Dir. Rainer Sarnet. Starring Rea Lest, Jorgen Liik, Taavi Eelmaa In the Wild West, they had tumbleweeds rolling across the desert scrub. In the 19th Century Estonia of November, they have kratts clanking in front of a town’s single manor. Made of three scythes and a cow’s skull, one of these kratts makes its way… Read More November (2017)
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. Starring Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik In a black-and-white film, throwaway comments about eye or hair color are distracting at best, like little asides to the audience whispering that yes, She is pretty. In practice they recall Sonya’s lament of the fate of ugly women: “When a woman is ugly, people say… Read More Ida (2013)
Dir. Asghar Farhadi. Starring Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Farid Sajadhosseini Asghar Farhadi is a hypnotic talent. His movies have an undertow capable of sucking us in when we have surrendered ourselves too fully to the waves. Scenes first unfold realistically; a husband stays behind after a show to talk to a censor, and his wife… Read More The Salesman (2016)
Dir. Sean Baker. Starring Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe (Or, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Representation.”) On many levels, The Florida Project is a good movie, and the majority of those are technical. There are some good wallpaper shots, such as when Moonee (Prince) and her friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) look… Read More The Florida Project (2017)
Dir. Mike Judge. Starring Ron Livingston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu Since watching Office Space for the first time, I’ve struggled to come up with a way to describe just how bad it is. The story of a bunch of nobodies being nobodies at their nothing jobs, intended as a color-by-numbers for beta males, is so terrifically dumb… Read More Office Space (1999)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Brenda De Banzie, Charles Laughton, John Mills David Lean plays two tricks on us in the first two minutes or so of Hobson’s Choice. The first has to do with the shoes. Hobson’s is a shop for boots, shoes, and clogs, proclaims the sign, and in a tracking shot we see… Read More Hobson’s Choice (1954)
Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske. Starring Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Verna Felton The story of Alice is one of the most frequently visited in English-language cinema, and the problem of how to represent the immense strangeness of her Wonderland is just about as vexing. How does one adequately represent the world beyond the… Read More Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Dir. Alfonso Cuaron. Starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris The Blue Marble, probably taken by Jack Schmitt aboard Apollo 17, has had a profound effect on the many millions of people who viewed it. Carl Sagan, twenty-odd years later, saw Earth from even farther away in the Pale Blue Dot. Everything you have ever… Read More Gravity (2013)
Dir. George Scribner. Starring Joey Lawrence, Dom DeLuise, Billy Joel The first five minutes of Oliver & Company are indebted to the opening minutes of two of its predecessors. Eleven years earlier, The Rescuers used still images of a message in a bottle, sometimes enduring a storm and sometimes reaching a pier in warm yellow… Read More Oliver and Company (1988)
Dir. Penny Marshall. Starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins, Jared Rushton Over the course of a year, three separate comedies put women at the upper echelons of late ’80s business and simultaneously ensnared them in love triangles. The world of business and work entwine each other until there is no clear separation between the profitable and… Read More Big (1988)
Seeing Things Secondhand 