Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking They Live by Night 1948 Nicholas Ray Cathy O’Donnell Farley Granger 3 All That Heaven Allows 1955 Douglas Sirk Jane Wyman Rock Hudson 24 Cane River 1982 Horace B. Jenkins Richard Romain Tommye Myrick 54 My Best Girl 1927 Sam Taylor Mary Pickford Charles Rogers 62 The Crimson Kimono… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: Society Gets in the Way Cliché
Okay, two sentences each, let’s make this happen, ready, hike.
This year, I watched more new-to-me movies than I’d ever watched before in a single year. I don’t have all that much in common with Pauline Kael, but as she boasted that she never saw a movie twice, I much prefer to learn a new movie rather than experience a movie I’ve seen before. I… Read More 2022 Year-End Review: What I Learned
You can find the introduction and index for this series here. Film Director Year Type Dragonwyck Joseph L. Mankiewicz 1946 Narrative feature Nightmare Alley Edmund Goulding 1947 Narrative feature I Remember Mama George Stevens 1948 Narrative feature “Goodbye, Miss Turlock” Edward L. Cahn 1948 Short Strange Victory Leo Hurwitz 1948 Documentary The Secret Land Orville O.… Read More 100 American Films to Save: Mirrors (1946-1952)
For each movie in the top 100, I’ve written a question to answer. (It would get very, very boring for me to have to write some variation on “boy howdy, you’ll never believe how good this movie is” one hundred more times.) There’s no exact sentence or word count I’m holding myself to here, but… Read More Top 250 American Movies: 51-60
Steven Hyden introduced his five-albums test more than a decade ago as a third way to judge a band, short of its popularity or its critical acclaim. While this one is not meant to stand on its own—for example, he’s not sure that either Bob Dylan nor the Rolling Stones had made five great albums… Read More The Five-Movies Test or: Which Director Has Had the Best Stretch of Consecutive Feature-Length Films in English?
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
I’m joining in the spirit of the year-in-review post, even though the way I watch movies isn’t really conducive to the kind of list that one usually sees at the end of the year. (Incidentally, if you happen to be a recent music aficionado, friend of the blog Matt will have his year-end list of… Read More 2018 Year-End Review: Fifty Movies
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Starring Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Stergioglou, Mary Tsoni. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Starring James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo. I don’t think anyone besides crusty parents and out-of-touch principals ever denies that growing up is difficult, and even then those people only exist in the pictures. Certainly this is the premise of Rebel Without a Cause,… Read More Dogtooth (2009) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Dir. Nicholas Ray. Starring Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard Da Silva A woman is like a dog, Keechie (O’Donnell) tells Bowie (Granger) one night. I knew a dog who lost his master and refused to eat food from anyone else’s hand, would let no one pet him. It is a humiliating comparison, and Keechie is… Read More They Live by Night (1948)
Seeing Things Secondhand 