Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Shirley Jones, Gordan MacRae, Charlotte Greenwood The year is 1955, the year of Kismet and Rebel without a Cause. The black-and-white musical is dead. The model of 42nd Street is crumbling around the feet of The Band Wagon. The three M’s (that’s “Method,” “Meisner,” and “Miller”) are coming to symbolize the… Read More Oklahoma! (1955)
Okay, two sentences each, let’s make this happen, ready, hike. Force of Evil, 1948, dir. Abraham Polonsky / America’s commitment to leftist filmmaking runs shallower than you’d find in many other countries, but that’s not Polonsky’s fault. His first feature (made not long before he was blacklisted) puts everyman John Garfield in a decent suit,… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (6/1-6/30): Great Caesar’s Ghost I Still Have a Lot of These Left
Okay, this is the hyperspeed version of a movie diary. Two sentences! Each of you movies gets two sentences! The Chosen, 1981, dir. Jeremy Kagan / Adored this movie based on the Chaim Potok novel I’ve never read and now realize I must read, given how closely this adheres to Brideshead Revisited and especially A… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (3/17-4/5): That Time I Got Really Into a Different Project and Realized That I’d Deserted a Perfectly Good Bit and Needed to Get Back to It
This one’s real late! A surprisingly busy schedule at work, the Oscars, and March Madness have all contributed. But it’s still really late! March 7th none At least it was a good day for rewatches historically? Maybe Last Temptation, The Fugitive, and Badlands don’t make for the neatest triple feature in the world, but there… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (3/7-3/16): Gamified Horror
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
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: 25-21
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: 30-26
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: 90-86
Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado The most famous reviews of High Noon are surely the grenades tossed at it by John Wayne and Howard Hawks; both men criticized the story for how it portrays a marshal who utterly fails to rouse his comrades to serve law and order. Hawks’ smear of how… Read More High Noon (1952)
Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Paul Scofield, Leo McKern, John Hurt Watching A Man for All Seasons forces the viewer to put The Crucible on the brain. Thomas More is the antithesis of John Proctor; where Proctor sees himself already neck-deep in the quicksand of his sin, Thomas More walks on water. Yet both are on trial, both of… Read More A Man for All Seasons (1966)
