Dir. Charles Sturridge. Starring Diana Quick, Charles Keating, Jeremy Irons (My thoughts on the preceding episode are here.) “Julia” signifies a shift in focus for Brideshead Revisited, equal parts palate cleanser and the seeds of a reboot. Less than ten minutes into episode, Charles intones, “It is time to speak of Julia” in a way… Read More Brideshead Revisited S1E6, “Julia”
Dir. Andrea Arnold. Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Griffiths Most of Mia’s (Jarvis) conversation, at least before Conor (Fassbender) shows up, is Hobbesian: “nasty, brutish, and short.” She has a flair for profanity, and while her vocabulary and speech appear to be pretty limited outside that one sphere, within it she’s practically a prodigy.… Read More Fish Tank (2009)
Dir. Andrzej Wajda. Starring Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Adam Pawlikowski Even when he’s literally lighting a guy on fire with rounds from his submachine gun (which is one heck of a visual touch), Maciek (Cybulski) doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who kills to survive. He lolls around on grassy hills outside chapels, or… Read More Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Andrew Garfield, Tadanobu Asano, Yosuke Kubozuka Spoilers ahead. Father Rodrigues (Garfield), over the course of the film, witnesses shocking humiliation, torture, and execution. Apostasy is the least of these after a while, almost passe in the misty mountains, immaculate sand, and lovely greens of one of the most hostile environments seen… Read More Silence (2016)
Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Starring Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth When I took a Faulkner class in college, we started with Flags in the Dust. It’s a messy book; right now, it’s notable almost entirely for a passage that Faulkner wrote about mules and the fact that Faulkner’s editors published it as Sartoris; in fact, Faulkner never… Read More Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Dir. John Carney. Starring Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Jack Reynor The one-sentence synopsis of Sing Street – boy creates band on spot to impress cute girl he met – sounds like a nightmare of a mediocre screwball update. But what John Carney seems to have understood intuitively was that this is not a story about about a kid faking… Read More Sing Street (2016)
Dir. Ang Lee. Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams More than a decade later, Brokeback Mountain is undoubtedly the best American movie of 2005 and, purely from back of the napkin work, probably one of the best American movies of the aughts. It’s a movie of striking bravery simply for the topic at hand; in 2005,… Read More Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Dir. Joe Wright. Starring Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law The action of Anna Karenina is set, sometimes tacitly but more often very, very loudly, in a theater. This suits Wright, whose sweet spot mixes handsome people in period costumes with enough tracking shots to make a West Wing fan turn purple. There’s some fairly dazzling work with… Read More Anna Karenina (2012)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier “I have a competition in me,” Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) says. “I want no one else to succeed.” He’s speaking to his brother, Henry (who, it will turn it, is neither his brother nor a Henry), a man he’s only met earlier that day. With only… Read More There Will Be Blood (2007)
Dir. Philip Kaufman. Starring Ed Harris, Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn The Right Stuff, when it’s functioning at its highest levels, is a story about the death of the Western, and no one could have been better equipped to play the leading role than Sam Shepard. History will remember Shepard the playwright, but to me he will… Read More The Right Stuff (1983)
Seeing Things Secondhand 