Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Starring Thanapat Saisayamar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee Boonmee (Saisaymar) is a man who is fairly well-off and who, by the looks of it, is faintly doomed. His kidney is not doing well; the laborious process of draining it hasn’t been unsuccessful, but it isn’t helping him in the way it will need… Read More Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
Dir. Brad Bird. Starring Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Janeane Garofolo Up until 2007, here’s how Pixar movies had ended: Toy Story – Woody and Buzz chase down a moving truck on an RC car, fall with style into a minivan, and then have their first Christmas together A Bug’s Life – After the gruesome death of… Read More Ratatouille (2007)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson Rebecca must be one of the great depictions of anxiety ever to appear on the big screen. Where some people dream of performing a role they haven’t practiced in front of a capacity crowd, or having an exam placed in front of them on a subject… Read More Rebecca (1940)
Dir. Roland Joffe. Starring Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Robert De Niro Father Gabriel (Irons) is the only European Jesuit priest above the waterfall who is unwilling to fight for the Guarani with violence. Rodrigo (De Niro), whose skill with violence is unquestioned, comes to Gabriel to be blessed before joining the battle. “I cannot bless… Read More The Mission (1986)
Dir. Jacques Demy. Starring Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Nino Castelnuevo Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Mohamed Ben Kassen Guy (Castelnuevo) has bad news for Genevieve (Deneuve): he’s being sent to Algeria, and at sixteen she is certain that she will die waiting for him. At this moment, she has already conceived the… Read More The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Dir. David Cronenberg. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris It’s almost too bad that A History of Violence isn’t a French movie about a reformed mobster from the tough streets of Marseille who escapes to the Massif Central and starts a family, because then the title would make a little more sense. In English, the term… Read More A History of Violence (2005)
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Marie Kean In the very, very early days of motion pictures, the novelty of a picture in motion was the primary reason for an audience to come see it. Actors were not actors so much as models, posing in front of the real star: the camera. Only two directors… Read More Barry Lyndon (1975)
Dir. Paul Greengrass. Starring Christian Clemenson, Khalid Abdalla, Ben Sliney Indulge me in the following thought experiment: You discover one evening, after coming home from work, that there is a friendly space alien in your home. He means you no harm, but he just wants to experience movie-watching with a human. He has studied certain aspects… Read More United 93 (2006)
Dir. Carol Reed. Starring Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli The Third Man starts slow. It builds atmosphere through its people (Alida Valli vamping, Trevor Howard with a mustache, Ernst Deutsch stuttering with an accent), through its sights (Vienna – if you haven’t seen the movie, just ask John Irving about it), and of course, with… Read More The Third Man (1949)
Dir. Morgan Spurlock Documentaries by lefty performance propagandists – like Morgan Spurlock or, better yet, Michael Moore – rely heavily on spectacle to make larger points about the social order and for that reason, the one sentence synopses of those documentaries tend to be misleading. Bowling for Columbine isn’t really about guns, but a culture of fear… Read More Super Size Me (2004)
Seeing Things Secondhand 