The Grapes of Wrath Goes Dour To Properly Explore The Brutal Plight of the Joad Family

Though apparently softened down from its John Steinbeck penned source material (particularly in terms of its ending), The Grapes of Wrath carries with it a startlingly grim tone that, much like In a Lonely Place, doesn't feel like the kind of thing you might find in a movie made under the Hayes Code era of American filmmaking. This was an era where tidy morality and an upholding of a narrowly defined status quo were emphasized greatly, so it's shocking to see a movie like The Grapes of Wrath tell a tale this committed to a dour aesthetic as well as make villains out of law enforcement individuals with nary a good cop in sight to establish some kind of #NotAllCops message to appease Hayes Code censors.

The Past Looms Large Over The Chilling Goth Horror Feature Rebecca

Another review of a classic movie by yours truly, another instance of me finally getting to watch a widely acclaimed actor I've somehow never seen in a movie before! This time around, it's Laurence Olivier and my introductory foray into Olivier's work as a performer came via his work in one of the two lead roles of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock's lone directorial effort to score a Best Picture Oscar. Like Steven Spielberg, it's puzzling to contemplate how Hitchcock managed to direct only one Best Picture winner given his illustrious career as a filmmaker, but at least a darn good movie like Rebecca managed to take home such a prestigious award.

The Philadelphia Story Is A Total Delight, Especially In Its Excellent Ending

I'm officially head over heels for Katharine Hepburn as an actor. There's so much to love about Hepburn as a performer, but perhaps best of all about her is her assured nature. Whether she's depicting her character in a sorrowful mood or making it clear that her character feels radiant, Hepburn conveys a self-possessed quality in her performances that's truly thrilling to watch. Getting to watch her excel in a screwball comedy like Bringing Up Baby was already such a treat and her work in The Philadelphia Story is similarly top-notch stuff. Her work here is truly exceptional on its own merits while watching her rub shoulders with the likes of Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant adds another layer of delightfulness to the proceedings.

His Girl Friday Is A Charming Screwball Comedy Up Until Its Crummy Ending

Though there are a large amount of comedy sequels out there, especially in the modern-day cinematic landscape, for much of history, when a comedy has ended up being successful, Hollywood's de riguer was to simply assemble the leading actor of that comedy and possibly also it's direct and have them pair off again for another separate adventure that was similar in tone and style to what had come before it. Thus, Howard Hawks & Cary Grant re-teamed for another screwball comedy called His Girl Friday in 1940 after their 1938 effort Bringing Up Baby, which didn't perform as well at the box office as producers wanted but it had definitely proved that Hawks & Grant were a combo that worked well together.

Good Actors Try To Work With An Uneven Script In The Biopic Drama Marshall

Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, finally got a biopic movie to headline. Instead of chronicling him being chosen for the Supreme Court, the movie Marshall concentrates on a 1940 court case that Thurgood Marshall (played by Chadwick Boseman here) served as a lawyer in. This court case involved Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown) being accused of raping a wealthy socialite, Elanor Strubing (Kate Hudson), a court case that seems to have the odds stacked against it, especially when Marshall, being an out of state lawyer dispatched by the NAACP, is forbidden from speaking during the trial, leaving all the in-court defense to Sam Friedman (Josh Gad).

Dunkirk Is An Incredible War Movie That Goes All-In On Uniqueness

Dunkirk very much does not rest on the laurels of convention in many key aspects of how it chooses to tell the real life story of the World War II rescue mission called the Dunkirk Evacuation. One expects ambition from Christopher Nolan's work at this point, with it mostly paying off for him as a filmmaker while his weaker movies (the still really good The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar) being remarkably admirable in their audaciousness, but kinda like how Edgar Wright demonstrated he could do gangster movies with the same sense of brilliant energy and creativity that he had with his comedy with last month's Baby Driver, Nolan uses his sense of ambition on Dunkirk to chart new territory for himself as a filmmaker. Both in the pantheon of his filmography and as a movie in its own right, Dunkirk really does cement itself as something special.