Before I can go any further, I need to tell you a bit of my own family history. I grew up with an amazing, loving father. He discovered he had a brain aneurysm in his temporal lobe, behind his eye when I was twelve and my brother eight years old. My father was only forty-four years old when he had his first stroke. One of … Continue reading The Whale (2022)
A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco. I’m going to be honest: I have tried to start this article four times now. All because I have no idea what I want to say about the film Casablanca. It’s a film that I own. It’s a film … Continue reading 3. Casablanca (1942)
In German-occupied Poland during World War II, industrialist Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis. Schindler’s List is, arguably, the defining Holocaust film. I remember having to get a waiver signed when I was in the eighth grade, so we could watch the film once we finished our Holocaust unit. (Yes. We had a Holocaust unit.) … Continue reading 8. Schindler’s List (1993)
I’m going to be completely honest: I was real disappointed with this film. I’m a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson, as both a writer and a director, but Licorice Pizza was not it. Right from the start, I was uncomfortable. Our two main characters, Alana, played by Alana Haim, and Gary, played by Cooper Hoffman, have a ten year age difference. Alana is twenty-five years … Continue reading Licorice Pizza (2021)
A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer’s client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother. One of the few true horror films on AFI’s 100 Greatest Films list is this Alfred Hitchcock classic. Released in theaters in 1960, I remember reading somewhere that, once the film began, you wouldn’t be … Continue reading 14. Psycho (1960)
A disillusioned college graduate finds himself torn between his older lover and her daughter. I find it very fitting that, as I sit down to write this post, it looks as if it may rain outside. I have only ever watched Mike Nichols’ The Graduate twice in my life: once as I was ending high school, going into college and the other in my junior year of … Continue reading 17. The Graduate (1967)
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter was a film that hit me unexpectedly. I went in knowing very little about it. All I knew is that the film was adapted and directed by Gyllenhaal, and starred Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley, and was categorized by Netflix as “cerebral, understated, intimate”. And that’s it. That’s all I had to go off of. I had no … Continue reading The Lost Daughter (2021)
An Oklahoma family driven off their farm by the poverty and hopelessness of the Dust Bowl joins the westward migration to California, suffering the misfortunes of the homeless in the Great Depression. Don’t you hate it when a movie made in the 1940s is still relevant 81 years later? The Grapes of Wrath starred Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and Russell Simpson as members of the Joad … Continue reading 23. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Directed by Irvin Winkler, written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, and starring Sandra Bullock and Jeremy Northam, The Net is a film that is only dated by the technology displayed. The overall plot of the film has aged tremendously and it’s, dare I say it, a good movie. For those unfamiliar with the 1995 film, Sandra Bullock plays a computer programmer named Angela Bennett. … Continue reading 90s Flashback: The Net (1995)
Atticus Finch, a lawyer in the Depression-era South, defends a black man against an undeserved rape charge, and his children against prejudice. The last time I watched Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird, I was in highschool. Freshman year, I think it was. We had just finished reading the book, so naturally that was followed with the film. I remember really disliking the book, and not … Continue reading 25. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
