Dir. Bill Condon. Starring Emma Watson, Ewan McGregor, Dan Stevens Since the movie has opened recently, an obligatory “spoilers.” Also, a shameless plug: I’ve written about the 1991 animated version with a special emphasis on that film’s symbolic use of color. You can find that here. The Beast (Stevens) reaches down and picks up an… Read More Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Dir. Joe Wright. Starring Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law The action of Anna Karenina is set, sometimes tacitly but more often very, very loudly, in a theater. This suits Wright, whose sweet spot mixes handsome people in period costumes with enough tracking shots to make a West Wing fan turn purple. There’s some fairly dazzling work with… Read More Anna Karenina (2012)
Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Skerritt Contact is fundamentally a story about belief, and whether or not our beliefs should be primarily scientific or primarily religious. The first clause would almost certainly make for an interesting movie; questioning what is worthy of belief, separating truth from untruth, or challenging beliefs have historically… Read More Contact (1997)
Dir. Jason Reitman. Starring Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Cameron Bright In 2005, when this movie first came out, I’m not sure that the slide with the names of four executive producers, men without any real creative input on the film, would have raised many eyebrows. In 2017, watching a movie that has the names… Read More Thank for You Smoking (2005)
Dir. Damien Chazelle. Starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend Early in the film, Mia (Stone) has a pretty bad day. She gets cut off by a guy in an old car while she’s practicing a monologue she’s going to audition with. She’s late for the audition itself, has to rush out of her coffee… Read More La La Land (2016)
Dir. Alan Parker. Starring Barry Miller, Maureen Teefy, Gene Anthony Ray A fun thought exercise for future car trips: what’s your trilogy of (insert city here) movies? For example, my Los Angeles trilogy features Sunset Boulevard, Blade Runner, and Pulp Fiction (with special apologies to Double Indemnity and Chinatown). I’ve given less thought to my… Read More Fame (1980)
Dir. Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell Burt Lancaster, as disgraced German jurist Ernst Janning, doesn’t have very much to say in Judgment at Nuremberg. Like a smart defendant, he is mostly silent for vast swaths of the film; Janning – through his lawyer, Hans Rolfe (Schell) – questions the validity of an… Read More Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Dir. Chris Columbus. Starring Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson I am afraid to type the following sentence, but it deserves to be said: Rent, as a film, deserves another chance. You have no idea how much I wish I didn’t mean that, unless you’ve read my thoughts on “What You Own” – so in… Read More Rent (2005)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns One of the cliches of Oscar history is the lament that the awards for 1998 passed over Saving Private Ryan in favor of Shakespeare in Love. “Passed over” is a little strong, seeing as Private Ryan racked up wins for Best Director, Best Cinematography, Film Editing, and swept the… Read More Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Dir. Roger Spottiswoode. Starring Matthew Modine, Saul Rubinek, Alan Alda The story of the HIV/AIDS crisis, especially in its nascent days in the late 1970s, is utterly terrifying. Until I read Randy Shilts’ magnificent tome on the first ten years of AIDS, And the Band Played On, it was hard for me to realize just… Read More And the Band Played On (1993)
Seeing Things Secondhand 