Dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Starring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan It’s about eighty percent of the way through the movie. Sam (Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and Harry (Colin Firth) have all learned why they’re on this little Greek island. The daughter of a woman each of them had a fling with about twenty years back… Read More Mamma Mia! (2008)
Dir. Jan de Bont. Starring Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffmann The roving band of free spirits who chase tornadoes, who each have their own weird nickname and their own competency within the group, have seen it all in their years of following twisters…except for an F5. Only Jo (Hunt), whose father was killed… Read More Twister (1996)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Jimmy Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger The idea behind Rope is a perfectly scrumptious one for a film; a pair of handsome young men, Brandon (Dall) and Phillip (Granger), decide to kill one of their friends for the thrill of it and then host a party immediately after, with food served from atop… Read More Rope (1948)
Dir. Andrew Stanton. Starring Ellen DeGeneres, Ed O’Neill, Albert Brooks Two things stand out when we talk about why Finding Nemo is one of the best animated movies of the past thirty years. First is the episodic structure of the narrative; Finding Nemo is, like The Canterbury Tales, much more than the sum of its parts based on the characters… Read More Finding Dory (2016)
Dir. Joe Wright. Starring Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law The action of Anna Karenina is set, sometimes tacitly but more often very, very loudly, in a theater. This suits Wright, whose sweet spot mixes handsome people in period costumes with enough tracking shots to make a West Wing fan turn purple. There’s some fairly dazzling work with… Read More Anna Karenina (2012)
Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Skerritt Contact is fundamentally a story about belief, and whether or not our beliefs should be primarily scientific or primarily religious. The first clause would almost certainly make for an interesting movie; questioning what is worthy of belief, separating truth from untruth, or challenging beliefs have historically… Read More Contact (1997)
Dir. Jason Reitman. Starring Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Cameron Bright In 2005, when this movie first came out, I’m not sure that the slide with the names of four executive producers, men without any real creative input on the film, would have raised many eyebrows. In 2017, watching a movie that has the names… Read More Thank for You Smoking (2005)
Dir. Alan Parker. Starring Barry Miller, Maureen Teefy, Gene Anthony Ray A fun thought exercise for future car trips: what’s your trilogy of (insert city here) movies? For example, my Los Angeles trilogy features Sunset Boulevard, Blade Runner, and Pulp Fiction (with special apologies to Double Indemnity and Chinatown). I’ve given less thought to my… Read More Fame (1980)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brendan Gleeson Gangs of New York is the movie that made me love movies, which is like saying that All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the album which made someone love music. I apologize for nothing. The first half of Gangs of New York is remarkable. In 1862, Irish… Read More Gangs of New York (2002)
Dir. Warren Beatty. Starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson When I first started this blog, one of the categories I knew I wanted to include was “Losing Steam,” for movies that began with a rush, reach a fabulous climax, and then peter out for one reason or another. Two movies immediately came to mind… Read More Reds (1981)
Seeing Things Secondhand 