In Contention

Tag: Repulsion

  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1965 and 1966

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    I’m back guys. Sorry for taking a week off but my older brother got hitched and I had a drunken Best Man speech that needed attending to. I trust you spent the week watching all the wonderful movies being highlighted in this column.

    We’re halfway through my favorite decade of film and 1965 is the first time the Oscar telecast came to you live and in color (any readers actually old enough to remember?). Going into the ceremony, bookies were split between “The Sound of Music” and “Doctor Zhivago,” but it was the light-hearted former that waltzed away with top honors.

    The Academy continued to show courageous love to foreign titles with Hiroshi Teshigahara earning a Best Director nomination for “Woman in the Dunes” in ’65 and Claude Leloach doing the same for “A Man and a Woman” in 1966.

    That was the year that Fred Zinnemann’s morality play, “A Man for All Seasons” took Best Picture and five other awards, beating out Mike Nichols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which remains one of the greatest film debuts of all time in my book. The Oscars were making some risky choices but they still missed out on honoring these timeless films.

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  • THE LISTS: In Contention’s top 20 horror films of all time

    228 Days LaterYes, how trite.  Another list of the “best” horror films of all time.  But this really is the most subjective of genres, is it not?  What is scary to us all has slipped out of the realm of the universal and become much more of a personal thing.

    Certain films are inarguable, as our list certainly reflects here and there.  But across the landscape of horror filmmaking, you find perhaps the broadest range of creativity in the medium.  So it goes without saying that a list such as this ought to be varied.

    Unlike the other lists we’ve featured here at In Contention, our rundown of the 20 best horror films of all time did not spring from the mind of this writer or that, but is instead representative of the collective.  We’ve polled each of our six contributors to ascertain their high marks in the genre and, through a complicated process of tabulation that involved thorough computation, lots of late nights and perhaps an abacus as well, the list was whittled down to the 20 films you see here.

    There are mainstays aplenty, but we think you’ll be surprised by a few of the entries.  Each of us hold very different opinions, as should be expected when you get a southerner L.A. transplant, an Arkansas law professor, two Toronto natives 20 years apart in age, a north easterner who recently made the trek out west and a humble Brit.

    We hope you enjoy the list.

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