Dir. Ken Russell. Starring Oliver Reed, Dudley Sutton, Michael Gothard It’s hard to find a full cut of The Devils. The one I watched on Filmstruck lacks a couple of the more controversial sequences, and I had to go fishing for others. If the movie were made today, I’m sure people would be upset about… Read More The Devils (1971)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Brenda De Banzie, Charles Laughton, John Mills David Lean plays two tricks on us in the first two minutes or so of Hobson’s Choice. The first has to do with the shoes. Hobson’s is a shop for boots, shoes, and clogs, proclaims the sign, and in a tracking shot we see… Read More Hobson’s Choice (1954)
Dir. Mike Newell. Starring Lily James, Michiel Huisman, Katherine Parkinson The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will, I hope, go down in history as the Saving Private Ryan of period romantic dramas. What both movies share is a tremendous sense that you should feel something and a complete inability to actually give us… Read More The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
Dir. Anthony Asquith. Starring Michael Redgrave, Nigel Patrick, Brian Smith There are so few good movies about teachers in the world because actual teachers’ professional lives don’t lend themselves well to typical movie drama. Thus movies about teachers frequently thrust them into situations where they take on “unteachable” students and, with some post-hard knocks empathy,… Read More The Browning Version (1951)
Dir. Jim Henson. Starring Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie, Brian Henson I suppose that there are worse things than being an ’80s cult classic, but I also don’t think that description does Labyrinth justice. This is, full stop, a really good movie and a thoughtful one too. It is a movie which understands teenagers about as… Read More Labyrinth (1986)
Dir. Edgar Wright. Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield (The following review is about an extremely funny movie that made me laugh a great deal. Since so much relies upon Simon Pegg’s surprising physical humor or Nick Frost’s indelible line deliveries, I’m not going to try to do justice to those…it’s more respectful to… Read More Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Victor Banerjee, Judy Davis, Peggy Ashcroft In The Love Bug, Jim Douglas does not want that little car at first. If Herbie were some average automobile, then the movie would be over in five minutes. (Or, alternately, might have taken a very dark and un-Disney turn as Dean Jones plays an… Read More A Passage to India (1984)
Dir. James Ivory. Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Julian Sands There’s a neatness in A Room with a View that is a little offputting. The Edwardian neatness makes sense within its context, but in the film’s rush to create an opposition to that neatness, created almost entirely with looks to Wordsworth’s Nature, the movie… Read More A Room with a View (1985)
Dir. J. Lee Thompson. Starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn At long last, it’s nearly the moment to strike. A small but impressive team of Allied commandos have squeezed, even by the standards of World War II, a year’s work into less than a week. Taking a dilapidated fishing boat through the Aegean, they… Read More The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Dir. James Ivory. Starring Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins “I pity you from the bottom of my heart,” Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave) tells Margaret (Thompson) upon hearing that her recent companion will lose her home in a matter of months. It is the place where she and her siblings were born, and it will… Read More Howards End (1992)
Seeing Things Secondhand 