Dir. Erich von Stroheim. Starring Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt Watching a movie like Greed—a movie I frankly lucked into catching on TCM before it left the channel—is enough to give someone an existential crisis about today’s movies. (Everything I am about to say has been said before. Forgive me, and lament with me.) Watch… Read More Greed (1924)
Dir. Ari Folman The movie which is probably the clearest companion to Waltz with Bashir is Tower, the Keith Maitland documentary about the University of Texas shootings in 1966. Like Waltz with Bashir, Tower is primarily animated despite its status as documentary, and like Waltz with Bashir relies on interviews with witnesses to tell the story. They even end similarly: after… Read More Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Dir. Robert Eggers. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie The real tension, the real horror in The Witch isn’t in the story. This is not a scary movie, despite the genre it belongs to on Netflix or at your local video store (as if!). The tension comes from wondering when Eggers is going to… Read More The Witch (2015)
Dir. Peter Farrelly. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini Mahershala Ali won his second Academy Award for playing Don Shirley in this movie, and it’s an extremely endearing performance. He exemplifies “trim” in this picture, from his beautiful clothes to his neat facial hair to his spotless elocution. Watching someone who has every inch… Read More Green Book (2018)
Dir. David Yates. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson Hogwarts deserves better than the ending it’s given. In the book as well, the Battle of Hogwarts is a sort of crumpled, bloodstained love letter to the school where the majority of this story has taken place. In some ways that’s even more true in… Read More Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)
Directed by David Yates. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint I’m sure the conversation didn’t happen just this way, but at some point the director, the producers, the writer, and so on must have sat down and said: “Part 1 is going to do all the work and Part 2 is going to be all payoff.”… Read More Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010)
Dir. David Yates. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint What Half-Blood Prince has in bunches, as much as any Potter movie with the possible exception of Goblet of Fire, is humor. If this is one of the Potter movies you cape for, then how funny it can be has to play a significant role. There’s some good… Read More Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
Dir. David Yates. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon Chris Columbus’ versions of Harry Potter were loving if long-winded, Alfonso Cuaron’s…I hate using this word, but it really was disruptive…and remarkable, and Mike Newell’s clean and effective. If those are all true, then David Yates’ versions are by and large ham-fisted. Yates’ four adaptations… Read More Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
Dir. Mike Newell. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint The Potter books total over a million words. The movies come to nearly twenty hours. There are any number of scenes that must have been difficult to adapt for myriad reasons, but the absolute most difficult scene to turn from words to images is the… Read More Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
Dir. Alfonso Cuaron. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson As a lad, I was so certain that the job of a filmmaker was to be as faithful as possible to the material s/he adapted. I have been wised up significantly since then, but I have to confess that because of that particular foible, I… Read More Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Seeing Things Secondhand 