Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Andrew Garfield, Tadanobu Asano, Yosuke Kubozuka Spoilers ahead. Father Rodrigues (Garfield), over the course of the film, witnesses shocking humiliation, torture, and execution. Apostasy is the least of these after a while, almost passe in the misty mountains, immaculate sand, and lovely greens of one of the most hostile environments seen… Read More Silence (2016)
Dir. Philip Kaufman. Starring Ed Harris, Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn The Right Stuff, when it’s functioning at its highest levels, is a story about the death of the Western, and no one could have been better equipped to play the leading role than Sam Shepard. History will remember Shepard the playwright, but to me he will… Read More The Right Stuff (1983)
Dir. Peter Weir. Starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Max Pirkis From whatever side you look at it, Master and Commander feels like a movie that was destined to be forgotten. It’s a movie about sailing and naval combat and intrigue which premiered the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. It would have been… Read More Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Starring William Shatner, Ricardo Montalban, Leonard Nimoy 1:34:51– What I will say is that the dude holding Terrell looks exactly like a sad Will Ferrell. When I wrote that back in May of 2013, I was in the habit of writing about movies and TV with linear recaps rather than the more… Read More Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) – Redux
Dir. Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, Tom Tykwer. Starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Doona Bae Mark Harris, whose best work as a film critic concerns the larger trend of American studios making the safest decisions possible to the detriment of American film, has spent years on the topic by now. I don’t know what his opinion… Read More Cloud Atlas (2012)
Dir. Dan Gilroy. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rene Russo Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal) is an enterprising American entrepreneur. Almost entirely self-trained, with the help of some business classes from the Internet, he represents the “school of hard knocks” approach to building a company. Through a combination of dogged persistence, on-scene training, hard work, and a… Read More Nightcrawler (2014)
Dir. Jan Troell. Starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg (This review is a bit more awkward than the average movie review I do, because The Emigrants is not really its own film any more than Fellowship of the Ring is its own film. The New Land, released the year after The Emigrants, is… Read More The Emigrants (1971)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Jason London, Rory Cochrane, Matthew McConaughey Deadwood, the Joe Rudi of Peak TV, takes the murder of Wild Bill Hickok more or less as its starting point. It’s a great place to start your TV show, especially if you’re a viewer who has never heard of Will Bill, knows he’s being… Read More Dazed and Confused (1993)
Dir. John Crowley. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Jane Brennan Saoirse Ronan, the Girl with the Huge Pupils, is costumed beautifully by Odile Dicks-Mireaux in this film. Ronan wears rich orangey-browns and cool blue-greens in the beginning, but by the end seems at home in bright yellow and pink; in one scene, she wears an… Read More Brooklyn (2015)
Dir. Hal Ashby. Starring Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern There’s a “Just So” story I encountered for the first time when I was a little boy. It was depicted in 3-D comic book form and came with the requisite glasses. (I may be making this up, but I’m pretty sure it came from a… Read More Coming Home (1978)
Seeing Things Secondhand 