You can find the introduction and index for this series here. Film Director Year Type Nancy Drew…Trouble Shooter William Clemens 1939 Narrative feature Life Begins for Andy Hardy George B. Seitz 1941 Narrative feature The Devil and Daniel Webster William Dieterle 1941 Narrative feature In This Our Life John Huston 1942 Narrative feature The Leopard Man… Read More 100 American Films to Save: Confrontations (1939-1946)
You can find the introduction and index for this series here. Film Director Year Type Buffalo Running Eadweard Muybridge 1883 Short Annabelle Serpentine Dance William Heise and William K.L. Dickson 1895 Short Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory James H. White 1897 Short Pan-American Exposition by Night, 1901 Edwin S. Porter and James… Read More 100 American Films to Save: Origins (1883-1932)
Voting is like mowing the lawn or folding socks. it’s one of those activities that you know you have to take care of but you can’t help but feel like it doesn’t matter even while you’re doing it. I live in a swing state (for now, anyway) and I still feel like that when I… Read More 100 American Films to Save: Introduction and Index
Dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan I’m in my tenth year as a high school teacher, and I’ve been listening to conversations in my classroom and standing in the hallways and reviewing papers long enough to know that teenagers, as a class, are not much for new… Read More Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Dir. Henry King. Starring Gregory Peck, Millard Mitchell, Skip Homeier Surely no other film makes as much dramatic hay with the insult “Mister Frazzlebottom” as The Gunfighter does. With terrible efficiency, Jimmy Ringo (Peck) makes quick work of Eddie (Richard Jaeckel), a loudmouth southwesterner with, given his death, an ironic yen for immortality. Eddie fancies… Read More The Gunfighter (1950)
Dir. Joseph Kosinski. Starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly Joseph Kosinski and Tom Cruise are a director-actor match made in Hell, and not in the fun Herzog-Kinski way. I imagine that the two of them plus Christopher McQuarrie and whichever other Tom Cruise pets helped make this film are probably even copacetic with each… Read More Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Kirk Douglas, Horace McMahon, Eleanor Parker Once a director finds a source material s/he’s fond of, it’s not unheard of for them to return to that well. Rob Reiner has Stand by Me and Misery, two relatively grounded works originally by Stephen King. John Ford went back to the James Warner… Read More Detective Story (1951)
Let’s start trendy: the link to my list on Letterboxd, which will entitle you to yell at me about what’s there and what’s not there, but maybe not with all that much nuance. And now practical: 1-10 / Nashville to The Master 11-20 / Rear Window to The Gold Rush 21-30 / Before Sunset to… Read More Top 250 American Movies: Home Page and Links
After completing a project that takes more than a couple weeks to put together, I like to create some visual data (in other words, what an idiot with a vague understanding of Google Sheets can put together). Another way to think about these charts is that they clarify my biases, and to some extent my… Read More Top 250 American Movies: Charts and Broad Insights
For each movie in the top 100, I’ve written a question to answer. (It would get very, very boring for me to have to write some variation on “boy howdy, you’ll never believe how good this movie is” one hundred more times.) There’s no exact sentence or word count I’m holding myself to here, but… Read More Top 250 American Movies: 1-10
Seeing Things Secondhand 