Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking The Age of Innocence 1993 Martin Scorsese Daniel Day-Lewis Michelle Pfeiffer 2 All This, and Heaven Too 1940 Anatole Litvak Bette Davis Charles Boyer 18 Holiday Affair 1949 Don Hartman Janet Leigh Robert Mitchum 32 The Best Years of Our Lives 1945 William Wyler Dana Andrews Teresa Wright 46… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: With the Wrong Person (Romantically) Cliché
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: 21-30
To see my running list of the hundred greatest movie stars in American film history, click here All stars are listed with a single film which is particularly important, though not exclusively so, to understanding what makes them vital to American movies. 65) Cate Blanchett / Key film – I’m Not There Cate Blanchett has… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars: 61-65
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
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: 10-6
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, click here. For a list of more than 800 films which I considered for the top 450 and my eligibility qualifications, click here. And for a way to vote on what you think the top… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100 (2017): 100-96
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Fredric March, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews In 1979, Jimmy Carter gave a speech that, in my mind, ranks with George Washington’s Farewell Address or Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as one of the most important in the history of the American executive. The “Crisis of Confidence” speech speaks to a statistic that… Read More The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Seeing Things Secondhand 