Dir. Rian Johnson. Starring Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver Spoilers below. If you love bar scenes, then Star Wars is historically a pretty good bet for you. There have been three Star Wars movies which make a Death Star the centerpiece of their plots; there are at least three Star Wars movies which place… Read More Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Dir. Mike Leigh. Starring Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall I’m not the world’s foremost Mike Leigh expert or anything, but I was amazed when he did something I’d never seen him do before in a movie: he rushed. The movie’s final confrontation is like coming downstairs, missing one, stumbling, but adjusting in the last… Read More Secrets and Lies (1996)
Dir. Elia Kazan. Starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau Here’s my Slate pitch about A Face in the Crowd: its best piece is its greatest weakness. By making Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes an Arkansas drifter, the film can call upon the services of Andy Griffith, who is absolutely electrifying. However, by making Lonesome Rhodes a Southerner,… Read More A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Dir. Mike Leigh. Starring Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey It takes a great will to make a biopic which does not lead to something. Say that Topsy-Turvy is a biopic, which I don’t know that I agree with but wouldn’t argue long about, and it is a clear case of leading up to a moment. Specifically, the movie… Read More Mr. Turner (2014)
Dir. Mel Gibson. Starring Mel Gibson, Patrick McGoohan, Sophie Marceau There are a bunch of different movies in Braveheart, and that wouldn’t be a problem if that were purposeful. The good first: I find Wallace (Gibson) surprisingly compelling, and I don’t think his limited motivations limit the character. He gets into the revolution business to avenge… Read More Braveheart (1995)
Dir. Mike Leigh. Starring Jim Broadbent, Allan Corduner, Michael Savage Some movies are perfect in the grammatical, Latin sense. Casablanca is a perfect movie. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a perfect movie. So are The Leopard, Ordet, and The Thin Red Line. (Making a list of “perfect movies” might be a potentially fatal wormhole.) These movies accomplish: at the end,… Read More Topsy-Turvy (1999)
Dir. Mike Leigh. Starring Alison Steadman, Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent Dir. Greta Gerwig. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts Some spoilers below for Lady Bird. And Life is Sweet, too, but that movie is older than me and I think I’ll be forgiven for “spoiling” it. Patience is a virtue, so we hear, and… Read More Life is Sweet (1990) and Lady Bird (2017)
Dir. Tomas Alfredson. Starring Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong I’ve been thinking about this (slightly old) article by Matt Zoller Seitz in which he argues that Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-presumed Best Actor award for The Revenant would be symbolic of the way we’ve become inclined to think about acting performances as much as for what’s off the… Read More Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Dir. Anthony Minghella. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche The English Patient is one of the best film adaptations of a novel from the past twenty-five years not because of its faithfulness but because of its evocation. There Will Be Blood, which I imagine is adapted from Oil! so no one from Upton Sinclair’s estate would… Read More The English Patient (1996)
Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Starring Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Isao Kimura Of all the lines spoken in Seven Samurai, none is more piercing than the Old Man’s (Kokuten Kodo) advice to the men who venture into the city searching for ronin. “Get hungry samurai,” he tells the little troupe. His meaning is probably limited to the literal hunger of… Read More Seven Samurai (1954)
Seeing Things Secondhand 