Dir. Richard LaGravenese. Starring Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan, Natalie Knepp A list of my ten favorite musicals right now, which is depressingly conventional, and maybe the clearest possible expression of my guilty pleasure (namely, well-off white people watching their lives go to pot; one might succinctly refer to it as the “Revolutionary Road principle”): Miss… Read More The Last Five Years (2014)
Dir. Lone Scherfig. Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina Movies about young adults very frequently – that is, always – feel a need to tell the audience that their characters change. One’s teenage years [he sighed while cleaning his eyeglasses] are the beginning of a life’s summer, after a springlike childhood and before the autumn… Read More An Education (2009)
Dir. Ron Howard. Starring Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Matthew Macfadyen Howard Zinn is probably the most important historian that the United States has ever produced. (Sorry, Charles Beard. I love you too.) Regardless of how you feel about him – in other words, regardless of whether or not you think “historical revisionism” is an honest… Read More Frost/Nixon (2008)
Dir. Nicholas Stoller. Starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall for the third time recently. I first saw it maybe a year after it came out. I watched it again in college, remembering how much fun I had when I saw it as a high school senior, and then wondered… Read More Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Seeing Things Secondhand 