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A Quiet Passion 2016
Director Terence Davies has carved a career out of his haunting, nostalgic portraits of British pastimes. In the semi-autobiographical The Long Day Closes, a a young boy is raised by the beauty and escapism of the cinema screen. Similarly, A Quiet Passion finds Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) as a woman who comes to understand and expand her world through Brontë novels. Although Dickinson has steadfast convictions and a strong opinion regarding marriage’s deadening potential on women, the film is far…
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Dunkirk 2017
Christopher Nolan is an unabashed formalist whose persistent focus on time is the uniting theme in all of his works. If Interstellar took the temporal to a cosmic level, Dunkirk shows Nolan’s fixation on the specificity of a singular time and place. The chaos of battle is articulated through Nolan’s puzzle-like narrative structure, with apparently disparate story threads collapsing on each other about midway through the film. If it does suggest the disorientation that one might feel on a battlefield,…
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Svengali 1931
At the time of its release, the New York Times published a review that heralded John Barrymore’s role as the eponymous Svengali as the very best of his career. It was a remarkable transition coming just one year after Barrymore’s take on Ahab in Moby Dick, said to be a performance in which the infamous drinker appeared inebriated on the screen. Barrymore’s performance is the most complex of the monsters from the 1930s deluge of horror films, a man equal…
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The Shining Hour 1938
In a Frank Borzage picture, romance is a life-force, an unmitigated drive, the unconquerable. In The Shining Hour, Borzage uses Margaret Sullavan (his muse at the time) to convey both the bravery of being a lover and the inherent tragedy of it. Both Sullavan and Melvyn Douglas are cast as characters who are positive in living and love without fear, harshly juxtaposed with the ever-doubting Joan Crawford and Robert Young, who are always searching for something more. Their capacity for…
