Smart Words About Cinema
[Originally published in Pacific Northwest, January 1988] • Hope and Glory: Down among the green leaves of his family’s backyard garden, young Bill Rohan (Sebastian Rice Edwards) confronts the wizard Merlin, while in the house the stillness of the adults ’round a grumbling radio signals that the Second World War has just been declared…. • [...]
Welcome 2012 with one last look back at the best releases of 2011, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View. Critics listed in reverse alphabetical order Andrew Wright (as posted at Salt Lake Weekly) 1. Melancholia 2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes 3. Cave of Forgotten Dreams 4. 13 Assassins 5. Drive [...]
The 2011 Village Voice Film Poll is out and three Parallax View contributors participated this year. Just for the record, and because it’s no surprise, The Tree of Life took the top spot, just as it did for the Indiewire survey and the MSN poll. As for the lists, you can find all the contributors [...]
MSN Movies published its annual Best of the Year poll this week, featuring Top Ten lists from thirteen MSN writers including a trio of Parallax View contributors: Richard T. Jameson, Kathleen Murphy and Sean Axmaker. The rest of the line-up isn’t too shabby either: Jim Emerson, Don Kaye, Glenn Kenny, Kim Morgan, Mary Pols, James [...]
Welcome 2011 with one last look back at the best releases of 2010, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View. Sean Axmaker 1. Carlos 2. Let Me In 3. The Social Network 4. White Material 5. Winter’s Bone 6. The Ghost Writer 7. Wild Grass 8. Eccentricities Of A Blond Haired Girl 9. Sweetgrass [...]
Best-of lists are by their nature subjective things, and even more so when it comes to DVD/Blu-ray. What makes a DVD release the “best”? The movie itself? The video and audio quality of the mastering and presentation? The supplements? Rarity of the title? Scope of the collection? Critical acclaim? Cult demand? Some inexplicable balance of [...]
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.
I’m not an adventurous filmgoer. Meaning I’m very seldom in the house for a first-run Hollywood picture. There’s generally a lag of a few years – during which a film acquires something of a reputation, or maybe I caught part on it on television – that I’ll check it out more fully. And then – [...]
[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 bag, [...]
[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 into frame [...]
[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 [...]
[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 plays [...]
[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 Farmer) [...]
[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 Red [...]