Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)

TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER  (1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Blake Edwards
    Peter Sellers, David Niven, Herbert Lom, 
    Joanna Lumley, Robert Loggia, Capucine,
    Richard Mulligan, Harvey Korman, Burt Kwouk,
    Graham Stark, Ronald Fraser, Denise Crosby
A sequel cobbled together from outtakes and clips from previous "Pink Panther" movies, with some new footage added in an effort to keep the franchise going after the death of Peter Sellers. It starts out with somebody (once again) stealing the world's most valuable diamond, but that part of the story goes nowhere. Instead, there's a journalist (Joanna Lumley) investigating the disappearance of Inspector Clouseau in a possible airplane crash, and Chief Inspector Dreyfuss (Herbert Lom) on a mission to make sure he's actually dead. The gags are recycled and the comedy's hit-and-miss, but it's funny enough. Niven's ALS was becoming an issue by then. He appears briefly in one of the newer segments, chatting with Lumley and Capucine, but his voice was dubbed by impressionist Rich Little. He died the following year. 

Woman In the Dunes (1964)

WOMAN IN THE DUNES  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Hiroshi Teshigahara
    Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida 
An entomologist spends a happy day looking for bugs near a small seaside village and misses the last bus home. He takes shelter with a woman living in a house in a sand dune, and everything goes bad from there. A creepy, unconventional horror movie that plays like a long nightmare from which there is no escape. What the allegorical implications might be is up for grabs, and has been since the movie's release. If nothing else, after watching it, you're not likely to look at sand the same way ever again. Teshigahara's direction got an Oscar nomination. 

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: F. Gary Gray
    O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell,
    Neil Brown Jr., Aldis Hodge, Marlon Yates Jr.,
    Paul Giamatti, R. Marcus Taylor, Alexandra Shipp
Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E and the boyz party hard and kick out their groundbreaking gangsta rap. Paul Giamatti plays the token white guy, an agent who promotes them and rips them off. It's dope, man, unless you're a woman. Women don't come off too good in this. 

Sex Kittens Go To College (1960)

SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE  (1960)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Albert Zugsmith
    Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, Louis Nye,
    Mijanou Bardot, Martin Milner, Mickey Shaughnessy,
    Pamela Mason, Jackie Coogan, John Carradine,
    Vampira, Conway Twitty, Woo Woo Grabowski
A sex comedy that's about as dopey as it sounds, starring Mamie Van Doren as an academic who raises eyebrows and pulse rates when she takes over the science department at a small-town college while keeping her prior occupation as the "Tallahassee Tassel Tosser" under wraps. It's not entirely without potential - there's a nice scene with Mamie and Martin Milner hanging around the science lab that suggests where it might've gone - but the overall stupidity quotient effectively prevents it from getting there. Tuesday Weld has little to do, despite being billed second behind Mamie. The actress who plays the saucy French student, the one who targets two idiot gangsters as research subjects, is Mijanou Bardot, Brigitte's sister. Jackie Coogan demonstrates that a W.C. Fields impression isn't enough when you don't have anything remotely funny to say. The nightclub line dance featuring Mamie, Coogan and John Carradine is a silly highlight, but that's not enough to save the movie, either. Maybe if Mamie were to toss a tassel or two. That might help.

The Curve (2015)

THE CURVE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Rifqi Assaf
    Ashraf Barhoum, Fatina Laila, 
    Mazen Moudam, Ashraf Telfah
A road movie about three strangers who end up traveling across Jordan together in a VW bus. All three are exiles from Palestine or Lebanon, and one of them, the driver, appears to be suffering from severe PTSD. The camera effectively puts you in the van with them, and by the time the picture's over, you won't just feel like you've gotten to know them, you'll be glad you did. It took Assaf six years to get the story to the screen, and he made a conscious decision not to change it, even though some things, like a refugee returning safely to Syria, were no longer in play on the ground. The movie's a bit of a reality warp, anyway, but in a region where the political dynamic is fluid and millions are displaced, you can see where reality might take a detour, too, now and then. Stay with it to the end, and see what you think. 

A Walk On the Moon (1999)

A WALK ON THE MOON  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tony Goldwyn
    Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen, Liev Schreiber,
    Tovah Feldshuh, Anna Paquin, Bobby Boriello
Anybody who ever tried to get it on in the back seat of a Studebaker will be able to relate to the scene in this movie where Diane Lane and Liev Schreiber struggle to do that. They play Pearl and Marty Kantrowitz, a going-on-middle-aged couple whose dreams and ambitions and passion have faded with the day-to-day reality of work and marriage and kids. It's the summer of 1969, and they're at a family camp in upstate New York, and a couple of  landmark cultural events are about to transpire. In July, Neil Armstrong will walk on the moon, and in August, coincidentally not far from the camp, a little outdoor music festival is going to take place. At the same time, while Marty keeps getting called away to work - he fixes televisions - Pearl catches the eye of a counterculture hunk who sells ladies' blouses out of a customized bus, and he catches hers. The "blouse man" is played by Viggo Mortensen, and to Pearl he represents everything she feels she's missed. They end up in the bus, making out during the moonwalk. (It has more room than the Studebaker, and anyway, Marty's taken the Studebaker back to the city.) They go skinny-dipping. They go to Woodstock. And, of course, there are consequences, and confrontations, and guilt. Great, heaping piles of guilt. The melodramatics kick into high gear toward the end, when Marty learns what's going on. At the same time, it's not hard to imagine where these characters are coming from, or why they behave the way they do. It's where Douglas Sirk meets the Age of Aquarius. The Dead, Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan are just some of the artists who turn up on the soundtrack - a more evocative late-'60s playlist would be hard to find - and the songs and stage announcements at the festival sound like actual audio from Woodstock.

3000 Nights (2015)

3000 NIGHTS  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mai Masri
    Maisa Abd Elhadi, Nadira Omran, Rakeen Saad,
    Raida Adon, Abeer Zeibak Haddad, IzabelRamadan
This movie's about finding humanity in a hellhole, along with a lot of hell. Its protagonist is a young Palestinian schoolteacher sentenced to eight years in an Israeli prison for her role in a terrorist incident she claims she had nothing to do with. There's no real evidence against her, but she was in the wrong place at the wrong time helping somebody out, and that's enough. It's a formula prison flick, but it's handled with skill and a sense of purpose, and the political dimension gives it a definite edge. There are a couple of hard lessons you can learn from a movie like this. Don't ever get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in the occupied territories, even if you're just doing somebody a favor, and especially if you're Palestinian. And whatever you're planning to do with the next eight years of your life, spending any part of it in an Israeli prison is not a good idea. 

Road To Morocco (1942)

ROAD TO MOROCCO  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Butler
    Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour,
    Anthony Quinn, Dona Drake, Vladimir Sokolof
Ski Nose and the Groaner are shipwrecked off North Africa and goof their way through another itinerant musical comedy. Bing sings "Moonlight Becomes You", and the camels talk.

Night and Fog (1956)

NIGHT AND FOG  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alain Resnais
A grim, unsparing documentary about concentration camps, with shots of the camps and their peaceful surroundings ten years after the war juxtaposed with horrific footage showing exactly what went on in them between 1940 and 1945. It's hard to believe anybody could deny the Holocaust after watching something like this, but, of course, there are those who do. They're probably the same people who wouldn't object if it happened again. 

The Fifth Estate (2013)

THE FIFTH ESTATE  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bill Condon
    Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Anthony Mackie,
    David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander, Laura Linney,
    Stanley Tucci, Peter Capaldi, Moritz Bleibtreu 
The cyberadventures of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who blew the lid on a million secrets by hacking computer systems around the world and posting what he found online. The movie's not especially sympathetic to Assange. Played by Benedict Cumberbatch, he's an egotistical bastard who claims to be serving the common good by giving people the information that governments and corporations don't want them ever to have, but turns spiteful and malicious whenever the spotlight shifts away from him. Apart from that, you don't really learn much about Assange, and the allegations of sexual misconduct that drove him into exile are mentioned in passing only at the very end. He's a renegade genius - maybe that's what makes him attractive to his loyal team of hackers - but he's also, as one character accurately describes him, a manipulative asshole. He's made his mark, though, and the impact of that is still playing out. If the information genie has escaped from its digital bottle, it's at least partly because of Julian Assange. 

Rodan (1956)

RODAN  (1956)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ishirô Honda
    Kenji Sawara, Yumi Shirikawa, Akihiko Hirata,
    Akio Kobori, Minosuke Yamada, Yoshifumi Tajima
Giant flying reptiles  terrorize Japan, and many miniature sets are laid waste before the creatures themselves go up in smoke. Oh, did I just give away the movie? Sorry about that.

Hardcore Henry (2015)

HARDCORE HENRY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ilya Naishuller
    Sharlto Copley, Tim Roth, Haley Bennett,
    Andrei Dementiev, Danila Kozlovsky
Insane, point-of-view mayhem about a biomechanical killing machine. So you get killing, killing and more killing, and then just for a change of pace, more killing still. As an exercise while you're watching it, see if you can count how many guys the title character dispatches to Valhalla in just 96 minutes.