Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado The most famous reviews of High Noon are surely the grenades tossed at it by John Wayne and Howard Hawks; both men criticized the story for how it portrays a marshal who utterly fails to rouse his comrades to serve law and order. Hawks’ smear of how… Read More High Noon (1952)
Dir. Elia Kazan. Starring Marlon Brando, Eva-Marie Saint, Karl Malden It’s hard to say this about Leonard Bernstein, who was one of the great American musical minds of the last century, but his score for On the Waterfront is occasionally distracting; there are times when one can more easily imagine this music in the background of a… Read More On the Waterfront (1954)
Dir. Ava DuVernay. Starring David Oyelowo, Stephan James, Tom Wilkinson It’s not enough to simply make a movie relevant by timing it so that it will align with certain current events. Selma landed like a haybale on a see-saw when it came out on Christmas 2014; not only did it land heavily, but it sprayed the… Read More Selma (2014)
Dir. Jordan Peele. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Lil Rel Howery What I love about the shot above, when Chris (Kaluuya) is meeting his girlfriend’s family for the first time, is the distance. Peele comes back to distance again and again in this movie (more on that later), but this is an early instance of… Read More Get Out (2017)
Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, Annie Corley The Bridges of Madison County is empty. In a movie that needs beautiful moments to live, there is only one beautiful moment in the entire flick. Happily it occurs at a key moment, lingering on a turn signal, the sight of a man through a windshield,… Read More The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. Starring Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Rachel House. After watching Zootopia eight or nine months ago, I thought that Disney movies were starting to stick to their claim outside musicals. After watching Moana, the latest entry to the Disney canon, I’m more sure than ever that the best elements of… Read More Moana (2016)
Dir. Barry Jenkins. Starring Alex Hibbert, Naomie Harris, Ashton Sanders This movie thrums. Moonlight has an after-school special feel to it for long stretches, but in each of its three acts finds a way to manage the least interesting of those excesses. Little (Hibbert) is accidentally rescued by Juan (Mahershala Ali) and Teresa (Janelle Monae)… Read More Moonlight (2016)
Dir. John Carpenter. Starring Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Kim Cattrall I think everything you need to know about the movie is abundantly clear from the name. Films are not usually catchy, but this one is; it uses abundant color, histrionic acting, and runaway dialogue so that you can’t help but get swept up in it. For… Read More Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Dir. Robin Hardy. Starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland (Featured image links here.) You go to see a movie called The Wicker Man. You sit through a movie which is occasionally uncomfortable and then incredibly funny and then cringe again at something else. I think the champion example is that guy who shows Howie… Read More The Wicker Man (1973)
Dir. John Huston. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, Walter Huston Almost as soon as Dobbs (Bogart) gets out of Tampico with some money and supplies in his back pocket, he begins the downhill slide which will lead to murder, theft, and betrayal (dun-dun-dun!). There is one scene, though, which keeps Dobbs from becoming a mere… Read More The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Seeing Things Secondhand 