Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Andrew Garfield, Tadanobu Asano, Yosuke Kubozuka Spoilers ahead. Father Rodrigues (Garfield), over the course of the film, witnesses shocking humiliation, torture, and execution. Apostasy is the least of these after a while, almost passe in the misty mountains, immaculate sand, and lovely greens of one of the most hostile environments seen… Read More Silence (2016)
Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Starring Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth When I took a Faulkner class in college, we started with Flags in the Dust. It’s a messy book; right now, it’s notable almost entirely for a passage that Faulkner wrote about mules and the fact that Faulkner’s editors published it as Sartoris; in fact, Faulkner never… Read More Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Dir. John Carney. Starring Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Jack Reynor The one-sentence synopsis of Sing Street – boy creates band on spot to impress cute girl he met – sounds like a nightmare of a mediocre screwball update. But what John Carney seems to have understood intuitively was that this is not a story about about a kid faking… Read More Sing Street (2016)
Dir. Ang Lee. Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams More than a decade later, Brokeback Mountain is undoubtedly the best American movie of 2005 and, purely from back of the napkin work, probably one of the best American movies of the aughts. It’s a movie of striking bravery simply for the topic at hand; in 2005,… Read More Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Dir. Joe Wright. Starring Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law The action of Anna Karenina is set, sometimes tacitly but more often very, very loudly, in a theater. This suits Wright, whose sweet spot mixes handsome people in period costumes with enough tracking shots to make a West Wing fan turn purple. There’s some fairly dazzling work with… Read More Anna Karenina (2012)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier “I have a competition in me,” Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) says. “I want no one else to succeed.” He’s speaking to his brother, Henry (who, it will turn it, is neither his brother nor a Henry), a man he’s only met earlier that day. With only… Read More There Will Be Blood (2007)
Dir. Philip Kaufman. Starring Ed Harris, Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn The Right Stuff, when it’s functioning at its highest levels, is a story about the death of the Western, and no one could have been better equipped to play the leading role than Sam Shepard. History will remember Shepard the playwright, but to me he will… Read More The Right Stuff (1983)
Dir. Rupert Wyatt. Starring Andy Serkis, James Franco, John Lithgow What makes Rise of the Planet of the Apes really different from other serious blockbuster movies of its time is its conscience. Like the original Planet of the Apes, which guesses that a nuclear holocaust would obliterate humanity, Rise of the Planet of the Apes… Read More Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Skerritt Contact is fundamentally a story about belief, and whether or not our beliefs should be primarily scientific or primarily religious. The first clause would almost certainly make for an interesting movie; questioning what is worthy of belief, separating truth from untruth, or challenging beliefs have historically… Read More Contact (1997)
Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, John Travolta Matt and I accidentally/jointly named Pulp Fiction the greatest movie in American history when we did our podcast on the matter a little while back. It’s certainly the greatest movie released in my lifetime (not literally, but essentially, since 1991). And as we recede further and… Read More Pulp Fiction (1994)
Seeing Things Secondhand 