Black Mass (2015)

BLACK MASS  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Scott Cooper
    Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch,
    Dakota Johnson, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard,
    Julianne Nicholson, Rory Cochrane, Corey Stoll
Johnny Depp and Captain Jack Sparrow disappear completely in the cold-eyed stare of James "Whitey" Bulger, a murderous hood who became an FBI informant and then used his government connections to neutralize his criminal competitors, namely Boston's Italian mob. Watching this, you can't help thinking about "The Departed" and "Mystic River". Besides the Boston connection and the casting of Kevin Bacon in two of them, all three movies have a similar brass-knuckles vibe and a similar sense of foreboding and doom. Joel Edgerton plays John Connally, Bulger's enabler at the Bureau, and there's a flickering moment of recognition between Benedict Cumberbatch and Julianne Nicholson at a dinner party that recalls their work together in "August: Osage County". Depp's lethally contained performance is the key through it all. He might be a pussycat losing at gin to his sweet old mother, but when he fixes you with those cold, dead eyes and smiles, you might want to find someplace else to be, real quick.

Above Suspicion (1943)

ABOVE SUSPICION  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Richard Thorpe
    Joan Crawford, Fred MacMurray, Conrad Veidt,
    Basil Rathbone, Reginald Owen, Richard Ainley
Fred and Joan play newlyweds who spend their honeymoon doing a little cloak-and-dagger work in France and Austria on the eve of World War Two. With Conrad Veidt and Basil Rathbone both in the supporting cast, you know somebody's up to no good. Veidt's last film.

Arrival (2016)

ARRIVAL  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Denis Villeneuve
    Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
    Michael Stuhlberg, Mark O'Brien, Tzi Ma
Keir Dullea in "2001". Richard Dreyfuss in "Close Encounters". Jodie Foster in "Contact". Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar". Amy Adams in this.

Earthquake (1974)

EARTHQUAKE  (1974)  ¢ ¢
    D: Mark Robson
    Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy,
    Genevieve Bujold, Richard Roundtree, Lorne Greene,
    Barry Sullivan, Victoria Principal, Marjoe Gortner,
    Lloyd Nolan, John Randolph, Walter Matuschanskyasky
An epic from the heyday of big-budget disaster movies, with an all-star cast of Angelenos scrambling to survive "the big one." The earthquake effects, which worked pretty well on a big screen in 1974 (with a seat-rattling gimmick called "Sensurround"), look cheesy on a small screen now. Mario ("The Godfather") Puzo had a hand in the ridiculous script. The actors do what they can, but are mostly along for the ride, and in fact, the movie did inspire a theme-park ride at Universal later on, thereby realizing its full artistic potential. 

Carol (2015)

CAROL  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Todd Haynes
    Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler,
    Jake Lacy, Sarah Paulson, John Magaro
To begin with, Rooney Mara in this movie looks more like Audrey Hepburn than any actress who's not Audrey Hepburn has a right to look. In some shots, she's a dead ringer. It's spooky. Mara plays a young woman named Therese, an aspiring photographer who's working the Christmas season in a department store when she meets Carol (Cate Blanchett). It's love at first sight for both of them, if the meaningful glances they exchange are any indication, but Carol's got a daughter and a soon-to-be-ex-husband, and this is the 1950s, so it's complicated. It's the acting of the two leads that carries this one. As melodrama it's a little obvious, but it's not hard to imagine two women looking like Blanchett and Mara being attracted to each other. One's cool, elegant, affluent and smokes like she really means it. The other could've wandered over from the set of "Funny Face" or "Love In the Afternoon". And come to think of it, Blanchett played Katharine Hepburn in a movie once, too. 

A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974/2015)

A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON  (1974/2015)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Les Blank
Leon Russell, who's like rock & roll's Mad Hatter, filmed on stage, in the studio, and hanging out back home in Oklahoma, in the days before his famously long hair and beard turned completely white. Blank doesn't take an on-screen directing credit on this - he's listed as the editor and cinematographer - and it almost looks like a movie that made itself. There's some good concert footage - Russell banging on a keyboard had charisma to burn - together with a lot of local color that Blank seems to have shot because it happened to cross his field of vision and he had a camera in his hand. One way to watch it would be to try to decide which people in the film seem the most wasted, and then try to guess which drugs they're on. Willie Nelson and George Jones turn up for a song each (without Russell), and at least one small animal was seriously harmed in a dramatic encounter between a baby chicken and a snake. Filmed between 1972 and 1974, but not officially released till 2015. 

Leon Russell

(1942-2016)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert Altman
    Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois,
    John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Keith Carradine,
    William Devane, Shelley Duvall, Michael Murphy
A Robert Altman dreamscape set in the rainy, snowy, mist-shrouded Pacific Northwest, starring Warren Beatty as a gambler who wanders into a rough little frontier settlement called Presbyterian Church, sees that there aren't many women about, and sends off for a wagonload of prostitutes to rectify that. He gets rich in the process, but when the time comes to sell out, he refuses, and that seals his fate. Julie Christie plays the opium-smoking madam. Shelley Duvall has an early role as one of the whores. Keith Carradine makes an impression as a kid who loses his life over a pair of socks. Leonard Cohen's playfully mournful tunes provide the musical backdrop, Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography looks like nothing else on film, and the themes and images Altman conjures up have a nice way of mirroring Cohen's lyrics. Or maybe it's all just a dream, carved out of the rain and fog, trailing off and drifting away like a half-heard scrap of conversation, or the smoke from Julie Christie's opium pipe. 

Leonard Cohen

(1934-2016)

Naked Edge / Take 6

Elizabeth McGovern in "Ragtime"
Kelly McGillis in "Witness"
Jennifer Connelly in "The Hot Spot"
Mia Farrow in "A Wedding"
Jamie Lee Curtis in "Trading Places"
Thora Birch in "American Beauty"
Joey Heatherton in "Bluebeard"
Julie Andrews in "S.O.B."
Samantha Mathis in "Pump Up the Volume"
Cybill Shepherd in "The Last Picture Show"

The Devil's Violinist (2013)

THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST  (2013)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Bernard Rose
    David Garrett, Jared Harris, Andrea Deck,
    Joely Richardson, Christian McKay,
    Veronica Ferres, Helmut Berger, Olivia d'Abo
Niccolò Paganini makes a deal with you-know-who and gets what he thinks he wants - rock-star recognition for his virtuosity on the violin. It seems like a good idea at the time, but of course there are strings attached. David Garrett plays Paganini and he's a virtuoso himself, with the dreamy look a 19th-century groupie could go for, but there's no edge to his acting, and Paganini definitely had an edge. Jared Harris gets the sinister side of Satan, but in the beginning, at least, the devil has to be seductive, too, and Harris isn't. The movie's dedicated to the late Ken Russell, but it lacks the bad-boy outrageousness Russell brought to his musical biopics. The best way to watch it might be to skip to the musical segments, especially the one in the bar, where Paganini rocks out on one string. How does he do that? Maybe the devil had something to do with it. 

Being There (1979)

BEING THERE  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Hal Ashby
    Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvin Douglas,
    Jack Warden, Richard Basehart, Richard Dysart
Peter Sellers plays a perfect cipher, an impeccably dressed blank slate who has lived into middle age without ever leaving the house in which he's always resided, except to go out and work in the garden. When he's forced out into the world, he's embraced as a savant, though he knows nothing other than horticulture and what he's watched on television. His name is Chance, and because he has no recorded past and no real identity, he can be whatever others see in him, or whatever they need him to be. It's an ideal role for Sellers, an actor who hardly seemed to exist beyond the characters he played on the screen. Keep an eye on the final image, and see what you think it says about who or what Chance might really be. 

Game Change (2012)

GAME CHANGE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jay Roach
    Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Ed Harris,
    Peter MacNicol, Jamey Sheridan, Sarah Paulson
How Sarah Palin, the ambitious, outspoken, telegenic and alarmingly ignorant governor of Alaska, became the Republican nominee for vice president in 2008, and the political circus that followed in her wake. Julianne Moore virtually disappears into her role as Palin. Put Moore, Tina Fey and the real Sarah Palin side by side and you'd think you were seeing triple. Ed Harris plays John McCain, the man at the top of the ticket, trying to salvage some speck of decency as his running mate goes off the rails and the campaign turns increasingly ugly. Woody Harrelson plays Steve Schmidt, the political guru whose job is to keep Palin's glaring limitations in check and her grandstanding behavior under control till early November. It's tempting in retrospect to view Palin as an aberration, a bad political joke. Based on the slimefest we've witnessed lately, that would be a mistake. If we continue to vote for cretins and idiots, we're bound to elect a few, and we've got to do better than that. If we don't, the joke's on us.

Ministry of Fear (1944)

MINISTRY OF FEAR  (1944)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Fritz Lang
    Ray Milland Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond,
    Dan Duryea, Alan Napier, Hillary Brooke
Ray Milland walks out of an asylum where he's spent two years for allegedly killing his wife. He buys a train ticket to London, and to kill time while he's waiting, wanders around a fund-raising fair where he wins a cake by correctly guessing its weight. He gets on the train, cake in hand, but it turns out this is no ordinary cake, and there are Nazis everywhere, and hardly anybody a newly released mental patient can confide in. A lot of this plays like a Hitchcock movie, and it's from a book by Graham Greene, which is close enough, with plenty of doubt and suspicion to go around for everybody. Can you trust the kindly bookstore owner, or the nice young tailor taking your measurements for a new suit, or the blind man sharing your compartment on the train? Not in this movie.

Chappie (2015)

CHAPPIE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Neill Blomkamp
    Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Yo-Landi Visser,
    Ninja, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver
Sometime in the future, in Neill Blomkamp's dystopian Johannesburg, a damaged police robot captured by a small gang of thieves becomes sentient, and has to adjust to a world where the 1% rule and most of humanity scrapes by in a violent slum. This has more of an escapist, comic-book feel to it than "District 9" and "Elysium", not that those movies weren't escapist, too. The metaphorical implications are more shaded and the emotional stakes, oddly enough, are higher, what with a cute robot and all. Sharlto Copley, without whom Blomkamp apparently couldn't make a movie, plays the robot, Chappie. Dev Patel, of the "Marigold Hotel" films, plays Chappie's creator, a nerd scientist working for a corporate overlord played by Sigourney Weaver. Hugh Jackman, with a terrible haircut and muscles left over from his last outing as Wolverine, plays a mercenary rival who's desperate to get his own giant monster robot online. Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser play the hoodlum couple who become Chappie's surrogate parents. (They also wrote most of the rap tunes on the soundtrack.) Blomkamp's vision of a grimy, ruined future remains distinctive. Nobody who's watched his other films would mistake "Chappie" for the work of anybody else.