A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018). Writer-director John Krasinski’s horror film about sonically-attuned, carnivorous creatures is a splendid analogy for the anxieties of child-rearing. It’s also wildly implausible within the confines of its own fictional world, largely because the threats … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — A Quiet Place; All Fall Down; New Wave: Dare to Be Different
#42 — The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) Absolutely saturated with Cold War anxiety, The Manchurian Candidate is a brilliantly feverish thriller that captures a very particular time in American history, when a wholly characteristic national skepticism was turbine-spun into … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Forty-Two
Flow: For Love of Water (Irena Salina, 2008). Because there are few things we enjoy in our house than watching documentaries that offer an assessment, in painful detail, of how humanity is engaged in self-inflicted extinction through carelessly destructive exploitation of one of the most necessary substances for human existence. It make for a fun night of movie-watching. Real popcorn fare. Irene Salina’s film is compelling and suitably frightening, although it occasionally tangles itself up because there’s simply so much ground to cover. As admirably as it presents the scope of the problem, there are definitely times when it seems … Continue reading Donen and Kelly, Frankenheimer, Salina, Skolimowski, Téchiné
The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009). The premise is great. Four guys go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. The next morning they wake up from a blackout drunk with the groom-to-be missing, and they have to reconstruct their crazy night from increasingly absurd clues. It’s like Memento reimagined as a ribald comedy. The execution is another matter. The screenwriting team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (who saw this turn into a box office sensation just a few weeks after their handiwork resulted in a dreadful-looking bomb) just pile on incident after incident, getting laughs from jolting the audience … Continue reading Bunuel, Frankenheimer, Phillips, Wright, Wyler
Coffee for Two 