In this episode, Matt and I wind up the Better than AFI’s Top 100 project that has taken up a lot of my time and effort over the past few months. We discuss the poll that thirty-seven (whoo!) different folks voted on; the results are below, next to the corresponding rank of the movie on… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 37: You Guys Voted in Seven Spielberg Movies
Dir. Jordan Peele. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Lil Rel Howery What I love about the shot above, when Chris (Kaluuya) is meeting his girlfriend’s family for the first time, is the distance. Peele comes back to distance again and again in this movie (more on that later), but this is an early instance of… Read More Get Out (2017)
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Starring Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko Watching Stalker, I felt as if my knowledge of how movies worked had been made irrelevant. The way the camera moves in with the most measured slowness on its target, so slowly that you hardly recognize it’s happening until it’s happened. The sudden appearances of… Read More Stalker (1979)
Dir. John Huston. Starring Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern In 1975, Roger Ebert interviewed John Huston, who by that time had peaked more than twenty years before and must have had some idea that he would never come close to the quality of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Maltese Falcon again. Ebert noted that Huston’s… Read More The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey Shadow of a Doubt is almost certainly Hitchcock’s best picture of the 1940s. There are more macabre movies, like Lifeboat and Rope, and more tense ones, like Saboteur or Suspicion. But Shadow of a Doubt has an eye on the same kind of ugliness that the no-doubt-about-it classics from the ’50s indulge in. Rear… Read More Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
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) The Killing (1956), directed by Stanley Kubrick Moviegoers have always been fascinated by… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Taut and Cold, 5-1
This was originally written as text for a student project. The mock publication can be viewed here. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, directed by Kerry Conran in 2004, is typically recalled — if people remember it at all — as “the movie where Angelina Jolie wears an eyepatch.” Set in an alternate version of the late 1930s during… Read More The Death of the Actor: Crossing the Uncanny Valley
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte In his essay on The Thin Red Line for the Criterion Collection, David Sterritt calls it “arguably the greatest war film ever made.” I’m not sure I would go that far, seeing as Grand Illusion still exists, but I have a hard time thinking of… Read More The Thin Red Line (1998)
Dir. Michael Powell. Starring Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley Cats, for the most part, don’t like citrus scents. Making your couch smell like lemon, for example, will reduce the cat’s desire to climb it, scratch it, or otherwise kill it. I know about this because I’ve tried it on my cat before (who is… Read More Peeping Tom (1960)
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) Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky It is genuinely difficult… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Taut and Cold, 10-6
Seeing Things Secondhand 