Dir. Tomas Alfredson. Starring Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong I’ve been thinking about this (slightly old) article by Matt Zoller Seitz in which he argues that Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-presumed Best Actor award for The Revenant would be symbolic of the way we’ve become inclined to think about acting performances as much as for what’s off the… Read More Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Dir. Anthony Minghella. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche The English Patient is one of the best film adaptations of a novel from the past twenty-five years not because of its faithfulness but because of its evocation. There Will Be Blood, which I imagine is adapted from Oil! so no one from Upton Sinclair’s estate would… Read More The English Patient (1996)
Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook The scene that made me love Powell and Pressburger is relatively unimportant in this film. Clive Candy (Livesey) has gone to Germany to publicly denounce an avid German nationalist and a true scoundrel named Kaunitz (David Ward). Unsurprisingly, the hotheaded officer with… Read More The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring Robert Rousenville, Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine The Tales of Hoffmann is one of those lovely movies which is a personality test for the viewer. The movie is a technical marvel, totally beautiful, beautifully aligned. It is no small thing to decide to take an opera, which are essentially… Read More The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
Dir. David Yates. Starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler I like the Niffler. The animation is a little mediocre by industry standard, I think – Fantastic Beasts is going to look outdated by the time the next movie in the series comes out – but he’s cute and mischievous all the same. He reminds me of… Read More Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond In Reds, Gene O’Neill makes a comment critical of Louise Bryant’s performance in some rehearsals for a play he’s written which she’s performing in. “You’re supposed to be searching for your soul, not an ashtray,” he sneers at her. Blithe Spirit has much the same… Read More Blithe Spirit (1945)
Dir. Michael Powell. Starring Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley Cats, for the most part, don’t like citrus scents. Making your couch smell like lemon, for example, will reduce the cat’s desire to climb it, scratch it, or otherwise kill it. I know about this because I’ve tried it on my cat before (who is… Read More Peeping Tom (1960)
Dir. James Ivory. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, James Fox Someone famous and distant is supposed to have said, “Hominem unius libri timeo,” or, “I fear the man of one book.” The phrase is pleasingly ambiguous. One might fear the man of “one book” because he has great learning in a subject which outstrips our… Read More The Remains of the Day (1993)
Dir. Martin Rosen. Starring John Hurt, Michael Graham Cox, Richard Briers In the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was a beautiful trend in animation which has by and large been abandoned by major studios. Characters would be rendered in a cartoonish, borderline cutesy style, but backgrounds and establishing shots would be rendered in these… Read More Watership Down (1978)
Dir. Cy Endfield. Starring Stanley Baker, Michael Caine, Nigel Green Just about everything has contradictions at its heart if you dig enough, but Zulu wears that contradiction at its most surface level. In 2017, it’s a movie fraught with the complications we attach to the burgeoning postcolonial period which also bears strong and obvious similarities… Read More Zulu (1964)
Seeing Things Secondhand 