The Shallows (2016)

THE SHALLOWS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jaume Collet-Serra
    Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada, Brett Cullen
"Jaws" meets "Blue Crush" meets "All Is Lost", with bikini-clad Blake Lively as a surfer named Nancy, who ends up on a rock in a bay in Mexico with only a wounded seagull and a hungry shark for company. It's not profound and it's not meant to be, but it's a decent piece of summertime escape, and Lively carries it most of the way alone. Fans of geographic displacement will note the effective casting of Australia in the role of Mexico.

Blow-Up (1966)

BLOW-UP  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michelangelo Antonioni
    David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles,
    John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Verushka

Spoiler Alert: If you've never seen "Blow-Up", you might want to do that before you read this review. 

Isolation and alienation blend and blur in a murder mystery set in mod, mid-'60s London. David Hemmings, who never did anything this good again, plays a cool, brooding photographer who's poking around in a park one day when he spies a couple off in the distance and sneaks a series of shots of them. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) chases him down and asks for the pictures. He tricks her by switching rolls and develops the film back at the studio, crops and enlarges the prints, and starts to suspect that, without knowing it, he's photographed a murder. For a movie that's so time-specific, this holds up really well. It still feels modern 50 years on. It was shot during the heyday of Carnaby Street, yet the city's quiet in a way that seems otherworldly. The streets are nearly empty. A raucous truckload of mimes motor about endlessly, improvising little bits of theater for no real audience except themselves. The Yardbirds perform in a cavernous club to a roomful of spectators who either dance trancelike or stand still as statues, staring straight ahead. "I thought you were in Paris," Hemmings says to the model Verushka at a party where the air's thick with pot. "I am in Paris," she replies, off in a zone of her own. In the end, the mystery goes unsolved. The pictures, the corpse and the woman are gone. The photographer's back in the park, where the mimes are acting out a tennis match. The ball goes back and forth for a while, and then it goes sailing over the fence and lands not far from the photographer. The ball does not exist, but the photographer picks it up anyway, and tosses it back into play. He watches the game, his eyes moving back and forth, and now he can hear it, the thwack-thwack-thwack of an imaginary ball hitting a make-believe racket in a made-up game. What's real? Who knows? And what difference does it make?

Inferno (2016)

INFERNO  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ron Howard
    Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan,
    Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ben Foster, Ana Ularu
Daredevil symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) battles amnesia while saving the world from a deadly plague by decoding a secret prophecy embedded in Dante's Divine Comedy. I wonder what Dante would think about that. 

Heart Beat (1980)

HEART BEAT  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Byrum
    Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, John Heard,
    Ray Sharkey, Ann Dusenberry, Tony Bill,
    Kent Williams, John Larroquette, Steve Allen
"The war had been over about five years. A new decade had begun. And we were just three Americans." The war that had ended was World War Two. The new decade was the 1950s. And the three Americans were Neal and Carolyn Cassady and their friend Jack Kerouac. As the movie looks in on them, Carolyn's going to art school. Jack's writing and trying to publish "On the Road". Neal's working for the railroad and doing real well to keep his car-stealing ass out of jail. They all end up sharing a house in the suburbs, and Byrum gets some easy laughs out of the cultural clash between these Charlie Parker bohemians and their Perry Como neighbors. There's a great movie waiting to be made about the Beats - actually, "Howl" was pretty good - and if "Heart Beat" doesn't quite get there, at least it's an interesting attempt. Heard is especially good as the lost, diffident Kerouac, and Ray Sharkey turns up briefly as Allen Ginsberg. Evocative jazz score by Jack Nitzsche. Based on a memoir by Carolyn Cassady. 

John Heard

(1946-2017)

Land of the Dead (2005)

LAND OF THE DEAD  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: George A. Romero
    Simon Baker, Asia Argento, Dennis Hopper,
    Robert Joy, John Leguizamo, Eugene Clark
37 years down the road from the drive-in movie that started it all, the man who gave the world "Night of the Living Dead" was back at it, and so were his rotting, lumbering, flesh-eating zombies. Things had changed some. The zombies are more sophisticated. They're starting to communicate with each other, and they're learning how to use tools, though their technical expertise in areas like keeping a jackhammer plugged in while you're drilling with it and aiming a machine gun when you're firing it still needs some refinement. They're catching on quick, though, and becoming a more collective threat to the embattled souls who haven't yet joined their ranks. Funny, gory, cool to look at and acted by folks who know exactly what to do with the stereotypes they're handed to play, "Land of the Dead" is a terrific zombie movie, demonstrating again that Romero wasn't just good at this stuff. He was the best.

George A. Romero

(1940-2017)

Ed Wood (1994)

ED WOOD  (1994)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tim Burton
    Johnny Depp. Martin Landau, Patricia Arquette,
    Sarah Jessica Parker, George "The Animal" Steele,
    Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray, Vincent D'Onofrio,
    G.D. Spradlin, Max Casella, Lisa Marie
A Tim Burton dream project, a fanciful, black-and-white account of Ed Wood's early years as a Hollywood auteur, from "Glen or Glenda?" in 1953 through the legendary "Plan 9 From Outer Space". Filmed in the style of a 1950s B movie, it's a loving, respectful, achingly funny tribute to the man universally recognized as the most inept filmmaker of all time. Depp plays the title role as if he were imitating Jon Lovitz, but it's a caricature that grows on you, as do the other performances. What gives the film its emotional resonance is Martin Landau's astonishing portrayal of Bela Lugosi, profane, crotchety and hooked on morphine, once the world's greatest horror star, reduced by the time he met Wood to poverty and self-parody, taking any bad part in any bad movie just to make his next fix. For the first few scenes he appears in, you keep looking for Landau under all that makeup. After that, you simply accept the fact that you're watching Lugosi. This is Ed Wood's life as Ed himself might have imagined it, or as he might have wanted to film it, if he'd ever had a real budget or a shred of talent. Lisa Marie (as Vampira) and George "The Animal" Steele (as Tor Johnson) are practically clones of their "Plan 9" counterparts, and Vincent D'Onofrio does a dead-on cameo as Orson Welles. 

Martin Landau

(1928-2017)

Everybody Wants Some!

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!  (2016)  ¢ ¢
    D: Richard Linklater
    Blake Jenner, Justin Street, Ryan Guzman,
    Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, Glen Powell,
    Zoey Deutch, Temple Baker, J. Quinton Johnson
Richard Linklater's followup to "Dazed and Confused" moves on in time from the '70s to the '80s, while the drinking, doping and hazing shift from high school to college. This time the partying protagonists are hot-dog jocks, members of the school's championship baseball team, and if the cost of playing ball is spending most of your time with these assholes, who the hell would want to? Spending a two-hour movie with them is more than enough. There are a couple of characters who aren't entirely unsympathetic. Both are pitchers, which automatically makes them suspect among their position-playing teammates: Everybody knows pitchers are weird. Which might be Linklater's subversive comment on the team and its prevailing mentality. The weirdos - the only characters who seem capable of thinking beyond their dicks - are the only ones you'd really want to know.

Timetable (1956)

TIMETABLE  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mark Stevens
    Mark Stevens, King Calder, Felicia Farr,
    Jack Klugman, Marianne Stewart, Wesley Addy
A low-rent precursor to "Touch of Evil", about two investigators, one working for an insurance company and the other for the railroad, trying to solve what appears to be the perfect crime: a $500,000 train robbery. A couple of switchbacks in the story keep you guessing for a while. The railroad man says the thieves will slip up sooner or later, and they do. The insurance man would rather be on vacation in Mexico City, but the case does take him as far as Tijuana. One of them knows a lot more about the robbery than he's letting on. Stevens also produced, and while he's no Orson Welles, he knows his way around a B movie. When you're a character trapped in a picture like this one, you're trapped but good. 

Five Came Back (1939)

FIVE CAME BACK  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Farrow
    Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, John Carradine,
    Wendy Barrie, Alan Jenkins, Joseph Calleia,
    Kent Taylor, Patric Knowles, C. Aubrey Smith
An airplane makes an emergency landing in the Amazon and the passengers go about trying to survive while the pilots work at repairing the engine. The bad news is that the plane won't clear the trees on takeoff, or the mountains after that, if it's carrying all the passengers. Some will have to stay behind in the jungle, and there's more bad news: The headhunters are closing in. A good, low-budget adventure thriller with a particular attention to character and how a shared life-and-death crisis can alter the way people act and relate to each other. Young Lucy plays a sympathetic floozy trying to escape her checkered past. 

X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES  (1963)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Roger Corman
    Ray Milland, Diana Van Der Vlis, John Hoyt,
    Harold J. Stone, Don Rickles, Dick Miller
Dr. Ray Milland develops some magic eye drops that allow him to see through things, which seems wonderful at first, but, of course, there are consequences. Winning at blackjack because you can see all the cards and scoping out the women on the dance floor because you can see through their clothes go in the plus column. Becoming psychotic and trying to drive while you're hallucinating do not. Something you'll see in this movie but probably nowhere else: Ray Milland doing the twist. The budget was close to $300,000, which makes it one of Corman's more expensive productions. 

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (2016)

MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tim Burton
    Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Samuel L. Jackson,
    Terence Stamp, Judi Dench, Allison Janney,
    Rupert Everett, Chris O'Dowd, Lauren McCrostie
If there was ever an actress who seemed destined to be in a Tim Burton movie, it's Eva Green. With her jet-black hair and icy gaze, she looks like something out of a dark fairy tale, which is what most of Burton's movies are. Playing the pipe-smoking Miss Peregrine in this film, she looks like she'd be as inclined to eat one of her young charges as care for them. She also appears to be having a real good time. Green's Miss Peregrine and her unusual kids live in a gothic mansion on an island off the coast of Wales and inhabit a time loop, repeating the same day over and over: September 3, 1943. Asa Butterfield, who's grown at least a foot since "Hugo", plays a Florida teenager who drops into the time loop from 2016, after the death of his grandfather, who had a connection with Miss Peregrine, too. I'm not sure every detail of the story adds up, and I'm not sure I care. It's wonderfully creepy and weird, in the way that only Tim Burton's movies are, and if you're a fan of the guy's work, that'll be enough. Plus, there's Eva Green, puffing on her pipe, resetting the time loop precisely every evening, managing a house full of very strange children, and facing down a monster she can't even see with a crossbow and a stone-cold glare. You wouldn't want Miss Peregrine to be played by anybody else.

Europa Report (2013)

EUROPA REPORT  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Sebastián Cordero
    Sharlto Copley, Michael Nykvist, Embeth Davidtz,
    Anamaria Marinca, Christian Camargo, Daniel Wu
Suspense in space, about a team of astronauts looking for life on the moons of Jupiter. Found footage still seems like a gimmick with limited potential (or maybe I'm just not seeing it), but here it works pretty well. The shots are mostly credible within the context of the story, and the editing makes sense, allowing the narrative to slip around in time. The word "creepy" comes up a few times in this, and speaking of creepy, wait till you see what the astronauts find under the lunar ice.

Michael Nykvist

(1960-2017)

Ghostbusters (2016)

GHOSTBUSTERS  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Paul Feig
    Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon,
    Leslie Jones, Chris Hemsworth, Ed Begley Jr.,
    Andy Garcia, Charles Dance, Bill Murray,
    Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver
The slime is back, and it's getting all over everybody, but especially Kristen Wiig as the most straight-laced member of the newly retooled Ghostbusters team. It's really just more of the same, except for the guys being girls and a funny turn by Chris Hemsworth as their spaced-out hunk receptionist. The women are up to it, especially the weirdly brilliant Kate McKinnon, but they're all underserved by the script. Surviving cast members from the previous "Ghostbusters" movies make cameo appearances.