Movie Reviews
Titles starting with S
Sullivan’s Travels
John L. Sullivan is a Hollywood director who makes $4000 per week. (The average yearly wage in 1941 was around $1500.) He makes comedies, like Ants in Your Pants of 1939, but he yearns to make a serious movie. He wants to film a book about hard times and poverty and other important things, called O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Sinclair ... Read more »
Sully
I am deeply conflicted about this movie. Tom Hanks is very good, as usual, as the hero of the Miracle on the Hudson. And the depictions of the crisis and how he and his copilot and cabin crew dealt with it are riveting, frightening, even though we all know how it all came out. And I understand that a screenplay has to have some conflict in it, it is almost impossible to make a movie that ... Read more »
Summer Hours
Three children and their families are spending some time at the country house of their mother, whose uncle was a famous painter. The house is full of his possessions, unchanged since his death: many sentimental items and some of great value, including two Corots. End of Act One. She dies, and they gather again to discuss what to do with the estate. One son wants to keep the house and ... Read more »
A Summer in Genoa
A woman dies in a car accident, leaving a husband and pre-teen and teenage daughters. Hoping that a change of scene will get them past the grief, the father (Colin Firth) takes them to Genoa, where he will teach and they will learn Italian and take piano lessons. Genoa has beautiful beaches full of beautiful boys for the teenager, lovely churches and architecture for the younger girl, ... Read more »
Sunday Bloody Sunday
It’s frequently the case that a movie that was ground-breaking and even a little shocking seems fairly ordinary after the passage of a few years. This one is more than forty years old now, and not nearly as revolutionary as it once seemed. It is a love triangle, two men (Peter Finch as a middle-aged doctor and Murray Head as a young sculptor) and a woman (Glenda Jackson), the twist being ... Read more »
Sundays and Cybele
Translation: Sundays in Ville d’Avray I am so, so glad I found this. It is an exceptional film. It has a warm heart … and a sad ending. But it is done with such lyrical perfection. If you can stand heartbreak, see this at once.
Hardy Krüger is a man suffering from what I guess you would call PTSD. He was a fighter pilot in Indochina, and he suffered ... Read more »
The Sundowners
Shot in Australia, and one of the chief reasons to see this is the locations, the photography, and the insight into the lives of the sheep drovers there. The story is unsurprising but well-told. There is a good, scary forest fire, and a pretty funny sheep-shearing contest. Robert Mitchum is relatively un-macho. His Aussie accent is terrible. Deborah Kerr’s is much better, though I doubt ... Read more »
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
I was looking at the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Films, and this was the only one I had never seen. It was made in Hollywood by F.W. Murnau at the tail end of the silent era. Murnau is most famous for Nosferatu, but I personally prefer another film from his German period, The Last Laugh. I have mixed ... Read more »
Sunrise at Campobello
A lot of the discussion at the IMDb was about Greer Garson’s teeth. No kidding. She’s wearing a dental appliance that makes her slightly buck-toothed, like Eleanor Roosevelt actually was. Most seemed to think it made her grotesque. What idiots. It would take a lot more than that to make the fabulous Greer look bad. And let’s face it, though Eleanor was a great woman, about the nicest thing ... Read more »
Sunset Boulevard
Still just as good as the first time I saw it. If All About Eve hadn’t come out in the same year it certainly would have won Best Picture. I don’t have a lot to add to the thousands of essays that have been written about it. Look some of them up, see the movie again, marvel at Billy Wilder’s audacity at even making it, and at Gloria ... Read more »