Dir. George Stevens. Starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean In recent television dramas, much has been made of the inclination towards male antiheroes at the expense of virtually any other type of protagonist. Since the form hit its heights with Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White, it’s become fashionable to simply give us… Read More Giant (1956)
Dir. Martin Rosen. Starring John Hurt, Michael Graham Cox, Richard Briers In the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was a beautiful trend in animation which has by and large been abandoned by major studios. Characters would be rendered in a cartoonish, borderline cutesy style, but backgrounds and establishing shots would be rendered in these… Read More Watership Down (1978)
Dir. Mathieu Kassovitz. Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kounde, Said Taghmaoui An old man pops out of a bathroom stall after Vinz (Cassel), Hubert (Kounde), and Said (Taghmaoui) have been having a fairly incriminating conversation. All of their conversations, to be fair, are incriminating in one way or another, but in this one they reference Vinz’s… Read More La haine (1995)
Dir. Michael Cimino. Starring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges At the end of the movie – and I mean the Director’s Cut, which is a pretty nimble three and a half hours – we’ve been transported to a place that the film never hinted we’d go to. After a relatively quick stop at Harvard… Read More Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy “I know, because I’ve actually already lived through this night,” Jesse (Hawke) says to Celine (Delpy) eighteen years after his first night with her. “I’m a time traveler.” Jesse’s verbal play isn’t delivered with a grin but with more grim intensity, surely, than he means to let… Read More Before Trilogy: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013)
Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore. Starring Jacques Perrin, Philippe Noiret, Marco Leonardi Cinema Paradiso is in many respects kind of a bad movie. It has a problem with its ending, which is not really its own ending so much as an ending pieced together from the endings of a great many other films. Depending on your point… Read More Cinema Paradiso (1988)
Dir. Barry Jenkins. Starring Alex Hibbert, Naomie Harris, Ashton Sanders This movie thrums. Moonlight has an after-school special feel to it for long stretches, but in each of its three acts finds a way to manage the least interesting of those excesses. Little (Hibbert) is accidentally rescued by Juan (Mahershala Ali) and Teresa (Janelle Monae)… Read More Moonlight (2016)
Dir. Errol Morris. There are more famous and prolific director-composer pairs out there than Errol Morris and Philip Glass, but I’m not sure that there’s a pair which more perfectly suits each other. Glass favors repetition and small variations on a theme; in A Brief History of Time, the only instrument used is the piano.… Read More A Brief History of Time (1991)
Dir. Gore Verbinski. Starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom Certainly they won’t love it like the people who grew up with it do, but I’m not sure future generations will even remember Curse of the Black Pearl. I think the best case scenario for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is Planet of the Apes, a… Read More Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Dir. Alexander Payne. Starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen One of the beats Jack (Church) hits with great frequency is the beat about how Miles (Giamatti) is in the way of his own happiness. The depression and anxiety Miles deals with badly might be there, but Jack is sure that more of what’s… Read More Sideways (2004)
Seeing Things Secondhand 