Dir. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart Whether or not this can be called a trend I’m not sure – do three movies over seven years constitute a trend? – but Still Alice falls neatly into the same subgenre that Away from Her and Amour do. Each one takes a seriously different approach to their… Read More Still Alice (2014)
Dir. John Huston. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. Starring George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Paul Stevens Patton does not ever get quite to “gentle” in Patton, but he comes uncharacteristically close in a tent for wounded soldiers in Italy. He pats shoulders and the feet of beds comfortingly, thanks men for their service, and for one man… Read More Let There Be Light (1946) and Patton (1970)
Dir. Laurent Bouzereau. I’ve spent some time thinking about what made Five Came Back so effective as a lens to view World War II, and at first I thought it was the subject matter. Entering this documentary and having little more prior knowledge than some vague understanding of John Ford and Frank Capra’s World War II service, I assumed that… Read More Five Came Back (2017)
Dir. John Cassavetes. Starring Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Lady Rowlands Picture links back here This is a well-known bit of trivia, but the word “hysteria” can be traced back to the Greek for womb, “hustera.” When the word hysteria was invented, it was thought of as a problem for women; because of the presence of… Read More A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Juliette Lewis Among its top ten grossing films in the colorfully named genre “Thriller – Psycho/Stalker/Blank from Hell,” Box Office Mojo places seven of them between 1987 and 1994. Cape Fear is not even the highest grossing film of its ilk from 1991; Sleeping with the… Read More Cape Fear (1991)
Dir. Roland Joffe. Starring Haing S. Ngor, Sam Waterston, John Malkovich The camera rarely stops moving in this film. Even when you’d expect it to sit still, it so rarely does. Most directors, I think, would keep their camera stationary when Dith Pran (Ngor) walks towards it near the film’s end. All he’s doing is… Read More The Killing Fields (1984)
Dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Starring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan It’s about eighty percent of the way through the movie. Sam (Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and Harry (Colin Firth) have all learned why they’re on this little Greek island. The daughter of a woman each of them had a fling with about twenty years back… Read More Mamma Mia! (2008)
Dir. James L. Brooks. Starring Holly Hunter, William Hurt, Albert Brooks Within a stretch of about twenty minutes, each of the principals in this movie has a moment where s/he asks someone else to hold on for a minute. Tom and Aaron (Hurt and Brooks) ask Jane (Hunter) to hold on for a second while… Read More Broadcast News (1987)
Dir. Spike Lee. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee Mission College, like any university, appears to be governed both practically and socially by a set of totally arcane rules, held by a small number of gatekeepers who seem not entirely sure how best to use those rules to benefit the college, their groups, or… Read More School Daze (1988)
Dir. Ang Lee. Starring Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall Put everything else about the movie down for a second, because I promise we’ll get to it, but we have to begin with Suraj Sharma. In his first ever film appearance, Sharma was, before he even turned twenty, asked to be the only corporeal thing… Read More Life of Pi (2012)
Seeing Things Secondhand 