Created by Bruce Miller. Starring Elisabeth Moss, Joseph Fiennes, Max Minghella My thoughts on episodes 1-5 can be found here. As the show continues, there’s been a persistent wondering about the role of race in a show set in a dystopian America. My favorite take so far is from Vulture, but The Verge and Cosmo… Read More The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 1, Episodes 6-10
Created by Bruce Miller. Starring Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Alexis Bledel As a novel, one of the many things which makes The Handmaid’s Tale special is that it does not make up details about the activities of the Republic of Gilead; in other words, everything that happens in Gilead has happened before in real life. The executions,… Read More The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 1, Episodes 1-5
Dir. Andrea Arnold. Starring Sasha Lane, Shia LeBeouf, Riley Keough (Featured image links here.) Krystal (Keough) is a master of the power move. Throughout American Honey she manages to manipulate, cow, impress, and otherwise command a group of a dozen or so teenagers/twenty-somethings with little more than magazine subscriptions. Her game is the mag crew, which… Read More American Honey (2016)
Dir. David Fincher. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer There is a sadness at the heart of The Social Network which is attractive to me because so much of it is self-inflicted. When we recall the movie, we will no doubt remember the warmly lit but definitely dour boardrooms where the depositions take place, and we… Read More The Social Network (2010)
Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page As the van which is holding the inception team and their mark tumbles, so too does the gravity change in a hallway where Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) is fighting a manifestation of Robert Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy) subconscious. The two of them come closer to falling up than anyone… Read More Inception (2010)
Dir. Bill Condon. Starring Emma Watson, Ewan McGregor, Dan Stevens Since the movie has opened recently, an obligatory “spoilers.” Also, a shameless plug: I’ve written about the 1991 animated version with a special emphasis on that film’s symbolic use of color. You can find that here. The Beast (Stevens) reaches down and picks up an… Read More Beauty and the Beast (2017)
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. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman Llewyn Davis (Isaac) has made an accidental habit of picking up orange cats. (I love cats. I confess to some slight distraction when they were on screen. Also, this movie has two cats, so by the standard the Academy set after The Artist, and… Read More Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Dir. Alejandro G. Inarritu. Starring Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone The star of Birdman is Emmanuel Lubezski, the cinematographer who at this writing has won three consecutive Oscars for Best Cinematography in three seriously stylish films: Gravity, Birdman, and The Revenant. Technically speaking, this is one of the most remarkable films of the decade. Edits are hidden so that… Read More Birdman (2014)
Dir. John Carney. Starring Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Lucy Boynton, Jack Reynor The one-sentence synopsis of Sing Street – boy creates band on spot to impress cute girl he met – sounds like a nightmare of a mediocre screwball update. But what John Carney seems to have understood intuitively was that this is not a story about about a kid faking… Read More Sing Street (2016)
Seeing Things Secondhand 