House On Haunted Hill (1958)

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL  (1958)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Castle

    Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Elisha Cook Jr.,

    Richard Long, Carolyn Craig, Alan Marshall

A mysterious millionaire invites five guests to spend the night in a haunted mansion, with the promise that whoever survives till morning will take home $10,000. So you get 75 minutes of creaking doors, guttering candles, thunder and lightning, loaded guns in miniature coffins, severed heads, blood dripping from the ceiling, an organ that plays itself, a vat of acid in the cellar, Elisha Cook Jr. acting fidgety, and Vincent Price. None of it's especially scary. William Castle was an inventive (and shameless) B-movie marketeer with a gift for turning schlock gimmicks into quick profits. "House On Haunted Hill" was his showcase for "Emergo", which involved a skeleton planted somewhere in the theater darting out toward the audience at a particular point in the film. Theaters sold tickets and popcorn. Moviegoers screamed and laughed. Castle collected his money. Everybody had a good time. And except for the rare midnight screening on Halloween, "Emergo" never showed up again.

Nowhere Boy (2009)

NOWHERE BOY  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sam Taylor-Wood

    Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff

The early days of John Lennon, as a bespectacled kid in late-'50s Liverpool, shuffling between his caring but straight-laced Aunt Mimi and his caring but unbalanced mother Julia. There's a school suspension relating to a pornographic magazine, and banjo lessons from his mum, and Aunt Mimi buys John his first guitar, and he forms a rock-&-roll band called the Quarrymen, and then Paul and George join the group, and the rest, of course, is history. There's some overdone melodrama here, not that John's life didn't have some of that, but mostly it's a sweetly evocative portrait of the artist as a Beatle-in-the-making. Aaron Johnson effectively captures Lennon in all his funny, arrogant, impish, prickly complexity, and Beatles fans will have a good time picking out incidental references to the songs he'd write later on. Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas are annoyingly good as the two older women in Lennon's life.

Quintet (1979)

QUINTET  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Altman

    Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey,

    Vittorio Gassman, Nina Van Pallandt, Brigitte Fossey

Cryptic, ice-age sci-fi about a seal hunter (Paul Newman) who walks in out of a frozen wasteland to look for work in the city, because there are no more seals to hunt. In the city, icicles hang down everywhere. Packs of wild dogs feast on corpses left in the streets. Food and fuel are scarce. There is no work. Instead, everybody plays Quintet, a board game that both reflects and determines the fates of its players. It's hard to know what to make of this, but it's definitely not like anything else, terse and ghoulish, somber and playful, one of Altman's most mystifying visions, and probably the strangest thing Newman ever did. Filmed in the middle of a Canadian winter, in and around the crumbling remains of the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, it doesn't look like anything else, either.

Micmacs (2009)

MICMACS  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jean Pierre Jeunet

    Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon, Julie Ferrier,

    André Dussolier, Yolande Moreau, Omar Sy,

    Marie-Julie Baup, Nicolas Marié, Michel Crèmandés

This movie opens with a soldier somewhere out in the desert, trying to defuse a land mine. The mine goes off and the soldier is killed. Flash ahead 20 years, and the soldier's son, now grown up and clerking in a Paris video store, gets shot in the head during a robbery. The clerk recovers, with a bullet still lodged in his skull, and joins small band of eccentrics living under a junk yard, where he hatches an elaborate plan to get back at the weapons manufacturers who made both the mine and the bullet. Which could be the setup for a shoot-'em-up action flick, but it's not. It's a comedy, like what you might get if Terry Gilliam made a Buster Keaton movie (or maybe the other way around), by the same guy who made "Amélie" and "Delicatessen". Like John Waters, Jeunet has a real affection for his misfit characters and a cinematic vision that's uniquely his own, and he sees to it that the merchants of death get what's coming to them in a way that's both funny and satisfying. Humanity triumphs, if only for a moment, and only on film. Justice is served.

Gold (1972)

GOLD  (1972)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Bill Desloge, Bob Levis

    Del Close, Garry Goodrow, Caroline Parr,

    Sam Ridge, Orville Schell, Dorothy Schmidt

Hmmmm . . . okay . . . let's see . . . There's a gold rush. And a train. And a blonde in a tight white dress. And a corrupt politician. And a crooked cop. And a guy on crutches. And some people called the Mud People, rolling around naked in the mud. And a revolution. And none of it makes any sense, because everybody who worked on this (apparently) was higher than a kite. It's an hour and a half of narrative incoherence and improvised gibberish, next to unwatchable, except for the naked hippie chicks and some tunes by the MC5. Good luck getting through it all, if you're not high on something yourself. Filmed in 1968, but not released theatrically till years later. You can kind of see why.

A Single Man (2009)

A SINGLE MAN  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Tom Ford

    Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult,

    Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena, Paulette Lamori

Colin Firth, looking strangely a lot like Nelson Rockefeller, plays George Falconer, a gay English professor coming apart in the wake of his longtime lover's unexpected death. The year is 1962 - the Cuban Missile Crisis is playing out in the background - and for men like George, being closeted isn't an option. It's a fact of life. Firth, who plays several key scenes in tight close-up, gives a wrenching performance, showing the anguish of a man trying desperately not to let his anguish show, and Ford's visual style has a nice way of showing the world from George's vantage point. When he's checking out a cute young guy, there's no doubt what he's looking at, because that's what you're looking at, too. The flashbacks tend to be in bright colors or black and white, with more muted tones for the later scenes. And the straight neighbors across the street are shot in gauzy slow motion, reinforcing the professor's sense of isolation. He's as closed off from their world as they are from his.

Hell and High Water (1954)

HELL AND HIGH WATER  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Samuel Fuller

    Richard Widmark, Bella Darvi, Victor Francen,

    Cameron Mitchell, Gene Evans, David Wayne

Two-fisted action with Widmark as a submarine captain on a mission to investigate some suspected nuclear activity in the Arctic. An exciting Cold War thriller from a time when the only good commie was a dead one and everybody knew it. Bella Darvi plays the only woman on board, a dishy scientist who appears to be fluent in all of the world's languages.

Four Lions (2010)

FOUR LIONS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Christopher Morris

    Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Riz Achmed,

    Adeel Akhtar, Preena Kalidas, Mohammad Aquil

A British black comedy about a small band of self-styled jihadis who decide to become suicide bombers. First they have to assemble the means to make the bombs (they need lots of bleach), and then there's the matter of deciding what, besides themselves, they want to blow up. (Possible targets include a pharmacy, the Internet, a mosque and the London Marathon.) So, okay, these aren't the brightest amateur terrorists on the block, a liability that's only slightly offset by the fact that they're completely delusional. You've got to admire a movie that would take on terrorism as a subject for comedy in the first place. But you've really got to admire one that would take a premise like this to its logical conclusion, which this film does. I saw it in a small theater with about ten other people, half of them watching in stony silence and the other half laughing hysterically. Me, I was one of the ones laughing. When a trainee in a terrorist camp in Pakistan tries to fire a rocket at an American drone and accidentally kills Osama Bin Laden instead, what's not funny about that?

Mr. Moto's Gamble (1938)

MR. MOTO'S GAMBLE  (1938)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: James Tinling

    Peter Lorre, Keye Luke, Lynn Bari,

    Maxie Rosenbloom, Ward Bond, Harold Huber,

    Douglas Fowley, Jayne Reagan, Lon Chaney Jr.

Peter Lorre was one of the screen's most distinctive character actors, a gnome-like figure who alternated between leads and supporting roles throughout his career. In the late 1930s, he got to play the impeccably smooth-mannered detective Mr. Moto, in a series of mysteries based on the novels of John P. Marquand. In this entry, Mr. Moto takes on the case of a boxer killed in the ring. It's a lively B-movie whodunit, and while Lorre was Hungarian and Marquand's sleuth is Japanese, you wouldn't want anybody else to play Mr. Moto. It started shooting as a Charlie Chan film, and went over to Mr. Moto when Warner Oland, who played Charlie Chan, backed out. Which explains why Keye Luke, Charlie Chan's #1 son, shows up here, too, doing broad comic relief with ex-pug Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom.