Smart Words About Cinema
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) [...]
[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…. • [...]
Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Control (John Hurt), aced out of MI6 after the disaster in Budapest, announces, “Smiley is coming with me.” Smiley (Gary Oldman), his back to the camera, tilts his head a millimeter—surprise? acceptance? both?… • The Descendants: the sound Matt King’s (George Clooney) [...]
[Originally published in The Informer, January 1983] • The first shots of E.T.: the downward slant of … something, maybe just our own gaze, across the starry night sky, and then the cut to the extraterrestrial craft already at rest on Earth… • Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), bowling through the slaughterhouse to confront the other [...]
Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films • The wall that is, and isn’t, there: The Ghost Writer… • In the hills at night, car lights on a distant curve of road—The American and Let Me In… • Gold-brown chicks cupped in Teardrop’s (John Hawkes) palms; memento mori in Winter’s Bone… • The nub [...]
[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 [...]
[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…. • The duel in the barn: shafts of blue light, the flutter of pigeon wings, [...]
[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 which his killer [...]
[originally published in Steadycam No. 49, February 2006] • Broken Flowers: Bill Murray fitting himself around a forkful of perfectly formed carrot slices… • The Squid and the Whale: The father (Jeff Daniels), coming by what is no longer his own home to pick up one of his sons, points at a TV set and [...]