Darren Aronofsky takes a very different approach to the Biblical epic with a film both earthy and mystical.
Category: historical
Clint Eastwood is ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ on Netflix
Eastwood brings warmth and low key humor to his previously cold-blooded revenge-seeking persona in this post-war western, his fifth film as a director.
John Huston’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ on Criterion Channel
Sean Connery and Michael Caine star in Huston’s magnificent adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s story, a larger than life tale on a glorious canvas.
Jamie Foxx is ‘Django Unchained’ on Netflix and Peacock
In Django Unchained (2012), Quentin Tarantino takes on one of his favorite genres: the spaghetti western, with all its extreme violence, operatic drama, eccentric characters, and brutal portrait of frontier existence. But Tarantino being Tarantino, he doesn’t just make a big, violent, sprawling western filled gunfights and clever talk and driven by revenge and Old […]
‘Lore’ – navigating the collapse of Nazi Germany on Criterion Channel and free on Kanopy and Hoopla
Before she was tapped to helm Black Widow for Marvel, Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland directed Lore (Germany, 2012). A coproduction of Germany and Australia with a German cast, setting, and language, Lore takes the viewer on a harrowing odyssey through Germany after the fall of Hitler. The privileged life of fresh-faced German teenager Lore (Saskia […]
Martin Scorsese’s ‘Boxcar Bertha’ on Amazon Prime
Boxcar Bertha (1972) – Martin Scorsese was just another college film school grad with a student feature under his belt (Who’s That Knocking at My Door) when producer Roger Corman tapped him to direct AIP’s entry in the Bonnie and Clyde craze of depression era gangster films. It was a straight work-for-hire job and it will […]
‘Drums Along the Mohawk’ – John Ford’s Colonial America on Criterion Channel
John Ford made his Technicolor debut with Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), a stunning pre-western about young settlers in the rich forest lands of the Mohawk Valley during the Colonial era. Claudette Colbert takes top billing as the cultured wife and Henry Fonda is her salt-of-the-Earth husband who takes her out of the city and […]
Francis McDormand in ‘Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day’ on Amazon Prime
The bouncy little screwball romance Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008) is a fizzy cocktail of a movie set in depression-era London, where the beautiful people dance away in fabulous fashions and decadent distraction. Frances McDormand is the dowdy Guinevere Pettigrew, a buttoned-down yet free-thinking governess whose unorthodox ways have landed her on the […]
Last chance: Burt Lancaster is ‘The Leopard’ in Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece on Criterion Channel
The Leopard (Italy, 1963), Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel (said to be a national touchstone for Italy), is his masterpiece. Burt Lancaster (his voice is dubbed by a deep-voiced Italian) may seem an unusual choice to play Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, an idealistic 19th century Sicilian prince (Visconti favored Laurence Olivier, a […]
Last chance: ‘The Good, the Bad, the Weird’- Kim Jee-won’s “Oriental Western” on Hulu
Kim Jee-won’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (South Korea, 2008) is a self-proclaimed “Oriental Western.” That about pegs this treasure hunt right out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by way of Peking Opera Blues and Dragon Gate Inn, set in thirties Manchuria and filled with Korean expatriates, Chinese bandits, Japanese occupiers, […]