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.

Race With the Devil (1975)

RACE WITH THE DEVIL  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Jack Starrett
    Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit,
    Lara Parker, R.G. Armstrong, Clay Tanner
Fonda and Oates play a couple of middle-class guys who take off on a road trip with their wives in a shiny, new motor home. The first night out, they're parked in the middle of nowhere getting pleasantly drunk, when they witness what appears to be a ritual murder. After that, they're on the run across a backroads landscape where everybody they meet, including the cops, could be out to kill them, and every sedan, school bus and pickup truck appears to be part of a plot to drive them off the road. A relentlessly creepy, low-budget study in paranoia, and nobody could play paranoia like Warren Oates. "Duel" meets "Rosemary's Baby" in this. Good car-wreck stunt work.

Peter Fonda

(1940-2019)

Down From the Mountain (2001)

DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN  (2001)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus, D.A.Pennebaker
In May of 2000, the musicians who performed on the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" got together for a benefit concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. This film chronicles that event. It's a great showcase for a bunch of alternative and old-time country performers, the folks you won't hear on most country radio stations, and an aching final glimpse of goofball songwriter, riverboat pilot and fiddle guru John Hartford. Face trembling, wasted by cancer and chemotherapy, tangled gray hair sticking out from beneath a beat-up bowler hat, Hartford steals the movie and the show, a joking apparition, a ghost. Every underappreciated artist should be accorded such an elegant final bow. 

D.A. Pennebaker

(1925-2019)

Eye of the Devil (1967)

EYE OF THE DEVIL  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: J. Lee Thompson
    David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Donald Pleasance,
    Sharon Tate, David Hemmings, Edward Mulhare,
    Flora Robson, Emlyn Williams, John Le Mesurer
David Niven plays the dashing but troubled Count de Montfaucon, who receives an urgent message during a posh gathering and takes off the next day for his ancestral estate. (His holdings seem to cover about half of Europe, and the castle alone is the size of France.) He tells his wife (Deborah Kerr) that that vineyards need his attention, but the strange, glazed look in his eyes is enough to tell you this is not just about grapes. Erwin Hiller's black-and-white cinematography, J.Lee Thompson's direction and the quiet spookiness of Donald Pleasance, David Hemmings and Sharon Tate are enough to keep you on edge for the first 30 or 40 minutes. The suspense levels off a little, the more you know (or think you know) about what's going on. The first significant role in Tate's brief career. 

Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD  (2019)
    D: Quentin Tarantino                                 ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie,
    Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant,
    Dakota Fanning, Austin Butler, Bruce Dern,
    Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino,
    Kurt Russell, Michael Madsen, Zoë Bell,
    Mike Moh, Lena Dunham, Clu Gulager,
    Brenda Vaccaro, Rumer Willis, Harley Quinn Smith
"Once Upon a Time In Hollywood" is like Quentin Tarantino's "Sunset Blvd.": a lovingly twisted look back at La La Land in 1969, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up actor and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, who by chance find themselves in a dustup with the Manson family. It's a rambling, episodic movie, and a long one, but it's never dull, loaded with period cultural references, tangents and side trips that take off in whatever direction the director wants to go. You get a real sense it's a movie Tarantino had to make, and it's not a movie that could've been made by anybody else. Leo's part is the more demanding one: a TV star whose marquee value has started to slip, and whose outsized ego is matched only by his insecurity. It's the case of an actor who can really act playing an actor trying to prove he can really act, and his two long scenes with child actress Julia Butters are especially good. Pitt, meanwhile, glides through it with the sort of easy self-assurance that reminds you why some people are movie stars. He commands the screen without even breaking a sweat. You know where it's heading, from the way Sharon Tate and the Manson girls keep turning up, and you know it's going to be bad when it gets there, but then Quentin flips history, the way he did in "Inglorious Basterds", with the kind of revisionist climax that only he can seem to get away with. A make-believe movie set in the land of make-believe, with moments of grotesque violence and a title that begins "Once Upon a Time . . . ": That's gotta be a fairy tale, right?

Resurrection (1980)

RESURRECTION  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Daniel Petrie
    Ellen Burstyn, Sam Shepard, Richard Farnsworth,
    Roberts Blossom, Eva Le Gallienne, Lois Smith
Ellen Burstyn plays a woman named Edna who comes back from a near-death experience and finds that she now has an unexplained power to heal. She's willing to chalk it up to love, but the local guardians of righteousness exhort her to embrace the Lord, and when she won't do that, they get righteously miffed. For some people, miracles aren't enough. An impossibly young Sam Shepard plays a guy Edna heals and then gets involved with, and Richard Farnsworth does a nice bit as a philosophical old coot who runs a gas station and shows her his two-headed snake. It costs her a dime, but it's worth it. A two-headed snake in a movie like this - that must symbolize something. I'm just not sure what.

The Great Buster (2018)

THE GREAT BUSTER  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich does an interesting thing structurally in this documentary about Buster Keaton. After tracking Keaton's life from his childhood in vaudeville through his apprenticeship with Fatty Arbuckle and the classic two-reelers he made in the early 1920s, Bogdanovich skips ahead to 1928 and Keaton's ill-fated decision to sign with MGM. In just three or four years there, Keaton's career collapsed, and from then on he took work where he could find it, in supporting roles, writing gags for other comics, low-budget shorts, and eventually television commercials. Keaton died in 1966, a year after his triumphant reception at the Venice Film Festival, at which point Bogdanovich slips back to the five or six years in the 1920s when he did his most famous work. Which ends the movie not just on a high note, but ten of them: "Sherlock Jr.", 'The Navigator", "The General" and all the rest. The clips are wonderful, and Bogdanovich leaves you wanting much more. What makes Keaton timeless is that his comedy transcends language, physical gags so brilliantly conceived and executed that they remain astonishing, and funny, not just a hundred years after he created them, but over and over again. There was nobody like Buster Keaton.

Performance (1970)

PERFORMANCE  (1970)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Donald Cammel, Nicolas Roeg
    James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg,
    Michele Breton, John Bindon, Stanley Meadows
A hippie-era period piece starring Mick Jagger as a reclusive musician and James Fox as a gangster looking for a place to hide out. Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton play the birds they dally with. Plenty of style, and the twist at the end is a puzzler, but what any of it's supposed to signify, or why you're supposed to care, is a little obscure. Maybe mushrooms would help.

Molly's Game (2017)

MOLLY'S GAME  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Aaron Sorkin
    Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner,
    Graham Greene, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong
When her dream of Olympic glory dies in a crash on the slopes, a skier named Molly Bloom finds she has a second skill that's just as exciting and maybe more dangerous: running a high-stakes poker game. Aaron Sorkin's scripts are always word feasts, and this movie contains plenty of talk. That's mostly what it is, and it's cast with actors who know what to do with all that language: Jessica Chastain as Molly, Idris Elba as her attorney, Kevin Costner as her demanding, psychotherapist father, and Graham Greene as the judge whose court she ends up in when the game catches up with her. Michael Cera turns up, too, as one of the players. He's an unlikely choice to play a movie star, but then, he's an unlikely movie star, and his character's so smug and annoying, you'd like to see somebody slug the guy. Nobody does, of course. They can't. His money's on the table, and he could be holding a full house. Or he could be bluffing. To find out, you're going to have to call. Are you in? Rules of the game.