Dir. Tom Ford. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson Nocturnal Animals checks off boxes for me, in the sense that it does things which typically annoy me in a movie. It can’t decide which part of its plot it’s most interested in and sacrifices both pieces for it. At a little less than two… Read More Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Dir. Ava DuVernay. Starring David Oyelowo, Stephan James, Tom Wilkinson It’s not enough to simply make a movie relevant by timing it so that it will align with certain current events. Selma landed like a haybale on a see-saw when it came out on Christmas 2014; not only did it land heavily, but it sprayed the… Read More Selma (2014)
Dir. Jacques Demy. Starring Francoise Dorleac, Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Perrin When you see “Jean Barthet: Chapeaux” in the opening credits, you know that it’s going to be good if they had to put him up top. Nor do his hats disappoint! They are enormous things, like mutant butterflies in marvelous yellow and pink – in… Read More The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
Dir. David Yates. Starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler I like the Niffler. The animation is a little mediocre by industry standard, I think – Fantastic Beasts is going to look outdated by the time the next movie in the series comes out – but he’s cute and mischievous all the same. He reminds me of… Read More Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol There’s a lot about Sophie’s Choice that works, but none of that addresses the central problem in the story: everything is too exaggerated to work well. Wouldn’t a jealous lover suffice as well as one with paranoid schizophrenia? Wouldn’t a haunting experience outside the Holocaust have… Read More Sophie’s Choice (1982)
You can read up on the basis for this series here, and also find links to other posts in the series. Movies I’ve reviewed on this site have a link in the title which you can follow to read my full review. 5) Before Sunrise (1995), directed by Richard Linklater If Sabrina is a… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Lovers, 5-1
You can read up on the basis for this series here, and also find links to other posts in the series. Movies I’ve reviewed on this site have a link in the title which you can follow to read my full review. As it stands, we are fifty movies down, with fifty more to… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Lovers, 10-6
Dir. Jane Campion. Starring Holly Hunter, Sam Neill, Harvey Keitel Someday, God forbid, Holly Hunter will die and everyone is going to rewatch her movies and wonder why she was not the most revered actress of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Her performances live somewhere between our retinas and our spinal columns, pulsing through… Read More The Piano (1993)
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard The single most annoying artistic choice among mainstream directors in the past decade or so has got to be the orange and blue color contrast that is just everywhere, in movies as diverse as Transformers and, as the author of that link brilliantly points out,… Read More Days of Heaven (1978)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond In Reds, Gene O’Neill makes a comment critical of Louise Bryant’s performance in some rehearsals for a play he’s written which she’s performing in. “You’re supposed to be searching for your soul, not an ashtray,” he sneers at her. Blithe Spirit has much the same… Read More Blithe Spirit (1945)
Seeing Things Secondhand 