Dir. James Gray. Starring Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller Would it be a movie about fin-de-siécle Englishman without a stag hunt? It’s how The Lost City of Z begins, showing us how Percy Fawcett (Hunnam) is not like the other men. The other military men going on this hunt are not his equals in… Read More The Lost City of Z (2016)
Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Ann Sothern, Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon In the wake of film noir, which used voiceovers and flashbacks to greater effect than ever before, A Letter to Three Wives and The Bad and the Beautiful are logical conclusions outside the genre. A Letter to Three… Read More A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Dir. Jim Henson. Starring Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie, Brian Henson I suppose that there are worse things than being an ’80s cult classic, but I also don’t think that description does Labyrinth justice. This is, full stop, a really good movie and a thoughtful one too. It is a movie which understands teenagers about as… Read More Labyrinth (1986)
Dir. Edgar Wright. Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield (The following review is about an extremely funny movie that made me laugh a great deal. Since so much relies upon Simon Pegg’s surprising physical humor or Nick Frost’s indelible line deliveries, I’m not going to try to do justice to those…it’s more respectful to… Read More Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Victor Banerjee, Judy Davis, Peggy Ashcroft In The Love Bug, Jim Douglas does not want that little car at first. If Herbie were some average automobile, then the movie would be over in five minutes. (Or, alternately, might have taken a very dark and un-Disney turn as Dean Jones plays an… Read More A Passage to India (1984)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring the entire population of Austin, Texas, but not nearly enough Butthole Surfers. Dir. Nicholas Roeg. Starring Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, David Gulpilil Do you have a favorite drip in Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five? Does one of the nails he hammered into his canvas stand out? It’s much the same in Slacker, an… Read More Slacker (1990) and Walkabout (1971)
Dir. Bruce Beresford. Starring Jack Thompson, Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown There may not be a more difficult and potent question than, “What responsibility do I have for my actions when I am compelled to do unjust things?” Breaker Morant, wisely, does not try to convince us of the innocence of Morant (Woodward), Handcock (Brown), and Witton… Read More Breaker Morant (1980)
Dir. Bob Rafelson. Starring Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach As much as any of the promising American directors of the early 1970s, Bob Rafelson was a victim of his own hype. Five Easy Pieces is an American entry into “angry young man”-ism which twists the typically industrial roots of that very British genre into… Read More Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand Dinner is wine, fish, vegetables, bread, butter. Eva (Ullmann) and Jan (von Sydow) sit outside on a bench underneath a tree, not so far underneath the tree that many shadows fall on them. This scene looks primarily at Eva over Jan’s shoulder. He frequently… Read More Shame (1968)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, Russell Simpson By the time he made The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford had already established himself as one of America’s best directors. Aside from an army of silent movies, he was already the man who had won Best Director for The Informer, which established a precedent… Read More The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Seeing Things Secondhand 