Category: Director

  • The best movies of 2023

    With the Academy Awards a week away (Sunday, March 10, for you sticklers), this seems like as appropriate a time as any to trot back out my picks for the Best Films of the year that was 2023. For those keeping score at home, my latest ranking has some differences from my initial take back…

  • Rope (1948)

    Rope is intriguing, if not altogether successful. The picture marked a kind of paradox for Alfred Hitchcock, a master of cinematic storytelling who presented himself with a challenge that appeared almost antithetical to the possibilities of film. In adapting a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton, the director wanted the story to be experienced in the same…

  • Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

    Back in the day when Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay were still pals, they stumbled upon a winning formula for comedy with 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which goosed TV newsrooms while simultaneously skewering the Dumb American Male over a fire pit. The humor was silly, largely improvisational, and devoted to a spirit…

  • Topaz (1969)

    The late 1960s marked something of a downslide for Alfred Hitchcock. There is speculation about what prompted his string of disappointments. Perhaps the slow demise of the studio system left the master of suspense rudderless. Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto contended in his 1983 biography, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, that…

  • The Tree of Life (2011)

    Not many pictures are so flat-out ballsy as to interrupt its principal narrative in order to reveal the origin of the cosmos. But Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life does just that. This coming-of-age story is ambitious and audacious, bold and bewildering. It is 2001 with a Texas twang. It is amazing. That doesn’t mean…

  • The Hustler (1961)

    The Hustler is a straightforward morality play, but told with a lean intensity that pushes it into the realm of classic cinema. It helped that the 1961 picture featured a slew of great acting performances, particularly a superstar-making turn by Paul Newman. Based on a 1959 novel by Walter Tevis, The Hustler follows Fast Eddie…

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

    There isn’t much middle ground when it comes to how one feels about writer-director Wes Anderson. His meticulously fussy visual style, offbeat humor and unflagging quirkiness have won both ardent fans and equally ardent detractors; one viewer’s delight is another’s eye-rolling preciousness. The Grand Budapest Hotel, quintessential Anderson, will not woo the unconverted. As with…

  • A Serious Man (2009)

    Larry Gopnik, the mild-mannered protagonist of Joel and Ethan Coens’ A Serious Man, is in a doozy of an existential crisis. His wife is leaving him for another man. He is being financially and psychologically squeezed by his self-absorbed children. And just as this college physics professor is on the cusp of receiving tenure, Larry’s…