To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) **1/2

Who doesn’t wish their father was a little bit (or maybe a lot) like Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck)? Kind, soft-spoken, principled, honorable, and patient are the words that spring to mind when I think of this iconic film and literary hero. If the stories are true that author Harper Lee based her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird on her own father, then she was an extremely lucky child and woman. She was also blessed by the fact...

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Sunset Boulevard (1950) ***

Before there was The Artist (2011) there was director Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Both movies shine a very bright light on the plight of a silent film star in the Hollywood Sound Era.  Of course, things end much better for George Valentin in The Artist than they do for Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard, but that’s probably why I prefer Norma’s story.  It also helps that the acting is insanely good, the script...

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Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru No Haka) 1988 **

Suffice to say, Japanese animation would have made Walt Disney both proud and sad at the same time.  Aesthetically beautiful, but just so damn depressing is the best way to describe director Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru No Haka, 1988). More than forty years after Japan’s surrender in WWII, Takahata made one of the most influential war films about the plight of war orphans based on Akiyuki Nosaka’s 1967 semi-autobiographical...

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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) **1/2

You’d think a film about a career British Army officer’s effort to make the Home Guard strong enough to withstand a German invasion during WWII would please the likes of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the War Office.  Yet, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s (AKA the Archers) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) was a mild annoyance to the British government, who worried that the film would send the wrong message to Britons....

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Dodsworth (1936) **

(This is my contribution to the Mary Astor Blogathon, hosted by Tales of the Easily Distracted and Silver Screenings. Please follow this link to find other great contributing posts.)“Love has got to stop some place short of suicide.” What a great line to walk out on your selfish, self-involved, two-timing wife.  I rank it right up there with, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Still, director William Wyler’s Dodsworth (1936) is not a particular...

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The Graduate (1967) ***

And here’s to you, Mrs. Bancroft…I love you more than you will know. Only you could make me give director Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) three out of four stars.  Had it not been for your phenomenal performance as Mrs. Robinson I am quite certain that I, and countless others, would have been much less enthralled with this satirical look at 1960s suburbia.  I expect that had you played a more dominant role in the second-half of the movie...

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