Personally I think Kieslowski is the king of beautiful cinema. If anyone knows of any films that could match or possibly top his excellence please list them. Here are, in my opinion the most beautiful films of all time:
La Double vie de Veronique
Blue
White
Red
Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick
Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
Nostalgia (Andrei Tarkovski)
Mirror (Andrei Tarkovski)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)
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That's a very good list! I'd add Antonioni's L'avventura, Apocalypse Now due to Storaro's Oscar winning cinematography, and Kubrick's 2001, which was as beautiful for space as Barry Lyndon was for interiors, not to mention the candlelight..
Most beautiful film of all: WINGED MIGRATION - filmed over six yrs, 200+ locations, most while flying with birds in ultralights.. BARAKA is another documentary, no dialogue, films of the spirituality of the planet, both locations & people (director Ron Fricke later worked on Planet Earth, which used time lapse cams he invented for Baraka)
Conformist was the 1st I saw to use dead, blowing leaves to symbolize death, later repeated in the Godfather and others.. Storaro also did the cinematography for that..
My only regret in life is that I'm not someone else - Woody Allen
This board is obviously biased (as the first post goes to show) so my opinions won't be taken as seriously, I imagine, but I hope they will.
Leon (1994)
The Fountain (2006)
King Kong (2005)
Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Great Expectations (1998)
Persona (1966)
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Bambi (1942)
Road to Perdition (2002)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
12 Angry Men (1957)
I'm sure the answers you were looking for fall more along the lines of...
Anything by Kieslowski
Anything by Kubrick
Anything by Tarkovsky
Yes, most of those films look nice, but what's the point of a beautiful film if the film itself has nothing to it (like 2001 and Stalker, for instance). It's like a masterpiece painting but the painter doesn't know why he made it, what it's of, and everyone looking at it just guesses. Pointless.
well, if Stalker has nothing...
I do think also that Kieslowski's and Tarkovsky's films are pure visual poetry with deep philosophical message, but not everybody can understand that:)
Elvira Madigan by Bo Widerberg
but not Kubrick...sorry:)
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"STALKER" - my favourite movie of all times .
Titus Androgenicus
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I'm sorry but the post was asking for "the most beautiful films". Kubrick and Kieslowski made the most BEAUTIFUL films (I haven't seen any Tarkovsky so I can't judge). Outside of your comment that the films have nothing to them (which I strongly disagree with, they are BEAUTIFUL films. They have top notch cinematography and are masterpieces of form. As in, they were made to look beautiful. Like a work of art. This is indisputable, because it's a respected fact. Through cinematographic genius the films of those two directors look far better than most of the other films ever made. The framing, the colours... Sumptuous.
That said, despite your blazing prejudice and mis-interpretation of the poster's intention, you do have Apocalypse Now and Pan's Labyrinth on your list, which I agree are wholeheartedly beautiful.
Persona! Glad somebody mentioned it.
The room's a wreck, but her napkin is folded.
"2001 is about nothing." Are you serious? It's probably one of the most complete movies, thematically.
shareAnything by Visconti.
"Truth? Justice? Human dignity? What good are they?" Alfred to Gustav Aschenbach in Death in Venice
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The most beautiful films... what a question. Well, first of all beauty is on the eye of the beholder. Therefore everybody will consider "beautiful" different things and for different reasons.
Having said that some of the movies that I consider are amongst the most beautiful films ever shot are:
"Hero" by Yimou Zhang
"Schindler's List" by Steven Spielberg
"María Candelaria" by Emilio Fernández
"Lawrence of Arabia" by David lean
"¡Qué viva México!" by Sergei Eisenstein (it contains some of the most beautiful sequences ever shot. Too bad that Eisenstein couldn't finish it)
"Cinema Paradiso" by Giuseppe Tornatore
"Trois couleurs: Rouge" by Krzysztof Kieslowski
"Satyricon" by Federico Fellini (not his best movie but visually the most wonderful film by Fellini)
"2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick
"Fanny och Alexander" by Ingmar Bergman
"Fitzcarraldo" by Werner Herzog
"Children of Men" by Alfonso Cuarón
"El laberinto del fauno" by Guillermo del Toro
"Ikiru" by Akira Kurosawa
"Babel" by Alejandro González Iñárritu
The most beautiful films of all time, in my view, are these: --
Krzysztof Kieslowski: La double vie de Véronique
François Truffaut: Jules et Jim
Stanley Kubrik: Barry Lyndon
Eric Rohmer: La collectionneuse
Terrence Malick: Days of Heaven
Ingmar Bergman: Viskningar och rop
Pascale Ferran: Lady Chatterly
Jacques Rivette: La belle noiseuse
Ridley Scott: The Duellists
Kar Wei Wong: 2046
Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo
Ettore Scola: Il Viaggio di Capitan Fracassa
Peter Weir: Picnic at Hanging Rock
David Lynch: The Elephant Man
Woody Allen: Manhattan
Quay-Brothers: Institute Benjamenta
Andrew Dominik: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Michael Haneke: Das weiße Band
... do you agree?
Some of my favorites, that come to mind:
Kieslowski: Three Colors, The Double Life of Veronique
Visconti: The Leopard
Wong Kar-Wai: In the Mood for Love, 2046
Kubrick: Barry Lyndon
Carol Reed: Odd Man Out, The Third Man
Melville: Army of Shadows
Yimou Zhang: Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Hero, House of Flying Daggars
Ang Lee: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
John Ford: The Searchers
Resnais: Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Anderson: There Will Be Blood
Marie Antoinette is beautiful to look at, besides all its flaws it is visually a very gorgeous thing to see.
In The Mood For Love came right to mind when I saw this post, jkierste-1 really nailed it on the head!
There are so many more though!
Some really good choices have been mentioned.
I'd add Lost In Translation, I'm amazed by the cinematography of that film
And add
Finding Nemo
Chinatown
Blade Runner
Black Orpheus
... and God Created Woman
Playtime
Singin' in the Rain
North By Northwest
Manhattan
8 1/2
The Leopard
I'd echo:
The Searchers
Dreams
Barry Lyndon
The Thin Red Line
Bambi
Vertigo
Casablanca
The Passenger
In The Mood For Love
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The Fall, definitely.
Wings of Desire
The Saddest Music in the World
Volver
Days of Heaven
The Double Life of Veronique
The Red Shoes
Manhattan
Contempt
Malena
City of God
Leave Her to Heaven
Tristana
Ugetsu
The Leopard
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast
Northfork
Black Orpheus
Barry Lyndon
Lola Montes
Don't Look Now
Mulholland Dr.
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Chungking Express
La Plaisir
Bunny Lake is Missing
The Night of the Hunter
Meet Me in St. Louis
The Piano
Personally, I think I have too much bloom. Maybe that's the trouble with me.
Personally, I think I have too much bloom. Maybe that's the trouble with me.
Agreed, about your first two. For "the most beautiful," I'd narrow Three Colors to Red. It's a hard call, for me, to rank Red, Veronique, and The Leopard. All are visual feasts. And all are superior to anything by Malick. Days of Heaven is self-conscious, affected, and mannered, imho. He tries far too hard, while Kieslowski's films--any of them that I've seen--and Visconti's The Leopard are both beautiful and controlled. I never have the feeling that either director is forcing anything. Also, each director uses the visuals to tell the story, symbolically and literally, an art that is mystery to far too many directors.
shareAdd
The Scent of Green Papaya
and
The Vertical Ray of the Sun--Ahn Hung Tran
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring--Kim Ki-Duk
Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel)is gorgeous because of the background of its somber colors through which that artful feast shines all the more brightly.
Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki)is stunning.
Housekeeping (1987)
Vénus beauté institut (1999)
In purely visual terms, these flicks are pretty beautiful:
Days of Heaven
Thin Red Line
Vertigo
Nostalgia
Mirror
Barry Lyndon
2001: A Space Odyssey
Three Colors
The Double Life of Veronique
Finding Nemo
Ratatouille
Amarcord
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Godfather
Sunrise
Apocalypse Now
The Shining
Once Upon a Time in America
Manhattan
The Untouchables
Blade Runner
Diamond Earings
Carlito's Way
The Sound of Music
Paths of Glory
Napoleon
Van Gogh
Modern Times
Playtime
Then you have stuff like Dekalog, M or Raging Bull, which are beautiful in a nasty sort of way.
"Rape is no laughing matter. Unless you're raping a clown."
Apocalypse Now
Blade Runner
Citizen Kane
The Conformist
House of Flying Daggers
Lawrence of Arabia
The Man with a Movie Camera
The Night of the Hunter
Night and the City (RIP Jules Dassin)
Y Tu Mama Tambien