Last year, my year-end review of the movies I watched still had the sheen of professional list-making on itl: I thought about it as, more or less, the fifty best movies I saw that year which I hadn’t seen before, but allowed for some leeway on that front to talk about the movies which I… Read More 2019 Year-End Review: Forty-Five Moments
Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring James Cagney, Joan Leslie, Walter Huston Perhaps some foolish moron will endeavor to create a little canon of “the most Hollywood movies” of all time. (I hear some of you saying that the AFI lists are such a canon already, and that said moron need not exert much effort on his… Read More Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
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: 70-66
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor In The Razor’s Edge, a novel which postdates Dodsworth the film by a little less than a decade and Sinclair Lewis’ novel Dodsworth by fifteen years, Somerset Maugham creates a rather memorable character named Elliott Templeton, an American who long ago forsook his uncultured native land for the… Read More Dodsworth (1936)
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: 40-36
Dir. John Huston. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, Walter Huston Almost as soon as Dobbs (Bogart) gets out of Tampico with some money and supplies in his back pocket, he begins the downhill slide which will lead to murder, theft, and betrayal (dun-dun-dun!). There is one scene, though, which keeps Dobbs from becoming a mere… Read More The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Seeing Things Secondhand 