Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Tim Robbins, Annie Ross, Julianne Moore Pesticides are being dropped on Los Angeles,and God defend the right. Julianne Moore’s character is safely inside at a concert (with Alex Trebek!), but there’s a similar motif to what you find in Safe a couple years later. Sherri (Madeleine Stowe) yells at her husband,… Read More Short Cuts (1993)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann Cries and Whispers is planted in a middle ground between the theatrical and the cinematic. As a play, it works for the uncanny focus on its primary characters, the rapidly understandable emotions each character holds back, the dramatic moments of pain, the rich setting in absolutely… Read More Cries and Whispers (1972)
Welcome to the minute-by-minute podcast devoted to The Incredibles, the 2004 Disney-Pixar film about a family with superpowers. Tim is a high school teacher living in the Southeast. His online writings are mostly about movies and can be found here, at Seeing Things Secondhand. Matt is a grad student and teacher based in the Great… Read More Jawn Voyage – The Incredibles, Minute by Minute
Dir. Andrea Arnold. Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Griffiths Most of Mia’s (Jarvis) conversation, at least before Conor (Fassbender) shows up, is Hobbesian: “nasty, brutish, and short.” She has a flair for profanity, and while her vocabulary and speech appear to be pretty limited outside that one sphere, within it she’s practically a prodigy.… Read More Fish Tank (2009)
Dir. Andrzej Wajda. Starring Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Adam Pawlikowski Even when he’s literally lighting a guy on fire with rounds from his submachine gun (which is one heck of a visual touch), Maciek (Cybulski) doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who kills to survive. He lolls around on grassy hills outside chapels, or… Read More Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Andrew Garfield, Tadanobu Asano, Yosuke Kubozuka Spoilers ahead. Father Rodrigues (Garfield), over the course of the film, witnesses shocking humiliation, torture, and execution. Apostasy is the least of these after a while, almost passe in the misty mountains, immaculate sand, and lovely greens of one of the most hostile environments seen… Read More Silence (2016)
Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Starring Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth When I took a Faulkner class in college, we started with Flags in the Dust. It’s a messy book; right now, it’s notable almost entirely for a passage that Faulkner wrote about mules and the fact that Faulkner’s editors published it as Sartoris; in fact, Faulkner never… Read More Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Dir. John Carney. Starring Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Jack Reynor The one-sentence synopsis of Sing Street – boy creates band on spot to impress cute girl he met – sounds like a nightmare of a mediocre screwball update. But what John Carney seems to have understood intuitively was that this is not a story about about a kid faking… Read More Sing Street (2016)
Dir. Ang Lee. Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams More than a decade later, Brokeback Mountain is undoubtedly the best American movie of 2005 and, purely from back of the napkin work, probably one of the best American movies of the aughts. It’s a movie of striking bravery simply for the topic at hand; in 2005,… Read More Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Dir. Joe Wright. Starring Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law The action of Anna Karenina is set, sometimes tacitly but more often very, very loudly, in a theater. This suits Wright, whose sweet spot mixes handsome people in period costumes with enough tracking shots to make a West Wing fan turn purple. There’s some fairly dazzling work with… Read More Anna Karenina (2012)
Seeing Things Secondhand 