Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes Hitchcock does not want to show us Novak’s face straight on until he absolutely must. We see her from behind, with her hair done in the little twist in the back which of course mirrors the hurricane symbol which has come to stand in… Read More Vertigo (1958)
Dir. Paul Greengrass. Starring Christian Clemenson, Khalid Abdalla, Ben Sliney Indulge me in the following thought experiment: You discover one evening, after coming home from work, that there is a friendly space alien in your home. He means you no harm, but he just wants to experience movie-watching with a human. He has studied certain aspects… Read More United 93 (2006)
Dir. Carol Reed. Starring Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli The Third Man starts slow. It builds atmosphere through its people (Alida Valli vamping, Trevor Howard with a mustache, Ernst Deutsch stuttering with an accent), through its sights (Vienna – if you haven’t seen the movie, just ask John Irving about it), and of course, with… Read More The Third Man (1949)
Dir. Morgan Spurlock Documentaries by lefty performance propagandists – like Morgan Spurlock or, better yet, Michael Moore – rely heavily on spectacle to make larger points about the social order and for that reason, the one sentence synopses of those documentaries tend to be misleading. Bowling for Columbine isn’t really about guns, but a culture of fear… Read More Super Size Me (2004)
Dir. Steve James Like any good 20th Century icon, Roger Ebert sits on a throne of contradictions. He was half of the pair who made “Two Thumbs Up!” and a partner in reductivism, in his own way part of dumbing down the movies as much as Spielberg, Lucas, Eisner, or Katzenberg. It is also true that Ebert will… Read More Life Itself (2014)
Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains “They don’t make movies like [x type of movie] anymore” is more often than not the most prosaic sort of movie criticism, a “Saturday Night Live had its best cast when I was sixteen” for film fogies. Typically it’s a statement of nostalgia more… Read More The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Dir. Andrew Stanton. Starring Ellen DeGeneres, Ed O’Neill, Albert Brooks Two things stand out when we talk about why Finding Nemo is one of the best animated movies of the past thirty years. First is the episodic structure of the narrative; Finding Nemo is, like The Canterbury Tales, much more than the sum of its parts based on the characters… Read More Finding Dory (2016)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles Before I saw Psycho, I knew more or less what was going to happen and what the twist would be. It’s hard to find anyone with any interest in seeing Psycho for the first time who hasn’t had much the same experience. It’s not even worth a “spoilers!”… Read More Psycho (1960)
Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Starring Lisbeth Movin, Thorkild Roose, Preben Lerdorff Rye Paul Schrader describes Day of Wrath as “a schizoid work of art,” for “the first half of Day of Wrath wonders if there are such supernatural things as witches; the second asks why Anne thinks she is a witch.” That’s a fair one sentence synopsis of the… Read More Day of Wrath (1943)
Dir. Bruce Robinson. Starring Paul McGann, Richard E. Grant, Richard Griffiths Withnail and I is a spiritual successor to Brideshead Revisited, presumably where Charles and Sebastian would have ended up if Waugh had ditched Sebastian’s Catholic family but maintained the guilt. Like Charles, And-I (whose name, based on the telegram he gets, is “Marwood,” but who I think is… Read More Withnail and I (1987)
Seeing Things Secondhand 