Dir. Alain Resnais. Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Bernard Fresson Dir. Spike Jonze. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams In a sea of other people, a French actress (Riva) and a Japanese architect (Okada) fall painfully and deeply in love. That sea of other people is less the present population of Hiroshima and more… Read More Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Her (2013)
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Starring Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko Watching Stalker, I felt as if my knowledge of how movies worked had been made irrelevant. The way the camera moves in with the most measured slowness on its target, so slowly that you hardly recognize it’s happening until it’s happened. The sudden appearances of… Read More Stalker (1979)
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte In his essay on The Thin Red Line for the Criterion Collection, David Sterritt calls it “arguably the greatest war film ever made.” I’m not sure I would go that far, seeing as Grand Illusion still exists, but I have a hard time thinking of… Read More The Thin Red Line (1998)
Dir. Michael Powell. Starring Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley Cats, for the most part, don’t like citrus scents. Making your couch smell like lemon, for example, will reduce the cat’s desire to climb it, scratch it, or otherwise kill it. I know about this because I’ve tried it on my cat before (who is… Read More Peeping Tom (1960)
Dir. Gabriel Axel. Starring Birgitte Federspiel, Bodil Kjer, Jarl Kulle Watch enough celebrity chefs and listen to them talk, and one of the common themes they always come back to is the belief in food done “simply.” Simplicity is a devilishly tricky noun, one that, given some of the dishes we see coming out of… Read More Babette’s Feast (1987)
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux Upon reflection, it’s stunning how many of our expectations about marriage are ridiculed, satirized, or otherwise contended with in The Lobster, and how often it’s done well. Forty-five days to meet a mate corresponds with our own arbitrary yet nearly ironclad ideas about how old… Read More The Lobster (2015)
Dir. Edward Yang. Starring Wu Nien-jen, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang There are few topics which are as generally repulsive as “person searches for meaning.” Look, here’s a Google search I did on the idea, and while not every option is bad, it ain’t a promising list: Yi Yi is full of characters who jump at… Read More Yi Yi (2000)
Dir. George Miller. Starring Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult When the Fury Road fever was at its highest – I remember laying in bed, sweating through my pajamas with a temperature of 104, intermittently shrieking, “I live, I die, I live again!” – there was a fair bit of talk about how the movie… Read More Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Dir. Joel Coen. Starring William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi I think it can be easily forgotten that in 1996, Fargo must have burst onto screens like a sudden cold front. The Coens had made five movies – Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and The Hudsucker Proxy – which are regarded well now… Read More Fargo (1996)
Dir. Rob Epstein. The dirty little secret of The Times of Harvey Milk is that its subject, who was killed in cold blood in 1978 at age forty-eight, probably would not have seen fifty-eight anyway. In 1984, when this film was released, people had learned the word “AIDS” and scientists in France and the United States… Read More The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
Seeing Things Secondhand 