[originally published in Film Comment Volume 31 Number 1, January-February 1995, reprinted by permission]
• At the beginning of Pulp Fiction, Amanda Plummer laying her head on the coffeeshop table and smiling: “I’m not gonna kill anybody”….
• Just-right treatment of place, climate, community in the main-title sequence of Nobody’s Fool…
• Bunny (Bill Murray) dipping a toe in the pool before stepping in to be baptized—Ed Wood…
• Orson Welles’s photograph banished upon the waters, Heavenly Creatures…
• Panhandling with comb kazoo (and fly open), Three Colors: White…
• In Being Human‘s medieval chapter, Robin Williams crests a hill to espy a little clot of battle at a bridge in the middle of nowhere. When a wounded man staggers up from the bloody fray, gasping “Help me!”, our hero retreats, declining an invitation to that particular story….
• The Hudsucker Proxy: Shadow of clock hand pointing Expressionistically at Norville (Tim Robbins) as he enters the executive. suite….