DISCLAIMER is a worthy, interesting, pointed work. It is full of committed performances, incredible technique and craft, and important themes. And yet, in some ways, it feels like a missed opportunity.
Alfonso Cuaron is one of the most talented and daring of the current crop of world cinema masters. Each new movie is a cause for celebration. Each new work is an experiment in genre, form, narrative. Yet each movie coheres to a continuum of Cuaron concerns…
Read MoreFirst off, please watch this movie (it's available to stream on CRITERION). It's a masterpiece that somehow has slipped through the cracks of the more talked about canonical movies of the time.
PANIQUE, based on a novel by master existential mystery/thriller author, Georges Simenon, directed by the famed Julien Duvivier, and staring the incomparable Michel Simon (one of the best actors to have ever practiced the craft), is brutal.
And unfortunately, in our strange and uncertain times, maybe a brutal “it can happen here” wake up call is what we need.
It tells the story of a mistrusted loner…
Read MoreNo one knows who wrote folk classic, “Wayfaring Stranger.” It emerges from history fully formed as if the wanderer has always been lost, always singing of his journey home. Hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away, the song plays out of a car speaker before a crash…
Titane opens with …
Read MoreSome films are like a punch to the face. It’s a good feeling. Rarely does, a project come along that hits all over your body for the entire duration. This is frenzied filmmaking, held together through sustained energy. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is like driving through an hour-long carwash full of fists, an assault on the senses that doesn’t let up. This would be trying if the approach wasn’t so electric.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man uses…
Read MoreThe vessel that houses our perspective, desire, and identity is a flawed mechanism. Vital functions operate in silence and impact waking life. Some fixate or make changes out of necessity but there’s a population with a fractured relationship, living as a sort of floating head. Bodies are uncomfortable to think about because …
Read MoreIt's hard to tell where the hilarious satire/dark comedy of BODIES BODIES BODIES ends and the self-conscious drive to be a movie of the moment begins.
The two herk and jerk in awkward dance movements throughout. But still, in the final analysis, the movie is mostly a fun, interesting take on the excesses of current American culture and thinking through the metaphoric lens of black comedy and horror.
A group of ...
Read MoreMEGALOPOLIS does not work. MEGALOPOLIS does work.
MEGALOPOLIS contains laughably horrible sequences. MEGALOPOLIS contains filmmaking as good as anything Coppola has ever done.
MEGALOPOLIS takes a left turn (among constant left turns) at the start of its final third that lead this writer to think the movie, which had been wobbling the whole time, had totally come off the potter's wheel.
Then it turned out it still had a few more things to say. And it ended with a shot that...
Read MoreIt may be with some cheek that we write a short(ish) piece on the movie epic-one of cinema's most difficult and rewarding genres.
Where do you start? Where do you end?
We are even more perverse as to leave out some of the highest watermarks-2001, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, The Godfathers Pts 1 & 2-get no mention here (as much as we love them). They're so talked about as to risk becoming white noise.
The movie epic is endangered. It runs the risk of extinction. We can not let that happen.
Because the movie epic is, in some ways, cinema's cathedrals. When you watch a great one, you...
Read MoreIt's funny what movies become comfort foods.
Who would have known thirteen years later that Tomas Alfredson's dense layered adaptation of John Le Carre's famous spy novel TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY starring a re-energized "I'm here to act!" Gary Oldman would become a go-to re-watchable.
The movie follows...
Read MoreFellow movie lovers of the world. Here we are. September 2024. Movies have survived world wars, global pandemics, depressions, fear of nuclear annihilation, television, the internet, streaming...
Read MoreScrewball comedies are characterized by madcap energy and eccentric characters. They act as musical comedic crescendos that climax in a kind of comedic apocalypse of craziness.
If you love 'em, you love 'em. If you're not on their wavelength, they often strike you as unnatural and head scratching.
For this writer though, very few things beat a great screwball comedy. They're as cinematic as any great movie.
Moviemakers Howard Hawks (TWENTIETH CENTURY, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, MONKEY BUSINESS along with BRINGING UP BABY) and Preston Sturges (SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, THE MIRACLE AT MORGAN'S CREEK, THE LADY EVE, etc) stand as the twin giants of this subgenre. And their movies have influenced Peter Bogdonovich (WHAT'S UP DOC), the Coen Brothers (RAISING ARIZONA, THE BIG LEBOWSKI), and David O Russell (FLIRTING WITH DISASTER).
The heyday of the screwball comedy era was the 1930's. And Hawks' 1938 BRINGING UP BABY starring megawatt megastars Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant along with an ensemble of hilarious character actors is one of the quicksilver zeniths of that period.
Grant plays zoologist David Huxley who needs just one more bone for the brontosaurus skeleton he's been working on for four years. He also needs to close a one million dollar endowment deal before he gets married to his prim fiance Alice Swallow.
But no sooner does...
Read MoreNo Country For Old Men (2007, adapt & dir by Ethan & Joel Coen, from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, starring Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly MacDonald, Woody Harrelson)
SPECIAL NOTE: This piece inaugurates an occasional series of longer form film pieces. Every now and then, Secret Movie Club will take a deeper dive/look into a movie, moviemaker, aspect of movie culture. There will be more research, trivia, behind the scenes, facts about the work/artist/aspect of cinema culture we’re exploring. Let us know what you think and what you
It has been seventeen years since the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men opened in movie theaters in 2007 and the movie feels like it is gaining in power and importance.
It was hailed as a return to form masterpiece from the get-go by critics. The Coens had just made Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004) back to back; two movies often considered pretty minor in the Coens’ formidable body of work.
No Country would go on to win 8 Academy Awards besting Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood at the awards ceremony.
This bloody, unsettling, and, for many first viewers, puzzling movie is also one of the Coens’...
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