Dir. Tomas Alfredson. Starring Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong I’ve been thinking about this (slightly old) article by Matt Zoller Seitz in which he argues that Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-presumed Best Actor award for The Revenant would be symbolic of the way we’ve become inclined to think about acting performances as much as for what’s off the… Read More Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Dir. Anthony Minghella. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche The English Patient is one of the best film adaptations of a novel from the past twenty-five years not because of its faithfulness but because of its evocation. There Will Be Blood, which I imagine is adapted from Oil! so no one from Upton Sinclair’s estate would… Read More The English Patient (1996)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Temple Baker In my experience, there is no species of jock as endlessly arrogant as baseball players. I can’t adequately explain why that is despite having played some kind of baseball for nearly fifteen years. Part of it absolutely is in the highly individualized nature of the… Read More Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw Watching Jaws now is like speaking to an oracle. One sees Spielberg the marvelous technical filmmaker with a strong sense of how the Weird sidles up to the Everyman: the shark is the vision of Devil’s Tower, the coming of E.T., the opening of the Ark of… Read More Jaws (1975)
Dir. Ted Kotcheff. Starring Gary Bond, Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty The following review addresses what might reasonably be referred to as animal cruelty. “All the little devils are proud of Hell,” Doc (Pleasence) mumbles by way of greeting. It’s at that moment that I knew that Wake in Fright would be strong medicine; forty-some years… Read More Wake in Fright (1971)
Dir. Norman Jewison. Starring Topol, Norma Crane, Rosalind Harris It’s been more than forty years since they made this movie, and with the possible exception of Moulin Rouge!, Fiddler on the Roof stands as the last good live-action Hollywood musical. I vividly remember Hugh Jackman saying during the filming of Les Miserables he did not always want to go for the… Read More Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Dir. Jan Troell. Starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg (My review of The Emigrants, which is less the first movie in a two-part series than it is the first half of this film, is here.) “We’ll have to figure out what that means,” Karl Oskar (von Sydow) murmurs as he reads over a… Read More The New Land (1972)
Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado The most famous reviews of High Noon are surely the grenades tossed at it by John Wayne and Howard Hawks; both men criticized the story for how it portrays a marshal who utterly fails to rouse his comrades to serve law and order. Hawks’ smear of how… Read More High Noon (1952)
Dir. Elia Kazan. Starring Marlon Brando, Eva-Marie Saint, Karl Malden It’s hard to say this about Leonard Bernstein, who was one of the great American musical minds of the last century, but his score for On the Waterfront is occasionally distracting; there are times when one can more easily imagine this music in the background of a… Read More On the Waterfront (1954)
Dir. Ava DuVernay. Starring David Oyelowo, Stephan James, Tom Wilkinson It’s not enough to simply make a movie relevant by timing it so that it will align with certain current events. Selma landed like a haybale on a see-saw when it came out on Christmas 2014; not only did it land heavily, but it sprayed the… Read More Selma (2014)
Seeing Things Secondhand 