Dir. Leo McCarey. Starring Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald, Risë Stevens “Schmaltz isn’t selling this season,” Father O’Dowd (Frank McHugh) reports to his buddy, Father O’Malley (Crosby). O’Malley—Chuck to his friends, a label which contains multitudes, including some guys who will go on to father Jets and the diva of the Metropolitan Opera—is a little chastened.… Read More Going My Way (1944)
Dir. Breck Eisner. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penelope Cruz Dir. Kerry Conran. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Giovanni Ribisi Two blockbusters, like in indignity, In the mid-aughts, where we lay our blame, From seared desert to dieselpunk city, Where bad reviews force bad pictures aflame. In Sahara, a group of ex-Navy Americans assist a… Read More Sahara (2005) and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Dir. Robert Redford. Starring Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore For a movie which places several of its most important scenes in therapy—a movie which is obsessive about getting Conrad (Hutton) to say what it is that’s been eating him up—it’s shocking that no one is willing to tell Beth (Moore), in plain English,… Read More Ordinary People (1980)
Dir. Mel Gibson. Starring Mel Gibson, Patrick McGoohan, Sophie Marceau There are a bunch of different movies in Braveheart, and that wouldn’t be a problem if that were purposeful. The good first: I find Wallace (Gibson) surprisingly compelling, and I don’t think his limited motivations limit the character. He gets into the revolution business to avenge… Read More Braveheart (1995)
Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, Annie Corley The Bridges of Madison County is empty. In a movie that needs beautiful moments to live, there is only one beautiful moment in the entire flick. Happily it occurs at a key moment, lingering on a turn signal, the sight of a man through a windshield,… Read More The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Dir. Elliot Silverstein. Starring Jane Fonda, Michael Callan, Lee Marvin I wish they’d just gone for it. There are moments of sheer joy in Cat Ballou. Jed (Dwayne Hickman), in his parson get-up, runs through the same speech half a dozen times in an attempt to get in to Clay (Callan), currently under arrest by… Read More Cat Ballou (1965)
Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Starring Jeremy Irons, Ron Silver, Glenn Close I think if screened Reversal of Fortune for ten other people and then asked them what they thought the film was about, I would get at least seven or eight different answers. Is it about Claus von Bulow (Irons), far and away the most interesting person… Read More Reversal of Fortune (1990)
Dir. Michael Gordon. Starring Jose Ferrer, Ralph Clanton, Mala Parsons Cyrano de Bergerac is a really tricky play to adapt, more or less as is, from stage to screen. The 1950 edition is sad proof of that difficulty. The play itself is filled with monologues and excessively verbose language as well as a setting which,… Read More Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)
Dir. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart Whether or not this can be called a trend I’m not sure – do three movies over seven years constitute a trend? – but Still Alice falls neatly into the same subgenre that Away from Her and Amour do. Each one takes a seriously different approach to their… Read More Still Alice (2014)
Dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Starring Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan It’s about eighty percent of the way through the movie. Sam (Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and Harry (Colin Firth) have all learned why they’re on this little Greek island. The daughter of a woman each of them had a fling with about twenty years back… Read More Mamma Mia! (2008)
Seeing Things Secondhand 