First Man (2018)

FIRST MAN  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Damien Chazelle
    Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke,
    Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit,
    Ciarán Hinds, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas
Neil Armstrong's moonwalk on July 20, 1969, was one of those historic moments that anybody who was around back then can remember. This movie tells Armstrong's story, from his time as a test pilot flying X-15s to the voyage of Apollo 11. The space stuff is suspenseful, even if you know the history in advance, and Ryan Gosling is ideally cast as Armstrong, a technocrat whose calm, analytical approach to a tense, demanding job makes him the perfect candidate to lead a mission to the moon. It's not that he lacks emotions, it's that he doesn't show them very much, and that's become a strain on his relationship with his wife Janet, played by Claire Foy. Foy's very good, too, but her role gives her less to grab onto, and for all the screen time devoted to it, the melodrama surrounding the Armstrongs' marriage is essentially a subplot. Neil and Janet would eventually split up, and their silent encounter through a pane of glass at the end of the film contains a revealing visual clue that something between them doesn't quite connect. 

House of Wax (1953)

HOUSE OF WAX  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Andre de Toth
    Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, Phyllis Kirk,
    Carolyn Jones, Paul Picerni, Roy Roberts,
    Paul Cavanagh, Dabbs Greer, Charles Buchinsky
Vincent Price plays an artist who specializes in wax sculptures. When a fire destroys his entire collection of historical figures, Vincent's work takes a turn toward the macabre. This was one of the first features shot in 3-D, but even without the gimmick, it's a pretty good horror movie, the one that established Price as a specialist in the genre for the rest of his career. Granite-faced Charles Buchinsky (aka Charles Bronson) makes his presence known in an early role as Igor, Price's mute assistant. 

Don't Let Me Die On a Sunday (1998)

DON'T LET ME DIE ON A SUNDAY  (1998)  ¢ ¢
    D: Didier Le Pêcheur
    Elodie Bouchez, Jean-Marc Barr, Martin Petit-Guyot,
    Patrick Catalifo, Gérard Loussine, Patrick Magee
This movie opens with a young woman on a slab in the hospital morgue, the apparent victim of an ecstasy overdose. The morgue attendants (a fairly sick bunch) stash her away and go home, but one of them slips back in later on to perform a little sexual post-mortem on his own. And guess what? The woman comes to, aroused from a drug-induced coma. The rest of the movie has the woman and the guys from the morgue hanging out together, engaging in some discreetly shot kinky sex, and standing watch with a friend who's dying of AIDS. They talk a lot, too, but it's hard to care about anything they're saying, and the subtitles are hard to read, anyway. (I guess it helps to know French.) The girl who turns out not to be dead is played by Elodie Bouchez, who's never hard to watch, but if getting it on with a corpse is something you'd like to spend more time learning about, you'd be better off checking out Jorg Buttgereit's "Nekromantik", or the 1996 Molly Parker movie "Kissed".

Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fredric Hobbs
    Christopher Brooks, Stuart Lancaster, Richard Marion,
    E. Kerrigan Prescott, Karen Ingenthron, Peggy Browne
Somewhere outside Reno, Nevada, some toxic gas from an abandoned mine contaminates a flock of sheep. One of the sheep gives birth to an embryo that grows into a giant sheep monster that lumbers around the countryside on its hind legs, frightening little children and bumping off the occasional gun-toting vigilante. It'd be easy to dismiss this as one of the worst movies ever made, but that would miss the point that it's also one of the most bizarre. The underlying themes are greed, racism and mob justice, and it ends in complete chaos, as avarice triumphs and society collapses and devours itself. So, yeah, it's a ridiculous, terrible movie, but it's also crazy in a way that's hard to ignore. The monster's the most sympathetic character in the film. Welcome to Indian Flats. 

Listomania / Take 10

Some American actors who have portrayed nationalities other than their own (or tried to):

John Wayne in "The Conqueror" (Mongol)
Burt Lancaster in "The Train" (French)
Jack Palance in "The Professionals" (Mexican)
Myrna Loy in "The Mask of Fu Manchu" (Chinese)
Henry Fonda in "War and Peace" (Russian)
Marlon Brando in "The Young Lions" (German)
Gregory Peck in "Behold a Pale Horse" (Spanish)
Spencer Tracy in "The Old Man and the Sea" (Cuban)
Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast At Tiffany's" (Japanese)
Gary Cooper in "The Adventures of Marco Polo" (Italian)

Between the Lines (1977)

BETWEEN THE LINES  (1977)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Joan Micklin Silver
    John Heard, Gwen Welles, Jeff Goldblum,
    Lindsay Crouse, Jill Eikenberry, Bruno Kirby,
    Stephen Collins, Joe Morton, Michael J. Pollard
The prospective sale of a once-scrappy alternative newspaper to a profit-driven mainstream publisher causes the paper's staff to evaluate the costs of selling out and the risks of moving on. A smart, lively ensemble piece with a great young cast, and a pretty good time capsule for the counter-culture '70s. It'd fit nicely on a double bill with "Return of the Secaucus Seven".

Michael J. Pollard

(1939-2019)

Hudson Hawk (1991)

HUDSON HAWK  (1991)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Lehmann
    Bruce Willis, Danny Aiello, Andie MacDowell,
    James Coburn, Richard E. Grant, Sandra Bernhard
Bruce Willis co-wrote this alleged caper comedy about a cat burglar who gets out of prison and immediately goes back to work stealing priceless Da Vinci artifacts. You know how some movies get a lot of bad ink, and then you see them and they turn out to be better than you expected? That's  not the case with "Hudson Hawk". It's cartoonish, categorically stupid and mostly just flat-out dull. Grant and Bernhard go way over the top as the villains, and even they're not any fun. One thing you'll see in this movie and nowhere else: the pope adjusting his TV so he can watch "Mr. Ed".

Danny Aiello

(1933-2019)

On the Basis of Sex (2018)

ON THE BASIS OF SEX  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mimi Leder
    Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux,
    Sam Waterston, Kathy Bates, Wendy Crewson
A dramatized account of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's early days as a wife, mother, law student, university professor and finally plaintiff's attorney in her first big gender-equality case. Felicity Jones plays the brilliant, forceful, unstoppable RBG. Armie Hammer plays her husband Marty, who lends a hand with the cooking (at which Ruth does not excel), while she helps him through law school when a cancer diagnosis threatens to derail his career. Sam Waterston plays the starched-collar dean of Harvard Law, and in the context of recent events, his resemblance to Robert Mueller is hard to ignore. If Ginsburg wasn't a real-life folk hero already, the movie's final shot should just about seal the deal. 

Fedora (1978)

FEDORA  (1978)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Billy Wilder
    William Holden, Marthe Keller, Hildegarde Knef,
    José Ferrer, Frances Sternhagen, Henry Fonda,
    Stephen Collins, Michael York, Mario Adorf
An impoverished producer flies to Corfu on borrowed money to try to coax a Garboesque movie star into reading a script he's trying to sell. Then things start to get perverse. This is like a throwback to Wilder's "Sunset Blvd.", with an aging William Holden cast as the producer and an aging actress again at the center of a seriously twisted story. There's little of the dark, morbid wit that Wilder brought to the earlier film - it's plenty dark and morbid, but the wit has mostly gone missing - and while Marthe Keller (as the actress) and Hildegarde Knef (as the countess who houses and protects her) aren't bad, neither has the star power their roles demand. (Apparently, Wilder had hoped to cast Faye Dunaway and Marlene Dietrich.) Henry Fonda plays himself as the president of the Motion Picture Academy, and Michael York plays himself as Michael York. 

Suspiria (2018)

SUSPIRIA  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Luca Guadagnino
    Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Grace Moretz,
    Sylvie Testud, Mia Goth, Angela Winkler, Alek Wek,
    Elena Fokina, Ingrid Caven, Fabrizia Sacchi
A horror art film starring Dakota Johnson as an Amish girl from Ohio who moves to Berlin in 1977 to join a modern dance company. Berlin looks drab and colorless, terrorism is all over the news, the dance studio is full of shadows, and there's something sinister about the women who run the place. What's going on here? Our Amish girl from Ohio is about to find out. This isn't a remake of Dario Argento's 1977 "Suspiria" as much as it is a reimagining. The story's told in six acts and an epilogue, and if the dots don't always seem to connect, it's good to remember that dreams don't always make perfect sense, either. Just keep an eye on what Guadignino puts on the screen, and especially keep an eye on Tilda Swinton - all three of her. She does something here that not many actors could pull off. If you know what that is in advance, you'll still be amazed at how well she does it. The movie itself is a trip to hell - at the end, literally. If the best horror movies are nightmares at 24 frames per second, this one achieves that, for sure.

The Lost Tribe (1949)

THE LOST TRIBE  (1949)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Berke
    Johnny Weissmuller, Myrna Dell, Elena Verdugo,
    Joseph Vitale, Ralph Dunn, Nelson Leigh 
Johnny Weissmuller fights a crocodile and kills a shark, and a lion fights a gorilla and then Johnny fights the lion and stabs it to death. Also, there's a lost city deep in the jungle and some thieves want to steal all the treasure there, but they'll have a tough time doing that as long as Johnny's around, at least that'd be my guess.

Hal (2018)

HAL  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Amy Scott
A documentary on Hal Ashby, the shaggy-bearded, pot-smoking filmmaker who turned out some of the most influential movies of the 1970s, battling the studios he worked for every step of the way. "Harold and Maude", "The Last Detail", "Coming Home", "Bound For Glory" and "Being There" are all Ashby films, all made within a period of about seven years when he was at his creative peak, and a time when a director with a reputation for reckless independence could still make films more or less on his own terms within the system. The era didn't last, and Ashby's work fell off in the decade that followed, but for a few years there, he was as good as anybody around, and his movies prove it. Ashby died at 59 in 1988.

The Face Behind the Mask (1941)

THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Florey
    Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe,
    George E. Stone, John Tyrell, James Seay
Peter Lorre plays a Hungarian immigrant who has some terrible luck and ends up running a criminal gang. An efficiently paced thriller and a textbook example of a really good B movie. Lorre gives one of his best performances. 

West Side Stories (1972)

WEST SIDE STORIES  (1972)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tristram Powell
    Jonathan Miller, Patti Smith
A ground-level  portrait of New York City, with your tour guides, British theater director Jonathan Miller and punk poet Patti Smith. Miller, who's 12 years older than Smith, first came to New York with "Beyond the Fringe" in 1961. He comes back when his work requires it, but he's an outsider who still finds the city intimidating. It's definitely not his home. Smith turned up a few years later, a scrawny kid from South Jersey, and unlike Miller, moved in. She looks like a thrift-store rag doll, at home on the streets and alive to the city's rough energy. So you've got these two creative artists with two sets of eyes and two distinct appraisals of a place where they've both done time. It's not clear from this whether Smith and Miller ever met. They appear in alternating segments, but never together. It'd be fun to see them talking over coffee somewhere, comparing notes. Call it an opportunity missed. Produced for the BBC.

Jonathan Miller

(1934-2019)

Dead Pigs (2018)

DEAD PIGS  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Cathy Yan
    Vivian Wu, Haoyu Yang, Meng Li,
    Mason Lee, David Rysdahl
Maybe this is what life is like in 21st-century China, at least for those who end up fighting to survive and stay human in a mercenary, rat-race economy. The characters include a pig farmer who's lost all his money in a crooked investment scheme, his sister, a beautician who refuses to sell their family home to a developer, the development company's young American architect, the pig farmer's son, the developer's daughter, a flock of pigeons and a lot of dead pigs. Nobody seems very happy here, though an absurd musical production number at the end allows them to briefly act that way. The pigeons come out of it all right, I guess. At least they've got a chance to. Not so much the pigs.

Nursery Favorites (1913)

NURSERY FAVORITES  (1913)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Allen Ramsey
    Edna Flugrath, Robert Lett, 
    Shirley Mason, Robert Milasch
Before a stationary camera, a troupe of elaborately costumed actors deliver lines from nursery rhymes, impersonating the characters. It's primitive in every way, but as one of the few surviving Edison Kinetophone films, it has some historical value. Kinetophone was a very early sound system that turned out not to be very practical, requiring an oversized phonograph cylinder synched with a 35mm projector by means of a linen cord soaked in castor oil. Production using the process lasted about a year and ended when a fire destroyed most of Edison's filmmaking facility in 1914.

The Movie Buzzard thanks The Sprocket Society for the technical information in this review.

I Think We're Alone Now (2018)

I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Reed Morano
    Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, 
    Charlotte Gainsbourg, Paul Giamatti
As this movie begins, the apocalypse has happened, and the last man on earth (he thinks) is a small-town librarian named Del, played by Peter Dinklage. Del's an orderly, self-sufficient guy who doesn't mind the lack of company, and, in fact, prefers it. He collects and hoards batteries, goes fishing in the lake, maintains the library, and methodically goes through the houses street by street, cleaning, disinfecting, hauling away the bodies and burying them. He catalogues photographs. He keeps things neat. It turns out he's not alone, however, and a lot of the film involves Del adjusting to the presence of a second survivor, a young woman named Grace, played by Elle Fanning, and Grace adjusting to him. The movie doesn't try to explain how the end of the world happened. The two characters puzzle over it briefly, but not for very long. It's more like, here's the situation these people are in, so now what? It's a good question, and the movie, in its dark, quiet way, keeps you wanting to find out. 

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

JOJO RABBIT  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Taika Waititi
    Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, 
    Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi,
    Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Archie Yates
This is a movie I almost didn't see, because I didn't see how anybody could possibly pull it off: a coming-of-age fantasy/war movie/Holocaust drama in which Adolf Hitler provides comic relief. It's set in Germany late in the war, and the protagonist is a ten-year-old boy named Johann (or Jojo), whose career in the Hitler Youth comes to a quick end when he refuses to kill a rabbit and then almost blows himself up with a hand grenade. His mother (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a Jewish girl behind an upstairs wall in their house, his best friend Yorki (another ten-year-old) ends up in the army, and Jojo, with help from his imaginary pal Adolf, tries to remain loyal and steadfast as it becomes increasingly clear that the war is going to be lost. Another complication: He's falling in love with the Jewish girl. It starts out as a slapstick black comedy, but there's a lot more going on than laughs at the expense of the Führer. At a time when right-wing nationalist movements are slithering out of the muck everywhere, it's not a bad thing to be reminded, even in the context of a dystopian fairy tale, what can happen when the fascists take control. And with Hitler himself representing the dark side, it's no accident that the girl in the attic, played by Thomasin McKenzie, bears a passing resemblance to Anne Frank.

S*P*Y*S (1974)

S*P*Y*S  (1974)  ¢ ¢
    D: Irvin Kershner 
    Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Zouzou, Joss Ackland,
    Vladek Sheybal, Nigel Hawthorne, Jacques Marin
Gould and Sutherland play bumbling spies in a frantic but feeble espionage comedy. This was promoted as a throwback (or followup) to "M*A*S*H", complete with asterisks between the capital letters in the title. That might've made marketing sense, but when it comes to making a movie, asterisks aren't enough. The final shot, made in fading light on the last day of filming, has the boys improvising a little song-and-dance routine as they head on down the road. It's nice to see them having such a good time, but by then you kind of wonder if they're not just making their escape, as happy as you are that the movie's finally over.

Double Lover (2017)

DOUBLE LOVER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Francois Ozon, 
    Marine Vacth, Jérémie Renier, Jacqueline Bisset
A creepy psychological thriller about a woman who gets involved with her psychiatrist, and then with the psychiatrist's twin brother. The second brother's a shrink, too, and one of these guys, at least, could use a refresher course in professional ethics and lessons learned from the #MeToo movement. It's plenty disturbing, though, with references to Hitchcock, De Palma and Cronenberg, and at least a touch of "Fifty Shades of Grey". Multiple images abound in this. That's kind of the point.

Comanche Station (1960)

COMANCHE STATION  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Budd Boetticher
    Randolph Scott, Nancy Gates, Claude Akins,
    Skip Homeier, Richard Rust, Dyke Johnson
Randolph Scott plays a retired cavalry officer who rescues a white woman from a band of renegade Comanches and then has to deal with three outlaws who decide to tag along on the long ride back into town. A good, spare western, the last collaboration between Boetticher and Scott, and Scott's next-to-last movie. Claude Akins plays the outlaw leader, a role Lee Marvin or Richard Boone might've played in previous Scott/Boetticher films.

Screen Test / Take 12

Name the movies in which the following things take place:

 1. Hal Holbrook tells Robert Redford to follow the money.
 2. Jean Seberg hawks the New York Herald Tribune.
 3. Uma Thurman and John Travolta do the twist. 
 4. Sterling Hayden starts World War III.
 5. Clint Eastwood throws his badge into San Francisco Bay. 
 6. Paul Newman and Katharine Ross go for a bicycle ride. 
 7. Charlie Chaplin eats a boot.
 8. Jimmy Cagney shoves a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face. 
 9. Steve Buscemi buries the money in the snow.
10. The Marx Brothers go to war.

                  Answers:
                  a. "The Public Enemy"   

                  b. "The Gold Rush"  

                  c. "Dr. Strangelove"   

                  d. "Pulp Fiction"   

                  e. "Duck Soup"   

                  f. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"  

                  g. "Fargo"   

                  h. "Breathless"  

                   i. "Dirty Harry"   

                   j. "All the President's Me"

       Answers:

       1-j / 2-h / 3-d / 4-c / 5-i / 6-f / 7-b / 8-a / 9-g / 10-e

Leave No Trace (2018)

LEAVE NO TRACE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Debra Granik
    Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie, Dana Millican,
    Jeffery Rifflard, Jeff Kober, Michael Prosser
Somewhere outside Portland, Oregon, two people, a traumatized Army vet and his teenaged daughter, are living in a forest, off the grid. They drink rain water, forage for food, sleep in a tent and hoard their dwindling supply of propane. Their life is far from idyllic, but it works for them. Eventually they're busted and come under the protection of social services, and that's when things start to change. Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie play the two people, and one of the more striking features of Debra Granik's script is how little they say to each other. It's almost as if they can read each other's thoughts. Granik, who made "Winter's Bone", has an obvious affinity for resilient young women in hardscrabble environments, and McKenzie is every bit as compelling as Jennifer Lawrence was in the previous film. Foster has never been better, playing a decent guy who's damaged in a way he knows he can never fix or escape. His love for his daughter is transparent, unequivocal and agonizing. You feel for these people. You want them to be together and safe. At the same time, you  can sense, as they do, that their situation can't last. "I don't have the same problem you have," she says at the end, and they both know it's true. In an imperfect world, you do the best you can. You pick each other up. You help each other out. But everybody, sooner or later, has to let go. 

Black Sunday (1960)

BLACK SUNDAY  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mario Bava
    Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi,
    Ivo Garrani, Arturo Dominici, Germana Dominici
200 years after her execution, a witch comes back to life, plotting with a warlock to take over the body of another young woman who looks just like her. The first feature directed by Italian horror master Mario Bava, based on a story by Nicolai Gogol and shot in gloomy, high-contrast black and white. Barbara Steele plays both the witch and her doppelgänger, and she's as seductive as she is eerie. Maybe all witches should be played by Barbara Steele.

The Mummy's Shroud (1967)

THE MUMMY'S SHROUD  (1967)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Gilling
    André Morell, John Phillips, Elizabeth Sellers,
    David Buck, Maggie Kimberly, Michael Ripper
Another team of archeologists break into another ancient Egyptian tomb and revive another murderous mummy. They never learn, do they?

The Blob (1958)

THE BLOB  (1958)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.
    Steve McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rove,
    John Benson, Stephen Chase, Olin Howland
A killer blob from outer space crashes to earth outside a small American town and young Steve McQueen tries to alert the local citizens, but what grownup is going to listen to a hot-rodding teenager? This was McQueen's first lead role, and while he's obviously way beyond high-school age, it's not hard to see the charisma and instinct for understatement that would make him a star. The film itself is better than you might think. Burt Bacharach wrote the goofy title tune. 

Chappaquiddick (2017)

CHAPPAQUIDDICK  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: John Curran
    Jason Clarke, Ed Helms, Jim Gaffigan,
    Kate Mara, Bruce Dern, John Fiore,
    Victor Warren, Taylor Nichols, Clancy Brown
Any chance Ted Kennedy had to become president effectively ended one night in the summer of 1969, when he drove a car off a bridge on Cape Cod, killing his passenger, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy crawled out of the river in a state of befuddled shock, and the operatives went to work to try to create and sell a cover story that wouldn't just salvage the senator's career, but keep him out of jail. It was a tabloid story from the start, and this is a tabloid dramatization of it. Kennedy comes off looking terrible - his behavior was beyond inexcusable - but that's not exactly news, and Jason Clarke does nothing to make you believe he's anything more than an actor trying to play Kennedy. It's a movie with few highlights, but one of them is Bruce Dern, who steals a couple of minutes as old Joe Kennedy, the dying patriarch. Confined to a wheelchair after a stroke, he's still a force his errant son must try to accommodate, and his contempt for Ted's pathetic response to the tragedy is obvious. Hell, if he was your old man, he'd scare you, too.

Lyrical Nitrate (1991)

LYRICAL NITRATE  (1991)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Delpeut
A found-f00tage compilation made up of clips from nitrate reels that sat for years in the attic of a cinema in Amsterdam. Some tell little stories. Some are just sequences of related shots. Most are from the second decade of the 20th century. The editing is masterful. The state of preservation, under the circumstances, is miraculous. 

The Last Suit (2017)

THE LAST SUIT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Pablo Solarz
    Miguel Ángel Solá, Ángela Molina, Martin Piroyansky,
    Natalia Verbeke, Olga Boladz, Jan Mayzel 
A very old man leaves Argentina on what will almost certainly be his last trip ever, to Poland, to look for an old friend, the one who saved his life after his escape from a concentration camp in 1945. This has been compared to David Lynch's "The Straight Story", and you can see the parallels. It's a quixotic, episodic journey with a protagonist whose willful stubbornness can make him a pain in the neck to deal with and at the same time accounts for his remarkable survival. Now, if he could just find a way to go from Paris to Warsaw by train without going through Germany.

Marat/Sade (1967)

MARAT/SADE  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Brook
    Patrick Magee, Ian Richardson, Glenda Jackson,
    Freddie Jones, Clifford Rose, Hugh Sullivan
Full title: "The Assassination and Persecution of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade". A movie released in 1967, based on a Royal Shakespeare Company production first staged in 1965, about a play being performed in 1808, looking back to the events of 1789. It's flamboyantly theatrical, a raucous celebration of anarchy in which arguments about war and peace, religion and revolution, tyranny and freedom, censorship, madness, income inequality and everything else are articulated, debunked, skewered, shat on and blown to smithereens. Ian Richardson as Marat looks exactly  like that famous painting of Marat's death in 1793, while Patrick Magee looks and acts like Marlon Brando in "Superman" (and this was ten years before Brando did "Superman".) The ending is total bedlam, which under the circumstances makes perfect sense.

An American Haunting (2005)

AN AMERICAN HAUNTING  (2005)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Courtney Solomon
    Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, James D'Arcy,
    Rachel Hurd-Wood, Thom Fell, Matthew Marsh
A spirit invades the home of a colonial family following a land dispute with a vengeful neighbor. Is it witchcraft? The devil? A ghost? Or the troubled dreams of a hysterical 12-year-old girl? This has beautiful Romanian locations and effective, eye-catching cinematography, but the story doesn't quite add up. The suspected source of the horror for much of the movie turns out to be a red herring, and the resolution that follows doesn't connect entirely with what's come before. It's unsettling at times, but there's no real compelling or pervasive sense of dread. Spacek and Sutherland give it some class.

Laughter In Paradise (1951)

LAUGHTER IN PARADISE  (1951)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mario Zampi
    Alistair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, Hugh Griffith,
    Fay Compton, John Laurie, Ernest Thesiger
An eccentric old man expires while playing what should be his final practical joke, but it's not. The ultimate trick up his sleeve is his will, in which he bequeaths £50,000 to four different relatives, on the condition that they each perform an assigned task. One, a timid bank clerk, must rob his place of employment. Another, the pseudonymous author of vulgar pulp mysteries, has to get himself arrested and serve a 28-day jail sentence. An imperious, condescending woman is required to find employment as a domestic servant and stay on the job for a month without quitting or being fired. And a carefree rake must persuade the first woman he talks to after the will is read to marry him. It's one of those smart, batty comedies that the Brits seem to do better than anybody, worth watching just for the way Alistair Sim cringes when one of his schemes goes awry. And keep an eye on the cigarette girl. She's Audrey Hepburn.

Flawless (2007)

FLAWLESS  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Radford
    Michael Caine, Demi Moore, Lambert Wilson
    Joss Ackland, Nathaniel Parker, Nicholas Jones
A janitor facing retirement and a career woman who can't break through the glass ceiling join forces in a diamond heist. A decently executed caper, worth catching if you haven't watched a movie about a diamond heist in a while. The relationship between Caine and Moore is functional, not romantic - there's the difference in their ages, for one thing - and except for Caine's customary droll performance, there's not much in the way of humor. The moral issues are what make it interesting, with both characters, for different reasons, seeking revenge, and seeing the diamonds as a means to an end. Another thing. As in politics sometimes, it's not the crime, it's the coverup that can get you into real trouble. 

The McKenzie Break (1970)

THE MCKENZIE BREAK  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lamont Johnson
    Brian Keith, Helmut Griem, Ian Hendry,
    Jack Watson, Patrick O'Connell, Horst Janson
A World War Two prison-camp movie with a twist: The camp is in Scotland, the prisoners are German, and an Irish intelligence officer (Brian Keith) has been assigned to find out whatever he can about an expected escape attempt. It's like "The Great Escape" flipped inside out, a good, well-paced thriller and an evenly matched cat-and-mouse game between Keith's Captain Connor and the captured U-boat captain played by Helmut Griem. Keith's performance, accent and all, is as sardonic as it is commanding. 

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
    Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Zoe Kazan,
    Tom Waits, Liam Neeson, Harry Melling,
    Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek, Tyne Daly,
    Bill Heck, Jonjo O'Neill, Chelsie Ross
Singing cowboys. Indian war parties. Gunfights. Wagon trains. Hangings. An old prospector panning for gold. A bank robber with real bad luck. A quadruple amputee reciting the Gettysburg Address. A cantina. A barking dog. A stagecoach. Aces and eights. A western by the Coen Brothers, as morbid, offbeat and crazy as you'd expect a Coen Brothers western to be. A collection of cynical, whimsical jokes in a comedy of increasing blackness, each with death as the punchline. 

Quote File / Take 15

"Good night, you princes of Maine, you kings of 
  New England."
  Michael Caine
  in "The Cider House Rules"

"Czechoslovakia!? Czechoslovakia!? It's like going 
  into Wisconsin!"
  Bill Murray
  in "Stripes"

"I love Kansas. I just don't want to live there."
  Gene Tierney
  in "Heaven Can wait"

"There is absolutely nothing I want to do in 
  Indiana."
  Johnny Depp
  in "Public Enemies"

"I don't know where the hell we are, but it sure ain't 
  Oklahoma."
  Paul Newman
  in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

"Could we go back to Texas now?"
  Joel Edgerton
  in "Midnight Special"

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)

THE MASK OF FU MANCHU  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Charles Brabin 
    Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, Karen Morley,
    Myrna Loy, Charles Starrett, Jean Hersholt
A team of British archeologists travel to Mongolia to retrieve the sword and mask of Genghis Khan before an evil Chinese warlord can use them to take over the world. The inherent racism in this has less to do with Boris Karloff playing an Asian than with the racist nature of the script. It's one of Karloff's most frightening portrayals, and the only horror movie I saw as a kid that came close to creeping me out. Myrna Loy, in the last of her early oriental roles, plays Karloff's "ugly and insignificant" daughter. 

Amateurs (2018)

AMATEURS  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Gabriela Pichler
    Zahra Aldoujaili, Yara Aliadotter, Fredrik Dahl,
    Shada Ismaeel, Maria Nohra, Susanne Hedman
When the somewhat rundown Swedish city of Lafors finds itself in the running for a big new German superstore, the town's civic leaders decide that what's needed is a promotional video showcasing all the benefits of building there. When they decide to make it a competition open to students at the local high school, two immigrant girls take up the challenge, using a cellphone camera and a selfie stick to show the town they really see. What they come up with is as silly, loose and ragged as you might expect, revealing aspects of the community not everybody wants the world to look at. "Amateurs" has a brash, shot-on-the-fly quality, too, the two films - the one the girls are making and the one that frames it - effectively reflecting each other. If some of the performances seem amateurish, it's because they're supposed to, and the actresses playing the young protagonists - one heavyset and the other distinctly androgynous - capture their giddy, dreamy, go-for-broke energy in a way that's completely convincing. 

The Last Run (1971)

THE LAST RUN  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Richard Fleischer
    George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere,
    Tony Musante, Colleen Dewhurst
The first thing you see in this movie is George C. Scott in a garage somewhere, tinkering with the engine of a souped-up convertible. The next thing you see, he's out on one of those winding, blind-corner highways that follow the seacoast in Portugal and Spain. He's taking it up to speeds that can accurately be described as insane, and at first you think he's out to kill himself. Then you realize that, no, he's practicing. Scott's character, Harry Garmes, is a retired getaway driver, living comfortably but getting bored in Albufeira, when he decides to go out on another job to see if he still has what it takes. The job involves driving an escaped convict and his girlfriend over the border from Spain into France. The convict is played by Tony Musante, who deserves a spot next to Andy Robinson in the screen psycho hall of fame. The girl is played by Trish Van Devere, who would eventually become Scott's wife. Interestingly, Colleen Dewhurst, Scott's wife at the time of the shoot, is in the movie, too. It's a good, literate action thriller, with European locations that let you know why movies get made there. Fleischer replaced the original director, John Huston, who, among other things, was not especially fond of George C. Scott. 

Annihilation (2018)

ANNIHILATION  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alex Garland
    Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac,
    Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, Tessa Thompson,
    Sonoya Mizuno, David Gyasi, Benedict Wong
On the surface, at least, "Annihilation" is a little like "The Descent", a 2005 movie in which a handful of adventurous women head down into an unexplored cave and meet all kinds of horror. In this movie, a handful of adventurous women head into something called "the shimmer," a mysterious, expanding entity that has taken over a national park and makes hideous stuff happen to anybody who goes in there. One of the women, played by Natalie Portman, is a biological researcher whose specialty is studying cancer cells. By testing her own blood using a microscope she carries in her backpack, Natalie discovers that the shimmer, whatever it is, can duplicate itself the same way the cells do. What's more, it can approproate the DNA of anything it comes in contact with, and that would include the women. There are monsters in the shimmer, too, an alligator that's bigger than anything anybody's ever seen, and another creature that at first appears to be a bear, but turns out to be more like a bear-sized rat. So you've got "The Descent", in which an all-female cast finds something awful in a cave, and "Annihilation", where a key plot point involves reproduction and the climactic goal is a lighthouse. Dr. Freud might have something to say about that. 

Wisconsin Death Trip (1999)

WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: James Marsh
    Jeff Golden, Jo Vukelich, Marcus Monroe,
    Marilyn White, John Schneider, John Baltes
A one-of-a kind documentary about murder, arson, suicide, madness, bad news, hard times, guns, graveyards and broken glass. The setting is Black River Falls, Wisconsin, between 1890 and 1900, and the film's slant on local history is not one you'd expect the chamber of commerce to go out of its way to promote. The stories are lifted directly from contemporary newspaper accounts, the black-and-white recreations look every bit as authentic as the period photographs, and the overall effect is mournful and creepy. Wisconsin in the late 19th century wasn't necessarily much weirder than any other place on earth, but a movie like this could make you wonder about that. If the subject matter is inescapably morbid, it's also an inescapable part of the human condition. Take a look.

The Leisure Seeker (2017)

THE LEISURE SEEKER  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Paolo Virzi
    Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland, Christian McKay,
    Janet Moloney, Dana Ivey, Dick Gregory
This plays like a variation on the 1981 Henry Fonda/Katharine Hepburn movie "On Golden Pond", with Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren in the Fonda and Hepburn roles. It's about an older couple named John and Ella Spencer, who decide to take off on one last road trip in their vintage Winnebago, before his dementia and her cancer make that impossible. They don't have any time to lose. It's a leisurely ride most of the way, and Mirren and Sutherland play off each other the way two people might after being married for 5o or 60 years. While she chatters away to anybody who will reluctantly listen, he drifts in and out, alert and attentive one moment, lost and confused the next. It's a beautifully acted duet, reminiscent of the work Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay did together in "45 Years". John and Ella both know what they're up against, and they know that life for either of them without the other is no longer an option. It's their last ride together in more ways than one. The late Dick Gregory does a cantankerous cameo as an old flame of Mirren's. 

Frankenstein Island (1981)

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND  (1981)  ¢
    D: Jerry Warren
    Robert Clarke, Steve Brodie, Cameron Mitchell,
    Robert Christopher, John Carradine, Andrew Duggan,
    Katherine Victor, George Mitchell, Dana Norbeck
Four balloonists wash up on a remote island whose inhabitants include two idiot sailors, a zombie security force, some alien women in animal-skin bikinis, and a disembodied John Carradine. (The Frankenstein Monster makes a lumbering appearance toward the end, but he's an afterthought.) Numbingly stupid, thrift-shop horror, in which the balloonists, faced with a choice between going off with the idiot sailors or hanging around with the alien women, decide to go with the idiots. After a bonehead move like that, they deserve whatever happens to them, including being stuck in this movie. 

The Death of Stalin (2017)

THE DEATH OF STALIN  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Armando Iannucci
    Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor,
    Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko, Adrian McLoughlin,
    Paddy Considine, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi
A dark, crazy, fascist farce about what happens in the upper echelons of the Kremlin when Josef Stalin has a massive stroke and all the minions who have climbed through the ranks (and stayed alive) by toadying up to the old man start maneuvering to see who will succeed him. Anybody who was tracking the news during the 1950s will recognize the names: Molotov, Bulganin, Mikoyan and others. Stalin's immediate replacement, Georgy Malenkov, is a ditherer, and the battle for the top job becomes a duel between the much-feared security chief Lavrenti Beria and the jocular Moscow Party leader Nikita Khrushchev. Beria (Simon Russell Beale) has the edge starting out. He's cagey, ruthless, ambitious, and as Stalin's enforcer, he knows where the bodies are buried. He should. He buried them. Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) comes off as a sort of buffoon, which masks a fine-tuned sense of the ever-shifting game and a shrewd, calculating instinct for survival. An exchange at the end between Khrushchev and Stalin's daughter Svetlana is pivotal. Throughout the film Khrushchev has deferred to Svetlana, accommodating her whims and wishes any way he can. Now, after engineering the execution of his main rival, he tells her the way things are going to be, and you realize that a shift has occurred, and so does she. The Politburo's class clown has effectively seized control. It's all played for laughs, but the reality behind the comedy wasn't all that funny. Beria, especially, was a monster, and real Russians were tortured, gunned down and shipped off to the gulag, not just under Stalin, but later, too. Sometimes you just have to laugh, I guess. But you feel a little uneasy, just the same. 

Steamboat Willie (1928)

STEAMBOAT WILLIE  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney
Disney's become such a vast spinoff empire over the last 90 years, that it's easy to forget that what it all spun off from is this early sound cartoon featuring the first screen appearance of Mickey Mouse. Watch it with "Fantasia" (1940) for a sense of how radically movie animation would evolve in the decade that followed. 

Come Take a Trip In My Airship (1930)

COME TAKE A TRIP IN MY AIRSHIP  (1930)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dave Fleischer
A remake of the Fleischer brothers' 1924 cartoon and apparently the movie that introduced the follow-the-bouncing-ball audience sing-along device. It's not a hard tune to sing along to, if you feel like doing that. 

Come Take a Trip In My Airship (1924)

COME TAKE A TRIP IN MY AIRSHIP  (1924)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dave Fleischer
Four years before Disney's "Steamboat Willie", Dave and Max Fleischer produced this sound cartoon in which various animated animals get into a spaceship and sail off to the moon. The song, with music by George Evans and lyrics by Ben Shields, dates to 1904.

Certified Copy (2010)

CERTIFIED COPY  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Abbas Kiarostami
    Juliette Binoche, William Shimell, Jean-Claude Carrière,
    Agatha Natanson, Gianna Giachetti, Adrian Moore
A middle-aged man and woman spend a Sunday walking around a small town in Tuscany, talking about life and art, and playing a mind game that blurs the lines between pretense and identity and becomes more intense and unsettling the longer it goes on. At first, they barely seem to know each other. Then they seem to slip into pretending they're married. Then they seem to be married, as if they were only pretending to be strangers in the first place. They're pretentious, anyway, and not real likeable, and you kind of get tired of them after a while, which is too bad, because Binoche and Simell are both very good playing them. The Tuscan scenery is beautiful, and the setup feels a little like of one of Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight" movies, only way more disturbed and dysfunctional.

The Defector (1966)

THE DEFECTOR  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Raoul Levy
    Montgomery Clift, Hardy Krüger, Macha Méril,
    David Opatoshu, Hannes Messemer, Roddy McDowall 
In his last movie, Montgomery Clift plays an American scientist who's recruited/blackmailed by the CIA to go behind the Iron Curtain and get some information from a Soviet colleague. It's decent Cold War cloak-and-dagger stuff, not great, but better than its reputation and the collective opinion of Clift's biographers would suggest. Clift was a wreck at that point. He hadn't worked in four years, and took the project to prove he could still act, while being considered for the lead in "Reflections In a Golden Eye". He holds it together, pretty much, but he seems distracted, not quite there. The film was shot on location, sometimes in the snow, and Clift insisted on doing his own stunts, even when that meant going in and out of a freezing river. It took a toll. He died before the movie's release, and Brando replaced him in "Reflections In a Golden Eye".

Bio Picks / Take 3

More memorable performances by actors 
playing people who actually lived:

                  Sean Penn as Harvey Milk 
                      in "Milk"

                  Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking 
                      in "The Theory of Everything"

                  Donald Sutherland as Paul Gauguin 
                      in "Wolf At the Door"

                  Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway 
                      in "Midnight In Paris"

                  Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck 
                      in "Shadow of the Vampire"

                  Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf 
                      in "La Vie en Rose"

                  Jeff Daniels as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain 
                      in "Gettysburg"

                  Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page 
                      in "The Notorious Bettie Page"

                  James Franco as Allen Ginsberg 
                      in "Howl"

                  David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow 
                      in "Good Night, and Good Luck"

A Ghost Story (2017)

A GHOST STORY  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Lowery
    Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, McColm Cephas Jr.,
    Kenneisha Thompson, Liz Cardenas Franke
Who would've thought the most inventive ghost story in ages would be the most low-tech, a movie with a ghost played by an actor wearing a sheet over his head? I couldn't tell you why that works. It shouldn't, but it does. Check it out sometime. You'll see.

Five Star Final (1931)

FIVE STAR FINAL  (1931)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Mervyn LeRoy
    Edward G. Robinson, Marian Marsh, H.B. Warner,
    Anthony Bushnell, Frances Starr, Boris Karloff,
    Aline McMahon, Ona Munson, Oscar Apfel
Robinson plays the tough-talking editor of a big-city scandal sheet whose publisher doesn't care what they print or whose lives get ruined, as long as circulation keeps going up. A hard-hitting newspaper drama and a scathing indictment of the tabloid press. Karloff has a supporting role as an unscrupulous reporter. Released the same year Karloff made "Frankenstein" and a year after Robinson's breakout performance in "Little Caesar".

Phantom Thread (2017)

PHANTOM THREAD  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Paul Thomas Anderson
    Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville
A waitress becomes the model, muse and mistress of the world's fussiest man, a fashion designer played with fastidious precision by Daniel Day-Lewis. It's a comedy of manners (I think), and there are a few amusing moments, but not enough of them. Like Day-Lewis's performance, it's a movie that feels calibrated to within an inch of its life, and while it's easy to admire the craftsmanship involved, I found myself in the last 20 or 30 minutes picking out spots where I thought it could end, and wishing it would. I also found myself thinking that Day-Lewis in this film looks like a guy who could be Arnold Schwarzenegger's skinny kid brother. Except that Arnold would be looser and funnier. And he'd break a few heads.

The Great Silence (1968)

THE GREAT SILENCE  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sergio Corbucci
    Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Frank Wolff,
    Vonetta McGee, Luigi Pastilli, Mario Brega
Most spaghetti westerns don't look like this: all cold and snowbound, with characters wrapped head to foot in long fur coats. The story takes place in the winter in Utah, which looks a lot different from the usual spaghetti West. (It was shot in the Dolomite Alps.) There's a mysterious stranger who never speaks and has a peculiar habit of shooting the thumbs off people he really doesn't like. He's played by French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who's not the first name that comes to mind when your thinking of a spaghetti western. Then there's a bounty hunter who's paid to bring his suspects in dead or alive, so he brings them in dead because it's easier. He's played by Klaus Kinski, who looks like he has a screw loose somewhere, and apparently did. There's a ragged gang of bandits living up in the mountains, and a sheriff who's as talkative as the stranger is silent, and a town whose only inhabitants appear to be whores and more bounty hunters, plus one corrupt public official who acts as the community's banker, mayor and judge. Most of these people will catch a bullet eventually, but not necessarily the people you think. Tarantino must've watched this a few times while he was dreaming up "The Hateful Eight". The ending's subversive, even by spaghetti western standards. See for yourself.

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Luca Guadagnino
    Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Amira Cassar,
    Michael Stuhlbarg, Esther Garrel, Victoire du Bois
A gay romantic fantasy about a 17-year-old named Elio who finds himself becoming attracted to and then involved with a man who's a few years older. It takes place in the summer in northern Italy, so the backdrop is beautiful, and Hammer and Chalamet make an attractive pair of lovers, and I guess if this is your idea of a dream romance, go for it. I couldn't quite buy it, though. The characters, even when they're confused and hurt, are invariably eloquent and articulate, in a way that wouldn't occur in real life, but can in a carefully scripted movie. And while you might wish every gay kid had such accommodating parents, you wonder why Elio's folks aren't a little more concerned about what's clearly going on between their underaged son and this smooth-talking older guy. (He might not be that much older, but it's enough to make a difference.) And there's this heart-to-heart talk between Elio and his dad toward the end, where the father reveals something that's no secret at all if you've been watching the movie. I also kept wondering how the dynamic might change if you were to monkey with the genders involved. Like, what if this arrogant but dashing guy was getting it on with your 17-year-old daughter instead of your son? Or what if the 17-year-old kid was a boy, but the older character was a woman? Or what if they were both women? The vibe would be different. Would anything else? Huh. I don't know.