Dir. David Lean. Starring Ann Todd, Ralph Richardson, Nigel Patrick Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Pattinson In two bloated ages of blockbuster filmmaking, David Lean and Christopher Nolan are curious rejoinders to their times. Lean, while not immune to the bloat of the 1950s and 1960s, made films which more… Read More The Sound Barrier (1952) and Tenet (2020)
Dir. Sidney Lumet. Starring Al Pacino, Charles Durning, James Broderick Enter another one of those Andy Griffith Conundrums, although maybe this is more like a Daniel Kaluuya Conundrum. Like Judas and the Black Messiah, a film based on actual events which featured name-brand actors in leading roles, Dog Day Afternoon makes most of its hay… Read More Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Dir. Fred Schepisi. Starring Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Shelley Duvall I’ve been watching this movie for, oh, fifteen years or so now, but it’s taken me until this most recent viewing to see what Fred Schepisi saw when he was making this movie. (Maybe I was dazzled by the pitch-perfect ’80s theme by Bruce Smeaton,… Read More Roxanne (1987)
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong If Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and Stephen Gaghan were making hyperlink cinema in the years preceding Zero Dark Thirty, then what Bigelow and writer Mark Boal are making is more like citation cinema. There’s a fascination with phrases which become title cards, such as “black site”… Read More Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Dir. Kurt Kuenne This is a genuinely unusual film, even though much of its trappings are pretty typical for a documentary. Talking heads, personal reminiscences, home videos, police reports, news clippings, all that stuff. It begins as the story of Andrew Bagby, a recent medical school graduate who was murdered by an ex-girlfriend named Shirley… Read More Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)
Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring Jodie Comer, Adam Driver, Matt Damon Spoilers, I guess…this is still a recent-ish release. The title cards separating the film’s chapters are not subtle about what they’re after. Chapter 1 begins after five or six minutes of prologue. It belongs to Jean de Carrouges (Damon), and the screen says: “The truth… Read More The Last Duel (2021)
Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Starring Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard As a horror movie, The Blair Witch Project is pretty disappointing. There are a couple moments here and there which are nervy, but on the whole it’s hard to credit the picture as a truly frightening one. The Blair Witch Project… Read More The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Dir. Seth Gordon “Remember the first rule of politics,” Jim Broadbent says as Boss Tweed in Gangs of New York. “The ballots don’t make the results. The counters make the result.” The counters in Gangs of New York have a simple goal: ensure that Democrats win every election in 1860s New York. It doesn’t matter… Read More The King of Kong (2007)
Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman One could sit around with a couple cocktails and some jazz in the background and have a very pleasant debate about which genre the swell matters more in. Does the swell matter more in drama, where a series of events pile on top of one… Read More M*A*S*H (1970)
Dir. Bryan Forbes. Starring Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough, Gerald Sim For so much of this film, less is more. In one of the film’s early sequences, Myra (Stanley) is revealing the remade child’s bedroom to her husband, Billy (Attenborough). It’s been redone to look like a hospital room, which Billy guesses at; Myra is dead… Read More Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)
Seeing Things Secondhand 