#40 — His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951) There’s so much messiness to sort through with His Kind of Woman that it makes the inclusion on any sort of best list a bit of a marvel. And of course … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty
#15 — Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells in Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer, 1979) By now, it’s firmly established that playing a historical figure necessitates an actor pursue expert mimicry and slavish adherence to documented tics and tendencies above all … Continue reading Greatish Performances #15
#41 — Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) History doesn’t slow down, and it doesn’t pause to give affected observers time to process what has happened. Sometimes art has to rush to keep up. In the process, it can unearth … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the Fifties — Number Forty-One
At this point in the director’s career, it may be easier and more instructive to catalog how a new Wes Anderson film is different than its predecessors. For example, his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is packed with all the … Continue reading What a beautiful dream that could flash on the screen in a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954). I sometimes identify Akira Kurosawa’s Ran as epic filmmaking writ as large as the screen allows. Seven Samurai, made over thirty years earlier, is epic filmmaking in the inverse, pruned and delicate and piercingly intimate. There are major moments to it, too, and scenes of pounding cinematic glory, but what really makes it work is the painstaking intricacy of Kurosawa’s storytelling. There’s a reason other creators return to it time and again, extracting what is useful for their own tales of valor and ironic victory. Kurosawa and his collaborators (Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni are … Continue reading Frears, Kurosawa, Robson, Sturges, Taylor
Reviewing films in a small, Central Wisconsin community led to some strange situations. It was always a bit of a crapshoot as to what would actually come to town, not just on opening weekend but at any point during its run. We spent a lot of time with our weekly radio show trying to figure out how to handle it when only one new release came to town, or other things that we were actively excited to cover dragged their way in well past the point when the national media was covering them. Given that, I’m sometimes amazed at the … Continue reading From the Archive: Rush
#42 — High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) Beware the film critic who has stumbled upon a thesis. This isn’t automatically a problem, but it does lead to an overvaluing of certain films over others, sometimes for fairly questionable reasons. For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which we will get to before this feature has run its course (although more quickly than most writers about film would consider prudent), has been elevated to the consensus pinnacle among The Master’s works perhaps as much because of how neatly it fits into pre-existing narratives of the his predilections and obsession than of any exhibited … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty-Two
I once posited in this space that Veronica Mars was one of the unsung (or at least under-sung) creations in the long transformation of the television series model from collections of loosely connected episodes to the mythology-heavy novels divided into … Continue reading Now she walks through her sunken dream to the seat with the clearest view and she’d hooked on the silver screen
It’s girl detective weekend at the movies, isn’t it? The main thing that strikes me about this review from an August 1991 edition of The Reel Thing is the rapid way that certain film careers can crumble away, especially for actresses of, shall we say, a certain age. When we started doing the radio show in 1990, Kathleen Turner was a performer of great significance and acclaim. By the time we were done, three years later, her career was reeling from a series of commercial missteps. Her wonderfully wicked and wackadoo turn in John Water’s 2004 film, Serial Mom, was … Continue reading From the Archive: V.I. Warshawski
#43 — Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953) I like to think that Billy Wilder is the only filmmaker — hell, maybe the only creator — who could make a film like Stalag 17 work, but that’s clearly not the case, on the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty-Three
Coffee for Two 