There was a time when you could stumble upon "The Princess Bride", without knowing what you were getting into. It had slid through theaters without making much of an impact. As William Goldman writes in a piece that is included the stellar, handsomely-bound Criterion release of this film: "Everyone who saw it loved it, but nobody saw it". I came across it during its network television premiere, as I did with most movies that are counted amongst my favorites now.…
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Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves 1991
I was all about this movie in the summer of 1991. I was also 13. That's the perfect age to be all about Robin Hood, especially when you live in a rural area. I ran around the woods, making makeshift bows and arrows out of branches and baling twine and shooting things with them...though never any living things. I guess I came close once when I shot an apple off of my sister's head like William Tell. Obviously that was…
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McCabe & Mrs. Miller 1971
Robert Altman's story of an ambitious but somewhat dim-witted gambler and pimp (McCabe, played by Warren Beatty) assisted in establishing a frontier bordello in a small mining town by a more experienced madame (Mrs. Miller, played by Julie Christie) is, in my opinion, his first genuine masterpiece.
It's a very unconventional movie, so much so that I didn't fall in love with it the first time I saw it. It's also a fairly downbeat movie by the end, and that…
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Birdy 1984
I routinely celebrate Nicolas Cage and, yeah, he's the reason that I watched this (as he is the reason I watch any film in which he appears) but Holy Shit! Matthew Modine! I never realized he had this in him.
A little background is necessary, I suppose: Nic and Matt play childhood friends who grow up together in Philadelphia. They have a series of adventures as they mature, culminating in them both shipping off to Vietnam. Both of them come…
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Dunkirk 2017
There's a tendency of this site to immediately overrate new movies. And I get it. Seeing a film in the theater has a bewitching effect. When you're used to seeing movies on your TV or, God forbid, your tablet, the charge of seeing something projected as large as possible in a big, dark room alone makes a movie a little better. If that movie's even remotely great, then all the better. Letterboxd isn't the only social media site to stoke…
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The Guest 2014
Hooptober 2016, Film #3
The set-up is simple: a man knocks on the door of a family still grieving the loss of their son in a war. The man introduces himself as the friend of their late son and says that their son's last wish was that he come and tell them how much their son loved them, and that his last thoughts were of them. The family, comforted by these words and happy to find some kind of connection…
