Parallax View

[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]
You don’t have to care or even know much about football to enjoy North Dallas Forty. Ted Kotcheff doesn’t seem to know much about football either, but that didn’t stop him from making a film about it. Well, no, not really. North Dallas Forty is barely about football [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]
Alan Alda is an unimpeachably right guy. He’s attractive, intelligent, multifariously talented, and probably good for the ecology. He is a model of sociopolitical conscientiousness, and a 100-percent masculine romantic icon without a touch of male-chauvinist-piggery. No matter how often or deservedly his talents [...]

Squeezing in just before the Oscar nominations are announced, here are a few final lists and remarks from Parallax View contributors and friends, along with those published by Seattle top critics, as a snapshot of the way we see 2009.

[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]
When Hitchcock had to set a spy movie in Switzerland, he decided that the most effective way to exploit the milieu would be to honor an armchair tourist’s idea of the place. Hence, he built his plot and key sequences around those geographical and cultural [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]
Horse comes over the horizon and slants down into the golden valley, right there I figure Sydney Pollack auteur time, whoa up. I mean, if Sydney Pollack can be an auteur, it isn’t worth being one. But he wants it, oh, he can taste it. [...]

Images, lines, gestures, moods from the films of the years…
In 1971, Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy offered the readers of Movietone News a different kind of celebration of the best of the year. In addition to the traditional “Top Ten” lists that every critic is apparently obligated by law to provide, they attempted to [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 36 Number 1, January/February 2000, reprinted by permission]
• The middle-aged Gerald (Alain Libolt) taking out his glasses to look at a photo of a woman who may become his wife—Eric Rohmer’s golden Autumn Tale…

• One of those days it’s a minute away from snowing: the dancing [...]

[Originally published in Film Comment Volume 32 Number 1, January/February 1996, reprinted by permission]
• Oriental views of train bridges into Brooklyn, Smoke…
• Birds, insects, air: the sounds around the Roseman Bridge, The Bridges of Madison County…
• 1948 sunshine, and a rapturously integral job of period re-creation that never preens as such—Devil in [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978]
• Archetypal cinema: the opening of Star Wars. The foreword plunges us, in media res, into the serial of our moviegoing lives. Then the camera drops its field of view, a planet heaves into sight to lend scale to the universe, and a spacecraft angles [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 29 Number 1, January-February 1993, reprinted by permission]
• The wait by the tree, and how Will Munny drinks after getting the news, Unforgiven: as director and actor, Clint Eastwood in excelsis…
• “The pleasure was all ‘mine”—The Crying Game….
• The Player: The fax curling out of the dashboard [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 38, January 1975]
• The moment of the year, probably: Day for Night: Georges Delerue phones in from Paris to play one of the key themes for the film-in-progress, at the same time a package of books arrives for use as props in an upcoming scene. As the music [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 33 Number 1, January/February 1997, reprinted by permission]
• The car materializing out of the whited-out mystery of snow/land/sky—the opening of Fargo…
• The English Patient: closeup, the look of pearls against Kristin Scott Thomas’s sweat-dampened throat … rediscovering the sensuality of the camera eye…
• Nobody (Gary [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 35 Number 1, January/February 1999, reprinted by permission]
• Shrapnel hanging in the air, every shard in razor-sharp focus, as if molecules of the film itself had been startled out of the emulsion by the battle: Saving Private Ryan…
• A bird born dying in battle: The Thin [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 53, January 1977]
• The premiere of The Clansman, and D.W. Griffith’s stately acknowledgement of the cheers-the night we’d like to have attended, and thanks to Peter Bogdanovich for enabling us to be there: Nickelodeon….
• Ther duel in the barn: shafts of blue light, the flutter of pigeon wings, and the [...]

[originally published in Film Comment Volume 34 Number 1, January/February 1998, reprinted by permission]
• The death of Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), L.A. Confidential: The gunshot comes as a cinematically rare and genuine shock, but this is crowned by a supreme actor’s-moment: Jack’s multivalenced chuckle—shoulda known better—as he plants the clue with [...]