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Tim Dirks
Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:
Filmsite - also known as Greatest Films (http://www.filmsite.org/ and www.greatestfilms.org/) is a unique website containing lengthy, interpretive, and descriptive review commentary and background history on hundreds of the best Hollywood and American classic films in the last century. It initiated the recent trend to select 100 Landmark Movies in the history of American/Hollywood cinema that are the milestones of our cinematic past, and the site has been recognized by Wikipedia as "an introduction to cinema literacy." The site was established by Senior Editor and Film Historian-Critic Tim Dirks in 1996 and continues to be managed and edited by him. It has over 4,500 web pages, and has provided a valuable curriculum resource for film studies courses (high school, undergraduate and graduate) throughout the country and world, and accolades from Roger Ebert and other noted writers and critics. The site includes comprehensive reference material including film reviews, Academy Awards history, film genres, film terms, film history by decade, trivia, and lots of information on the 'best' films, stars, scenes/moments, quotes, posters, and much more.
Publications:
Favorites:
There are no personal favorites, although the site has selected for commentary cinema's most critically-acclaimed, significant
Location:
California
Official Website:
http://www.filmsite.org/allfilms.html
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Last Tango in Paris (1972) |
Director Bernardo Bertolucci's landmark and controversial erotic film - an arthouse film, told about the development of a destructive relationship, as it followed a distraught, confused, grieving widower and middle-aged American exile named Paul - Filmsite
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| Posted Nov 09, 2023
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Repulsion (1965) |
Co-writer/director Roman Polanski's disturbing, tense, frightening horror-psychological thriller was about the mental deterioration into schizophrenia of beautiful, timid, vulnerable and paranoid young 18 year-old blonde manicurist Carol Ledoux - Filmsite
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| Posted Nov 03, 2023
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The Band Wagon (1953) |
Director Vincente Minnelli's and MGM's great "backstage" movie musical, under the guidance of producer Arthur Freed, was satirically self-mocking, and also took shots at show business and those who were involved in musical-dance productions. - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 21, 2022
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Witness for the Prosecution (1957) |
Witness for the Prosecution (1957) is co-writer and director Billy Wilder's brilliant film, with crisp dialogue, a complicated and intriguing plot, unique characters and excellent acting performances. It was a convoluted, twisting courtroom drama-mystery - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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The Producers (1968) |
Writer/director Mel Brooks' debut film and most popular farce was a zany, often brilliant spoof comedy about Broadway productions (and their producers) and the Nazis that many considered shoddy and in very bad taste. The subversive and irreverent film - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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Saturday Night Fever (1977) |
Director John Badham's melodramatic, out-dated, coming-of-age, Bee Gee's-saturated disco dance classic was a defining 70s dance film that was the biggest musical sensation and blockbuster of the late 1970's (from co-producer Robert Stigwood). - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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Miracle on 34th Street (1947) |
Director George Seaton's popular and perennial Thanksgiving and Christmas classic holiday film was a dramatic comedy-fantasy about the commercialization of Santa Claus (Kris Kringle) and Christmas itself. The sentimental and appealing - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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No Time to Die (2021) |
The 25th installment of the long-running spy series: James Bond film franchise. The blockbuster film's plot opened with a prologue explaining how Agent 007 James Bond's (Daniel Craig in his last outing as MI6 agent) former partner and psychotherapist - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) |
Producer Tim Burton's imaginatively dark, musical fantasy and original yet spooky stop-motion animated tale was directed by Burton's colleague at Disney Animation Henry Selick. It was also known as "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas" and served - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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The Great Dictator (1940) |
The Great Dictator (1940) is director/actor Charlie Chaplin's first full all-talking ("talkie" with dialogue) picture (in a film similar to the Marx Brothers' anti-war comedy Duck Soup (1933)) in which he delivered spoken lines... - Filmsite
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| Posted Dec 26, 2019
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The Scarlet Empress (1934) |
The Scarlet Empress (1934) is director Josef von Sternberg's startling, dark, visually opulent, hauntingly expressionistic, semi-erotic and mostly fictional biopic of one of 18th century Russia's most illustrious historical figures - - Filmsite
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| Posted Dec 19, 2019
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The Thief of Bagdad (1924) |
The Thief of Bagdad (1924) is Raoul Walsh's timeless and expensive silent costume fantasy. It was a lavish and bold Arabian Nights swashbuckler-adventure film - and an epic, spectacular accomplishment in production design and revolutionary... - Filmsite
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| Posted Dec 17, 2019
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A Face in the Crowd (1957) |
A Face in the Crowd (1957) is director Elia Kazan's satirical and powerful socio-political drama that illustrated how a jailed, down-home country boy in the late 1950s could be transformed overnight into a media celebrity on the radio, and later - Filmsite
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| Posted Nov 02, 2019
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The Wind (1928) |
The Wind (1928) is one of Lillian Gish's greatest achievements in a powerfully dramatic silent film - her fourth and last MGM film and the last of her silent films. She had previously collaborated with Swedish director Victor Sjostrom... - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 19, 2019
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The Freshman (1925) |
The Freshman (1925) is actor/director Harold Lloyd's silent film satire of college life (aka College Days), one of his best-remembered and well-crafted films and also his most successful effort. It was one of the top-grossing films of the year... - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 13, 2019
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The Kid (1921) |
The Kid (1921) is silent comic star Charlie Chaplin's classic of comedy and pathos - his first feature-length film (it was a more sophisticated six-reeler or "6 Reels of Joy" than his previous shorts). - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 08, 2019
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Sherlock, Jr. (1924) |
Sherlock Jr. (1924) is stone-faced director/producer Buster Keaton's marvelously inventive, short silent film era, comic fantasy - his third and shortest feature film. It was filled with the comedian's trademark physical gags... - Filmsite
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| Posted Oct 04, 2019
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Toy Story (1995) |
Toy Story (1995) is the first completely computer-generated, animated feature film. The visuals were entirely generated from computers, creating a wonderfully-realistic 3-D world with lighting, shading, and textures... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Tootsie (1982) |
Tootsie (1982) is an engaging, original, hilarious gender-comedy story of an unemployed actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) whose disguises as a feminist named "Dorothy" fooled his/her co-actors and helped him get a job and become a female star - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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To Be or Not to Be (1942) |
To Be or Not to Be (1942) is Berlin Germany-born director Ernst Lubitsch's sophisticated screwball masterpiece, with satirical comedy, romance, and suspense. The controversial anti-war comedy about espionage and politics from producer Alexander Korda - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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The Thing (1951) |
The Thing (From Another World) (1951) is an influential and taut horror and science-fiction B-film hybrid, loosely based (by screenwriter Charles Lederer) on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr. - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Strangers on a Train (1951) |
Strangers on a Train (1951) was director Alfred Hitchcock's suspenseful, noirish black and white thriller about two train passengers: tennis pro Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and psychopathic dandy Bruno Antony (Robert Walker)... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Planet of the Apes (1968) |
Planet of the Apes (1968) is a classic, thought-provoking and engrossing science fiction film that was the loosely-adapted film version of Pierre Boule's 1963 science-fiction novel La Planète Des Singes (Monkey Planet). - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Pulp Fiction (1994) |
Pulp Fiction (1994) brought director Quentin Tarantino, a B-movie fanatic and ex-video store clerk, to mainstream attention with this stylish and inventive episodic thriller about corruption and temptation. It featured guns, femmes fatales, deadly hit-men - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Platoon (1986) |
Platoon (1986) is a harrowing, visceral, ultra-realistic, gutsy, visually-shattering Vietnam-war film, based on the writer/director's own first-hand knowledge as a Vietnam combat-infantry soldier. The insightful Best Picture-winning war film - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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The Red Shoes (1948) |
The Red Shoes (1948, UK) is a beautiful and sensitive post-war film - the 10th collaboration from the masterful and respected British directing/producing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Pinocchio (1940) |
Pinocchio (1940), Disney's second feature-length animated film followed after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and was produced during Disney's heyday from 1937-1942 of animated classics... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) |
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) was iconoclastic and offbeat director Robert Altman's acclaimed revisionist western (or "anti-western" according to some) about the American frontier. It was the first of his two myth-busting westerns... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Mean Streets (1973) |
Mean Streets (1973) is Martin Scorsese's third full-length feature film - and first important film, with energizing early 60s girl-group and hit rock 'n' roll songs. With a script co-written by the director and Mardik Martin, the original film... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Metropolis (1927) |
Metropolis (1927) is a stylized, visually-compelling, melodramatic silent film set in the dystopic, 21st century city of Metropolis - a dialectical treatise on man vs. machine and class struggle. Austrian director Fritz Lang's German Expressionistic - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Murder, My Sweet (1944) |
Murder, My Sweet (1944) was to be released with the original title of its literary source, writer Raymond Chandler's 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely, although it was changed so that fans of 30s song-and-dance star Dick Powell... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Manhattan (1979) |
Manhattan (1979) was an acclaimed, mature, B/W masterpiece enhanced by a George Gershwin score (performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta), telling about infidelity, entangling romances and situations... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) |
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) was another nostalgic and memorable B/W John Ford-directed film about the passing of the Old West and the rise of civilization - it was his last great film. - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Knute Rockne, All American (1940) |
Knute Rockne: All American (1940) is the inspirational film biography of the famous and prominent Notre Dame football coach, Knute 'Rock' Rockne (Pat O'Brien). The immortalized coach is brought to life in this excellent, episodic film... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Key Largo (1948) |
Key Largo (1948) is one of the more entertaining crime-gangster melodramas from Warner Bros. The intelligent, exciting, theatrical, but moody, downbeat crime drama-thriller (and melodramatic film noir)... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Jailhouse Rock (1957) |
Jailhouse Rock (1957) is a prison-related, rags-to-riches musical-drama (and biopic parable of a predictable downfall and recovery) from director Richard Thorpe. It was the most influential black-and-white rock musical... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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The Killing (1956) |
The Killing (1956) is a stylish but stark film noir crime drama, and the definitive heist-caper movie - a story of greed and infidelity. The classic, dark-edged black and white film was 28 year-old writer/director Stanley Kubrick's third film - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) |
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) is one of many film adaptations of the classic 1831 Victor Hugo 'beauty and the beast' novel about a deaf, hunch-backed, outcast bellringer Quasimodo (Charles Laughton) in the Notre Dame... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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In a Lonely Place (1950) |
In a Lonely Place (1950) is maverick director Nicholas Ray's and Columbia Pictures' well-respected, bleak, mature, and dramatic film noir, although it was not a box-office hit and received no Academy Award nominations. - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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The Heiress (1949) |
The Heiress (1949), as the theatrical poster declared, is "a truly great motion picture" - a bleak tale of crushed, heartbroken expectations and incisively-harsh retribution. The top-line, prestige production was directed by William Wyler... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Forbidden Planet (1956) |
Forbidden Planet (1956) is one of the more influential, classic and ground-breaking science-fiction space-opera adventures ever made - it was the first science-fiction film in color and CinemaScope. The film, directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Giant (1956) |
Giant (1956) is a sprawling, grandiose and iconic western epic and melodrama based on Edna Ferber's celebrated 1952 novel. It told about two generations of a wealthy American cattle ranching family in Texas spanning a twenty-five year period - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Freaks (1932) |
Freaks (1932) is a shocking, bizarre and unsettling horror film, but a durable cult favorite. Tod Browning directed the unusual, creepy, and gothic horror film with real-life side-show "freaks" - it was one of his best works... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Footlight Parade (1933) |
Footlight Parade (1933) is one of the three most spectacular musicals in 1933 from Warner Bros. and legendary choreographer Busby Berkeley, alongside Lloyd Bacon's 42nd Street (1933) and Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) - - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Eyes Wide Shut (1999) |
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is legendary director Stanley Kubrick's highly-anticipated, last completed film. It was titled 'Eyes Wide Shut' to imply self-contradictory opposites: at first being exposed or tempted, and then reflexively turning away... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) |
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is one of the most influential, seminal fantasy science fiction films in motion picture history. The counter-revolutionary, big-budget film provided salient social commentary about the madness of Cold War politics... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Dial M for Murder (1954) |
Dial M For Murder (1954) is director Alfred Hitchcock's screen version of English playwright Frederick Knott's script. It was filmed in 3-D with the faddish technology that was available at the time (but already going out of fashion)... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Don't Look Now (1973) |
Don't Look Now (1973) is British director Nicolas Roeg's haunting and classic "shattering" supernatural thriller (his greatest film), and depiction of grief, based upon the 1971 Daphne du Maurier short story tale. - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Dodsworth (1936) |
Dodsworth (1936) is famed German-born director William Wyler's classic romantic drama from Samuel Goldwyn Productions, and distributed by United Artists. Scriptwriter Sidney Howard wrote the screenplay based upon his 1934 stage adaptation of... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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Cabaret (1972) |
Cabaret (1972) is director/choreographer Bob Fosse's defining, decadent, award-winning musical which popularized the phrase: "Life is a Cabaret." It was only Fosse's second film, but won numerous accolades... - Filmsite
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| Posted Sep 29, 2019
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