Dir. Anthony Minghella. Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law On an individual level, just about everything in this movie is wonderful. Anthony Minghella’s direction is competent and assured. His screenplay is effectively paced, providing ample time for us to watch Tom Ripley come up with ideas about how to manipulate his compatriots in age… Read More The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
To read my introduction to this set of rankings, go here. I’ve broken the twenty-three movies from this franchise into tiers of irregular size. I still have a fairly firm ranking in my head for each of them, but I include the tiers to give a sense of what movies roughly match each other in… Read More Infinity Saga/Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies Ranking – Part 2
To read my introduction to this set of rankings, go here. I’ve broken the twenty-three movies from this franchise into tiers of irregular size. I still have a fairly firm ranking in my head for each of them, but I include the tiers to give a sense of what movies roughly match each other in… Read More Infinity Saga/Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies Ranking – Part 1
Dir. Shane Black. Starring Robert Downey, Jr., Paul Bettany, Guy Pearce It’s really something that what makes this Marvel movie (what’s killing cinema in my salad days) interesting and enjoyable is its closeness to ”80s and ’90s action movies (you know, what was killing cinema when I was a little kid). Shane Black, who I… Read More Iron Man 3 (2013)
Dir. Jon Favreau. Starring Robert Downey, Jr., Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke I’ve been workshopping this take since about halfway through this movie, and here’s what I’ve got: this is a significantly more interesting movie than Iron Man. It is not necessarily a better movie than Iron Man, because there is some real flab on this movie: the… Read More Iron Man 2 (2010)
Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet In the moment, Contagion is a rush. This is one of the virtues of its structure, one of the late legacies of the aughts fascination with multiple loosely connected story strands. (It’s like everyone in Hollywood watched Nashville on the same weekend in 1998 and spent the… Read More Contagion (2011)
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: 60-56
Dir. Breck Eisner. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penelope Cruz Dir. Kerry Conran. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Giovanni Ribisi Two blockbusters, like in indignity, In the mid-aughts, where we lay our blame, From seared desert to dieselpunk city, Where bad reviews force bad pictures aflame. In Sahara, a group of ex-Navy Americans assist a… Read More Sahara (2005) and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Seeing Things Secondhand 