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. 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. John Huston. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, Walter Huston Almost as soon as Dobbs (Bogart) gets out of Tampico with some money and supplies in his back pocket, he begins the downhill slide which will lead to murder, theft, and betrayal (dun-dun-dun!). There is one scene, though, which keeps Dobbs from becoming a mere… Read More The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Dir. Sidney Lumet. Starring Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch In Sunset Blvd, Joe Gillis recognizes that he has seriously damaged two women and decides to bail out back to Ohio: not because he’s running away from them, but because he sees it as a penance for his sins. (Of course, we know what happens to… Read More Network (1976)
Dir. John Cassavetes. Starring Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Lady Rowlands Picture links back here This is a well-known bit of trivia, but the word “hysteria” can be traced back to the Greek for womb, “hustera.” When the word hysteria was invented, it was thought of as a problem for women; because of the presence of… Read More A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Dir. Todd Haynes. Starring Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Peter Friedman Carol (Moore) flips through her guide to Wrenwood. Peter Dunning (Friedman) appears to have founded the center all the way back in 1978; by now it could be 1988, although the given year for the movie is ’87. 1978 is an interesting year for him… Read More Safe (1995)
Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Irene Tunc Just as monster movies are often highly successful when the monster is hidden from our sight (Jaws, The Thing), so too can romances be terribly erotic when there’s absolutely no sex. Brief Encounter is such a film; it turns even the idea of a sexual liaison between the… Read More Leon Morin, Priest (1961)
Dir. Douglas Sirk. Starring Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead Cary Scott’s (Wyman) garbage children, Ned and Kay (William Reynolds and Gloria Talbott, respectively), are both in their early twenties during the events of the film. In 1955, I don’t think any but the most clairvoyant Americans would have foreseen the events in Vietnam, only the… Read More All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Starring Henrik Malberg, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Emil Hass Christensen Mikkel (Christensen) can tell something’s wrong while he’s speaking with the new parson (Ove Rud). He’s met Johannes (Rye), one of Mikkel’s younger brothers, who speaks slowly, harshly, as if there were some sharp metal obstacle in his throat for the words… Read More Ordet (1955)
Seeing Things Secondhand 