If I hadn’t known it was directed by Stanley Kubrick, there isn’t much of a chance I would have guessed it just from watching the film. It lacks his signature creativity and cinemagraphic elegance. In fact, it came off to me as just another Old Hollywood-style epic. The only scene where I could feel Kubrick’s vision was the wonderful scene before the final battle, where the Roman army is shown marching out into battle formation. The movie is not bad, but I think it was an error to add it to the new AFI list when they took off much better films. I think people tend to remember the few really good scenes and overrate a film such as this one. I mean, “I am Spartacus!” is pretty much Hollywood 101. That being said, I really enjoyed the performances by Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors). The best perfomance was hands-down Peter Ustinov’s and I’m glad to have found out since watching the film that he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for this picture – very well deserved. All in all, one of those classics that you should see, but not necessarily one I would go out of my way to see.

Definitely one of the most authentic-feeling historical dramas I have ever seen. Due largely to Daniel Day-Lewis’s triumph of a performance, but also the cinematography, the direction, and the purposefully slow storytelling – the screen felt inhabited by the characters in a way that is hard to find in a lot of self-conscious period pieces (take for example Atonement). Beautifully done.

As a product of the south, I am generally kind of touchy when it comes to movies featuring racist southerners. Not because they don’t exist and not because I don’t enjoy seeing ignorant racist idiots get what is coming to them, but most of the time it is just so cliche, and I guess I just hate everyone assuming that all southerners are racist rednecks because that is all they see portrayed in movies.

This film was made in the day when it was still common practice to call an adult black male “boy” and civil rights were still a dream for most African Americans in the south. It was a very brave film for its day because it featured the magnificent Sidney Poitier facing the indignities of the racist south with complete dignity. What made this film wonderful was the fact that the characters are not caricatures but are developed and given a range of emotions. Chief Gillespie begins the film as your general racist police chief, but he is allowed to have his beliefs challenged, to be vulnerable, to stand up in his own way. Even Virgil Tibbs has his faults – he lets his passion against the rich cotton planter get the best of him and blind him to the truth.

Overall a great contemporary movie that can be seen both as a great film and a product of its time.

Wouldn’t it have helped to have shown the sister in jail a picture of Leigh at some point to see if that was the same guy she was talking about?

Other than that, I really loved the movie.

I caught this on PBS as part of their “The Complete Jane Austen” and I am sad to say it was a little disappointing to me. It has been a few years since I read Mansfield Park so I can’t really comment on how much it stuck to or deviated from the original source, but I think it was the general pretty-close-to-the-page Masterpiece Theatre adaptation. Of course, I am very partial to the Frances O’Connor film from a few years ago, which took many daring liberties with the original, so that can account for some of the let-down. Mostly I think I was displeased with the way the director spent so much time on Mary Crawford’s character. Instead of being a villain, she is almost portrayed as the heroine (albeit a anti-heroine), while Fanny Price is stuck in the background. I wasn’t crazy about any of the casting or their acting jobs. All in all, not a bad way to waste an hour and a half of a Sunday night, but not worth buying, or even renting.

My favorite part of the movie was during the “present-day” story, when we were told that women went into reforming when they were no longer found attractive by men. Oh, Griffiths, you talented bastard.

I know a lot of people (like my boyfriend) get instantly turned off if they know a film is a “classic” and heaven forbid it be in black and white! I can understand that to a degree, because not all films age well and some are simply laughable today. But the amazing thing about film is its ability to capture for eternity a great performance, a brilliant shot, a director’s daring vision. All of this is present in “Mutiny on the Bounty,” a film that in many ways shows its age, but, if taken as a product of its time, is still brilliant.

“Mutiny” is a grand adventure film, very daring at the time for being shot on location – at sea – instead of on a soundstage. This realism is deftly brought through to the audience through the great cinematography. The sea is another character in the film. Certain aspects of the film are almost foreign to modern movie-making – the way the Tahitians are portrayed, the time spent meandering on the exotic island, and the monologues, especially Byam’s at the end. What moved the movie into a five-star film for me, though, was the electrifying performance of Charles Laughton as Bligh. Everything about his character is sheer genius – the slight hunch, the bushy eyebrows, the constant sneer – all of which could have easily moved into something of a cartoonish parody of a villain. Instead, he is mesmerizing. You are repulsed, you are intrigued. I was looking forward to seeing Clark Gable in another role, but found myself eagerly waiting for Laughton to come back on screen. It is a performance that makes you grateful for the invention of film and its capacity to save a 70-year-old performance for new generations to discover.

I found this movie very interesting because of the intentional ambiguity of its characters and their actions. Montgomery Clift’s character, George Eastman, is supposedly a good midwestern guy raised by parents devoted to Christian mission work. He gets a job at his rich uncle’s company, but almost immediately breaks the cardinal rule of not “socializing” with the female employees by seducing Shelley Winters’ character, Alice. Winters’ performance still carries a hefty punch today, but I think that today’s audience probably misses most of the ambiguity of her character as well. We see her as the victim, a poor, hardworking girl who gets pregnant and can’t get the father to marry her because he’s moved on to the beautiful, rich socialite, Elizabeth Taylor. But audiences in the 1950s would have been a lot more judgmental of a woman who had sex before marriage and then tries to get an abortion. But the movie never passes judgment on the characters, it simply shows what they did and Clift was especially brilliant when it came to showing how torn he was emotionally between doing the right thing and doing the unthinkable.

Warning: Some spoilers…

After enjoying “A History of Violence” enough to buy it, and hearing such acclaim for “Eastern Promises,” I approached this film with high expectations and came away somewhat disappointed. Like “A History of Violence,” David Cronenberg gives us a tense thriller involving ordinary people mixed up with the mafia. In “Eastern Promises” Naomi Watts plays a midwife on a mission to find the family of a baby she delivered from a dying 14-year-old prostitute. Armed with a diary written in Russian, she accidentally hands herself over to the very people who were responsible for the young girl’s enslavement, pregnancy and death. The Russian mafia family’s chauffeur is a tattooed and heavily-accented Viggo Mortensen who is trying to advance his career, yet feels an attraction to Watts’ character.

Cronenberg’s characteristic over-the-top and in-your-face violence is present from the very beginning and I enjoyed the slow, thoughtful pace of the film. The acting was superb, and I especially liked Vincent Cassel as the drunken son of the mafia boss. However, the movie fell flat for me most of the time – I just never felt all that concerned for the characters or their predicament. The film didn’t help any by going on for most of its duration as if it is a “tough look at violence and broken dreams” and then wrapped up the last 30 minutes so that everyone pretty much gets a happy ending, despite some plausibility issues (the hospital just lets Watts’ character keep the baby? Is that standard protocol?). Not a bad watch, but not one of my favorites of the year.

I had put off watching this movie because I knew it was about a recently released pedophile, and well, despite critical acclaim you just aren’t always in the mood for that type of story. How surprising to fall in love with this movie from the first couple of scenes. I found it similar in tone and plot (somewhat) to American Beauty – that kind of “secrets behind suburban doors” story with a touch of tragedy and a touch of humor. What makes the film so compelling are the incredibly defined and well-acted characters – there were so many little gems of “reality” tossed into the story that at times it becomes too achingly real (like Winslet telling her daughter to “just pee in the pool”). I can’t wait for the next Todd Field picture to come along as he has delivered two of the best American films of the last decade.