For the past couple of weeks, movie buffs have been tweeting, discussing, and analyzing this piece from Fast Company, which distilled a four hour interview with Martin Scorsese into a list of 85 films “you need to see to know anything about film” — Mr. Scorsese’s mini-film school, if you will. There are some real surprises on the list: no Kubrick, no Fellini, no Kurosawa, no Peckinpah, very little French New Wave, only one Hitchcock. Meanwhile, there’s more Altman than we might have anticipated, as well as copious amounts of Welles and Rossellini.

If Marty is like us — and we’d like to imagine he is — there’s also a very good chance that these are just the 85 movies that were on his mind that day. Your list of favorite films is a living thing, always changing and amending, growing and revising; we’d bet good American money he thought of five films he should’ve included the second he walked out the door. (The absence of 8 ½, for example, is suspect, since he called it a “personal turning point” in his documentary My Voyage to Italy.) But this is the list he made on that day, in that room, and it’s worth looking at; there are some really interesting choices here, titles worth seeking out if you haven’t seen them.

In the interest of helping you sift through the list and load up your Netflix queue and Amazon cart accordingly, we’ve put together a video essay of clips and stills from the “Scorsese 85,” using his own words when possible (from his wonderful documentaries A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy). We strongly recommend reading the article first, since some of the other clips were chosen specifically to comment his quotes on them (Klute, The Trial, and M*A*S*H, for example). Check out our latest video essay after the jump.

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Tower Heist, Brett Ratner’s late-fall heist picture, is out this week on DVD, so our latest video essay takes a look at this durable genre via a step-by-step examination of how to put a big heist together — according to the movies, anyway. We grabbed pieces from over two dozen heist movies, from here and abroad, from the 1950s to the present, and put them together to show, in seven easy steps, how to pull that one big score. (Bonus points if it’s your last big one before retiring somewhere warm.)

We’ll show you how it’s done with the help of some of our favorite directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Michael Mann, John Frankenheimer, Bryan Singer, John Huston, David Mamet, Peter Yates, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jules Dassin, Sidney Lumet, John McTiernan, Jim Henson, and Frank Oz. And check out our all-star cast: Robert DeNiro, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Marlon Brando, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Edward Norton, Julia Roberts, Michael Caine, Charlize Theron, Pierce Brosnan, Harvey Keitel, Val Kilmer, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Steve Buscemi, Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Spacey, Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Liotta, Danny DeVito, Michael Madsen, Stellan Skarsgård, Tom Sizemore, Vincent Cassel, Owen Wilson, Joe Pesci, Luke Wilson, Sean Connery, Guy Pearce, George Segal, Sam Rockwell, Delroy Lindo, Seth Green, Sterling Hayden, Chris Penn, Mos Def, Lawrence Tierney, Jason Statham, Jean Reno, the Muppets, and many, many more. Find out “How to Pull the Perfect Movie Heist” after the jump.

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Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar Hoover biopic J. Edgar is out on DVD today, following a fall theatrical run notable mostly for its lack of awards consideration; the film, and particularly Leonardo DiCaprio’s leading role in it, had been the object of much presumptive Oscar buzz (hitting, as it does, multiple circles in the Oscar Venn diagram: slightly villainous, based on a real person, wide range of aging, secretly gay). But the film underwhelmed, for one very simple reason: we’re just getting tired of biopics.

The biographical film portrait has been a venerable institution since the early days of cinema; Georges Méliès made a Joan of Arc biopic clear back in 1900. And while there have been scores of great ones, the tropes of the form (the birth-to-death chronology, the trials and triumphs, the romantic struggles, etc.) are so firmly established that the only biographical films that really make an impression any more, it seems, are those that buck the trends and experiment, or at least futz with the form a bit. After the jump, we’ll take a look at ten great biopics that made an impression, and float some theories as to why.

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This year’s Academy Awards are just around the corner (well, okay, they’re still a week and a half away, so it’s more like around the corner, down a little, second door on the left), and while we can’t help but get a little excited about Hollywood’s big night, we’re also being very careful to keep our expectations in check. We’ve already lamented the many worthwhile films and performances that were unduly snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the nominations phase; when Sunday the 26th rolls around, you can bet the farm that the AMPAS will confound us again by making at least a couple of spectacularly bone-headed choices. There’s a long and storied history of the Oscar simply going to the wrong damn person or movie, countless cases where a peek back at the list of nominees and the eventual winner provokes confusion, rage, or at the very least, a bit of head-scratching. After the jump, we’ve gathered ten of the most egregious examples.

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1. The Help was the big winner at last night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, nabbing Best Cast, Best Actress (Viola Davis), and Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer), but the biggest surprise of the evening was Jean Dujardin’s victory over George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role category. [via The Wrap]

2. Thanks to a $6-a-ticket Groupon deal, Katherine Heigl’s poorly reviewed new film One for the Money came in third place at the weekend box office, earning a respectable $11.8 million. Topping it was Liam Neeson’s harrowing survival drama, The Grey, which took in $20 million, and Underworld Awakening, which made $12.5 million. [via I Watch Stuff]

3. The Sundance Film Festival handed out its 2012 awards over the weekend, with top honors going to buzzed-about titles like Beasts of The Southern Wild and The Surrogate; check out the full list of winners here.

4. The first teaser for Season 5 of True Blood is online, and while it doesn’t reveal any new footage, the tagline — “In Bon Temps, Nothing Stays Buried Forever” — suggests that a Russell Edgington-dominated storyline lies ahead. [via TVLine]

5. “You have to take a drink every time, and I mean every time, you hear the word ‘Scorsese.’ You’d be surprised how much that comes up in just casual conversation because people like to throw that thing around.” — Melissa McCarthy explains the drinking game that she and her Bridesmaids co-stars Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph came up with at last night’s SAG Awards.

Bonus Buzz: The Zombie Presidents Of The United States

Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got eight new trailers for you this week from all-star directors and former child stars; check ‘em all out after the jump.

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When you have to keep an obsessive eye on film, music, books, visual art, television, the Internet, and all other manner of popular culture, something eventually has to give, and for us — well, for this author, anyway — it’s sports. An almost-complete disinterest in professional and collegiate sporting events can make one feel a bit of an outcast (and it certainly makes for a confusing Facebook feed; apparently some guy who’s really into Jesus won something important on Sunday?), but after faking it through high school and college, I can’t pretend to care anymore. Maybe it makes me a pencil-necked geek, but the idea of spending three hours watching a football going to and fro — particularly when there are still Hitchcock movies I haven’t seen — is simply unacceptable.

However, many of the same film fans who are patently disinterested in a Sunday afternoon of TV sports will gladly spend that same time planted in front of a sports-themed movie — basically the same thing, albeit with better camera angles and a scripted ending. (And the angles are the only difference in a wrestling movie, HA HA!) And that’s fine with this viewer; as I told a friend after its release, “I’d watch football every week if it looked like Any Given Sunday.” But cinephiles more sport-phobic than I (and they’re out there!) might prefer films that keep the game play squarely off-screen. In honor of today’s DVD release of Moneyball, one of the best of the bunch, we offer ten genuinely good movies about sports that are notable for their minimal sports action. Check them out after the jump, and add your own in the comments.

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[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published August 10, 2011.] Earlier this summer, a shocking number of our readers flocked to read (and amend) our list of the harshest author-on-author insults in history. But you know who is even more childish, trifling, vindictive, and nasty than your favorite scribes? Your favorite filmmakers. These directors may not have quite the same precision with the written word as those rancorous authors, but when it comes to pettiness, they can’t be beat. After the jump, we’ll run down 30 of our favorite slights, slanders, and cheap shots from filmmakers both classic and contemporary; we’d love to hear yours in the comments.

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[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published May 23, 2011.] A few weeks back, we mentioned that list of Steven Soderbergh’s “cultural diet” (films viewed and books read and TV watched over the course of one year), noting that, in one week, he took in Raiders of the Lost Ark no less than three times — and that he carefully pointed out that each viewing was in black and white. In writing about that list, I said that this was something “we’re totally going to do now,” and last week, I did. Guess what? Soderbergh’s right. Raiders is way better in black and white.

That little experiment got me thinking about other modern movies that might play better in this decidedly less-than-modern format. There is, we can all agree, just something about black and white. In his wonderful 1989 essay “Why I Love Black and White,” Roger Ebert wrote: “There are basic aesthetic issues here. Colors have emotional resonance for us… Black and white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.”

Once I picked the movies that we thought would work for this experiment, I realized that trying to just describe them in a standard post wouldn’t work at all. So I’m doing something different with this post: I made a little video for each title, with clips transformed to black and white and commentary explaining why each one was selected. Check out Raiders and my other choices after the jump.

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We thought it was strange when rumors circulated last year that Lars von Trier and Martin Scorsese were planning to team up for a remake of Taxi Driver. You know what’s even more bizarre? Michel Gondry’s new two-minute version of the movie, which he created for the French premiere of Hugo. As fans of Be Kind Rewind might expect, Gondry’s “sweded” remake is decidedly more arts and crafty than the original; colored pencils stand in for bullets, and when Travis Bickle (who’s played by the French auteur) delivers his famous “You talkin’ to me?” lines, the dramatic scene is suddenly transformed into something that’s wacky and adorable. Click through to check out the charming short now. Read More »