Dir. William Wyler. Starring Kirk Douglas, Horace McMahon, Eleanor Parker Once a director finds a source material s/he’s fond of, it’s not unheard of for them to return to that well. Rob Reiner has Stand by Me and Misery, two relatively grounded works originally by Stephen King. John Ford went back to the James Warner… Read More Detective Story (1951)
Dir. Amma Asante. Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sam Reid, Sarah Gadon When Esther’s words were reported to Mordecai, he sent back this answer: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place,… Read More Belle (2013)
Dir. Rick Alverson. Starring Tye Sheridan, Jeff Goldblum, Hannah Gross The movie this most reminded me of was Solaris, and it had everything to do with the production design. It’s not the look of it so much, for Solaris is a film which constantly has something jutting out of a wall or something on the… Read More The Mountain (2018)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Henrietta Crosman, Maurice Murphy, Marian Nixon Pilgrimage is built on three shots. Not scenes, not sequences, not moments, but shots. Pilgrimage, John Ford on a diet of F.W. Murnau, designed this film around three shots. The characters, the story, the beats, the emotions, the ideas: they are all sublimated to these… Read More Pilgrimage (1933)
Dir. John Ford. Starring John Wayne, William Holden, Constance Towers The standout sequence of The Horse Soldiers is about the cadets of the Jefferson Military Academy, which is to say that the best part of this movie about Marlowe (Wayne) and Kendall (Holden) has very little to do with either one of them. In a… Read More The Horse Soldiers (1959)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Betsy Palmer Some soldiers, just through luck or probability or God’s will, are doomed to be the ones to watch others die. Marty Maher (Power), though he enlists annually for decades on end and is in the service for both world wars, never actually goes to battle.… Read More The Long Gray Line (1955)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Eric Bana, Mathieu Amalric, Ciaran Hinds The final shot of Munich, in terms of detracted value, one of the very worst shots of Steven Spielberg’s career. I’m trying to forgive him, because better directors than him were shaken by 9/11 in ways that destabilized their own movies. For example, there’s that deeply… Read More Munich (2005)
Dir. David Fincher. Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Stellan Skarsgard All of us can name action movies or thrillers which don’t have all that much perspective to speak of, but have enough of a plot to remain entertaining and effective. This is Se7en, a movie which gets a lot of plot mileage out of punning… Read More The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Dir. John Ford. Starring John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, Harry Carey, Jr. It may be my contrarian inclinations, it may be my childlessness, it may be that I just prefer critters, but I know that whenever someone has a baby on a sitcom it bores me. It is one of two common topics in fiction (the other being… Read More 3 Godfathers (1948)
Dir. Jon Favreau. Starring Robert Downey, Jr., Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke I’ve been workshopping this take since about halfway through this movie, and here’s what I’ve got: this is a significantly more interesting movie than Iron Man. It is not necessarily a better movie than Iron Man, because there is some real flab on this movie: the… Read More Iron Man 2 (2010)
Seeing Things Secondhand 