Dir. Paul Schrader. Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles I spent a long time preparing the joke: when an American remakes Winter Light (and sort of smushes in a little Diary of a Country Priest), he ends it with an explosion. The movie disappointed my joke, alas, although I’m not sure it would have been worse if… Read More First Reformed (2017)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Julia Dufvenius, Liv Ullmann, Borje Ahlstedt Image links back here Music is a discipline too often taken for granted, I think; there’s a sense in the popular imagination that all musicians are either Mozart reborn, effortlessly cranking out the hits, or teetering on the edge of personal collapse à la Johnny… Read More Saraband (2003)
Dir. Roberto Rossellini. Starring Nazario Gerardi, Severino Pisacane, Esposito Bonaventura Federico Fellini worked with Rossellini on several of his movies as a writer. Whether or not one prefers his neorealist period to his baroque one is up for contention, but it’s a pleasure in either event to see the off-kilter characters who would populate his… Read More The Flowers of St. Francis (1950)
Dir. Steve McQueen. Starring Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez Widows begins with a long take of Liam Neeson and Viola Davis kissing. There’s a lot of tongue. It’s 2018, and it’s the first time I’ve seen an interracial kiss onscreen with that much tongue involved. I have said it many times, and I have… Read More Widows (2018)
Dir. Zoltan Korda. Starring Ralph Richardson, John Clements, C. Aubrey Smith The shot above is the movie’s thesis. A storm of ferocious, enthusiastic cavalry troops charging en masse but not in formation, meets a disciplined enemy firing with superior weaponry from their thin red line. (Fear not: the British square was used earlier in the… Read More The Four Feathers (1939)
Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring Andie MacDowell, James Spader, Laura San Giacomo Soderbergh’s camera sidles up to its targets in sex, lies, and videotape, like a bold young boy putting an arm around a girl whose name he doesn’t know. Perpetually on edge, always a little antsy, given to slow approaches into a character’s face from above or… Read More sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
Dir. Aki Kaurismaki. Starring Matti Pellonpaa and a whole bunch of guys with equally Finnish names There are more brilliant gags in Leningrad Cowboys Go America than this one, but the moment I knew I was watching the funniest thing in the entire world comes about halfway through. The band is all in the car,… Read More Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)
Dir. Yasujiro Ozu. Starring Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, Haruko Sugimura The Abilene paradox posits that in a group of people, it is entirely possible that a group of people can collectively engage in an activity even though all of them hold some reservations about so doing. The original example features four people who decide to… Read More Late Spring (1949)
Dir. Bradley Cooper. Starring Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott We could talk about spoilers, but the concept for this movie is eighty years old, and let’s face it, we all know what happens. The politics of A Star Is Born are what we might euphemistically call “old-fashioned.” They are the politics of whites in… Read More A Star Is Born (2018)
Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. Starring Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Christian Barbier Melville, whose track record with the French Resistance had a great influence on his future filmmaking career (not least of which was his name, a nom de guerre from the guerre itself), frequently begins his films with epigraphs. Not all of them work for me—looking… Read More Army of Shadows (1969)
Seeing Things Secondhand 