Dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky As a damn Yankee—a Yankee merely visits the South but a damn Yankee stays—I have been occasionally amazed at the inability of even highly educated Southerners to name what states make up New England and which ones they are. And as a person who was born and raised in… Read More Brother’s Keeper (1992)
Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman It’s about as simple as a documentary gets. A few ambient shots of something like birds flying or a sunset, occasional home movies, more photographs, pans across quilt squares, some footage of people reading names, talking heads. I use this a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever meant… Read More Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
Dir. Agnès Varda. Starring Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer When Francois (Jean-Claude) is telling Therese (Claire) about how much more he feels thanks to his affair with Emilie (Boyer), how much his happiness has been amplified, how much greater his emotions are and how many more arms he can offer to embrace and feels embraced by,… Read More Le bonheur (1965)
Dir. Masaki Kobayashi. Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentaro Mikuni, Akira Ishihama I’m not usually a person who cares very much about spoilers, but I’ll grant that there are certain movies where it’s hard to imagine the first viewing being as good with information as it is without information. Recently, Parasite has become the standard-bearer for folks like me,… Read More Harakiri (1962)
Dir. Godfrey Reggio. If there is one thing that I didn’t expect Koyaanisqatsi to make me do, it’s laugh. But it did. There’s that sequence in which we see how they make the hot dogs, or at least how the hot dogs come out of the machinery. They come down little ramps, cased together. Two men… Read More Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Dir. Billy Wilder. Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray In writing about The Apartment in the past (once as a great American movie, and the other as a Best Picture winner), I find myself coming back to the movie’s cynical heart, the seediness which is totally unexceptional to its purveyors, and all the more real for… Read More The Apartment (1960)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Zeva Postic edited Shoah, and it’s a heroic job. Not simply because there was so much to go through, and not simply because there was so much to finally get on the screen. It’s because she highlights the strands of Lanzmann’s inquiry so cleanly, an absolute necessity for a film with this one’s… Read More Shoah (1985)
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones There’s a compulsion to see No Country as a sort of relentlessly nihilistic story, and I smell what those people are stepping in. There is an awful lot of collateral damage in this picture, well beyond the people who enter a dangerous line of… Read More No Country for Old Men (2007)
Dir. Lars von Trier. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland There’s a shot in Melancholia where I felt like waving at the screen and calling Justine (Dunst) companero, as if I were Peter Falk in Wings of Desire. I understood Justine entirely. It’s when she’s sitting on top of a stack of chairs in her wedding dress as… Read More Melancholia (2011)
Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains Sometimes, when I feel just aggressively masochistic, I try to narrow down the best scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. This is a fool’s errand, and only fools rush in. On the other hand, I’ve seen Casablanca maybe a dozen times in my life, and I… Read More Casablanca (1943)
Seeing Things Secondhand 