The Outrun (2024)

 

THE OUTRUN  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Nora Fingscheidt

    Saoirse Ronan, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves

Saoirse Ronan singlehandedly holds this one together as a reckless young woman named Rona who leaves London for the Orkney Islands to try to get sober. The tales, legends and desolate, windswept landscapes of the islands help tell the story, and Ronan goes places she hasn't explored before as a smart, troubled girl whose giddy energy lights up the party till the moment her demon takes over and you can't get away from her fast enough. Anybody who's struggled with recovery, or knows somebody who has, will be able to relate. 

The Seventh Coin (1993)

 

THE SEVENTH COIN  (1993)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Dror Soref

    Peter O'Toole, Alexandra Powers, Navin Chowdhry,

    John Rhys-Davies, Ally Walker, Jill Novick, Gilat Ankori

An Arab boy and a Jewish-American girl get caught up in an adventure that takes them all over Jerusalem, when they come into the possession of a rare coin that dates back to the time of King Herod. It seems there are seven coins all together, dug up in the ruins at Masada, and a murderous criminal played by Peter O'Toole will stop at nothing to have them all in his collection. It's formula stuff, with some nice location work and appealing performances by the juvenile leads. O'Toole looks weary, but with a wide selection of elegant wardrobe options, you can't say he's not well-dressed. 

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

 

RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL  (2020)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Woody Allen

    Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Elena Anaya,

    Louis Garrel, Douglas McGrath, Steve Guttenberg,

    Sergi Lopez, Tammy Blanchard, Christoph Waltz

This is not the worst late-career Woody Allen movie to come along, which is faint praise maybe, but there it is. Wallace Shawn plays a film critic and would-be novelist, tagging along with his wife (Gina Gershon), who's working publicity at the San Sebastian Film Festival. While she spends most of her time with a hot young director (Louis Garrel), he starts to fall for an attractive doctor (Elena Anaya), so here's yet another Woody Allen movie dealing with love, infatuation and infidelity among people who are too smart for their own good. (At least this time, one of the protagonists is not a 20-year-old girl.) The best parts are the dream sequences. (Shawn's character always dreams scenes from classic movies, in black and white.) Welles, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Godard and Bunuel are all represented, so there's at least a faint echo of "Stardust Memories going on, and if you stay till the end, you get a riff on "The Seventh Seal" with Christoph Waltz as Death.

Phantom Ship (1935)

PHANTOM SHIP  (1935)  ¢ ¢

    D: Denison Clift 

    Bela Lugosi, Shirley Grey, Arthur Margetson,

    Edmund Willard, Dennis Hoey, George Mozart

In 1872, a merchant vessel sets sail for Genoa, carrying a cargo of liquor, a crew of 13, a woman, a black cat and Bela Lugosi. This is not going to end well, is what I'm thinking, and when the ship turns up adrift in the Atlantic later on, there's not a trace of anybody on board. A speculation based on an actual incident, one of the unsolved mysteries of the sea. The movie's not much, but Lugosi's good.

Flashback: A Few Nights At the Movies

    I once watched "The Maltese Falcon" in a tiny, storefront theater on Cannery Row. It was 1975, and I was in my Jack Kerouac phase, bumming around the country in a well-traveled Ford Mustang with money I'd saved in the Air Force. What was distinctive about Monterey's 812 Cinema, apart from its hole-in-the-wall size, was that there were no seats, just pillows and cushions on the floor, so you more or less reclined while you watched the movie. Which could be a problem if you were real tired. I think I fell asleep. 

    I once watched Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" in the Stiftskeller in the Memorial Union  at the University of Wisconsin. The Stiftskeller was a small room just off the Rathskeller (a much larger room), and the screening was probably put on by one of the campus film societies. The place was packed, standing rom only, so I stood. Through the whole movie. This was the late '60s, before VHS, DVD and TCM. Before cable. Before video stores. Before streaming. Back then, if something like "The Great Dictator" turned up and you wanted to see it, you went. There was no guarantee you'd get another chance. Also, there weren't a lot of indoor smoking regulations and a lot of people smoked, which added to the ambience, I suppose. The Stiftskeller was definitely smoky.

    I once watched "Night of the Living Dead" at the Badger Drive-In in Madison. This was in the late '70s, and it was one of the films on a dusk-to-dawn quintuple feature, along with "Toolbox Murders", "Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre", "Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon" and "Mansion of the Doomed". I don't remember whether it was my brother Bill or me who saw the ad in the paper, but the moment it crossed our radar, we knew we had to go. We weren't the only ones who did, but we might've been the only ones who stayed awake through all five movies. As a public service, the concession stand provided free coffee and donuts to the survivors around 3:30 in the morning.

    I once watched "Tony Rome" and "The Green Berets" on a double bill at another Wisconsin drive-in. I don't remember what town it was, but the year would've been 1968. I had a summer job on a traffic survey crew with the state highway department, and we always stayed in cheap motels when we were on the road away from Madison. On this occasion, our motel was about a mile down the road from a drive-in theater, so as evening approached, I hiked down there, walked in the exit, found a place to sit under an available speaker, turned up the volume and watched both movies. I haven't seen "The Green Berets" since. 

    After 70 years or more watching flickering images flash across various screens, some experiences are bound to stand out, and the more offbeat they are, the more likely they are to stick in your memory. For me, the best was this:

    About 25 years ago, there was a screening of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in Seattle's Gas Works Park. It was summer, so it was warm, and people brought food and blankets and found places to sit on the hill facing the iron wreckage that was once the city's gas works. Lang's vision of a dystopian future played out with all that industrial junk in the background, under a full moon, while a live orchestra played an original score timed to sync with the film. As a moviegoing event, it was magical, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. 

    Sometimes the stars line up and the cinema gods look your way and something comes along that's just too good (or crazy, or comical, or weird) to pass up. You can't anticipate an experience like that. When it happens, you've just got to go. 

The Moderns (1988)

 

THE MODERNS  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alan Rudolph

    Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino, Genevieve Bujold,

    Geraldine Chaplin, John Lone, Wallace Shawn, 

    Kevin J. O'Connor, Elsa Raven, Isabel Serra, Ali Giron

Alan Rudolph's whimsical reflection  on art and deception takes place in Paris in 1926. (Montreal plays Paris.) Keith Carradine plays Nicky Hart, a painter whose copies of Cezanne and Modigliani are so good, you can't tell them from the real thing. He's got an agent, a gallery owner played by Genevieve Bujold, but his work hasn't sold, so he keeps himself in oils and cognac by drawing newspaper cartoons. This is the Lost Generation, so Hemingway's around, played by Kevin J. O'Connor, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and a few unidentified others. There's a rubber baron (John Lone), a vulgar industrialist who views the world and everything in it through the prism of money, and his wife (Linda Fiorentino), who's secretly still married to Hart. A wealthy collector (Geraldine Chaplin), who tries to entice Hart into doing a little forgery. A newspaper columnist (Wallace Shawn), who can't stop talking about suicide. And that covers most of the key players. It's Rudolph in total command of his craft, working with a cast that's perfectly in tune with what he's up to, and it's a sometimes surreal comedy ending with a series of devious jokes about the pretensions of the art world and the people in it. If that's something that interests you, or you just want to spend a couple of hours hanging out in Hemingway's Paris, check it out.

Samba (2014)

SAMBA  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Oliver Nakache, Éric Toledano

    Omar Sy, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Tahar Rahim,

    Youngar Fall, Issakla Sawadogo, Izïa Higelin

A French movie about the tentative relationship between an undocumented immigrant from Senegal, scuffling to survive and escape deportation, and a burned-out caseworker who has issues of her own. Life in the shadows. Love on the edge. Nicely acted by Sy and Gainsbourg. 

Marlowe (2022)

 

MARLOWE  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Neil Jordan

    Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange,

    Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, Ian Hart,

    Colm Meaney, Adele Akinnouye-Agbaje,

    Seána Kerslake, François Arnaud, Patrick Muldoon

Liam Neeson adds his name to the long list of actors who have played Philip Marlowe in a twisty noir mystery set in 1939 Los Angeles. The story's a puzzle involving the corpse of a guy who may not be dead and certain items being smuggled from Mexico, and there's more than a hint of "Chinatown", with a lot of corruption, a troubled mother and daughter (Jessica Lange and Diane Kruger, who look enough alike to be convincing), and Danny Huston as a character who conspicuously resembles the monster his father played in the earlier film. It's a movie whose parts don't always match up. The music's anachronistic, the cinematography (which director Neil Jordan admits was influenced by "Blade Runner") looks a little too crisp and clean, and some of the turns the plot takes are implausibly convenient. Plus, Neeson at 70 seems a little mature to be playing Marlowe. It's enhanced by an odd sense of dislocation - it was shot in Spain and Ireland - and a script that never stops throwing you curveballs. Sometimes there are movies you like without knowing quite why, and sometimes that's part of the puzzle. I guess for me, one of those movies is "Marlowe".

Salambo (1911)

 

SALAMBO  (1911)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arturo Ambrosio

    Gigetta Morano, Giovanni Coppo, Oreste Grandi,

    Alberto Capozzi, Ercole Vaser, Maria Bay

Some mercenaries help the Carthaginians fight off the invading Romans, but then the Carthaginians try to cheat the mercenaries out of their payment in gold, which turns out to be a bad idea. Italian filmmakers were the first to realize there was money to be made (and spent) on grandiose historical epics. This one has hundreds of extras, opulent sets and costumes, horses, camels and a lion. You can bet Cecil B. DeMille was watching and taking notes. 

Maxxxine (2024)

 

MAXXXINE  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ti West

    Mia Goth, Simon Prast, Kevin Bacon, Deborah Geffner,

    Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Halsey, Lily Collins,

    Chloe Farnworth, Giancarlo Esposito, Zachary Mooren,

    Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Sophie Thatcher

The third entry in the Ti West/Mia Goth horror trilogy finds Maxine Minx, the sole survivor of the massacre in "X", in Hollywood, still working in the skin trade, but determined to make it big in mainstream films. Also, there's a serial killer on the loose, the "night stalker," whose victims all appear to be connected to Maxine. West is at least as interested in the workings of the movie industry as he is in the maniac-on-the-loose storyline, and it's another picture that makes you thankful to be living anywhere except Hollywood. It's set in 1985, and it has the look of a low-budget thriller viewed on an old VHS tape. (Be kind. Rewind.) The synth-driven musical score fits the period, too, along with Kevin Bacon, chewing everything except the Hollywood sign as  an obnoxious private eye. It's Mia Goth's movie, though. With an on-screen producer's credit and her name above the title, there's no doubt she's the star, and she plays her role with a naked yearning for the attention her character believes she deserves. Maxine herself wouldn't have it any other way.

Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Stephen Frears

    Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Christopher Guest, Will Young,

    Kelly Reilly, Thelma Barlow, Natalia Tena, Toby Jones,

    Anna Brewster, Rosalind Halstead, Sarah Solemani

Judi Dench plays a wealthy widow who finds a productive use for her time and money when she buys a derelict London theater and hires Bob Hoskins to run the place. The vaudeville-style revues they put on are a hit at first, but when copycat competition causes attendance to decline, she comes up with a daring idea: naked girls. The time is the 1930s and stodgy old England has never seen anything like it, and as the country heads into World War Two, the theater, running continuously, even during the Blitz, becomes a symbol of steadfastness - and a sense of fun - in the face of peril. It's an affectionate look at a time gone by, and a compelling testament to the notion that a few boobs and backsides, artfully exhibited, aren't necessarily a bad thing. 

Murder Rock: Dancing Death

 

MURDER ROCK: DANCING DEATH  (1984)  ¢ ¢

    D: Lucio Fulci

    Olga Karlatos, Ray Lovelock, Claudio Cassinelli,

    Cosimo Cinieri, Belinda Busato, Maria Vittoria Tolazzi,

    Carla Buzzanca, Angela Lemerman, Silvia Collatina

A killer stalks the students at a New York dance school, dispatching them with chloroform and a hatpin. Whodunit? Who cares?

Murder At Yellowstone City (2022)

MURDER AT YELLOWSTONE CITY  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Gray 

    Gabriel Byrne, Isaiah Mustafa, Thomas Jane, 

    Anna Camp, Aimee Garcia, Scottie Thompson,

    Isabella Ruby, Richard Dreyfuss, John Ales

When a gold prospector strikes it rich and turns up murdered, the local sheriff wastes no time finding a convenient suspect, a black man who just rode into town. He promises a trial followed by a quick hanging, but the woman who runs the livery stable turns up evidence that shows he's put the wrong guy in jail. There are more murders, with people getting their throats cut, followed by a climactic gunfight in which many more people are shot and killed. There are some interesting wrinkles in this: John Ales and Richard Dreyfuss as a couple of old guys who would be flying a pride flag over the saloon if they weren't in 1881 Montana, and a loose community of women who in most ways are smarter than the men. Most of the characters have secrets, and most are dealing with crippling loss. Tense performances by Scottie Thompson as the murder victim's grieving widow and Gabriel Byrne as a no-nonsense lawman who's more committed to the appearance of justice than the real thing. 

Murderdrome (2013)

 

MURDERDROME  (2013)  ¢ ¢

    D: Daniel Armstrong

    Daisy Masterman, Rachel Blackwood, Jake Brown,

    Demonique Deluxe, Gerry Mahoney, Max Marchione,

    Pepper Minx, Mary Poppenskulls, Dayna Seville

Tough-talking roller-derby babes take on a witch queen from hell. Choppings, stabbings, burnings and beheadings follow, backed by a death-metal soundtrack. Bare-bones horror, made in Australia for next to no money and shot at night, so the cast and crew could go to their day jobs. Plotting and character development are minimal, but it's got attitude, and the effects look better than you might expect. The girls never take off their skates.

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)

 

ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING  

(1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

    Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Hugh Williams,

    Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, Emrys Jones,

    Googie Withers, Pamela Brown, Joyce Redman,

    Hay Petrie, Robert Helpmann, Peter Ustinov

Six crewmen on an RAF bomber bail out over the Netherlands after an attack on Stuttgart. Courageous Dutch villagers hide them from the Nazis and help them escape. World War Two heroics done entirely without music, which you notice after a while by its absence. Two early scenes in the plane stand out: a fourth-wall-bashing bit in which the camera pans around and the flyers take turns introducing themselves, and the part moments later when they exchange stories about the girls they've met in Stuttgart, even as they're on their way to bomb them. The editor was David Lean. A young (and remarkably thin) Peter Ustinov appears briefly as a parish priest. One sign that this might be a Powell and Pressburger film: The plane, after the men have jumped, sputters back to life and continues to fly on its own.

Free (2022)

 

FREE  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Autumn de Wilde 

    Florence Welch, Bill Nighy

A music video for the Florence & the Machine song "Free", shot on location in Kyiv and dedicated to the people of Ukraine. Florence (as "Herself") delivers the tune and dances with spastic abandon, while Bill Nighy (as "Her Anxiety") makes a phone call.

Justine: The Misfortunes of Virtue (1977)

JUSTINE: THE MISFORTUNES OF VIRTUE 

    D: Chris Boger                                           (1977)  ¢ ¢

    Koo Stark, Martin Potter, Lydia Lisle,

    Katherine Kath, Hope Jackman, Louis Ife 

Cast out of the convent, an innocent young girl tries to safeguard her virtue in a world that never stops trying to take it away. Some of de Sade's philosophy comes through in this, but it's overplayed, episodic and depraved without being all that interesting. Koo Stark had a brief fling in the spotlight when she hooked up romantically with Britain's Prince Andrew, but her participation in movies like this one did not play well at Buckingham Palace. Roger Deakins did the camerawork. 

His Double Life (1933)

HIS DOUBLE LIFE  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Arthur Hopkins

    Roland Young, Lillian Gish, Montagu Love,

    Charles Richman, Lucy Beaumont, Lumsden Hare

A famous but reclusive artist tries to dodge the spotlight when a case of mistaken identity makes everybody think he's dead. Roland Young plays the artist with Topper-like befuddlement. Lillian Gish, whose specialty during the silent era was heavy-duty drama, tries out her screwball skills and shows she's good at comedy, too. 

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

 

KINDS OF KINDNESS  (2024)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Yorgos Lanthimos

    Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe,

    Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Hunter Schafer

Yorgos Lanthimos follows up "Poor Things" with a trilogy of oddities in which the same actors play different roles in three loosely connected stories. In the first, Jesse Plemmons plays a corporate toady with Willem Dafoe as his godlike boss. In the second, Plemmons plays a cop who suspects his wife (Emma Stone) may not really be his wife. In the third, Plemmons and Stone are members of a cult, bombing around in a sporty Dodge Challenger and trying to find a woman with a specific set of attributes, who they hope will be able to raise the dead. It's all more strange than compelling, and the stories feel a little incomplete, but you don't want to look away. You'll probably miss something if you do, and with Lanthimos at the controls, you never know what that will be. Bonus highlight, if you stay all the way to the end: Stone's loopy, parking-lot dance routine. 

Maciste In Hell (1925)

MACISTE IN HELL  (1925)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Guido Brignone 

    Bartolomeo Pagano, Umberto Guarracino,

    Elena Sangro, Lucia Zanussi, Pauline Polaire,

    Franz Sala, Domenico Serra, Mario Saio

A legendary strongman gets tricked by a devil and ends up in hell, where there's a new rule: If he kisses a female demon within three days, he has to stay forever. And with all those provocative demons lounging around in their pre-Code costumes, it's going to be tough. Fortunately, there's another rule: If you're mentioned in a little kid's prayers back on earth, you win a get-out-of-hell free card. It's an old-style vision of hell - the Italians always knew how to do that - but the technique looks primitive - more 1910 than 1925. Whoever landed the pitchfork concession made a bundle on this. 

Quote File / Take 27

 

Some lines from the movies of Terence Stamp:

"I've said it before and I'll say it again: No more 

  fucking ABBA."

  Stamp in "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert"

"Well, you did your job, so I suppose I can't kill 

  your wife."

  Stamp to Dalip Singh in "Get Smart"

"The universe is full  0f surprises." 

  Stamp in "Red Planet"

"A woman like you does more damage than she 

  can conceivably imagine." 

  Stamp to Julie Christie in "Far From the Madding Crowd"

"I love the movies."

  Stamp in "My Wife Is an Actress"

"No one ever really disappears. They're always 

  around somewhere." 

  Stamp in "Last Night In Soho"

                                             (1938-2025)

Lawless Heart (2001)

 

LAWLESS HEART  (2001)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Tom Hunsinger, Neil Hunter

    Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander, Douglas Henshall, 

    Sukie Smith, Clémentine Célarié, Josephine Butler,

    Ellie Haddington, Stuart Laing, Dominic Hall

A bittersweet comedy about lives connecting and coming apart in the aftermath of a funeral. The story spins out and doubles back on itself as various characters move into and out of the spotlight. A dog, a scarf, a corkscrew, an old movie projector and some coconuts all figure into the script. Keep an eye on Douglas Henshall as a fereeloading opportunist named Tim and see if he doesn't remind you of an "Alfie"-era Michael Caine.

Helen of Troy (1956)

 

HELEN OF TROY  (1956)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Wise

    Rossana Podesta, Jacques Sernas, Cedric Hardwicke,

    Niall MacGinnis, Torin Thatcher, Harry Andrews,

    Brigitte Bardot, Stanley Baker, Robert Douglas,

    Ronald Lewis, Nora Swinburne, Janette Scott

The Trojan War, with massive battle scenes, lavish production design, thousands of extras and a talky script. Oh, and there's a big, wooden horse. You'll need to brush up on your Homer to keep track of all the characters, but there is an on-screen credit for "Bacchanal Choreography," so at least they got that right. Brigitte Bardot has a supporting role as Andraste, Helen's devoted slave, but if you're making a movie about Helen of Troy and Brigitte Bardot's in it, shouldn't Helen be played by Brigitte Bardot?

La Chimera (2023)

 

LA CHIMERA  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alice Rohrwacher

    Josh O'Connor, Carol Duarte, Isabella Rossellini,

    Vincenzo Nemolato, Giuliano Mantovani,

    Ramona Fiorini, Gian Piero Capretto

An archeologist just out of prison for grave robbing falls back in with the gang of thieves who set him up. With an uncanny ability to locate buried antiquities, he and his divining rod go back to work, and what he uncovers this time could either make him rich or get him killed. There's a lot of early Fellini in this, with the outlaws doubling as a ragtag group of actors, and a touch of magic realism and a dash of "The Lost King" thrown in. And there's a moral: If you want to make a killing in contraband Etruscan art, be rich. If you're not, they'll let you do the dirty work, but when it comes to the big score, and maybe staying out of jail, forget it. You're screwed.

How To Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965)

HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI  (1965)  ¢ ¢

    D: William Asher

    Annette Funicello, Dwayne Hickman, Mickey Rooney,

    Buster Keaton, Brian Donlevy, Harvey Lembeck,

    Beverly Adams, Jody McRae, Len Lesser,

    Ilene Tsu, Marianne Gaba, Frankie Avalon

Frankie's off in the South Pacific with the Naval Reserve, but the rest of the gang is still hanging out at the beach. The plot? It don't matter. Buster Keaton, Mickey Rooney and Brian Donlevy are in it, and there's some back projection that looks terrible (but who cares?), and Dobie Gillis fills in for Frankie, because Annette has to not hook up with somebody (and she's still the only girl in Malibu not wearing a bikini). An undemanding time filler, from a more innocent time maybe, innocuous, even by "Beach Party" standards. The Kingsmen show up long enough to play a tune, but it's not "Louie Louie".

Lourdes (2009)

 

LOURDES  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jessica Hausner

    Sylvie Testud, Léa Seydoux, Bruno Tedeschini,

    Elina Löwensohn, Gilette Barbier, Gerhard Liebmann

For those not steeped in Catholic lore and legend, Lourdes is a place in France where the Virgin Mary is said to have made a personal appearance, witnessed by a peasant girl named Bernadette, in 1858. For a long time since then, Lourdes has been a place where crippled, sick, paralyzed and otherwise debilitated pilgrims go to pray to the Virgin for relief from their afflictions. If the way it's depicted in this quiet, meditative movie is accurate, Lourdes isn't just about faith and healing. It's a whole tourist industry that makes the Dickeyville Grotto look like, well, the Dickeyville Grotto. (You don't know about the Dickeyville Grotto? Then never mind.) One of those who comes to Lourdes is a young woman in a wheelchair, a paraplegic named Christine, played with beatific stillness by Sylvie Testud. She admits she goes on these religious excursions not so much because she believes, but to escape her confined existence. (She prefers cultural outings to religious ones.) To reveal what happens to Christine at Lourdes would reveal too much, but the movie tracks her stay there with restraint and a documentary-like detachment that both acknowledges and transcends the kitsch that surrounds her. The rationalizations the tour group leaders provide for God's role in all this seem pretty hollow. Testud's performance is anything but. 

Lady In Cement (1968)

 

LADY IN CEMENT  (1968)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gordon Douglas

    Frank Sinatra, Raquel Welch, Dan Blocker,

    Richard Conte, Martin Gabel, Lainie Kazan,

    Pat Henry, Richard Deacon, Virginia Wood

Frank's second outing as wiseguy private eye Tony Rome, who's out diving off his boat one day when he comes across a woman at the bottom of the sea with her feet encased in a block of cement. That leads to an investigation involving a gangster (Martin Gabel), a giant (Dan Blocker) and Raquel Welch as a woman who has money and a drinking problem and looks real good in a bikini. Sinatra gets to act tough and tell people off, which apparently he liked to do, but the actor who gets your attention is Blocker, who does just enough to make you wonder what he might've done with a part like Lennie in "Of Mice and Men". Watch for the references to "Bonanza" and a once-famous commercial for canned vegetables, and consider how many people these days would even get the joke. 

Longlegs (2024)

 

LONGLEGS  (2o24)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Osgood Perkins

    Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood,

    Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby

An FBI agent, psychic or autistic or possibly both, gets involved in the hunt for a serial killer played by a bonkers Nicolas Cage. Suspension of disbelief could be hard to come by with this one, unless you look at the whole movie as a sort of fucked-up dream. None of it really adds up, but Maika Monroe is effectively understated as the agent, and Cage's wigged-out performance could've been modeled on Tiny Tim.

Bowanga Bowanga (1951)

 

BOWANGA BOWANGA  (1951)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Norman Dawn

    Lewis Wilson, Morton C. Thompson, Don Orlando,

    Dana Wilson, Charleen Hawks, Frances Dubay

Pith-helmeted adventurers are captured by "the white sirens of Africa," an unlikely tribe of female warriors who are in the market for a few good men. The amazon queen wants to take the biggest and hunkiest of the men for herself and sacrifice the others to the Fire God, but the rest of the girls think that's a terrible waste of men and stage a rebellion. So there's some singing and dancing, and a couple of catfights, and two of the men get into wrestling matches with two of the women, and eventually the guys make their escape because one of them was thoughtful enough to pack a small arsenal of fireworks to bring along on the expedition. Which is, like, a spoiler, I guess, but it's useful to know that if you're in Africa being chased by 20 or 30 savage women, a cache of fireworks could be your key to survival.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)

KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Norman Foster 

    Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, Robert Newton, 

    Jay Novello, Grizelda Harvey, Aminta Dyne

A damaged war veteran, plagued by bouts of uncontrolled violence, kills a man in a bar, meets a nice girl, and gets blackmailed into doing some dirty work in an efficiently made him noir shot in Hollywood but set in foggy London. Nicely underplayed by Fontaine and Lancaster, with a nasty turn by Robert Newton as the hoodlum who sets Burt up. The ending feels a little contrived, but that's a great film noir title, don't you think?

Is Anybody There? (2008)

 

IS ANYBODY THERE?  (2008)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Crowley

    Michael Caine, Bill Milner, Anne-Marie Duff,

    David Morrissey, Peter Vaughan, Leslie Phillips,

    Sylvia Sims, Linzey Cocker, Rosemary Harris

An old magician (Michael Caine) moves into a retirement home where he befriends the 12-year-old son of the couple who run the place. The magician is losing his memory. The boy is obsessed with ghosts. The old man knows he's fading and he's fighting it off, looking back on a life filled with love and regret. The kid knows more about death than most 12-year-olds, and wants to know what comes next. The movie leans toward sweetness at times, and if Caine's cantankerous performance doesn't entirely offset that, he at last makes you not mind too much. 

Going Hollywood (1933)

 

GOING HOLLYWOOD  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Raoul Walsh

    Marion Davies, Bing Crosby, Fifi D'Orsay,

    Stuart Erwin, Ned Sparks, Patsy Kelly

William Randolph Hearst's girlfriend plays a French teacher who quits her job and follows a radio crooner to Hollywood where he's scheduled to make a movie. Bing sings "Temptation", the title tune and a few other things, Marion gets a musical number or two, and Patsy Kelly makes the most of her first feature film role as Marion's Hollywood pal. Surprise highlight: a group called the Radio Rogues, whose vocal impressions include Kate Smith and Crosby rivals Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallee.

Lucky Luke (2009)

 

LUCKY LUKE  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: James Huth

    Jean Dujardin, Sylvie Testud, Melvil Poupaud,

    Michaël Youn, Alexandra Lamy, Daniel Prévost

The president of the United States, facing a tough reelection campaign, dispatches a gunman named Lucky Luke to clean up a place called Daisy Town, where he plans to sink the last spike in the Transcontinental Railroad. An absurdist French spoof on westerns, both spaghetti and traditional, based on a comic book. It plays like a cartoon, sometimes funny, sometimes silly, and usually both at once. (There's even a talking horse.) Calamity Jane, Jesse James and Billy the Kid all show up. They bring their guns. 

The Last Vampyre (1993)

THE LAST VAMPYRE  (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Tim Sullivan 

    Jeremy Brett, Edward Hardwicke, Roy Marsden,

    Keith Barron, Yolanda Vazquez, Maurice Denham,

    Richard Dempsey, Juliet Aubrey, Jason Hetherington

Sherlock Holmes investigates some mysterious deaths that the local townspeople believe to be the work of a vampire. They think they know who the vampire is, too, but Holmes suspects they're wrong and seeks a more rational solution. Most vampire movies, you know who the vampire is and you're just watching and wondering how many necks he'll bite before he steps out into the sun or gets a wooden stake through the heart. This one's a mystery and keeps you guessing. Jeremy Brett makes a stuffy Sherlock - he played the role on British television for about ten years - and Roy Marsden as the alleged vampire resembles Richard E. Grant just enough to make you wonder what Grant could do as Dracula. 

The Last Movie (1971)

 

THE LAST MOVIE  (1971)  ¢ ¢

    D: Dennis Hopper

    Dennis Hopper, Julie Adams, Stella Garcia,

    Don Gordon, Tomas Milian, Donna Baccala,

    Roy Engel, Samuel Fuller, Severn Darden,

    Toni Basil, Kris Kristofferson, Sylvia Miles,

    Rod Cameron, Peter Fonda, Warren Finnerty,

    Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn,

    John Phillip Law, Jim Mitchum, Henry Jaglom

Dennis Hopper's deranged followup to "Easy Rider", about a Hollywood stuntman who hangs around a Peruvian location after the shooting wraps and everybody else goes home. Hopper called it the cinematic equivalent of abstract expressionism - a film about film as film - but it's also self-indulgent, incoherent and most of the time, just plain boring. There's some impressive stuntwork , the cinematography's by László Kovacs, and Sam Fuller plays himself directing the movie within the movie, but if this is what the world looks like from inside Dennis Hopper's head, it's not a place you'd ever want to be. One way to make watching it more interesting might be to try to guess what chemicals the cast and crew were dabbling in, and how much.

Kill Your Darlings (2013)

 

KILL YOUR DARLINGS  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Krokidas

    Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Michael C. Hall,

    Ben Foster, Jack Huston, David Cross, John Cullum,

    Jennifer Jason Leigh, Elizabeth Olsen, Erin Drake

The birth of the Beats. How Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr came together at Columbia University in the 1940s and started what would become a literary revolution. Allen's the new kid, a freshman just arrived from Paterson, New Jersey. Lucien's the brilliant, arrogant instigator who introduces hm to the jazz scene and the gay haunts on Christopher Street. Burroughs is experimenting with whatever drugs he can get his hands on, and Kerouac, the ex-football hero and sometime merchant seaman, has already written a million words. And there's the matter of David Kammerer, whose obsession with Lucien would have consequences for all of them. "Beat", a movie from 2000 with Courtney Love and Kiefer Sutherland, covered some of the same territory, but this one does it better, going deeper into the energy, camaraderie, intellectual daring and freewheeling, borderline madness that drove the Beats. You can almost taste the booze and smell the cigarette smoke. 

Movie Star Moment: Christopher Lee

 

Christopher Lee as Monsieur Labisse

in "Hugo" (2011)

    Christopher Lee was in his late 80s when he appeared in Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" as the old bookseller Monsieur Labisse. It was one of Lee's last screen roles. 

    Monsieur Labisse presides over a bookshop in the Paris train station where much of the movie takes place. Thanks to Dante Ferretti's set design, the shop is more vertical than horizontal, with ladders and staircases and books piled up everywhere. Monsieur Labisse looks down on everything from a tall desk in the middle of the room. 

    The first time Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle takes Hugo into the shop and introduces him to Monsieur Labisse, the old man gives him a look that freezes Hugo in his tracks. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a boy who lives in the walls of the train station and survives at least partly by stealing. Whether Monsieur Labisse suspects that or not is unclear, but the look he gives Hugo conveys the unmistakable messsage that walking off with anything from the bookshop would be less than a good idea. 

    What makes the look even more intimidating is that it's coming not just from the old bookseller, but the actor playing him, and for viewers who know anything about Lee's career, that means one thing: Dracula. It's an extra dimension of dread. 

    Monsieur Labisse turns out to be much less forbidding than he first appears, but in the bookshop, at least, Hugo won't be taking any chances. Heck, if you were a 12-year-old kid getting the evil eye from Christopher Lee, you'd be intimidated, too.

God's Gift To Women (1931)

 

GOD'S GIFT TO WOMEN  (1931)  ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Curtiz

    Frank Fay, Laura La Plante, Joan Blondell,

    Yola D'Avril, Louise Brooks, Charles Winninger,

    Alan Mobray, Margaret Livingston, Tyrell Davis

A frantic and somewhat desperate pre-Code farce about a notorious womanizer who finally meets the girl of his dreams and can't convince anybody that this time he's serious. Frank Fay is a curious choice to play the alleged Don Juan: part Robin Williams, part Danny Kaye, part Edward Everett Horton and part Liberace, if you can imagine something like that. Louise Brooks does a nice bit as (what else?) a party girl, but the fact that she's billed tenth tells you something about the status of her career at the time. She gets one great closeup, though. It's almost worth watching the movie for that.

The File On Thelma Jordan (1949)

 

THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN  (1949)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Siodmak

    Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Paul Kelly,

    Joan Tetzel, Stanley Ridges, Richard Rober,

    Minor Watson, Barry Kelley, Kasey Rogers

An assistant D.A. and a woman who fears her house might be burglarized slip into an adulterous affair. Then the woman's house is burglarized, the woman's indicted for murder, and the assistant D.A. gets assigned to prosecute the case. So it's complicated, and more than a little implausible, and like "The Furies", released the following year, we're expected to believe that Barbara Stanwyck would fall head-over-heels for Wendell Corey, who's a good actor but the world's least charismatic leading man. It's noir, so it does not end well, but nobody ever came out of a fiery car wreck to die more beautifully than Barbara Stanwyck. 

A Dandy In Aspic (1968)

 

A DANDY IN ASPIC  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Anthony Mann, Laurence Harvey

    Laurence Harvey, Mia Farrow, Tom Courtenay, 

    Per Oscarsson, Harry Andrews, Lionel Stander,

    Peter Cook, Calvin Lockhart, Michael Trubshawe

Bond-era spy stuff starring Laurence Harvey as a double agent assigned to carry out a hit in Berlin. Mia Farrow plays a globe-trotting photographer who seems to show up everywhere he does. Could she be an agent? Everybody else is. There's a tension and remoteness about Harvey's performance that fits a guy who's been in the trade, on both sides, since his teens, and knows he can't trust anybody. Farrow's party-girl act is all surface and no depth. (She doesn't get much to work with.) Tom Courtenay seems miscast as an arrogant prick assigned to keep an eye on Harvey and help out if needed. Lionel Stander chews it up as an old-school Soviet spy. Harry Andrews plays the head of British intelligence. It's a decently done genre piece with a Quincy Jones score that owes something to Maurice Jarre, and some amusing sexual innuendo. (Watch the way Courtenay brandishes his walking stick in a confrontation with Harvey, and Farrow, in a boyishly mod cap and trousers, straddling a tree branch.) Harvey took over the direction when Mann died during the shoot. Farrow gave birth to "Rosemary's Baby" the same year.

Empire Records (1995)

 

EMPIRE RECORDS  (1995)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Allan Moyle

    Anthony LaPaglia, Rory Cochrane, Robin Tunney,

    Liv Tyler, Renée Zellweger, Johnny Whitworth,

    Ethan Embry, Coyote Shivers, Maxwell Caulfield,

    James "Kimo" Wills, Ben Bode, Brendan Sexton III

Here's a movie for anybody who's old enough or young enough to remember record stores. The storytelling's minimal - the kids who work in a record store hang out all day and stuff happens - but the energy's infectious. It's where "Clerks" meets "Dazed and Confused", a throwback to a time before streaming and Spotify, and a giddy valentine to the reckless passion of adolescence and the transformative power of rock & roll. An underrated gem, nicely played by a good, young cast. 

Filibus (1915)

 

FILIBUS  (1915)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Mario Roncoroni

    Valeria Creti, Giovanni Spano, Cristina Ruspoli,

    Mario Mariani, Filippo Vallino

A baroness with her own airship and a gift for disguise competes with a famous detective to unmask a notorious burglar named Filibus, the catch being that the burglar is the baroness herself. A title in the trailer from 2019 calls this "the 1915 Italian Feminist Steampunk Jewel Thief Cross-Dressing Aviatrix Thriller of the Year!" and that describes it pretty well. A lively, outlandish fantasy adventure with a playfully androgynous performance by Valeria Creti in the title role. With a nod to science fiction and a female protagonist who's bold, independent, resourceful and flexible in the area of gender roles, the film was years ahead of its time. 

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. 

St. Ives (1976)

 

ST. IVES  (1976)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: J. Lee Thompson

    Charles Bronson, Jacqueline Bisset, John Houseman,

    Maximilian Schell, Harry Guardino, Harris Yulin,

    Dana Elcar, Michael Lerner, Elisha Cook Jr.,

    Daniel J. Travanti, Robert Englund, Jeff Goldblum

Charles Bronson plays a crime-reporter-turned-would-be-novelist whose book's not going anywhere, so he takes a job as go-between in a payoff involving some stolen journals. It gets way more complicated than that - the narrative lost me completely after an hour or so - but by then you kind of want to stick around just to find out what the hell is going on. The Los Angeles locations look appropriately gritty, and Bronson, as usual, is bulletproof.

Harris Yulin

(1937-2025)

Carry On Don't Lose Your Head (1967)

 

CARRY ON DON'T LOSE YOUR HEAD  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gerald Thomas

    Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey,

    Joan Sims, Jim Dale, Peter Butterworth, Dany Robin

In late 18th-century France, the mob is screaming for blood, heads are rolling off the guillotine, and a rogue agent called the Black Fingernail is giving the revolutionary authorities a lot of trouble. Frantically paced silliness, with the Carry On Gang cutting up all over the place. True to form, the characters have names like Citizen Bidet, Citizen Camembert, the Duc de Pommefrit and Sir Rodney Effing (with two "f"s). Also, Sid James with a lisp. That's Carry On.