This brilliant and often hilarious 2003 essay film by Thom Andersen assembles clips from 191 movies set in Los Angeles, juxtaposing their fantasies with the real city as seen by a loyal and well-informed native. Designed specifically to ape an old-fashioned double feature, with an intermission planted about two-thirds of the way through, it lies outside the mainstream because it lacks studio backing and distribution, yet it’s far too plainspoken and witty to qualify as esoteric or marginal. It’s an essay that qualifies as social history, as film theory, as personal reverie, as architectural history and criticism, as a bittersweet meditation on automotive transport, as a critical history of mass transit in southern California, as a wisecracking compilation of local folklore, as “a city symphony in reverse,” and as a song of nostalgia for lost neighborhoods such as Bunker Hill and unchronicled lifestyles such as locals who walk or take buses. Most of all, it qualifies as film criticism on the highest level — analytical, transformative, and profoundly political. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)