Sightlines · a viewing thread

All the World's a Stage

Watch these together when you want the theater seen from the wings — faded stars angling for a comeback, hungry understudies, actresses in extremity, and a director who walked away — each film besotted with performance and clear-eyed about its cost.

Blue-chip canon a cinephile will nod at instantly: All About Eve and All About My Mother are widely loved and easy to enter, The Band Wagon a buoyant crowd-pleaser once you seek it out, with My Dinner with Andre the one that asks real patience for two hours of pure conversation.

• All About Eve (1950)
• All About My Mother (1999)
• The Band Wagon (1953)
• My Dinner with Andre (1981)
• Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) — The overlooked Almodóvar that rhymes with All About My Mother — a Madrid voice actress unraveling over a phone, all melodrama and dubbing-booth artifice, the dry run for the theater-of-women he'd perfect a decade later.