Dir. Bryan Forbes. Starring Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough, Gerald Sim For so much of this film, less is more. In one of the film’s early sequences, Myra (Stanley) is revealing the remade child’s bedroom to her husband, Billy (Attenborough). It’s been redone to look like a hospital room, which Billy guesses at; Myra is dead… Read More Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)
Dir. Norman Jewison. Starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Karl Malden Spoilers follow…I almost never do spoiler warnings, and I can’t remember if I’ve ever done one for a film from the 20th Century. Yet this film ends so dramatically and boldly that the shock, one way or another, feels especially meaningful. It’s not a… Read More The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring Julia Roberts, Albert Finney, Aaron Eckhart At the end of the movie, two final scenes find an ugliness in this movie’s heart that I’m not entirely sure the movie would think is ugly. In the first, Brockovich (Roberts) receives a check from Masry (Finney) which he “warns” her is not the… Read More Erin Brockovich (2000)
Dir. Danny Boyle. Starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels About an hour into Steve Jobs, it’s clear that something about the movie just isn’t working well enough. The first forty minutes are remarkably tight, so direct and effective that it’s easy to forget the freewheeling Danny Boyle is behind the wheel with a roadmap… Read More Steve Jobs (2015)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Cate Blanchett, Emma Nelson, Billy Crudup Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a truly rare thing: a movie that runs at about 105 minutes that really ought to run about 135. Anyone who’s watched an Oscar movie will know that the opposite is so much more often the experience, but like Nocturnal Animals,… Read More Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)
Dir. Noah Baumbach. Starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Azhy Robertson This came out yesterday, so I guess spoilers, but also if you’re worried about spoilers don’t go on Twitter either. Until the fight, I felt like Marriage Story worked. The fight is not a bad scene, especially if one was waiting for an earthshaking screaming match to… Read More Marriage Story (2019)
Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Starring Paul Muni, Edward Ellis, Glenda Farrell There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about the last half-hour of Fugitive. James Allen (Muni) is a sucker, and apparently so is his lawyer, who has the foresight to tell him not to return to the Southern state he’s escaped from but doesn’t have the… Read More I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Dir. John Carpenter. Starring Karen Allen, Jeff Bridges, Charles Martin Smith What separates grief from its lesser emotional cousins is how total it is, how difficult it is to shake, how nearly it stalks. In a film filled with gorgeous moments, the one that stands out most to me takes place in a truck stop… Read More Starman (1984)
Dir. Robert Eggers. Starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, a very sassy bird As this is still in theaters, here’s a spoiler warning, but also I don’t know that this is a movie someone who cares about spoilers would be into, so… Persona: Ingmar Bergman’s twenty-seventh movie 3 Women: Robert Altman’s fourteenth movie Mulholland Drive:… Read More The Lighthouse (2019)
Dir. Herbert Ross. Starring Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton Whaddaya like? You like coming home to a kiss? Somebody with a smile at the door? Whaddaya like? You like indescribable bliss? Then whaddaya wanna get married for? Just as Company makes sense in the New York City of the late ’60s, Steel Magnolias makes sense in… Read More Steel Magnolias (1989)
Seeing Things Secondhand 