Okay, this is the hyperspeed version of a movie diary. Two sentences! Each of you movies gets two sentences!
To see the intro page for “Best Director” Madness, click here. To see the Round of 64, click here. To see the Round of 32, click here. We’ve lost one of our 1-seeds, and in the Sweet 16 we’ll lose another. Each round of the bracket will use a quote from a Roger Ebert review… Read More “Best Director” Madness 2023: Sweet 16 and Elite 8
They do brackets for everything at this time of year. For those of us who live the Way of the Bracket, this deluge of bracketology is reminiscent of April Fools’ Day for those of who live the Way of Lying Indiscriminately. It’s nice to see people trying because it’s precious. Because the Oscars happened a… Read More “Best Director” Madness 2023: Introduction and Bracket Reveal
The Sight and Sound poll invites more than a thousand real critics (i.e., not me) to submit their top ten films to be compiled as part of their decennial results. There will be a new Sight and Sound poll this year, which I’ve been indecently excited about for the past three or four years now,… Read More My Sight and Sound 2022 Ballot (It’s Not Real, I’m Just Jealous and Want to Participate)
Steven Hyden introduced his five-albums test more than a decade ago as a third way to judge a band, short of its popularity or its critical acclaim. While this one is not meant to stand on its own—for example, he’s not sure that either Bob Dylan nor the Rolling Stones had made five great albums… Read More The Five-Movies Test or: Which Director Has Had the Best Stretch of Consecutive Feature-Length Films in English?
Dir. David Lean. Starring Ann Todd, Ralph Richardson, Nigel Patrick Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Pattinson In two bloated ages of blockbuster filmmaking, David Lean and Christopher Nolan are curious rejoinders to their times. Lean, while not immune to the bloat of the 1950s and 1960s, made films which more… Read More The Sound Barrier (1952) and Tenet (2020)
Dir. David Lean. Starring Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard There’s a scene in Madeleine, made two decades earlier and under a radically different set of censorship instructions, where a sex scene is replaced, essentially, with a torrid reel. Rather than depicting a coital sequence between Ann Todd and Ivan Desny which wouldn’t have passed… Read More Ryan’s Daughter (1970)
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here 1) Brief Encounter (1945), directed by David Lean I went back a few days ago and decided to count how many movies each director had contributed to this list. Mike Leigh was first, with seven entries. Then David Lean and Michael Powell,… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 1
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here 4) Kes (1969), directed by Ken Loach Kes is the first foreign-language movie I’ve written about for this series (waits patiently for laughs). In seriousness, this is a fairly talky movie, done in Yorkshire accents so thick that I honestly wouldn’t… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 4-2
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here 60) Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott Last year I was in my living room with a cockroach. I thought I saw it duck out from behind my curtains and then run back behind them, and I wasn’t entirely sure that… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 60-56
Seeing Things Secondhand 