Wild Target (2010)

WILD TARGET  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Jonathan Lynn
    Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt, Rupert Grint,
    Rupert Everett, Eileen Atkins, Martin Freeman
An off-kilter black comedy about a hit man who hooks up with the kleptomaniac he's supposed to kill. Blunt models a variety of eye-catching outfits, and Nighy's zoned-out aplomb and delayed double takes are out in full force. The movie goes its mad, merry way, and if a few more or less innocent characters get plugged at point-blank range, they're no more or less dead than the unlucky parrot who ends up with a hat pin through its heart after meeting the hit man's mother. 

Ice Station Zebra (1968)

ICE STATION ZEBRA  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Sturges
    Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan, Ernest Borgnine,
    Jim Brown, Tony Bill, Lloyd Nolan, Alf Kjellin
Cold War adventure starring Rock Hudson as the stalwart captain of a U.S. nuclear submarine on a rescue mission in the Arctic, where something's going on that only a British spy (Patrick McGoohan) and a Russian double agent (Ernest Borgnine) seem to know anything about. Suspense under the ice, and on the frozen surface, with occasional bouts of exposition to help you track the typically convoluted Alistair MacLean plot. Howard Hughes, in his eccentric later years, loved this movie, and reportedly watched it 150 times.

Life Itself (2014)

LIFE ITSELF  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Steve James
The only time I saw Roger Ebert in person was around 1980 at the Majestic Theater in Madison. He was there to show some film clips and do a Q&A about movies, and I remember that he struck me as kind of arrogant, which was how he usually came across in those TV shows he did with Gene Siskel. I don't know to what extent he was really like that, but it didn't appear to be an act. So it was interesting to see how much genuine affection he attracted in the time leading up to his death, and the unprecedented amount of grief (for a film critic!) that followed his passing last year. Of course, Ebert was no ordinary film critic. He was easily the most widely recognized movie reviewer in the world, and arguably the best writer who ever tried to make sense of what he saw in those images flashing across the screen. This documentary tracks Ebert and his lifelong passion for journalism from Urbana, Illinois, where as a kid he wrote, published and delivered his own neighborhood newspaper, through his Pulitzer Prize-winning work for the Chicago Sun-Times, his combative love-hate relationship with Siskel, his drinking and sobriety, his marriage (at 50) to the love of his life, Chaz, and, painfully, his heroic (and very public) battle with cancer. There might be lives that can be reduced to two hours of screen time. Ebert's was not one of them. But the access James had to Roger and Chaz toward the end makes the movie as indispensable as it is, sometimes, hard to watch. Ebert might've been an asshole (Siskel thought so), but you can see, too, why so many people loved the guy, and if you don't come away from this admiring his courage, you must be living on the moon. It's not often you see Martin Scorsese at a loss for words, choking up. It happens when he's talking about Ebert in this, and that's saying something.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS  (1973)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Denis Sanders
    William Smith, Anitra Ford, Victoria Vetri,
    Anna Aries, Katie Saylor, Beverly Powers
The bee girls are these witchy babes with weird black eyeballs who have somehow linked themselves genetically with bees and are going around seducing men and killing them with sex. It's every bit as nutty as it sounds, with more than enough bee-girl T&A to make up for its artistic shortcomings. The highlight has to be the bizarre sequence where a naked bee-girl recruit gets slathered in some sticky white glop before being swarmed by a million bees. You sure don't see that every day. This was one of Gene & Roger's favorite guilty pleasures.

Edge of Darkness (2010)

EDGE OF DARKNESS  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Martin Campbell
    Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston,
    Bojana Novakovic, Shawn Roberts, Denis O'Hare
In a story with some striking parallels to "The Lovely Bones", Mad Mel plays a Boston police detective whose daughter is gunned down in a drive-by in front of his house. If you've watched any previous Mel Gibson movies, you know that messing with Mel's family in any way in the opening reel is not a smart thing to do if you want to survive to the end of the film. But thankfully (and somewhat surprisingly), this is about more than simple revenge. It's an intricate whodunit, with Mel going through the grieving process at the same time his investigation uncovers a maze of government and corporate deceit, all of it tied to his daughter's murder. He's helped along the way by a mercenary troubleshooter with a dry sense of humor and a lethal sense of ethics, played by Ray Winstone. There's plenty of action, too, and Winstone steals every scene that's not bolted to the floor. The resolution's a lot like the ending in "Hamlet". Everybody dies.

The Lovely Bones (2009)

THE LOVELY BONES  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Jackson
    Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz,
    Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Rose McGiver
The protagonist in this movie, based on Alice Seybold's novel, is a suburban teenager named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), who's murdered on her way home from school one day and hangs around in a limbo-like afterlife, keeping a watchful eye on both her family and her killer. Peter Jackson would seem to be the right guy to make a picture like that, but for every scene that dazzles, there's something else that goes flat or seems way too obvious. The credit and the blame are in the uneven script. There's some suspense in the story and Jackson's visuals are stunning, but the pieces don't always add up. (The fact that it's being narrated by a dead 14-year-old might have something to do with that.) Susan Sarandon, looking horrid, plays the girl's boozy grandmother, and Stanley Tucci's suitably creepy as the kind of strange man parents warn their kids to stay away from.

Seven Samurai (1954)

SEVEN SAMURAI  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Akira Kurosawa
    Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Yoshio Inaba,
    Ko Kimura, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Chiaki
Some desperately poor peasants in 16th-century Japan hire a band of misfit warriors to defend their village from marauding bandits, feeding them in exchange for protection. The first half of the movie is about how the warriors come together and train the peasants to fight off the coming attack. The second half is the siege, with the final battle playing out in a sea of mud in a driving rainstorm. Kurosawa's long, exciting and often comical samurai movie pretty much set the standard for the genre and has influenced action filmmakers ever since. (When Sam Peckinpah said he wanted to make westerns like Kurosawa made westerns, this is what he had in mind.) The samurai leader, played by Yul Brynner a few years later in "The Magnificent Seven", looks and acts a lot like Lee Van Cleef.