Charlie Chan In Egypt (1935)

CHARLIE CHAN IN EGYPT  (1935)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Arthur Ripley
    Warner Oland, Pat Paterson, Thomas Beck,
    Rita Hayworth, Stepin Fetchit, Frank Conroy
When a mummy turns up with a bullet in its chest and the paint still wet on its sarcophagus, detective Charlie Chan becomes suspicious. Ah, so. Just about every character in this movie acts like a suspect. Maybe they all done it.

Tiny Furniture (2010)

TINY FURNITURE  (2010)  ¢
    D: Lena Dunham
    Lena Dunham, Merritt Wever, Grace Dunham,
    Laurie Simmons, Alex Karpovsky, Jemima Kirke
I've never been quite sure what constitutes a mumblecore movie, but I think this might be one. It's got a low budget and an amateur cast and a boring lead character (a young woman named Aura, just home from film school) trying to work out her boring personal issues by inflicting them on all her boring acquaintances and friends. And if Aura can't find happiness (and she can't), she'll do the next best thing: share her misery with everybody else. It's a case where you wonder whether the filmmaker herself is any different from the character she's playing. You hope not, but there's so little artistry in this, it's hard to say. Aura is somebody with absolutely no concept of personal space. She doesn't want any for herself, and it doesn't seem to matter to her that other people might. The result is a kind of suffocating intimacy that men sometimes take advantage of, and everybody - friends, relatives, lovers - steps away from sooner or later. Apparently, Aura's endless existential suffering isn't nearly as fascinating to anybody else as it is to her. And Dunham has made this really boring, irritating movie about it. The movie lasts 98 minutes, but it feels a lot longer, like a relationship that you wonder why you got into that goes bad real fast, and now you're just putting up with it till you can figure out a way to get the hell out. 98 minutes spent watching a movie like "Tiny Furniture" is way more than enough.

The Story of Mankind (1957)

THE STORY OF MANKIND  (1957)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Irwin Allen
    Ronald Colman, Vincent Price, Hedy Lamarr,
    Peter Lorre, Virginia Mayo, Dennis Hopper,
    Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx,
    Agnes Moorehead, Edward Everett Horton,
    John Carradine, Reginald Gardiner, Marie Wilson,
    Franklin Pangborn, Francis X. Bushman, Henry Daniell
The Devil (Vincent Price) and the Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman) debate the role of good and evil through history, while the High Tribunal of Outer Space considers the evidence and decides the fate of the human race. Harpo Marx plays Isaac Newton. Peter Lorre plays Nero. Dennis Hopper plays Napoleon. Hedy (not Hedley) Lamarr plays Joan of Arc. You don't see history like that every day. Definitely one of the oddest things ever to come out of mainstream Hollywood: moviemaking so sincerely (and comically) misguided, it's almost surreal. For curiosity value alone, it shouldn't be missed.

Love Actually (2003)

LOVE ACTUALLY  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Richard Curtis
    Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson,
    Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney,
    Colin Firth, Martine McCutcheon, Keira Knightley,
    Martin Freeman, Joanna Page, Billy Bob Thornton
An all-star ensemble comedy about love and its infinite manifestations in the weeks leading up to Christmas. This is what the flacks like to call a "guaranteed crowd-pleaser," and it pretty much covers the range from laugh-out-loud funny to sitcom cute. To suggest that a cast like this deserves something more substantial is beside the point. They do, but so what? Chances are you'll have at least as much fun with it as they did, and it's Christmas, after all, so go ahead and enjoy this one. You can always forgive yourself in the morning.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mervyn Leroy
    Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell,
    Ginger Rogers, Aline MacMahon, Warren William,
    Guy Kibbee, Ned Sparks, Sterling Holloway
A bunch of chorus girls sharing a flat and trying not to starve as they search in vain for theater work. A producer who has a great idea for a show, but no money to put it on with. A boyish songwriter across the way who's working on some terrific tunes and just might know how to finance a Broadway production. The quintessential 1930s musical isn't the escapist fantasy you might expect, despite its flamboyant Busby Berkeley production numbers. The Depression hangs over everything, from the opening song (Ginger Rogers singing "We're In the Money" in pig Latin) to "Forgotten Man", the somber, show-stopping finale. Even with its chorus girls dangling costume coins and playing neon violins, the underlying spirit is dark.
    

Rio (2011)

RIO  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Carlos Saldanha
A vibrantly colorful animated feature about a rare bird, a blue macaw, who's captured and smuggled out of a South American jungle, ending up, improbably, in the ice-bound metropolis of Moose Lake, Minnesota. There he's taken in by a young girl and becomes her pet, best friend and soulmate, as she grows up to become the owner of a bookstore called (of course) the Blue Macaw. Eventually, both the bird and the bookseller end up back in Brazil, where the bird gets captured again, and, you know, I just realized you could probably watch this movie in the time it takes to explain the story. Anyway, it moves right along, Anne Hathaway, Jesse Eisenberg, Jamie Foxx and Tracy Morgan do some of the voices, and the songs are catchy without being annoying in the way that the songs in cartoons can sometimes be. If the little ones insist on watching and listening to the title track 10 times running, it might not even drive you crazy. Which is good. Because they might want to.

The Deadly Companions (1961)

THE DEADLY COMPANIONS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Sam Peckinpah
    Brian Keith, Maureen O'Hara, Steve Cochran, 
    Chill Wills, Strother Martin, Will Wright
There's an undercurrent of madness running through this movie, which stars Brian Keith as a Civil War veteran called "Yellowleg", for the Union officer's trousers he's still wearing five years after Appomattox. Bitter, haunted and bent on revenge for a wartime atrocity that left him scarred in more ways than one, Keith has teamed up with two former rebels and gone into business robbing banks. An ironic and tragic turn of events brings them into the company of a saloon girl (Maureen O'Hara) on a journey deep into Apache territory. Peckinpah's darkly compelling first feature was a kind of bridge between the 1950s westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, and the director's own later work. (Peckinpah regular Strother Martin turns up as a preacher, and a shot of some kids playing in the dusty street as the outlaws ride by into town directly foreshadows "The Wild Bunch".) Keith's laconic, hard-bitten performance is a long way from the sitcom dad he played on television's "Family Affair".

Battle Royale (2000)

BATTLE ROYALE  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Kinji Fukasaku
    Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Tarô Yamamoto,
    Chiaki Kuriyama, Sôsuke Takaoka, Beat Takeshi
42 kids on a school field trip are drugged and transported to an island were they're issued survival gear and weapons and sent out to play a deadly game. The rules are simple. They're to kill each other, and the last one still breathing wins. The game lasts three days. If more than one player survives at the end, all the survivors die. An obvious forerunner to "The Hunger Games", and an impressive piece of storytelling, considering the number of characters involved. Titles keep a running count of which combatants have been killed and how many remain. Beat Takeshi Kitano, who's like Japan's Robert Mitchum, plays the deadpan ex-teacher who moderates the game. My colleague Dr. Sporgersi thought that in an American remake the role should be played by Robert Forster, but I was thinking Bill Murray.

The Hunger Games (2012)

THE HUNGER GAMES  (2012)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Gary Ross
    Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth,
    Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland,
    Elizabeth Banks, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones,
    Lenny Kravitz, Amandla Stenberg, Willow Shields
A post-apocalyptic teenage gladiator movie based on the bestselling novel by Suzanne Collins and borrowing generously from the 2000 Japanese thriller "Battle Royale". Jennifer Lawrence plays the feisty heroine, Katniss Everdeen, one of 24 "tributes", young men and women picked by lot to fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses at the direction of dictatorial president Donald Sutherland. It probably helps to have read the book before seeing this, and it probably helps even more to be a teenager. There's little or no character development in the supporting roles, the editing's only marginally coherent, the script jumps and skips over parts of the story that apparently wouldn't fit in the film, and the emotional payoffs that come out of that don't feel quite earned. Which won't matter much if you're a teenager, and it is kind of refreshing to see a movie like this with a strong young woman in the lead. Fight on, Katniss Everdeen, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Naked Edge / Take 3

Kate Winslet in "Holy Smoke"
Christina Ricci in "Prozac Nation"
Kirsten Dunst in "Melancholia"
Natalie Portman in "Hotel Chevalier"
Charlize Theron in "The Cider House Rules"
Asia Argento in "Boarding Gate"
Toni Colette in "Japanese Story"
Milla Jovovich in "Resident Evil"
Neve Campbell in "When Will I Be Loved"
Gretchen Mol in "The Notorious Bettie Page"

Nightmare Alley (1947)

NIGHTMARE ALLEY  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Edmund Goulding
    Tyrone Power, Colleen Gray, Joan Blondell,
    Helen Walker, Julia Dean, Mike Mazurki
Exceptionally dark film noir set in the world of carnival hustlers, starring Tyrone Power as a smooth-talking sideshow barker and Joan Blondell as the tarot reader who predicts his downfall. You don't need the cards to know the guy is doomed. In a movie like this, it's inevitable.

The Woman (2011)

THE WOMAN  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lucky McKee
    Pollyanna McIntosh, Sean Bridgers, Angela Bettis,
    Lauren Ashley Carter, Zach Rand, Carlee Baker
Word has it that when this movie screened at Sundance, some viewers could barely contain their disgust. And some didn't. It's about a lawyer who lives out in the country with his wife and three kids. One day the lawyer's out hunting in the woods and he comes across a savage-looking woman, apparently living in the wild, wearing rags and covered in blood and mud. So the lawyer does the sensible thing. He throws a net over the woman, drags her home and chains her up in the cellar, and for the next 60 or 70 minutes you witness the hellish social dynamics of this fucked-up family, along with the care and feeding and torture of the captive woman. It's extreme, even for an exploitation movie, but it could be significantly more graphic than it is. Except for one full-on bush shot, the nudity is fairly discreet, and in some of the more disturbing scenes, the camera cuts away, not showing you what's going on, but (maybe worse) letting you guess. I wouldn't recommend it to most people I know, but if you're a fan of transgressive cinema, and you've got the stomach for it, "The Woman" is worth checking out. Like it or not, the filmmakers plainly had an idea, knew what they wanted to do with it, and did. Sean Bridgers as the lawyer is just the kind of guy who could make most women want to commit murder, and Pollyanna McIntosh in the title role has a furtive, feral presence that can't be forgotten or ignored. Watch out. She bites.

Images (1972)

IMAGES  (1972)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Altman
    Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi,
    Hugh Millais, Cathryn Harrison, John Morley
In a movie that foreshadows both Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" and Altman's "3 Women", Susannah York plays an emotionally unstable fantasy writer who escapes with her husband to a vacation house in the country, where she really cracks up, haunted by a dead ex-lover and a doppelgänger of herself. There are no transitional effects to let you know what's real and what's imagined in this. To a person going crazy, it all looks real, so that's what you see. It's a movie for Altman fans mostly, a throwback to a time - the 1970s - when an independent filmmaker with an idea and a bag of good weed could not only dream up something this unusual, but imagine getting away with it. York won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance, and that's her unicorn story she's reading in the voiceover on the soundtrack.

The Descendants (2011)

THE DESCENDANTS  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alexander Payne
    George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller,
    Nick Krause, Robert Forster, Beau Bridges,
    Matthew Lillard, Judy Greer, Laird Hamilton
George Clooney plays a Hawaiian lawyer forced to take on a more active role as a parent after his wife goes into a coma. He's got two daughters, aged 10 and 17. They're just as smart and demanding and annoying as kids can be, and he hasn't got a clue how to deal with them. Other characters enter the picture. His older daughter's slacker boyfriend. His inflexible, hard-headed father-in-law. The realtor his wife was cheating on him with. The realtor's wife. And a whole slew of relatives who are waiting for  him to sign off on a land deal that could make them all rich. There are few surprises, but Payne gets the Hawaiian vibe about right, and he has a nice way of giving each character a moment of grace, even those you're inclined not to sympathize with. It's a sitcom, really, but it's a sitcom done real well.

Damn the Defiant! (1962)

DAMN THE DEFIANT!  (1962)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lewis Gilbert
    Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Quayle,
    Maurice Denham, Richard Carpenter, Nigel Stock
Dispatched to Corsica in 1797 to escort a shipment of timber back to England, Captain Alec Guinness sails into the Mediterranean , facing down a mutinous crew, a sadistic fellow officer and the French fleet along the way. A good, old-fashioned naval adventure with tall ships exchanging broadsides backed by a rousing musical score. Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey would feel right at home.

Scarlet Diva (2000)

SCARLET DIVA  (2000)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Asia Argento
    Asia Argento, Jean Shepard, Vera Gemma, 
    Herbert Fritsch, Fabio Camilli, Daria Nicolodi
Asia Argento wrote and directed this gloomy character study about a movie-star actress whose life is coming apart. As a filmmaker, Argento doesn't mind making her self-absorbed, self-destructive heroine (played by Argento) look unappealing. So you get to see Asia shaving her armpits. And smearing makeup all over her face. And getting all ratty and strung-out on drugs. And engaged in some fairly unelegant humping. What she doesn't do is give you much of a reason to care. She has interesting tattoos, though.

Elevator To the Gallows (1957)

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS  (1957)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Louis Malle
    Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet, Georges Poujouly,
    Jean Wall, Charles Denner, Jean-Claude Brialy
An ex-paratrooper working for a high-end arms dealer kills his boss and heads out to a rendezvous with the old man's wife. Remembering a bit of incriminating evidence he left behind, he returns and gets stuck in the elevator. From that point on, things spin out of control for everybody: the killer, the wife, and the reckless young couple who steal the killer's car. Louis Malle's macabre first feature (after some documentary work with Jacques Cousteau) plays like a Hitchcock movie in French: tense, ironic and devious. Moreau at 29 already looks ageless. Musical score by Miles Davis.

The Cat's Meow (2001)

THE CAT'S MEOW  (2001)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Bogdanovich
    Edward Herrmann, Kirsten Dunst, Eddie Izzard,
    Cary Elwes, Joanna Lumley, Jennifer Tilly
Elegant murder mystery/melodrama about what might've happened to movie producer Thomas Ince on a cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht off Southern California in 1924. Orson Welles devotee Peter Bogdanovich gets to make his own Hearst movie and indulge his fetish for old Hollywood at the same time. There's not much mystery to the mystery, but it's got a smart, witty script and some finely polished performances, especially by Herrmann as Hearst and Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies. What Bogdanovich captures (that Welles conspicuously missed in "Citizen Kane") is the genuine and enduring affection between Davies and Hearst, which makes Hearst's ego-addled jealousy over Marion's dalliance with Charlie Chaplin both pathetic and frightening. As to what really happened on Hearst's yacht that weekend long ago, that's the enduring mystery.

Betty Boop For President (1932)

BETTY BOOP FOR PRESIDENT  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dave Fleischer
Who wouldn't vote for Betty Boop?

The Way Back (2010)

THE WAY BACK  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Weir
    Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan,
    Colin Farrell, Mark Strong, Dragos Bucur
An exciting, old-fashioned survival story about a handful of prisoners who escape from a Soviet gulag and trek 4,000 miles to India by hiking through Siberia, Mongolia, China and Tibet. It's a heroic journey, and there's not much in the way of physical hardship these characters don't endure: cold, heat, thirst, starvation, snow, mosquitoes and dust. They're political prisoners mostly, enemies of the state. One's an artist. Another's a priest. Guys who were unlucky enough to attract the attention of Stalin's secret police. Only one, a brute played by Colin Farrell, is a real criminal. Jim Sturgess is a Pole convicted of espionage because his wife was tortured into testifying against him. Ed Harris is an American known only as "Mr. Smith". Saoirse Ronan plays a fugitive of uncertain origin who joins them along the way. The locations are convincing. You can feel the blistering heat of the desert, and the cold looks cold enough to kill you. The prison camp scenes are horrifying, an unrelieved vision of hell from which (supposedly) there is no escape. Make it through the first couple of reels and you'll know one thing for sure: Death would be better than life in the camps.

Dracula's Widow (1988)

DRACULA'S WIDOW  (1988)  ¢
    D: Christopher Coppola
    Sylvia Krystel, Joseph Sommer, 
    Lenny Von Dohlen, Rachel Jones
The count would impale himself on a wooden crucifix in a garlic field in broad daylight if he had to endure this boring vampire movie. Sylvia "Emmanuelle" Krystel plays Mrs. Dracula. She doesn't even take off her clothes.

Sylvia Krystel

(1952-2012)

Screen Test / Take 3

Match the following movie titles with the actors who played the title roles:

  1. "Harold and Maude"
  2. "Pat and Mike"
  3. "Min and Bill"
  4. "Robin and Marian"
  5. "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"
  6. "John and Mary"
  7. "Ma and Pa Kettle"
  8. "Henry & June"
  9. "Bonnie and Clyde"
10. "Benny & Joon"

a. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
b. Fred Ward and Uma Thurman
c. Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow
d. Aidan Quinn and Mary Stuart Masterson
e. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
f. Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn
g. Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon
h. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie
i. Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery
j. Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride

Answers:
1-g / 2-e / 3-i / 4-f / 5-h / 6-c / 7-j / 8-b / 9-a / 10-d

The Saddest Music In the World (2003)

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD  (2003)
    D: Guy Maddin                                                ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros
When a Winnipeg beer baroness launches a contest to determine which country produces the saddest music, musicians from around the world come together to compete. This looks like it was shot inside a snow globe. (It was actually filmed in a freezing warehouse: Both the snow and the steam coming from the actors' mouths are real.) Taking his visual cues from silents and early talkies, Maddin's both a visionary and a throwback. Using old forms to challenge the conventions that made those forms obsolete, he creates a kind of soft-focus dreamworld in which art and artifice hook up, knock back a few pints, and stumble arm-in-arm out into the snow.

The Conversation (1974)

THE CONVERSATION  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Francis Ford Coppola

    Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield,

    Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, Teri Garr,

    Michael Higgins, Elizabeth MacRae, Harrison Ford

Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a professional eavesdropper who becomes obsessed with a conversation he's recorded that could be a clue to a murder. A tense, paranoid variation on "Blow-Up", directed by Coppola at his peak, between the first and second "Godfather" pictures. Hackman looks so ordinary in this, he's practically invisible. A balding, middle-aged man in glasses and a dime-store raincoat, Harry's the last guy you'd ever pick out in a crowd. That's the idea, of course, and it's hard to remember another case of an actor playing a character so nondescript, and making it so compelling.

Lustful Addiction (2002)

LUSTFUL ADDICTION  (2002)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Misty Mundae
    Ruby LaRocca, Misty Mundae,
    Darian Caine, T. Oilet
Straight-to-video goddess Misty Mundae wrote and directed this loose remake of Nick Phillips' 1969 grindhouse flick, in which characters do drugs, have sex and come to a real bad end. True to Seduction Cinema's infallible money-making formula, the production values are cheap and most of the groping is between women, the centerpiece being a long (some would say endless) scene in which Misty and Ruby LaRocca fondle each other between hits of coke and ecstasy while lounging around in their strip-joint underwear. The drug use, like the sex, appears to be simulated.

Lustful Addiction (1969)

LUSTFUL ADDICTION  (1969)  ¢ ¢
    D: Nick Phillips
    Justine D'Or
Softcore smut aimed at the 42nd Street raincoat trade, about a pretty girl who meets a real nice guy but can't stay away from the pusher man. A grindhouse art film in black and white, with no dialogue and a lot of jangly sitar music on the soundtrack. The voiceover narration is in verse, and the shots of people shooting up and nodding off are intercut with negative footage of monkeys. A video remake by Misty Mundae came out in 2002.

Meek's Cutoff (2011)

MEEK'S CUTOFF  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Kelly Reichardt
    Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton,
    Shirley Henderson, Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Neal Huff
This might be the first wagon-train movie in 90 years, or maybe ever, that does nothing to minimize or romanticize the harshness of the journey west. It's about a handful of settlers trying to make it across the desert of Eastern Oregon in 1845. There are some recognizable faces among them, but nobody in this movie looks like a movie star. They look like the characters they're playing: hot, grimy, exhausted, miserable, desperate and scared. Plus, they're lost and they're running out of water, and it's not clear that the guide they've hired to get them through the mountains knows where the hell he's going. Then they kidnap an Indian, hoping he can lead them across, or at least to the next water hole, but it's not clear where he's taking them, either. The film leaves you with a real appreciation for the insane bravery of those who took the wagons across the prairie (and for the agonizing amount of time it took to load a black-powder gun). The western landscape has never looked more desolate or spectacular, and Reichardt uses a lot of existing light. You don't always see real well, but you see what the settlers see, and you hear what they hear, sometimes just the endlessly repetitive sound of a creaking wheel, or the muffled words of a quiet conversation 50 feet away. There's no conventional story arc. You could question whether the picture even has a beginning or an end. It's more like you're with these people, driving the oxen or gathering fire wood, knitting or kneading bread, stealing a rare moment along the way to read, or sing, or laugh, or pray, and then moving on again, heading west, trudging forever across the plain.

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

THE RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER  (1975)
    D: Blake Edwards                                                 ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Peter Sellers, Christopher Plummer, Catherine Schell,
    Herbert Lom, Victor Spinetti, Burt Kwouk
The second entry in the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers/Pink Panther franchise (or the third, if you count "A Shot In the Dark"), with Inspector Clouseau again stumbling after the world's most famous diamond. This is the Pink Panther movie where a man gets his fingers broken on the installment plan, and Chief Inspector Dreyfus, trying to light a cigarette with a loaded revolver, accidentally shoots off his nose. Clouseau's fractured French accent adds a whole new dimension to words like "room", "license", and "monkey".

Herbert Lom

(1917-2012)

A Dangerous Method (2011)

A DANGEROUS METHOD  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Cronenberg
    Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen,
    Vincent Cassel, Sarah Gadon
Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud duke it out on the intellectual battlefield of early 20th-century psychoanalysis. So Freud pontificates and smokes a lot of cigars (because sometimes a cigar is just, well, you know . . .), and Jung hooks up with a patient named Sabina Spielrein (the human skeleton known as Keira Knightley), who becomes a psychoanalyst herself. (She also likes to be spanked.) It's a movie of ideas, a lot of it just people talking, or exchanging letters, and it holds your interest, even if, like some of us, you've somehow made it through school and life without ever cracking a psych book. Fassbender and Mortensen are the essence of restraint, while Knightley plays Spielrein with intense physicality, twisting her limbs into knots and sticking her chin out so far, you wonder how she managed not to dislocate her jaw. The spanking scenes are notably discreet.

The Indian Tomb (1921)

THE INDIAN TOMB  (1921)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Joe May
    Conrad Veidt, Olaf Fönss, Mia May,
    Bernard Goetzke, Paul Richter, Erna Morena
Epic German melodrama in which Conrad Veidt (looking like Vladimir Putin doing a Rudolph Valentino impression) plays an Indian maharaja who enlists a back-from-the-dead yogi (Bernard Goetzke, looking like Charlton Heston doing a Boris Karloff impression) to bring him an architect to design and build a fabulous tomb for his beloved princess. It turns out the princess isn't dead yet, just locked up for having an affair with a British adventurer (Paul Richter, looking like T.E. Lawrence doing a T.E. Lawrence impression), and the architect has to leave England without telling his fiancee, who finds out anyway and sails to India to track him down. So the raj sends the tiger hunters out after the T.E. Lawrence guy and the architect contracts leprosy and the fiancee has to sacrifice herself to save him and the servant girl who runs errands for the princess does a belly dance and then a deadly snake bites her, and the architect and the fiancee and the princess all escape and there's a big climactic chase over the water and up some cliffs to a suspension bridge over a canyon, because there has to be a suspension bridge in a movie like this. That might make the picture sound more exciting than it is, but some of it's not bad, in a long, slow, over-the-top silent movie way. The production values are impressive, and Goetzke has a strange, commanding presence as the yogi. Veidt's as effectively understated as he is miscast, while the stocky, graying Fönss and the hefty, matronly May, as the dashing young architect and his adventurous would-be bride, are simply miscast. Fritz Lang co-wrote the script. 

Better Than Sex (2000)

BETTER THAN SEX  (2000)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jonathan Teplitzky
    David Wenham, Susie Porter,
    Catherine McClements, Kris McQuade
A whimsical romantic comedy about two people who meet at a party and agree to a simple one-night stand that turns out to be more than they bargained for. There's an easy, natural chemistry between the leads that's especially impressive when you consider how much of the picture they spend without much of anything on. Wenham's got the ruggedly handsome features of a catalog model - well, okay, a model who hasn't shaved for a couple of days - and Porter has an adventurous, lived-in look, an early Jean Seberg haircut and a million freckles, all of them on display. I wouldn't take bets on these two characters being together six months on. They never get past the lust phase here. But for the three days the movie covers in its 80-odd minutes, they sure have a good time.

Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR  (1965)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Max Hunter
    Mickey Hargitay, Louise Barrett,
    Walter Brandi, Rita Klein
Lame-brained horror movie about a camera crew and four dishy models who invade a medieval castle for a photo shoot, only to be terrorized by a muscle-bound sadist in red tights and a Phantom mask. Down in the dungeon, they're subjected to hideous tortures, including the rack, the iron maiden, the boiling-oil torture, the icy-water torture, the cage-suspended-over-a-firepit torture, the blonde-chained-to-the-top-of-a-brick-oven-wearing-only-a-pair-of-black-panties torture, and watching Mickey Hargitay act. The horror.

Festival Express (2003)

FESTIVAL EXPRESS  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Bob Smeaton
A booze-fueled train ride across Canada with Janis Joplin, the Band and the Grateful Dead. Were those folks ever that young? Were we?

Movie Star Moment: Burt Lancaster

Burt Lancaster as Captain Vallo
in "The Crimson Pirate" (1952)

It's a moment in time, a cinematic prelude, after the Warner Bros. logo appears and before the opening credits. A man swings out on a rope, high above the deck of a tall sailing ship, starting on one yardarm and landing on another. The man is bare-chested, with chiseled features and great, gleaming teeth. He moves with the grace and agility of an acrobat, which he is. In medium close-up, he speaks straight into the camera: "Gather round, lads and lasses, gather round! You've been shanghaied aboard the last voyage of the Crimson Pirate. Remember, on a pirate ship, in pirate waters, in a pirate world, ask no questions. Believe only what you see." Then he swings out on the rope again, landing on another yardarm. "No!" he says, correcting himself. "Believe half of what you see!" The man is Burt Lancaster, at his absolute swashbuckling peak. That's really him up there doing the stunt work, and nobody, with the possible exception of Douglas Fairbanks, brought more full-blooded physicality to movies like this. Cue the music. Roll the credits. Bring on the pirates. The adventure's about to begin.

The Killers (1946)

THE KILLERS  (1946)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Siodmak
    Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien,
    Albert Dekker, William Conrad, Charles McGraw
Neatly plotted film noir about a payroll robbery and its aftermath, based partly on the Hemingway short story. Lancaster plays a doomed ex-boxer, Gardner's the femme fatale, and they get top billing, but the actor who holds the piece together is Edmond O'Brien as the cocky insurance investigator who cracks the case. Flashbacks tell the story, not always in chronological order. (The nonlinear story structure would not be lost on Quentin Tarantino.) The double-crossers all get double-crossed here. Lancaster's first film.

The Tree of Life (2011)

THE TREE OF LIFE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Terrence Malick
    Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn,
    Hunter McCracken, Fiona Shaw, Irene Bedard
Terrence Malick takes on life, death, God, families, the origin of the universe, evolution, the hereafter and everything in between, all playing out from (and back into) the story of a middle-class family in 1950s Texas. Slow going at times, but a head trip, for sure. The only way to understand it all would be to crawl inside Terrence Malick's skull, and the only one who can do that is Terrence Malick. It's like "The Fountain" meets "Contact" meets "2001". They're all kind of barking up the same tree.

Carny (1980)

CARNY  (1980)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Kaylor
    Jodie Foster, Gary Busey, Robbie Robertson,
    Meg Foster, Kenneth McMillan, Craig Wasson,
    Bert Remsen, John Lehne, Elisha Cook Jr.
Young Jodie plays a bored small-town waitress who runs off and joins a traveling carnival, hooking up with a couple of midway hustlers played by Busey and Robertson. A dramatized slice of carnival life, including a peak at the freak show. The stars are worth watching, especially the effortlessly low-key Robertson, but the movie never catches up with its potential. Unexpected highlight: an acoustic blues number performed by a 600-pound mass named Jelly Belly Harold.

Baarìa (2009)

BAARÌA  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Giuseppe Tornatore
    Francesco Scianna, Margareth Madè, Giorgio Faletti,
    Enrico Lo Verso, Angela Molina, Leo Gullota
Giuseppe Tornatore's memory piece about life in Sicily in the age of Mussolini and beyond is an epic told in snapshots, the story of a town and its people through a half-century of struggle and resilience, movies and books, strong teeth and broken eggs, love and death and personal grudges and practical jokes and political upheaval. It follows an illiterate young peasant named Peppino from milking cows and herding sheep through a lifelong battle to make a living and provide for his family, while retaining his ideals as a determined but not terribly effective leader in the local Communist Party. It's a funny, affectionate, life-affirming journey through time, with maybe a touch of magic around the edges. By the time the end credits roll, you don't feel so much like you've watched a movie as lived in it.

Bad Buck of Santa Ynez (1915)

BAD BUCK OF SANTA YNEZ  (1915)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: William S. Hart
    William S. Hart, Bob Kortman,
    Fanny Midgley, Thelma Salter
Early William S. Hart, with Hart as Bad Buck Peters, a troublemaker who hightails it out of town, chased by the sheriff's posse. On the run, he comes across a woman and her daughter in a covered wagon, stranded because the woman's husband has just died from prairie fever. Bad Buck knows he can't spare the time, but he kind of takes a shining to the kid, so he stops long enough to bury the old man and put the woman and the girl up in his shack. Then  he gets out of there just ahead of the sheriff. Then the sheriff and his boys show up at the shack, but when they see that Bad Buck's not there, they ride on back into town. Then Bad Buck gets out a knife and a stick and carves a wooden doll for the little girl. Then the girl goes down by the creek, where she gets bit by a rattlesnake. Then Bad Buck gets back and sees the girl needs help right away, so he rides off to get the doctor, even though that will take him back through town, where he doesn't want to go. Then he gets shot riding back with the doctor. Then he and the doctor show up just in time to save the little girl's life. Then, well, no, I'm not going to tell you everything, but maybe you can guess. Here's a hint: Hart's westerns didn't always end with the hero riding off into the sunset. And they weren't real big on subplots.

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

OCEAN'S ELEVEN  (2001)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Steven Soderbergh
    George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, 
    Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Elliott Gould,
    Carl Reiner, Casey Affleck, Bernie Mac
George Clooney and a bunch of other cool guys stage a big casino heist in a reworking of the old Frank Sinatra Rat Pack flick. Movies don't get much more superficial than this, and that almost seems to be the point. It might not have anything to say, but it says it with plenty of style.

Top Gun (1986)

TOP GUN  (1986)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tony Scott
    Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Tom Skerritt,
    Anthony Edwards, Michael Ironside, John Stockwell,
    Rick Rossovich, Tim Robbins, Meg Ryan
Hotshot flyboys with nicknames like Wolfman, Iceman, Cougar, Viper, Goose and Maverick soar up into the wild blue yonder in what amounts to a feature-length, high-tech recruiting commercial. There's a homoerotic subtext to this that's kind of amusing, when you think about it. Gung ho.

Tony Scott

(1944-2012)

Your Sister's Sister (2011)

YOUR SISTER'S SISTER  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Lynn Shelton
    Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt,
    Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia

Dear Ms. Applebaum,

I was hot here the other day, in the 90s, so I biked up to the Crest to take advantage of the air conditioning and a $3 movie. The movie was "Your Sister's Sister" and it was filmed around here, mostly up on Orcas, it looked like, and it's a three-way about these two sisters and the blunt but loveable guy they both end up getting close to. It's a chick flick, definitely, and I couldn't buy into everything that happens in it, but it's funny and smart and well-played, and the emotions seem pretty honest. If you've got $3 and you're looking to escape the heat for a couple of hours, I recommend it.

Nick

Red State (2011)

RED STATE  (2011)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Kevin Smith
    Melissa Leo, Michael Parks,
    John Goodman, Kevin Pollack
Kevin Smith gets all serious (or maybe just forgets how to be funny), with a movie about a small congregation of well-armed religious fanatics determined to send as many sinners to hell as they can while they wait for the rapture to take them back to Jesus. Give Smith credit for taking a risk and working way outside his usual box, but he seems to have picked a bad time to abandon comedy. A little profane humor (or a lot of it) would be a nice way to counter the thinking and behavior of these batshit zealots, but without it, the movie's an awful bore. It's enough to make you long for one of Kevin's earlier films, if only as an antidote to this one.

A Nous la Liberté (1931)

A NOUS LA LIBERTE  (1931)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: René Clair 
    Raymond Cordy, Henri Marchand, Rolla France,
    Paul Oliver, Jacques Shelly, Andre Michaud
Two cellmates engineer a prison break, but only one of them makes it over the wall. Through luck and resourcefulness, he ends up rich, the owner of a record factory. When his buddy finally gets paroled, he goes to work on the assembly line, not knowing that his old friend is now the big boss. A musical comedy from the early sound era, often cited for its influence on Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times". (Clair was influenced just as much by Chaplin.) There's an irony here you won't find in Chaplin, and you never know when some unlikely band of convicts or factory workers will burst into song. The lyrics are absurdly optimistic, usually in direct counterpoint to the fortunes of the characters singing them.

Le Havre (2011)

LE HAVRE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Aki Kaurismaki
    André Wilms, Kati Outinen, Blondin Miguel,
    Elina Salo, Evelyn Didi, Quoc Dung Nguyen
A young African, trying to get to London as a stowaway on a container ship, lands in the French port city of Le Havre, where an aging shoeshine man becomes his unlikely guardian angel. This is a fairy tale, and in a fairy tale, miracles can happen, so they do. Tragedies are averted, people go the extra mile to help each other out, and Kaurismaki's deadpan delivery prevents it from ever getting cute. It's nice when humanity comes out ahead, even if it's only in the movies.

Slave of the Cannibal God (1978)

SLAVE OF THE CANNIBAL GOD   (1978)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Sergio Martino
    Ursula Andress, Stacy Keach,
    Claudio Cassinelli, Franco Fantasia
Ursula Andress flies to New Guinea, where she and Stacy Keach go off on a jungle expedition to look for her lost husband. There's a lot of explicit footage of wild animals killing and eating each other, but the real high point comes when the cannibals capture Ursula and tie her to a stake naked and smear her body with blood. Is this great art, or what?

Cannibal Ferox (1981)

CANNIBAL FEROX  (1981)  ¢ ¢
    D: Umberto Lenzi
    Lorraine de Selle, Bryan Redford,
    John Morghen, Zora Kerova
An anthropology student working on her Ph.D heads into the Amazon to prove that cannibals don't exist. She and her travelling companions find out otherwise. Eyes are gouged out. Hands are chopped off. Animals are cut up and cut open. Two men are castrated. A woman gets hung up on hooks through her chest. Fresh brains and entrails are consumed. Sound like fun? The violent scenes in this are just as explicit and appalling as those in "Cannibal Holocaust", but the earlier film with its more limited production values and docudrama technique did a better job of accentuating the horror. That still leaves "Ferox" on the extreme end of the scale for cannibal movies. If you're squeamish, it'll really make you squeam. Alternate titles: "Make Them Die Slowly", "Woman From Deep River".

Cannibal Holocaust (1979)

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ruggero Deodato
    Francesca Cardi, Robert Kernan, Luca Barbareschi
Young documentary filmmakers venture into the Amazon, where they terrorize and photograph the local population. Eventually they go in too far and a primitive tribe of tree people do ghastly things to them. A "found footage" horror movie predating "The Blair Witch Project" by 20 years. The framing device isn't remotely believable, but the graphic, documentary-like realism with which Deodato shoots scenes of rape, torture, dismemberment and the jungle dinner hour is undeniably horrifying. You'll need a strong stomach to watch some of this. Bon appetit.

The C List

Some of the movies condemned by the Legion of Decency (later the National Catholic Office For Motion Pictures):

"Queen Christina" (1933/Rouben Mamoulian)
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934/Josef von Sternberg)
"The Outlaw" (1943/Howard Hughes)
"Baby Doll" (1956/Elia Kazan)
"Blowup" (1966/ Michelangelo Antonioni)
"Rosemary's Baby" (1968/Roman Polanski)
"A Clockwork Orange" (1971/Stanley Kubrick)
"Last Tango In Paris" (1973/Bernardo Bertolucci)
"Taxi Driver" (1976/Martin Scorsese)
"All That Jazz" (1979/Bob Fosse)

Hanna (2011)

HANNA  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Joe Wright
    Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett,
    Olivia Williams, Tom Hollander, Jason Flemyng
This is like a variation on "The Bourne Identity", with a teenaged girl in the Matt Damon role. The main difference, besides the age and gender of the protagonist, is that Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) isn't an amnesiac trying to piece together who she used to be. She's just your average kid growing up in complete isolation in northern Finland with a father (Eric Bana) who's teaching her how to kill people. When she's finally let out into the wider world (she literally flips a switch to make this happen), she's quickly captured and whisked off to a heavily fortified holding facility in what turns out to be Morocco. She escapes (of course) and starts to make her way toward Berlin, where she's supposed to meet the old man at Jakob Grimm's house (see, this is a fairy tale), while the Wicked Witch (a snarling Cate Blanchett) and her evil henchmen try to hunt her down. It's no more believable than the Bourne movies , maybe a little less, but it's got most of what makes an action thriller like this work: exotic locations, a director who knows how to keep the chase moving, and a lead actor who commands the screen. There aren't many 16-year-olds you could trust to carry a film like this. Ronan is one of them.

All About Eve (1950)

ALL ABOUT EVE  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
    Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders,
    Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Thelma Ritter,
    Hugh Marlowe, Gregory Ratoff, Marilyn Monroe
Famously venomous backstage melodrama starring Bette Davis as a legendary actress and Anne Baxter as an eager young fan who insinuates her way into the great star's life. Davis totally kicks ass in this. You wouldn't want anybody else playing Margo Channing. Others could try, but they wouldn't be Bette Davis. And you could get emphysema just watching her smoke. There's a theatrical quality to most of the performances, which makes perfect sense under the circumstances, and makes you aware of the players who go the other way: George Sanders as a lethally snide critic, Thelma Ritter as Davis's seen-in-all attendant, and Marilyn Monroe in a brief early role as a girl from the Copacabana who's angling for a chance to act. The dialogue crackles and bites (and it's very funny), as if Mankiewicz wrote the script not with a pen or a typewriter, but a dagger dipped in battery acid.

Celeste Holm

(1917-2012)

The Big Year (2011)

THE BIG YEAR  (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Frankel
    Owen Wilson, Steve Martin, Jack Black,
    Rosamund Pike, Rashida Jones, Kevin Pollack,
    Anjelica Huston, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest
Wilson, Martin and Black play rival birders, competing to see who can break the North American record for sighting the most species in a single year. A pleasantly innocuous comedy, competently made, easy to look at and pretty much risk-free. The birds are cool.

Bronco Billy (1980)

BRONCO BILLY  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Clint Eastwood
    Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Scatman Crothers,
    Geoffrey Lewis, Bill McKinney, Sam Bottoms,
    Dan Vadis, Sierra Pecheur, Hank Worden
Eastwood Americana, with Clint as Bronco Billy McCoy, the star and proprietor of a ragtag Wild West show. Eastwood led an itinerant existence for much of his early life, and it's interesting how many of his films, especially from the '70s and '80s, are road movies with various bands of misfit characters forming extended families and moving from place to place. In this one, most of the performers in Billy's show, including Billy himself, are ex-cons, and in some way, they've all bought into Billy's homespun philosophy of personal reinvention. That the enterprise they've reinvented themselves in is a touring anachronism with no economic future doesn't seem to matter to any of them. Memorable moments: Billy backing down in a standoff with an overbearing sheriff to spring his rope artist, an Army deserter, from jail. Billy on horseback, trying and failing to rob an indifferently speeding train. And the company's climactic performance, in a giant tent made in a mental institution out of stitched-together American flags. It's about as loose and laid-back as the country songs that turn up on the soundtrack, but there's a streak of subversion running through it, too, a kind of good-natured outlaw spirit that America wouldn't be America without. "Are you for real?" Sondra Locke asks Billy at one point. "I'm who I want to be," he replies. If you want to know where Eastwood's coming from, as a kid growing up on the road, or an artist later on making movies about it, you've got to watch "Bronco Billy".

Red (2010)

RED  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Schwendtke
    Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren,
    John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Karl Urban,
    Richard Dreyfuss, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ernest Borgnine,
    James Remar, Brian Cox, Greg Bryk
A funny, fast-paced action comedy about some retired spooks who team up and go back to work when somebody starts shooting at them. The plot's just a setup for the bullets and wisecracks, but those old folks sure are having a good time. Mary-Louise Parker's the audience surrogate, the only member of the gang who's not a professional assassin, and 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine turns up briefly as the CIA's most senior top-secret archivist.

Ernest Borgnine

(1917-2012)

Fat City (1972)

FAT CITY  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Huston
    Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges,
    Susan Tyrrell, Candy Clark
Stacy Keach plays an aging boxer settling into a life on the skids in Stockton, California. Jeff Bridges plays a new kid with some good-looking moves, who Keach meets working out at the Y. These aren't guys who are ever going to fight for a title. They're club fighters doing their work in tank-town gyms, ham-and-egg pugs who might hope to get a preliminary bout somewhere, but not much more. Win some, lose some, go a few rounds, put on a good show, collect a couple hundred bucks and go back to day labor while the cuts heal. Huston's approach to this world is matter-of-fact. It's as if he'd just wandered into some dive bar, found these down-and-outers sitting there, and rolled the camera. (Susan Tyrrell as the barfly Keach gets involved with is so convincing, it's scary.) The ending's a million miles from "Rocky" or "Cinderella Man", but then, so is the rest of the film. "Fat City" would make a credible entry on anybody's list of the best boxing movies ever. Just don't look for a lot of romance or redemption in it, that's all.

Susan Tyrrell

(1945-2012)

My Week With Marilyn (2011)

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Simon Curtis
    Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne, Kenneth Branagh, 
    Julia Ormond, Emma Watson, Toby Jones
The allegedly true, behind-the-scenes story of what happened when Marilyn Monroe went to England in 1956 to film "The Prince and the Showgirl" with Laurence Olivier. It's based on the diary entries of Colin Clark, a smart, wide-eyed 23-year-old embarking on his first job as a gofer on the film. Over the course of the shoot, Clark strikes up a friendship with Monroe, or maybe something more than that, and takes on the task of keeping her ahead of her demons enough to get through the picture. There's a lot of "My Favorite Year" in this, but it's not played so much for laughs. Monroe (Michelle Williams) is visibly battling the pills, booze and personal issues that would eventually do her in, the architect and victim of her own outsized fame. Peter O'Toole's advantage as the Errol Flynn surrogate in "My Favorite Year" was that he didn't have to play Errol Flynn. He could channel Flynn through Peter O'Toole. Williams has to play Monroe as Monroe, and if she can't actually be Marilyn, she nails her famous moves and poses about as well as anybody could. Branagh's equally good as the arrogant, demanding Olivier, and Redmayne has a likable, open-faced presence as Clark. You're left to wonder whether everything you see here actually happened, or whether some parts were embellished a little to tell a more interesting story. At one point, Clark goes to Monroe's quarters to retrieve a script, and Monroe walks into the room naked. The scene is jaw-dropping, not because it's all that explicit (it's not), but for the way it captures in a couple of seconds both the relationship between Monroe and Clark and the wish-fulfillment fantasies of 100 million men. For some people, maybe most, that's what Marilyn Monroe was all about.