As usual, I’m deep into covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. My Cinequest Preview highlights this weekend’s United States premiere of the brilliant indie drama Bikini Moon. Bookmark my Cinequest 2018 page, with links to all my coverage. Follow me on Twitter for the latest.
Before Sunday night’s Oscar show, you’re going to want to see the Oscar favorites Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Shape of Water. (I’ve also written If I Picked the Oscars – before the nominations were announced.) Here are the best movie choices in theaters this week:
- The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative, operatic inter-species romance may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
- Steven Spielberg’s docudrama on the Pentagon Papers, The Post, is both a riveting thriller and an astonishingly insightful portrait of Katharine Graham by Meryl Streep. It’s one of the best movies of the year – and one of the most important. Also see my notes on historical figures in The Post.
- Pixar’s Coco is a moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, and it’s visually spectacular.
- Lady Bird , an entirely fresh coming of age comedy that explores the mother-daughter relationship – an impressive debut for Greta Gerwig as a writer and director.
- I, Tonya is a marvelously entertaining movie, filled with wicked wit and sympathetic social comment.
Here’s the rest of my Best Movies of 2017 – So Far. Most of the ones from earlier this year are available on video. Here’s another current (and Oscar-nominated) choice:
- Call Me By Your Name is an extraordinarily beautiful story of sexual awakening set in a luscious Italian summer, but I didn’t buy the impossibly cool parents or the two pop ballad musical interludes.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is a crowd-pleaser from the 2013 Cinequest, The Sapphires. The Sapphires is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, GooglePlay and Flixster.
Turner Classic Movies is in its 31 Days of Oscars, and I’m calling out the March 9 telecast of High Noon. This is a movie that I rank among my 50 or so Greatest Movies of All Time. It’s also a movie that John Wayne called “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life”. I’m right, and the Duke was wrong.
Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a veteran town sheriff who is about to retire to a ranch with his Quaker bride (Grace Kelly). A thug that he sent to prison is about to get out and vows to return and take his revenge on Kane. His pacifist wife demands that he continue with the plan to retire and leave town. But Kane lives by a code – he can’t abandon his town to criminal disorder, and he can’t be seen as running away from a fight. He can handle the threat if only a few of the folks he has been protecting will step up and have his back.
High Noon is worth watching just for director Fred Zinnemann’s iconic montage when the clock is about to strike noon – it’s really the gold standard for any montage in cinema. But Gary Cooper’s performance as the stoic Will Kane, whose determination is bringing him more and more desperation, is a masterpiece of understatement. There are also two supporting performances for the ages. Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life) plays the mayor, Will Kane’s stoutest defender, who finds it politically convenient to take his chances with the outlaws; his speech of support-turned-into-betrayal can be compared only to Marc Antony’s burial speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. And the smoldering Katy Jurado is unforgettable as Will Kane’s ex; a woman who acts practically, but who respects a man with a code. Plus, there’s Dmitri Tiomkin’s Oscar-winning song Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’.
High Noon is generally interpreted as a statement against the Hollywood Blacklist (hence John Wayne’s complaint). That’s the way it was intended by its soon-to-be-blacklisted screenwriter Carl Forman. I recommend author Glenn Frankel’s interview on NPR’s Fresh Air about his book High Noon. But, message aside, it works as a thriller without any political subtext.
Baby Boomers who remember Sea Hunt will be jarred by Lloyd Bridges as a less than heroic persona. Lee Van Cleef (without any spoken lines) looks menacing in his film debut.
