Crimson Peak.
Crimson Peak
Red is the outstanding color in Crimson Peak (2015), a film that makes astute use of the palette—especially darker hues juxtaposed against pure white. With Crimson Peak, director Guillermo del Toro crafted a cinematic gothic story featuring a Byronic anti-hero (Tom Hiddleston), his sinister sister (Jessica Chastain), an American innocent abroad (Mia Wasikowska) and better-than-usual CGI. The groaning, decaying castle is pure Edgar Allan Poe, haunted by the spirits of terrible misdeeds.
Man of a Thousand Faces
They called Lon Chaney “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” In this 1957 tribute movie, James Cagney pushes himself emotionally and physically, playing the silent star best recalled for his still-shocking role as the masked organist in The Phantom of the Opera. Chaney gets the Hollywood treatment, turning pain into melodrama, yet the movie gets at the general idea: The bullied child of deaf-mute parents, Chaney combined empathy for outsiders with remarkable physical agility.
“Holocaust”
The 1978 mini-series launched Meryl Streep’s rise as the great actress of her generation and introduced “Holocaust” as the standard term for the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews. It’s a largely accurate impression of history dramatized through an overlapping set of family stories. That it remains painful to watch testifies to its endurance. The one problem with “Holocaust” is a screenplay that shoehorns an array of historical references into dialogue that doesn’t ring true.
“China Beach: The Complete Series”
All 62 episodes of the popular series “China Beach” (1988-1991) are collected in an elaborate DVD box set. “China Beach” worked territory familiar from “M*A*S*H” but located the action in Vietnam around a medical evacuation hospital near Da Nang. In episode one, protagonist Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) is shown reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, his disparaging appraisal of U.S. naiveté in Vietnam. It’s a sign that someone smart had a hand in the program’s inception.
