Parallax View

Framing Pictures will be staring down the opening weekend of the Seattle International Film Festival. That’s right, the talkmeisters convene Friday, May 17, 5 p.m. at Northwest Film Forum for their monthly mulling over of movies new and old. Emend that: screen experiences new and old, because part of the evening will be devoted to [...]

Sam Peckinpah’s much-messed-with 1965 film Major Dundee has just come out on Blu-ray from the boutique label Twilight Time. The two-disc set features both the 2005 reissue based on a preview version of the movie and the version released theatrically 48 years ago. Both are worth having, as the following Queen Anne & Magnolia News [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 47, January 1976] Despite its director’s solid critical and commercial reputation and a Cannes Festival showing, The Nickel Ride arrived in Seattle well over a year late, as a first-run second feature to a new film being ballyhooed via the moronic action-film come-on. (That the new film happens to be [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 47, January 1976] Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, and music scorer John Morris notwithstanding, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother is no Young Frankenstein. What’s been crucially left out of the mix is virtually any feeling for those literary and cinematic forebears all but the most couthless of [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 47, January 1976] The Romantic Englishwoman affords an unexceptionably witty and civilized film experience from the first shivery glimpse of Glenda Jackson’s double reflection over the passing wintry German landscape to the last of the end credits: “A British–French Co-production”. Losey’s direction has never been more assured; the casting leaves [...]

MSN Movies recently polled the contributors to submit a list of their favorite films. Not a list of the best films ever made, or the most important, or most significant. This was about personal favorites, the films we return to, the films we love. Four Seattle film writers — all of them contributors to Parallax [...]

For an Oscar year in which several big awards were foregone conclusions, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences soiree this past Sunday included its share of surprises. It also featured an equable, perhaps accidental, distribution of the prizes among a range of movies. When we consider how set the Hollywood community appeared to [...]

[originally published on Straight Shooting] Best Pictures ‘Argo’ is better than The Broadway Melody, Cimarron, Cavalcade, The Great Ziegfeld, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, The Sound of Music, The Sting, Rocky, Gandhi, Driving Miss Daisy, Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, Slumdog Millionaire Best Pictures ‘Argo’ can orbit [...]

Argo, the movie inspired by the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, is going to win the Academy Award as best picture of 2012. Go ahead, place that bet in your office Oscar pool, but don’t expect to reap much advantage, because everybody else is just as sure that Argo is going to win. The signs are [...]

[Turner Classic Movies will show Cocoon, one of Ron Howard's pretty-good movies, this coming Sunday, Feb. 10, at 2:45 p.m. Pacific Time. The following review appeared in The Weekly during the film's 1985 first run. Also on screens then was another sci-fi film in a very different key, Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce. That won't be on [...]

[Originally published in Argus (Seattle), 1978] “The Duel” is one of the most mysterious stories Joseph Conrad ever wrote. Ostensibly based in fact, it recounts the bizarre involvement of two career officers in Napoleon’s Grande Armée who, in the first year of the Little Corporal’s reign, become adversaries in a private quarrel no other man—and [...]

Everybody gets to gripe about the Academy Awards. Sometimes it’s a matter of “How could you nominate that mess for anything but oblivion?” Sometimes it’s disbelief at a great performance or great camerawork being passed over to reward something not-necessarily-bad but not nearly as good. Then there are the compensation awards — giving somebody an [...]

First they made The Hurt Locker; then their blistering modern war film made them Academy Award winners. Even as they collected their Oscars, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter-producer Mark Boal were already at work on something tentatively tagged “The Hunt for Osama bin Laden.” Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, myriad arms of the [...]

Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films • Asleep in a balcony seat at the top of some golden-age movie palace, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is brought a telephone: The Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd) is calling from England … • In Lincoln, the magnetic clasp of hands at the moment Stanton (Bruce McGill) [...]

Welcome 2013 with one last look back at the best releases of 2011, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View and a few notable Seattle-based film critics. Sean Axmaker 1. Holy Motors 2. Zero Dark Thirty 3. Moonrise Kingdom 4. Margaret (2011 in NY and LA, didn’t screen elsewhere until 2012) 5. Cosmopolis 6. [...]