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)
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
Seeing Things Secondhand 