Properly Screened

This film was directed by the same filmmaker who gave us sweeping, visually stunning epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago , so I came in expecting grandeur. What I got instead was fairly ordinary. Brief Encounter (1945) leans heavily on exposition, with Laura, a reserved and introspective housewife, narrating much of the story through voiceover. Too often, it tells us what she feels rather than trusting the strength of Celia Johnson’s acting to convey it. But isn’t the first rule of effective screenwriting: show us, don’t tell us? By today’s standards, the central affair is tame. I understand that 1940s British social norms demanded that personal desire take a backseat to marital duty. But the film could learn a thing or two from Wong Kar-wai, who perfected the restrained, unconsummated affair in In the Mood for Love . He demonstrates how longing, tension, and emotional depth can make a story riveting. The film avoids total collapse thanks to Celia Johnson. Every emotion is ...

I've spent my movie watching career generally avoiding the Classic Westerns genre. The frontier masculinity is off putting. So are the racist depictions of Native Americans. And the treatment of women as symbols rather than subjects. This film has all three. In The Searchers (1956), John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a brooding Confederate veteran driven to hunt down the Comanche chief who killed his family and abducted his niece, Debbie, played by Natalie Wood.  This film is one of the most mysterious of the classic Westerns because of the degree that the audience is asked to read into the antihero's motivations. Does Ethan feel he is to blame for the death of his family? Is he on a quest to bring Debbie home because he's secretly her father? Does he mean to rescue her, or is he so outraged by the threat of miscegenation that he'd rather kill her? Is that why Debbie's adopted brother is so insistent in joining him, to guard against his fury? Maybe Ethan is meant to b...