Agora (Amenábar, 2009)
Kenneth R. Morefield reviews Agora at 1More Film Blog.
Category: Reviews
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Vision (von Trotta, 2009)
Films that depict communal religious life with nuance and sympathy are rare, and those that probe without cliché the relationships, communal and familial, between women are rarer still. So why… Continue reading "Vision (von Trotta, 2009)"
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To Be or Not To Be (Lubitsch, 1942)
The larger point, though, is that Hollywood has participated from the beginning in shaping our attitudes in the service of a political or ideological point of view. The Reader was not the first portrayal of the German people as being beleaguered by Nazism, nor was Quentin Tarantino the first to mine the fascist mindset for Juvenalian satire.
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Screen Door Jesus (Davis, 2003)
Part Short Cuts, part Lone Star, part Saved!, with a pinch of Flannery O'Connor thrown in for good measure, Screen Door Jesus will delight a few, infuriate a few, bore a few, and remain unseen by a multitude.
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Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009)
You should know the resulting film is one where the titular Basterds are not the focus, where two-thirds of the film is subtitled French and German, and where nearly all the scant action scenes already appeared in the trailers. But misleading trailers aside, the resulting film left me stunned. This movie is going to make some people angry and shocked, but Tarantino succeeds in making the movie I never imagined, but maybe actually always wanted. It's an audacious, dizzying, beautiful cinematic fever dream.
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Julie & Julia (Ephron, 2009)
In fact, there may be the tiniest hint of feminine fantasy in the film's stew of supportive masculinity--made all the more suspect by the knowledge that Powell's second memoir (forthcoming) chronicles her extra-marital affair.
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Forgiving Dr. Mengele (Hercules, 2006)
The act of reviewing carries with it a strain of judgment, and when reviewing a documentary it is hard not to feel as though one is judging the subject and not just the artists' presentation of him or her. Which of us would dare judge Eva Moses Kor?
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Waltz With Bashir (Folman, 2008)
Several times while watching Waltz With Bashir I thought about the notion that by the measure we judge we shall be weighed, and I don't doubt that contributed to my dissatisfaction with the film.
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The Informer (Ford, 1935)
In an interview republished in the anthology Interviews With Film Directors, Jean Mitry cites John Ford's desire to balance innovation and aesthetics with populist appeal. "Directing is craft," Ford is quoted as saying, "If a director's films do not make money, he cannot expect to retain the confidence and good will of the men who put up the wherewithal" (195).
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Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
One problem, of course, with a great books (or great films) curriculum is that we get students to equate "classic" with dull, uninteresting, or obsolete.