Below you'll find a list of all posts from January, 2017
(Welcome to Movies for the Resistance, a weekly column intended to showcase films with particular pertinence for 2017. One of the fundamental purposes of art in general, and movies in particular, is to serve as a spiritual armory: bringing hope, timely lessons and shared experiences when times are dark. They can move us to positive political action, lend insight to …
It’s another quiet day today, with just two notable features to discuss. We’ll start with the freaky one: Ringu, the film which, along with The Grudge, set the pace for the J-horror movement of the late 1990s. Gore Verbinski remade it as the smash hit The Ring, but the original is far more unsettling. It opened in Japan today in 1998. On …
Charlie Chaplin has been on our minds a lot of late, and today saw the release of one of his masterpiece: City Lights, the story of Chaplin’s ubiquitous Little Tramp and the blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) who falls in love with him. It’s vintage Chaplin at its finest, and if you don’t get a little misty-eyed at the finale, you …
At the top of today’s list Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester, released in 1956. It stands as a high point of Kaye’s career, both for the marvelous way he sends up Errol Flynn-style swashbuckling (complete with Basil Rathbone as the villain) and for the marvelous wordplay of the script (“the pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the …
In The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell posited two poles of human perception. At one end sits waking, conscious life, which is mainly taken up by the necessities of existence: jobs, bills, children, family, chores. At the other sits deep sleep – sleep without dreams – in which we commune with whatever cosmic forces lie beyond this level …
(Welcome to Movies for the Resistance, a weekly column intended to showcase films with particular pertinence for 2017. One of the fundamental purposes of art in general, and movies in particular, is to serve as a spiritual armory: bringing hope, timely lessons and shared experiences when times are dark. They can move us to positive political action, lend insight to …
It’s a quiet day for movie releases, but I’ll go with one that deserves some love. Fierce Creatures, the follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, reunited the same four principal cast members for a new bit of zaniness. It lacks some of the zip of its predecessor — the absence of director Charles Crichton probably played a hand — but …
There are good movies, there are great movies, and then there are movies that have become an ingrained part of the culture. The greatest movie ever made? You could make the case very easily. The one and only Casablanca went wide today in 1943. A few years later, Robert Montgomery attempted a strange — and ultimately unsuccessful — cinematic experiment …
Show of hands: who wants to watch a bracing 104 minutes of Soviet-era propaganda? I knew you would! Sergei Eisenstein’s October opened today in 1928: generally regarded as one of the masterpieces of Soviet cinema and granting its director license to expound upon numerous cinematic theories — like montage — that today have become standard practi- You in the back, quit falling …
We start off today with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who appeared in one of their very best collaborations, Woman of the Year on this date in 1942. Director George Stevens knew how to bring their incomparable comic chemistry to life, and though this was only their first movie together, it proved to be the spark that lit the flame. They …