Dir. Martin Campbell. Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen It’s just a little too talky, isn’t it. Not a lot too talky, but it’s just talky enough that it pulls you away from what’s really exciting about the film itself. Before anyone arrives in Montenegro for the poker game, there’s a ceiling on what… Read More Casino Royale (2006)
Dir. John Huston. Starring Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn It’s easier for me at least to identify single choices in form, structure, performance, and so on which torpedo a movie rather than elevate it. In Moby Dick, there’s an all-timer of a decision which elevates the movie to mysterious heights, and that is the… Read More Moby Dick (1956)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard There’s a scene in Madeleine, made two decades earlier and under a radically different set of censorship instructions, where a sex scene is replaced, essentially, with a torrid reel. Rather than depicting a coital sequence between Ann Todd and Ivan Desny which wouldn’t have passed… Read More Ryan’s Daughter (1970)
Dir. Edmund Goulding. Starring Tyrone Power, Coleen Gray, Joan Blondell Everyone has a few quotes that rattle around in their brains in perpetuity for no good reason at all. Here’s one of mine: Gillis: They’re pretty hot for it over at Twentieth, but I think Zanuck’s all wet. Can you see Ty Power as a… Read More Nightmare Alley (1947)
Dir. Ema Ryan Yamazaki There are more than 350 Division I men’s basketball programs in the United States. The 68-team March Madness tournament remains one of the great unifiers of offices across the nation, as even casual observers get pushed into pools to submit their brackets. Its randomness is its calling card, and for three… Read More Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (2019)
Dir. Norman Jewison. Starring Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Karl Malden Spoilers follow…I almost never do spoiler warnings, and I can’t remember if I’ve ever done one for a film from the 20th Century. Yet this film ends so dramatically and boldly that the shock, one way or another, feels especially meaningful. It’s not a… Read More The Cincinnati Kid (1965)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Betsy Palmer Some soldiers, just through luck or probability or God’s will, are doomed to be the ones to watch others die. Marty Maher (Power), though he enlists annually for decades on end and is in the service for both world wars, never actually goes to battle.… Read More The Long Gray Line (1955)
Dir. Satyajit Ray. Starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Haradhan Bandopadhyay For much of the movie (which translates in English as The Coward), it appears that Karuna (Mukherjee) is not a woman much given to second chances. Upon discovering that a woman he’d loved for eighteen months in his younger days is a married, a proper… Read More Kapurush (1965)
Dir. Preston Sturges. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn One assumes that the phrase “head over heels” used to be the much more evocative “heels over head,” seeing as the one we’re using now describes most of us who are not circus performers. Not every strange pratfall which strikes Charlie Pike (Fonda) has him… Read More The Lady Eve (1941)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Eric Bana, Mathieu Amalric, Ciaran Hinds The final shot of Munich, in terms of detracted value, one of the very worst shots of Steven Spielberg’s career. I’m trying to forgive him, because better directors than him were shaken by 9/11 in ways that destabilized their own movies. For example, there’s that deeply… Read More Munich (2005)
Seeing Things Secondhand 