Clift’s performance is austere and sensitive, and he is so deep inside his character that one cannot see a false moment or move. Michael Logan seems like a man who has found a way of being himself by being a priest: he is alert, direct, frank, moral, and sensitive, contemplative, sacrificing, and of service.
Category: Film Reviews
American Monsters in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Godfather
In light of the fact that little could be said to be at stake—the son of a major criminal becomes a criminal, and he and other criminals try to kill each other, one would think that the story would have less grasp of the imagination of the viewer, but its grasp is secure thanks to the attitude, atmosphere, and tone of The Godfather.
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, a great film focused on Sicilian aristocracy and cultural change
Burt Lancaster is the patriarch, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the prince of Salina, and his way of life is threatened by revolutionary change: the struggle to unify Italy, and the rising commercial middle class, are at his door. There are predictions that the aristocracy will lose its status, the prominence of its values, and possibly its lands, and that the church may lose as much too.
Death Ends A Holiday: Julia Murat’s film Found Memories
Are they happy or unhappy? Are they afraid or resigned? Are any of them ready to die? The simplicity of the lives of the people in the village gives them a dignified, mysterious quality verging on myth: can they stay alive forever, simply because they choose to? The film achieves its power honestly, plainly, slowly, but power—and finally charm—it does have.
Labor Class Conflict and Interracial Friendship: Edge of the City, starring Sidney Poitier and John Cassavetes, with Ruby Dee and Jack Warden
The city in the film is large, but the area that we see most is small, that of men who work with their bodies—and yet the tensions among them are those known to society at different levels, in many countries. What is the ultimate standard of value? What is the ideal for maturity; and what is the basis of loyalty; and what are the requirements of justice?
Earth Under Attack, As Entertainment: Attack the Block, and Cowboys & Aliens, two humorous science-fiction films
One of the interesting aspects of this vivid film, full of anticipation, amusement, and anxiety, is the fact that at first the young people are irritating and threatening, the kind that one would cross the street to avoid. Their attitude is rude, language offensive, and acts easily contemptible. It is a lesson that the film allows us to see another side to them—that they can be both resilient and sweet.
Notes on an African-American Canon in Cinema: On Sidewalk Stories, Daughters of the Dust, Eve’s Bayou and other films
African-Americans have wanted to claim and define their own public images in every art—literature, paintings, sculpture, dance, music, film, videos, television. The presentation of African-Americans in the legendary moving picture Birth of a Nation—which presented blacks as both culturally ambitious and personally barbarous—was a continuation of old stereotypes that led to actual violence against blacks. People—blacks and whites—protested the film, inspiring its director D. W. Griffith to make Intolerance, an anti-prejudice reaction to his own film. The African-American image has yet to cease to be controversial.
The Heroic Age of Denzel: the films Antwone Fisher and Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington
I had thought the film a lot simpler than it was—I thought it was some kind of celebration of ghetto life, but I could not have been more wrong: it is about how an abused boy joins the military and meets a navy psychiatrist who helps him to understand his past and use his anger as energy for self-improvement, and to use his loneliness as a spur to connect with a healthy branch of his family. Consciousness leads to purpose.
Heroism, after Wayne and Cooper, in the Work of Eric Bana: Eric Bana’s Love the Beast; and Joe Wright’s Hanna, starring Bana and Saoirse Ronan
Bana has been featured in an impressive panoply of films—I immediately think of Munich and Troy; Bana played an assassin with a conscience in the first and a reluctant royal warrior in the second—and it is hard to predict what Bana might do next or how that will be received or remembered.
Memory, Time Travel, Terrorism, Romance, and Gyllenhaal: Source Code
Will the film seem visionary or shallow to people alive in the future? It is perfectly entertaining to me, and there are aspects of it that are provocative. How much responsibility does one want to take for others? Is it possible to stop unpredictable and uncontrollable disturbed individuals who intend to do things that put the mass public at stake?