Harper (1966)

 

HARPER  (1966)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jack Smight

    Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris,

    Arthur Hill, Janet Leigh, Pamela Tiffin,

    Robert Wagner, Robert Webber, Shelley Winters,

    Strother Martin, Roy Jensen, Harold Gould

Private eye Lew Harper (Paul Newman) cruises around L.A. in a battered Porsche, tracking down leads in a missing-person case. William Goldman wrote the wise-cracking script from a Ross Macdonald  novel, with the detective's name changed from "Archer" to "Harper" to accommodate Newman's fondness for titles starting with the letter "H". It's the kind of thing Bogart might've done, if Bogart was Paul Newman making movies in the 1960s, reinforced by the presence of Lauren Bacall in the supporting cast. All these years later, it holds up pretty well, and I imagine there are still women out there who can't get enough of those famous blue eyes. 

Gilda Live (1980)

GILDA LIVE  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Mike Nichols

    Gilda Radner, Don Novello, Paul Schaffer,

    Diana Grasselli, Myriam Valle, Maria Vidal

Gilda Radner brings her act to the stage in the wake of her time on "Saturday Night Live". Emily Litella, Judy Miller, Roseanne Roseannadanna and Candy Slice all show up.

Dead For a Dollar (2022)

DEAD FOR A DOLLAR  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Walter Hill

    Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan,

    Warren Burke, Brandon Scott, Benjamin Bratt,

    Luis Chavez, Hamish Linklater, Guy Burnet,

    Diane Villegas, Fidel Gomez, Alfredo Aragon

Right away in "Dead For a Dollar", you notice some of the things you'd associate with a spaghetti western: the title, the musical score, the desiccated landscapes. It's like Walter Hill's way of saying, "Look, I can make a spaghetti western if I want to," but that's not quite what it's about. It's more like, what if John Ford made a spaghetti western, or more to the point, Budd Boetticher, to whom the film is dedicated. Remember David Lynch as Ford in "The Fabelmans", telling young Steven Spielberg to look at the horizon? There are a lot of horizons to look at here. Christoph Waltz plays a bounty hunter. Willem Dafoe plays a gambling ex-con who's good with a gun. Rachel Brosnahan plays a kidnapped woman Waltz has been hired to rescue, only she hasn't been abducted and doesn't want to be saved. There's a classic look to the way the shots are set up, with lots of washed-out colors and sepia tones, and Hill's an economical storyteller, even when he's doing exposition. Also, he knows where to put the horizon. 

My Dog Stupid (2019)

 

MY DOG STUPID  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Yvan Attal

    Yvan Attal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Eric Ruf,

    Pascale Arbilot, Ben Attal, Adèle Wismes,

    Pablo Vanzel, Panayotis Pascot, Oscar Copp

A very large and horny dog saunters into a house through an open door, plops himself down on the couch and decides to stay. The family living there - a middle-aged couple and their four grown children - reluctantly take the animal in, just as their domestic situation starts to fall apart. Dad (Yvan Attal) is a novelist with a severe case of writer's block. Mom (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is trying to blot out a life of suffocating boredom with tranquilizers and alcohol. The kids - a daughter and three sons - all have issues of their own. The dog turns out to be a supporting player - he provides comic relief - and the movie maintains a precarious balance between sitcom and psychodrama. Yvan and Charlotte are enough to make you want to stick around. Ben Attal, who plays the anarchist intellectual Raphe, is their real-life son. 

Somewhere (2005)

 

SOMEWHERE  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Emmanuel Murat

    Yvan Attal, Vernon Dobtcheff

A man gets up every morning and takes the train to a job distributing mail in a large office building. The train always goes through a place called Liege, but it appears that Liege Station is closed to passengers. What will happen if the man gets off at Liege?

My Heart Laid Bare (2008)

 

MY HEART LAID BARE  (2008)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Yi Zhou

    Charlotte Gainsbourg, Enzo Basile, Gianmaria Majorana

A woman walks along the waterfront and stops to buy a big chunk of meat, a heart. She goes to the seashore and drops the heart in the water. The heart turns to crystal and slips away. 

Cry Macho (2021)

 

CRY MACHO  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Clint Eastwood

    Clint Eastwood, Eduardo Minett, Natalia Traven,

    Dwight Yoakam, Fernanda Urrejola, Horacio Garcia Rojas

In what's likely to be his final road movie, Clint plays an old cowboy dispatched to Mexico to retrieve the son of a wealthy horse rancher and bring the kid back across the border to Texas. Eastwood was about 90 when he made this. He moves and looks and sounds old, and his timing is about half a beat off. He still knows how to bite off a good line, though, and when a friendly restaurant owner played by Natalia Traven comes along, the years drop away and his eyes light up in a way that's unmistakable. The story's leisurely to the point of being lackadaisical. You know it'll get where it's going eventually, but it's in no particular hurry to get there, and neither is its star, content to pull off the road from time to time just to poke around and hang out. When you're 90, nobody expects you to go anywhere too fast. 

Evil Toons (1992)

 

EVIL TOONS  (1992)  ¢ ¢

    D: Fred Olen Ray

    David Carradine, Dick Miller, Monique Gabrielle,

    Madison Stone, Suzanne Ager, Stacey Nix, 

    Arte Johnson, Michelle Bauer, Don Bowe

A self-consciously silly slasher movie about some sorority sisters spending a weekend in a house they've been hired to clean up. Also, there's an old book of satanic drawings and incantations, and when one of the girls reads the wrong page out loud, translating from the Latin, a cartoon demon gets out. Director Fred Olen Ray has made a lot of these low-budget horrors, so he knows the genre he's spoofing. He also knows that in a movie like this, writing and acting don't mean nearly as much as boobs and blood. David Carradine skulks around in it, following in his old man's footsteps. Dick Miller gets to watch himself on television in "Bucket of Blood" and wonder "how come this guy never won an Academy Award?" Arte Johnson pops in for a couple of scenes. The rest of the cast was selected for a willingness to get topless more than anything else. Madison Stone (the raven-haired Girl Possessed By the Devil) and Stacey Nix (the blonde Girl You Know Is Going To Die) had both done adult film work, and Monique Gabrielle (the Girl With Glasses and a Brain) was a Penthouse model.

Evils of the Night (1985)

 

EVILS OF THE NIGHT  (1985)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Mardi Rustam

    John Carradine, Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, 

    Tina Louise, Julie Newmar, Karrie Emerson,

    Bridget Holloman, David Hawk, G.T. Taylor

Aliens touch down in a small college town, looking for healthy humans between the ages of 16 and 24, hoping to drain their blood. It's summer break - the aliens didn't consider that - but there are still plenty of potential donors making out down at the beach, if John Carradine, Tina Louise and Julie Newmar can just get them into the world's sketchiest-looking hospital. Primally awful T&A sci-fi (more T than A), with aging B-list actors going through the motions, presumably for beer money. Director Mardi Rustam claims the movie that inspired him to make this was "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Yeah, sure, whatever.

Country Music (2019)

COUNTRY MUSIC  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ken Burns

90 years of county music, from Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to Hank Williams and Patsy Cline to Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash to Emmylou Harris and Garth Brooks. From the beginning, country music has straddled a line between art and commerce. As soon as broadcast and recording technology made it commercially viable, folks were using it to sell stuff. And despite Burns' efforts to showcase its diversity and its roots in gospel and blues, it's always been primarily a white man's game. And a conservative one. At its worst, country is just bad pop music. At its best, it touches the heart. All the key figures turn up in this, and the witness list includes everybody in the business who was still breathing when the movie was shot. Mandolin virtuoso Marty Stuart is the most articulate, and, appropriately, gets the last word. 

The Dreamers (2003)

 

THE DREAMERS  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Bernardo Bertolucci

    Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green, Anna Chancellor,

    Robin Renucci, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Jean-Pierre Léaud

With revolution breaking out in the streets, three beautiful young cinemaphiles hole up in a Paris apartment, getting to know each other better. Two of them (Eva Green and Louis Garrel) are incestuous French twins. The third (Michael Pitt) is a Yank. At one point, Bertolucci has Janis Joplin on the soundtrack and Charlie Chaplin on the screen, while the boys argue about who's funnier, Chaplin or Keaton, and Eva cues up Janis on the record machine. The movie combines the 1968 street riots, a consuming passion for film, and enough graphic nudity to earn an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. Wes Anderson did a spoofier take on some of this stuff in the Timothée Chalomet episode of "The French Dispatch". 

Dear Dictator (2017)

DEAR DICTATOR  (2017)  ¢ ¢

    D: Lisa Addario, Joe Syracuse

    Michael Caine, Odeya Rush, Katie Holmes,

    Seth Green, Jason Biggs, Jackson Beard,

    Adrian Voo, Jordyn Cavros, Fish Myrr

A mostly disposable comedy starring Michael Caine as a deposed Caribbean strongman who slips off to the States and finds himself hiding out in a suburban garage. Caine has always pinned his career on the notion that it's better to be working - in anything - than idle too long, and apparently that's still the case. The movie's a trifle, but without Sir Michael, it wouldn't be anything at all.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

GODZILLA MINUS ONE  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Takashi Yamazaki

    Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Sakura Ando,

    Hidetaka Yoshioka, Kuranosuke Sasaki, Munetaka Aoki

Leave it to the Japanese to make a big-budget Godzilla movie and get it right. It starts out late in World War Two, with a kamikaze pilot touching down on a small island, having chosen a life of dishonor over certain death. The pilot has barely made it out of the cockpit, when lumbering out of the depths comes Godzilla, the world's biggest, baddest, most epically pissed-off reptile, stomping everything in its path. From there, the movie follows two connected narrative tracks - the pilot struggling to survive in the aftermath of the war, and Godzilla wreaking horrific destruction and providing both the pilot and the Japanese people a chance at redemption after the war's humiliating conclusion. The effects look good, the sound work is awesome, the story resonates, and the monster is scary as hell. What more cold you ask for from a Godzilla movie?

The Florodora Girl (1930)

 
THE FLORODORA GIRL  (1930)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Harry Beaumont

    Marion Davies, Lawrence Gray, Walter Catlett,

    Ilka Chase, George Chandler, Anita Louise

William Randolph Hearst's girlfriend plays a chorus girl looking for love. The movie's not much, but Marion's cute.