Dir. Tomas Alfredson. Starring Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong I’ve been thinking about this (slightly old) article by Matt Zoller Seitz in which he argues that Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-presumed Best Actor award for The Revenant would be symbolic of the way we’ve become inclined to think about acting performances as much as for what’s off the… Read More Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Dir. Anthony Minghella. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche The English Patient is one of the best film adaptations of a novel from the past twenty-five years not because of its faithfulness but because of its evocation. There Will Be Blood, which I imagine is adapted from Oil! so no one from Upton Sinclair’s estate would… Read More The English Patient (1996)
Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Starring Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook The scene that made me love Powell and Pressburger is relatively unimportant in this film. Clive Candy (Livesey) has gone to Germany to publicly denounce an avid German nationalist and a true scoundrel named Kaunitz (David Ward). Unsurprisingly, the hotheaded officer with… Read More The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Created by Ryan Murphy. Starring Matthew Morrison, Lea Michele, Cory Monteith 22) E21, “Funk” – written by Ian Brennan As much as any show I’ve ever watched, I think I remember where I was for my first viewings of Glee episodes. I know where I was when I watched “Funk” for the first time. It was… Read More Glee, Season 1
Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Starring Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Isao Kimura Of all the lines spoken in Seven Samurai, none is more piercing than the Old Man’s (Kokuten Kodo) advice to the men who venture into the city searching for ronin. “Get hungry samurai,” he tells the little troupe. His meaning is probably limited to the literal hunger of… Read More Seven Samurai (1954)
Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Starring Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Bateman Spoilers, I guess. It seems seriously unnecessary to do that for a movie based on an eighty-year-old novel with multiple adaptations, but… There are more than a dozen named characters squeezed into a fairly limited space for the bulk of this movie, and I’m not… Read More Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Starring Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, Edna Best There’s a scene towards the beginning of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir which is actually even a little spooky. Lucy (Tierney) is walking around the cottage which used to belong to a sea captain, Daniel Gregg (Harrison). Mankiewicz is working at a disadvantage here. For one… Read More The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
You can read up on the basis for this series here, and also find links to other posts in the series. Movies I’ve reviewed on this site have a link in the title which you can follow to read my full review. 5) Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), directed by Woody Allen (Straightens tie, looks… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Family Drama, 5-1
Dir. Frank Capra. Starring Ronald Colman, H.B. Warner, Thomas Mitchell While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ask myself what device they were going to use to make sure Bob (Colman) left Shangri-La so we’d get our big finish. What they eventually choose is not bad on its face—Bob’s brother George (John Howard) has… Read More Lost Horizon (1937)
Dir. Richard Linklater. Starring Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Temple Baker In my experience, there is no species of jock as endlessly arrogant as baseball players. I can’t adequately explain why that is despite having played some kind of baseball for nearly fifteen years. Part of it absolutely is in the highly individualized nature of the… Read More Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
Seeing Things Secondhand 