Dir. Luchino Visconti. Starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale I don’t know that there are many other movies like The Leopard, at least not from the past fifty years. The Leopard would be able to function as a silent movie. Although the three hours are filled with dialogue, much of it seems as decorative as the frescoes… Read More The Leopard (1963)
Dir. Elem Klimov. Starring Aleksey Kravchenko, Vladas Bagdonas, Olga Mironova Come and See lays animals into the picture in ways that I don’t think any other war movie even attempts to do. Consider the turkeys which get full camera focus in Flor’s house, or the cow that Roubej gives his life to steal. Think of the… Read More Come and See (1985)
Dir. John Crowley. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Jane Brennan Saoirse Ronan, the Girl with the Huge Pupils, is costumed beautifully by Odile Dicks-Mireaux in this film. Ronan wears rich orangey-browns and cool blue-greens in the beginning, but by the end seems at home in bright yellow and pink; in one scene, she wears an… Read More Brooklyn (2015)
Dir. Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell Burt Lancaster, as disgraced German jurist Ernst Janning, doesn’t have very much to say in Judgment at Nuremberg. Like a smart defendant, he is mostly silent for vast swaths of the film; Janning – through his lawyer, Hans Rolfe (Schell) – questions the validity of an… Read More Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Dir. Chris Columbus. Starring Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson I am afraid to type the following sentence, but it deserves to be said: Rent, as a film, deserves another chance. You have no idea how much I wish I didn’t mean that, unless you’ve read my thoughts on “What You Own” – so in… Read More Rent (2005)
Dir. Hal Ashby. Starring Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern There’s a “Just So” story I encountered for the first time when I was a little boy. It was depicted in 3-D comic book form and came with the requisite glasses. (I may be making this up, but I’m pretty sure it came from a… Read More Coming Home (1978)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns One of the cliches of Oscar history is the lament that the awards for 1998 passed over Saving Private Ryan in favor of Shakespeare in Love. “Passed over” is a little strong, seeing as Private Ryan racked up wins for Best Director, Best Cinematography, Film Editing, and swept the… Read More Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Starring Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready If you don’t count Fear and Desire, and from what I can tell Stanley Kubrick would really rather you didn’t, Paths of Glory is Kubrick’s third film of twelve and his first certain classic; if you don’t count Fear and Desire, it’s also Kubrick’s first film about war, a… Read More Paths of Glory (1957)
Dir. Byron Howard and Rich Moore. Starring Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Jenny Slate Zootopia is built on sight gags, one of those rare gifts to animated film that just work better there than in real life. Judy Hopps (Goodwin), who is incredibly small compared to the other animals in Zootopia, chases a thief into a… Read More Zootopia (2016)
Dir. Steve McQueen. Starring Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Brian Milligan After the debut of 12 Years a Slave, the charges that McQueen’s direction – his long takes, his still camera, his artful establishing shots – was “gimmicky” or, more inscrutably, “distracted from the film” began to proliferate. I’ve always thought that was primarily a response to… Read More Hunger (2008)
Seeing Things Secondhand 