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. 10) L.A. Confidential (1997), directed by Curtis Hanson Other movies in this series are going… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Period, 10-6
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams In that long lull in the beginning of Gettysburg’s fourth act, there’s a throwaway scene with Hancock and Chamberlain which serves to show that Hancock is thinking about Armistead almost as much as Armistead thinks about him. Hancock asks the learned Chamberlain, a professor… Read More The Master (2012)
Dir. Alain Resnais. Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Bernard Fresson Dir. Spike Jonze. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams In a sea of other people, a French actress (Riva) and a Japanese architect (Okada) fall painfully and deeply in love. That sea of other people is less the present population of Hiroshima and more… Read More Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Her (2013)
Dir. Elia Kazan. Starring Marlon Brando, Eva-Marie Saint, Karl Malden It’s hard to say this about Leonard Bernstein, who was one of the great American musical minds of the last century, but his score for On the Waterfront is occasionally distracting; there are times when one can more easily imagine this music in the background of a… Read More On the Waterfront (1954)
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
Seeing Things Secondhand 