Dir. Sergei Bondarchuk. Starring Ludmila Savelyeva, Sergei Bondarchuk, Vyacheslav Tikhonov Unless I manage to get my hands on Satantango or, God forbid, Out 1 at some point, I think War and Peace will probably rank as the lengthiest movie I watch this year. At 421 minutes, it is one of the giants of narrative cinema,… Read More War and Peace (1967)
Dir. Peter Weir. Starring Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Dragos Bucur The Way Back is awfully cool to the touch, which is an issue I’ve always had with Peter Weir movies. His films, so frequently conceptual and odd, sound like movies I would love but all too often devolve into these technically remarkable and emotionally empty endurance… Read More The Way Back (2010)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd, Haya Harareet This is weird for me to say about him, but Charlton Heston was the right man for the job. Judah Ben-Hur spends the vast majority of this movie, which is probably about as famous for being long as it is for anything else, planning to… Read More Ben-Hur (1959)
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. Frank Lloyd. Starring Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Franchot Tone The mutiny on the Bounty is a fairly exciting scene, as far as these things go, filled with rapid cuts and people swinging swords and punching each other in tight spaces. A ship that had been mildly claustrophobic before becomes airless, as the men loyal to… Read More Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Rose Byrne One of my least favorite games to play, maybe because it’s too easy or maybe because it reminds me of horoscopes, is deciding how a movie is a “movie of the moment.” It is not merely enough for a film to be of its own… Read More Troy (2004)
Dir. Mel Gibson. Starring Mel Gibson, Patrick McGoohan, Sophie Marceau There are a bunch of different movies in Braveheart, and that wouldn’t be a problem if that were purposeful. The good first: I find Wallace (Gibson) surprisingly compelling, and I don’t think his limited motivations limit the character. He gets into the revolution business to avenge… Read More Braveheart (1995)
Dir. Jan Troell. Starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg (My review of The Emigrants, which is less the first movie in a two-part series than it is the first half of this film, is here.) “We’ll have to figure out what that means,” Karl Oskar (von Sydow) murmurs as he reads over a… Read More The New Land (1972)
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard The single most annoying artistic choice among mainstream directors in the past decade or so has got to be the orange and blue color contrast that is just everywhere, in movies as diverse as Transformers and, as the author of that link brilliantly points out,… Read More Days of Heaven (1978)
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte In his essay on The Thin Red Line for the Criterion Collection, David Sterritt calls it “arguably the greatest war film ever made.” I’m not sure I would go that far, seeing as Grand Illusion still exists, but I have a hard time thinking of… Read More The Thin Red Line (1998)
Seeing Things Secondhand 