Dir. John Ford. Starring Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Betsy Palmer Some soldiers, just through luck or probability or God’s will, are doomed to be the ones to watch others die. Marty Maher (Power), though he enlists annually for decades on end and is in the service for both world wars, never actually goes to battle.… Read More The Long Gray Line (1955)
To see what interests me about the Andy Hardy movies (with apologies to the rest of his family) and to get some broader thoughts on them, you can follow this link. You can also find this list with so many fewer words at my Letterboxd. It goes without saying that there are moderate to serious… Read More The Andy Hardy Movies: Ranking
I have a book I’ve been terribly fond of called Our Times: An Illustrated History of the 20th Century. A little disappointingly, it only goes up to the mid-1990s, but otherwise I can’t fault the book, which has been my introduction over the past fifteen years and more to scores of culturally relevant moments, texts,… Read More The Andy Hardy Movies: Introduction
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)
When Soggy Bottom is released sometime later this year, it will be Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth film in twenty-five years. Anderson, like another smart set favorite in Quentin Tarantino, is feted for a small filmic oeuvre indeed. If you want to replace Tarantino with David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, or even older directors like… Read More Paul Thomas Anderson Meta-Analysis
Dir. Todd Field. Starring Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl I had some issues with Manchester by the Sea, a movie which I found posed and a little preachy, but one thing I never doubted was the tragic moment at the center of the film. I never doubted the plausibility of Lee’s mistake which leads… Read More In the Bedroom (2001)
Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman It’s about as simple as a documentary gets. A few ambient shots of something like birds flying or a sunset, occasional home movies, more photographs, pans across quilt squares, some footage of people reading names, talking heads. I use this a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever meant… Read More Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
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. Satyajit Ray. Starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Haradhan Bandopadhyay For much of the movie (which translates in English as The Coward), it appears that Karuna (Mukherjee) is not a woman much given to second chances. Upon discovering that a woman he’d loved for eighteen months in his younger days is a married, a proper… Read More Kapurush (1965)
Seeing Things Secondhand 