It’s been twenty years since I last watched “Ball of Fire.” At the time it was the third Gary Cooper film I’d seen other than “High Noon” and “Sergeant York.” While Barbara Stanwyck is a sparklingly live wire, I had totally forgotten how adorable Gary Cooper is in this. No one else could have played his role, except MAYBE Jimmie Stewart, but even he might have laid the awe shucks on too thick. Here, Cooper is gentle, vulnerable, curious: His…
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Walk on the Wild Side 1962
Everyone is good in this — especially Laurence Harvey playing against type and Jane Fonda in only her second film role — but let’s be honest, Barbara Stanwyck is the show: The film loses a palpable sizzle whenever she’s off screen.
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Oppenheimer 2023
“Oppenheimer” stunned me. You could accuse it of being another tired great man or tortured genius narrative, but I think you’d be wrong. For one, Christopher Nolan wonders aloud if Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) even was a genius or merely a good organizer (it’s telling that we see Oppenheimer make very few discoveries, everyone is usually scientifically and mathematically ahead of him, yet he is continually capable of leveraging the appearance of his genius for the desired outcome). I’m also not…
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Babylon 2022
“Babylon” is already a misunderstood gem, in my opinion. Weirdly called a mess, even though its plotting and character arcs are tightly interwoven and classically structured (you could almost accuse it of being a tad too simple rather than chaotic).
It’s a fascinating critique of the ways the white capitalistic greed of Hollywood forced (and still forces) assimilation onto the dreams of the marginalized and then forces them to turn on each other. It spotlights who cannot live without the…