Gideon's Daughter (2005)

 

GIDEON'S DAUGHTER  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Stephen Poliakov

    Bill Nighy, Miranda Richardson, Emily Blunt,

    Robert Lindsay, David Westhead, Tom Hardy,

    Ronni Ancona, Samantha Whittaker, Joanna Page

Bill Nighy plays a public relations guru estranged from his college-bound daughter. Miranda Richardson plays a convenience-store clerk whose son has died in a bicycle accident. They're an odd couple, but they hit it off in a low-key character study produced by the BBC. The death of Princess Diana and the lead-up to the new millennium provide historical context and subplots. Emily Blunt plays Nighy's daughter. 

Project Moon Base (1953)

 

PROJECT MOON BASE  (1953)  ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Talmadge

    Donna Martell, Ross Ford, Larry Johns, 

    Hayden Rorke, Herb Jacobs, Barbara Morrison

Astronauts on a mission to take pictures in the lead-up to a moon landing are forced to land on the moon themselves when something goes wrong. Unexciting Cold War sci-fi with the accent on low-budget technology more than high-concept storytelling. (For a movie released more than 15 years before the actual event, the lunar landing vehicle looks a lot like the real thing.) Robert Heinlein wrote the script, and the sporty shorts and helmets the astronauts wear are cute. 

Battle Circus (1953)

 

BATTLE CIRCUS  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Brooks

    Humphrey Bogart, June Allyson, Keenan Wynn,

    Robert Keith, William Campbell, Philip Ahn,

    Patricia Tiernan, Adele Longmire, Steve Forrest

Major Humphrey Bogart and Lieutenant June Allyson find they're falling for each other while patching up the wounded in Korea. The love story's formulaic, but there's some tension in  the battle scenes. The makers of "M*A*S*H" took a few cues from this. 

Meteor (1979)

 

METEOR  (1979)  ¢ ¢

    D: Ronald Neame

    Sean Connery, Karl Malden, Natalie Wood,

    Brian Keith, Martin Landau, Joseph Campanella,

    Henry Fonda, Trevor Howard, Richard Dysart

A space rock five miles wide is hurtling toward Earth at 30,000 miles an hour, and could cause a new ice age if it hits us. The Yanks and the Russkies have the weapons out there to save the planet, but only if they combine forces and sync their systems to blow the thing out of the sky. A '70s disaster thriller from American International, with the mandatory all-star cast and some cheesy-looking special effects. Favorite bad-movie bit: Toward the end, the main players and a couple dozen other rocket scientists are making their way through an old subway tunnel under the Hudson River when the walls give way the the river floods in. They emerge completely covered in mud, except for two hookers who look like they're just getting ready to go to work. Henry Fonda, who's not down there in the subway tunnel, plays "The President." 

Made In England (2024)

 

MADE IN ENGLAND  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: David Hinton

Martin Scorsese plays tour guide on a journey through the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who teamed up in the 1940s on a series of movies that combined a groundbreaking use of Technicolor with undercurrents of mysticism. Clips from "A Matter of Life and Death", "Black Narcissus" and "The Red Shoes", intercut with shots from "Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull", show the direct influence the Powell & Pressburger films had on Scorsese, who first started watching them as a kid on a black-and-white TV. He's been watching them ever since. 

Telefon (1977)

 

TELEFON  (1977)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Don Siegel

    Charles Bronson, Lee Remick, Donald Pleasance

    Tyne Daly, Alan Badel, Patrick Magee, Sheree North,

    Frank Marth, Helen Page Camp, Iggie Wolfington

Passable pulp spy stuff with Charles Bronson as a Russian agent dispatched to the States to stop a rogue KBG official from starting World War Three. The credibility quotient is not high, but Don Siegel brings it off with his usual efficiency, and Tyne Daly steals a scene or two as a computer analyst with the CIA. Stirling Siliphant worked on the script. 

The Crime Is Mine (2023)

 

THE CRIME IS MINE  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: François Ozon

    Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Rebecca Marder, Isabelle Huppert,

    Fabric Luchini, Dany Boon, André Dussollier

When a starving actress is accused of murder, her flatmate, an equally hungry lawyer, defends her in court. Which is just the beginning of this screwball comedy, a period social satire with a distinctly feminist edge. It can't quite sustain the pace it starts out with, but the actors pull you along. If you aren't completely fluent in French, be ready to read subtitles real fast. 

Screen Test / Take 22

 Match the  following music performers 

with the movies they acted in:

                                         1. Mick Jagger

                                         2. Elvis Presley

                                         3. Joan Jett

                                         4. Art Garfunkel

                                         5. k.d. lang

                                         6. Bob Dylan

                                         7. Marianne Faithfull

                                         8. David Bowie

                                         9. Madonna

                                       10. Ringo Starr

                              a. "Light of Day"

                              b. "The Magic Christian"

                              c. "The Man Who Fell to Earth"

                              d. "Ned Kelly"

                              e. "Shanghai Surprise"

                              f.  "Carnal Knowledge"

                              g. "The Girl On the Motorcycle"

                              h. "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid"

                              i.  "Salmonberries"

                              j.  "Flaming Star"

ANDSWERS:

1-d / 2-j / 3-a / 4-f / 5-i / 6-h / 7-g / 8-c / 9-e / 10-b

Into the Mud (2016)

 

INTO THE MUD  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Pablo Pastor

    Maris Forqué, Ramón G. del Pomer

A woman wakes up on the edge of a forest, naked and covered in dirt. She slips away into the trees and a hunter with a rifle goes after her. She lures him into a pond and there's a surprise. 

Frankenstein (1952)

 

FRANKENSTEIN  (1952)  ¢ ¢

    D: Don Medford

    John Newland, Lon Chaney, Mary Alice Moore,

    Peggy Allenby, Raymond Bramley, Farrell Pelly

A rarely screened, half-hour, kinescope version of the classic horror tale, shot fast and cheap and performed live for the "Tales of Tomorrow" television series. Guess who plays the Monster?

Incident By a Bank (2010)

 

INCIDENT BY A BANK  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ruben Östlund

    Bahador Foladi, Ramtin Parvaneh, Leif Edlund,

    Rasmus Lindgren, Henrik Vikman, Per Olaf Albrektsson

A movie about a failed bank robbery, done in a single 12-minute take (shot outside the bank) and apparently based on an actual incident. It plays like a documentary. The action looks real. The choreography is neatly worked out. 

Wolfs (2024)

 

WOLFS  (2024)  ¢ ¢

    D: Jon Watts

    George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams

Clooney and Pitt play rival cleanup men called in to make a dead body in a luxury hotel suite disappear. It gets more complicated than that, but not in a way that's ever very interesting. Brad and George trade wisecracks throughout, but they don't look like they're enjoying it all that much, and everything about the movie feels old and tired, from the derivative "Pulp Fiction" setup to the recycled "Butch Cassidy" conclusion. Visually, there's an awful lot of darkness. The musical score's not bad. 

Strongroom (1962)

 

STRONGROOM  (1962)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Vernon Sewell

    Derren Nesbitt, Colin Gordon, Ann Lynn,

    Keith Faulkner, William Morgan Sheppard

Three bank robbers pull off a heist and make their getaway, leaving two people - the bank's manager and his secretary - locked in the vault. They're home free, till they realize it's a holiday weekend, the vault is airtight, and by the time the bank opens on Tuesday morning, those two people will be dead. Not wanting to add murder to their rap sheet, they decide to break back into the bank before it's too late. Implausible, to be sure, but a nifty, little, low-budget thriller starring nobody you've ever heard of, except maybe Derren Nesbitt, who would later play the arrogant Gestapo officer in "Where Eagles Dare". The final closeup shot is both comical and - for the bank robbers - devastating.