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.