Category: Film

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Seven

Dan Seeger

The comparison to All the President’s Men is irresistible, only because it is so apt. With Spotlight, named after the investigative journalism unit at The Boston Globe, director Tom McCarthy traces the efforts of a team of dedicated reporters examining the pervasive sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by members of the Catholic clergy and the reprehensible cover-up of those crimes by the institutional powers within the Church. Like Alan J. Pakula’s sterling 1976 drama, Spotlight approaches its subject with a commitment to depicting the meticulous toil that goes into building a devastating, revelatory newspaper article of undeniable fact, essentially celebrating the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Seven

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Carey, Harvey, Hill, Maloof and Siskel, Shepard

Dan Seeger

Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962). The film begins with a car crash, the vehicle careening off a cliff into the murky drink. Though the authorities are unable to find the vehicle’s female occupant (Candace Hilligoss), she eventually emerges, carrying no memory of how she survived. She proceeds with her plan, traveling to Utah for a job as a church organist. From there, writer-director Harvey, along with co-screenwriter John Clifford, comes up with downright ingenious ways to build scenes with unsettling layers with an obviously meager budget. The movie is ticklishly amusing given some of its more dated elements and amateurish … Continue reading Carey, Harvey, Hill, Maloof and Siskel, Shepard

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From the Archive: Unforgiven

Dan Seeger

As we continue to trek through the favored films I wrote about for the special year-end edition of The Reel Thing, I will now note that we also carved out a few minutes in the episode to discuss the worst films of 1992. Currently blessed with the selectivity of a part-time film critic, I’m decidedly ill-equipped to come up with such a list, but we had no shortage of contenders back then, especially with small-town screens serving as our main source of cinema. So, straight from the script, here’s my list of the worst films of 1992: Look, there’s a … Continue reading From the Archive: Unforgiven

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Eight

Dan Seeger

Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth is spectacularly discombobulating. The bare bones of the plot make it seem as plain and direct as can be: Catherine (Elizabeth Moss), reeling from the death of her father and a recent breakup, goes to spend a week at a lake house with her best friend, Virginia (Katherine Waterston). The broken neediness that Catherine carries with her parallels that of Virginia one year earlier, as does the lack of sympathy in others stirred by that vivid sorrow. The execution of the story, however, is anything but simple, with Perry taking the already strong emotions and … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Eight

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Greatish Performances #22

Dan Seeger

#22 — Oliver Platt as Dennis Murphy in Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998) Once a film about politics swerves toward satire, there’s a hope and expectation that it will be simultaneously revelatory and prescient, especially if the cinematic endeavor in question comes from one of Hollywood’s more revered figures. The fourth film to formally credit Warren Beatty as director eagerly viewed as precisely that sort of astute, forward-thinking examination of the nation’s ruptured system for identifying worthy public servants. Even at the time of its release, Bulworth seemed to be missing its target, in part because Beatty couldn’t entirely split the … Continue reading Greatish Performances #22

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Nine

Dan Seeger

Approaching ten years since the heartless, virulently irresponsible greed of countless Wall Street hooligans decimated the United States housing market, the one part of the nation’s economy thought to be practically bulletproof, and nearly took the entire global financial network down with it, and the repercussions against the perpetrators have been practically nonexistent. Damning journalism and ferocious editorials haven’t shifted the national narrative. Maybe comedy can help.  In adapting Michael Lewis’s the non-fiction book The Big Short, which itself is infused with an apoplectic wryness, filmmaker Adam McKay brings his long history as a boisterously committed comic voice (mostly working … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Nine

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Ten

Dan Seeger

With all due respect to the enjoyable spectacle from the end of the calendar year that put more eyeballs on Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson than ever before, Ex Machina is 2015 science fiction film featuring the two actors that approaches greatness. The directorial debut of Alex Garland, the film casts Gleeson as a programmer drone at a multinational tech corporation who gets selected for an exclusive trip to the home workshop of the company’s CEO (Isaac) with the promise of getting an early glimpse at the latest innovations. The breakthrough device is a robot dubbed Ava (Alicia Vikander), supposedly built … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Ten

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From the Archive: Reservoir Dogs

Dan Seeger

As you can see, getting to my yearly top ten list a little later that most has been a longtime problem. Back when the radio movie review program was a going concern, the program went on hiatus during the college’s winter break. Upon our return, we reintroduced ourselves with our respective top ten lists of the prior film year, which could be a challenge even at this late date, since there were plenty of Oscar hopefuls still dragging their feet when it came to claiming a screen in our humble Midwestern town (the nominations announcement and the ceremony itself both … Continue reading From the Archive: Reservoir Dogs