Dir. Terry Gilliam. Starring Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Michael Palin Brazil gives itself an awfully difficult task to pull off, requiring a faceless evil to fight against, a clear vision of the world of the future, and a protagonist who can both guide us through the future and hold our sympathy. It requires those primary… Read More Brazil (1985)
Dir. Noah Baumbach. Starring Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Laura Linney. (Featured image links here.) The Squid and the Whale is scathing when it wants to be, which is just about all the time. For a time, Walt (Eisenberg) is the most odious of the family, a teenager who deserves the kind of tongue-lashing that Roald Dahl could… Read More The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Dir. Andrea Arnold. Starring Sasha Lane, Shia LeBeouf, Riley Keough (Featured image links here.) Krystal (Keough) is a master of the power move. Throughout American Honey she manages to manipulate, cow, impress, and otherwise command a group of a dozen or so teenagers/twenty-somethings with little more than magazine subscriptions. Her game is the mag crew, which… Read More American Honey (2016)
Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring Cary Grant, Thomas Mitchell, Jean Arthur (Featured image links here.) Throughout the film, Hawks is careful not to use close-ups with much frequency. His shots are the long shots which allow us to marvel at the model airplanes which rise and fall from the little airstrip, and the American shots which… Read More Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Dir. Douglas Sirk. Starring Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, Susan Kohner (Featured image links here.) Sarah Jane Johnson (Kohner) can trace her future in two directions. The first path keeps her with her loving, practically perfect mother, Annie (Moore). Annie’s friendship, which borders ungracefully on mistress/maid with a successful actress named Lora Meredith (Turner), will almost certainly… Read More Imitation of Life (1959)
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. Starring Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Rebecca Pan The smallest things are beautiful in In the Mood for Love. The smoke from the cigarettes Chow (Leung) enjoys don’t billow so much as luxuriate in midair, and in a movie which largely eschews blues, the robin’s egg color of Su’s (Cheung) typewriter stands out… Read More In the Mood for Love (2000)
Dir. Billy Wilder. Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson MacMurray made a career out of playing nice guys and friendly fellas, but heaven knows he’s a more effective heel than a buddy. Take one of the early scenes in the movie, where his Walter Neff has seen Phyllis (Stanwyck) in a towel from… Read More Double Indemnity (1944)
Dir. David Fincher. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer There is a sadness at the heart of The Social Network which is attractive to me because so much of it is self-inflicted. When we recall the movie, we will no doubt remember the warmly lit but definitely dour boardrooms where the depositions take place, and we… Read More The Social Network (2010)
Dir. Gus Van Sant. Starring John Robinson, Alex Frost, Elias McConnell Elephant is one of the great high school movies ever made because more than any other high school movie I’ve seen it nails the look and feel of what high schools are like. The affluent white high school that the students of this film are… Read More Elephant (2003)
Dir. Yasujiro Ozu. Starring Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara I’ve never seen a movie which wanted me to notice the power lines as much as Tokyo Story, and the more you look for them the more you find them. Ozu doesn’t need to work very hard to differentiate Onomichi, the quiet town where Shukichi (Ryu)… Read More Tokyo Story (1953)
Seeing Things Secondhand 