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".