Black Moon (1934)

BLACK MOON  (1934)  ¢ ¢
    D: Roy William Neill
    Jack Holt, Fay Wray, Dorothy Burgess,
    Cora Sue Collins, Arnold Korff, Clarence Muse
A handful of white folks who probably shouldn't be on this Caribbean island to begin with try to survive long enough to make their escape when a horde of black natives lay some voodoo on them. One of the white women has gone native herself and keeps sneaking off at night to dance to the jungle drums. I'm not sure that's gonna help.

The High Sun (2015)

THE HIGH SUN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Dalibor Matanic
    Tihana Lazovic, Goran Markovic, Nives Ivankovic,
    Stipe Radoja, Trpimir Turkic, Slavko Sobin
Love among the ruins. Three Balkan love stories set in three different decades, with the same actors playing different roles in each. All three stories center on the relationship between a Croat and a Serb, and all are influenced (and to some extent damned) by recent Balkan history, the lovers united by their grudging humanity and ripped apart by wounds too deep to heal. Love won't conquer all, but it won't stop trying, either, and I guess there's hope in that. It's not much, but it's something. The fact that most viewers outside the Balkans won't even know who's a Serb and who's a Croat only reinforces the underlying tragedy.

The Vagabond Lover (1929)

THE VAGABOND LOVER  (1929)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Marshall Neilan
    Rudy Vallee, Sally Blaine, Marie Dressler,
    Charles Sellon, Nella Walker, Danny O'Shea
A musical from the early sound era, made to cash in on the popularity of radio crooner Rudy Vallee, about a group of young musicians who crash a high-society benefit by posing as a famous jazz band. Vallee's facility with dialogue would get sharper as time went on. Starting with his performance in this film, it had to. He does better at singing, of course, and Sally Blaine in the female lead could melt a few hearts, but it's Marie Dressler as a dithering matron who chews up the soundstage and steals the show. The movie's slight, but fun.

One More Time (2015)

ONE MORE TIME  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Edwards
    Christopher Walken, Amber Heard, Kelli Garner,
    Hamish Linklater, Ann Magnuson, Oliver Platt
Christopher Walken, dialing the weirdness back a notch, stars as Paul Lombard, a crooner who used to pack 'em in, but whose glory days are long gone. Amber Heard plays his daughter Jude, an aspiring musician who desperately wants to make it on her own and can't stand living in the old man's overbearing shadow. Kelli Garner plays Corinne, the other daughter, the responsible one, "the one who can't sing," whose mercenary pragmatism comes through in a big way for all of them. Hamish Linklater plays Corinne's husband Tim, who once had an affair with Jude, who's also slept with her therapist, her agent, and who knows how many other guys. For the moment, the whole family's hanging out at Paul's house in the Hamptons, talking at, over and through each other, the way people who've known each other too long and too well sometimes do. There are a couple moments of high drama, but what really counts here are the day-to-day interactions between the various players, and the grudging affection that underlies all the sniping and complaining they do. They're not perfect - far from it - but they try, and there's a kind of nobility in that. Besides, as Katharine Hepburn put it in "The Lion In Winter", "What family doesn't have its ups and downs?"

Woodstock (1970)

WOODSTOCK  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Wadleigh
Hippies, pot, bad acid, Richie Havens, Canned Heat, Crosby, Stills & Nash, rain, mud, Joan Baez, The Who, Sha Na Na, dancing, skinny-dipping, yoga, Joe Cocker, Ten Years After, Country Joe & the Fish, telephones, garbage, more pot, Arlo, Janis, Jimi, Sly & the Family Stone, helicopters, traffic jams, babies, portable toilets, Wavy Gravy, Bill Graham, Jerry Garcia and more pot. An Oscar-winning documentary about an indelible cultural moment - the now-legendary three-day music festival held in 1969 in Upstate New York, where a who's who of period rock-&-roll acts serenaded a crowd estimated at half a million people. The restored director's cut runs four hours, including an "interfuckingmission," and if you watch the whole thing straight through, you could feel like you survived the festival yourself. A title at the end scrolls through the names of counterculture figures who have died since the festival took place. It's a long list, and growing.

Jackie (2016)

JACKIE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Pablo Larraín
    Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig,
    Billy Crudup, John Hurt, Richard E. Grant,
    Caspar Phillipson, John Carroll Lynch, Beth Grant,
    Max Casella, Corey Johnson, Aidan O'Hare
Natalie Portman plays Jacqueline Kennedy in the days immediately following the assassination of JFK, in a movie that's not incoherent exactly, but always a little sketchy around the edges. It's like one of those reenactments created for the History Channel: a reasonable facsimile that never quite captures the look or feel of the real thing. There are times, especially in profile, when Portman comes close to resembling Jackie. More often, she looks like the younger sister of Kristin Scott Thomas. Peter Sarsgaard is good as Bobby Kennedy, but you'd never look at him and think, there's Bobby Kennedy. Caspar Phillips0n is a dead ringer (bad choice of words) for JFK, but this is Jackie's movie, and Jack's on the periphery. The picture goes out of its way not to deify Jackie. In the aftermath of Dallas, she's a basket case (who wouldn't be?), but she can also be cold and manipulative, spoiled and temperamental, wounded and indecisive, depending on which way the fates are knocking her around. Talking to a journalist (Billy Crudup) and determined to shape her husband's legacy while she can, she's a chain-smoking bitch. Leading Charles Collingwood on a televised tour of the White House, she's all staged, whispering charm. I don't know how close any of this gets to the real Jackie, but one thing's certain. She was a lot more complex and emotionally volatile than the elegant, carefully composed images we saw during her time in the White House, on the magazine covers and on TV.

Movie Star Moment: Gregory Peck

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch
in "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)

   If there was ever a case of perfect typecasting in a movie, it was Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the Depression-Era Southern lawyer in "To Kill a Mockingbird". I'm sure other actors could've done it, but for most of us, when you think of Atticus Finch, you think of Gregory Peck. It's like Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler, or Henry Fonda playing Tom Joad. Why would you want anybody else?
    In this scene, it's night and Atticus has gone out into the backwoods of Alabama to tell the parents of Tom Robinson their son is dead. Tom's a young black man Atticus has been defending on a bogus rape charge, and he's been shot while in police custody, trying to escape. While Atticus is in the house, the rape victim's father, a man named Bob Ewell, turns up and demands to see him. Ewell is played by the character actor James Anderson. Atticus comes out and walks up to where Ewell is standing. The two stare into each other for a moment, and then in an act of undisguised hatred, Anderson spits in Peck's face. Atticus moves as if he's about to strike back, and then he pauses, checks himself, and very deliberately takes out a handkerchief and in one dismissive motion, wipes the insult away. His eyes never leave Ewell, and he never says a word. He walks past Ewell to the car where his nine-year-old son is waiting, and as he does, he throws the handkerchief in the dirt, leaving it. The gesture makes its point in no uncertain terms. It's direct. It's simple. It packs a dramatic punch, and a moral one. In the context of the scene, the story, and the whole twisted history of the South, it's absolutely the right thing for Atticus to do. 
    That's Atticus Finch. That's Gregory Peck.

Topper Returns (1941)

TOPPER RETURNS  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Roy Del Ruth
    Roland Young, Joan Blondell, Carole Landis,
    Billie Burke, Dennis O'Keefe, Patsy Kelly,
    George Zucco, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson
A comic mystery with Roland Young again playing Cosmo Topper, the staid, straight-laced banker bedeviled by spirits. Joan Blondell's a newly minted ghost who enlists Topper's help to find out who done her in. It's the third entry in the series, and George and Marian Kirby, the ghosts played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in the original "Topper" film, aren't around anymore. The movie kind of misses their spectral presence, but it's not bad, with enough suspicious characters to keep you guessing about who stuck a knife in poor Joan.

Holy Motors (2012)

HOLY MOTORS  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Leos Carax
    Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes,
    Kylie Minogue, Elise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson
A well-to-do businessman gets into a stretch limo and sets out to keep a series of appointments. That much of the movie is simple. It's in the nature of the appointments that things get strange. Real strange. The appointments take place all over Paris, and it's never entirely clear what they're supposed to signify, or what's going on. But you never know what to expect in them, either, any more than you could predict the course of a dream. There's a direct reference to Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face" in the casting of Edith Scob as the limousine driver, and, this being a Leos Carax film, the guy keeping all the appointments is Denis Lavant. 

Song of Love (1947)

SONG OF LOVE  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Clarence Brown
    Katharine Hepburn, Paul Henreid, Robert Walker,
    Henry Daniell, Else Janssen, Leo G. Carroll
An admittedly fanciful musical biopic in which Johannes Brahms moves in with Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, their beleaguered housekeeper and their seven kids. Robert and Clara are eternally devoted to each other, but then Brahms falls for Clara, and she kind of likes him, too. Some longing looks are exchanged, but that's as far as it goes, and much beautiful music gets made. Hepburn doesn't actually play the piano in this, but she makes it look convincing. Her fingers appear to be hitting the right keys, and her hands are flying. Henry Daniell, for whom the word "reserved" was probably invented, gives one of his more animated performances as the caustic, grandstanding Franz Liszt.

Rules Don't Apply (2016)

RULES DON'T APPLY  (2016)  ¢ ¢
    D: Warren Beatty
    Warren Beatty, Alden Ehrenreich, Lily Collins,
    Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Martin Sheen,
    Hart Bochner, Paul Sorvino, Annette Bening,
    Oliver Platt, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan
It took decades for Warren Beatty to get his Howard Hughes movie made, and here it finally is, with Beatty as the famously eccentric billionaire. It's nice to look at (Caleb Deschanel did the cinematography) and a lot of famous faces turn up in fairly small roles, but the script is devoid of surprises and the picture never really comes to life. Beatty doesn't even make Hughes all that interesting, and Hughes was one of the 20th century's preeminent oddballs. It plays like a long, slow movie from another time, and you keep waiting for something to happen that could keep you from glancing at your watch, but it doesn't. It just goes on, and on, and on. Beatty's co-writer, Bo Goldman, wrote the screenplay for "Melvin and Howard", a 1980 movie (and a better one) in which Jason Robards played Hughes.

When a Man Loves (1927)

WHEN A MAN LOVES  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alan Crosland
    John Barrymore, Dolores Costello, Warner Oland,
    Sam De Grasse, Holmes Herbert, Stuart Holmes
An opulent costume romance set in 18th-century France, with Barrymore as an aspiring man of the cloth and Dolores Costello as a woman who makes his commitment to chastity somewhat difficult. Also, there's treachery and sword fighting and cheating at cards and a revolt aboard a prison ship. (Criminals considered too wicked for French prisons in this film face an even more horrible fate: deportation to Louisiana.) Swashbuckling takes over toward the end, and Barrymore gets manic in the action scenes.

Spy Kids: All the Time In the World (2011)

SPY KIDS: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD  (2011)
   D: Robert Rodriguez                                                    ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Jessica Alba, Rowan Blanchard, Mason Cook,
    Joel McHale, Jeremy Piven, Alexa Vega
"Spy Kids 4", in case you're keeping score, or maybe "Spy Kids: The Next Generation", with our preteen agents taking on a villain called the Timekeeper, who wants to slow down time till it stops, messing things up for everybody. The younger spy kid - the boy - is hearing-impaired, which comes in handy as the plot unfolds. The older kid - the girl - is just annoying. Ricky Gervais gets most of the good lines as the voice of a wise-cracking robot dog. Danny Trejo's Machete character appears for a second or two, frozen in time.