Taxi Driver (review)
Was *Taxi Driver* more disturbing, or less disturbing, before its unpleasant truths shifted into the real world?
classics
Raging Bull (review)
The other great movie about boxing, Martin Scorsese’s *Raging Bull* is as dismal as *Rocky* is triumphant, as hopeless as *Rocky* is hopeful.
GoodFellas movie review: king of the hill
This is the best mob movie ever made.
American Beauty (again) (review)
Was American Beauty the single best film of 1999? I can’t decide. The second time I watched the film, on a widescreen video screener after it won the Oscar for Best Picture, I thought with horror: I named this sitcom one of my best films of the year? On a third viewing, also on the small screen, I saw once again all the brilliance that I saw the first time around, and more.
Boiler Room and Wall Street (review)
And that realistic attitude is a big part of what makes Boiler Room so refreshing: Younger doesn’t offer any pat, happy endings, doesn’t have all his characters wrap things up by kissing and making nice. The film ends on such an abrupt note — and such a perfect one — that I gasped with unexpected delight.
A Christmas Story (review)
Maybe because A Christmas Story, based on writings by humorist Jean Shepherd, concerns itself with the universalities of childhood, at least as it existed in America in the 20th century. From the mysteries of life — like, Does a human tongue stick to a frozen flag pole? — to the ‘unthinkable disasters’ of youth that are hilarious in adult retrospect, A Christmas Story taps into the bewildered and not-so-innocent child still in all of us.
White Christmas (review)
White Christmas is billed as a remake of Holiday Inn, but the only thing these two films have in common is Bing Crosby singing the most beautiful secular Christmas carol, Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ (which was originally written for Holiday Inn). White Christmas isn’t as delightful as its supposed predecessor, but if for no other reason, it’s worth seeing for a gorgeously simple arrangement of the title tune, which Crosby croons accompanied only by a windup music box.
Holiday Inn movie review: two guys and a girl
God, I love those snarky 40s comedies in which there’s just a bit of meanness under the humor. Holiday Inn is, of course, filled with the kind of pretty Christmas songs and picture-postcard scenes of snow and horse-drawn sleighs that make for beloved holiday movies. But there’s also some darkness lurking here.
A Christmas Carol (Patrick Stewart) and A Christmas Carol (aka Scrooge) (Alistair Sim) (review)
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Patrick Stewart do his one-man reading/performance of A Christmas Carol several times. Nothing beats the impact of live theater, and so for years now Stewart has personified Ebenezer Scrooge for me. I was delighted to learn that Stewart would be playing Scrooge in a full-blown production of Charles Dickens’s classic novel — playing all this month on the cable network TNT — and fully expected that it would become a favorite Christmas movie of mine. And it has.
Miracle on 34th Street movie review: the spirit of Christmas
Miracle on 34th Street is, as all of us who love this classic film know, the story of how Macy’s department store in New York City not only found the real Santa Claus but hired him to, well, play Santa Claus.
