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 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 are… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (3/7-3/16): Gamified Horror
February 20th One of the first pieces that Woodward and Bernstein try to get through in All the President’s Men is, on the whole, kind of thin. When Bradlee actually reads it, he tells them, “You haven’t got it,” says, “Not good enough.” The sell, delivered by Jack Warden’s Rosenfeld, initially described the piece to… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (2/20-3/1): A Rush of 2020s to the Head
You can find the introduction and index for this series here. Film Director Year Type Nancy Drew…Trouble Shooter William Clemens 1939 Narrative feature Life Begins for Andy Hardy George B. Seitz 1941 Narrative feature The Devil and Daniel Webster William Dieterle 1941 Narrative feature In This Our Life John Huston 1942 Narrative feature The Leopard Man… Read More 100 American Films to Save: Confrontations (1939-1946)
Dir. John Huston. Starring Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn It’s easier for me at least to identify single choices in form, structure, performance, and so on which torpedo a movie rather than elevate it. In Moby Dick, there’s an all-timer of a decision which elevates the movie to mysterious heights, and that is the… Read More Moby Dick (1956)
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
One of the Grantland legacies I’m fond of, although I’m sure the idea didn’t start there, is the championship belt (RIP Grantland, long live Barnwell and Hyden). The purpose is to go year by year and create a list of who’s at the top of some field, which is a deceptively simple task, and one… Read More Anglophone Director Championship Belt, 1918-2018
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: 5-2
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams In that long lull in the beginning of Gettysburg’s fourth act, there’s a throwaway scene with Hancock and Chamberlain which serves to show that Hancock is thinking about Armistead almost as much as Armistead thinks about him. Hancock asks the learned Chamberlain, a professor… Read More The Master (2012)
Dir. John Huston. Starring Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern In 1975, Roger Ebert interviewed John Huston, who by that time had peaked more than twenty years before and must have had some idea that he would never come close to the quality of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Maltese Falcon again. Ebert noted that Huston’s… Read More The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
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 and an index of other entries in the series, click here. For a list of more than 800 films which I considered for the top 450 and my eligibility qualifications, click here.… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100: 40-36
Seeing Things Secondhand 