Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking The Age of Innocence 1993 Martin Scorsese Daniel Day-Lewis Michelle Pfeiffer 2 All This, and Heaven Too 1940 Anatole Litvak Bette Davis Charles Boyer 18 Holiday Affair 1949 Don Hartman Janet Leigh Robert Mitchum 32 The Best Years of Our Lives 1945 William Wyler Dana Andrews Teresa Wright 46… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: With the Wrong Person (Romantically) Cliché
Dir. Howard Hawks. Starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Haydn Watching Ball of Fire, you get the sense that Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were just more interested in telling a story about eight men writing an encyclopedia than they were in telling the story of an unlikely romance between a gangster’s moll, Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck)… Read More Ball of Fire (1941)
Main Street on the March!, a short movie by Edward Cahn, is a forerunner for what has become, beyond the postwar years, a significant mode in World War II filmmaking. Cahn’s picture depicts an American public which is blissfully unaware that war will come to their territorial borders, and that they will send out so… Read More “We Can Begin to Live Again” – Portraits of Adjustment in Post-World War II American Cinema
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 10-6
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. 10) Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky It is genuinely difficult… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Taut and Cold, 10-6
The following is part of an overview of the top 100 American narrative fiction feature films, from my perspective. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a list of more than 800 films which I considered for the top 450 and my eligibility qualifications, click here. And for a way to vote on what you think the top… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100 (2017): 100-96
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Fredric March, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews In 1979, Jimmy Carter gave a speech that, in my mind, ranks with George Washington’s Farewell Address or Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as one of the most important in the history of the American executive. The “Crisis of Confidence” speech speaks to a statistic that… Read More The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Seeing Things Secondhand 