A Dog's Life (1918)

A DOG'S LIFE  (1918)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Charles Chapin

    Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Albert Austin,

    Bud Jamison, Henry Bergman, Syd Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin, a dog, a dance-hall girl, a couple of crooks and some cops.

Missile To the Moon (1958)

 

MISSILE TO THE MOON  (1958)  ¢ ¢

    D: Richard E. Cunha

    Richard Travis, Cathy Downs, K.T. Stevens,

    Tommy Cook, Gary Clarke, Nina Bara,

    Michael Whalen, Laurie Mitchell, Leslie Parrish

Three scientists and two escaped convicts find themselves passengers on a rocket to the moon. Ducking into a lunar cave to escape some monsters, they encounter a dwindling race of cute, curvy women, most of them played by beauty pageant contestants. So, okay, it's not exactly "2001", but there's some real midnight-movie potential in this. The spider monster in the cave and the rock monsters on the surface have to be seen to be believed. 

The Other One (2014)

THE OTHER ONE: THE LONG, STRANGE TRIP 

OF BOB WEIR  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Mike Fleiss

The Grateful Dead guitarist talks about his music, his friendships with Neal Cassady and Jerry Garcia, and a lifetime spent playing in the band. Phil Lesh, Peter Coyote and John Perry Barlow are among the other witnesses. Required viewing for Deadheads. You know who you are.

Primal (2010)

 

PRIMAL  (2010)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Josh Reed

    Zoe Tuckwell-Smith, Krew Boylan, Lindsay Ferris,

    Rebekah Foord, Damian Freeleagus, Wil Travel

Six good-looking, fun-loving young people head out into the wilderness to look for an ancient cave painting. They find it, along with an ancient curse, and things get bloody. Rule: When you're the mean bl0nde in a slasher movie and you're almost certainly marked for death, anyway, maybe don't go skinny-dipping alone in the woods late at night. Just sayin'. Other highlights include the part where the girl who went skinny-dipping grows a new set of razor-sharp teeth, and the part where one of the other women performs a caesarean on herself using a machete. Nice. Made in Australia.

Kitten With a Whip (1964)

KITTEN WITH A WHIP  (1964)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Douglas Heyes

    Ann-Margret,  John Forsythe, Peter Brown,

    Patricia Barry, Richard Anderson, Skip Ward

A would-be candidate for high office played by John Forsythe makes a lot of real bad choices when a dangerously bipolar juvenile delinquent played by Ann-Margret invades his home. Sometimes the best thing about a movie is its title, and that's the way it is with "Kitten With a Whip".

The Holdovers (2023)

THE HOLDOVERS  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alexander Payne 

    Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da'Vine Jay Randolph,

    Carrie Preston, Andrew Garman, Naheem Garcia,

    Brady Hepner, Stephen Thorne, Michael Provost,

    Gilliam Vigman, Tate Donovan, Darby Lee-Stack

In a snowbound December in 1970, a cook, a part-time janitor, a teacher and a handful of kids with nowhere to go get stuck with each other at a boys' boarding school over Christmas break. You can guess how a setup like this will play out, and some of it does. But David Henningson's script repeatedly steers your expectations in one direction and then takes you somewhere else. It's beautifully acted and often funny, heartfelt without being too sentimental, and the bittersweet conclusion does not resolve everybody's problems and tie it all up with a bow. And it's a time capsule. Whether or not you're old enough to remember 1970, watch the first ten minutes of this and you're there. 

LOLA (2022)

 

LOLA  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Andrew Legge

    Stefanie Martini, Emma Appleton, Rory Fleck Byrne,

    Hugh O'Conor, Ayvianna Snow, Aaron Monaghan

On the eve of World War Two, a couple of British women invent a machine that can show them the future. They like what they see there, especially David Bowie and Bob Dylan, but when they start using the machine to help Britain win the war, there are consequences. It's a found-footage movie, the footage supposedly scraps of film shot around 1940, and the film is the key to the story. It's brilliantly worked out and executed, right up to the revealing final shot, and, trust me, if you make it through the rest of the movie, you don't want to miss that shot. 

Moon Garden (2022)

 

MOON GARDEN  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ryan Stevens Harris

    Haven Lee Harris, Augie Duke, Brionne Davis,

    Morgana Ignis, Maria Olsen, Timothy Lee DePriest,

    Phillip E. Walker, Angelica Ulloa, Téa Mckay

We're in Guy Maddin territory with this one. It's about a young girl, maybe four or five, who tumbles down a flight of stairs, lands on her head and ends up in a coma. From that point on, it's about what's being processed by the girl's brain: a dream, a hallucination, a nightmare, a long, strange trip through the subconscious and a journey into the light. It's vividly imagined, with creepy sets and weird, frightening characters - the kind of thing that could creep a kid out for life. My first thought was that it might be a good movie to watch on drugs. My second thought was, maybe not. 

Murders In the Zoo (1933)

 

MURDERS IN THE ZOO  (1933)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: A. Edward Sutherland

    Lionel Atwill, Gail Patrick, Randolph Scott,

    Charlie Ruggles, Kathleen Burke, John Lodge

A power-mad zoologist, obsessed with the attention his wife keeps getting from other men, brings a boatload of wild animals back to the States and deposits them in a zoo, where people start turning up dead, apparently killed by the animals. Randolph Scott plays a doctor whose antidote for snakebite comes in handy when he's bit by a snake. Charlie Ruggles plays a talkative PR guy and delivers what's supposed to be comic relief. Lionel Atwill plays the jealous zoologist, and if it's not revealing too much, let's just say that you can't trust Lionel Atwill. Ever. 

The New Age (1994)

THE NEW AGE  (1994)  ¢

    D: Michael T0lkin 

    Peter Weller Judy Davis, Patrick Bauchau, 

    Paula Marshall, Bruce Ramsay, Adam West,

    Samuel L. Jackson, Corbin Bernsen, John Diehl

A boring, affluent California couple seek enlightenment after losing their jobs. It doesn't make them any less boring. Davis is wasted in this one, and as cinematic sins go, that's unforgivable. 

Love On the Ground (1984)

 

LOVE ON THE GROUND  (1984)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jacques Rivette

    Jane Birkin, Geraldine Chaplin, André Dussollier,

    Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Isabelle Linnartz, Laszlo Szabo

Birkin and Chaplin play actresses cast in a play for which an ending does not yet exist. They've got one week to rehearse at the playwright's cavernous house in the country, while he tries to figure out a way to wrap up the last act. The performance will be Saturday night. The director's cut runs just under three hours, which is twice as long as it probably needs to be, but there's some shifty stuff going on in it, with what's real, what's imagined and what's being acted out reflecting, anticipating and bumping into each other. The scene where Jane spills the contents of her handbag on the floor of a Metro car duplicates an actual incident on an airline flight, which inspired the creation of a high-end fashion accessory called the Birkin bag. 

A Love Song (2022)

A LOVE SONG  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Max Walker Silverman

    Dale Dickey, Wes Studi, Benja K. Thomas,

    Michelle Wilson, John Way, Marty Grace Dennis

There's a startling m0ment a couple minutes into this, when you first see Dale Dickey's face. At first, you just see her in long shots, a woman walking down to the lake shore to check on a crab pot. She goes into a small camper, and suddenly there's this closeup, and a thousand miles of rough road etched in this old woman's face. Dickey plays a nomad named Faye, who's set herself up in campsite 7 in this desolate part of Colorado, where she subsists on crayfish and coffee, keeps an eye on the birds and the stars, and waits. The movie's as spare as its landscape, and the dialogue is terse. It's about the silent spaces in conversations between people who aren't used to talking, or don't know what to say or how to say it, or just don't see the point. Wes Studi's in it, plying the old high-school friend Faye's waiting to meet up with, but the picture belongs to Dickey and that heroically weathered face. If minimalism has a cinematic definition, it's this movie.

The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

THE POPE'S EXORCIST  (2023)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Julius Avery

    Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe,

    Franco Nero, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney,

    Laurel Marsden, Cornell John, Ryan O'Grady

Wearing a cassock, riding a Vespa, and armed with a peculiar accent and an impish sense of humor, Russell Crowe goes to work battling Satan as the Vatican's chief exorcist. The case he's assigned to in the movie involves a kid in Spain who's doing most of what Linda Blair did in "The Exorcist", minus the thing with the crucifix and the pea soup. It's formula stuff at this point, with lots of sound and fury and special effects, and you can sense that a quieter, more understated movie might've been way more creepy, but we're going for an audience here, right? And speaking of creepy, the script suggests that the Inquisition was the work of the devil, implicitly letting the Church off the hook for the most heinous chapter in its long, troubled history. Maybe a sequel will try to whitewash the clergy sex abuse scandal. 

The Mystery of Henri Pick (2010)

 

THE MYSTERY OF HENRI PICK  2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Rémi Bezançon

    Fabrice Luchini, Camille Cottin, Alice Isaaz,

    Bastien Bouillon, Josiane Stoléru, Hanna Schygulla

In a dimly lit room in a small-town library, a book editor comes across an unpublished manuscript which she manages to get into print. The book becomes a runaway bestseller, but a famous critic doesn't believe the author, a local pizza chef who's been dead for two years, could be the one who wrote it. He decides to find out who did. A whodunit that's really more of a who-wrote-it, in which the dead man's defenders, with whom you're inclined to sympathize, could be motivated by something more than literary authenticity, while the critic, who's the personification of smug condescension, isn't necessarily wrong. Other than wanting to ban them, when was the last time anybody in the real world paid this much attention to books?

Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954)

MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR  (1954)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Wyott Ordung 

    Anne Kimbell, Stuart Wade, Dick Pinner,

    Wyatt Ordung, Inez Palange, Jonathan Haze

Well, why not? They've come from everywhere else.

Movie Madness (1982)

 

MOVIE MADNESS  (1982)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Scott Giraldi, Henry Jaglom

    Peter Riegert, Diane Lane, Candy Clark,

    Ann Dusenberry, Robert Culp, Fred Willard,

    Olympia Dukakis, Mary Woronov, Dick Miller,

    Robby Benson, Richard Widmark, Julie Kavner,

    Christopher Lloyd, Henry Youngman, Elisha Cook Jr.

A trilogy of comedy sketches from National Lampoon, which is all you need to know if you're familiar with National Lampoon.The first segment is a crazed Woody Allen knockoff starring Peter Riegert and a Diane Keatonish Candy Clark. The second stars Ann Dusenberry as a stripper who sleeps her way to the top of the margarine industry. The third has Richard Widmark as a veteran cop paired with a wide-eyed rookie partner played by Robby Benson. The gags are uneven, but the movie gets by on sheer silliness, absurdity (sometimes) winning out over questionable taste.

Living (2022)

LIVING  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Oliver Hermanus 

    Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp,

    Hubert Burton, Adrian Rawlins, Oliver Chris

Bill Nighy has been stealing movies and scenes in movies for years now, and in "Living" he gets the kind of part most older actors would sell a chunk of their soul for: a starring role in a movie with a good script about a man who's dying. Nighy's character, Mr. Williams, is a career civil servant working in a government office whose primary function seems to be moving documents around and making sure nothing gets done. When he learns he has terminal cancer, he starts to think about what he might do with the time he has left, and it's not what he's been doing for the last 40 years. Some of this plays like straight-laced Monty Python - the men with their bowler hats and business suits and umbrellas on their way to their bureaucratic jobs - and you think, shouldn't John Cleese be in there somewhere? But it's an affecting character study, and it all hinges on Nighy, playing a man who's self-effacing to the point of being invisible, a chronic conformist facing one last chance to color outside the lines (and maybe do something useful) before it's too late. Without giving too much away, let's just say he doesn't waste the chance, and neither does the actor playing him.

Screen Test / Take 20

 

Name the movies the following actors appeared in together:

1. Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Margaret Hamilton,

Bert Lahr (1939)

2. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Sydney Greenstreet, 

Peter Lorre (1942)

3. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Harry Morgan, 

Lon Chaney Jr. (1952)

4. Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, 

Montgomery Clift (1961)

5. William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien,

Warren Oates (1969)

6. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Sterling Hayden, 

Robert Duvall (1972)

7. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto,

Harry Dean Stanton (1979)

8. Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin, Andre the Giant,

Robin Wright (1986)

9. Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, 

Christopher Walken (1994)

10. Ralph Fiennes, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, 

Jude Law (2014)

                                    ANSWERS:

                          1. "The Wizard of Oz"

                         2. "Casablanca"

                         3. "High Noon"

                         4. "Judgment at Nuremberg"

                         5. "The Wild Bunch"

                         6. "The Godfather"

                         7. "Alien"

                         8. "The Princess Bride"

                         9. "Pulp Fiction"

                       10. "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

Kiss Me (2011)

KISS ME  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alexandra Therese Keining

    Ruth Vega Fernandez, Liv Mjönes, Krister Henriksen,

    Lena Endre, Joakim Nätterqvist, Josefine Tengblad

Two beautiful young women, hanging out in beautiful surroundings, fall in love, beautifully, but one of them is engaged to be married, so it's complicated. Fortunately, they're in the sort of romantic melodrama where women are sensitive and men are obtuse, so the odds are in their favor. Also, they're Swedish, which helps, and it doesn't hurt to be beautiful.

Mother Joan of the Angels (1961)

MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jerzy Kawalerowicz 

    Mieczyslaw Voit, Lucyna Winnicka, Anna Ciepielewska, 

    Maria Chwalibóg, Stanislaw Jasiukiewicz, Jerzy Kazmarek

This one's in Latin and Polish and I watched it late at night without subtitles, so I couldn't tell you everything that's going on. There's an itinerant priest who turns up in a remote rural community somewhere in, like, the 17th century. He looks unhappy, and the first thing he does after saying his prayers is, he hangs his whip on the wall, but only after kissing it first, so he can flog himself later. Like I said, he looks like an unhappy man. There's also a cloister of nuns close-by, and the nuns appear to be demonically possessed. And a tavern where the local peasants hang out and drink. And that's the setup, pretty much. It's strikingly filmed in black and white, with lots of point-of-view shots where characters look directly into the camera. And there's a scene where the priest and a rabbi confront each other face-to-face, and the rabbi's played by the same actor who plays the priest. And the nuns' choreography, in those flowing white habits, is really nice. It's based on some of the same events that inspired Ken Russell's "The Devils" and Aldous Huxley's book "The Devils of Loudon", and it reminded me a little of Peter Brook's "Marat/Sade", with all that weird craziness going on. Maybe the next time I watch it, it'll have subtitles. Or maybe I'll just watch it with the sound off and play some Gregorian chant.

The Poetry Deal: A Film with Diane di Prima (2011)

 

THE POETRY DEAL: A FILM WITH DIANE 

DI PRIMA                                           (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Melanie La Rosa 

"A poem can be anything," Diane di Prima says at about the midpoint of this 27-minute documentary. "You have a blank piece of paper. You can do anything. You can make anything happen." Di Prima spent a lifetime doing that, as one of the few women to crack the mostly boys' club that was the Beat Generation. She was passionate about her work and tenacious in her pursuit of it, because she didn't know any other way to be. "Remember, you can have what you ask for," she says at the end. "Ask for everything."

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (1993)

 

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALLEN GINSBERG  

    D: Jerry Aronson                                      (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢

These days, it's hard to imagine a poet reaching the level of acclaim and notoriety that Allen Ginsberg attained in the second half of the 20th century. As a primal figure in the Beat movement of the '40s and '50s, a queer, a Jew, a champion of psychedelics, an activist against the Vietnam War, a student of Eastern mysticism and a cohort of everybody from Jack Kerouac to Timothy Leary to Patti Smith, Ginsberg both defined and symbolized the counterculture for 50 years. This documentary digs into some of that, with William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Abbie Hoffman, Joan Baez and Ken Kesey all lining up as witnesses, and Ginsberg himself talking about his life and reading from "Howl", "Kaddish" and other works. Required viewing for fans of the Beats, and highly recommended for anybody trying to figure out how a poet could ever command that kind of public attention.

The Lost King (2022)

THE LOST KING  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Stephen Frears 

    Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, Harry Lloyd,

    Mark Addy, James Fleet, Julian Firth

An unlikely crowd-pleaser based 0n a true story about an unlikely archeological dig, starring Sally Hawkins as a mad Englishwoman on a personal quest to locate and recover the remains of Richard III. The surprise comes when she finds what she's looking for, under a car park in Leicester. It's a David-vs.-Goliath story, the plucky amateur up against the unscrupulous academics who scoff at her request for funding and then try to horn in on her work. (The bureaucrats and professors do not come off looking too good.) Hawkins gets some great closeups, and how can you not root for Sally Hawkins in a movie like this? Steve Coogan, who plays her estranged husband, produced and cowrote the script. 

La Poison (1951)

 

LA POISON  (1951)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sacha Guitry

    Michel Simon, Jean Debucourt, Germaine Reuver,

    Jacques Varennes, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Pauline Carton

A crackup black comedy from France, about a guy who kills his wife to prevent her from killing him. There's a bit of Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" in this, but Guitry's approach feels looser, and why there was never an American remake by somebody like Hitchcock or Wilder or Woody Allen is hard to say. My favorite part was when a bunch of kids, hearing stories about the murder trial from a neighbor, build their own backyard guillotine.

Saltburn (2023)

SALTBURN  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Emerald Fennell

    Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe

    Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver,

    Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Reece Shearsmith

A devious dark comedy about an impoverished scholarship student who's invited to spend the summer holiday at the posh estate of a much-admired classmate. There are three or four turns in this that not only don't go where you expect them to, they go places you maybe haven't seen before. Barry Keoghan's at the center of it all, proving without a doubt that his Oscar-nominated performance in "The Banshees of Inisherin" was no fluke. Starting out, his character, Oliver, is a socially awkward, fish-out-of-water new kid facing his first term at Oxford. But he's smart and clever and he catches on quick, and his eyes don't miss a thing. He'd be easy too underestimate, and as it turns out, that would be a big mistake. The upper-crust family who take him in - Sir James (Richard E. Grant), wife Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and daughter Venetia (Alison Oliver) - cover the spectrum from merely eccentric to barking mad, and that doesn't even take in houseguest "Poor Dear Pamela" (Carey Mulligan, who doesn't get nearly enough screen time). From the absurdly ornate opening titles on, Emerald Fennell's direction is both delicate and in-your-face, a high-wire act you've got to be bold to attempt and skilled to pull off. But it all comes back to Keoghan and those knowing, inscrutable eyes. If there was any chance you'd forget him in this, what he does at the end should take care of that. 

It Pays To Advertise (1931)

 

IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE  (1931)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Frank Tuttle

    Norman Foster, Carole Lombard, Eugene Pallette, 

    Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Lucien Littlefield,

    Judith Wood, Louise Brooks, Morgan Wallace

A laugh-free comedy about a couple of guys trying to scam their way to the top of the soap business. Louise Brooks, billed seventh, has a small role as a dancer, but you never 

see her dance and she quickly disappears.

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Chad Stahelski 

    Keanu Reeves, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ian McShane,

    Ruby Rose, Common, Claudia Gerini, Lance Reddick

    Laurence Fishburne, Franco Nero, John Leguizamo

The Boogeyman is back, and the bullets are flying and the bodies are piling up, with two more chapters (at least) yet to go. Somebody calculated the number of people John Wick kills in this and came up with 128. That seems a little low. 

Kiki (1931)

KIKI  (1931)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sam Taylor

    Mary Pickford, Reginald Denny, Margaret Livingston,

    Joseph Cawthorn, Phil Tead, Fred Walton, Edwin Maxwell

Pre-Code Pickford, with Mary as a French chorus girl in love with a producer played by Reginald Denny. Pickford was in her mid-30s by the time sound came in, too old for the little-girl characters that had made her the screen's first female superstar. She made a few talkies (this was her next-to-last), but her transition to more adult roles didn't click with audiences and she retired in 1933. Not surprisingly, the best stuff in "Kiki" is visual, most  notably a musical number choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with the star in tails and a top hat gradually losing her pants. Pickford could do that sort of thing as well as anybody, including Chaplin, but movies were evolving and moving on, and they were about to move on without Mary Pickford. 

It Happens Every Spring (1949)

IT HAPPENS EVERY SPRING  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2 

    D: Lloyd Bacon

    Ray Milland, Jean Peters, Paul Douglas,

    Ed Begley, Ted de Corsia, Ray Collins,

    Jessie Royce Landis, Alan Hale Jr.

A chemistry professor (Ray Milland) creates a substance that prevents baseballs from coming in contact with bats, and soon finds himself in cleats and a uniform, pitching and winning in the major leagues. A pleasant, unpretentious baseball fantasy with nice work by Milland in a role that seems tailor-made for Jimmy Stewart. 

I Spit On Your Grave (1978)

 

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE  (1978)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Meir Zarchi

    Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace,

    Anthony Nichols, Gunter Kleemann 

A notorious exploitation piece in which a young woman played by Camille Keaton spends roughly half the movie being assaulted and the other half getting even. You can decide for yourself which half is more painful to watch. The rape sequences are brutal and degrading, a human being reduced to a quivering piece of meat. The revenge segments are kind of ridiculous, but there's lots of blood. Roger Ebert found the movie despicable. (He was as revolted by the audience he watched it with as he was by the picture itself.) Like it or hate it, it's a rough, uncompromising film, as hard to defend as it is to dismiss. 

Vaudeville (1997)

 

VAUDEVILLE  (1997)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    W: Greg Palmer

When I was a kid, there was a guy who used to show up on television from time to time called the Banana Man. The Banana Man would come out wearing a long, bulky overcoat and he'd pull stuff out of his overcoat - bananas, hundreds of them, but lots of other stuff, too. It was amazing what he could pull out of his overcoat. That was it. That was what he did. The Banana Man had been a novelty act in Vaudeville, and he turns up briefly in this American Masters documentary with more than a hundred other performers, some of them famous and a lot of them (these days) obscure. Starting in the 19th century, Vaudeville, with its comics, dancers, jugglers, musicians, plate-spinners, regurgitators, magicians, contortionists and acrobats, was massively popular at a time when live entertainment was the only entertainment there was. What killed it was technology, specifically radio and film. The irony, watching a movie like this, is that film is the sole reason most of these performances still exist, an art form preserved by the medium that brought it to an end. Immortality, of sorts, for the Banana Man.

Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist (2004)

 

JESUS CHRIST: SERIAL RAPIST  (2004)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Bill Zebub

    Alexandra Voskobnikov, Kerri Taylor, Debbie Dee,

    Yelena Sabel, Rocco Martone, Bill Zebub

Cheaply shot, dimly lit sexploitation in which women are tied up, tortured and killed to a death-metal soundtrack. Then, for a change of pace, the camera moves outside and the light gets better and some women are crucified. (The opening credits and the bonus features on the DVD reveal a singular preoccupation with crucified women.) I'm thinking "Bill Zebub" could be an alias, what about you? (For the record, Bill's other screen credits include "Dumb and Dahmer", "Sicko, the Bloodclown" and "Boogers of the Antichrist".) Some movies you watch just to see how bad a movie with a title like that could be. Then you find out.

The Movie Buzzard 100

 

    Undaunted - well, maybe a little bit daunted - by the fact that subjective lists of anything are arbitrary, here's an arbitrary list of the Movie Buzzard's top 100 films, subject to change at any time. 

    Some of these titles are iconic. Some are idiosyncratic choices that probably wouldn't turn up on any other list. All are movies I wouldn't want to head into the future without. 

"A Trip To the Moon" (1902/Georges Méliès)

"Intolerance" (1916/D.W. Griffith)

"Nosferatu" (1922/F.W. Murnau)

"Sherlock Jr." (1924/Buster Keaton)

"Metropolis" (1927/Fritz Lang)

"Napoleon" (1927/Abel Gance)

"The Passion of Joan of Arc" 

  (1928/Carl Theodor Dreyer)

"Dracula" (1931/Tod Browning)

"The Mummy" (1932/Karl Freund)

"Duck Soup" (1933/Leo McCarey)

"Tarzan and His Mate" (1934/Cedric Gibbons)

"Bride of Frankenstein" (1935/James Whale)

"Modern Times" (1936/Charlie Chaplin)

"Way Out West" (1937/James W. Horne)

"Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" (1939/Frank Capra)

"The Wizard of Oz" (1939/Victor Fleming)

"Citizen Kane" (1941/Orson Welles)

"The Wolf Man" (1941/George Waggner)

"Casablanca" (1942/Michael Curtiz)

"The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943/William Wellman)

"My Darling Clementine" (1946/John Ford)

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951/Robert Wise)

"The African Queen" 1951/John Huston)

"High Noon" (1952/Fred Zinnemann)

"Singin' In the Rain" 

  (1952/Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen)

"The Crimson Pirate" (1952/Robert Siodmak)

"Roman Holiday" (1953/William Wyler)

"Pickup On South Street" (1953/Samuel Fuller)

"Sabrina" (1954/Billy Wilder)

"Plan 9 From Outer Space" (1959/Ed Wood)

"The Mouse That Roared" (1959/Jack Arnold)

"Psycho" (1960/Alfred Hitchcock)

"Charade"  (1963/Stanley Donen)

"Dr. Strangelove" (1964/Stanley Kubrick)

"The Train" (1964/John Frankenheimer)

"A Fistful of Dollars" (1964/Sergio Leone)

"The Flight of the Phoenix" (1965/Robert Aldrich)

"Blow-Up" (1966/Michelangelo Antonioni)

"The Professionals" (1966/Richard Brooks)

"Where Eagles Dare" (1968/Brian G. Hutton)

"The Wild Bunch" (1969/Sam Peckinpah)

"Easy Rider" (1969/Dennis Hopper)

"The Magic Christian" (1969/Joseph McGrath)

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" 

  (1969/George Roy Hill)

"M*A*S*H" (1970/Robert Altman)

"The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1971/Sam Peckinpah)

"The Godfather" (1972/Francis Ford Coppola)

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" (1973/Peter Yates)

"The Taking of Pelham 123" (1974/Joseph Sargent)

"Young Frankenstein" (1974/Mel Brooks)

"Chinatown" (1974/Roman Polanski)

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" 

  (1975/Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones)

"Nashville" (1975/Robert Altman)

"All the President's Men" (1976/Alan Pakula)

"Sorcerer" (1977/William Friedkin)

"Animal House" (1978/John Landis)

"Days of Heaven" (1978/Terrence Malick)

"Alien" (1979/Ridley Scott)

"All That Jazz" (1979/Bob Fosse)

"Apocalypse Now" (1979/Francis Ford Coppola)

"Airplane!" (1980/Jim Abrahams, David Zucker 

  and Jerry Zucker)

"Stripes" (1981/Ivan Reitman)

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981/Steven Spielberg)

"Blade Runner" (1982/Ridley Scott)

"The Big Chill" (1983/Lawrence Kasdan)

"The Right Stuff" (1983/Philip Kaufman)

"Trouble In Mind" (1985/Alan Rudolph)

"The Princess Bride" (1986/Rob Reiner)

"Wings of Desire" (1987/Wim Wenders)

"Radio Days" (1987/Woody Allen)

"The Navigator" (1988/Vincent Ward)

"Field of Dreams" (1989/Phil Alden Robinson)

"The Civil War" (1990)/Ken Burns)

"Life Is Sweet" (1990/Mike Leigh)

"Thelma & Louise" (1991/Ridley Scott)

"Pulp Fiction" (1994/Quentin Tarantino)

"The Usual Suspects" (1995/Bryan Singer)

"Fargo" (1996/Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)

"Lone Star" (1996/John Sayles)

"Bandits" (1997/Katja von Garnier)

"Run Lola Run" (1998/Tom Tykwer)

"Dogma" (1999/Kevin Smith)

"Divine Intervention" (2002/Elia Suleiman)

"Mystic River" (2003/Clint Eastwood)

"A History of Violence" (2005/David Cronenberg)

"Good Night, and Good Luck" (2005/George Clooney)

"V For Vendetta" (2005/James McTeigue)

"Linda Linda Linda" (2005/Nobuhiro Yamashita)

"The Brave One" (2007/Neil Jordan)

"Rumba" (2008/Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon 

  and Bruno Romy)

"Hugo" (2011/Martin Scorsese)

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014/Wes Anderson)

"The Dressmaker" (2015/Jocelyn Moorhouse)

"Spotlight" (2015/Tom McCarthy)

"La La Land" (2016/Damien Chazelle)

"The Shape of Water" (2017/Guillermo del Toro)

"They Shall Not Grow Old" (2018/Peter Jackson)

"The Old Man and the Gun" (2018/David Lowery)

"1917" (2019/Sam Mendes)

"Poor Things" (2023/Yorgos Lanthimos)

Infamous (2006)

INFAMOUS  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Douglas McGrath 

    Toby Jones, Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig,

    Sigourney Weaver, Peter Bogdanovich, Hope Davis,

    Jeff Daniels, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rossellini

The second of two movies, released within a year of each other, covering the time Truman Capote spent researching and writing "In Cold Blood". In "Capote" (2005), Philip Seymour Hoffman played Capote. In this film, it's Toby Jones. Both portray Capote as a devious, self-serving prick, and Hoffman got the Oscar at least partly by getting there first. Sandra Bullock plays Harper Lee, the part Catherine Keener played in the Hoffman version, but the revelation here is Daniel Craig as Perry Smith, a lost soul on a one-way ticket to hell, and the key figure in Capote's nonfiction novel. It's a compelling performance, and you don't see much of James Bond in it anywhere. You barely even see Daniel Craig.

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE  (2016)  ¢ ¢

    D: Roland Emmerich

    Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman,

    Charlotte Gainsbourg, Maika Monroe, Sela Ward,

    William Fichtner, Jessie T. Usher, Judd Hirsch,

    Brent Spiner, Vivica A. Fox, Angelbaby, Chin Han

Twenty years after President Bill Pullman climbed into the cockpit to lead the world in its war against the aliens, the aliens are back, bigger and badder than ever. Can the grizzled ex-president, alien experts Jeff Goldblum and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and crazy Brent Spiner defeat the aliens this time? Can crotchety Judd Hirsch outrun the aliens in a schoolbus full of kids? And will Brent Spiner ever get out of that hospital gown and put on a pair of pants? The effects are apocalyptic (again), but you can't help wondering if AI had a hand in the recycled script.

The House of the Devil (2009)

 

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ti West

    Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Greta Gerwig,

    Mary Woronov, AJ Bowen, Dee Wallace

A college student who's low on cash answers an ad for a babysitter in a big house way out of town. The setup seems sketchy, but it'll pay a lot and she needs the money, so she takes the job. The first 30 minutes are mostly the girl exploring the house (as you do in a movie like this), opening doors and peering into dark rooms, her curiosity and fear touched off by the sounds she hears (or doesn't hear when her Walkman's plugged in). Then, as the saying goes, all hell breaks loose. (It's called "The House of the Devil", after all.) An early feature from Ti West, who made "X" and "Pearl" and has a real instinct for how to make this genre stuff work. Greta Gerwig has a scene-stealing supporting role as the heroine's best friend. 

Cops (1922)

 

COPS  (1922)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton

    Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts

Buster Keaton on the run from an army of cops. Favorite bit: Buster takes out a cigarette but can't find a match. An anarchist throws a bomb that practically lands in his lap, so he uses it to light the cigarette and throws the bomb away. It explodes, triggering the chase.

Death On the Nile (1978)

DEATH ON THE NILE  (1978)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Guillerman 

    Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Mia Farrow,

    Lois Chiles, Simon MacCorkindale, Jon Finch,

    Olivia Hussey, Jane Birkin, Bette Davis,

    Maggie Smith, George Kennedy, Angela Lansbury,

    Jack Warden, Sam Wanamaker, Harry Andrews

A boatload of vaguely suspicious characters sail up the Nile, posing elegantly and taking in some of the world's most famous ruins. When one of them is found dead, shot in the head, it's up to Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) to figure out whodunit. The plotting's complicated: As Poirot interviews each suspect in turn, it becomes clear that they all had a reason to hate the victim, any one of them could be the killer, and the detective imagines multiple ways the murder could've played out. The solution is far-fetched, and at 2 hours and 20 minutes, the movie's a little long. It's not hard to look at, though, the actors tear into their roles with relish, and cinematographer Jack Cardiff has a good time with the Egyptian locations. 

Maggie Smith

(1934-2024)

Disappearances (2006)

DISAPPEARANCES  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jay Craven

    Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold, Charlie McDermott,

    Lothaire Bluteau, Gary Farmer, William Sanderson

The first thing you see in this movie is a 15-year-old boy, played by Charlie McDermott, and his aunt, played by Genevieve Bujold, walking together from their farm to the local school, where she teaches and he's trying to make sense of "Paradise Lost". A horse-drawn coach goes by, carrying two riders on top and a coffin. "Who died?" the boy asks. "Nobody," his aunt replies, and the next thing you see, the two riders on the coach are gone. That's the first of many disappearances in a movie that's haunted by them. Kris Kristofferson plays the kid's dad, a farmer in Prohibition-Era Vermont, who returns to running bootleg whiskey over the Canadian border after a freak fire destroys his barn. It's part ghost story, part shaggy-dog adventure story and part coming-of-age story, with the emphasis not on the customary obsession with getting laid, but on learning to cope with the inevitability of loss. You can't always tell  reality from illusion, and as Bujold's character explains it, you're not supposed to. It's a movie that goes its own way in any case, and with a regional accent, a crooked sense of humor and the north-woods equivalent of magic realism at work, it does the job. "Ain't this the most spectacular trip you ever imagined?" Kristofferson asks at one point. And for the adventures to be had, and the life lessons learned, for a kid of 15, it just might be.

Kris Kristofferson

(1936-2024)

The Hideous Sun Demon (1958)

 

THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON  (1958)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Clarke, Tom Boutross

    Robert Clarke, Patricia Manning, Nan Peterson,

    Patrick Whyte, Fred La Porta, Peter Similuk

Exposure to an atomic isotope causes a scientist to change into a horrible monster when exposed to the sun, which makes him a sort of vampire, half human and half lizard. A thing like that can really put a dent in a guy's personal life, you know? The downside of solar, I guess. 

The Loudest Voice (2019)

 

THE LOUDEST VOICE  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Kari Skogland, Jeremy Podeswa,

         Scott Z. Burns, Stephen Frears

    Russell Crowe, Sienna Miller, Naomi Watts, 

    Seth McFarlane, Annabelle Wallis, Simon McBurney,

    Aleksa Palladino, Josh Stamberg, Susan Pourfar

Russell Crowe, looking convincingly fat and unhealthy, weighs in as Roger Ailes, the cut-throat, right-wing television producer who created Fox News (with Rupert Murdoch's money), turning it into the most watched cable news network in the country, operating on the stated principle that facts don't matter but ratings do. The movie covers the main events in Ailes' rise and fall - it was originally broadcast in seven parts on Showtime - and if you're looking for a handy blueprint to how fascist messaging works, you'll find it here. There's an inkling of charm about Ailes in the beginning - Crowe peering impishly over his wire-framed glasses could be playing Benjamin Franklin - but it recedes quickly, and what you're left with is a monster, equal parts ambition, paranoia, brilliance, rage, sleaze, cunning and (especially once Barack Obama steps onto the stage) bigotry. The last act, the prelude to his downfall, has Ailes using Fox to help orchestrate Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election. Ailes, Trump and millions of suckers out there tuning in and eating up every angry word: Those guys were made for each other.

Her Night of Romance (1924)

 

HER NIGHT OF ROMANCE  (1924)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sidney Franklin

    Constance Talmadge, Ronald Colman, Jean Hersholt,

    Albert Gran, Sidney Bracey, Robert Rendel, Eric Mayne

Love among the idle rich, with Ronald Colman as an impoverished British lord and Constance Talmadge as an American millionaire's daughter. A series of deceptions cause complications, but true romance wins out in the end. Talmadge is probably best remembered for playing the feisty Mountain Girl in the Babylonian segment of Griffith's 1916 epic "Intolerance", but her specialty was elegant comedy and it made her a star. She continued to work in silent films through the end of the 1920s, and retired with the coming of sound. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

 

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 

    D: James Gunn                  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana,

    Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff,

    Vin Diesel, Chikwudi Iwuji, Sean Gunn,

    Will Poulter, Michael Rooker, Sylvester Stallone

The final entry in James Gunn's "Guardians" trilogy finds Rocket (Bradley Cooper) on life support while the rest of the gang battles a villain called the  High Evolutionary and a galactic army of horrible-looking creatures who are up to no good. There's a lot going on in this - too much, probably - not that fans are likely to care. "Guardians of the Galaxy" has always been the Marvel franchise that got it right by not taking itself too seriously, led by a team of misfit heroes whose bickering camaraderie made them relatable and made you care. They get to save the universe, sure, but mythmaking in these films is strictly an afterthought. They're mostly about having fun.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Peter Bogdanovich 

    Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Shepherd,

    Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn,

    Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, Sam Bottoms,

    Randy Quaid, Sharon Taggart, Kimberly Hyde

Lives going nowhere in a dead-end town, based on the novel by Larry McMurtry and brought to the screen with sepia-tone mastery by Peter Bogdanovich. The year is 1951. The place is a desolate, dot-on-the-map crossroads in West Texas. There's not much to do there, and way too much time to do it in, but when you're a high-school senior, you'll find a way to fill in the gaps. (And when you're on the football team that just lost Friday night's game 121-14, you can expect a certain amount of abuse.) Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd are the young leads. Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Academy Awards, and the entire ensemble is solid, but if I was going to pick somebody to keep an eye on, that'd be Eileen Brennan as a cafe waitress who's seen it all and can freeze you with a look. The spirit is mournful, but sometimes so is life. 

France (2021)

 

FRANCE  (2021)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Bruno Dumont

    Léa Seydoux, Benjamin Biolay, Emanuele Arioli, 

    Jawad Zemmar, Noura Benbahlouli, Blanche Gardin

A high-end, high-maintenance television journalist starts to unravel big-time when she injures a kid in a traffic accident on a Paris Street. The movie's kind of strung-out, too, and at 2 hours and 13 minutes, it feels a little long. But it looks real nice, and Léa Seydoux has some arresting closeups that seem to go on forever and then some, usually with the actress looking straight into the camera. It's all kind of outlandish - the journalist and her family live in an apartment the size of the Louvre - but as satire it's not half as funny as it thinks it is, and as melodrama it's not that involving. Most of us will never know, of course, but apparently it's not always enough to be beautiful, famous and rich.

Full Time (2021)

 

FULL TIME  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Eric Gravel

    Laure Calamy, Anne Suarez, Geneviève Mnich,

    Nolan Arizmendi, Sasha Lemaitre Cremaschi,

    Cyril Gueï, Lucie Gallo Agathe Dronne

This movie has drawn comparisons to Tom Tykwer's "Run Lola Run", and while the narrative operates on a slightly different track, it moves just about as fast. It's about a Paris hotel maid frantically trying to juggle her job, her kids, her commute and a crucial upcoming interview, all of it complicated by an ex who's late with the alimony payment and a crippling transit strike. For the length of the movie and the four or five days over which the story plays out, she barely has time to breathe. Laure Calamy plays the frazzled heroine, struggling to hold it together in the face of what appears to be never-ending chaos. It's a terrific performance as the kind of person you see all the time and never really notice, suggesting that just getting by from one day to the next, when the fates are lined up against you, can be an act of extraordinary courage.