Dir. Henry King. Starring Gregory Peck, Millard Mitchell, Skip Homeier Surely no other film makes as much dramatic hay with the insult “Mister Frazzlebottom” as The Gunfighter does. With terrible efficiency, Jimmy Ringo (Peck) makes quick work of Eddie (Richard Jaeckel), a loudmouth southwesterner with, given his death, an ironic yen for immortality. Eddie fancies… Read More The Gunfighter (1950)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Kirk Douglas, Horace McMahon, Eleanor Parker Once a director finds a source material s/he’s fond of, it’s not unheard of for them to return to that well. Rob Reiner has Stand by Me and Misery, two relatively grounded works originally by Stephen King. John Ford went back to the James Warner… Read More Detective Story (1951)
Dir. Jim Henson. Starring the Muppets, Diana Rigg, Charles Grodin My ten favorite gags in The Great Muppet Caper, which has been one of my favorite movies since the mid-1990s. (I’ll save you some suspense. “What color are their hands now?” is not going to make this list.) 10) No respect for the British Society… Read More The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
Dir. Amma Asante. Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sam Reid, Sarah Gadon When Esther’s words were reported to Mordecai, he sent back this answer: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place,… Read More Belle (2013)
Dir. Rick Alverson. Starring Tye Sheridan, Jeff Goldblum, Hannah Gross The movie this most reminded me of was Solaris, and it had everything to do with the production design. It’s not the look of it so much, for Solaris is a film which constantly has something jutting out of a wall or something on the… Read More The Mountain (2018)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Ann Todd, Ralph Richardson, Nigel Patrick Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Pattinson In two bloated ages of blockbuster filmmaking, David Lean and Christopher Nolan are curious rejoinders to their times. Lean, while not immune to the bloat of the 1950s and 1960s, made films which more… Read More The Sound Barrier (1952) and Tenet (2020)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Henrietta Crosman, Maurice Murphy, Marian Nixon Pilgrimage is built on three shots. Not scenes, not sequences, not moments, but shots. Pilgrimage, John Ford on a diet of F.W. Murnau, designed this film around three shots. The characters, the story, the beats, the emotions, the ideas: they are all sublimated to these… Read More Pilgrimage (1933)
Dir. John Ford. Starring John Wayne, William Holden, Constance Towers The standout sequence of The Horse Soldiers is about the cadets of the Jefferson Military Academy, which is to say that the best part of this movie about Marlowe (Wayne) and Kendall (Holden) has very little to do with either one of them. In a… Read More The Horse Soldiers (1959)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Benny Safdie Spoilers! The plot is pretty far from twisty, but maybe you haven’t seen this and you’re looking forward to hearing the dialogue fresh or not knowing what classic music you’ll hear from the 1970s. At the risk of sounding like a stan or a… Read More Licorice Pizza (2021)
Dir. John M. Stahl. Starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain Leave Her to Heaven reminds me less of other noirs and more of stories of the bad seed, which is all the more interesting because the film predates the first known use of the term by some years. Ellen (Tierney) is not a traditional… Read More Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Seeing Things Secondhand 