Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. A lovely young woman named Melanie (Hedren) – all lovely young women are named Melanie – is a flirt, a prankster, a teaser. She has the sort of verve for mischief that one… Read More The Birds (1963)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Jimmy Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger The idea behind Rope is a perfectly scrumptious one for a film; a pair of handsome young men, Brandon (Dall) and Phillip (Granger), decide to kill one of their friends for the thrill of it and then host a party immediately after, with food served from atop… Read More Rope (1948)
Dir. Todd Haynes. Starring Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Peter Friedman Carol (Moore) flips through her guide to Wrenwood. Peter Dunning (Friedman) appears to have founded the center all the way back in 1978; by now it could be 1988, although the given year for the movie is ’87. 1978 is an interesting year for him… Read More Safe (1995)
Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page As the van which is holding the inception team and their mark tumbles, so too does the gravity change in a hallway where Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) is fighting a manifestation of Robert Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy) subconscious. The two of them come closer to falling up than anyone… Read More Inception (2010)
Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Irene Tunc Just as monster movies are often highly successful when the monster is hidden from our sight (Jaws, The Thing), so too can romances be terribly erotic when there’s absolutely no sex. Brief Encounter is such a film; it turns even the idea of a sexual liaison between the… Read More Leon Morin, Priest (1961)
Dir. Brad Bird. Starring Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Janeane Garofolo Up until 2007, here’s how Pixar movies had ended: Toy Story – Woody and Buzz chase down a moving truck on an RC car, fall with style into a minivan, and then have their first Christmas together A Bug’s Life – After the gruesome death of… Read More Ratatouille (2007)
Dir. Douglas Sirk. Starring Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead Cary Scott’s (Wyman) garbage children, Ned and Kay (William Reynolds and Gloria Talbott, respectively), are both in their early twenties during the events of the film. In 1955, I don’t think any but the most clairvoyant Americans would have foreseen the events in Vietnam, only the… Read More All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Starring Henrik Malberg, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Emil Hass Christensen Mikkel (Christensen) can tell something’s wrong while he’s speaking with the new parson (Ove Rud). He’s met Johannes (Rye), one of Mikkel’s younger brothers, who speaks slowly, harshly, as if there were some sharp metal obstacle in his throat for the words… Read More Ordet (1955)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson Rebecca must be one of the great depictions of anxiety ever to appear on the big screen. Where some people dream of performing a role they haven’t practiced in front of a capacity crowd, or having an exam placed in front of them on a subject… Read More Rebecca (1940)
Dir. Bill Condon. Starring Emma Watson, Ewan McGregor, Dan Stevens Since the movie has opened recently, an obligatory “spoilers.” Also, a shameless plug: I’ve written about the 1991 animated version with a special emphasis on that film’s symbolic use of color. You can find that here. The Beast (Stevens) reaches down and picks up an… Read More Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Seeing Things Secondhand 