All posts by Scott A. McConnell
-
On Greta Garbo’s Greatness: An Appreciation of the Silent Icon’s Sound Star Turn in Queen Christina
“Spoils, glory, flags and trumpets! What is behind these high-sounding words? Death and destruction, triumphals of crippled men, Sweden victorious in a... -
Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious: How to Create Drama from Internal Conflict and Ironic Suspense
To stop a Nazi plot, an American agent pimps the woman he loves to a dangerous Nazi. This is the premise of... -
The Mark of Zorro Unmasked: Analyzing the Irony and Disguises of Tyrone Power’s Swashbuckling 1940s Hero
Some movies offer their audience the experience of an efficacious hero wittily fighting evil in a dramatic but benevolent world. The 1940 film The... -
100 Seconds of Greatness: Analyzing the First Scene of John Ford’s The Searchers
What made John Ford a great director? Let’s try an experiment to help answer that question. Let’s look at a one minute,...
Summer 2019
Spring 2019
Winter 2019
Guide 2019
Summer 2018
Year in MovieMaker
Inside the Issue: Acting
Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker: Richard Dreyfuss
American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stand By Me, Mr. Holland’s Opus… even while reading like a what’s what of cinema, those titles...1Inside the Issue: Directing
Cold Piece of Work: Richard Linklater Braves Greenland Hurricanes for Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette opens with the answer to its titular question. In an impressively executed overhead shot, the camera gazes down onto placid...Inside the Issue: How To
How They Did It: The Farewell Writer-Director Lulu Wang Shares Secrets to Turning Your Life Story into a Memoir Movie
The week before production started on The Farewell—my sophomore feature about a young woman (Billi, played by Awkwafina) and her family’s attempts to keep their grandmother’s...