Dir. Krzystof Kieslowski. Starring Juliette Binoche, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Irene Jacob Not since I wrote about Persona about eighteen months ago have I felt so reluctant to commit to what I think about a movie (or, indeed, three of them). Kieslowski died in 1996 and never lived to see the new millennium or the way the… Read More Three Colors Trilogy: Blue (1993), White (1994), Red (1994)
Dir. Ray Müller By the early ’90s, Riefenstahl had had a long time to think about the answers to questions like those posed by Müller throughout the movie. She “regrets” making Triumph of the Will, was never a member of the Nazi Party, never infused her work with anti-Semitic language or “race theory,” was out of… Read More The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains Pain boils down to a loss of control. Something outside of our reach hurts, and for the most part there is nothing we can do to stop that hurt from coming, and above all else that’s what makes us crazy. Lingering deaths would be scary… Read More Notorious (1946)
Dir. George Cukor. Starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Charles Bickford Dir. William Wyler. Starring Olivia de Havilland, Miriam Hopkins, Montgomery Clift A Star Is Born stands as a sort of caduceus, a mere movie entwined by the serpents “joyous star vehicle” and “anthropological document.” On one hand, this is Judy Garland’s last stand. “The Man That… Read More A Star Is Born (1954) and The Heiress (1954)
Dir. Jeff Nichols. Starring Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton, Nick Kroll My humble definition of a biopic is “any movie which makes months, and preferably years, of a real human being’s life into its plot.” By my own definition, I would say that Loving qualifies as a biopic of Richard and Mildred Loving (Edgerton and Negga,… Read More Loving (2016)
Dir. Louis Malle. Starring Pierre Blaise, Aurore Clément, Holger Löwenadler Lucien (Blaise) has five days off from his job mopping floors and emptying bedpans in a local hospital. He hasn’t called his mother (Gilberte Rivet) to tell her that he’s coming home for a while, and when he gets there he is more or less… Read More Lacombe, Lucien (1974)
Dir. Sergei Bondarchuk. Starring Ludmila Savelyeva, Sergei Bondarchuk, Vyacheslav Tikhonov Unless I manage to get my hands on Satantango or, God forbid, Out 1 at some point, I think War and Peace will probably rank as the lengthiest movie I watch this year. At 421 minutes, it is one of the giants of narrative cinema,… Read More War and Peace (1967)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson There may not be an actor whose star persona has interested me more in the past eighteen months than Max von Sydow’s. (I admit to a limited understanding of his Scandinavian film career outside of Bergman and Jan Troell, so I’m not going to… Read More The Passion of Anna (1969)
Dir. Anthony Asquith. Starring Michael Redgrave, Nigel Patrick, Brian Smith There are so few good movies about teachers in the world because actual teachers’ professional lives don’t lend themselves well to typical movie drama. Thus movies about teachers frequently thrust them into situations where they take on “unteachable” students and, with some post-hard knocks empathy,… Read More The Browning Version (1951)
Dir. Hal Ashby. Starring Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid The Last Detail, with its frustrated young men, faithfully rendered milieu, and miles of walk-and-talk, screams “Linklater movie.” It’s no wonder that Last Flag Flying borrows from this movie; the guidebook is right here in Hal Ashby’s direction and Robert Towne’s screenplay before either of them lost… Read More The Last Detail (1973)
Seeing Things Secondhand 