Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones There’s a compulsion to see No Country as a sort of relentlessly nihilistic story, and I smell what those people are stepping in. There is an awful lot of collateral damage in this picture, well beyond the people who enter a dangerous line of… Read More No Country for Old Men (2007)
Dir. Jane Campion. Starring Nicole Kidman, Martin Donovan, John Malkovich The words don’t matter in this movie. I find that pleasingly ironic, given Henry James’ reputation as a stylist, but it’s more than just irony that makes the effacing of language so interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a traditional narrative feature where the… Read More The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
Dir. Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton The original plan was to do an unlikely moving pairing post which put this in conversation with Gunga Din, sort of a commentary on the resounding popularity of moderately racist entertainment. And then I actually watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie which is significantly more… Read More Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Dir. Lars von Trier. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland There’s a shot in Melancholia where I felt like waving at the screen and calling Justine (Dunst) companero, as if I were Peter Falk in Wings of Desire. I understood Justine entirely. It’s when she’s sitting on top of a stack of chairs in her wedding dress as… Read More Melancholia (2011)
Dir. Milos Forman. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge There are two kinds of people in the world (here it comes): the people who need validation and people who don’t. It’s not merely that Salieri (Abraham) and Mozart (Hulce) are both the first type in a job where that external validation is all… Read More Amadeus (1984)
Dir. Arthur Hiller. Starring Ryan O’Neal, Ali McGraw, Ray Milland This is a movie about two and a half things. The half-thing is Harvard, which always manages to insert itself into places it doesn’t really have any reason to be, though I appreciate the commitment to the bit and I also appreciate how this movie… Read More Love Story (1970)
Dir. Mark Robson. Starring Diane Varsi, Lana Turner, Hope Lange The premise of Peyton Place is based on the shallow belief that many people begin from in their real lives, no matter how many times they learn about books and covers as tots: appearances are reality. The trouble with the fame of Peyton Place is that we all… Read More Peyton Place (1957)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Cate Blanchett, Emma Nelson, Billy Crudup Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a truly rare thing: a movie that runs at about 105 minutes that really ought to run about 135. Anyone who’s watched an Oscar movie will know that the opposite is so much more often the experience, but like Nocturnal Animals,… Read More Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)
Before the Oscars, I was flirting with the idea of writing something contrarian. Those anonymous Oscar voter pieces are, as Darren Rovell might have said, “tremendous content,” and the one that went viral this year was the one that basically said that foreign-language movies should not win Oscars. In the week or so leading up… Read More Thoughts on Parasite, Best Picture Winner
From worst to best: 5) Brotherhood, dir. Meryam Joobeur One of the great burns on Glee was that time it came out that Santana said Will needed to be in a twelve-step program because he was addicted to vests, and I strongly second that feeling as regards Meryam Joobeur. Many of the worst tendencies in short films are here… Read More 92nd Academy Awards Live Action Short Nominees
Seeing Things Secondhand 