Is anything better than Tilda? No? What about two Tildas?
Despite my affection for Swinton, I went into The Eternal Daughter with some trepidation because the only other Joanna Hogg I’ve seen is The Souvenir, which I don’t care for. That’s the one place Tilda didn’t elevate the material. Despite some reservations, I like Daughter for the most part.
The main thing the film has going for it is Tilda’s creating two distinct characters, both fragile but in different ways.…
This one's going out for Deanna Durbin, born December 4, 1921,
Has there ever been a more misleading film than Christmas Holiday? The title suggests a warmhearted family drama or maybe a comedy. If the stars are Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, it must be a musical. I wonder what percentage of 1944 ticket-buyers knew they were letting themselves into a tale of murder and deception.
I remember liking Christmas Holiday the one previous time I had seen it and…
“What did you think I was trying to do? Kill you?”
Suspicion has a bad rep because of the copout ending, and I’ve had mostly tepid responses whenever I’ve watched it. The last time I tried, I couldn’t even finish it. This time, I must have been in the right mood because I liked it for the most part. Of course, it isn’t all that Hitchcockian, except for the suspense over whether Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) is a murderer/would-be murderer.…
“One more to die, and then you won’t have to be alone.”
Now, this is my idea of a Christmas movie: cold, bleak, existential, dirty, grimy, brutal, with greasy-haired lowlifes and a little jazz. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to see Allen Baron's Blast of Silence. It is everything I like: noir, low-budget B-movie, voiceover, tough-guy posturing, lots of Manhattan locations. The locations prove that the city is eternal, only the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree gets…
