Dir. Gus van Sant. Starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin There are some real howlers in the history of Best Picture winners. One thinks The Artist in 2011. 2011 wasn’t a terribly strong year, but Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy were at least viable options. (Bridesmaids and A Separation, for their own reasons, would… Read More Milk (2008)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, John C. Reilly In the Lindsay Lohan Parent Trap, once Hal and Annie have both been sent to the “Isolation Cabin” to work out the problems the two of them have with one another, a storm breaks out and the window gets stuck. The wind swirls. The girls work… Read More The Aviator (2004)
Dir. Joe Wright. Starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan In the past twenty years, I think moviegoers’ penchant for a twist ending has become stronger. People have always loved having that “Whoa!” moment at the end of a film – Vertigo and Psycho both indulge here – but since The Usual Suspects I think our appetites have been… Read More Atonement (2007)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brendan Gleeson Gangs of New York is the movie that made me love movies, which is like saying that All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the album which made someone love music. I apologize for nothing. The first half of Gangs of New York is remarkable. In 1862, Irish… Read More Gangs of New York (2002)
Dir. Nicholas Hytner. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Scofield, Joan Allen I always get nervous when writers get to redo their own work. George Lucas is the alpha and omega of this model, but fans of Amadeus or The Crucible or Doubt must know that even when excellent playwrights turn into screenwriters, they find themselves touching up scenes or… Read More The Crucible (1996)
Dir. Michael Haneke. Starring Burghart Klaußner, Christian Friedel, Susanne Lothar There’s a scene fairly early in The White Ribbon where the schoolteacher, fishing for trout, sees one of his students – Martin, the pastor’s eldest son, maybe twelve or thirteen years old – walking on the rail of a wooden bridge high above the stream. If he fell,… Read More The White Ribbon (2009)
Dir. Wolfgang Becker. Starring Daniel Bruhl, Katrin Saß, Maria Simon After her husband escapes to the west, a single mother of two, Christiane Kerner (Saß), becomes deeply involved in East German politics. The government is grateful. Such people are common enough in any nation: they devote themselves at a local level and become symbols at… Read More Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)
Dir. Lone Scherfig. Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina Movies about young adults very frequently – that is, always – feel a need to tell the audience that their characters change. One’s teenage years [he sighed while cleaning his eyeglasses] are the beginning of a life’s summer, after a springlike childhood and before the autumn… Read More An Education (2009)
Dir. Ron Howard. Starring Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Matthew Macfadyen Howard Zinn is probably the most important historian that the United States has ever produced. (Sorry, Charles Beard. I love you too.) Regardless of how you feel about him – in other words, regardless of whether or not you think “historical revisionism” is an honest… Read More Frost/Nixon (2008)
Dir. James Bridges. Starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas Spoilers for The China Syndrome abound below. Usually I wouldn’t include a spoiler alert for a movie that’s more than thirty years old, but the film is fairly taut, and knowing too much about it would detract from the viewing experience. It’s Los Angeles in… Read More The China Syndrome (1979)
Seeing Things Secondhand 