Dir. David Miller. Starring Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, James MacColl I’m not entirely sure where this paradox begins. When people read a story or watch a movie or whatever about a dramatic historical event, they look for the depiction thereof to have even more drama scooped on top of it. However, it stands to reason… Read More Executive Action (1973)
Dir. Godfrey Reggio. If there is one thing that I didn’t expect Koyaanisqatsi to make me do, it’s laugh. But it did. There’s that sequence in which we see how they make the hot dogs, or at least how the hot dogs come out of the machinery. They come down little ramps, cased together. Two men… Read More Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, Gilbert Roland There’s a shot in Cheyenne Autumn that my little heart took note of, either because I am very sensitive to bravado or because I am very partisan. Wright (Walter Baldwin), a Quaker ministering to the Cheyenne’s needs on the reservation as best he can, works with his… Read More Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
Dir. Ladj Ly. Starring Damien Bonnard, Alexis Manenti, Djebril Zonga The circus is in town, and it is pissed off. The circus van, which had previously meandered around Montfermeil advertising the show, has changed its tune considerably. A slew of profanity seems to both precede and follow the vehicle, all of it in response to… Read More Les Misérables (2019)
Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Starring William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, Christopher Plummer It’s a little hard to love the execution of The Undiscovered Country, a movie which throws quotes from Shakespeare around with total abandon in lieu of actualy dialogue—which suffers from a lack of any really good scenes between the one where Kirk (Shatner) and McCoy (Kelley)… Read More Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Dir. S. Craig Zahler. Starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins There’s nothing new, precisely, in Bone Tomahawk, nothing that you couldn’t alchemize out of John Ford and Wes Craven. O’Dwyer (Wilson) is a Christian who insists on praying before meals, crosses himself with a Catholic gusto (one of those touches which feels odd for the… Read More Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Dir. Mimi Leder. Starring Téa Leoni, Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman Hi, everyone. My name is Tim. In my spare time I like to write about movies. I have never been so confused by a movie as I was by Deep Impact, a picture long known to me as being the weird twin of Armageddon. I was not… Read More Deep Impact (1998)
Dir. Dan Scanlon. Starring Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus There are no true standout moments in Onward, no really funny bits, no moments of great pathos, no witticism in a line or line reading that I’ll be able to point to in a year or so when I recall the movie. There are no particularly… Read More Onward (2020)
Main Street on the March!, a short movie by Edward Cahn, is a forerunner for what has become, beyond the postwar years, a significant mode in World War II filmmaking. Cahn’s picture depicts an American public which is blissfully unaware that war will come to their territorial borders, and that they will send out so… Read More “We Can Begin to Live Again” – Portraits of Adjustment in Post-World War II American Cinema
Dir. Jennifer Kent. Starring Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr, Sam Claflin The Nightingale contains the strongest rebuke of the silliness, the callowness, of violence for violence’s sake in the pictures. It is not a war movie, but it has what they say about war movies in mind: that no movie can truly be anti-war, because the… Read More The Nightingale (2018)
Seeing Things Secondhand 