We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational

Tag: streaming

  • After Hours

    Not as famous as the movies that surrounded it, but After Hours is very much Scorsese at his peak. Griffin Dunne finds himself in a late night fever dream, swallowed up by the craziness of SoHo when it was still SoHo. And no matter how hard he tries, he cannot get home. Each time he…

  • Midnight Run

    Charles Grodin displays immense actorly patience, letting you warm to his character oh so slowly. His blank, backward-staring gaze – not De Niro’s fire, humor and despair – dominate Midnight Run. Then come the moments when he confiscates “counterfeit” bills, slams the train door on De Niro, and turns out, gloriously, to be a pilot.…

  • The Eight Mountains

    The journey from book to movie is arduous and fraught. It is exceedingly rare for a movie to flatly exceed its source (e.g. The Godfather) and perhaps even less common for the movie to be a perfect distillation of the novel. The Eight Mountains is that. It brings every scene and every character to life…

  • The Fabelmans

    After the disappointingly bland remake of West Side Story, Spielberg returns to form. Yes, it’s obviously a “late” work in the mold of great craftsmen reflecting on their life and craft, but it has all the classic Spielberg touches: masterly direction, a certain innocence, a genuine love of the craft, and a gift for getting…

  • Living

    A London-based remake of the Kurosawa classic, Ikuru, with Kazuo Ishiguro doing the screenplay and Bill Nighy playing the lead. This version hits many of the same beats and sometimes does it just as well as the original. If there’s a flaw, it’s in the decision to set the story (like Ikuru) in the 1950’s.…