Hitchcock Movie Review

There is a speech delivered by Helen Mirren in Hitchcock that begins bluntly and forcefully, before becoming one of those acting moments that gets played over and over again at awards shows. It’s a moment of performance that can so quickly and easily become overwrought, but then you realize that Mirren is an actress of incredible skill, subtlety, and professionalism that she won’t let her performance overshadow her character. She plays Alma Reville, the great director Alfred Hitchcock’s long-suffering wife and behind-the-scenes collaborator. She holds the film together and although Hitchcock is ostensibly concerned with the making of Psycho, that’s really just a backdrop for the way their marriage functioned and occasionally faltered.

From My Collection: The Outsiders Movie Review

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton, is one of those iconic movies from my childhood. It was slightly before my time, but I watched it any time I caught it on TV. The boys in the film were old enough that to me they were grown up. Still, something in the story connected with me in a strong way so that I lived and breathed with their actions and, in some cases, their tragic ends. Of course it didn’t hurt that it’s a story about boys being boys without any real authority to direct their rambunctious energy and it all ends with an epic rumble in the rain and mud.