Film
TNR Film Classics: ‘All About Eve’ (November 6, 1950)
Once a year, Hollywood relaxes the lollypop diet on which it sustains a large but jaded public, and serves up one dish of acidulous sophistication. Or to be more precise, about once a year Joseph Mankiewicz at Twentieth Century-Fox does this under the indulgent eye of Darryl F. Zanuck. The last chef’s special was Letter to Three Wives; the new one is All About Eve, the bitchiest fabrication since Mrs. Luce’s The Women. READ MORE >>
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 >>
