Dir. Gore Verbinski. Starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom Certainly they won’t love it like the people who grew up with it do, but I’m not sure future generations will even remember Curse of the Black Pearl. I think the best case scenario for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is Planet of the Apes, a… Read More Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Starring Judy Garland, Lucille Bremer, Leon Ames Meet Me in St. Louis is not my musical cup of tea. It belongs to that old-fashioned, basically extinct form of movie musical in which the songs exist as ditties to hum while leaving the theater and as future sheet music, not as vehicles to… Read More Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Dir. Joel Coen. Starring William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi I think it can be easily forgotten that in 1996, Fargo must have burst onto screens like a sudden cold front. The Coens had made five movies – Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and The Hudsucker Proxy – which are regarded well now… Read More Fargo (1996)
Dir. Alexander Payne. Starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen One of the beats Jack (Church) hits with great frequency is the beat about how Miles (Giamatti) is in the way of his own happiness. The depression and anxiety Miles deals with badly might be there, but Jack is sure that more of what’s… Read More Sideways (2004)
Dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Starring Jeremy Irons, Diana Quick, Jane Asher (My thoughts on the preceding episode are here.) “Oh, yes” Charles says. “He was the forerunner.” The beginning of this episode charts, as every other episode must, really, the ongoing changes and worsening of the Flytes. Yet it seems that everyone is very much the… Read More Brideshead Revisited S1E9, “Orphans of the Storm”
Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson Picture links back here Westerns are, as a general rule, as formulaic and reliable as any movie genre this side of romantic comedy. Rio Bravo doesn’t lean far away from any of its tropes. You can check off grizzled sheriff, struggling drunk, goofy geezer, tough… Read More Rio Bravo (1959)
Dir. Lynne Ramsay. Starring Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell We Need to Talk About Kevin is terribly powerful. During the first half-hour, I found myself doing something which, philosophically, I am deeply opposed to: I tried to turn the movie into a single word. I thought “unsparing” might be the right word, but that’s… Read More We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Ramon Bieri Picture links back here I’m not sure I’ve ever reacted to the end of a movie before like I did with Badlands; I’ve never been given a clearer, more concrete grip on character motivation and thought it obliterated the movie’s feel. (The last movie I… Read More Badlands (1973)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a real giveaway, up there with classics like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Not only that, but the movie makes it fairly clear what happens to its main characters before we even know they’re the… Read More The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Dir. Stephen Frears. Starring Gordon Warnecke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Saeed Jaffrey The character structure of My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, is about as perfect as they come in movies. Hussein (Roshan Seth), Nasser (Jaffrey), and Hussein’s son, Omar (Warnecke) are each placed in conjunction with each other; they are the sides of the prism… Read More My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Seeing Things Secondhand 