More on: Essays

Terrence Malick (2012) THE FILMS OF TARENCE MALICK, or at least his most recent ones, are perhaps more admired than loved. I’ve struggled through the longueurs of late Malick, but at the same time I’m aware that my brain has been conditioned by Hollywood conventions. Malick takes running leaps off the high dive and sometimes…

Preston Sturges (1941) ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT 2016, a truly punishing year, I sat in my brother’s living room. I was house- and dog-sitting and most importantly keeping Christmas with our elderly mom, who otherwise would have been alone with her nurse. My husband and I sat in front of a dying fire, dogs in sleepy…

Danny Boyle (2004) IF FILMS CAN INSPIRE US to live better, you’d think that for people of faith, the most inspiring movies would be Christmas movies. Oh, my child, if only it were so. There’s The Nativity Story, but there’s also Kirk Cameron Saves Christmas (yes, that happened). I used to love It’s a Wonderful…

Jean-Pierre Melville (1949) IN ONE OF THE GREATEST DEFENSES of poetry ever written, Percy Shelley wrote that “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” Shelley defined love as a “going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.”…

Michael Haneke (2009) ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND IS ASSASSINATED. Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. Germany follows suit three days later, turning on Russia first, and then on France the following Monday. An unnamed tailor from the fictitious village of Eichwald, Germany, presents these facts in simple, direct voiceover during the final minutes of Michael Haneke’s The…

Spike Lee (1989) WHAT FILM HELPS YOU LIVE BETTER? It’s an impossible question. Something by Francis Ford Coppola? Terrence Malick? Richard Linklater? A documentary by Steve James, Ondi Timoner, Barbara Kopple, the Maysles Brothers, or D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus? Yes to all. But just as Chris Rock says about music, I think there is…

Hirokazu Kore-eda (2011) BY THE END OF CELEBRATED DIRECTOR Hirokazu Kore-eda’s delightful 2011 fable I Wish, two preteen brothers, living in different towns with their separated parents, will have traveled across the Japanese countryside with a gaggle of school friends to watch two bullet trains speed past each other at a new track point. They…

Harold Ramis (1993) phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? man at the bar: That about sums it up for me. THIS CONVERSATION LIES AT THE HEART of an unusual film from the 1990s—unusual because it’s a…

Lars von Trier (2003) It’s completely insane. No edit more than twelve frames long—it’s totally destructive. What the hell does he expect me to do? He’s ruining it from the start. SO DECLARES EXPERIMENTAL DANISH FILMMAKER and poet Jørgen Leth. Leth has agreed to remake The Perfect Human (1967), his elegant, minimalist short film of…

Paul Thomas Anderson (2012) IN HIS BOOK Devotional Cinema Nathaniel Dorsky notes that the film-going experience is a metaphor for vision: we perceive a world of light and movement from within the darkness of our heads in the same way that filmgoers sit in dark theaters and watch a world take shape out of light and…