Film
Thomson on Films: The Oedipal Complexity of Early Psychoanalysis
A Dangerous Method is crammed with alarm and peril at the outset. A young, dark-featured woman in white is barely contained in a moving carriage in 1904—she is screaming, heaving, sighing—and she is being taken to a clinic just outside Zurich where she will become the patient of Dr Carl Jung. READ MORE >>
David Thomson on Films: Tinker, Tailor, Boredom, Why?
TNR Film Classics: 'Miracle on 34th Street' (June 2, 1947)
Frequency Hopping
SHE WAS A movie star trapped in loveless marriages, trite Hollywood roles, and—worst of all—her own beauty. He was a broke modernist composer reduced to writing schlocky articles for Esquire. Together they gave birth to a frequency-hopping technology that they dreamed would control torpedoes, and which, it would later be discovered, made cell phones function. While it is unlikely that Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil ever slept together, their story is still the stuff of movies. READ MORE >>
How many major black-and-white movies can you think of that have been made in the last five years? I can think of five: The Wild Child (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971), Paper Moon (1973), Lenny (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974). In all five, the decision to use monochrome was both calculated and special. There was a time in the not-so-distant when using color was the choice that was calculated and special. What happened and why? READ MORE >>
David Thomson on Films: Why Does This Movie Want Us to Feel So Miserable About Sex?
What do you expect from a film called Shame with an NC-17 rating? Right at the start we see Brandon awake in the pale blue sheets of his bed. He gets up, goes to the bathroom, and turns around. He has a penis, and I suppose it is Michael Fassbender’s. So many of the things an actor brings to a picture are his parts, and it is up to us and the whole project to decide whether they also belong to a credible and interesting fictional character. READ MORE >>
TNR Film Classic: 'Kramer vs. Kramer' (1979)
The Most Tender Tribute Marilyn Monroe Has Ever Received
Some time towards the end of this delightful entertainment, the realization dawns of how much courage Michelle Williams needed in accepting the offer to play Marilyn Monroe. Yet an hour earlier, I had been asking, “Oh, why do it? Why take on this child monster yet again, in the year before we will be inundated with memories and garbage at the fiftieth anniversary of her death?” READ MORE >>
