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‘It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man,’ says thief and killer William Munny (Clint Eastwood, who also directed) in Unforgiven. ‘You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.’ Practically an antimovie, this revisionist Western rejects the concept of casual murder that many films revel in to examine why ‘it ain’t so easy to shoot a man.’
The Silence of the Lambs is a psychological thriller of the highest order, and well deserving of the unusual Oscar nod for Best Picture, never before bestowed upon a film like this. Before or since, action/horror has never been done so well or so cerebrally.
Dances with Wolves is one of the most visually and emotionally stunning movies I’ve ever seen, a glimmer of another world where less might have been lost if more people had been as open and friendly as John Dunbar. From John Barry’s stirring score to director/producer Costner’s daring presentation of a huge chunk of the movie in the beautiful Sioux Lakota language (with subtitles), this is a majestic requiem for a world that is gone.
Atlantan Miss Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy) is a ‘fine, rich, Jewish lady,’ says her black chauffeur, Hoke Coburn (Morgan Freeman). Driving Miss Daisy is the bittersweet drama about the unspoken friendship between this unlikely pair over a quarter of a century, from 1948 to 1973.
Barry Levinson’s Rain Man was so seminal a film that its title character’s nickname and dialogue have entered the vernacular — we’ve all said ‘Kmart sucks’ and ‘I’m an excellent driver’ once or twice, right? Beneath the film’s gentle odd-couple comedy and astonishingly affecting performance by Dustin Hoffman as the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, however, is a sharp drama about emotionality, frustration, and the capacity we all have for surprising ourselves by changing.
When Pu Yi ascended the throne in Peking in 1908, he was only 3 years old. From his short-lived reign to his arrest as a counterrevolutionary in Red China in 1950, he spent his life as little more than a pawn of those who wished to further their own agendas. Nevertheless, director Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous and seductive The Last Emperor imbues this powerless and constantly thwarted figure with a resolute if melancholy grace.
Never has the chaos and horror of battle been so in-your-face, so personal, as in writer/director Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Based on his experiences in Vietnam, this is a stark, caustic account of one man’s war.
Like Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa is a story of time and place. Just as T.E. Lawrence’s tale could only have happened in the Middle Eastern deserts of the Great War, Isak Dinesen’s would not exist without the gorgeous vistas of East Africa of almost exactly the same time.
Is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham, in a virtuoso performance he has yet to match) insane? Amadeus opens with an old, bitter Salieri living out his last days in an asylum, where he’s been relegated following a suicide attempt. The film’s story, and the story of his life, unfolds as he confesses to a priest how, and why, he killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It’s a complicated love/hate relationship that mothers and daughters share. They can be each other’s best friend and worst enemy, often at the same time. Terms of Endearment perfectly captures that morass of conflicting emotions — at least from the daughter’s point of view, as I can testify from personal experience.
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