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.