About Ardan Michael Blum |
About Ardan Michael Blum |
Last updated: October 14, 2026
From Casablanca and Seven Samurai to Twin Peaks and Dekalog, this page brings together some of my favorite films and television series. Each selection includes a brief introduction to its story and themes, with YouTube links to explore further.
Before viewing, check the current rating for the specific release and a detailed content guide. I encourage you to check out The Motion Picture Association of America rating and Common Sense Media: Age-Based Media Reviews for Families for detailed information.
Navigation: Skip to the 5 Star Films
There are many films I adore that fall just short of five stars. Some have aged badly. Others contain a scene, an image, or even a single moment that breaks the spell for me. Let me be specific.
Again: Some films listed here are stricly for adults.
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is a lovely film. I enjoy its colors, its humor, and the strange world it creates. But one image goes too far for me: the brief sexual scene involving Gustave and an elderly hotel guest. It feels like a forced attempt to shock, and it pulls me out of a story I was otherwise delighted to inhabit.
Two very frightening films, both for adult audiences, almost make my list of the best horror movies: Hostel, the original rather than the sequels, and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Both turn a journey abroad into a trap. A friendly welcome conceals murderous intentions, and the travelers discover their mistake too late.
I find both extraordinary, but certain effects break the spell for me: a victim’s head in one film, a victim’s skin being worn in the other. I become too conscious of the props, and what should be horrifying begins to look farcical. The situation is already utterly terrible. At those moments, the attempt to make the horror fully visible makes it less convincing.
The bond between Aureliano and Spadino gives this Italian television series much of its heart. I became caught up in their lives, their loyalties, and their betrayals. The ending, however, feels hurried. After spending so much time with these characters, I wanted more time to take in the final events and feel their consequences. That disappointment keeps an otherwise gripping series just short of five stars. More: https://www.netflix.com/title/80081537
What holds this television series back for me is the way it presents certain killings. Some scenes linger too much on the violence. The acting and the stories have already made me care. I would have found a little more restraint more moving. More: on Amazon. (Not a sponsored link).
Children of Paradise is a great classic. The crowded streets and the world of the theater are a pleasure to enter, and Baptiste’s mime can still move me. Some scenes, however, feel dated in a way I find off-putting. There is much here that I admire but you are constantly aware of the camera.
The film on Amazon (Note: No links are associated with commercial returns).
Both films come close to being favorites. I admire the acting, the dark humor, and the strange situations in which the characters find themselves. Yet something holds me back. Perhaps the humor sometimes leaves me a little too distant from their troubles. There are scenes that stay with me, but the films as a whole leave me less moved than I expect. I cannot quite explain that gap, though it keeps both just short of five stars.
Both films have extraordinary moments, but neither quite comes together for me as a whole. Their strongest scenes make me feel I am watching something exceptional. Elsewhere, that feeling slips away. I come away remembering particular passages more vividly than the complete films. Those moments deserve my admiration, but they do not quite overcome my disappointment with what surrounds them.
The turning space station and the quiet movement of the spacecraft are images I find extraordinary. The scenes with HAL draw me in most strongly; that calm voice makes the danger even more unsettling. Perhaps what keeps it just below five stars for me is that some passages test my patience. I admire their beauty while still wanting the film to move on, and that occasionally interrupts my sense of wonder.
Three Days of the Condor | A Day at the Races | Annie Hall | Bananas | Argo: Extended Cut | Die Hard 2: Die Harder | Eyes Wide Shut | Heat | Manhattan | Nightcrawler | Tootsie | Moonraker | The Shining | Munich | Matchstick Men | Nikita | Pulp Fiction | Radio Days | Spartan | Smiles of a Summer Night | Seven | Star Wars: Return of the Jedi | The Beach | Super 8 | The Matrix (just the first film) | The Producers (1968) | The Sum of All Fears | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets | Trading Places | Zero Dark Thirty | La La Land (for me, amazing on a movie screen, less so on television) | The Little Drummer Girl (1984) | American Psycho (2000) | The Last Metro | Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) | TV: Generation Kill | Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players (1977)
Details: Casablanca is a 1942 wartime romantic drama with noir elements, set in Vichy-controlled Morocco during World War II. The film centers on Rick Blaine, a cynical American expatriate who runs a nightclub where refugees, officials, smugglers, and resistance figures cross paths while trying to escape Europe.
When Rick’s former lover Ilsa Lund arrives with her husband, resistance leader Victor Laszlo, the story becomes a test of memory, loyalty, and moral courage.
Why I love this film: Everyone at Rick’s has a story. A woman bargains over the price of her diamonds. The Leuchtags practice their English before leaving for America, and Carl kindly assures them that they will manage. We learn that Amsterdam’s leading banker is now the pastry chef. Yvonne, hurt by Rick’s indifference, later sings La Marseillaise with tears in her eyes. I love the attention given to these lives. A few lines or a gesture suggest what someone has lost, whom they care about, or what they hope will happen next. I want to know more about the people at the next table.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG-lKxPb5yU
Details: Federico Fellini’s 1960 Italian drama La Dolce Vita follows a tabloid journalist through the glittering and exhausted world of modern Rome. Moving through celebrities, aristocrats, nightclubs, religious spectacle, and empty pleasure, the film studies fame, spiritual drift, moral fatigue, and the search for meaning beneath a glamorous surface.
Rather than telling a conventional plot, La Dolce Vita unfolds as a series of encounters that reveal a society both dazzling and hollow.
Why I love this film: I love how Fellini fills the wide black-and-white frame with faces, gestures, and movement, then lets a change in light or a solitary figure alter its mood. The nights draw me into their theatrical richness; the dawns leave people exposed in a quieter world.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4mrKN3iW3s
Details: Roman Polanski’s 1974 crime drama Chinatown follows private investigator Jake Gittes through a Los Angeles shaped by secrets, wealth, and political corruption. What begins as a private investigation gradually reveals a larger story about land, water, murder, and the abuse of power.
Set in 1930s Los Angeles, the film turns water into a symbol of control: whoever controls it controls the city’s future.
Why I love this film: The sunny streets and beautiful houses make the growing sense of danger especially unsettling. I enjoy following Gittes as he pieces things together, sometimes believing his conclusions too quickly. Jack Nicholson’s humor makes him good company, even when he gets things wrong. As the film goes on, I become more concerned about Evelyn than about solving the mystery. That is what stays with me: wanting the truth to come out, and hoping it will be enough to help her.
Details: Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 political satire The Great Dictator attacks fascism, antisemitism, and dictatorship through comedy, parody, and direct moral warning. Chaplin plays both a tyrannical ruler modeled on Adolf Hitler and a Jewish barber caught inside a society being reshaped by fear, propaganda, and persecution.
The film uses absurdity to expose the vanity and cruelty of authoritarian power, but its comedy is never only comic.
Why I love this film: Chaplin can make me laugh with a movement, then change the feeling of a scene without warning. The dance with the globe stays with me: a ruler plays with the world as though it belongs to him, until the balloon bursts. It is funny, graceful, and unsettling all at once. The barber’s wish to live an ordinary life gives me someone to care about amid the madness.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1C6qZVeFtA
Details: Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Swedish drama The Seventh Seal is set in medieval Sweden during the Black Death. It follows a knight returning from the Crusades who meets Death and tries to delay his fate through a game of chess.
The film explores death, faith, doubt, fear, and the human search for meaning in a world marked by suffering and uncertainty.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozr6cpCMw1g
Details: Federico Fellini’s 1963 Italian film 8½ follows Guido Anselmi, a film director trapped in a creative and personal crisis while preparing a new movie. As his project begins to fall apart, his memories, fantasies, relationships, and professional pressures blur together.
The film is about artistic exhaustion, self-doubt, desire, memory, and the difficulty of turning life into art.
Details: Sidney Lumet’s 1975 crime drama Dog Day Afternoon follows a failed Brooklyn bank robbery that turns into a tense public spectacle. As Sonny Wortzik tries to control the situation inside the bank, police, crowds, and television cameras gather outside, turning private desperation into public theater.
The film studies pressure, fear, media attention, and the unstable line between sincerity and performance.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ca0T6jbhHo
Details: Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese epic Seven Samurai follows a farming village that hires samurai to defend it from bandits after the harvest. The film builds its story around preparation, teamwork, class tension, sacrifice, and the cost of violence.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI2vfWsQKww
Details: Billy Wilder’s 1953 comedy-drama Stalag 17, follows American prisoners held in a German camp during World War II. When escape attempts fail and suspicion spreads through the barracks, the men begin to believe that one of their own is betraying them.
The film mixes wartime captivity, dark humor, mystery, and distrust, turning the prison camp into a place where survival depends on nerve, suspicion, and performance under pressure.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zavDZyx1SdY
Stalag 17 was adapted from Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski’s play by screenwriters Billy Wilder and my grandfather Edwin Blum.
Details: Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 Japanese drama Rashomon examines truth through conflicting accounts of the same crime. As different witnesses describe what happened, each version reveals not only the event itself but also the pride, fear, shame, and self-interest of the person telling it.
The film studies subjective truth, unreliable testimony, guilt, and moral uncertainty.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqoyl2p8_lw
Details: Édouard Molinaro’s 1978 Franco-Italian comedy La Cage aux Folles follows Renato and Albin, a gay couple who run a drag nightclub in Saint-Tropez. When Renato’s son becomes engaged to the daughter of conservative parents, the family tries to stage a respectable version of itself for a disastrous dinner.
The film studies family, performance, social respectability, and the pressure to hide parts of one’s life in order to be accepted.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxVPpbH34Ug
Details: Woody Allen’s 1987 nostalgia comedy Radio Days looks back at family life in Rockaway Beach, Queens, during the late 1930s and 1940s. Through the memories of a young boy and his extended family, the film shows how radio programs, music, news, and entertainers shaped everyday imagination before television took over.
The film moves between a crowded family home and the more glamorous world of radio performers, turning memory into a series of comic and affectionate episodes.
Details: Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood drama follows a struggling screenwriter who becomes entangled with Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star unable to accept that her era has passed. The film studies delusion, fame, failure, dependence, and the cruelty of a changing movie industry. It remains one of the sharpest films about Hollywood’s ability to create stars, discard them, and leave them trapped inside their own legends.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFaPbkvSVPM
Details: Sydney Pollack’s 1975 political thriller follows a CIA researcher who returns from lunch to find his entire office murdered. Forced into hiding, he tries to survive while uncovering a conspiracy inside the intelligence world.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWsRFVyQ9I
Details: Steven Spielberg’s 2005 political thriller follows the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack and the secret Israeli mission to target those believed responsible. The film studies grief, retaliation, national trauma, and the moral cost of answering violence with further violence.
Details: Francis Ford Coppola’s extended 2001 version of his Vietnam War epic follows a military mission that becomes a psychological descent into violence, power, and imperial madness. Apocalypse Now Redux is not just a longer cut; its added scenes slow the journey, deepen the film’s political unease, and make the war feel even more surreal, exhausted, and morally unstable.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxENJ2LwecY
Details: Jacques Tati’s 1958 comedy contrasts old neighborhood life with the strange perfection of modernist design and consumer convenience. Through the gentle chaos of Monsieur Hulot, the film studies technology, social status, awkward behavior, and the way modern spaces can make ordinary human life feel mechanical, fussy, and absurd.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHJcwMrqnJo
Details: Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 family epic is set in early twentieth-century Sweden, around 1907, and follows two children growing up inside a wealthy theatrical family. The film blends childhood memory, holiday warmth, theater, religion, grief, cruelty, and imagination. After their father dies and their mother remarries a strict bishop, the children move from a lively world of performance and affection into a colder household ruled by discipline and fear. Bergman uses the story to study family life, artistic freedom, religious authority, and the way children use fantasy and memory to survive what adults cannot explain.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCXoXFdNa1o
Details: Jacques Tati’s 1953 seaside comedy follows Monsieur Hulot as he arrives at a modest beach resort and gently disrupts the habits of the other vacationers. The film is built less around a conventional plot than around small observations: awkward greetings, hotel routines, beach games, dining-room rituals, and the quiet absurdity of people trying to relax according to social rules.
The film studies leisure, social awkwardness, class behavior, and the comedy hidden inside routine. Its humor is gentle but exact.
Details: Chaplin’s 1936 industrial-age comedy satirizes factory work, automation, poverty, and modern life through the Tramp.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9ESFJTnHs
Details: Brian De Palma’s 1983 crime epic follows Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who rises through Miami’s narcotics underworld through ambition, brutality, and hunger for status. The film turns the gangster story into a study of excess, power, paranoia, and self-destruction.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8lZXYXGaSA
Details: J. J. Abrams’s 2011 science-fiction adventure follows young filmmakers who stumble into a military cover-up and an alien mystery.
Details: Hitchcock’s 1938 train thriller turns a missing passenger into a compact story of conspiracy, denial, and suspense.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTKfhyj2neg
Details: Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 period drama follows Redmond Barry, an ambitious Irish adventurer who moves through war, gambling, marriage, and aristocratic society in eighteenth-century Europe. His rise is elegant on the surface, but the film gradually turns social ascent into a cold study of luck, vanity, class, and decline.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQE73GDo4So
Details: Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 alternate-history World War II film mixes revenge fantasy, suspense set pieces, and cinema about propaganda, identity, and performance. The film follows intersecting plots involving Jewish resistance, Nazi spectacle, undercover deception, and a planned attack on a propaganda premiere in occupied France.
Details: Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science-fiction landmark moves from human origins to artificial intelligence, space travel, and cosmic transformation. The film begins with early humans discovering tools and ends with a mysterious leap beyond ordinary human experience, linking evolution, technology, and the unknown.
Its central space sections follow a mission shaped by secrecy, silence, and the presence of HAL 9000, an artificial intelligence whose calm voice becomes increasingly threatening. Rather than explaining every mystery, Kubrick uses image, music, scale, and stillness to make space feel both beautiful and terrifying. The film studies human progress, machine intelligence, isolation, and the possibility that evolution may be guided by forces beyond human understanding.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_e9y-bka0
Details: The Marx Brothers’ 1937 comedy follows chaotic schemes around a sanitarium, a horse race, and a string of comic set pieces.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im9rnn-Lpu0
Details: J. J. Abrams’s 2006 action thriller pits Ethan Hunt against a ruthless arms dealer while pushing the spy series toward more personal stakes.
Details: Ridley Scott’s 2007 crime drama follows Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas and the law-enforcement pursuit around him.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV_nssS6Zkg
Details: The 1949 noir set in postwar Vienna is known for atmosphere, zither score, and moral ambiguity.
Details: Coppola’s 1974 crime epic pairs Michael Corleone’s consolidation of power with Vito Corleone’s immigrant backstory.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEmbFDXGzMg
Type: TV series
Details: David Lynch and Mark Frost’s 1990 mystery series mixes murder investigation, surrealism, and small-town Americana.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYPW3O6VhXo
Details: Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy turns nuclear war into a terrifying absurdist farce. The film satirizes military logic, political panic, Cold War paranoia, and the fragile systems that place world-ending power in the hands of unstable men. Its comedy is sharp because the danger is real: behind the jokes is a nightmare about bureaucracy, masculinity, technology, and the possibility that civilization could destroy itself through procedure.
Details: Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film follows a family isolated for the winter inside the Overlook Hotel, where loneliness, resentment, supernatural fear, and psychological breakdown begin to merge. Its slow pace, disturbing images, and intense atmosphere make it a major work of modern horror.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV3LzeiaTvU
Details: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 mistaken-identity thriller follows an advertising executive who is accidentally pulled into a world of spies, deception, and danger. The film combines suspense, romance, humor, and elegant set-piece filmmaking, including the famous crop-duster sequence and the Mount Rushmore finale. It remains one of Hitchcock’s clearest examples of a normal man trapped inside a plot he does not understand, forced to survive through charm, instinct, and luck.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek7T9Gyl_J4
Type: TV series
Details: This crime series follows the rise of major drug cartels and the law-enforcement campaigns built to stop them. Moving through cartel violence, political corruption, police work, intelligence operations, and international pressure, the series studies how the drug trade reshapes entire institutions, not just individual criminals.
Details: Satyajit Ray’s 1958 drama follows a fading Bengali aristocrat who clings to music, status, and the rituals of a world disappearing around him. As his wealth declines and a new social order rises, he retreats into private performances, memory, and pride.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gExKrla47IA
Type: TV series
Details: A Polish television series by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Dekalog tells ten separate but spiritually connected stories set around a Warsaw apartment block.
Inspired by the Ten Commandments, the series examines moral choice, guilt, love, chance, and the quiet pressure of everyday life.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbCfWIfyIi4
Details: Buster Keaton’s 1928 silent comedy follows a mild, awkward young man who returns home and tries to prove himself to his tough riverboat-captain father. The film builds its comedy around family conflict, romantic trouble, riverboat rivalry, and Keaton’s deadpan response to danger.
Its most famous sequence comes during a cyclone, when buildings collapse, streets fall apart, and Keaton moves through disaster with impossible calm.