The 15:17 To Paris (2018)

 

THE 15:17 TO PARIS  (2018)  ¢ ¢

    D: Clint Eastwood

    Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, Alex Skarlatos,

    Ray Corasani, Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer

Clint Eastwood's leisurely topical thriller breaks down into three distinct parts. In the first act, three young boys who like to play war games and spend most of their time at school in the principal's office remain friends as they grow older, and two of them join the military. In act two, the boys, now in their 20s, meet up in Europe and see the sights. Act three finds them on a train bound for Paris from Amsterdam when a terrorist incident occurs and they become heroes. The movie is part propaganda piece, part travelogue, and (too briefly) part suspense drama. It's a recreation of actual events, and Eastwood took a risk by getting the main participants to play themselves. (His relaxed, less-is-more approach to filmmaking works in their favor.) But the script is pretty slack, especially that long stretch in the middle where you're really just watching other people having fun playing tourist. And there's a fourth hero on the train, a middle-aged man who helps out with a passenger who's been shot, but you never learn anything about him. He gets the Lègion d'Honneur at the end, too, but I'm not sure you even learn his name.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

 

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS  (2024)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ethan Coen

    Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, 

    Beanie Feldstein, Bill Camp, Colman Domingo,

    Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson, Matt Damon

The first movie Joel Coen made without his brother Ethan was an Oscar-nominated adaptation of "Macbeth". The first movie Ethan Coen made without his brother Joel was . . . this. It's a lesbian road movie about two women (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) who take off in a drive-away Dodge going from Philadelphia to Talahassee, with detours and stops along the way. There's a metal suitcase in the trunk of the car, and they don't know what's in it at first, and then they find out. There's some good, funny writing in the exchanges between the two women, and in the parts involving Bill Camp as the guy at the drive-away place, but it's a sloppy movie - in contrast to everything else the Coens have done - and it looks like something some teenager shot on Super 8. Qualley takes a rapid-fire delivery and a biscuits-and-gravy accent and dials them up to eleven. She's balls-out from start to finish, and Viswanathan's cautious, composed demeanor is the counterpoint to that. Yin and yang, I guess. Matt Damon has a cameo as a Florida senator with a particular interest in the contents of that suitcase, and you can't help thinking that maybe he made a bet with his pal Ben Affleck and the loser had to be in this movie. Bad luck, Matt.

Dirty Harry (1971)

DIRTY HARRY  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Don Siegel 

    Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Andy Robinson,

    John Vernon, Reni Santoni, John Mitchum, John Larch

"Uh uh. I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell ya the truth, in all this excitement, I've kind of forgotten myself. But being that this is a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you gotta ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" A crazed serial killer is on the loose, and the man out to stop him is the San Francisco police officer least likely ever to lead a sensitivity seminar. The first and best of the "Dirty Harry" movies, funny, fast-paced and brutal, directed with vicious efficiency by Don Siegel. Condemned as a tribute to law-and-order fascism by critics who probably took the movie more seriously than it takes itself, and defended by others as a dramatic argument for victims' rights. It doesn't really make it on either count, unless you buy the notion that a victim's rights begin when a defendant's rights are eliminated. What's interesting is how effectively Eastwood and Siegel stack the deck, helped by Lalo Schiffrin's pulsing, vertiginous musical score and Andy Robinson's scary, psychotic performance as the killer. This guy isn't just a madman who shoots people, he's total, unchecked evil, and by the time he hijacks a school bus to set up the movie's climax, you want nothing more than to watch Harry blow him away. 

Lalo Schiffrin

(1932-2025)

Citizen Ruth (1996)

CITIZEN RUTH  (1996)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alexander Payne

    Laura Dern, Swoozie Kurtz, Mary Kay Place,

    Kurtwood Smith, Kelly Preston, M.C. Galney,

    Kenneth Mars, David Graf, Burt Reynolds

Laura Dern gives a ferocious performance as Ruth Stoops, a chronically strung-out waste case who's already had four kids and finds out she's pregnant. About to be sentenced to jail for endangering the fetus through drug abuse - she'll huff anything she thinks will get her high - she becomes the focal point in a tug-of-war between an anti-abortion outfit called the Baby Savers and a pro-choice group. The Baby Savers claim to be all about love, except, of course, when anybody disagrees with them. The pro-choice folks are just as dogmatic, and conspicuously lacking in anything resembling a sense of humor. Ruth, who has a long history of making really bad decisions, doesn't see much hope either way. She'd rather be getting drunk or sniffing airplane glue. There's a bombs-away bluntness to a lot of this, and it'd be funnier if it didn't feel so true, but Ruth isn't a character you'll quickly forget. Like Paul Giamatti's forlorn schoolteacher in Payne's "The Holdovers", she makes a getaway at the end, and you'd like to think she'll move on to something better, even though you know the odds are against it. 

 

Bad Times At the El Royale (2018)

 

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Drew Goddard

    Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson,

    Jon Hamm, Chris Hemsworth, Lewis Pullman,

    Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman, Shea Whigham

A handful of strangers check into a curiously empty hotel that literally straddles the Nevada/California state line. They've all got stories, but are any of them who they say they are, and will anybody live long enough to check out in the morning? That last question could go either way in a crooked, new-noir nightmare that, like the hotel of the title, doesn't really exist anywhere except in its own dreamworld universe. You can't tell what will happen there, ever, except that it'll be nothing you expect. "What is this? Some sort of pervert hotel?" a character asks, and it is, but that's just a side effect. The El Royale is really about its guests. The bugs and concealed cameras and two-way mirrors aren't the half of it. 

The Burning Sea (2021)

THE BURNING SEA  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Andreas Anderson 

    Kristine Kujath Thorp, Henrik Bjelland, Bjorn Floberg,

    Rolf Kristian Larsen, Anders Baasmo, Nils Elias Olsen,

    Anneke von der Lippe, Ane Skumsvoll, Christoffer Staib

A pulse-pounding eco-thriller from Norway, about a massive oil-rig disaster in the North Sea. More evidence that the Norwegians know how to do this stuff as well as anybody. The storytelling's efficient, the effects look good, and the human element never gets lost. Some of the same people who worked on "The Quake" and "The Wave" were responsible for this. 

Love and Science (1912)

 

LOVE AND SCIENCE  (1912)  ¢ ¢

    D: M.J. Roche

    Èmile Dehelly, Renée Sylvaire

An inventor has a falling out with his fiancée 

while trying to set up what looks like the world's 

first Zoom call. Cinematography saves the day.