Nomadland: Life of a Vandweller

Frances McDormand. Photo: Searchlight Pictures Watching this movie reminded me of a younger relative of mine. I haven’t met him for many years; he’s spent most of his time on…

Blue Velvet: Quite an Earful

Photo: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group In his annual movie guide, Leonard Maltin expresses amazement at how Blue Velvet was a critically lauded film. Roger Ebert wrote about how Isabella Rossellini was degraded,…

Pretty Woman

Depressed corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) hooks up with a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute (Julia Roberts) and realizes she’s a human being. An enormous box-office hit at the time, this…

Freaky Friday 

Teenager Annabel (Jodie Foster) and her mother (Barbara Harris) magically switch bodies and try to deal with each other’s challenges. When Mary Rodgers wrote her novel, the concept of characters…

Best Years of Our Lives: Coming Home

Myrna Loy and Fredric March. Photo: RKO The premiere of The Best Years of Our Lives seemed to hit America like a ton of bricks. Coming the year after the…

The Last Adventure 

Jimmy Mattsson (Göran Stangertz) abruptly ends his military service and is hired as a high-school teacher… but sleeping with one of the 16-year-old students (Ann Zacharias) causes a problem. One…

Last Tango in Paris: Dark Moments Together

Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando. Photo: United Artists The scene in Last Tango in Paris where Marlon Brando anally rapes Maria Schneider was controversial at the time of the release…

Red River: Mutiny on the Trail

John Wayne and Joanne Dru. Photo: United Artists John Ford was the man behind the movie that made John Wayne a star, Stagecoach (1939). When he saw Red River nine…

Andrei Rublev: Before the Tsars

Photo: Mosfilm Andrei Tarkovsky’s wildly ambitious second film was shown in a cinema in 1966. The audience seemed to like it, but the Soviet censors refused to approve the epic…