Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand Dinner is wine, fish, vegetables, bread, butter. Eva (Ullmann) and Jan (von Sydow) sit outside on a bench underneath a tree, not so far underneath the tree that many shadows fall on them. This scene looks primarily at Eva over Jan’s shoulder. He frequently… Read More Shame (1968)
Dir. James Ivory. Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Julian Sands There’s a neatness in A Room with a View that is a little offputting. The Edwardian neatness makes sense within its context, but in the film’s rush to create an opposition to that neatness, created almost entirely with looks to Wordsworth’s Nature, the movie… Read More A Room with a View (1985)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, Russell Simpson By the time he made The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford had already established himself as one of America’s best directors. Aside from an army of silent movies, he was already the man who had won Best Director for The Informer, which established a precedent… Read More The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd, Haya Harareet This is weird for me to say about him, but Charlton Heston was the right man for the job. Judah Ben-Hur spends the vast majority of this movie, which is probably about as famous for being long as it is for anything else, planning to… Read More Ben-Hur (1959)
Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm I wonder what Noel Coward would have made of All About Eve, which has much of the same species of charm that his own work has but with a major improvement: All About Eve thinks that women are perhaps even more interesting than men,… Read More All About Eve (1950)
Dir. J. Lee Thompson. Starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn At long last, it’s nearly the moment to strike. A small but impressive team of Allied commandos have squeezed, even by the standards of World War II, a year’s work into less than a week. Taking a dilapidated fishing boat through the Aegean, they… Read More The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Starring Louis Jourdan, Leslie Caron, Hermione Gingold Dir. Gus Van Sant. Starring River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, William Richert “Thank heaven for little girls,” Honoré (Maurice Chevalier) sings, and it’s as apt an opening for the film as there could be; there can be no question of why they are thanking heaven. The men… Read More Gigi (1958) and My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Dir. Frank Lloyd. Starring Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone The mutiny on the Bounty is a fairly exciting scene, as far as these things go, filled with rapid cuts and people swinging swords and punching each other in tight spaces. A ship that had been mildly claustrophobic before becomes airless, as the men loyal to… Read More Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Jack Carson I spent most of my life in the kitchen, Mildred (Crawford) tells a policeman in the beginning of the movie. It is bizarre to see Crawford in an apron not merely because she’s Joan Crawford, but because her star image was based primarily on the… Read More Mildred Pierce (1945)
Dir. Peter Weir. Starring Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Lukas Haas The line between “wants to make you feel this” and “doesn’t make you feel much of anything” is one of the most difficult and most subtle lines to walk in a movie. Go too far to the former, and the viewer is alienated by the… Read More Witness (1985)
Seeing Things Secondhand 