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. Danny Boyle. Starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels About an hour into Steve Jobs, it’s clear that something about the movie just isn’t working well enough. The first forty minutes are remarkably tight, so direct and effective that it’s easy to forget the freewheeling Danny Boyle is behind the wheel with a roadmap… Read More Steve Jobs (2015)
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: 50-46
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) Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), directed by Sidney Lumet Picture links… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Family Drama, 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. 5) Fantasia (1940), directed by (deep breath) Samuel Armstrong, James Algar, Bill Roberts, Paul… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Sprawling, 5-1
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. 5) Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis “What if a man… Read More 100 Exceptional American Movies in 10 Genres: Speculative, 5-1
Dir. Noah Baumbach. Starring Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Laura Linney. (Featured image links here.) The Squid and the Whale is scathing when it wants to be, which is just about all the time. For a time, Walt (Eisenberg) is the most odious of the family, a teenager who deserves the kind of tongue-lashing that Roald Dahl could… Read More The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Dir. Woody Allen. Starring Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello (Featured image links here) In the past five or six years, I think we’ve been very anxious to find movies which remind us somehow of the past, to lighten our own sort of pessimism about the world at large, and to crown these films as… Read More The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Dir. Ronald F. Maxwell. Starring Tom Berenger, Jeff Daniels, Martin Sheen I can’t think of another movie made in the past quarter-century which should have seen big screens less than Gettysburg. This isn’t a statement of the film’s quality, but of its marketability, because let’s face it, this is a unicorn of a film. Longer… Read More Gettysburg (1993)
Seeing Things Secondhand 