Dir. Eiichi Yamamoto. Starring Aiko Nagayama, Tatsuya Nakadai, Katsutaka Ito Dir. Volker Schlondorff. Starring Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti, Alain Delon Two movies about sex, which go about the subject about as differently as one could imagine. In Belladonna of Sadness, the Devil (Nakadai) appears to Jeanne (Nagayama) as a, well, he’s a penis, and he… Read More Belladonna of Sadness (1973) and Swann in Love (1984)
Dir. Eric Rohmer. Starring Marie Rivière. In cinematic heaven, there’s a special mansion for movies which are willing to lay it all on the line for their endings. Not a twist, precisely. It’s not about surprising us. It’s about wagering that a final scene, or even a last shot, will be sufficient to linger with… Read More The Green Ray (1986)
Dir. Robert Eggers. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie The real tension, the real horror in The Witch isn’t in the story. This is not a scary movie, despite the genre it belongs to on Netflix or at your local video store (as if!). The tension comes from wondering when Eggers is going to… Read More The Witch (2015)
Dir. Alfonso Cuaron. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson As a lad, I was so certain that the job of a filmmaker was to be as faithful as possible to the material s/he adapted. I have been wised up significantly since then, but I have to confess that because of that particular foible, I… Read More Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Dir. Chris Columbus. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson The Harry Potter books are meant for young people—I was in elementary school when my dad all but pressed a copy of Sorcerer’s Stone on me during a Barnes and Noble trip, and in high school when I inhaled Deathly Hallows—but unless you’re one of… Read More Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)
Dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman. Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Liev Schreiber This is the kind of superhero movie I imagined when I was a preteen: witty, action-packed, heartfelt, and most of all absolutely overflowing with possibility. Multiverses are cheating, fine, but here’s an example. The first superheroes I ever got into were… Read More Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Dir. Rob Reiner. Starring Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin William Goldman could not have chosen a more difficult kind of story to write than this bifocals fairy tale. Looking at it through the top half of the lens, this is a once upon a time story about adventure and magic and a princess in… Read More The Princess Bride (1987)
Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Starring Lily James, Richard Madden, Cate Blanchett Pretend I sound like your mother when I say: This is just a nice movie. The story of Cinderella (James) is one that banks on the obvious cruelty that the stepmother (Blanchett) and stepsisters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera) throw at our innocent heroine. Some… Read More Cinderella (2015)
Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie This is a recent release at the time of publication, so I’ll throw a generic “spoilers” alert up for it. There was a friend of Bob Rafelson’s named Donna Greenberg, who recalled a story about a weekend morning when she was at home with her… Read More Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
Dir. Michael Mann. Starring Russell Crowe, Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer There are home goods chains with fewer lighting options than Mann makes use of in The Insider. Indoor lighting, outdoor lighting, faded out darkness, microscopic clarity, shadows, penumbras, pore-gazing well-lit closeups, the works. This is a truly omnivorous movie for lighting, and they primarily shine on… Read More The Insider (1999)
Seeing Things Secondhand 