Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson Picture links back here Westerns are, as a general rule, as formulaic and reliable as any movie genre this side of romantic comedy. Rio Bravo doesn’t lean far away from any of its tropes. You can check off grizzled sheriff, struggling drunk, goofy geezer, tough… Read More Rio Bravo (1959)
Dir. Lynne Ramsay. Starring Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell We Need to Talk About Kevin is terribly powerful. During the first half-hour, I found myself doing something which, philosophically, I am deeply opposed to: I tried to turn the movie into a single word. I thought “unsparing” might be the right word, but that’s… Read More We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Ramon Bieri Picture links back here I’m not sure I’ve ever reacted to the end of a movie before like I did with Badlands; I’ve never been given a clearer, more concrete grip on character motivation and thought it obliterated the movie’s feel. (The last movie I… Read More Badlands (1973)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a real giveaway, up there with classics like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Not only that, but the movie makes it fairly clear what happens to its main characters before we even know they’re the… Read More The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Dir. Stephen Frears. Starring Gordon Warnecke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Saeed Jaffrey The character structure of My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, is about as perfect as they come in movies. Hussein (Roshan Seth), Nasser (Jaffrey), and Hussein’s son, Omar (Warnecke) are each placed in conjunction with each other; they are the sides of the prism… Read More My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Dir. Wim Wenders. Starring Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski Like the angels in the sky over Berlin, whose job is to record and preserve the little human moments they witness, our job as moviegoers is to watch without hope of climax and see with wide, sympathetic eyes. I said this about Wings of… Read More Paris, Texas (1984)
Dir. Dario Argento. Starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Alida Valli Suspiria is what you’d get if Michael Powell and John Carpenter were forced to do a movie together, combining stunning color with marvelously eerie settings. Like the best of Powell’s work, a good but somewhat outmatched woman is at the center of the movie; like… Read More Suspiria (1977)
Dir. Michael Hoffman. Starring Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, Steven Culp The weather is a lie in The Emperor’s Club, set at a boys’ school (and later at a company retreat in Long Island) where the sun always shines and the sky never ever hints at rain. There’s a snowball fight for about three seconds during… Read More The Emperor’s Club (2002)
Dir. Whit Stillman. Starring Chloe Sevigny, Chris Eigeman, Kate Beckinsale No one with a name seems able to have fun in The Last Days of Disco, and no one is keen to expose him- or herself as a genuine human being. Obviously, this is a tricky line to walk in a discotheque, perhaps to the… Read More The Last Days of Disco (1998)
In this episode of the B&B B&B, the two of us take a deep dive into the Better than AFI’s Top 100 list that Tim has spent a lot of time on in the past few months. We talk about some top choices on the list, discuss directors who are well represented, and mention a… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 36: The Triple Pronged Genre Question
Seeing Things Secondhand 