What­ev­er our set of beliefs, most of us soon­er or lat­er unite in the same cel­e­bra­to­ry pur­suit on Christ­mas Day: the watch­ing of movies. Going out to the the­ater to catch a hol­i­day-sea­son block­buster or two after you’ve opened your presents (or after oth­er peo­ple have fin­ished open­ing their presents) has become a kind of tra­di­tion in itself, and enough of a tra­di­tion to per­mit vari­a­tions. Maybe you’d rather use film to free your­self of the bur­dens of the Christ­mas sea­son, going instead to the art house and catch­ing the least com­mer­cial film pos­si­ble in this increas­ing­ly com­mer­cial time of the year.

But even if you stick with the auteurs, you can’t get away from Christ­mas entire­ly. A cou­ple Christ­mases ago, “The Auteurs of Christ­mas” shot a series of ver­sions of this most antic­i­pat­ed morn­ing in the style of direc­tors Steven Spiel­berg, Sergei Eisen­stein, Wes Ander­son, Woody Allen, Lars von Tri­er, Mar­tin Scors­ese, Michael Moore, Stan­ley Kubrick, Wern­er Her­zog, and Baz Luhrmann.

More recent­ly, the fol­low-up above expand­ed the project to envi­sion Christ­mas as envi­sioned by Char­lie Chap­lin, Quentin Taran­ti­no, Ter­rence Mal­ick, Christo­pher Nolan, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitch­cock, Mor­gan Spur­lock, David Lynch, M. Night Shya­malan, and Michael Bay.

But just as the con­clu­sion of one year’s Christ­mas can sim­ply get you look­ing for­ward to the next year’s, so these two super-homages make you think about the pos­si­ble auteurs for inclu­sion in a third: what would Yasu­jirō Ozu’s Christ­mas morn­ing look like, shot just a cou­ple feet off the tata­mi mat? Or Chan­tal Aker­man’s, which, for prop­er pac­ing, might require a whole video by itself? Or a Coen Broth­ers Christ­mas? Gas­par Noé’s? Tru­ly, this hol­i­day keeps on giv­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Ter­ry Gilliam’s Ani­mat­ed Short, The Christ­mas Card (1968)

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

William S. Bur­roughs Nar­rates a Clay­ma­tion of His Grim Hol­i­day Sto­ry “The Junky’s Christ­mas”

A Christ­mas Car­ol Pre­sent­ed in a Thomas Edi­son Film (1910)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Some­times when I enjoy a movie less than I thought I would, I find that my dis­sat­is­fac­tion stems from the feel­ing of hav­ing watched a movie made out of oth­er movies, a Franken­stein­ian cre­ation assem­bled from the dead bits and pieces that worked well when attached to their orig­i­nal bod­ies, alive long ago, but, when re-used, don’t come to life at all. When avid cinephile turned avid cinephile and direc­tor Quentin Taran­ti­no plays the role of a cin­e­mat­ic Dr. Franken­stein, how­ev­er, he turns the volt­age much high­er up, ele­vat­ing the prac­tice to an auteur’s art.

When Taran­ti­no’s films ref­er­ence his favorite films — be they clas­sics of the canon, tried-and-true west­erns, kung-fu obscu­ri­ties, pieces of Euro­pean new-wave, or grind-house exploita­tion flicks — they often tran­scend their sources. Jacob Swin­ney, whose super­cuts of Taran­ti­no’s use of sound, close-ups, and cars we fea­tured back in April, has cut togeth­er 34 par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive visu­al ref­er­ences of the thou­sands found in the direc­tor’s fil­mog­ra­phy and placed them along­side the works quot­ed.

The video cov­ers, in three min­utes, visu­al ref­er­ences from the “Mex­i­can stand­off” from City of Fire in Reser­voir Dogs to the dances from Band of Out­siders and 8 1/2 in Pulp Fic­tion to Super­chick and The Grad­u­ate’s open­ing titles in Jack­ie Brown to Bruce Lee’s track­suit in Game of Death on Uma Thur­man in Kill Bill Vol­ume One to Daryl Han­nah’s writhing from Blade Run­ner in Kill Bill Vol­ume Two to fram­ing from The Searchers in Inglo­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds.

It stops short of The Hate­ful Eight, Taran­ti­no’s lat­est, leav­ing it as an exer­cise for the view­er to tab­u­late just how wide a swatch of cin­e­ma the man has repur­posed this time. He’s gone on record as say­ing he’ll only make two more fea­ture films, but don’t wor­ry, cinephiles: they’ll more than like­ly con­tain enough ref­er­ences to oth­er movies, visu­al and oth­er­wise, to keep you in view­ing mate­r­i­al for the next twen­ty years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Super­cuts Explore the Director’s Styl­ized Use of Sound, Close Ups & Cars in His Films

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns, Start­ing with The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Taran­ti­no Tells You About The Actors & Direc­tors Who Pro­vid­ed the Inspi­ra­tion for “Reser­voir Dogs”

Watch Free Online My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Have you had enough Star Wars yet? No, you will nev­er have enough Star Wars, not even after you’ve acquired the Star Wars dinette set, Star Wars bed and bath col­lec­tion, $400 Star Wars Lego Death Star, Star Wars chick­en frank­furter snack with built-in ketchup (seri­ous­ly)… and that’s not even to men­tion the first six movies, re-released every few years in new for­mats and expand­ed edi­tions.

Yeah, the mer­chan­dis­ing may be a lit­tle much; with the inau­gur­al film of the reboot­ed fran­chise open­ing dur­ing the hol­i­days, it’s a feed­ing fren­zy, no doubt. But for true fans, no amount of crass mate­ri­al­ism can put a damper on the enthu­si­asm, and yes, the anx­i­ety, for Star Wars: The Force Awak­ens. Will it eclipse our painful mem­o­ries of the pre­quels? Will Episode VII rekin­dle the mag­ic of Episodes IV-VI (for­mer­ly Episodes I‑III)? By near­ly all accounts, J.J. Abrams reimag­in­ing of the George Lucas lega­cy does all of the above.

To help you pre­pare for open­ing night (I’ve got my tick­ets!), we’ve com­piled some of our top Star Wars posts, fea­tur­ing all man­ner of doc­u­men­tary explain­ers, fan homages, inter­views, par­o­dies, remix­es, etc. From the dead­ly seri­ous to the ridicu­lous, per­haps no pop­u­lar movie prop­er­ty has attract­ed as much com­men­tary and meta-com­men­tary as Star Wars. That isn’t like­ly to change any­time soon, what with the Star Wars uni­verse again expand­ing into infin­i­ty. Before you take the leap for­ward into its future, revis­it its past at the links below.

Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tures and Archival Footage:

Watch the Very First Trail­ers for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi (1976–83) (see the first above)

The Mak­ing of Star Wars As Told by C‑3PO & R2-D2: The First-Ever Doc­u­men­tary on the Film (1977)

Kurt Rus­sell Audi­tions for Star Wars

The Mak­ing of The Empire Strikes Back Show­cased on Long-Lost Dutch TV Doc­u­men­tary

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

How Star Wars Bor­rowed From Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Great Samu­rai Films

2 Hour Anno­tat­ed Star Wars Film Reveals the Cin­e­mat­ic Influ­ences Behind George Lucas’ Clas­sic Film

Joseph Camp­bell and Bill Moy­ers Break Down Star Wars as an Epic, Uni­ver­sal Myth

Star Wars is a Remix

Adap­ta­tions, Fan Films, and Par­o­dies:

Hard­ware Wars: The Moth­er of All Star Wars Fan Films (and the Most Prof­itable Short Film Ever Made)

Fans Recon­struct Authen­tic Ver­sion of Star Wars, As It Was Shown in The­aters in 1977

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film

The Empire Strikes Back Uncut: A New Fan-Made, Shot-for-Shot Remake of the 1980 Sci-Fi Clas­sic

The Exis­ten­tial Star Wars: Sartre Meets Darth Vad­er

Star Wars as Silent Film

Watch a New Star Wars Ani­ma­tion, Drawn in a Clas­sic 80s Japan­ese Ani­me Style

And final­ly, if you’ve got the stom­ach for it and you want to catch up on the last six Star Wars films—or watch them all for the first time—you can do so all at once in the mind-bend­ing Meta Star Wars, which lay­ers all six films over each oth­er to cre­ate a psy­che­del­ic onslaught of whoosh­ing space­ships, droid bleeps and bloops, and flash­ing blasters and lightsabers. You won’t come away from the expe­ri­ence, if you can stand it, with any sense of plot or char­ac­ters, but you’ll have an inti­mate knowl­edge of the Star Wars uni­verse’s many unique sound effects.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch George Lucas’ Award-Win­ning Stu­dent Film Elec­tron­ic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB (1967)

Free: Down­load 151 Sci-Fi & Fan­ta­sy Sto­ries from Tor.com

Blade Run­ner is a Waste of Time: Siskel & Ebert in 1982

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If you can rank the work of a film­mak­er by the num­ber of video essays it inspires, then Yasu­jirō Ozu must have made some of the great­est motion pic­tures of all time. Wes Ander­son, despite hav­ing got his start 65 years lat­er than Ozu, would also place well — and nat­u­ral­ly, as we post­ed back in July, one video essay even exam­ines the two men’s films (on most lev­els so seem­ing­ly dif­fer­ent) in par­al­lel. But today, let’s take a clos­er look at the mid­cen­tu­ry Japan­ese auteur of Tokyo Sto­ry, Float­ing Weeds, Late Spring and many more in iso­la­tion, through Lewis Bond’s new video essay “The Depth of Sim­plic­i­ty.”

At first glance, most of Ozu’s more than thir­ty films — domes­tic dra­mas which, as crit­ic Don­ald Richie wrote in his study of the direc­tor, “had but one major sub­ject, the Japan­ese fam­i­ly, and but one major theme, its dis­so­lu­tion” — might seem sim­i­lar to each oth­er. But that first glance only reveals the para­me­ters with­in which Ozu decid­ed to work, the stric­tures that engaged his genius. “Although I may seem the same to oth­er peo­ple,” he said in the quote that opens “The Depth of Sim­plic­i­ty,” “to me each thing I pro­duce is a new expres­sion and I always make each work from a new inter­est. It’s like a painter who always paints the same rose.” (Or maybe the same tea ket­tle?)

“Ozu want­ed to cap­ture the cin­e­mat­ic qual­i­ty of every­day life,” says Bond, “and doing so required a very spe­cif­ic style.” Rather than adding tech­niques on to his cin­e­mat­ic vocab­u­lary, Ozu elim­i­nat­ed them, mak­ing com­plete and mean­ing­ful use of those that remained: rig­or­ous, paint­ing-like com­po­si­tions using frames with­in frames; a low-placed cam­era (set, leg­end has it, around the height of some­one sit­ting on a tra­di­tion­al tata­mi mat) that hard­ly ever moves and always uses a human eye­sight-like 50-mil­lime­ter lens; dia­logue that cuts between straight-on close-ups of each speak­er (break­ing film­mak­ing’s sacred “180-degree rule” every time).

These tech­niques and oth­ers, which “seem false at first glance but begin to weave their way into the tex­ture of his films,” give Ozu’s work what Bond calls its “radi­ant­ly calm tone,” its abil­i­ty to “strad­dle the line of sub­jec­tiv­i­ty and objec­tiv­i­ty,” and its expres­sion of mono no aware, one of those not-espe­cial­ly-trans­lat­able Japan­ese con­cepts hav­ing to do with the dis­tinc­tive emo­tion felt upon recog­ni­tion of the tran­sience of all things. Of course, Ozu him­self, who com­pared him­self to a hum­ble tofu-mak­er, would nev­er have made such claims. “I just want to make good tofu,” he said, and cinephiles the world over con­tin­ue to eat it up today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Yasu­jiro Ozu, “the Most Japan­ese of All Film Direc­tors”

Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unex­pect­ed Par­al­lels Between Two Great Film­mak­ers

The Essence of Hayao Miyaza­ki Films: A Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Human­i­ty at the Heart of His Ani­ma­tion

Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Of all the tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions hap­pen­ing around me as I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, none excit­ed me more than the DVD direc­tor’s com­men­tary. Yes, LaserDisc diehards, I know com­men­tary tracks did­n’t begin with the advent of DVDs, but they unques­tion­ably came into their own as a form on that for­mat. A promis­ing-enough direc­tor’s com­men­tary — one fea­tur­ing a fun­ny film­mak­er, or one full of fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries, or one wonky enough to get as deep into the nuts and bolts of the craft as time allowed — could by itself con­vince me to rent or even buy a disc, whether or not I cared for or had even heard of the movie itself.

And so I found it a bit dis­may­ing that, as online stream­ing began to dis­place disc-watch­ing as the home-the­ater tech­nol­o­gy of choice, direc­tor’s com­men­tary tracks — or com­men­tary tracks by any­one else, for that mat­ter — looked like a soon-to-be thing of the past. But as we’ve learned, espe­cial­ly this cen­tu­ry, tech­nol­o­gy tends to open a win­dow when it clos­es a door. At the New York Times, inter­net video has opened anoth­er win­dow onto the mind of the mod­ern film­mak­er with Anato­my of a Scene, a series of clips that each take just one scene from a film and have the film’s direc­tor explain in depth, DVD-com­men­tary-style, what went into that scene.

At the top of the post, you can hear Wes Ander­son, a direc­tor long known for his mas­tery of a cer­tain aes­thet­ic, explain some of the tech­niques that make up that aes­thet­ic as he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors used them in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Below that, Tim Bur­ton, who grew famous using an equal­ly dis­tinc­tive but whol­ly dif­fer­ent visu­al vocab­u­lary from Ander­son­’s, talks about a scene from Big Eyes, his film about the life of painter Mar­garet Keane. Keane’s paint­ings fea­ture heav­i­ly in the back­ground, which gives Bur­ton the oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk about how they cap­ti­vat­ed him in child­hood: “I found them quite dis­turb­ing, and the col­or schemes were quite lurid” — and so he explains how those lurid col­ors pro­vid­ed the col­or scheme for the movie itself.

The direc­tors of Anato­my of a Scene tend to talk about their recent films, and in recent years we’ve seen a fair few high-pro­file Hol­ly­wood movies deal­ing with out­er space and the worlds beyond Earth: Christo­pher Nolan’s Inter­stel­lar, for instance, whose scene of its astro­nauts hurtling into the great unknown pro­vides the mate­r­i­al for its Anato­my of a Scene video. Rid­ley Scott, always a stim­u­lat­ing com­menter, has also done one on The Mar­t­ian, his own lat­est space movie which came out this year. Scott talks over the scene where his film’s astro­naut, marooned and seek­ing any tool of sur­vival, digs NASA’s Pathfind­er out of the Mar­t­ian sands, about how, as “one of those prim­i­tives who can actu­al­ly draw,” he sto­ry­boards every­thing in detail: “By the time I start the movie, I’ve kind of ‘filmed’ it on paper, and when I get there, it gives me the con­fi­dence to feel free to allow the actors and every­body else to do their thing.”

But Anato­my of a Scene does­n’t just invite house­hold names. I used to live in Los Ange­les and still keep up with movies that exam­ine the city, and so I found fas­ci­nat­ing indeed their video with Dan Gilroy on Night­crawler, my favorite Los Ange­les movie of this past year (maybe along­side Paul Thomas Ander­son­’s Thomas Pyn­chon adap­ta­tion Inher­ent Vice, a scene from which also gets anat­o­mized). The Times has put togeth­er over a hun­dred of these videos, all of which you can watch at their Anato­my of a Scene page or on Youtube. They’ve includ­ed scenes from the work of such auteurs as Olivi­er Assayas, Noah Baum­bach, Richard Lin­klater, and Lukas Moodys­son (as well as scenes from such, er, oth­er sorts of pic­tures as Zack Sny­der’s Man of Steel). If the com­men­tary is dead, well, long live the com­men­tary.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Lan­dis Decon­structs Trail­ers of Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Films: Cit­i­zen Kane, Sun­set Boule­vard, 2001 & More

Moviedrome: Film­mak­er Alex Cox Pro­vides Video Intro­duc­tions to 100+ Clas­sic Cult Films

Direc­tor Robert Rodriguez Teach­es The Basics of Film­mak­ing in Under 10 Min­utes

Film­mak­ing Advice from Quentin Taran­ti­no and Sam Rai­mi (NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.