Dir. Ladj Ly. Starring Damien Bonnard, Alexis Manenti, Djebril Zonga The circus is in town, and it is pissed off. The circus van, which had previously meandered around Montfermeil advertising the show, has changed its tune considerably. A slew of profanity seems to both precede and follow the vehicle, all of it in response to… Read More Les Misérables (2019)
Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Starring William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, Christopher Plummer It’s a little hard to love the execution of The Undiscovered Country, a movie which throws quotes from Shakespeare around with total abandon in lieu of actualy dialogue—which suffers from a lack of any really good scenes between the one where Kirk (Shatner) and McCoy (Kelley)… Read More Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Dir. S. Craig Zahler. Starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins There’s nothing new, precisely, in Bone Tomahawk, nothing that you couldn’t alchemize out of John Ford and Wes Craven. O’Dwyer (Wilson) is a Christian who insists on praying before meals, crosses himself with a Catholic gusto (one of those touches which feels odd for the… Read More Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Starring Ryan Gosling, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas Since the beginning of this isolation business, I’ve been working from home and drinking…look, we don’t have to talk about how much tea I’m drinking, because I’m not trying to give you anxiety about my future kidney stones on top of what’s going on in the… Read More Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson I’m contractually obligated to bring up the rat crawling in front of the Massachusetts State House, one of my least favorite shots ever, but on rewatching The Departed for the zillionth time, it seems like the reason it’s in the movie at all is because the filmmakers… Read More The Departed (2006)
Dir. Robert Z. Leonard. Starring William Powell, Luise Rainer, Frank Morgan Before we start, I want to make clear that I am not “motivation Internet guy.” I don’t think everyone in a movie needs to be obviously motivated by something, least of all villains. (Who thinks Anton Chigurh needs a motivation? Or Old Man Clanton?)… Read More The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet In the moment, Contagion is a rush. This is one of the virtues of its structure, one of the late legacies of the aughts fascination with multiple loosely connected story strands. (It’s like everyone in Hollywood watched Nashville on the same weekend in 1998 and spent the… Read More Contagion (2011)
Dir. Jane Campion. Starring Nicole Kidman, Martin Donovan, John Malkovich The words don’t matter in this movie. I find that pleasingly ironic, given Henry James’ reputation as a stylist, but it’s more than just irony that makes the effacing of language so interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a traditional narrative feature where the… Read More The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
Dir. Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton The original plan was to do an unlikely moving pairing post which put this in conversation with Gunga Din, sort of a commentary on the resounding popularity of moderately racist entertainment. And then I actually watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie which is significantly more… Read More Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Dir. Mark Robson. Starring Diane Varsi, Lana Turner, Hope Lange The premise of Peyton Place is based on the shallow belief that many people begin from in their real lives, no matter how many times they learn about books and covers as tots: appearances are reality. The trouble with the fame of Peyton Place is that we all… Read More Peyton Place (1957)
Seeing Things Secondhand 