Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Melinda Dillon Close Encounters, if I’m honest, is a hard movie to love. A lot of the film is about Richard Dreyfuss rapidly going insane after having been the only witness in his family to three UFOs. It’s one thing to listen to him pontificate about the… Read More Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Starring Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Muhe, Martina Gedeck Von Donnersmarck and his DP for this film, Hagen Bogdanski, make an interesting choice early in the film. During a conversation between the playwright Dreyman (Koch) and his lover, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck), the camera takes Sieland’s flirty smile and stays with… Read More The Lives of Others (2006)
Dir. Gavin O’Connor. Starring Kurt Brooks, Patrick O’Brien Demsey, Eddie Cahill Miracle and Argo make an interesting pair. The events of the two films happen almost concurrently; their climaxes (the Canadian Caper leaves the airport in Tehran and the Miracle on Ice) occurred within about three weeks of one another. One movie is a Disney movie, one of… Read More Miracle (2004)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds The right song over a montage in a film can be magic. Think “Layla” in Goodfellas. “Eye of the Tiger” in Rocky III. “Joy” in Boogie Nights, which plays as we walk into Eddie Adams’ bedroom, which is a swirling monument to all things hip, groovy, and masculine in… Read More Boogie Nights (1997)
Dir. Richard LaGravenese. Starring Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan, Natalie Knepp A list of my ten favorite musicals right now, which is depressingly conventional, and maybe the clearest possible expression of my guilty pleasure (namely, well-off white people watching their lives go to pot; one might succinctly refer to it as the “Revolutionary Road principle”): Miss… Read More The Last Five Years (2014)
Dir. Billy Wilder. Starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Nancy Olson One of my favorite scenes in Sunset Boulevard, far and away the most shocking of the bunch, is the scene where Joe (Holden) has just snuck back to the Desmond estate after a writing session with Betty (Olson); Max, the butler (Erich von Stroheim), is hiding… Read More Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Dir. Ron Howard. Starring Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise. This started because I wanted to talk about Argo. (Right now, and don’t hold me to this, the plan is to talk about Argo in conjunction with another movie of similar quality and subject matter). Argo is not a bad movie, necessarily, but I’m not sure it holds up… Read More Apollo 13 (1995)
Dir. Frank Lloyd. Starring Diana Wynyard, Frank Lawton, Una O’Connor For folks who lived in the 20th Century, or for people who can remember it, even, we’re at an increasingly strange point in our history. Super Bowl L (“50,” because now it makes sense to ditch the Roman numerals) is nigh. The 88th Academy Awards… Read More Cavalcade (1933)
Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring I have been vexed occasionally in the past year because I wanted to write something about a Powell and Pressburger film but couldn’t think of a good way to do it; as a general rule I don’t like to talk about what… Read More The Red Shoes (1948)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Fredric March, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews In 1979, Jimmy Carter gave a speech that, in my mind, ranks with George Washington’s Farewell Address or Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as one of the most important in the history of the American executive. The “Crisis of Confidence” speech speaks to a statistic that… Read More The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Seeing Things Secondhand 