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)
Dir. Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges Directors of documentaries frequently look for ways to make sure that their words reinforce the images they’ve chosen for the screen, whether it’s by writing a narration or appearing in front of the camera. If you’re Michael Moore, at the far end of both qualities for intrusiveness, it… Read More Class Action Park (2020)
Dir. John Ford. Starring Will Rogers, Stepin Fetchit, Henry B. Walthall Featured image links back here During the Civil War, Kentucky declared itself a neutral state, though in practice what that meant was that it stayed with the Union, choosing native son Abraham Lincoln over native son Jefferson Davis. Tens of thousands of men from… Read More Judge Priest (1934)
Dir. Andrew V. McLaglen. Starring Jimmy Stewart, Phillip Alford, Rosemary Forsyth One of my five favorite movies of all time is Gettysburg, a childhood favorite which I describe in that linked piece as having a “softness” concerning slavery but worlds of sympathy about the introspection of Confederate generals out to keep other men in chains.… Read More Shenandoah (1965)
Dir. Enrico Casarosa. Starring Jacob Tremblay, Jack Dylan Grazer, Emma Berman Spoilers ahead for people who care, but if you’ve seen a movie with children in it before I’m not sure what you think you’d be ruining for yourself. In its favor, Luca is the most visually attractive Pixar film since Coco, and this despite… Read More Luca (2021)
Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Bill McKinney My favorite piece of film criticism from the past five years or so is probably Angelica Jade Bastien’s review of The Beguiled, and if it’s not my favorite it’s the one I spend the most time thinking about. When The Beguiled was released, the… Read More The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Dir. Travis Wilkerson Another day, another documentary that is a better story than a film. Wilkerson is very much the central character in this documentary, more so than his great-grandfather, S.E. Branch, or the Black man who Branch murdered, Bill Spann. I suppose in any documentary where the filmmaker has this close a connection to… Read More Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017)
Dir. William Friedkin. Starring Kenneth Nelson, Cliff Gorman, Leonard Frey Watching this movie, I wondered as much as anything else how it could possibly be remade. Some of this stuff would never work as drama; there’s almost a timeless quality to how much the second act is aggressively forced in ways that will always fall… Read More The Boys in the Band (1970)
Dir. Alex Gibney Alex Gibney is one of the clubhouse leaders in documentaries that make you shake your head and/or your fist at the screen as you watch. His skill is in clarifying potentially difficult storylines, making the corporate or technical or financial jargon of his stories into simply understood narratives. In a different time,… Read More Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss The ’90s remain a key reference point for action films in this country, and to say “’90s action movie” is to call up larger than life scenarios and apocalyptic visions. There are significantly more ludicrous ’90s action movies than Point Break, say, but… Read More The Matrix (1999)
Seeing Things Secondhand 