Where exactly does Bonnie and Clyde rank in the American pantheon? It's a bona-fide classic, to be sure. It placed on the American Film Institute's Top 100 in 1998 and again in 2007. It's also on the IMDB's Top 250 list. Upon closer inspection, however, it's far more than a perfect, polished gemstone. Rather, it's a bundle of contradictions. Everyone knows that it was a groundbreaking film of its day, the first to incorporate a new kind of violence and moral complexity into the mainstream. But screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman borrowed these elements directly from French New Wave films like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) and Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960). In fact, Truffaut was the first director approached for the project. Despite this, Bonnie and Clyde somehow transcends time. More than just a moldy relic of the 1960s, it has aged much better and is far more watchable today than, say, Easy Rider (1969) or even The Graduate (1967).

Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

He's been gone for over 20 years, but now François Truffaut's work is once again heading to the big screen. Well, sort of. Variety reports that New Line is remaking his 1981 film, The Woman Next Door (La Femme d'a cote). Neil LaBute, the pen behind In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty, and The Wicker Man, will handle adapting the film, while Oscar-winner Taylor Hackford (Against All Odds, Ray) has signed on to direct. This will be the first time LaBute writes a feature for someone else. Now of course, he won't begin writing until the WGA strike is over, but Variety says he couldn't resist the offer, which came after Hackford and wife Helen Mirren saw LaBute's play, Wrecks.

I understand being allured by great projects, but it seems like making big writing deals while you're striking is really defeating the purpose. I wonder if he'll start writing it now, but only "officially" start later. Anyway, LaBute says: "This is a lesser-known Truffaut film about ex-lovers, long separated, who suddenly find themselves living next door to each other. Each is married. Neither tells their spouse they know each other, and it's a collision course into disaster as they rekindle a volatile relationship, with great passion and suspense. ...Taylor said if he was ever going to remake a movie, this was the one he could do something with." That's not surprising, considering the possibilities with the urges of temptation and rekindling of lust. The original starred Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant as the trysters, but who would you cast in a modern-day, English version?

Roman Polanski's recent supporting role in Brett Ratner's Rush Hour 3 raised more questions than the film itself ever could. What could that dynamic have been like? How could one of the world's greatest directors have taken orders from one of the world's worst? We know from previous films (The Fearless Vampire Killers, Zemsta, etc.) that Polanski has a yen for acting, even if his skills in this arena run toward broad, rather than subtle. Likewise Kevin Smith working for Len Wiseman in Live Free or Die Hard. Would Smith have made suggestions on how to make the movie nerdier? It got me thinking about the many directors who have performed for their colleagues, and the very interesting dynamics they created. The following are the seven best and/or most interesting combos. I've only included people who are primarily known as directors, as opposed to actor-directors, like Jackie Chan, George Clooney, Denzel Washington, etc.. I've also left out glorified cameos (Steven Spielberg in The Blues Brothers) and jokey appearances (Samuel Fuller in Pierrot le Fou). Finally, I've excluded Quentin Tarantino, whose lack of thespian skills is unquestioned. (Though I would have loved to have been on the set of Spike Lee's Girl 6 the day those two crossed paths...)

1. Orson Welles in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949)
This is the most obvious one; the Big Guy's presence as Harry Lime has led generations of moviegoers to believe that Welles actually directed this movie. Certainly his fingerprints are on it. He spoke often about building up to the first appearance of a character by having other characters talk about him long before we actually see him. Welles managed to do this with his Rochester in Jane Eyre (1944), and even more memorably here. We know all about Harry Lime before those lights unexpectedly splash on his face and he lets slip an amused smile. Reportedly, the famous "cuckoo clock" speech was his own. However, Reed undoubtedly directed; the overall suspense and structure of the film has more in common with Reed's The Fallen Idol than with anything Welles made.

2. John Huston in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974)
The maverick director had a terrific screen presence with his large, ambling frame, cavernous face and sonorous voice, and acted in many films, mostly his own, and notably in cult films like Winter Kills (1979) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Happily, the news recently broke that rights issues surrounding Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind have been resolved, and so the world may get to see Huston's lead performance in that film as well. In Chinatown, Huston gives a flat-out great performance as the insidious industrialist who gets away with more than murder and justifies it with a hearty laugh. Jack Nicholson may have got his nose cut, but Huston emerges untouched.

Everyone has a different opinion regarding the greatest films in history. Since half the fun is in the arguing, pity the poor cinephile who thinks they've got it all figured out. A new DVD box set from Criterion and Janus may not claim to have finally compiled the greatest films ever, but they've gotten off to a pretty good start.

Janus was a distribution company founded in 1956 by Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey. They had been showing foreign films in their Massachusetts theater for a few years before becoming the premiere distributors of foreign films in the US. Janus has teamed with their sister company Criterion to create Essential Art House: 50 Years Of Janus Film. This whopper of a collection is now available and includes films from directors like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel and Akira Kurosawa -- you can read about Criterion's remastered Seven Samurai here. In total, this box set contains 50 different films, numerous extras, and a 240-page book with an introduction written by Martin Scorsese. Most of these films have been available through Criterion for years, but not in one collection.

All of this film history doesn't come cheap though, the set has a retail price of $850. If that seems a little excessive, don't worry; Criterion is also planning on releasing individual discs from the series as well.

[via CNN Entertainment]

The UK's Times Online has an interesting piece up about great Hollywood director-muse partnerships, from John Wayne and John Ford, to George Cukor and Katherine Hepburn, to Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman. As the article's author Ian Johns notes, these kinds of filmmaker-actor partnerships are less common these days, as directors have a wider array of big-name stars to choose from. Yet, there are still some profitable and creative partnerships out there. Martin Scorsese appears to have moved on from this 1970s and '80s pairing with Robert DeNiro to his modern creative muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he has made Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and now The Departed, with a fourth partnership -- a film about Theodore Roosevelt -- reportedly in the works. Russel Crowe and Ridley Scott worked together first in The Gladiator, then most recently in this year's TIFF offering A Good Year, and they went straight from that into shooting American Gangster together.

Johns goes on to make mention of Pedro Almodóvar's ensemble cast in Volver, where the director featured his favorite muse of the moment, Penelope Cruz alongside Carmen Maura, whom he directed in the 1980s. He doesn't mention my favorite director/ensemble combo of the moment, Christopher Guest and his amazing repeat performers, including Eugene Levy (with whom Guest also co-writes), Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Bob Balaban, Michael McKean and Parker Posey, to name only a few. So pivotal are these actors to Guest's latest films that I can't imagine him making a film without them at this point. They work together with an incredible ease that makes the improvisational style of Guest's films really work.

The article does give props to one of my favorite director/actor pairings: François Truffaut and his on-screen alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud. One of the greatest joys of watching movies in my cinematically geeky life has been watching Léaud grow from boy to man as Antoine Doinel, starting in 1959's The 400 Blows, the film that first earned Truffaut respect at Cannes, when Léaud was just 15, through 1979's Love on the Run -- a 20-year run of great filmmaking. Leaud worked with other directors as well, of course, including Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he made 10 films, including Week End in 1967 and, nearly 20 years later, Détective in 1985, but nothing ever quite matched the magic of Léaud with Truffaut.

Who are some of your favorite director-actor pairs? And who would you like to see work together more?

In case anyone is headed to India this weekend, New Delhi's South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce Auditorium (whew) will be hosting a Truffaut festival from Sept. 3-7, hosted by the French Embassy, the Alliance Francaise of Madras, and the Madras Film Society.

They will be showing the full Antoine Doinel cycle, Two English Girls, The Last Metro (for which he reunited with former love, muse and current head-juror over at the Venice Film Fest this year, Catherine Deneuve after 8 years of little-to-no contact), and The Woman Next Door (starring his wife, final muse and mother of his child, Fanny Ardant -- the movie itself, meanwhile, concerns Truffaut's resurgence of feelings after reuniting with Deneuve in Metro). Both Metro and Women feature Gerard Depardieu, by the way, and both have earned the distinction of a place on my DVD rack.