Dir. Matt Spicer. Starring Aubrey Plaza, O’Shea Jackson, Elizabeth Olsen I don’t know where Matt Spicer went to film school. I don’t even know if Matt Spicer went to film school. (Maybe David Branson Smith did? He also has a screenwriting credit for this picture, and I know as little about him as I do… Read More Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Dir. Josh Cooley. Starring Tom Hanks, Annie Potts, Tony Hale Toy Story 4 is like the reverse ship of Theseus. In the original problem, the physical ship rots away and is replaced piece by piece, and the question is primarily whether the naming of the ship, or the spirit of the ship, is what makes… Read More Toy Story 4 (2019)
Dir. Eiichi Yamamoto. Starring Aiko Nagayama, Tatsuya Nakadai, Katsutaka Ito Dir. Volker Schlondorff. Starring Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti, Alain Delon Two movies about sex, which go about the subject about as differently as one could imagine. In Belladonna of Sadness, the Devil (Nakadai) appears to Jeanne (Nagayama) as a, well, he’s a penis, and he… Read More Belladonna of Sadness (1973) and Swann in Love (1984)
Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, Richard Burton The most famous scene of Cleopatra is one that unfolds slowly, but in a sense it’s what we came for or, at least, what we knew we’d be getting when we saw Hermes Pan’s name pop up in the opening credits. Caesar (Harrison) has… Read More Cleopatra (1963)
Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. Starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Edmund MacDonald Maybe I’m too online to live, but at the moment where Vera (Savage) tells Al (Neal) that he’s trying to “buck Fate,” I couldn’t help but find the spoonerism. This is, amusingly enough, pretty darn close to the twin problems that men have in… Read More Detour (1945)
Dir. Eric Rohmer. Starring Marie Rivière. In cinematic heaven, there’s a special mansion for movies which are willing to lay it all on the line for their endings. Not a twist, precisely. It’s not about surprising us. It’s about wagering that a final scene, or even a last shot, will be sufficient to linger with… Read More The Green Ray (1986)
Dir. Erich von Stroheim. Starring Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt Watching a movie like Greed—a movie I frankly lucked into catching on TCM before it left the channel—is enough to give someone an existential crisis about today’s movies. (Everything I am about to say has been said before. Forgive me, and lament with me.) Watch… Read More Greed (1924)
Dir. Ari Folman The movie which is probably the clearest companion to Waltz with Bashir is Tower, the Keith Maitland documentary about the University of Texas shootings in 1966. Like Waltz with Bashir, Tower is primarily animated despite its status as documentary, and like Waltz with Bashir relies on interviews with witnesses to tell the story. They even end similarly: after… Read More Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Dir. Robert Eggers. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie The real tension, the real horror in The Witch isn’t in the story. This is not a scary movie, despite the genre it belongs to on Netflix or at your local video store (as if!). The tension comes from wondering when Eggers is going to… Read More The Witch (2015)
Dir. Peter Farrelly. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini Mahershala Ali won his second Academy Award for playing Don Shirley in this movie, and it’s an extremely endearing performance. He exemplifies “trim” in this picture, from his beautiful clothes to his neat facial hair to his spotless elocution. Watching someone who has every inch… Read More Green Book (2018)
Seeing Things Secondhand 