Dir. Andrew V. McLaglen. Starring Jimmy Stewart, Phillip Alford, Rosemary Forsyth One of my five favorite movies of all time is Gettysburg, a childhood favorite which I describe in that linked piece as having a “softness” concerning slavery but worlds of sympathy about the introspection of Confederate generals out to keep other men in chains.… Read More Shenandoah (1965)
When Soggy Bottom is released sometime later this year, it will be Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth film in twenty-five years. Anderson, like another smart set favorite in Quentin Tarantino, is feted for a small filmic oeuvre indeed. If you want to replace Tarantino with David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, or even older directors like… Read More Paul Thomas Anderson Meta-Analysis
Dir. Todd Field. Starring Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl I had some issues with Manchester by the Sea, a movie which I found posed and a little preachy, but one thing I never doubted was the tragic moment at the center of the film. I never doubted the plausibility of Lee’s mistake which leads… Read More In the Bedroom (2001)
Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman It’s about as simple as a documentary gets. A few ambient shots of something like birds flying or a sunset, occasional home movies, more photographs, pans across quilt squares, some footage of people reading names, talking heads. I use this a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever meant… Read More Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
Dir. Enrico Casarosa. Starring Jacob Tremblay, Jack Dylan Grazer, Emma Berman Spoilers ahead for people who care, but if you’ve seen a movie with children in it before I’m not sure what you think you’d be ruining for yourself. In its favor, Luca is the most visually attractive Pixar film since Coco, and this despite… Read More Luca (2021)
Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Bill McKinney My favorite piece of film criticism from the past five years or so is probably Angelica Jade Bastien’s review of The Beguiled, and if it’s not my favorite it’s the one I spend the most time thinking about. When The Beguiled was released, the… Read More The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Dir. Satyajit Ray. Starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Haradhan Bandopadhyay For much of the movie (which translates in English as The Coward), it appears that Karuna (Mukherjee) is not a woman much given to second chances. Upon discovering that a woman he’d loved for eighteen months in his younger days is a married, a proper… Read More Kapurush (1965)
Dir. Jon M. Chu. Starring Anthony Ramos, Melissa Barrera, Leslie Grace There’s a post-post-credits scene in In the Heights where Samuel L. Jackson comes out to ask Lin-Manuel Miranda if he wants to join the Avengers. But before that post-post-credits scene, there’s a regular post-credits scene where Piraguera (Miranda) takes advantage of a breakdown in… Read More In the Heights (2021)
Dir. Travis Wilkerson Another day, another documentary that is a better story than a film. Wilkerson is very much the central character in this documentary, more so than his great-grandfather, S.E. Branch, or the Black man who Branch murdered, Bill Spann. I suppose in any documentary where the filmmaker has this close a connection to… Read More Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017)
Yesterday afternoon, while cheerfully taking my zillionth Twitter constitutional, I found Katey Rich’s tweet in which she noted her involvement in an article for Vanity Fair which named, in the eyes of critics K. Austin Collins and Richard Lawson (and presumably some assists from the rest of VF’s movie staff), the twenty-five most influential movie… Read More Better than Vanity Fair’s 25 Most Influential Movie Scenes
Seeing Things Secondhand 