Dir. Roland Joffe. Starring Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Robert De Niro Father Gabriel (Irons) is the only European Jesuit priest above the waterfall who is unwilling to fight for the Guarani with violence. Rodrigo (De Niro), whose skill with violence is unquestioned, comes to Gabriel to be blessed before joining the battle. “I cannot bless… Read More The Mission (1986)
Dir. Peter Weir. Starring Helen Morse, Margaret Nelson, Rachel Roberts More than forty years later it’s nearly impossible to come to Picnic at Hanging Rock without knowing that you’ll not receive satisfaction from the movie, at least in terms of the plot. That’s not to say that some kind of satisfaction – or at the very least… Read More Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Dir. Jacques Demy. Starring Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Nino Castelnuevo Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Mohamed Ben Kassen Guy (Castelnuevo) has bad news for Genevieve (Deneuve): he’s being sent to Algeria, and at sixteen she is certain that she will die waiting for him. At this moment, she has already conceived the… Read More The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Dir. Asghar Farhadi. Starring Peyman Moaadi, Sarina Farhadi, Sareh Bayat I adore the first scene of this movie, because it is so terribly frank. The room itself is bare, with gray walls and handsome, but simple, wooden chairs. Nader (Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are a married couple in front of a judge. She wants… Read More A Separation (2011)
Dir. David Lynch. Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Elise Harring, Justin Theroux It seems silly to say “spoilers” when talking about a sixteen-year-old movie, but if you haven’t seen it and you’re reading this, you should probably watch the movie instead. Tinch admitted he didn’t really know. “The new fiction is interested in language and in… Read More Mulholland Drive (2001)
The Luminaries is an enormously enjoyable novel, with emphasis on the adverb. At more than eight hundred pages, it is the longest novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, and its author, Eleanor Catton, is the youngest to ever win the Man Booker. (She was twenty-eight when it was published, which makes me wish I… Read More Casting The Luminaries for TV: Utter, Wishful, and Shameful Fanfiction
Dir. Charles Sturridge. Starring Jeremy Irons, Jane Asher, Phoebe Nicholls (My thoughts on the preceding episode are here.) Like anyone who has just been broken up with – perhaps “divorced” might be an even better word – Charles veers from haughty calm to disconsolate sadness. Charles is back from Morocco in this episode (only, about… Read More Brideshead Revisited S1E8, “Brideshead Deserted”
Dir. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois. Starring Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson I vividly remember where I was the first time I saw a commercial for How to Train Your Dragon. I was a freshman in college and I was on my top bunk; my roommate was on the bottom one at the time, and… Read More How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Dir. David Cronenberg. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris It’s almost too bad that A History of Violence isn’t a French movie about a reformed mobster from the tough streets of Marseille who escapes to the Massif Central and starts a family, because then the title would make a little more sense. In English, the term… Read More A History of Violence (2005)
Dir. Michael Mann. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Steven Waddington What if Michael Mann is responsible for the best journalism flick of the ’90s, the best cop movie of the ’90s, and the best western of the ’90s? I don’t know that there’s much argument that The Insider and Heat fill those first two niches, but there may be… Read More The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Seeing Things Secondhand 