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.