Dir. Kenneth Lonergan. Starring Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams The premise of Manchester by the Sea is one that would have fit neatly enough into the serious dramas of the ’40s or ’50s, in part because its drama is fever-pitch loud, and in part because it’s not hard to imagine someone like Casey Affleck… Read More Manchester by the Sea (2016)
Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Haydn Watching Ball of Fire, you get the sense that Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were just more interested in telling a story about eight men writing an encyclopedia than they were in telling the story of an unlikely romance between a gangster’s moll, Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck)… Read More Ball of Fire (1941)
Dir. Andrey Zyvagintsev. Starring Nadezhda Markina, Andrey Smirnov, Elena Lyadova “To understand all is to forgive all,” Tolstoy wrote, but Zyvagintsev seems to disagree. Elena is one of the boldest movies of the last decade because it is austerely antagonistic. One lane heads north, and on that highway there’s pity for the characters. Then there’s another lane… Read More Elena (2011)
Dir. Jennifer Kent. Starring Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr, Sam Claflin The Nightingale contains the strongest rebuke of the silliness, the callowness, of violence for violence’s sake in the pictures. It is not a war movie, but it has what they say about war movies in mind: that no movie can truly be anti-war, because the… Read More The Nightingale (2018)
Dir. Martin Ritt. Starring Paul Newman, Brandon deWilde, Melvyn Douglas Dir. Sofia Coppola. Starring Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Emma Watson All these years I’ve been down on Paul Newman, and I don’t regret it. All the same, it’s not entirely his fault. He was so gorgeous, and had such easy body language, that it must… Read More Hud (1963) and The Bling Ring (2013)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Barely a movie in the traditional sense, A Visitor from the Living has two flourishes which make it more than a taped interview. The first are some shots of Theresienstadt, very much in the style that Lanzmann had used in Shoah. The buildings in the contemporary present are seen while we hear the words of… Read More A Visitor from the Living (1997)
Dir. Milos Forman. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge There are two kinds of people in the world (here it comes): the people who need validation and people who don’t. It’s not merely that Salieri (Abraham) and Mozart (Hulce) are both the first type in a job where that external validation is all… Read More Amadeus (1984)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Cate Blanchett, Emma Nelson, Billy Crudup Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a truly rare thing: a movie that runs at about 105 minutes that really ought to run about 135. Anyone who’s watched an Oscar movie will know that the opposite is so much more often the experience, but like Nocturnal Animals,… Read More Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)
Dir. Lulu Wang. Starring Awkwafina, Zhao Shuzhen, Tzi Ma Dir. Jia Zhangke. Starring Zhao Tao, Liao Fan, Casper Liang There are a bunch of scenes where people eat in The Farewell, which is lowkey one of the hungriest movies in recent memory, but the image that stands out from all this eating is the laziest… Read More The Farewell (2019) and Ash Is Purest White (2018)
Dir. Daniel Mann. Starring Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, Terry Moore I’m not an alcoholic, and if there have been alcoholics in my life I couldn’t name them. I couldn’t say whether or not it’s likely that an alcoholic’s first bender in a year would end in him brandishing a knife at his wife, although one… Read More Come Back, Little Sheba (1952)
Seeing Things Secondhand 