Directed By: Ang Lee

Top 8 Cast: Christina Ricci, Joan Allen, Kevin Kline, Tobey Maguire, Sigourney Weaver, Elijah Wood, Adam Han-Byrd, Jamey Sheridan

Plot: It’s 1973 in New Canaan, CT. Ben Hood’s stepping out on Elena with Janey. Sex is budding for Mikey, Wendy, Sandy & Paul. A way of life is changing. A storm’s a’brewin’.

Response: Dudes confide to their mistresses that they don’t enjoy golf as much as they feel they ought. Kevin Kline drops the turkey. This is where that saying, “you really dropped the turkey” comes from. Sitting on unceded tribal lands. Old enough to fuck, young enough to be carried by Dad. Young sadists cradle G.I.Joes while on TV, Italians play Indians crying about pollution. There’s a moment when Joan Allen basically says to a creepy priest, “you fuck sheep, bro?” Spirit adrift. Tell Gen Z, Ice Storm’s got some of that dark academia I heard they like. 90’s for 70’s. Grubby hands manning ice cubes. The camera shows us that which we can normally only see just before death. The majesty of nature, it’s not so much that it’s indifferent as that it exists above, beyond, and including us. The ocean upon which we rest. Dude’s slip on the ice. Katie Holmes is also in this. Wild Wild West’s Kevin Kline is in this.

Quick Reflections: This is the kinda movie that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. Totally economic and spare in its plot and pacing yet filled with great depths. It’s true to the emotional experience of children and adults. It’s got spiritual, political and literary levels. Very sad, only slightly elliptical and real good. On some level it feels like a better, though less iconic, American Beauty in that it’s dealing with similar suburban nuclear-family malaise and disillusionment but this one’s far richer. It ends on a perfect note. It also opens with some arresting strangeness, a frozen rail car, total ice-begrimed, seemingly abandoned, with a boy inside reading comics in the dark. It’s a “woah, shit” movie for sure.

Second Opinions:

“p much the saddest movie ever made but also ALL THE TEEN ACTORS HAVE SUCH CUTE LIL CHUBBY CHEEKS” - David Sims on Letterboxed

“Something about this haunts me after every viewing. The Native American flute on the soundtrack is so vital in distinguishing this from an American Beauty-style tragicomedy. It evokes a feeling that the drama is being played out on land that existed long before the characters dwelled there, and will continue to exist long after we're gone.” - Trevor Tillman on Mubi

"The Ice Storm captures this place, this season, this garish and confused moment in history, with surgical precision...It's Lee's sympathetic detachment that gives the movie its paradoxical power.” - David Ansen, Newsweek