12 Monkeys (1995)

12 MONKEYS  (1995)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Terry Gilliam 
    Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt,
    Christopher Plummer, Frank Gorshin, David Morse
A mind-bending science-fiction movie exploring the psychological territory between insanity and time travel. Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a convict who starts out in the future (his present) with a shot at a pardon if he "volunteers" to go back to 1996 to help prevent an epidemic that will otherwise wipe out all human life. Only Cole gets dispatched back to 1990 instead, where he's arrested for violent behavior, and when he starts telling people he's from the future, and how there's going to be an epidemic connected to a conspiracy involving (you guessed it) 12 monkeys, he's locked up in a mental institution. There he falls in with a fellow patient played by Brad Pitt (acting crazy and having a real good time), who, it turns out, has something to do with the 12 monkeys. It's a mystery that keeps you wondering, even after Cole comes under the care of a shrink (Madeleine Stowe), who's sympathetic, but doesn't believe his time-travel story, at least not right away, and by the end, when it all kind of comes together, you're in "Vertigo" territory. It's one of Terry Gilliam's best movies, an example of what he can do when his visual extravagance serves the story, and not the other way around. David Webb Peoples, who wrote Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven", cowrote the script.

Beware of Mr. Baker (2012)

BEWARE OF MR. BAKER  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jay Bulger
Of all the pharmaceutical adventurers who made it out of the 1960s, it's hard to imagine anybody less likely to have survived into the 21st century than Ginger Baker. Even in an era of epic drug use, Baker's consumption was legendary. Did he really shoot heroin into his eyeballs? Maybe not, but take a look at his eyes. So here's Baker in this documentary at about age 70, not only kicking and breathing, but as cranky and crazy as ever. Chain-smoking in an easy chair in his home in South Africa, Baker looks back, in a manner that's not the least bit mellow, on his career as one of the world's most accomplished and explosive drummers, and a personal life that's about as tidy as a freeway wreck. Film clips across the years show what he could do behind a drum kit. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Charlie Watts and Steve Winwood are among the witnesses. You get a better sense of Baker as a person than as a musician here, and the man emphatically, defiantly is who he is, take it or leave it, like it or not. You can't help admiring that in a way, but it's not clear Baker cares one way or another. It's startling when he chokes up talking about the percussionists he admires, but his attitude toward everybody else seems to be a well-aimed "Fuck off." It's not hard to see why his bands didn't last very long and other musicians and most of his wives walked away. He might've been a reckless, self-immolating asshole, and maybe still is, but he sure could play the hell out of a drum.

The Teacher (1974)

THE TEACHER  (1974)  ¢ ¢
    D: Howard Avedis
    Angel Tompkins, Jay North, Barry Atwater,
    Anthony James, Marlene Schmidt, Quinn O'Hara
Angel Tompkins plays your average high school teacher who looks like a Playboy model, drives a Corvette, and spends her days off sunbathing topless on a boat in the middle of the harbor. Dennis the Menace plays the student she hooks up with for a little post-graduate study. It looks like he's got a lot to learn, but maybe she grades on a curve. 

Movie Star Moment: Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp
in "City Lights" (1931)

    "City Lights" is the Charlie Chaplin movie where the Little Tramp befriends a blind flower girl who mistakenly believes he's a millionaire. Unwilling to reveal his true identity, he goes along with the ruse, while trying to raise the money to pay for an operation that can restore her sight. A lot of great comedy comes out of that, but what makes the film transcendent is its final image, an exquisitely simple shot that could make the most stone-hearted moviegoer choke up. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven't, keep a handkerchief handy and watch "City Lights".

Roller Town (2012)

ROLLER TOWN  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andrew Bush
    Mark Little, Kayla Lorette, George William Basil,
    Pat Thornton, Adam Bayne, Brian Heighton
Kids on skates band together and fight back when a gangster and a disco-hating mayor try to close down their beloved roller rink. A silly, outrageous, good-natured spoof on the disco-era artifact "Roller Boogie", and the greatest roller-disco comedy shot entirely in Halifax, Nova Scotia, you'll ever see. Probably. The sketch comedy troupe Picnicface cooked this one up. Keep a finger on the pause button for the end credits.

Stalker (1979)

STALKER  (1979)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andrei Tarkovsky
    Alexander Kaidanovsky, Nikolai Grinko,
    Anatoly Solonitsin, Alice Friendlich
Somewhere in an unnamed country, there's a place called "the Zone". Armed guards patrol its perimeter, allowing nobody in. The guards themselves are afraid to go in there. Inside the Zone, there's said to be a room where, if you can find it, your innermost wish becomes reality. Three men break through the guarded border and enter the Zone. One's a writer. Another's a professor. The third's a "stalker", a kind of underground tour guide who gets paid to escort travelers surreptitiously into, through and out of the Zone. A demanding, ambiguous, sci-fi puzzle, long on talk and short on action, a slog to sit through but great to look at. The scenes outside the Zone are in sepia. Everything in them looks grimy and wet, a primitive industrial landscape in an advanced state of decay. The Zone doesn't look much more inviting, but at least it's in color, and the difference is startling. Some puzzles aren't meant to be solved, and this might be one of them, but if you enjoyed trying to wrap your head around Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life", or Lars von Trier's "Melancholia", or Tarkovsky's "Solaris", you might like "Stalker", too. Geoff Dyer's "Zona", published in 2012, is a book-length meditation on this film.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (2012)

CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: WORLDS AWAY  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Andrew Adamson
    Erica Linz, Igor Zaripov, 
    Lutz Halhubner, John Clarke
A girl goes to the circus, where she follows an aerialist down a rabbit hole and into a dream world that's ten times stranger than the circus. That's it for the story, but it's enough to string together a bunch of Cirque du Soleil's greatest hits. Some sequences are more striking than others, but they all exhibit a keen grasp of the laws of physics, an eye-popping sense of spectacle, and a willingness to explore what amazing things the human body can do. Drop down the rabbit hole yourself, and see.

Hook (1991)

HOOK  (1991)  ¢ ¢
    D: Steven Spielberg
    Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts,
    Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith, Caroline Gooodall,
    Charlie Korsmo, Amber Scott, Gwyneth Paltrow
Steven Spielberg's sequel to "Peter Pan" (as if one was needed), with Peter now a grownup dad returning to Neverland to save his children from the clutches of Captain Hook. The trouble is, Peter doesn't remember anything from his life as a Lost Boy. He no longer knows how to crow or fly. He has to learn all over again. Robin Williams (looking constipated) plays Peter. Julia Roberts (nice legs) plays Tinkerbell. Dustin Hoffman (ugly wig) plays Hook. Maggie Smith plays Wendy as an old woman and Bob Hoskins plays Smee. The setup has some potential, but Spielberg piles on enough cuteness to out-Disney Disney, and that's too much. Kids should like it. Grownups beware.

Easy Rider (1969)

EASY RIDER  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dennis Hopper
    Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson,
    Luke Askew, Luana Anders, Sabrina Scharf,
    Karen Black, Toni Basil, Robert Walker
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play Wyatt and Billy, a couple of 20th-century outlaws who make some money smuggling cocaine out of Mexico and take off across the U.S. on motorcycles, heading for Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Hopper's groundbreaking first feature became a cinematic anthem for the 1960s, filled with late-'60s cliches, but played with a conviction that few other movies from or about the period seem to get. Nicholson's star-making performance as a loquacious small-town lawyer should bring a knowing grin to anybody who remembers smoking pot for the first time, and there's some great rock & roll on the soundtrack. Wyatt and Billy might be free-wheeling free spirits, but they're not entirely likeable, and they're a distinctly odd couple when it comes to temperament and style. One's a fashionably decked-out narcissist. The other's a ratty, unkempt sociopath. They don't think much beyond themselves, and their behavior sometimes reflects that. They complain about not being able to get a room in a cheap motel, but when they're turned away from a cheap motel late at night, you suspect it's got less to do with their bikes and long hair than the fact that they're acting like assholes. Some might see them as martyrs, but they're sure as hell not saints, and that gives the movie's dreamy pessimism a subversive, misanthropic edge. Still, nobody looked cooler back then than Peter Fonda on a motorcycle, and nothing distilled counterculture rebellion to a more succinct level of expression than Hopper's defiant, one-fingered salute. The violent, senseless conclusion can still make your blood run cold.

Karen Black

(1939-2013)

New York, I Love You (2009)

NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Fatih Aikin, Yvan Attal, Randall Balsmeyer,
    Mira Nair, Allen Hughes, Shunji Iwai,
    Wen Jiang, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston,
    Natalie Portman, Brett Ratner
    C: Natalie Portman, Andy Garcia, Orlando Bloom,
    Hayden Christensen, Christina Ricci, Maggie Q,
    Ethan Hawke, James Caan, Julie Christie,
    John Hurt, Shia LaBeouf, Chris Cooper,
    Robin Wright Penn, Eli Wallach, Cloris Leachman,
    Irfan Khan, Anton Yelchin, Bradley Cooper
A follow-up to "Paris Je T'aime", a collection of short films by different directors, all dealing in some way with love (or sex) and relationships, and all set in New York. The stories are slight. Some are just fragments, a moment or two long. Sometimes they overlap. More often they don't. With maybe a few exceptions, there isn't much going on in them that's specific to the location. Characters like these could be doing essentially the same things in any big city in the world. Maybe that's the point. But it leaves you with a sense that the filmmakers missed something, too: the elephant in the room, New York City. Highlights: Cloris Leachman and Eli Wallach as an elderly couple out for a walk, a cross-cultural piece about a pair of diamond traders played by Natalie Portman and Irfan Khan, and two twisted jokes that play out around people smoking cigarettes, one starring Chris Cooper and Robin Wright Penn, the other with Maggie Q and Ethan Hawke.

Paris Je T'aime (2006)

PARIS JE T'AIME  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tom Tykwer, Bruno Podalydès, Gurinder Chadha,
    Gus Van Sant, Joel and Ethan Coen, Walter Salles, 
    Daniela Thomas, Christopher Doyle, Isabel Coixet, 
    Nobuhiro Suwa, Sylvain Chomet, Alfonso Cuarón,
    Olivier Assayas, Oliver Schmitz, Richard Lagravenese,
    Vincenzo Natali, Wes Craven, Frédéric Aubertin,
    Gérard Depardieu, Alexander Payne
    C: Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Juliette Binoche,
    Willem Dafoe, Natalie Portman, Maggie Gyllenhaal,
    Emily Mortimer, Elijah Wood, Ben Gazzara,
    Gena Rowlands, Gérard Depardieu, Bob Hoskins,
    Marianne Faithfull, Fannny Ardant, Rufus Sewell,
    Ludivine Sagnier, Miranda Richardson, Olga Kurylenko
Vignettes, all dealing in some way with love, each made by a different director and set in a different neighborhood in the City of Light. They run about five minutes each, and like any collection of short stories, they vary widely. Some don't really go anywhere and aren't meant to. Some are just little jokes. Some are unexpectedly moving. Picking a favorite could be a challenge. There's Steve Buscemi in a Coen Brothers piece about a tourist in a Metro station. An aching reflection on loss by Nobuhiro Suwa, with Juliette Binoche as a grieving mother and Willem Dafoe as a cowboy. A tongue-in-cheek vampire story by Vincenzo Natali, starring Elijah Wood. A droll segment by Wes Craven, with Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer as an estranged couple traipsing through Pére Lachaise Cemetery and getting a much-needed comic assist from the ghost of Oscar Wilde. And a tragedy by Oliver Schmitz about bad luck, two cups of coffee, a rescue worker and a Nigerian parking-lot attendant. Many famous faces appear, but the real star is the world's most romantic city. If you've ever spent time in Paris and thought you might want to go back someday, this is a vicarious way to do that. 

The Manitou (1978)

THE MANITOU  (1978)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Girdler
    Tony Curtis, Susan Strasberg, Michael Ansara,
    Stella Stevens, Burgess Meredith, Ann Sothern
A good cast trashes its way through some foolish hocus pocus about a woman who checks into a hospital to get a tumor looked at and learns she has an ancient Indian medicine man growing out of her neck. Curtis and Stevens play psychics, and Strasberg's the unlucky girl with the growth. During the climactic confrontation with the monster, she doesn't even try to keep a straight face.

Michael Ansara

(1922-2013)

The Sting (1973)

THE STING  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: George Roy Hill
    Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw,
    Eileen Brennan, Charles Durning, Ray Walston,
    Harold Gould, Dana Elcar, Sally Kirkland
An Oscar-winning caper starring Newman and Redford as con artists out to take down a cold-blooded high roller played by Robert Shaw. A slick piece of work all the way, from the painted titles to the intricate plotting to the Scott Joplin music to Henry Bumstead's Depression-era art direction. It's all style, really, but when it's done this well, with these guys in front of the camera, style's enough.

Eileen Brennan

(1932-2013)