Category: Film

  • 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…

  • Muscle Shoals (2013)

    The documentary Muscle Shoals chronicles the oddity of Muscle Shoals, Ala., a tiny town near the Tennessee River that became an improbable birthplace for some of the most soulful music of the 20th century. At the center of the Muscle Shoals miracle is Rick Hall, a stone-faced guy with a hardscrabble past, who in the…

  • 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…

  • Diary of the Dead (2007)

    As the granddaddy of the modern-day zombie flick, George A. Romero understood that the undead are much more than simply people who have a good reason for smelling bad. He recognized that zombies make for potent metaphors with (considering the constraints of rigor mortis) surprising malleability. One minute, they’re fearsome monsters with an insatiable need…

  • 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…