You can read up on the basis for this series here, and also find links to other posts in the series. Movies I’ve reviewed on this site have a link in the title which you can follow to read my full review. 10) The Hunt for Red October (1990), directed by John McTiernan If Red… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in Ten Genres: Veterans of Foreign Wars, 10-6
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor In The Razor’s Edge, a novel which postdates Dodsworth the film by a little less than a decade and Sinclair Lewis’ novel Dodsworth by fifteen years, Somerset Maugham creates a rather memorable character named Elliott Templeton, an American who long ago forsook his uncultured native land for the… Read More Dodsworth (1936)
Dir. Rene Clair. Starring Veronica Lake, Fredric March, Cecil Kellaway Most of us in our movie judging lives reach a point where we begin to generally credit directors instead of actors for film quality. It’s easy to get carried away on this front, especially if you’re André Bazin or Andrew Sarris or someone like that,… Read More I Married a Witch (1942)
Dir. Richard Curtis. Starring Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson Although I don’t watch nearly as much television as I used to—at this point in my life, I really feel like I’m down to Food Network and sports—anyone who turns on the set during December will inevitably see a car commercial and a jewelry commercial.… Read More Love Actually (2003)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Allan Edwall There’s not much sympathy left in the world for Tomas Ericsson (Bjornstrand). Surely that must have been true, to some extent, in the ’60s, but it is all the more accurate five decades on. Tomas is financially stable. He is a practitioner of an old… Read More Winter Light (1963)
Dir. Mike Leigh. Starring David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge In the early ’90s, Johnny (Thewlis) is an iconoclast, a true man alone whose perpetually noisy solo meanderings recall the Ancient Greeks. There’s some Diogenes in Johnny, although he is even more aimless than the original and far less likely to befriend a dog. He… Read More Naked (1993)
In the following talk, Tim and Matt think about what it means for some text to be “perfect.” In lieu of an actual podcast, we type our way through Carl Theodor Dreyer, Prince, Arrested Development, Anton Chekhov, and more. You can find Matt’s work, including an upcoming Top 50 albums of 2017 project, here. Tim:… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations, #1: Perfection
Dir. Rian Johnson. Starring Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver Spoilers below. If you love bar scenes, then Star Wars is historically a pretty good bet for you. There have been three Star Wars movies which make a Death Star the centerpiece of their plots; there are at least three Star Wars movies which place… Read More Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Dir. Mike Leigh. Starring Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall I’m not the world’s foremost Mike Leigh expert or anything, but I was amazed when he did something I’d never seen him do before in a movie: he rushed. The movie’s final confrontation is like coming downstairs, missing one, stumbling, but adjusting in the last… Read More Secrets and Lies (1996)
Dir. Elia Kazan. Starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau Here’s my Slate pitch about A Face in the Crowd: its best piece is its greatest weakness. By making Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes an Arkansas drifter, the film can call upon the services of Andy Griffith, who is absolutely electrifying. However, by making Lonesome Rhodes a Southerner,… Read More A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Seeing Things Secondhand 