Dir. Dan Scanlon. Starring Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus There are no true standout moments in Onward, no really funny bits, no moments of great pathos, no witticism in a line or line reading that I’ll be able to point to in a year or so when I recall the movie. There are no particularly… Read More Onward (2020)
Main Street on the March!, a short movie by Edward Cahn, is a forerunner for what has become, beyond the postwar years, a significant mode in World War II filmmaking. Cahn’s picture depicts an American public which is blissfully unaware that war will come to their territorial borders, and that they will send out so… Read More “We Can Begin to Live Again” – Portraits of Adjustment in Post-World War II American Cinema
Dir. Jennifer Kent. Starring Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr, Sam Claflin The Nightingale contains the strongest rebuke of the silliness, the callowness, of violence for violence’s sake in the pictures. It is not a war movie, but it has what they say about war movies in mind: that no movie can truly be anti-war, because the… Read More The Nightingale (2018)
Tim: This is the story of something that began nine months ago, something that Matt and I conceived, you might say, and now we’re adding a third person to make our duo a trio. I am very proud of this introductory statement, and a little horrified that we’re getting back to the Disney… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #16: Disney/Pixar Rankings Roundup, Part 2 (The One Where We Grill Josh About Frozen II)
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)
Seeing Things Secondhand 