Category: ★★½
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No Highway in the Sky has a peculiar structure. It starts with Jack Hawkins; he’s just starting at a British aircraft manufacturer and, during his tour, meets scientist James Stewart, who’s hypothesized a catastrophic, inevitable failure for the latest, greatest plane. Stewart’s convinced the tails will rattle off the planes, which are made with a…
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Young Man with a Horn has a third act problem. It’s got too many of them as it tries to find a way not to end on a down note. As a result, each third act gets more depressing, more dire, and correspondingly adjusts the expected bounce-back. But Horn’s got a bookending device with co-star…
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Victor Sjöström directs, stars, and adapts The Phantom Carriage. He gives himself a great showcase. Most of the film is a breathtaking character study of an abject bastard. The film throws reason after reason for Sjöström being an irredeemable, abject bastard, and none of them stick. He’s always ready to deliver more bastard. It’s his…
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The best thing about Much Ado About Nothing, except the dialogue, is Delamere’s direction. Not the stage direction, Rourke did that job, but Delamere’s direction of this recording. There’s some ho-hum headroom stuff going on to keep actors in the shot, but it’s a phenomenal showcase of the actors’ performances. They don’t credit the editor,…
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Gunpowder Milkshake is a moody, neon, sometimes minimalist mix of neo-noir and spaghetti Western. Director Papushado approaches the film’s budgetary constraints with creativity and ingenuity, focusing tightly on lead Karen Gillan and her dangerous presence. The film bookends with noir narration from Gillan, which creates a dreamscape for the runtime. A highly stylized dreamscape, full…
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Avalon is not a success. It very frustratingly waits until the very end of the picture to clearly not succeed. After trying real hard, there’s just nothing to it. Writer and director Levinson makes a whole bunch of big swings in how he directs the narrative, which is an attempt at doing lyrical structure–just one based…
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The evil in Deliver Us from Evil is specifically Lee Jung-jae’s sadistic villain but generally the entire world of the film, which features drug kingpins, child kidnapping, government assassins turned hitmen, human traffickers, real estate swindlers, organ thieves, and crooked cops. At one point the film gets super-judgy about Park Jeong-min’s cabaret singer complaining about…
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The first act of Hard Boiled is fantastic. Between Woo’s glossy, smooth jazz but with bite tone and Chow Yun-Fat’s glorious lead performance; it’s all like butter. There’s a big, intricate shootout with Woo (and his editors Ah-Chik, Kai Kit-Wai, and David Wu) doing masterful work, there’s some workplace humor with cop Chow being on…
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The Famous Sword Bijomaru is a tragedy. Well, at its best, it’s a tragedy. The film—which runs sixty-five minutes and has zero subplots, very few close-ups, and no establishing shots or sequences—opens with apprentice swordsmith Hanayagi Shôtarô presenting his benefactor, Oya Ichijirô, with a new sword. Hanayagi is an orphan, Oya took him in at…
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The Bee Gees deserve a more comprehensive documentary thanHow Can You Mend a Broken Heart. The film skips over a lot of specifics in the early years, then ends its main narrative in the late 1970s with the Disco Demolition, which could have been a major turning point in the film as they’re talking about…
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Eun-hee (Park Ji-hu) is an average Seoul eighth grader circa 1994, which would be fine if being average weren’t a one-way ticket to nowhere. Park’s the youngest of three children; while presumably eldest sister Park Soo-yeon has already screwed up and is going to a crappy school across the bridge, son Son Sang-yeon is doing…
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Samurai Marathon has some strange epilogue problems; all of a sudden the movie’s about marathons, when it turns out the marathon isn’t a particularly big deal in the story. It’s central to the story, but as a narrative tool. It provides the right stage for these characters. Though, with a title like Samurai Marathon, you’re…
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Maybe a third of the way into Cool Hand Luke, the film all of a sudden starts getting really good. It’s when Jo Van Fleet makes her appearance, which provides the film both its single best acting—Newman and Van Fleet are exquisite in the scene—and also director Rosenberg showing he’s actually got a handle on…
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A Safe Place tracks the relationship of apparently financially secure but listless hippie Tuesday Weld and her square of a new boyfriend, Phil Proctor. Weld spends her time presumably stoned—though we don’t see her smoke, her friends are always rolling a joint or smoking one—and dwelling on the past. She can’t get over the lack…
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There are two profoundly well-directed scenes in the third act of The Daytrippers, including the last one, so you really want to give what you can of it a pass. Daytrippers is very straightforward, even through the various complexities of the third act, but just because Mottola (who wrote as well as directed) knows what…
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Erik the Viking is a great example of when the director doesn’t know how to direct the script. What makes it peculiar is… director Jones wrote the script. The film, an absurd comedy about a group of Vikings trying to end Ragnarok so they people will stop killing each other, starts with the the very…
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If you tilt to just the right angle, for a while you can see Dead End as the tale of three people from a poor neighborhood and how life has worked out for them as they got closer to their thirties. Humphrey Bogart grew from a “not too bad” young punk to a public enemy…
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Every once in a while, The Ref lets you forget it’s just a comedy vehicle for stand-up comic Denis Leary and so doesn’t need to actually be a good drama and just lets you enjoy the acting. Demme’s direction is simultaneously detached, thoughtful, and sincere. He and editor Jeffrey Wolf craft these wonderful comedic scenes.…
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The Spy Who Dumped Me has, rather unfortunately, a punny title. It’s an accurate title—the film’s about spy Justin Theroux dumping his civilian and not aware he’s a spy girlfriend Mila Kunis—but it doesn’t capture the mood of the film. No doubt, it’s a hard one to title—because even though it starts with Kunis going…
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Becket has some genre constraints. Significant ones. It’s a king-sized 70mm Panavision English history epic only it doesn’t feature any big battles. In fact, it goes out of its way not to show battles. It’s also an early sixties historical epic and it’s trying to be a little edgy in how it shows the relationship…
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There’s a lot of fine direction in The King’s Speech. Hooper does exceedingly well when he’s showcasing lead Colin Firth’s acting or showing how Firth, who starts the film as Duke of York and ends it King of England, moves through the world as this sheltered, unawares babe. Of sorts. These successful sequences would stand…
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Well-made don’t call us a superhero movie superhero origin story about superpowers but can’t control them Gugu Mbatha-Raw returning home to mom Lorraine Toussaint and daughter Saniyya Sidney who both can control the powers. Lots of secrets, a handful of lies. Excellent performances from the three leads; some have better parts than others–Toussaint gets a…
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Constantly charming if not particularly ambitious coming of age story about eighties British Pakistani teenager Viveik Kalra (in a great lead performance) and his discovery of Bruce Springsteen at just the right time in his life. The film does a fine job showing how working class travails can be utterly unrelated to geography or ethnicity,…
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Uneven but charming tale of Matthew Broderick (an analogue for writer Neil Simon) and his time, in 1945, at Army boot camp in, you guessed it, Biloxi, MS. Simon’s adapting his stage play, which explains the stagey plotting; however, the film itself never feels stagey in the scenes, probably because director Nichols takes the whole…
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Vibrant retelling of the Orpheus myth during Rio de Janeiro’s Carnaval. Great looking and sounding, with a really likable cast–director Camus and co-writer Jacques Viot don’t have the adapting the legend part cracked. They’ve got the Brazil during Rio part; maybe it’s the same problem in Vinicius de Moraes’s source play. Leads Breno Mello and…
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Very smart comedy about married lawyers Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She’s the crusading progressive, he’s the assistant D.A. Usually they’re just adorable together but then Hepburn defends a wife on an attempted murder rap–the wife (a phenomenal Judy Holliday) shot her cheating husband. And of course D.A. Tracy’s the prospector; martial courtroom warfare ensues.…
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Probably rather confusing sequel to successful television show (made four years after the show finishes, but set a couple years later) about a troubled but surviving country house at the end of the 1920s. The family and staff have to prepare for a royal visit. Drama, action, romance, and comedy ensue. Good acting, brilliantly constructed…
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All-star adaptation relies almost as heavily on laughs as on action, with Michael York’s D’Artagnan simultaneously gymnastic and clumsy in his sword fights; he’s just come to Paris to become a Musketeer and, while delayed from that goal, finds camaraderie with all-ready Musketeers Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay; he also finds romance with…
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Short on budget, long on enthusiasm OZ “sequel”–to the original book, not the famous 1939 movie adaptation–returns Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) to a very different Oz, where the bad guys have taken over since she left. She’s got to gather a new bunch of friends to save the old ones from the ominous Nome King (Nicol…
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Part special effects spectacular, part protracted romantic melodrama has Navy nurse Kate Beckinsale coming between best buds and Army fliers Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. Will they have time to resolve the love triangle as World War II looms and they all get stationed at, you guessed it, Pearl Harbor? Really bad script (by Randall…
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