A determined but hapless man who thinks he’s more competent than he is gets mixed up in a crime, and everything proceeds to go horribly wrong. That's a plot hook that the Coen brothers have riffed on several times throughout their shared career, most visibly so in Blood Simple, Fargo, and this, their first film conventionally adapted from a literary source.* What distinguishes No Country for Old Men’s take on this plot hook from its predecessors’, and indeed from the…
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The Rules of the Game 1939
When you’re starting out on your cinephile journey, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game* is one of the first experiences you’re likely to have where a film’s lofty reputation confuses you. I say this as someone who had such an experience. I first saw the film at age 16, when my knowledge of world cinema and filmmaking in general was still developing - to give you some sense of where it was, I was confident enough to say that…
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The Song of Bernadette 1943
A director like Henry King is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you know you're going to get craftsmanship of a vintage rare even during the Golden Age, but on the other, that rarely translates into much that's actively interesting. Maybe he was just unfortunate in the material he was given to work with: Carousel is a shoddly-plotted musical, and The Song of Bernadette is a rigidly pious biopic of the titular saint who discovered the spring at Lourdes.…
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Scenes from a Marriage 1974
Scenes from a Marriage is one of Ingmar Bergman’s most atypical films. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that it’s also one of his best I’m not sure, but there must be some link between its popularity and how starkly it stands in contrast to the widespread understanding of the filmmaker’s work as oblique, hung up on arcane spiritual questions, and addicted to laboured allegory in that oh-so-arthouse way.
Admittedly, if there’s one thing the name “Ingmar…
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Allen v. Farrow 2021
Why don't we all just forget about when Mia Farrow's legal team, which included one Alan Dershowitz, offered to make the molestation charges go away if Woody Allen would agree to a $5 million settlement? I don't know about you, but to me that doesn't exactly look like something a woman who feared "for years" that her boyfriend was a paedophile would do (see also: allowing him to co-adopt their children in 1991).
Oh, and another thing: if it doesn't…
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Singin' in the Rain 1952
I've been feeling pretty crappy lately, and I've decided that, from now on, I'll watch a favourite of mine whenever I'm like this to remind me that all is not lost. I'm going to have a hard time topping tonight's selection, Singin' in the Rain - a film I more or less grew up with, which is something I'll be eternally grateful for. I can't imagine my life without this film, one of the happiest there is. Nor do I…
