Trumbo (Askin, 2007)
One strength of the film is that it relies heavily on the words of a wordsmith.
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Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954)
Although the movie is named for Sterling Hayden’s character, the story really revolves around saloon girl turned saloon owner, Vienna, played by Joan Crawford. I’ll chock the ill-chosen title up to the fact that it’s 1954, and who wants to see a Western called Vienna?
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The Dude Abides (Falsani, 2009)
I never did attend film school or seminary, or design my own college major combining my two primary interests. And 25 years later, I’m not convinced Blood Simple is any more spiritually significant than any other noir-ish thriller that visits biblically proportioned consequences on the black hearts of its protagonists. But God bless Cathleen Falsani for trying to convince me it is.
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TIFF 2009 Summary: Chalk
No pretentious film critic ever made himself look smarter than everyone else (or ahead of the curve) by walking out of a major film festival shouting, “Campion! Hornby! Kore-eda!” or “me too!”
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The Road (Hillcoat, 2009)
As a professional literature teacher, I always feel guilty about not getting behind the Cormac McCarthy bandwagon. Surely anything that promotes reading of a more literate kind, that gets people to take serious literature seriously, ought to be championed, embraced...revered.
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Leslie, My Name is Evil (Harkema, 2009)
Helter Skelter + Saved! + South Park with a dash of Rocky Horror Picture Show thrown in. Now write a review for a Christian audience. My try is at CT Movies.
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Agora (Amenábar, 2009)
Kenneth R. Morefield reviews Agora at 1More Film Blog.
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Bright Star (Campion, 2009)
Jane Campion's Bright Star is a heartfelt, carefully drawn, masterpiece of a love story, It contains all the fire and penetration one would expect from a Campion film, but there is also a surprising--and welcome--tenderness as well.
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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.