Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Starring Paul Muni, Edward Ellis, Glenda Farrell There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about the last half-hour of Fugitive. James Allen (Muni) is a sucker, and apparently so is his lawyer, who has the foresight to tell him not to return to the Southern state he’s escaped from but doesn’t have the… Read More I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Dir. John Carpenter. Starring Karen Allen, Jeff Bridges, Charles Martin Smith What separates grief from its lesser emotional cousins is how total it is, how difficult it is to shake, how nearly it stalks. In a film filled with gorgeous moments, the one that stands out most to me takes place in a truck stop… Read More Starman (1984)
Dir. Robert Eggers. Starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, a very sassy bird As this is still in theaters, here’s a spoiler warning, but also I don’t know that this is a movie someone who cares about spoilers would be into, so… Persona: Ingmar Bergman’s twenty-seventh movie 3 Women: Robert Altman’s fourteenth movie Mulholland Drive:… Read More The Lighthouse (2019)
Dir. Armando Iannucci. Starring Simon Russell Beale, Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor “I know about the hockey team.” This is the single funniest line in The Death of Stalin, a gravity well which sucks in comedy as easily as it sucks up horror or prestige drama. It is a perfect distillation of what works when the… Read More The Death of Stalin (2017)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk The camera moves a whole lot. It’s Steven Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski; one expects that it’s going to move elegantly. For the most part that’s even the case in this movie, I would say, typically able to move us around a newsroom or the offices… Read More The Post (2017)
Dir. Max Ophuls. Starring Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret, Odette Joyeux Dir. Michael Haneke. Starring Juliette Binoche, Luminita Gheorghiu, Thierry Nevec In the early days of this blog’s reboot, one of the problems I found myself grappling with was the trouble that comes from adapting a play into a movie. The trouble is with the similarities… Read More La ronde (1950) and Code Unknown (2000)
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)
Seeing Things Secondhand 