Classic Flicks: Flaherty's Nanook of the North

How often does the first of anything stand the test of time? We don't see too many people driving around in Model-T's these days, nor do we see anyone carrying textbook-sized cell phones except in 20-year-old films. American director Robert Flaherty's silent documentary, Nanook of the North, the first nonfiction feature of its kind, remains surprisingly fresh today, nearly 90 years after its release.Flaherty is not a household name, but if you have ever seen a documentary, you have seen one of his great-grandchildren. Filmmakers of old and of new have long sung the praises of Flaherty's films: Nanook of the North was a favorite of Orson Welles, and contemporary director Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart) said the film "is a visual poem that challenges how we live and how we see, and all the while accepting life for what it is."

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Classic flicks: Wadleigh's Woodstock

For those of us without relatives or friends old enough to remember the "Summer of Love" of 1967, we have Woodstock. The Summer of Love kicked off one of the greatest cultural moments in our nation's history - the hippie revolution - which effectively came to a close with the Woodstock Festival in 1969. A huddled mass of 500,000 hippies made the trek to Bethel, N.Y. to watch 32 different musical acts perform over three days of "peace and music." After working previously as cinematographer on several underground films, Michael Wadleigh finally - and for the only time in his career thus far - experienced commercial success with Woodstock, making $50 million from a movie with a budget of $600,000.

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Classic Flicks: A window on the world with Ron Fricke's Baraka

Here's a quick linguistics lesson: In the context of this film, "baraka" refers neither to the female version of our current president's name, nor does it refer to my favorite Mortal Kombat character. In Judaism, the word signifies a ceremonial blessing. In Arabic, Swahili, Urdu, Persian and Turkish, it is "spiritual wisdom from God." The Sufi translation of baraka - also the translation given on the film's Blu-Ray cover - is "the thread that weaves life together." Brilliant: a multilingual pun in the title of the film alone.

Classic Flicks: The Coens' No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is the 12th studio film by movie-making duo Ethan and Joel Coen, and their first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. The Coen brothers are known for producing intelligent, humorous and stylish films, but No Country for Old Men stands apart from the other films in the Coen brothers' oeuvre. Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, No Country for Old Men is the brothers' first literary adaptation into a film. Yet surprisingly, almost scene for scene, the Coen brothers modified relatively little of McCarthy's story in writing their screenplay, although the motifs of chance, freedom and destiny that appear in many of their previous films are also explored here.

Classic Flicks: Apocalypse Now

Film should not be thought of as merely a visual medium. The best films are gesamtkunstwerken - that is, they expertly fuse the arts of photography, music, writing and theater. However, in some of the greatest films, one or more elements often take precedence over the others.In the case of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, photography - the fruit of the labors of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and film editor Walter Murch - is the most vital component of the film. The camera translates Coppola's grand statement on the madness that stems from war into a visual narrative which portrays the grim psychological and physical realities of war; it is the camera of a documentarian sensitive to human emotion; it is an observant yet naive camera, which, like the characters on screen and the audience in the theater, is unaware of its ultimate destiny. This transforms Apocalypse Now beyond historical fiction into the realm of fictional nonfiction.