Dir. Jacques Demy. Starring Francoise Dorleac, Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Perrin When you see “Jean Barthet: Chapeaux” in the opening credits, you know that it’s going to be good if they had to put him up top. Nor do his hats disappoint! They are enormous things, like mutant butterflies in marvelous yellow and pink – in… Read More The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
Dir. Jane Campion. Starring Holly Hunter, Sam Neill, Harvey Keitel Someday, God forbid, Holly Hunter will die and everyone is going to rewatch her movies and wonder why she was not the most revered actress of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Her performances live somewhere between our retinas and our spinal columns, pulsing through… Read More The Piano (1993)
Dir. Terrence Malick. Starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard The single most annoying artistic choice among mainstream directors in the past decade or so has got to be the orange and blue color contrast that is just everywhere, in movies as diverse as Transformers and, as the author of that link brilliantly points out,… Read More Days of Heaven (1978)
Dir. Jordan Peele. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Lil Rel Howery What I love about the shot above, when Chris (Kaluuya) is meeting his girlfriend’s family for the first time, is the distance. Peele comes back to distance again and again in this movie (more on that later), but this is an early instance of… Read More Get Out (2017)
Dir. John Huston. Starring Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern In 1975, Roger Ebert interviewed John Huston, who by that time had peaked more than twenty years before and must have had some idea that he would never come close to the quality of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Maltese Falcon again. Ebert noted that Huston’s… Read More The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey Shadow of a Doubt is almost certainly Hitchcock’s best picture of the 1940s. There are more macabre movies, like Lifeboat and Rope, and more tense ones, like Saboteur or Suspicion. But Shadow of a Doubt has an eye on the same kind of ugliness that the no-doubt-about-it classics from the ’50s indulge in. Rear… Read More Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Ben Johnson, Ward Bond, Harry Carey, Jr. Travis (Johnson) has decided, a little foolishly, to check out a geographical formation in the distance. He’s not sure where he is, though Sandy (Carey) seems to vaguely remember it. Predictably, Travis rides into a small band of Navajo who give chase to him.… Read More Wagon Master (1950)
Dir. Terry Zwigoff. Starring Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson While I was in college, one of my professors referred to a mutual acquaintance as an “LSEOR” (ell-see-or), which stands for “low self-esteem overreactor.” Enid (Birch) must be able to see the relevance of that acronym to her personality, but the true LSEOR would overreact… Read More Ghost World (2001)
Dir. Jacques Tourneur. Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph In a movie which does not shy away from meaningful monologues, the most telling and troubling monologue of all belongs to Oliver Reed (Kent Smith, not the actual Oliver Reed, who was like, four when this movie came out). I’ve always been happy, he tells… Read More Cat People (1942)
Dir. James Ivory. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, James Fox Someone famous and distant is supposed to have said, “Hominem unius libri timeo,” or, “I fear the man of one book.” The phrase is pleasingly ambiguous. One might fear the man of “one book” because he has great learning in a subject which outstrips our… Read More The Remains of the Day (1993)
Seeing Things Secondhand 