Dir. Michael Gordon. Starring Jose Ferrer, Ralph Clanton, Mala Parsons Cyrano de Bergerac is a really tricky play to adapt, more or less as is, from stage to screen. The 1950 edition is sad proof of that difficulty. The play itself is filled with monologues and excessively verbose language as well as a setting which,… Read More Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)
Dir. Barry Jenkins. Starring Alex Hibbert, Naomie Harris, Ashton Sanders This movie thrums. Moonlight has an after-school special feel to it for long stretches, but in each of its three acts finds a way to manage the least interesting of those excesses. Little (Hibbert) is accidentally rescued by Juan (Mahershala Ali) and Teresa (Janelle Monae)… Read More Moonlight (2016)
Dir. Edward Yang. Starring Wu Nien-jen, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang There are few topics which are as generally repulsive as “person searches for meaning.” Look, here’s a Google search I did on the idea, and while not every option is bad, it ain’t a promising list: Yi Yi is full of characters who jump at… Read More Yi Yi (2000)
The Hollywood Reporter recently published a Todd McCarthy article wondering, basically, about sequel fatigue. The summer, he notes, movies like Transformers: The Last Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Cars 3 have each sputtered at the American box office. This is our fifth Transformers movie since 2007, our fifth Pirates movie since 2003, and… Read More The American Blockbuster Bubble
Dir. Errol Morris. There are more famous and prolific director-composer pairs out there than Errol Morris and Philip Glass, but I’m not sure that there’s a pair which more perfectly suits each other. Glass favors repetition and small variations on a theme; in A Brief History of Time, the only instrument used is the piano.… Read More A Brief History of Time (1991)
Dir. George Miller. Starring Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult When the Fury Road fever was at its highest – I remember laying in bed, sweating through my pajamas with a temperature of 104, intermittently shrieking, “I live, I die, I live again!” – there was a fair bit of talk about how the movie… Read More Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Dir. Gore Verbinski. Starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom Certainly they won’t love it like the people who grew up with it do, but I’m not sure future generations will even remember Curse of the Black Pearl. I think the best case scenario for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is Planet of the Apes, a… Read More Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Starring Judy Garland, Lucille Bremer, Leon Ames Meet Me in St. Louis is not my musical cup of tea. It belongs to that old-fashioned, basically extinct form of movie musical in which the songs exist as ditties to hum while leaving the theater and as future sheet music, not as vehicles to… Read More Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Dir. Joel Coen. Starring William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi I think it can be easily forgotten that in 1996, Fargo must have burst onto screens like a sudden cold front. The Coens had made five movies – Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and The Hudsucker Proxy – which are regarded well now… Read More Fargo (1996)
Dir. Alexander Payne. Starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen One of the beats Jack (Church) hits with great frequency is the beat about how Miles (Giamatti) is in the way of his own happiness. The depression and anxiety Miles deals with badly might be there, but Jack is sure that more of what’s… Read More Sideways (2004)
Seeing Things Secondhand 