Behind Locked Doors (1948)

BEHIND LOCKED DOORS  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Oscar Boetticher

    Richard Carlson, Lucille Bremer, Douglas Fowley,

    Ralf Harolde, Thomas Browne Henry, Tor Johnson

Efficiently paced, no-frills thriller about a private eye who has himself checked into a mental institution to investigate the disappearance of a crooked judge. There's got to be an easier way for a gumshoe to make $5,000. Mighty Tor Johnson plays one of the inmates. Oscar (Budd) Boetticher went on to direct a series of highly acclaimed westerns starring Randolph Scott.

Magic Trip (2011)

MAGIC TRIP: KEN KESEY'S SEARCH FOR A KOOL PLACE  (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney

Postcards from the edge. There are few things more quintessentially American than a road trip, and it's safe to say there was never a road trip quite like the acid-fueled cross-country journey Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took in 1964 in a psychedelic school bus, with Kesey orchestrating the fun and games and Neal Cassady speeding along behind the wheel. This documentary captures some of what went on back then, but it's a scattershot account and the effect is a little like watching an old home movie of somebody else's party. The magic of the moment can never be recreated, with film or anything else, and whatever cosmic insight these people thought they were pulling out of the smoke-filled air, their personal foibles and romantic entanglements are as mundane as anybody else's. Still, they did all manage to be on board for one of the more celebrated side trips of the 1960s. That must've been one hell of a bus ride.

O. Henry's Full House (1952)

O. HENRY'S FULL HOUSE  (1952)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Henry King,

         Henry Koster, Jean Negulesco

    Charles Laughton, David Wayne, Marilyn Monroe,

    Dale Robertson, Richard Widmark, Gregory Ratoff,

    Anne Baxter, Jean Peters, Fred Allen,

    Jeanne Crain, Farley Granger, Oscar Levant

Five short films based on O. Henry stories, introduced by John Steinbeck. In "The Cop and the Anthem", Charles Laughton tries to get himself arrested, hoping to spend a comfortable three months in jail. In "The Clarion Call", Richard Widmark's a hoodlum and Dale Robertson's a straight-arrow cop. (Widmark's nasal laugh signals his presence before you even see him.) In "The Last Leaf", an avant-garde painter (Gregory Ratoff) switches to realism, inspired by a girl who appears to be dying. In "The Ransom of Red Chief", Fred Allen and Oscar Levant play con men whose hare-brained kidnapping scheme goes wrong at every turn. In "The Gift of the Magi", Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger exchange Christmas presents. You might guess where most of the stories are going before they get there, but that's part of the fun. Irony was O. Henry's stock in trade. He was a master at it.

Another Year (2010)

ANOTHER YEAR  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Mike Leigh

    Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville,

    Oliver Maltman, Peter Wright, David Bradley,

    Martin Savage, Karina Fernandez, Imelda Staunton,

    Phil Davis, Michele Austin, Stuart McQuarrie

Another slice-of-life ensemble piece from Mike Leigh, who continues to make extraordinary movies about ordinary people. This one's about a small group of mostly older Britons, middle-class people in their early 60s, still working but looking toward the horizon at retirement, and beyond that the time when, as one of them puts it, they'll be history themselves. At the center of it are Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) a long-married couple who kid each other and dote on each other and demonstrably still have the hots for each other after 40 years of marriage. Then there's their son Joe, a good-natured guy who's 30 and still single and not terribly concerned about that. Ken, an old friend who looks like he's eating and drinking and smoking his way to an imminent heart attack. Mary, a coworker of Gerri's, who's on the hunt for a man (any man but Ken), and can put away the wine herself. And (eventually) Joe's girlfriend Katie, Tom's widowed brother Ronnie, Ronnie's belligerent son Carl, and a few more. A lot of it's just people talking, over drinks, or dinner, or tea, trying to find humor, and every now and then a solution, to life's everyday problems. They're not perfect, but they try. The whole cast is terrific, but the player who really gets your attention (maybe because her character demands it) is Lesley Manville as Mary. Mary's a lost soul and a lost cause, the kind of desperately needy relative or acquaintance who ultimately can't be helped, and will only bring grief to anybody who tries. It would be easy to take a role like that over the top, but Manville keeps it real, balanced on the edge, where every tic and twitch and darting look is painful.

The 10 Best Movies of 2011

THE TEN BEST:

"Hugo"

"Another Year"

"Page One: Inside the New York Times"

"Midnight In Paris"

"Le Havre"

"Baarìa"

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

"The Way Back"

"Sound of Noise"

"Cracks"

SECRET TREASURES:

"Happy, Happy"

"Black Field"

"Troll Hunter"

"Apollo 18"

GUILTY PLEASURES:

"The Woman"

"Attack the Block"

"The Thing"

"Cowboys & Aliens"

BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN:

"Playtime"

"The Wolf Man"

"Raiders of the Lost Ark"

"The War Wagon"

FOUR FROM THE VIDEO STORE:

"Trigger"

"Howl"

"Ever After"

"All About Eve"

WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:

"Red State"

Pigalle (1994)

PIGALLE  (1994)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Karim Dridi

    Véra Briole. Francis Renaud, Raymond Gil,

    Bobby Pacha, Bianca Li, Philippe Ambrosini

Paris down and dirty, about a young couple going to hell in the city's red light district. This is not the romanticized Paris of Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly, or Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. It's a shadowland of pimps and thieves, whores and hustlers, junkies and gunrunners, hoodlums and killers, every kind of predatory lowlife you'd never want to meet late at night in the city. It's a human sewer in which there's no redemption, and from which there's no escape. Dridi does an effective job of capturing all that, but whether you'll want to spend an hour and a half of your life there is another matter. You can practically smell the urine on the sidewalk.

Apollo 18 (2011)

APOLLO 18  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gonzalo López-Gallego

    Warren Christie, Ryan Roberts, Lloyd Owen

It's generally accepted that the last manned trip to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972. This movie imagines a follow-up flight, dispatched by the Defense Department on a mission so secret, even the astronauts don't know what's going on. When they get to the moon, they find out. It's yet another "found footage" horror movie, and it works better than most, at least partly because the blurry visuals and staticky sound approximate what we're used to from old space shots on television. It also helps that the astronauts are played by relatively unknown actors. It makes them seem more like real astronauts. The effects are visibly low-tech - the fuzzy cinematography and abrupt cutting are an asset there - and the suspense comes more from what you don't see, or kind of see, or maybe think you see, than anything that actually shows up on the screen. Just keep an eye on those moon rocks. And when you start to feel edgy and your eyes get real bloodshot, paranoid psychosis might be a logical response.

Marathon Man (1976)

MARATHON MAN  (1976)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: John Schlesinger

    Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider,

    Marthe Keller, William Devane, Jacques Marin

William Goldman's paranoid thriller about a grad student at Columbia who gets pulled into a nightmare involving spies, diamonds, Joe McCarthy, an oil truck, a Nazi death camp doctor and some seriously painful dental work. When Laurence Olivier lays out his instruments and starts to go to work on Dustin Hoffman's teeth, you might want to think about leaving the room.

Rango (2011)

RANGO  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gore Verbinski

A lizard on a family road trip drops onto the highway and out of his broken terrarium and wanders through the desert into the Wild West. In a dusty, godforsaken town called "Dirt", he gets involved in a war over water rights that mirrors the story in "Chinatown", complete with a wheelchair-bound villain transparently modeled on John Huston's Noah Cross. It's hard to tell what the intended audience for this is supposed to be. The references to older films will fly right by young kids, who might be frightened by some of the imagery and violence. But with its furry (and scaly) critters and cartoon cuteness, it's not playing just to grownups, either. Which doesn't make it a bad movie, just kind of a puzzling one for the marketing department. Roger Deakins helped with the cinematography, Hans Zimmer and a mariachi band of owls play around with the musical score, and there's an amusing encounter between the lizard (voiced by Johnny Depp) and another Depp character from a previous film. And for anybody who's watched even a couple of westerns in the last 50 years, wait till you see who turns up as "The Spirit of the West".

Final Reel 2011

Dust to the wind:

ANNE FRANCIS, 80, actress
"Bad Day At Black Rock"
"The Blackboard Jungle"
"Forbidden Planet"

PETE POSTLETHWAITE, 64, actor

"The Usual Suspects"

"Brassed Off"

"Among Giants"

PETER YATES, 81, director

"Bullitt"

"The Deep"

"Murphy's War"

SUSANNAH YORK, 72, actress

"Freud"

"Tom Jones"

"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

JOHN BARRY, 77, composer

"The Lion In Winter"

"Out of Africa"

"On Her Majesty's Secret Service"

MARIA SCHNEIDER, 58, actress

"Last Tango In Paris"

"The Passenger"

"Mama Dracula"

LENA NYMAN, 66, actress

"I Am Curious (Yellow)"

"I Am Curious (Blue)"

"Autumn Sonata"

TURA SATANA, 72, actress

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

"The Doll Squad"

"The Astro-Zombies"

DAVID F. FRIEDMAN, 87, producer

"Blood Feast"

"Two Thousand Maniacs!"

"Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S."

ANNIE GIRARDOT, 79, actress

"The Dirty Game"

"No Time For Breakfast"

"The Piano Teacher"

JANE RUSSELL, 89, actress

"The Outlaw"

"The Paleface"

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"

CHARLES JARROTT, 83, director

"Anne of the Thousand Days"

"Mary, Queen of Scots"

"Lost Horizon"

MICHAEL GOUGH, 94, actor

"The Horse's Mouth"

"Sleepy Hollow"

"The Cherry Orchard"

ELIZABETH TAYLOR, 79, actress

"National Velvet"

"Cleopatra"

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

RICHARD LEACOCK, 89, director, cinematographer

"Bernstein In Israel"

"Monterey Pop"

"Lulu In Berlin"

JOE WIZAN, 76, producer

"Jeremiah Johnson"

"Tough Guys"

"Wrestling Ernest Hemingway"

FARLEY GRANGER, 85, actor

"Rope"

"They Live By Night"

"Strangers On a Train"

SIDNEY LUMET, 86, director

"12 Angry Men"

"Dog Day Afternoon"

"The Verdict"

KEVIN JARRE, 56, writer

"Glory"

"Tombstone"

"The Devil's Own"

JACKIE COOPER, 88, actor

"Skippy"

"The Champ"

"Superman"

ARTHUR LAURENTS, 92, writer

"The Turning Point"

"The Way we were"

"Rope"

WILLIAM CAMPBELL, 87, actor

"Backlash"

"Night of Evil"

"Dementia 13"

YVETTE VICKERS, 81, actress

"Attack of the 50 Foot Woman"

"Attack of the Giant Leeches"

"Hud"

DOLORES FULLER, 88, actress

"Jail Bait"

"Glen or Glenda?"

"Bride of the Monster"

MARY MURPHY, 80, actress

"The Wild One"

"The Mad Magician"

"The Desperate Hours"

LEONARD KASTLE, 82, writer, director

"The Honeymoon Killers"

BILL HUNTER, 71, actor

"Gallipoli"

"Strictly Ballroom"

"Australia"

JAMES ARNESS, 88, actor

"The Thing From Another World"

"Them!"

"Big Jim McLain"

LAURA ZISKIN, 61, producer

"Pretty Woman"

"As Good As It Gets"

"Spider-Man"

PETER FALK, 83, actor

"Husbands"

"The Princess Bride"

"Wings of Desire"

EDITH FELLOWS, 88, actress

"Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch"

"Jane Eyre" (1934)

"Pennies From Heaven" (1936)

ROBERTS BLOSSOM, 87, actor

"Escape From Alcatraz"

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

"The Quick and the Dead"

MICHAEL CACOYANNIS, 89, director

"Zorba the Greek"

"The Cherry Orchard"

"The Day the Fish Came Out"

G.D. SPRADLIN, 99, actor

"Apocalypse Now"

"North Dallas Forty"

"Ed Wood"

POLLY PLATT, 72, producer

"Bottle Rocket"

"I'll Do Anything"

"Broadcast News"

BUBBA SMITH, 66, actor

"Police Academy"

"Stroker Ace"

"Black Moon Rising"

RAOUL RUIZ, 70, director

"Three Sad Tigers"

"Mysteries of Lisbon"

"Klimt"

GEORGE KUCHAR, 69, director

"Hush, Hush, Sweet Harlot"

"The Fury of Frau Frankenstein"

"Honey Bunnies On Ice"

CLIFF ROBERTSON, 88, actor

"Charly"

"Obsession"

"Three Days of the Condor"

CHARLES NAPIER, 75, actor

"The Grifters"

"Philadelphia"

"The Silence of the Lambs"

DIANE CILENTO, 77, actress

"Tom Jones"

"Hombre"

"The Wicker Man" (1973)

FRITZ MANES, 79, producer

"Tightrope"

"Sudden Impact"

"Pale Rider"

JOHN NEVILLE, 86, actor

"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen"

"The Fifth Element"

"The Statement"

KEN RUSSELL, 84, director

"Tommy"

"The Devils"

"Women In Love"

HARRY MORGAN, 96, actor

"The Ox-Bow Incident"

"High Noon"

"Inherit the Wind"

BERT SCHNEIDER, 78, producer

"Easy Rider"

"Five Easy Pieces"

"The Last Picture Show"

ROBERT EASTON, 81, actor, dialect coach

"Working Girl"

"Paint Your Wagon"

"The Giant Spider Invasion"

PEDRO ARMENDARIZ JR., 71, actor

"Old Gringo"

"Tombstone"

"The Mask of Zorro"

CHEETAH, 80, actor

"Tarzan the Ape Man"

"Tarzan and His Mate"

"I've had a good career, a lot of laughs. I don't know if that's enough, but it beats coal mining."

Harry Morgan