Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong If Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and Stephen Gaghan were making hyperlink cinema in the years preceding Zero Dark Thirty, then what Bigelow and writer Mark Boal are making is more like citation cinema. There’s a fascination with phrases which become title cards, such as “black site”… Read More Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
For a brief introduction and a running list of movies covered in this project, click here 20) Sapphire (1959), directed by Basil Dearden Murder will out, but what’s most interesting to me about the outing in this movie is the reaction. The primary suspect all along was David. His pregnant black girlfriend was found murdered in… Read More Better than BFI’s Top 100: 20-16
Dir. Peter Weir. Starring Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Dragos Bucur The Way Back is awfully cool to the touch, which is an issue I’ve always had with Peter Weir movies. His films, so frequently conceptual and odd, sound like movies I would love but all too often devolve into these technically remarkable and emotionally empty endurance… Read More The Way Back (2010)
Dir. Tomas Alfredson. Starring Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong I’ve been thinking about this (slightly old) article by Matt Zoller Seitz in which he argues that Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-presumed Best Actor award for The Revenant would be symbolic of the way we’ve become inclined to think about acting performances as much as for what’s off the… Read More Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Dir. Morten Tyldum. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Allen Leech The Imitation Game is structurally deficient. By virtually any standard it’s got all of the best elements of a good biopic: a well-known (but not too well-known) historical figure with some relevance to even casual viewers, a story which relates back to an important historical… Read More The Imitation Game (2014)
Seeing Things Secondhand 