Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Eric Bana, Mathieu Amalric, Ciaran Hinds The final shot of Munich, in terms of detracted value, one of the very worst shots of Steven Spielberg’s career. I’m trying to forgive him, because better directors than him were shaken by 9/11 in ways that destabilized their own movies. For example, there’s that deeply… Read More Munich (2005)
Several years ago I made a list in tiers of American directors. I will not share that list, because it is quite dumb, but I think my first three tiers still make sense as concepts. In the first tier went directors who could combine peak with longevity, who made brilliant movies consistently throughout a career… Read More Steven Spielberg Meta-Analysis
I have no doubt that if these two movies had come out in 2018 instead of 1998, the Discourse would have reached absolutely incandescent levels. As it is, one can tell from reading the old reviews that the Discourse, analog and slow as it was in 1998, was lit. You know it’s bad when the… Read More Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, and the Critics
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn A “Zemeckis cube” and a DeLorean, a long chapter of the film devoted to painstakingly recreating The Shining, namedropping the Millennium Falcon, and of course, the somewhat controversial usage of the Iron Giant. If on one snowy night, his lip cut up from a punch and his mind… Read More Ready Player One (2018)
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken Steven Spielberg’s top six movies, per the AFI in 2007: Schindler’s List (8th) E.T. (24th) Jaws (56th) Raiders of the Lost Ark (66th) Saving Private Ryan (71st) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (64th in 1998, off the list in 2007) Steven Spielberg’s top seven movies, per Metacritic:… Read More Catch Me if You Can (2002)
As any true -holic knows, a little grace goes a long way. As I read through and listened to dozens of Best of the Decade lists, I tried to apply a truth I’d always kept close about list-making: it’s about what’s not on the list as much as it is what’s there. To some extent,… Read More Top 100 Movies of the Decade (2010-2019): The Painful Cuts
Dir. Steven Spielberg. Starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk The camera moves a whole lot. It’s Steven Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski; one expects that it’s going to move elegantly. For the most part that’s even the case in this movie, I would say, typically able to move us around a newsroom or the offices… Read More The Post (2017)
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: 30-26
Another week, another conversation. The latest conversation in our series considers what it means for a band or a director, specifically, to age. How do we reevaluate them? What do we look for? Do they fade away entirely? What is their (gulp) legacy? What follows is a lightly edited conversation in lieu of a podcast.… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations, #5: How Media Changes As It Ages
Seeing Things Secondhand 