This Gun For Hire (1942)

THIS GUN FOR HIRE  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Frank Tuttle

    Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Robert Preston,

    Tully Marshall, Laird Cregar, Marc Lawrence,

    Pamela Blake, Frank Ferguson, Roger Imhof

Alan Ladd is one of those 1940s movie stars who looks like he was born wearing a fedora and a trench coat. In his first starring role, he plays a hit man called Raven, who does a job and gets paid off in counterfeit money. With the cops closing in, he teams up with a nightclub singer (Veronica Lake) to go after the guys who set him up, who, it turns out, are dealing chemical secrets to the Japanese. A tense, efficient thriller, released at a time when even a hard-boiled assassin could be called on to do his part for the war effort. That's a cool-looking trench coat and fedora, too.

Hamlet 2 (2008)

HAMLET 2  (2008)  ¢ ¢

    D: Andrew Fleming

    Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener,

    Amy Poehler, Elisabeth Shue

Fitful comedy about a frustrated high school drama teacher who decides to stage an original play, a sequel to "Hamlet", complete with music, low-riders, sex, dancing, much foul language, a time machine, a gay chorus, aerial combat and Jesus Christ. It's not exactly what Shakespeare had in mind, and it's never quite as funny as it probably sounded in the concept phase. Show-stopping highlight: a raucous production number called "Rock Me Sexy Jesus". Nope, it's not what Shakespeare had in mind at all.

Sometimes a Great Notion (1971)

SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Paul Newman

    Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Lee Remick,

    Richard Jaeckel, Michael Sarrazin, Linda Lawson

Paul Newman plays Hank Stamper, the hard-headed, beer-guzzling older son in a family of loggers living together in a waterbound fortress somewhere around Coos Bay, Oregon. Henry Fonda plays Henry Stamper, Hank's crotchety old man, and if you think Hank's a hard case, you ain't met Henry. Richard Jaeckel plays cousin Joe Ben, who's found the Lord and a loving wife, and refuses to see the serious side of anything. Michael Sarrazin plays Leland, Hank's half-brother, newly arrived from the East, full of anger and self-pity after a comically botched suicide attempt. There's a strike going on, and all the local loggers are in on it except the Stampers, who have a contract and will make sure they honor it, come hell or high water, which is pretty much what they get. Newman's screen version of the Ken Kesey novel can't capture what Kesey did with prose. What it does capture fairly well is the lifestyle and attitude of loggers and logging towns, and the inherent danger that goes with that line of work. And it works as a character study, with the leads all perfectly cast, including Lee Remick as Hank's wife Viv, a girl from Colorado whose dreams have stalled out in this rain-drenched spot on the Oregon coast. But the movie ultimately belongs to Fonda as the ornery, foul-mouthed patriarch, stomping around banging on doors to wake everybody up at four in the morning and railing against pinkos and Bolsheviks, a philosophical counterpoint to Tom Joad. He might not be on screen at the end, but the grisly, defiant gesture that concludes the film belongs to him, too.

Michael Sarrazin

(1940-2011)

The Warrior's Way (2010)

THE WARRIOR'S WAY  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sngmoo Lee

    Dong-gun Jang, Kate Bosworth, Geoffrey Rush,

    Danny Huston, Tony Cox, Lung Ti

A samurai spaghetti western about a master swordsman who wanders into a baroque frontier hellhole inhabited by a few grimy settlers and a broken-down carnival. So there's a little Fellini, a little Mad Max, a little Hawks, a little Eastwood, parts snatched from a hundred different sources, all pitched into this hyperviolent dream. Geoffrey Rush plays the town drunk, Dean Martin being no longer available. Kate Bosworth channels Hilary Swank as a plucky young woman who's good with a knife. Dong-gun Jang as the warrior slices and dices the bad guys and looks real cool doing it. Danny Huston oozes vileness as the outlaw leader. The colors are vivid. The music is knockoff Morricone. The believability quotient is zero, but then, dreams aren't required to play by the rules, or even make sense. Filmed in New Zealand.

Murder On the Orient Express (1974)

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS  (1974) 

    D: Sidney Lumet                                         ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Albert Finney, Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark,

    Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Lauren Bacall,

    Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York,

    John Gielgud, Jacqueline Bisset, Wendy Hiller

This starts out with a dozen characters, all played by famous movie stars, boarding a train in Istanbul, bound for Paris and Calais. One of them is nasty old Richard Widmark, who very quickly turns up dead, the victim of a heavy sedative and multiple stab wounds. With the train stuck in a Balkan snowdrift, the owner of the railroad (Martin Balsam) enlists his old friend and fellow passenger Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) to question the suspects and solve the case before the coach reaches Prague. It's all a bit over the top, from the posh production values to Finney's fussy performance, but it's over the top done real well, with elegant star turns by just about everybody. By the time the mystery's solved and each actor takes what amounts to a curtain call before the end credits, you half expect Widmark to come back from the dead for a final bow, too.

Sidney Lumet

(1924-2011)

Shadows and Fog (1992)

SHADOWS AND FOG  (1992)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Woody Allen

    Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, John Malkovich,

    John Cusack, Lily Tomlin, Donald Pleasence,

    Jodie Foster, Fred Gwynne, Julie Kavner,

    David Ogden Stiers, Kathy Bates, Madonna,

    Kate Nelligan, Josef Sommer, Robert Joy,

    Kenneth Mars, John C. Reilly, Wallace Shawn

The first thing you see is a man's shadow, shrouded in fog. The man's short and round and vaguely resembles Peter Lorre in "M". The second thing you see is another man, tall and gaunt, with a bald head. He vaguely resembles Max Schreck in "Nosferatu". The second man approaches the first man with a piece of piano wire and strangles him. The visual references to Schreck and Lorre are no coincidence, and neither is Kurt Weill's music. The picture looks like something out of Germany between the wars. The story's about a fidgety little nebbish named Kleinman (Woody Allen), who's enlisted to be part of a late-night street patrol out to track down a serial killer (the guy who looks like Schreck). So Kleinman goes out on the street, not knowing what role he's supposed to play in the manhunt, and soon finds himself a suspect, and then a target of the mob, when the Schreck figure, now working with the vigilantes, fingers him as the murderer. It's a nightmare that gets progressively more sinister and unsettling, and it's not going to end when he wakes up, because he's not asleep. It's a comic study in mass hysteria and the psychology of lynch mobs, and it's one of Woody Allen's best movies, not like anything else he's done, though it's hard to imagine anybody else doing it. There are passing references to Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus" and Tod Browning's "Freaks", and scenes often play out with key characters outside the frame, off screen. Characters in other Woody Allen films found temporary salvation at the movies, with the Marx Brothers, or Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Here they turn up at a circus, or a brothel, seeking relief, or at least a diversion, from a world gone horribly wrong, an evil it's not in their power to prevent. Kleinman's solution is the ultimate magician's trick, an escape into pure illusion. When you're trapped in the night in the shadows and fog, that's as close to a happy ending as you're likely to get.

Fish Tank (2009)

FISH TANK  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Andrea Arnold

    Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Griffiths,

    Harry Treadaway, Kierston Wareing, Sarah Bayes

Nobody does working-class despair better than the Brits. This movie's about a 15-year-old girl named Mia, who has what you might call anger management issues. She lives with her mother and younger sister in a noisy, crumbling flat in a kind of urban no man's land, where she's apparently dodging school and pinning her hopes for the future on catching a break as a dancer. Her dogged ambition greatly outweighs her actual prospects. She's played by Katie Jarvis, a newcomer who has the surly teenage rebellion routine down cold, apparently from living it. It's a remarkable debut performance, as real as Mia's tank-top-and-sweat-pants wardrobe and the junkyard where her potential new boyfriend steals parts for used cars. After watching it, you'll be real glad you didn't grow up in this rundown corner of England. But you'll remember one who did, at least on film. And you'll remember Katie Jarvis.

Creepozoids (1987)

CREEPOZOIDS  (1987)  ¢ ¢

    D: David DeCoteau

    Linnea Quigley, Ken Abraham, Michael Aranda,

    Kim McKamy, Richard Hawkins, Joi Wilson

In the post-apocalyptic future (1998), boxers are in, bras apparently are out, and World War Three is raging. To escape a deadly dose of acid rain, a handful of army deserters hole up in an abandoned research warehouse, where they're terrorized by a slimy, mutant monster and some very large rats. A low-budget "Alien" knockoff, the kind of movie where, in the time it takes to say, "Don't go in there," somebody goes in there, and as soon as you start to think, "Don't split up," the survivors split up. Linnea Quigley's overexposed knockers make an obligatory appearance, but Kim McKamy as the relative brains of the outfit does a better job of commanding the screen. McKamy appears to be seconds away from her own nude scene when the camera cuts to Quigley being attacked by a giant rat, an ironic example of topless interruptus when you consider Kim's X-rated work as porn star Ashlyn Gere.

Augustus (2003)

AUGUSTUS  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Roger Young

    Peter O'Toole, Charlotte Rampling, Ken Durken,

    Vittoria Belvedere, Benjamin Sadler, Anna Valle

Pick up any Peter O'Toole movie, and you can just about count on getting your money's worth, if not from the movie, then at least from O'Toole. In fact, what you get with O'Toole isn't just a performance, but two: the actor playing a character, usually several times larger than life, and the actor playing himself. O'Toole's not somebody who vanishes into a role. He's incapable of it. He doesn't become a character as much as he takes a character over and makes it become him. In this movie, O'Toole plays the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus, scheming, clinging to power, looking back on his life and plotting his succession at about the time B.C. becomes A.D. It's a potboiler filmed in Tunisia, and it provides the kind of outsized canvas on which O'Toole seems to do his most impressive work. It's not "I, Claudius", but still, it's O'Toole, at 70, hitting every mark, nailing every line, reaching for the rafters with a relish he's rarely bothered to contain and a precision that allows him to get away with it. It's hard to imagine O'Toole retiring till he's smoked his last Gauloise, but the emperor's death scene gives you the spooky sense that you're not just watching the curtain go down on Augustus. You're watching a great movie star - O'Toole playing himself - bow out, too.