Newbury literally created his own artistic place that’s simultaneously familiar and unclassifiable.
With Topsy-Turvy, Leigh jettisons his usual pinpoint focus in favor of a broad, inclusive narrative.
Once Nora Ephron ditches the whole social impetus of her remake, the movie settles in to a lovely rhythm.
The Mackendrick film’s plot and imagery both rely on the timely, English steam trains that always seem to be within earshot of the action.
With its mythic production long in the past, Lucky Lady now stands as a highly enjoyable, underappreciated adventure film.
Absolutely worth seeking out for diehard fans of the 1970s Hollywood renaissance.
This past summer should have belonged to Joe Dante.
The original Hairspray is just funky and enthusiastic enough to make its ham-handed moral go down easy.
In Hitchcock’s peerless ’50s and ’60s work, the storytelling and visual style are so intertwined as to be indistinguishable.
Take Two #9: Love Affair (1939) & An Affair to Remember (1957), with Complaints About Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Superficial qualities aside, the movies are entirely the same, even line for line in many cases.
If the remake stinks, that’s only because it removes the moody pacing and reveals the essential silliness under the former’s classy Euro-glaze.
There are a hundred objections to The Searchers, none of which are as convincing as the film itself.
These are fundamentally directors’ films, but any discussion of them has to come back to the lead performances.
The older 3:10 to Yuma harkens back to a time when westerns were westerns, with their own assumed moral systems and thematic boilerplate.
Ahh, baseball! The invigorating thrill of freshly cut grass, the sweet pop of leather and oak on a summer day!
The Big Chill is a master class in Hollywood co-option of fundamentally noncommercial material.
Most sadly, The Wiz collapses under the weight of its creators’ own good intentions.
The film is an incredible statement of friendship, and one of the most inspired depictions of the creative process.
All invasion stories are allegorical, which makes this pair of movies a perfect vehicle to debut this series of essays.