[7] Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood) won his third Oscar for his convincing portrait of America’s 16th president during the final months of the Civil War. Lincoln is a decades-long pet project for director Steven Spielberg, who chose Angels in America scribe Tony Kushner to make Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln the foundation …
[7] Thirteen-year-old aspiring writer Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) accuses her older sister’s lover of a crime he didn’t commit, effectively condemning him to years of prison and compulsory military service. The lovers (Keira Knightley and James McAvoy) stay connected through letter-writing, but the unfolding tragedies of World War II keep them ever apart. Years later, Briony wants to atone for the sin that tore her …
[2] Mary Tyler Moore (Ordinary People) and Christine Lahti (Running on Empty) star as newfound friends who discover a terrible coincidence — that the man Lahti is having an affair with is none other than Moore’s husband (Cheers‘s Ted Danson). Lahti is the first to realize the problem and tries to break it off with Danson. But fate intervenes, and the secret eventually comes out. …
[6] This movie has the distinction of being the first released film about the eponymous serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’60s. While it has all the low production values you might expect from a 16mm low-budget drive-in flick, the screenplay is structurally sound and does an interesting job marrying fact with fiction. The Zodiac Killer starts off by …
[8] Socially-conscious filmmaker Stanley Kramer (Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg) made an impact early in his directing career with this dramatic chase story of two escaped convicts evading authorities while chained together at the wrists. The twist? One prisoner’s white and the other’s black. This poetic plot point allows The Defiant Ones to address racism in America while also delivering as a tense cat …
[4] Barbara Stanwyck plays a poor waitress who falls in love with a rich man (Regis Toomey), but his mother (Clara Blandick) is determined to keep the two apart. She even goes so far as to have a judge arrest her on a phony morals charge and send her to ninety-day reform program! Once she’s released, Stanwyck starts a new life and becomes a infamous …
[4] Michael Fassbender (Shame, Steve Jobs) stars as a Norwegian police detective on a missing person case that quickly becomes the hunt for a serial killer called The Snowman. Rebecca Ferguson (Dune, Doctor Sleep) co-stars as his eager new partner, who discovers potential leads involving a fertility doctor and a powerful businessman. But as leads turn into red herrings, is it possible the killer is …
[8] Adrien Brody (The Pianist, The Thin Red Line) plays a ’50s Hollywood detective investigating the mysterious death of actor George Reeves, played by Ben Affleck (Gone Girl, The Town). Hollywoodland is based on the true story of Reeves, who struggled to claim fame on the big screen but ended up finding it as the star of television’s The Adventures of Superman. Brody and Affleck …
[6] Peter Cushing and Andre Morell, paired a few years earlier in The Hound of the Baskervilles, re-team for Hammer Studios in Cash on Demand. Based on a stage play, this is largely a two-man show with Morell playing a charming but dangerous bank robber who forces Cushing, a bank manager, to help him abscond with over ninety-thousand pounds. Taking place in ‘real time’ two …
[5] Nancy Carroll (Hot Saturday) murders an ex-lover after he threatens to put out a hit on her new fiancée (Cary Grant). She and Grant escape on a three day pleasure cruise, but a lawyer friend of the deceased crashes the vacation, determined to bring her to justice. The Woman Accused has a fun set-up, great sets, and beautiful lighting, but only Carroll benefits from …
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