Category: Actor

  • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

    Among the final pictures by John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reveals the legendary filmmaker poking a stick at the Old West mythologies he helped create. It’s one of the director’s best, and that’s saying something for the guy who gave us Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, How Green Was…

  • Baby It’s You (1983)

    Writer-director John Sayles has a gift for taking the most cliché-riddled formula and then – voila! – skirting cliché. Such is the redemptive power of full-blooded characterization and an understanding that people are unpredictable. Baby It’s You is a modest story of young love, but it nicely illustrates the filmmaker’s knack for wringing genuine complexity from what otherwise could…

  • Ghost (1990)

    I wasn’t impressed when I first saw Ghost in the theater back in 1990. At the time, I was a twenty-something cinephile (or movie geek, to be blunt about it) fond of overusing terms like auteur and mise-en-scène, and so I turned my nose up and dismissed the box-office blockbuster as a sappy crowd-pleaser. Now much older and marginally wiser, I…

  • Big Leaguer (1953)

    Spring is here, and with the sights and sounds of rebirth – flowers blooming, birds chirping, suffering masses enduring hay fever – come thoughts of baseball … well, at least if you happen to be a baseball fan (Major League Baseball’s season begins this week, in case you care.) Any buff of the once-upon-a-time national…

  • Bright Lights, Big City (1988)

    “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” –Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City. Alfred Hitchcock said he preferred making movies adapted from marginal novels instead of top-shelf literature. The latter, he reasoned, already had been defined in an artistic medium that…

  • The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

    If this rags-to-riches tale wasn’t true, you’d think it was the invention of the world’s sappiest motivational speaker. Chris Gardner, penniless and homeless in the early 1980s, remained committed to caring for his young son while working toward a career as a stockbroker. It’s stuff tailor-made for an inspirational Hollywood flick, and it is a…

  • Serpico (1973)

    Serpico is gritty. It’s rough around the edges. It’s mired in an on-the-mean-streets-of-New York-in the-1970s vibe. In short, it’s a Sidney Lumet movie. Al Pacino delivers an indelible, iconic performances as Frank Serpico, the real-life undercover cop who blew the whistle on widespread New York City police corruption in the early ‘70s. The movie begins with…

  • The Hangover (2009)

    The no-holds-barred bachelor’s party ranks as one of life’s great paradoxes. OK, maybe not one of the great paradoxes, but certainly in the top 100 or so. As anyone who has ever engaged in such depravity can attest (or so I’m told), this particular rite of passage turns on the conceit that its most memorable…