Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Marie Kean In the very, very early days of motion pictures, the novelty of a picture in motion was the primary reason for an audience to come see it. Actors were not actors so much as models, posing in front of the real star: the camera. Only two directors… Read More Barry Lyndon (1975)
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. Bruce Robinson. Starring Paul McGann, Richard E. Grant, Richard Griffiths Withnail and I is a spiritual successor to Brideshead Revisited, presumably where Charles and Sebastian would have ended up if Waugh had ditched Sebastian’s Catholic family but maintained the guilt. Like Charles, And-I (whose name, based on the telegram he gets, is “Marwood,” but who I think is… Read More Withnail and I (1987)
Dir. Richard Attenborough. Starring Ben Kingsley, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey Two scenes in Gandhi – a movie which, at just over three hours, is less lengthy than its reputation – have always stood out to me as terribly impressive and, more importantly, as filmic blueprints for fighting back against stronger powers. One of them is in… Read More Gandhi (1982)
Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring Roger Livesey, David Niven, Kim Hunter The second scene of the film, the one where Peter Carter (Niven, who will always be the guy who got off the best burn in Oscar history) descends about as slowly as possible in a crashing airplane, is surprisingly moving. The surprise… Read More A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Maggie Smith, Kelly Macdonald, Ryan Philippe In retrospect, it was a mistake to make Gosford Park a murder mystery. What makes Nashville and Short Cuts effective is the unbelievably patient burn among small pockets of people which culminates in an event which no person can ignore. In Short Cuts, it’s the earthquake that no one can escape from;… Read More Gosford Park (2001)
Dir. Charles Sturridge. Starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Jonathan Coy (My thoughts on the preceding episode are here.) Anthony Blanche can’t hide his revulsion when he thinks of Kurt (Coy), the German ex-soldier who is something between Sebastian’s ward and his pet. Anthony, who has acclimated to ’20s London in a way that he never… Read More Brideshead Revisited S1E7, “The Unseen Hook”
Dir. Charles Sturridge. Starring Diana Quick, Charles Keating, Jeremy Irons (My thoughts on the preceding episode are here.) “Julia” signifies a shift in focus for Brideshead Revisited, equal parts palate cleanser and the seeds of a reboot. Less than ten minutes into episode, Charles intones, “It is time to speak of Julia” in a way… Read More Brideshead Revisited S1E6, “Julia”
Dir. Andrea Arnold. Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Griffiths Most of Mia’s (Jarvis) conversation, at least before Conor (Fassbender) shows up, is Hobbesian: “nasty, brutish, and short.” She has a flair for profanity, and while her vocabulary and speech appear to be pretty limited outside that one sphere, within it she’s practically a prodigy.… Read More Fish Tank (2009)
Dir. Morten Tyldum. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Allen Leech The Imitation Game is structurally deficient. By virtually any standard it’s got all of the best elements of a good biopic: a well-known (but not too well-known) historical figure with some relevance to even casual viewers, a story which relates back to an important historical… Read More The Imitation Game (2014)
Seeing Things Secondhand 