Dir. Amma Asante. Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sam Reid, Sarah Gadon When Esther’s words were reported to Mordecai, he sent back this answer: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place,… Read More Belle (2013)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Ann Todd, Ralph Richardson, Nigel Patrick Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Pattinson In two bloated ages of blockbuster filmmaking, David Lean and Christopher Nolan are curious rejoinders to their times. Lean, while not immune to the bloat of the 1950s and 1960s, made films which more… Read More The Sound Barrier (1952) and Tenet (2020)
Dir. Martin Campbell. Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen It’s just a little too talky, isn’t it. Not a lot too talky, but it’s just talky enough that it pulls you away from what’s really exciting about the film itself. Before anyone arrives in Montenegro for the poker game, there’s a ceiling on what… Read More Casino Royale (2006)
Dir. Pablo Larrain. Starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins Spoilers for a recent film, but one of the best things about Spencer is that I’m not sure it can actually be spoiled in any meaningful way. In the first few minutes of the movie, a fleet of Land Rovers drives perilously close to the… Read More Spencer (2021)
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. David Lean. Starring Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard There’s a scene in Madeleine, made two decades earlier and under a radically different set of censorship instructions, where a sex scene is replaced, essentially, with a torrid reel. Rather than depicting a coital sequence between Ann Todd and Ivan Desny which wouldn’t have passed… Read More Ryan’s Daughter (1970)
Dir. Tom Hooper. Starring Francesca Hayward, Robbie Fairchild, Judi Dench The gamble that any production of Cats makes, whether it’s a stage show or a movie, is that the spectacle of the piece will outweigh the inherent strangeness of the material. The answer is a really hard “No!” for a lot of people for the musical itself,… Read More Cats (2019)
Dir. Richard Attenborough. Starring Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Ryan O’Neal In that subgenre of war movies which has to do with soldiers in battle, there’s a moment I always look for and rarely find. An officer, typically a name-brand actor, tells subordinates to move ahead on a position knowing that doing so will get them… Read More A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Dir. Jane Campion. Starring Nicole Kidman, Martin Donovan, John Malkovich The words don’t matter in this movie. I find that pleasingly ironic, given Henry James’ reputation as a stylist, but it’s more than just irony that makes the effacing of language so interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a traditional narrative feature where the… Read More The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
Dir. Sam Mendes. Starring George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Claire Duburcq The Allies won. There, I got the spoilers out of the way. With about forty-five minutes left in the movie, finally something happens that makes you say, “Ah, Deakins did this.” Schofield (MacKay) has just awoken. Where it was afternoon before now it is blue night. He… Read More 1917 (2019)
Seeing Things Secondhand 