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Best documentaries of 2023
While 2023 was a banner year for narrative films, at least in my opinion, I was less enthusiastic about the year’s crop of documentaries. There were a handful of standouts, such as the thrilling Beyond Utopia (pictured below), but none of my picks for the Best of 2023 approach what I would consider a masterpiece.…
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The Lunchbox (2013)
Sometimes you must board the wrong train to get to the right station. It’s a bit of wisdom that figures prominently in, and is offered by, The Lunchbox, a sweetly engaging Hindi-language film about two wounded souls who make an accidental but critical connection in the Indian city of Mumbai. What makes an already-appealing movie…
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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…
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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…
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The Awful Truth (1937)
The centerpiece of this screwball comedy still sparkles as brilliantly as it did in 1937, that being the embattled married couple of Jerry and Lucy Wariner, played by Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Oklahoma viewers, however, might be slightly more interested by Ralph Bellamy as the movie’s requisite dope, a rich Oklahoma oilman named Dan.…
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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…
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The Ritchie Boys (2004)
One of the pleasures of little-known documentaries is learning about something wholly new and unexpected. After Ken Burns’ exhaustive documentary on World War II, I figured there weren’t too many more WW2 stories still waiting to be unearthed. The Ritchie Boys happily proved me wrong. This straightforward doc tells the tale of a group of…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 