Last year, my year-end review of the movies I watched still had the sheen of professional list-making on itl: I thought about it as, more or less, the fifty best movies I saw that year which I hadn’t seen before, but allowed for some leeway on that front to talk about the movies which I… Read More 2019 Year-End Review: Forty-Five Moments
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here And we’re back! Halfway through, let’s keep rolling. 50) Howards End (1992), directed by James Ivory As sumptuous as the sets of Howards End are, and as lovely the costumes, all of it enhanced by some seriously underrated photography by Tony Pierce-Roberts, this… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 50-46
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here. 95) Pygmalion (1938), directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard In sports, people obsess over “bad contracts,” which belong to players who don’t produce very much but who are paid well above the market value of that production.… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 95-91
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here. 100) Ex Machina (2015), directed by Alex Garland I have such hopes for Garland, who appears to be groping his way towards an autopsy of alienation. Sunshine, which he wrote, is most interesting when it is concerned about human failure and… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 100-96
I’m joining in the spirit of the year-in-review post, even though the way I watch movies isn’t really conducive to the kind of list that one usually sees at the end of the year. (Incidentally, if you happen to be a recent music aficionado, friend of the blog Matt will have his year-end list of… Read More 2018 Year-End Review: Fifty Movies
Dir. Anthony Asquith. Starring Michael Redgrave, Nigel Patrick, Brian Smith There are so few good movies about teachers in the world because actual teachers’ professional lives don’t lend themselves well to typical movie drama. Thus movies about teachers frequently thrust them into situations where they take on “unteachable” students and, with some post-hard knocks empathy,… Read More The Browning Version (1951)
Seeing Things Secondhand 