I’m joining in the spirit of the year-in-review post, even though the way I watch movies isn’t really conducive to the kind of list that one usually sees at the end of the year. (Incidentally, if you happen to be a recent music aficionado, friend of the blog Matt will have his year-end list of… Read More 2018 Year-End Review: Fifty Movies
Dir. Dominic Cooke. Starring Saiorse Ronan, Billy Howle, Adrian Scarborough On Chesil Beach might even have been Atonement but for two things. (It is probably not fair of me to compare them, but Ian McEwan, sad lovers, I doubt I’m the first one here.) First, Ronan and Howle don’t have the power of Knightley and… Read More On Chesil Beach (2018)
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Zoe Kazan, Tom Waits, Tim Blake Nelson If the six segments of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are meant to cohere, then it’s as six distinct pieces of the various types of the western genre. It hits on virtually all of them from gunmen to highwaymen, wagon trails (why… Read More The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Dir. Yann Demange. Starring Jack O’Connell, Sean Harris, David Wilmot If you think that more civilized discourse would go a long way to solving our political problems, if you are socially liberal and economically conservative, if you wistfully recall the dominion of uber-WASPs like George H.W. Bush, if you think “All Lives Matter” gets at… Read More ’71 (2014)
Dir. Paul Schrader. Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles I spent a long time preparing the joke: when an American remakes Winter Light (and sort of smushes in a little Diary of a Country Priest), he ends it with an explosion. The movie disappointed my joke, alas, although I’m not sure it would have been worse if… Read More First Reformed (2017)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Julia Dufvenius, Liv Ullmann, Borje Ahlstedt Image links back here Music is a discipline too often taken for granted, I think; there’s a sense in the popular imagination that all musicians are either Mozart reborn, effortlessly cranking out the hits, or teetering on the edge of personal collapse à la Johnny… Read More Saraband (2003)
Seeing Things Secondhand 