The Killing An exemplary film noir, leaner and less portentous than some of the director's more self-conscious later efforts, 'The Killing' is about a heist at a race course.
Robert Greene's film "Actress," from 2014, is an exemplary film about a relationship, or about several relationships — and it shows why Greene is one of the major documentary filmmakers of the time.
It's "Blow-Up" in perukes, to be sure, but the delicately nasty vision of class warfare -- Merchant-Ivory with barely sheathed claws -- made "Contract" an exemplary film for its time.
You Must Remember This, the exemplary film podcast made and presented by Karina Longworth, has a couple of series within its overall series, and I must recommend the 12-episode exploration of the Manson murders.
An exemplary film in this tradition might be Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet, a celebration of domestic, unheroic contentment, which is unsentimental precisely because it's mixed up with a realistic awareness of problems and compromises.
As in his impressive first book, Scenes from a Revolution, a long, detailed study of five 1967 movies that announced "the birth of the new Hollywood", Harris takes five exemplary film-makers, each well established and approaching the peak of his career, and sees how they reacted to the coming of war and, more briefly, how they responded to the challenge of peace.
It's worth revisiting at greater length, and I'm planning to do so; for now, I'd like to suggest that, with its blend of history and fantasy, of immediate physicality and wild subjectivity, it's both the proof of a true artist's arrival and an exemplary film for the moment.
Mazursky's film may well be the best Hollywood movie of that year, and it's an exemplary modern film in its tone and its direction.
"Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands," directed by Christian Braad Thomsen, is an exemplary portrait-film, a model of personal documentary filmmaking that implicates its maker, intellectually and ethically, in the film's very existence.
It's a thriller about hackers, starring Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, and Wei Tang, but it also looks like a work of an awesome abstraction — like an exemplary "late film".
Robert Siodmak's exemplary 1949 film noir "Criss Cross" (which I discuss in the clip above) tells an emotionally tangled story by means of an unusually knotty narrative tangle.
