Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey Shadow of a Doubt is almost certainly Hitchcock’s best picture of the 1940s. There are more macabre movies, like Lifeboat and Rope, and more tense ones, like Saboteur or Suspicion. But Shadow of a Doubt has an eye on the same kind of ugliness that the no-doubt-about-it classics from the ’50s indulge in. Rear… Read More Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Ben Johnson, Ward Bond, Harry Carey, Jr. Travis (Johnson) has decided, a little foolishly, to check out a geographical formation in the distance. He’s not sure where he is, though Sandy (Carey) seems to vaguely remember it. Predictably, Travis rides into a small band of Navajo who give chase to him.… Read More Wagon Master (1950)
Dir. Michael Cimino. Starring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges At the end of the movie – and I mean the Director’s Cut, which is a pretty nimble three and a half hours – we’ve been transported to a place that the film never hinted we’d go to. After a relatively quick stop at Harvard… Read More Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring Cary Grant, Thomas Mitchell, Jean Arthur (Featured image links here.) Throughout the film, Hawks is careful not to use close-ups with much frequency. His shots are the long shots which allow us to marvel at the model airplanes which rise and fall from the little airstrip, and the American shots which… Read More Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Dir. Jacques Tourneur. Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas Picture links back here Out of the Past is a film which doesn’t work well unless you believe with a full heart in the inevitable stupidity of men, a stupidity which is born out of arrogance and self-importance, and which is compounded by an inability… Read More Out of the Past (1947)
Dir. Spike Lee. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee Mission College, like any university, appears to be governed both practically and socially by a set of totally arcane rules, held by a small number of gatekeepers who seem not entirely sure how best to use those rules to benefit the college, their groups, or… Read More School Daze (1988)
Dir. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois. Starring Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson I vividly remember where I was the first time I saw a commercial for How to Train Your Dragon. I was a freshman in college and I was on my top bunk; my roommate was on the bottom one at the time, and… Read More How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Dir. Michael Mann. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Steven Waddington What if Michael Mann is responsible for the best journalism flick of the ’90s, the best cop movie of the ’90s, and the best western of the ’90s? I don’t know that there’s much argument that The Insider and Heat fill those first two niches, but there may be… Read More The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Starring Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor The camera follows people from below, through walls and rooms, through shelves and bookcases. The people – mostly men – are obscured. The camera cannot pierce everything, but we see just enough setting and just enough of people’s faces to get the point. The… Read More The Killing (1956)
Dir. Peter Weir. Starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Max Pirkis From whatever side you look at it, Master and Commander feels like a movie that was destined to be forgotten. It’s a movie about sailing and naval combat and intrigue which premiered the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. It would have been… Read More Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Seeing Things Secondhand 