Dir. Martin Ritt. Starring Paul Newman, Brandon deWilde, Melvyn Douglas Dir. Sofia Coppola. Starring Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Emma Watson All these years I’ve been down on Paul Newman, and I don’t regret it. All the same, it’s not entirely his fault. He was so gorgeous, and had such easy body language, that it must… Read More Hud (1963) and The Bling Ring (2013)
Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Starring Ryan Gosling, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas Since the beginning of this isolation business, I’ve been working from home and drinking…look, we don’t have to talk about how much tea I’m drinking, because I’m not trying to give you anxiety about my future kidney stones on top of what’s going on in the… Read More Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson I’m contractually obligated to bring up the rat crawling in front of the Massachusetts State House, one of my least favorite shots ever, but on rewatching The Departed for the zillionth time, it seems like the reason it’s in the movie at all is because the filmmakers… Read More The Departed (2006)
As any true -holic knows, a little grace goes a long way. As I read through and listened to dozens of Best of the Decade lists, I tried to apply a truth I’d always kept close about list-making: it’s about what’s not on the list as much as it is what’s there. To some extent,… Read More Top 100 Movies of the Decade (2010-2019): The Painful Cuts
Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Starring William Powell, Luise Rainer, Frank Morgan Before we start, I want to make clear that I am not “motivation Internet guy.” I don’t think everyone in a movie needs to be obviously motivated by something, least of all villains. (Who thinks Anton Chigurh needs a motivation? Or Old Man Clanton?)… Read More The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet In the moment, Contagion is a rush. This is one of the virtues of its structure, one of the late legacies of the aughts fascination with multiple loosely connected story strands. (It’s like everyone in Hollywood watched Nashville on the same weekend in 1998 and spent the… Read More Contagion (2011)
Dir. Jon Turteltaub. Starring Nicolas Cage, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger Could anyone else besides Nicolas Cage have pulled this kind of movie off? There’s no one who I think we, as a society, expect this kind of tightrope walking from. This guy has an Oscar, which I forget about all the time, in much the… Read More National Treasure (2004)
Dir. Billy Wilder. Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray In writing about The Apartment in the past (once as a great American movie, and the other as a Best Picture winner), I find myself coming back to the movie’s cynical heart, the seediness which is totally unexceptional to its purveyors, and all the more real for… Read More The Apartment (1960)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Barely a movie in the traditional sense, A Visitor from the Living has two flourishes which make it more than a taped interview. The first are some shots of Theresienstadt, very much in the style that Lanzmann had used in Shoah. The buildings in the contemporary present are seen while we hear the words of… Read More A Visitor from the Living (1997)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Zeva Postic edited Shoah, and it’s a heroic job. Not simply because there was so much to go through, and not simply because there was so much to finally get on the screen. It’s because she highlights the strands of Lanzmann’s inquiry so cleanly, an absolute necessity for a film with this one’s… Read More Shoah (1985)
Seeing Things Secondhand 