Dir. Karel Reisz. Starring Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Hilton McRae Movies don’t usually come with morals (glory to God in the highest for that), but occasionally one comes across a film which contains within itself a parable. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is such a film, which uses the story of a pair of protagonists to create… Read More The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
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 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. 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. Douglas Sirk. Starring Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead Cary Scott’s (Wyman) garbage children, Ned and Kay (William Reynolds and Gloria Talbott, respectively), are both in their early twenties during the events of the film. In 1955, I don’t think any but the most clairvoyant Americans would have foreseen the events in Vietnam, only the… Read More All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois Many people have thought about McCabe & Mrs. Miller before I got here, and they each land on their own sense of what is most memorable and striking about the movie. The right answer is probably, yes, DP Vilmos Zsigmond’s work in flashing the negative to… Read More McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Dir. Carol Reed. Starring Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli The Third Man starts slow. It builds atmosphere through its people (Alida Valli vamping, Trevor Howard with a mustache, Ernst Deutsch stuttering with an accent), through its sights (Vienna – if you haven’t seen the movie, just ask John Irving about it), and of course, with… Read More The Third Man (1949)
Dir. Alejandro G. Inarritu. Starring Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone The star of Birdman is Emmanuel Lubezski, the cinematographer who at this writing has won three consecutive Oscars for Best Cinematography in three seriously stylish films: Gravity, Birdman, and The Revenant. Technically speaking, this is one of the most remarkable films of the decade. Edits are hidden so that… Read More Birdman (2014)
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. 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)
Seeing Things Secondhand 