Dir. Douglas Sirk. Starring Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, Susan Kohner (Featured image links here.) Sarah Jane Johnson (Kohner) can trace her future in two directions. The first path keeps her with her loving, practically perfect mother, Annie (Moore). Annie’s friendship, which borders ungracefully on mistress/maid with a successful actress named Lora Meredith (Turner), will almost certainly… Read More Imitation of Life (1959)
Dir. Wong Kar-wai. Starring Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Rebecca Pan The smallest things are beautiful in In the Mood for Love. The smoke from the cigarettes Chow (Leung) enjoys don’t billow so much as luxuriate in midair, and in a movie which largely eschews blues, the robin’s egg color of Su’s (Cheung) typewriter stands out… Read More In the Mood for Love (2000)
Dir. Billy Wilder. Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson MacMurray made a career out of playing nice guys and friendly fellas, but heaven knows he’s a more effective heel than a buddy. Take one of the early scenes in the movie, where his Walter Neff has seen Phyllis (Stanwyck) in a towel from… Read More Double Indemnity (1944)
Dir. David Fincher. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer There is a sadness at the heart of The Social Network which is attractive to me because so much of it is self-inflicted. When we recall the movie, we will no doubt remember the warmly lit but definitely dour boardrooms where the depositions take place, and we… Read More The Social Network (2010)
Dir. Gus Van Sant. Starring John Robinson, Alex Frost, Elias McConnell Elephant is one of the great high school movies ever made because more than any other high school movie I’ve seen it nails the look and feel of what high schools are like. The affluent white high school that the students of this film are… Read More Elephant (2003)
Dir. Yasujiro Ozu. Starring Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara I’ve never seen a movie which wanted me to notice the power lines as much as Tokyo Story, and the more you look for them the more you find them. Ozu doesn’t need to work very hard to differentiate Onomichi, the quiet town where Shukichi (Ryu)… Read More Tokyo Story (1953)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Luis Guzman “This is Barry,” Barry (Sandler) says whenever he picks up the phone. It’s one of those friendly touches one adds to whatever entrepreneurs call bedside manner – “Yes, ma’am, there is a real live human on the other end of this line!” – and it’s… Read More Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Dir. Robin Hardy. Starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland (Featured image links here.) You go to see a movie called The Wicker Man. You sit through a movie which is occasionally uncomfortable and then incredibly funny and then cringe again at something else. I think the champion example is that guy who shows Howie… Read More The Wicker Man (1973)
Dir. Jacques Tourneur. Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas Picture links back here Out of the Past is a film which doesn’t work well unless you believe with a full heart in the inevitable stupidity of men, a stupidity which is born out of arrogance and self-importance, and which is compounded by an inability… Read More Out of the Past (1947)
Dir. Woody Allen. Starring Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello (Featured image links here) In the past five or six years, I think we’ve been very anxious to find movies which remind us somehow of the past, to lighten our own sort of pessimism about the world at large, and to crown these films as… Read More The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Seeing Things Secondhand 