literally?

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29

I caught it on the Zigfield’s astonishing screen about ten years ago. Tiny crowd, so we kind of had the place to ourselves. Surreal but amazing.

30

Literally.

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31

I would have thought that of all Greenaway films ‘The Draughtsman’s Contract’ was the most beautiful.

32

I can’t speak to that one as I haven’t seen it. So many films, so little free time.

33

I couldn’t decide between the colour-co-ordinated ‘Hero’, the sweeping ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ or the mystical ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ but then I remembered ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.’ The night-time search for the buried body in the Anatolian steppe and the later appearance of the innkeeper’s daughter bringing tea, her face illuminated by a lamp on the tray are scenes of breathtaking beauty unlike anything else I can think of. Not a movie for Michael Bay fans but highly recommended to the patient movie fan (and people who don’t mind subtitles.)

34

The correct term would be ‘hanged on a dramatic cliffhanger’, then.

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35

Agreed. Of course, Ultraviolet is hardly the height of SF filmmaking either.

36

William Dieterle’s PORTRAIT OF JENNY

37

Who Killed Teddy Bear?…err no sorry couldn’t resist.

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39

Haven’t seen that one, but Princess Mononoke is definitely in my top five most gloriously gorgeous movies.

I can’t really think of any live action movies that have struck me as beautiful in the moment when I was watching them…

There’s a lot of shots in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (specifically the Two Towers) that strike me right in the gut as goddamn beautiful. But I’m not so sure it’s the cinematography so much as the fact that New Zealand is one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

Maybe 2001 could make it up there for me. The set design is pretty pleasing to me. The toroidal inhabited portion of the spacecraft with artificial gravity looks just like how I imagine a centrifuge system for that type of mission would work.

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40

I think Joe Wright’s films deserve a place (in the top 50). Atonement, Pride and Prejudice. Anna Karenina tries to get away from that naturalistic feel, though.

Maybe he’s mimicing a master, though, and I’m not cultured enough to recognize imitation.

I like some of the cinematography in Scorsese’s films-- Last Temptation of Christ, Bringing Out the Dead, though maybe I should be crediting Michael Ballhaus and Robert Richardson. Though perhaps those aren’t beautiful,…