Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones There’s a compulsion to see No Country as a sort of relentlessly nihilistic story, and I smell what those people are stepping in. There is an awful lot of collateral damage in this picture, well beyond the people who enter a dangerous line of… Read More No Country for Old Men (2007)
Dir. David Yates. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson Hogwarts deserves better than the ending it’s given. In the book as well, the Battle of Hogwarts is a sort of crumpled, bloodstained love letter to the school where the majority of this story has taken place. In some ways that’s even more true in… Read More Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)
The landing page, with rationale and links to other posts in this series, can be found here. Somewhere towards the end of this movie, I had to level with myself. I was laughing my butt off at basically everything Jack-Jack did, but as the movie decided to get closer to solving its plot and further away… Read More Disney/Pixar Rankings: 45-41
Dir. Danny Boyle. Starring Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner I’m not a drug user, nor have I ever been. Movies about drug use overwhelmingly bore me, I guess, because I have no point of reference. I’ve ignored Trainspotting for many years largely because I couldn’t imagine finding a movie about heroin addicts interesting, and… Read More Trainspotting (1996)
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: 50-46
Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Maggie Smith, Kelly Macdonald, Ryan Philippe In retrospect, it was a mistake to make Gosford Park a murder mystery. What makes Nashville and Short Cuts effective is the unbelievably patient burn among small pockets of people which culminates in an event which no person can ignore. In Short Cuts, it’s the earthquake that no one can escape from;… Read More Gosford Park (2001)
Dir. Joe Wright. Starring Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law The action of Anna Karenina is set, sometimes tacitly but more often very, very loudly, in a theater. This suits Wright, whose sweet spot mixes handsome people in period costumes with enough tracking shots to make a West Wing fan turn purple. There’s some fairly dazzling work with… Read More Anna Karenina (2012)
Seeing Things Secondhand 