Hoosiers (1986)

 

HOOSIERS  (1986)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: David Anspaugh

    Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper, 

    Sheb Wooley, Fern Persons, Chelcie Ross

Gene Hackman plays a hard-nosed basketball coach who's been banned from college ball for hitting a player. After ten years in the Navy - he's still wearing his peacoat - he lands at a high school in a small Indiana town where he's not warmly received by the locals, or (at first) by his scrappy, short-handed team. Will he and the boys win the town over? Will the coach and the bad-ass vice principal played by Barbara Hershey hit it off? Will the team of underdogs start to win? Put it this way: Have you ever seen a Hollywood sports movie? Unabashed, feel-good Americana with real-looking Midwest locations and effective supporting work from Hershey and a visibly rehabbing Dennis Hopper.

Girl Gang (1954)

 

GIRL GANG  (1954)  ¢

    D: Robert C. Dertano

    Joanne Arnold, Timothy Farrell, Harry Keaton,

    Mary Lou O'Connor, Mildred Kalke, Lou Monson

Here are some things you should know, if you don't know them already. Don't steal cars. Don't take the payment you get for them in joints. Don't smoke pot because it'll make you want to shoot heroin right away. Don't shoot heroin. Don't get your drugs from a pusher named Joe, even if everybody tells you he's a "regular guy." Don't loan money to a junkie who says she'll pay you back, because she won't. Don't keep fighting that other heroin addict on the floor in the hallway when the cops are coming up the stairs to arrest you both. Don't leave the safe open after you open it to get the money to pay a junkie for sex. Don't pay a junkie for sex. Don't get shot robbing a gas stati0n to get money for dope, and don't die on the kitchen table while the quack doctor is digging the bullet out of your gut. Don't do any of that stuff. And definitely don't do it in a movie called "Girl Gang". Just don't. That's all.

Joe (2013)

 

JOE  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: David Gordon Green

    Nicolas Cage, Tye Sheridan, Gary Poulter,

    Ronnie Gene Blevins, Adrienne Mishler,

    Sue Rock, Heather Kafka, AJ Wilson McPhaul

Nicolas Cage plays the title role, a middle-aged guy living in a backwater hellhole where he makes a living running a crew of day laborers, killing trees for a company that wants them dead so they can be cut down. He's estranged from his family, he drinks and smokes too much, he's a regular at the local whorehouse, and he's subject to bouts of uncontrollable rage. Despite all that, he's a basically decent guy. He's not looking for trouble, but trouble always finds him. What you've got here is a Southern Gothic twist on "Nobody's Fool", with Cage as a more damaged and volatile version of Paul Newman's Donald Sullivan. Tye  Sheridan plays a kid who goes to work on Joe's crew, and there's a scary performance by Gary Poulter as the boy's abusive, alcoholic father. Poulter was literally cast off the street, and there's a real sense that he's not so much acting his role as living it. He died two months after shooting ended. Director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr conjure up a dimly lit world you'll be glad you're not living in, a place you'd just drive on through, no matter how bad you needed a coke or a pack of smokes, and Cage gives one of his most compelling performances.

F1 (2025)

 

F1  (2025)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joseph Kosinski 

    Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem,

    Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia

When my Uncle Barney was driving stock cars on dirt tracks around southern Wisconsin back in the 1950s, the strategy for racing was simple: foot to the floor and turn left. When Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) is asked how he plans to compete in a Formula One race in "F1", his answer is equally succinct: drive fast. Hayes is a barnstormer, a guy living out of a van who will race anything anywhere, and he's been off the Formula One circuit for 30 years when an old colleague (Javier Bardem) coaxes him back, to drive one of his cars and mentor a new young driver (Damson Idris) who has all the tools but still needs to learn a few things if he wants to get to the top. It's a formula Formula One script, but as a piece of summertime escape, it gets the job done. The cars fly like bullets, powered by space-age technology, and the camerawork in the racing scenes could have you bracing yourself and holding your breath. (IMAX theaters should be equipped with seat belts for movies like this.) Sonny Hayes is the kind of role Paul Newman or Steve McQueen would've played a few decades ago (and did), and Pitt's performance is a throwback to that: a movie star at the top of his game and so at ease in front of the camera, he can command the screen without even seeming to try.

Grand Prix (1966)

 

GRAND PRIX  (1966)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Frankenheimer

    James Garner, Yves Montand, Eva Marie Saint, 

    Toshiro Mifune, Jessica Walter, Brian Bedford,

    Antonio Sabato, Adolfo Celi, Françoise Hardy

Drivers and owners, wives and girlfriends follow the Grand Prix circuit in a movie that thunders and roars in its pulse-pounding racing scenes but runs low on gas when it's not on the track. There was  no CGI back then, so Frankenheimer mounted cameras on the cars and had guys drive them real fast, something he'd do again more than 30 years later when he made "Ronin". (He didn't speed up the film. The cars really are going that fast.) Garner apparently did his own driving. The split-screen montage sequences were the work of legendary title designer Saul Bass. Several of the drivers who worked on this would die racing over the next few years. 

Nitram (2021)

 

NITRAM  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Justin Kurzel

    Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Essie Davis,

    Anthony LaPaglia, Sean Keenan, Phoebe Taylor

I went into this movie without knowing the story behind it. It's set in Australia and its main character is a guy in his 20s living at home with his parents and subject to bouts of erratic behavior thanks to some significant mental health issues. He has the look of a surfer and, in fact, he longs to be one, though he's never surfed and doesn't even swim anymore. He's all impulse and no filter and there's a vaguely blank look about him that tells you the circuits don't all connect. There's a real sense that without mum and dad to keep a watchful eye on him, he'd be institutionalized, and that maybe he should be. You just hope he doesn't hurt anybody, and you really hope he's taking his meds. It's when he walks into a gun shop and starts putting together an arsenal that you start to think, oh no, this is not going to end well, and that's where the backstory comes in. Caleb Landry Jones in the lead gives the kind of performance that could make you feel real uncomfortable. Judy Davis (looking old) and Anthony LaPaglia (looking heavy) play his caring but beleaguered parents. 

A House of Dynamite (2025)

 

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE  (2025)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Kathryn Bigelow

    Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Jared Harris,

    Tracy Letts, Gabriel Basso, Anthony Ramos,

    Moses Ingram, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Greta Lee

"Fail-Safe" for the 21st century.

They Made Me a Criminal (1939)

 

THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Busby Berkeley

    John Garfield, Gloria Dickson, Claude Rains, 

    Ann Sheridan, May Robson, Billy Halop,

    Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall,

    Frank Riggi, John Ridgley, Ward Bond

In his second feature film, John Garfield plays a prizefighter who goes on the lam when he's framed for a murder and ends up on an Arizona date farm where the Dead End Kids are cracking wise and cooling their heels. Claude Rains steps out of character as a hard-boiled police detective determined to track Garfield down. The studio was Warner Bros. (of course). 

The Room Next Door (2024)

 

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Pedro Almodóvar

    Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro

Tilda Swinton, looking skeletal, plays a woman who's dying, knows she's dying, and wants to die. Deciding against any more treatment, she gets a euthanasia pill off the dark web and asks an old friend (Julianne Moore), not to help with the act itself, but to be around, in the next room, when it happens. Almodóvar's color-coded reflection on end-of-life issues is beautifully composed and formal to the point of being a little stiff. Its characters are attractive, smart, accomplished and affluent enough not to have to worry too much about paying the rent and hospital bills, or whether they can afford to fix the brakes or replace the bald tires on the family car. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a fact that most folks don't get to die so neatly or in such elegant surroundings. On the other hand, most people who are dying in movies aren't played by Tilda Swinton, whose character, a veteran war correspondent, has lived life on her own terms, feels it slipping away, and doesn't see the point of hanging around much longer. It's the kind of performance you can't look away from, whether it's the almost imperceptible way her lower lip trembles with an involuntary twinge of pain, or the way her eyes light up when she opens the door and (literally) catches a breath of fresh air. It's Almodóvar's first feature in English, set in New York state, but partly filmed in Spain.

Freud's Last Session (2023)

 

FREUD'S LAST SESSION  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Matt Brown

    Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Liv Lisa Fries,

    Jodi Balfour, Orla Brady, Jeremy Northam

In September of 1939, Sigmund Freud, exiled from Vienna, entertains a guest in his London apartment - the Oxford professor and future author of "The Chronicles of Narnia", C.S. Lewis. Much of what follows is a philosophical debate between the prickly, combative atheist Freud, played by Anthony Hopkins, and the more defensive but no less emphatic Christian apologist Lewis, played by Matthew Goode. Other elements play into the discussion. Freud is dying of cancer, hooked on morphine and in pain. His daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) has become his primary caregiver, and his incessant demands are exhausting her. Germany has invaded Poland and the Blitz is about to begin, and Lewis has lingering PTSD from his time in the infantry during the Great War. It's a lively intellectual joust and a spirited workout for Hopkins and Goode. Sir Anthony overdoes it a little - when you're alone a quiet room with just one other person, you don't have to project that much - and Goode, like Lewis, more than holds his own. No matter what side of the argument you come down on, it might be worth your while to listen in.

Love and Other Drugs (2010)

 

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS  (2010)  ¢ ¢

    D: Edward Zwick

    Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Oliver Platt,

    Hank Azaria, Josh Gad, Gabriel Macht,

    Jill Clayburgh, George Segal, Judy Greer

A hustling pharmaceutical salesman finds himself falling for an artist who's battling Parkinson's, when it turns out she has even less interest in emotional commitment than he does. Highlight: Anne Hathaway gets topless for a second or two. Downside: any scene with Josh Gad. Part romantic comedy and part disease-of-the-week melodrama, some if it sentimental and some of it just crass. The actors who play the Parkinson's patients at the convention in Chicago are real. 

Slattery's Hurricane (1949)

SLATTERY'S HURRICANE  (1949)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Andre De Toth

    Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Veronica Lake, 

    John Russell, Gary Merrill, Walter Kingsford

Richard Widmark plays an ex-Navy pilot who flies into the eye of a hurricane in an apparent attempt to rise above an otherwise earthbound plot. Linda Darnell and Veronica Lake play the women in  his life, and John Russell, looking like a stand-in for Randolph Scott, plays an old buddy from the war. The airplane-against-the-storm stuff is okay, but the movie spends way too much time on the ground.

Juror #2 (2024)

 

JUROR #2  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Clint Eastwood

    Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons,

    Chris Messina, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough

    Amy Aquino, Kiefer Sutherland, Leslie Bibb

Clint Eastwood's latest (and possibly last) movie is a riff on "12 Angry Men", about a murder trial, an ambitious prosecuting attorney, a defendant who seems guilty but might not be, and a  juror (Juror #2) who knows more about the case than he should. I'm not sure it all adds up, but it's an effective piece of cinematic storytelling, a reflection on the imperfect nature of justice, and the scenes in the jury room, for anybody who's ever sat on a jury, are right on the mark. Clint fans will note that some key flashback scenes take place in and around a roadhouse - a signature Eastwood location - and that the place is called Rowdy's Hideaway. A coincidence? Probably not. 

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. 

Megalopolis (2024)

 

MEGALOPOLIS  (2024)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Francis Ford Coppola 

    Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel,

    Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Talia Shire,

    Jason Schwartzman, James Remar, D.B. Sweeney,

    Chloe Fineman, Balthazar Getty, Dustin Hoffman

Francis Ford Coppola's grandiose hallucination about fashion, architecture, politics, love, time, greed, arrogance, power and just about everything else is a monument to epic ambition and narrative incoherence. Five minutes in, I was hopelessly lost, and nothing happened in the next two hours to change that. My colleague Ms. Applebaum thought drugs might help. I'm not sure about that. 

Raggedy Man (1981)

 

RAGGEDY MAN  (1981)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jack Fisk

    Sissy Spacek, Eric Roberts, Sam Shepard,

    William Sanderson, Tracey Walter, R.G. Armstrong,

    Henry Thomas, Carey Hollis Jr., Bill Thurman

There's a lot of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in this movie, which stars Sissy Spacek as a small-town telephone operator in World War Two Texas, stuck in a job she longs to escape and doing her best to raise two active young boys. There's a Boo Radley character, the scarred, mysterious "raggedy man," keeping a watchful eye on the woman and her kids and pushing a lawn mower around. There's a fleeting shot at romance with a sailor (Eric Roberts) that doesn't last long, and a threat in the form of two menacing cretins played by Tracey Walter and William Sanderson. Director Jack Fisk (Spacek's husband) has worked mostly as a production designer and knows how to make a period piece look good. Jerry Goldsmith composed the music, and if you remember Elmer Bernstein's score for "To Kill a Mockingbird", that'll feel just right, too.

On the Rocks (2020)

 

ON THE ROCKS  (2020)  ¢ ¢

    D: Sofia Coppola

    Rashida Jones, Bill Murray, Marlon Wayans,

    Jessica Henwick, Jenny Slate, Barbara Bain

With Woody Allen's career tailing off at this point, I guess somebody has to make movies about the kinds of people who can still afford to live in Manhattan. So here's Sofia Coppola with a story about a 39-year-old writer and mother of two (Rashida Jones) who, aided and abetted by her meddling father (Bill Murray), starts to suspect her husband is having an affair. The affluent have their problems, too, it seems, and they're not any better at solving them than the rest of us. Murray and Jones are both good, but the setup feels flimsy, and Murray's casual misanthropy has an unpleasant edge. 

Thelma (2024)

 

THELMA  (2024)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Josh Margolin

    June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree,

    Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell

When an old woman named Thelma loses $10,000 in a telephone scam, her family starts to think about moving her to a different level of care. Thelma, faced with the everyday issues of aging, has a different idea, and takes off on a mission to track down the scammers and get her money back. On the plausibility scale, this lands somewhere between highly unlikely and no way in hell, and while it's nicely cast and acted, it's way too cute. The French movie "Driving Madeleine" covered similar material with more subtlety and restraint. Richard Roundtree's last film. 

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

 

BEAU IS AFRAID  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ari Aster

    Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuP0ne, Amy Ryan,

    Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Kylie Rogers,

    Bill Hader, Stephen McKinley Henderson

Beau is also deeply fucked-up and racked with a truckload of crippling guilt. Beau is in a nightmare he can't escape, because the nightmare is his life. Beau is played by Joaquin Phoenix in an ambitious, surreal psychodrama that might be more compelling if it had a running time shorter than 179 minutes. The pure nightmare stuff is the best. (The first couple of reels are truly frightening.) It loses something the more it tries to explain itself. And then there's Beau's mother. And the monster in the attic. (Don't ask.) Psych majors will want to take a look.

The Godfather Part II

THE GODFATHER PART II  (1974  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Francis Ford Coppola 

    Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall,

    Diane Keaton, John Cazale, Talia Shire,

    Lee Strasberg, G.D. Spradlin, Bruno Kirby

Continuing the saga of the Corleone family, from Don Vito's origin story in the first part of the 20th century to Michael's ruthless reign in the middle of it. If the original "Godfather" was a model of efficiency and restraint, this is the opposite of that. It's more ambitious and wide-ranging, but it goes on too long, and the soap-opera element, which was tightly controlled before, spills over. The stuff with Robert De Niro playing the young Vito is compelling, but when Michael (Al Pacino) and Kay (Diane Keaton) get into a screaming match over the fate of their marriage and their dead infant son, it starts to feel unhinged. The movie won an Oscar for best picture, and there are those who consider it to be better than the first film, but . . . it's not.