Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Haydn Watching Ball of Fire, you get the sense that Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were just more interested in telling a story about eight men writing an encyclopedia than they were in telling the story of an unlikely romance between a gangster’s moll, Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck)… Read More Ball of Fire (1941)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Zeva Postic edited Shoah, and it’s a heroic job. Not simply because there was so much to go through, and not simply because there was so much to finally get on the screen. It’s because she highlights the strands of Lanzmann’s inquiry so cleanly, an absolute necessity for a film with this one’s… Read More Shoah (1985)
Dir. Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton The original plan was to do an unlikely moving pairing post which put this in conversation with Gunga Din, sort of a commentary on the resounding popularity of moderately racist entertainment. And then I actually watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie which is significantly more… Read More Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Dir. Arthur Hiller. Starring Ryan O’Neal, Ali McGraw, Ray Milland This is a movie about two and a half things. The half-thing is Harvard, which always manages to insert itself into places it doesn’t really have any reason to be, though I appreciate the commitment to the bit and I also appreciate how this movie… Read More Love Story (1970)
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)
Dir. Mike Judge. Starring Ron Livingston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu Since watching Office Space for the first time, I’ve struggled to come up with a way to describe just how bad it is. The story of a bunch of nobodies being nobodies at their nothing jobs, intended as a color-by-numbers for beta males, is so terrifically dumb… Read More Office Space (1999)
Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman Hurt, sad, defeated, [Emma Stone] collapses, face first, onto her bed while a wall-sized image of Ingrid Bergman smiles behind her. It’s not often that a movie finds a way to create a self-describing image, but La La Land, bless its heart, pulled it off.… Read More Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Starring Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Stergioglou, Mary Tsoni. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Starring James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo. I don’t think anyone besides crusty parents and out-of-touch principals ever denies that growing up is difficult, and even then those people only exist in the pictures. Certainly this is the premise of Rebel Without a Cause,… Read More Dogtooth (2009) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman If you give an actor the director’s chair, he’ll want his star persona to go with it. This is how we end up with Unforgiven, which looks like it’s rattling along as an interesting movie until it works itself out, unsurprisingly, as Eastwood machismo killporn… Read More Unforgiven (1992)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw Watching Jaws now is like speaking to an oracle. One sees Spielberg the marvelous technical filmmaker with a strong sense of how the Weird sidles up to the Everyman: the shark is the vision of Devil’s Tower, the coming of E.T., the opening of the Ark of… Read More Jaws (1975)
Seeing Things Secondhand 