Bad Day at Black Rock is a tight, no-bull 81-minutes coming from a no-bull director (John Sturges) and a no-bull star (Spencer Tracy). Tracy and Sturges have rarely, if ever, been better. It is set in a sleepy (and angry) little town in the west. Parts were shot in Death Valley and the Mojave. Started with a whirlwind score (even before Sturges worked with Elmer Bernstein, he apparently had a type he liked—just like with Nolan before Zimmer) with a train steaming into Black Rock. The train has not stopped there in four years. Tracy playing John J.

This was a bigger production, a western shot in Mexico featuring Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson- both massive stars at the time. Douglas plays Bren O’Malley, a man with a checkered past who has come back for a former lover (Dorothy Malone’s character) while being chased by the law (Rock Hudson). Carol Lynley plays Malone’s daughter. This reteams Malone and Hudson from 1956’s Written on the Wind by Douglas Sirk. There is a great throwaway line about Douglas’ character and how he “has a hole in his chin” (referring to the actor’s famous dimple chin). At the 14-minute mark

  Josephine Decker’s Shirley has more in common with Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than any conventional biopic about the life of writer Shirley Jackson. The chamber play-like drama consists of Elisabeth Moss (putting together an remarkable body of work) Michael Stuhlbarg (outstanding in everything he does) as Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman. She is a writer and Stanley is a professor at the local college. Odessa Young and Logan Lerman are the younger couple that live with them. This makes Stuhlbarg the Richard Burton character and Moss the Elizabeth Taylor character. These two superb actors are

It is a very strong debut from Lucrecia Martel—the title literally translates to “the swamp” and the opening pool set piece one of the film’s highlights (all three shots above from the opening). Martel starts off with these drunk upper/middle-class laying around by an unclean (very green swamp-like) pool. Mercedes Moran plays Tali, and Graciela Borges (really the center of the film) plays Mecha and they are sisters living in provincial Argentina. Mecha and her husband are in this sort of inebriated, apathetic malaise that hovers around and infects everyone in and around their house (which 75% of the

Cowboy is made the year after Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford paired up for 3:10 to Yuma There are noteworthy contributors here beyond just Glenn Ford. Saul Bass did the opening titles, Dalton Trumbo partially wrote the screenplay (originally uncredited due to the blacklist). But the film is probably most remembered for being the only Jack Lemmon western. He plays Frank Harris. Lemmon is 33-years old here, and this is the first archiveable film for him since his Oscar-winning turn in Mister Roberts (1955)—his first archiveable film overall. It opens with Lemmon’s character as a hotel clerk (perfect fit)

  It is worth noting that in at least one year during the prime of Ozu and Kurosawa, it is Keisuke Kinoshita who made the best Japanese film of the year (Equinox Flower for Ozu and The Hidden Fortress for Kurosawa in 1958). It was famously dismissed (and debated) by some at Cahiers du Cinéma for the vast departure from realism in the world Kinoshita built (which feels like judging it on the merit of its black and white photography (it is in color)). Set in a remote village, Kinuyo Tanaka (playing way older, and she is fantastic here)

City Streets is a welcomed entry into the early 1930s prohibition gangster genre. It is not to be confused with 1931’s City Lights from Chaplin of course based on an original story by Dashiell Hammett 6-minutes into the film Rouben Mamoulian starts with a striking close-up of Sylvia Sidney (who makes the most of her chance to replace Clara Bow here in the lead after Bow’s breakdown) using a gun (which turns out to be a squirt gun at a game), and brilliantly pulls back the camera. This shot choice would be repeated often in the film as

For the first time in his career, Malick chooses a single character for his central figure. Christian Bale plays Rick, a writer in Hollywood, living out a sinful life filled with material excess, and spiritual emptiness. After being cinema’s J.D. Salinger from 1978-1998—Malick is now firing almost at Woody Allen’s pace in the 2010s this is his third film of the decade already. This is his second straight film set in the modern day like To the Wonder. And this is not really about the dichotomy between violence in man and beauty found in nature like much of his

Between 1973 and 2011 Terrence Malick made five (5) films in thirty-eight (38) years. Between the five films, he took an average of 8.5 years to make his next movie. In 2012, he made To the Wonder just one year after The Tree of Life. Be careful what you wish for with an auteur with a typical long gestation period between films. It looks slightly different from the start, Malick starts with his trademark voice-over (here from Olga Kurylenko- nothing surprising there yet) with this lo-fi, grainy footage. We are not accustomed to ugliness in Malick’s world. He would