Dir. Richard Curtis. Starring Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson Although I don’t watch nearly as much television as I used to—at this point in my life, I really feel like I’m down to Food Network and sports—anyone who turns on the set during December will inevitably see a car commercial and a jewelry commercial.… Read More Love Actually (2003)
Dir. Rian Johnson. Starring Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver Spoilers below. If you love bar scenes, then Star Wars is historically a pretty good bet for you. There have been three Star Wars movies which make a Death Star the centerpiece of their plots; there are at least three Star Wars movies which place… Read More Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Starring Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Bateman Spoilers, I guess. It seems seriously unnecessary to do that for a movie based on an eighty-year-old novel with multiple adaptations, but… There are more than a dozen named characters squeezed into a fairly limited space for the bulk of this movie, and I’m not… Read More Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, Edna Best There’s a scene towards the beginning of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir which is actually even a little spooky. Lucy (Tierney) is walking around the cottage which used to belong to a sea captain, Daniel Gregg (Harrison). Mankiewicz is working at a disadvantage here. For one… Read More The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
Dir. Frank Capra. Starring Ronald Colman, H.B. Warner, Thomas Mitchell While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ask myself what device they were going to use to make sure Bob (Colman) left Shangri-La so we’d get our big finish. What they eventually choose is not bad on its face—Bob’s brother George (John Howard) has… Read More Lost Horizon (1937)
Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring Robert Rousenville, Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine The Tales of Hoffmann is one of those lovely movies which is a personality test for the viewer. The movie is a technical marvel, totally beautiful, beautifully aligned. It is no small thing to decide to take an opera, which are essentially… Read More The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
Dir. David Carson. Starring Patrick Stewart, Malcolm McDowell, Whoopi Goldberg In Somm, one of the candidates, Ian Cauble is a little notorious among his in-group because of the smells he claims to be able to get hints of in a glass of wine; doubtless the most idiosyncratic is the “freshly opened can of tennis balls.” But Ian… Read More Star Trek Generations (1994)
Dir. Alain Resnais. Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Bernard Fresson Dir. Spike Jonze. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams In a sea of other people, a French actress (Riva) and a Japanese architect (Okada) fall painfully and deeply in love. That sea of other people is less the present population of Hiroshima and more… Read More Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Her (2013)
Dir. Tom Ford. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson Nocturnal Animals checks off boxes for me, in the sense that it does things which typically annoy me in a movie. It can’t decide which part of its plot it’s most interested in and sacrifices both pieces for it. At a little less than two… Read More Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol There’s a lot about Sophie’s Choice that works, but none of that addresses the central problem in the story: everything is too exaggerated to work well. Wouldn’t a jealous lover suffice as well as one with paranoid schizophrenia? Wouldn’t a haunting experience outside the Holocaust have… Read More Sophie’s Choice (1982)
Seeing Things Secondhand 