Salting the Battlefield (2014)

SALTING THE BATTLEFIELD  (2014) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Hare
    Bill Nighy, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes,
    Judy Davis, Rupert Graves, Olivia Williams, 
    Felicity Jones, Ewen Bremner, Saskia Reeves
The last chapter in David Hare's espionage trilogy starts out with rogue agent Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) on the run and trying to leak enough information to the press to bring down the prime minister (Ralph Fiennes). Others with a hand in the outcome include Johnny's partner and fellow fugitive Margot Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter), the deputy prime minister (Saskia Reeves), a newspaper editor (Olivia Williams) and Johnny's old boss at MI5 (Judy Davis). The storytelling's complex and once again it's the writing and the performances that carry it. The ending's a sort of stalemate in which the positions of the players have shifted, but all remain somewhere in play. Nobody triumphs completely, but nobody loses everything, either. It's a dirty deal, but in this game there's no other kind, and they know that. John Le Carré would approve.

Turks & Caicos (2014)

TURKS & CAICOS  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Hare
    Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, Christopher Walken,
    Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves, Ralph Fiennes,
    Dylan Baker, James Naughton, Ewen Bremner
The middle episode in David Hare's spy trilogy, starring Bill Nighy as British agent Johnny Worricker. In this one, Johnny's lying low in the West Indies where he's approached by a CIA op played by Christopher Walken to help crack a syndicate of money-laundering, tax-dodging billionaires who've cornered a lucrative market in the war on terror, building black-hole detention centers outside the United States. The story's complex, with a literate script delivered by actors who know that when the writing's this good, you don't have to put too much spin on it. Under the circumstances, it can't be an accident that both Nighy and Helena Bonham Carter are reading books by Hemingway, or that the alias Johnny's using on the island is "Tom Eliot". 

Page Eight (2011)

PAGE EIGHT  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: David Hare
    Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon,
    Judy Davis, Felicity Jones, Saskia Reeves,
    Ralph Fiennes, Alice Krige, Marthe Keller
Spy-vs.-spy stuff, starring Bill Nighy as British intelligence analyst Johnny Worricker, who gets into a lot of trouble because a) he's good at his job, and b) he tells the truth. Not many guns get fired in this. There are no bang-up car chases. Nothing explodes. Just a bunch of spooks calculating, maneuvering, spinning what they know and trying to outsmart each other. Rachel Weisz plays Johnny's neighbor across the hall. Ralph Fiennes plays the prime minister. Judy Davis and Michael Gambon play a couple of Johnny's colleagues in the trade. For a movie made for television - well, okay, British television - that's a hell of a cast.

Wheels of Terror (1987)

WHEELS OF TERROR  (1987)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Gordon Hessler
    Bruce Davison, David Patrick Kelly, D.W. Moffett,
    Jay O. Sanders, David Carradine, Oliver Reed
A variation on "The Dirty Dozen", about a German Panzer unit made up entirely of convicted criminals. That, and the fact that they're a bunch of insolent goof-offs who don't necessarily worship the Führer, makes them disposable, and their commander (David Carradine) would like nothing better than to ship them to the Russian front, so that's where they end up. It's a loose, untidy B movie - part World-War-Two action piece, part Sgt. Rock comic book, and part "Animal House" in a tank - and assuming you've lowered your expectations enough going in, it's kind of fun. Carradine appears to be less than totally engaged - he was drinking a lot at the time - but he does get to strut around wearing a monocle. Oliver Reed - who drank a lot all the time - appears for a moment or two at the end. By then the movie's oddball crew has kind of grown on you, and in the context of the story they're in, the ending's a good one. Alternate title: "The Misfit Brigade". 

Never Look Away (2018)

NEVER LOOK AWAY  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
    Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer,
    Saskia Rosendahl, Oliver Masucci, Hanno Koffler
Thirty years of troubled German history reflected in the life of an artist, from the Nazi era to 1966. As a young boy, Kurt Barnert sees his beloved but troubled Aunt Elisabeth whisked away in an ambulance. She's been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and for the would-be engineers of a genetically perfect master race, that makes her disposable. The boy never sees her again. A few years later, he sees the Allied planes fly over on their way to bomb Dresden. He can see the city burning from his house. After the war, he studies art and finds work as a painter, making signs and then moving on to heroic depictions of proletarian solidarity, socialist realism being the only kind of art the rulers of the German Democratic Republic want to see. He meets a fellow student, a seamstress and textile artist who reminds him of Elisabeth - her name is also Elisabeth - and she makes him a suit and they fall in love and eventually marry. They escape to the West and he begins to explore the world of modern art - a taboo in the East - searching for a way to express what he can't articulate but feels compelled to say. Through all this, he's hounded and haunted by his wife's father, a respected gynecologist whose monstrous behavior over decades has horrifying consequences for both the aunt and the second Elisabeth. It's a long movie - over three hours - but doesn't feel like it. It drags only briefly in the middle, when Kurt's modernist colleagues at the academy in Dusseldorf trade philosophical abstractions about art. It's beautifully shot (by Caleb Deschanel) and scored (by Max Richter), and it's finally a movie about how art can sometimes transcend politics by expressing what can't be expressed any other way, and why sometimes we need it to.

Silverado (1985)

SILVERADO  (1985)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Lawrence Kasdan
    Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover,
    Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt,
    Jeff Goldblum, John Cleese, Rosanna Arquette, 
    Jeff Fahey, Joe Seneca, James Gammon,
    Amanda Wyss, Lynn Whitfield, Richard Jenkins
This movie does for westerns what "Raiders of the Lost Ark" did for the action/adventure serials of the '30s and '40s. It's a throwback, not to a time that was more innocent necessarily, but a time when our movies were. It's got just about everything you'd expect to find in a traditional western, except maybe Indians: good guys, bad guys, gunfights, shootouts, saloons and saloon girls, shady gamblers, crooked lawmen, a cattle stampede, pioneers in covered wagons, knives, whiskey, racism and a climactic showdown on a dusty street with the steeple of the town church looming in the background. It's a highly romanticized view of the West, and of western movies, in which the romantic subplots, between Kevin Kline and Linda Hunt, and Scott Glenn and Rosanna Arquette, are almost subliminal. It's got a great cast, most of whom, other than Kevin Costner, aren't known for their work on the frontier. And Costner, playing Glenn's high-spirited younger brother, gives the kind of loose, funny, free-wheeling performance that turns young actors into movie stars, which, in fact, it did. Lots of westerns are more original than this, and many are more profound, but few deliver the old-fashioned goods in a way that's more purely enjoyable.

Brian Dennehy

(1938-2020)

Scared To Death (1947)

SCARED TO DEATH  (1947)  ¢ ¢
    D: Christy Cabanne 
    Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, Nat Pendleton,
    Molly Lamont, Gladys Blake, Trey Wilson
A woman lying dead on an autopsy table recalls the events that led up to her murder in a low-budget comic thriller that's neither very thrilling nor very comical. Lugosi's only movie in color.

Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ruben Fleischer
    Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg,
    Abigail Breslin, Zooey Deutch, Rosario Dawson,
    Luke Wilson, Avan Jogia, Thomas Middleditch
Ten years after hitting the road together in the first "Zombieland" adventure, Wichita, Tallahassee, Columbus and Little Rock are back at it, chopping and hacking and blasting away at a new and improved generation of the undead. It'd be hard to think of a movie more disposable than this, but everybody involved seems to know that, and they dispose of it - along with a lot of zombies - in lighthearted, blood-splattering style. It's a guilty pleasure and not much more, but if the gang wants to meet up and knock out another one of these things, like, ten years from now, count me in.

Scandal Sheet (1985)

SCANDAL SHEET  (1985)  ¢ 1/2
    D: David Lowell Rich
    Pamela Reed, Burt Lancaster, Lauren Hutton,
    Robert Urich, Peter Jurasik, Trey Wilson
Tabloid junk starring Burt as the ruthless publisher of a supermarket rag and Pamela Reed as a financially desperate writer who goes to work for him. Lancaster's character could be the brother of J.J. Hunsecker - he could also be the devil - but this movie is a long way from "Sweet Smell of Success". It's pretty dreadful, actually. Made for TV.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and the Bigfoot (2018)

THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN 
THE BIGFOOT  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Robert D. Krzkowski
    Sam Elliott, Aidan Turner, Caitlin FitzGerald, 
    Larry Miller, Sean Bridgers, Ron Livingston
Some movies, if all you knew about them was the title, it'd be hard to even guess what they were about. "In the Fade", for example. Or "Quantum of Solace". That's not the case with this movie here. It really is about a man who kills Hitler and then Bigfoot. He's played by Sam Elliott, who makes it not just a cloak-and-dagger/monster movie, but an elegant reflection on aging. I'm not sure there's any sure-fire way to pull off a movie that takes on both Sasquatch and the Führer, but if you're going to give it a shot, here's the first thing you should do: Hire Sam Elliott.

What's In a Name?

Honor Blackman

(1925-2020)

Rest in peace, Pussy Galore.

Vanishing Point (1971)

VANISHING POINT  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Richard C. Sarafian
    Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, Dean Jagger,
    Victoria Medlin, Arthur Malet, Anthony James,
    Gilda Texter, Severn Darden, Timothy Scott
An existential car-chase movie stripped down to its bare essentials, about an auto-delivery driver named Kowalski (Barry Newman) who makes a bet that he can drive a souped-up Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in 36 hours. Bleary-eyed, cranked on speed and wanted by the highway patrol in three states, Kowalski roars west, while a blind soul D.J. (Cleavon Little) provides on-the-air radio updates and encouragement. The America depicted here is a wasteland whose scattered inhabitants - an unlikely melting pot of bikers, hippies, rednecks, Christian revivalists, black hipsters and gay holdup men - seem to be there not by choice, or because they belong there, but because they've got nowhere else to be. The same is true of Kowalski, who only really exists behind the wheel - "the last American hero," the D.J. calls him - tearing over some empty highway or off-road across the desert, a quarter-mile and a cloud of dust ahead of the cops. Decide for yourself if the climactic bulldozer roadblock is the real vanishing point, or if Kowalski has reached it long before the movie ends.

Transit (2018)

TRANSIT  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Christian Petzold
    Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese,
    Lilien Batman, Maryam Zaree, Barbara Auer
A man has to escape from France, where people without papers are being rounded up in a widespread campaign of "cleansing." The man gets to Marseilles, where he delivers a couple of letters as a favor for a friend and ends up assuming the identity of a dead writer, which brings him into contact with the writer's estranged wife, who doesn't know her husband is dead. He tries to tell her. She doesn't believe it. There's a boat sailing in a couple of weeks. It's their last chance to get out of France. This is, in all kinds of ways, a study in dislocation. It's based on a novel written during  World  War Two, but the movie takes place in the present day, and the man trying to escape is German. There are layers and layers to the story, to the point where the voiceover narration and what you see on the screen don't always match up, and at times contradict each other. It's like "Casablanca" meets "The Passenger" meets one of those Aki Kaurismaki movies like "Le Havre" or "The Other Side of Hope". There's not much in the way of comic relief, just a pervasive sense of being displaced, and trapped.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947)

THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Godfrey
    Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Tully Marshall,
    Nigel Bruce, Ann Carter, Anita Bolster
Bogart plays an artist who has a habit of killing his wives, once he's finished painting their portraits. Barbara Stanwyck plays wife #2, who learns that drinking milk can be bad for you. Good thing there's plenty of whiskey in the house, because the weather outside is nasty.