Unlocked (2017)

UNLOCKED  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Apted
    Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Toni Collette,
    John Malkovich, Michael Douglas, Michael Epp
A good, twisty, cloak-and-dagger piece starring Noomi Rapace as an interrogator named Alice Racine, who works for either MI5 or the CIA, it's not clear which. Still lying low after an assignment that ended badly two years before, Alice finds herself being pulled back into the game to help stop some bad guys from releasing a deadly biological weapon somewhere in London. Beyond that, it gets complicated. John Malkovich plays her American minder. Toni Collette plays his British counterpart. Michael Douglas plays a colleague in the trade, Alice's mentor from the old days. Orlando Bloom, looking seedy, plays a thief who might not be merely a thief. You can't trust any of them, really, and in a movie like this one, there's no good reason you should. It's not a key factor in the outcome necessarily, but the actor who appears to be having the most fun here is Malkovich.

Jaws (1975)

JAWS  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Steven Spielberg
    Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss,
    Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Susan Backlinie
Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. You're gonna need a bigger boat.

Silence (2016)

SILENCE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Martin Scorsese
    Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson,
    Issei Ogata, Yoshi Oida, Ciarán Hinds
Martin Scorsese's meditation on faith and suffering, about two Portuguese missionaries who go to 17th-century Japan to look for a colleague who may be dead or lost. It took Scorsese years to get the movie made, and it's not hard to see parallels with "The Last Temptation of Christ" and Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". It even has crucifixions - there's a lot of torture - and the images of Christ that keep coming up are mostly Christ crowned with thorns or Christ on the cross. It's long, slow, beautiful to look at, and for anybody who doesn't share Scorsese's preoccupation with old-school Catholicism and the concept of salvation through martyrdom, kind of dull. There's no room for comic relief - zealots rarely find anything funny - and the impact might be greater if the roles of the lead actors were reversed. Andrew Garfield has the much bigger part, but Adam Driver has more charisma, combined with the gaunt, ascetic look of somebody who might actually be a 17th-century man of the cloth. It's worth remembering that the church of these missionary priests was also the church of the Inquisition. Here the inquisitors are Japanese and the priests are the tortured, but the effect is the same: institutionalized barbarism in the name of religion, a righteous sense of purpose going hand in hand with unspeakable brutality. 

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World (1961)

SAMSON AND THE SEVEN MIRACLES OF THE WORLD  (1961)  ¢ ¢
    D: Riccardo Freda
    Gordon Scott, Yoko Tani, Hélène Chanel,
    Dante DiPaolo, Gabriele Antonini, Chu Lai Chit
The legendary strongman, roaming the Far East for reasons that are never explained, helps Chinese rebels fight off the invading Mongols. In the interest of concise storytelling, the movie skips most of the seven miracles, but a well-oiled, musclebound Caucasian in a loincloth passing unnoticed through a crowded Chinese city in broad daylight has to qualify as some sort of miracle, don't you think?

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017)

RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Catherine Bainbridge, Alfonso Maiorana
A documentary about the impact of Native Americans on everything from jazz, blues and metal to folk, rock and rap. Charlie Patton, Mildred Bailey, Jimi Hendrix and the Band's Robbie Robertson are among those profiled. Witnesses include Robertson, Tony Bennett, Martin Scorsese and John Trudell. It'd be worth watching this just for the segment on Link Wray, and any movie in which Buffy Sainte-Marie appears, even briefly, is fine by me.

Naked Space (1983)

NAKED SPACE  (1983)  ¢ ¢
    D: Bruce Kimmel
    Cindy Williams, Bruce Kimmel, Leslie Nielsen,
    Gerrit Graham, Patrick Macnee, Ron Kurowski
A zero-budget sci-fi comedy about a handful of astronauts sharing a spaceship with an astronaut-eating alien. It comes down squarely on the stupid side of silly, but Cindy Williams is cute, and there are a couple of fun bits: the alien's song-and-dance number, "I Want To Eat Your Face", and a mock trailer in which Paul Brineger, one of Clint Eastwood's old "Rawhide" co-stars, plays Dirty Harry.

Lucky (2017)

LUCKY  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Carroll Lynch
    Harry Dean Stanton, David Lynch, Ron Livingston,
    Ed Begley Jr., Tom Skerritt, Barry Shabaka Henley,
    Beth Grant, James Darren, Hugo Armstrong
A small town somewhere in the Southwest. A diner. A bar. A tortoise named President Roosevelt. Milk. Coffee. Bloody Marys. A pet store. A grocery store. Some crickets. A fiesta. Crossword puzzles. Game shows. A joint. Liberace. Saguaros. A memory of World War Two. A bony old cowboy shuffling toward the abyss, but in no special hurry to get there, trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke. The singular, oddball greatness of Harry Dean Stanton. 

It's Always Fair Weather (1955)

IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER  (1955)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
    Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Michael Kidd,
    Cyd Charisse, Dolores Gray, David Burns
This isn't really a sequel to "On the Town", but it could be. Three G.I.buddies go to their favorite New York bar after V-E Day and make a pact to meet up there again in ten years. They do, but by then their lives have moved on. So this one's not about kicking around the city and picking up girls (though Gene Kelly does make a move on Cyd Charisse). It's about the passing of time and dreams not quite coming true. And it's a cinemascopic poke at the incipient pervasiveness and banality of television. The leads are all hoofers and the dance numbers are the highlights. Kelly on roller skates. Charisse in a gym with a chorus line of pugs. And Kelly, Dailey and Kidd showing off their dexterity with garbage-can lids. Jack Benny's old nemesis, Frank Nelson, appears unbilled as a nightclub announcer.

Ghost In the Shell (2017)

GHOST IN THE SHELL  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Rupert Sanders
    Scarlett Johansson, Pilon Asbaek, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano,
    Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt, Chin Han, Danusia Samal
A live-action-and-CGI remake of the 1995 animated feature based on the manga character first introduced in 1989, a killing machine with a human brain and the mechanized face and body of (in this case) Scarlett Johansson. This is where "Blade Runner" meets "Resident Evil", which means it falls somewhere between being a real good movie and an okay one. It works best as a reflection on identity, with Scarlett's character trying to remember where she came from and figure out who she really is, while running, leaping, flying through the air and disposing of numerous bad guys. The action scenes are functional, the highlight being "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, the hero of many Japanese gangster movies, going up against an arsenal of automatics with a throwback revolver. Scarlett's remoteness serves her well as an android, and she has a distracting habit of removing her costume whenever she goes into serious combat. Whether what she strips down to is the android equivalent of nudity or a computer generated catsuit, the effect is hard to ignore. That's some shell. That's some ghost.

From Beyond the Grave (1973)

FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Kevin Connor
    Peter Cushing, David Warner, Margaret Leighton,
    Ian Bannen, Donald Pleasance, Angela Pleasance,
    Diana Dors, Lesley-Anne Down, Nyree Dawn Porter
Four tales of the supernatural, each revolving around an object purchased or purloined from Peter Cushing's curiosity shop. Hint: If you're a character in a movie called "From Beyond the Grave" and you walk into an antique store run by Peter Cushing, don't take anything with you when you leave. 

Anybody Remember George C. Scott?

"What else has George C. Scott done?
  The name sounds familiar."
  unidentified moviegoer leaving the Uptown Theater
  after a revival screening of "The Changeling" 
  Seattle International Film Festival, 6/5/2018

Maudie (2016)

MAUDIE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Aisling Walsh
    Sally Hawkins, Ethan Hawke, Kari Matchett,
    Zachary Bennett, Gabrielle Rose, Billy MacLellan 
Sally Hawkins plays Maud Lewis, a Canadian folk artist whose colorful paintings of flowers, cats and pastoral scenes brought her wide recognition, if not great prosperity, despite severe physical limitations (she had crippling arthritis) and a location (rural Nova Scotia) that couldn't be much more remote. Ethan Hawke plays Maud's husband Everett, a grumpy fish peddler who hires her at first to be a live-in housekeeper. He's antisocial and sometimes abusive, and their relationship is contentious, but there's love in it, too, and Hawkins and Hawke quietly capture that. In one of their more intimate moments, they compare themselves to a pair of mismatched socks, and the metaphor fits. They even exchange ideas about what kinds of socks they would be. Hawkins' physical transformation recalls Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking, and the movie's reminiscent of "Séraphine", a 2008 French film about another suffering folk artist. (If "Maudie" has more emotional resonance, it's because of Hawkins' performance.) Maud Lewis died at 67 in 1970. Everett was killed by a burgler nine years later in the tiny house he and Maud had shared. Many of Maud's paintings, along with the house itself, are on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.

Bio Picks

Memorable performances by actors playing famous people:

          Maria Falconetti as Joan of Arc

          in "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928)

          Brian Keith as Theodore Roosevelt

          in "The Wind and the Lion" (1975)

          Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee

          in "All the President's Men" (1976)

          Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill

          in "Reds" (1981)

          Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager

          in "The Right Stuff" (1983)

          Gregory Peck as Ambrose Bierce

          in "Old Gringo" (1989)

          Vincent D'Onofrio as Orson Welles

           in "Ed Wood" (1994)

          Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler

           in "Downfall" (2004)

          Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan

           in "I'm Not There" (2007)

          Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett

           in "The Runaways" (2010)

          Viggo Mortensen as William S. Burroughs

          in "On the Road" (2012)