The point of The Natural is not to give Roy Hobbs his longed-for second chance, but to destabilize the very concept of “second chances.”
With Southland Tales, Richard Kelly asked audiences to deal with the bleakest aspects of their current reality via a tonally ambiguous, hyper-taxing, incomplete narrative. When you look at it that way, even its sub-half-million box office take might sound high.
Moneyball is not a baseball movie as much as it is a treatment on convictions, traditions, decisions, and how each of them have relational ramifications. Even the grandest plans have consequences.
If many of Steven Spielberg’s films are marathon novels, Duel is a sonnet—it has room to play because of its formal constraints.
In the six-decade and soon-to-be-25 film oeuvre of the series, Diamonds Are Forever stands out as the most peculiar entry in the franchise thanks to its unintentional embrace of the surreal and the challenges it poses to its own pedigree and dogma.
If much of Fonda’s life both before and after Klute was marked by losses of her own identity as she attempted to mold herself into whatever the dominant man in her life wanted, Klute captures a rare and specific transitional moment.
The Leftovers makes two competing claims: that other people are mostly what gives life meaning; and that, despite guaranteed loss, we have to invest in them anyway.
The Straight Story represents the Lynchian world redeemed, a pocket of America that battled dread and violence and won, earning its just reward.
Hepburn and Grant tumble toward happy endings through chaos and adventure, misunderstandings and trickery, all with an effortless grace.
The real crux of Aubrey and Maturin's friendship, what makes Master And Commander so rich in general, is the way in which the film challenges their relationship and also kind of has an answer for a very a la mode question: how do people with different political beliefs get along?
Marie Antoinette is arguably the centrepiece of Coppola’s MTV-inflected career, conceived as it was as a sort of love letter to the music and music videos she loved as a teenager.
A Prairie Home Companion is a tender meditation on music, memory, and death that holds Robert Altman’s final goodbye inside it like a fly in amber, preserved for all who will listen.
