Invictus

#16 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. This feels like a fairy tale. Born of Morgan Freeman's desire to play Nelson Mandela in a film about the South African leader's life, it is a celebration of the man and his triumph in bringing the embittered, divided nation together through bread and circuses. It's ultimately…

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I Will Buy You

#7 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. This is the Japanese baseball version of Ace in the Hole, but it's missing one component that could have pushed it into greatness. The characters are well-drawn, the situation appropriately murky, and the tension real, but there's a moral component to the story that Masaki Kobayashi seems…

Flesh

#18 in my ranking of John Ford's filmography. Only really remembered these days because the Coen Brothers paid homage to it as the title of the screenplay being written by the title character in Barton Fink, Flesh is another nearly forgotten Ford film in his very busy 30s period that definitely doesn't deserve to be…

The Crowd Roars

#33 in my ranking of Howard Hawks' filmography. Two men bond over their mutual, masculine profession, and their women get an inordinate amount of screen time, confusing what the actual point of this short movie about racing is supposed to be. Is it about brothers finding a common, dangerous interest, or is about the women…

The Color of Money

#19 in my ranking of Martin Scorsese's films. Where Martin Scorsese took the sports movie in the direction of a dark, character driven exercise of personal exploration in Raging Bull, he takes the genre in a more conventional direction in The Color of Money. The sequel to The Hustler, made 25 years after the original,…