1995 – Chris Noonan – This charming fantasy about a talking pig who thinks he's a sheepdog, adapted from a children's novel by Dick King-Smith, was something of a surprise hit with audiences and critics and became one of the few films of its kind to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. What makes Babe such a wonderful movie is that it rises above standard children&#x…
1946 – William Wyler – Rarely has simplicity been more eloquent on screen. Opening in the immediate aftermath of the veteran's homecoming, William Wyler's masterpiece of three servicemen returning home after World War II seems dated in only very small ways. Hugo Friedhofer's Oscar-winning score may be a bit over-repeated on the soundtrack, and Robert E. Sherwood…
1983 – Ingmar Bergman – Ingmar Bergman's wonderful movie swan song and semi-autobiography opens with the Ekdahl family in 1907 Sweden. The first forty minutes or so show us a family on Christmas, as the wise matriarch (Gunn Wallgren) waits for her three sons, their wives, and children to arrive. The large, lavishly appointed house all but glows with warmth. Many of these even…
1988 – Phil Alden Robinson – “Are you a ghost?” asks Karen Kinsella (Gaby Hoffmann) of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta). “Do I look like a ghost?” replies Jackson. Karen says, “Ya look real to me.” “Well then, I must be real.” concludes Shoeless Joe. As you watch the curious corn farmer Ray (Kevin Costner) plow under his crops…
1940 – John Ford – Many big-budget epics organize themselves around a series of set pieces that usually showcase special effects. Based on Steinbeck's novel, this epic of the common man organizes itself around some of the milestones in the life of the Joad family. In the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma during the Depression, countless families are dispossessed by bank foreclosures. Imp…
1946 – Frank Capra – Suicide and Christmas—two staples of Frank Capra's film world—produce an even better mix in this classic than in Meet John Doe. How does Capra pay faithful service to both the spirit of Yuletide and fantasy and that of frustration and despair? Much of it comes through his Everyman hero George Bailey (James Stewart). George's deep fear…
1994 – Edward Zwick – Director Edward Zwick's 1989 Civil War film Glory was a tragic-heroic exploration of the realities of war and racial oppression, an important movie about a disenfranchised people struggling against the odds to fight for personal freedom. Set during and after World War I, Zwick's Legends of the Fall, a story about three brothers who love the same w…
1942 – Orson Welles – Somebody should make a movie about the making of The Magnificent Ambersons. Tim Robbins could play young Orson Welles, who in 1941 was fresh from the critical success and financial failure of Citizen Kane when he chose for his second RKO project Booth Tarkington's 1918 Pulitzer prize-winning novel about an Indianapolis family at the turn of the century a…
1976 – Bernardo Bertolucci – <img2.5> Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 falls into the category of sprawling, novel-like epics that exist in versions of various lengths (Once Upon a Time in America, featuring the same star and composer, is another). The sympathetic, even affectionate, presentation of the rise of Italian communism, coupled with comments from the director…
1942 – Michael Curtiz – Yankee Doodle Dandy is the story of the great George M. Cohan, Broadway song and dance legend. The film takes us through his life in a flashback while he speaks to President Roosevelt prior to receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor. As Cohan leaves FDR, he descends a grand White House staircase with a dancing jaunt in his stride, an emblematic image for a…
During the peak of popularity for the television mini-series during the 1970s, the epic seemed for a while to become more the property of the small screen than the big. Two of the most popular mini-series also dramatized family stories. Rich Man, Poor Man, based on Irwin Shaw's novel, aired in 1976, and its popularity led television historians Tim Brooks and Earl Marsh to speculate that &#x…