Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Maloof, Charlie Siskel
This would make a good companion piece to "Searching For Sugar Man", another documentary detective story about the quest to track down an artist whose self-imposed obscurity seems at odds with the astonishing quality of the artist's work. Vivian Maier worked for 40 years as a nanny, and for all of that time roamed the streets with a Rolleiflex camera, shooting what she saw. She took more than 100,000 pictures, in slums and stockyards, in New York and Chicago and around the world, often with her underaged charges (and occasional subjects) in tow. Her negatives turned up in boxes which were auctioned off when the money ran out to pay storage costs, and that's how she came to the attention of John Maloof, who bought some of them and became obsessed with finding out who took all those photographs. There's no last-act happy ending here, at least not for Vivian Maier, who died at 83, impoverished and mentally ill, in 2009. At the same time, you wonder whether in some way she got what she wanted. She knew her work was good, and she went to some trouble, as long as she was able, to insure its survival. Her compulsion was with making art, not showing or selling it. She never shared her pictures with anybody, and many of them she never saw herself. That they're being recognized and celebrated only after her death isn't necessarily a tragedy, and could be just the opposite. Brilliant, eccentric and willfully reclusive, Vivian Maier might not want it any other way.

International House (1933)

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: A. Edward Sutherland
    W.C. Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen,
    Bela Lugosi, Franklin Pangborn, Stuart Irwin,
    Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Rudy Vallee, Cab Calloway,
    Sterling Holloway, Lumsden Hare, Baby Rose Marie
Potential buyers from around the world gather at a luxury hotel in Wuhu, China, to bid on a new invention that looks a lot like a prototype of television. That sets up a series of vintage, pre-Code comedy sketches and musical acts. So Franklin Pangborn fusses about, W.C. Fields imbibes, Peggy Hopkins Joyce hunts for a husband, and Gracie Allen drives everybody around her crazy. Meanwhile, Baby Rose Marie belts out a blues number, Cab Calloway sprints through a hopped-up rendition of "Reefer Man", and Sterling Holloway does a loose-limbed dance routine backed by 40 chorus girls. Fields more or less takes over, once he and his beer bottles touch down in Wuhu, but even he has to take a step back when he shares the screen with Gracie. 

Nymphomaniac (2013)

NYMPHOMANIAC  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lars von Trier
    Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin,
    Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, 
    Jamie Bell, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Willem Dafoe,
    Connie Nielsen, Udo Kier, Jean-Marc Barr, Mia Goth
A man finds a woman bleeding in an alley, takes her back to his gloomy flat, and spends the night listening to her tell stories about her life as a nymphomaniac. This movie is bold, playful, disturbing, provocative, beautiful, inventive, ridiculous, illuminating, pornographic, contrived, profound, self-indulgent and sick - all the contradictory things Lars von Trier's movies can be. Plus, the uncut version (Parts 1 & 2) runs five-and-a-half hours. That's a lot of Lars von Trier. It's never boring, though. Its uninhibited sexuality might have something to do with that, but so do the performances of Stellan Skarsgård as a sort of secular priest hearing the woman's confession, and Charlotte Gainsbourg (lately von Trier's resident muse) as the bruised, conflicted heroine. Apparently thanks to some state-of-the-art CGI, the actors aren't always doing what it looks like they're doing in those down-and-dirty sex scenes. They sure look convincing, though. If you didn't know any better, you'd never know. Which still leaves you admiring the courage of the actors, especially the long-suffering Gainsbourg. And scratching your head about Lars von Trier.

A Girl In Every Port (1928)

A GIRL IN EVERY PORT  (1928)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Howard Hawks
    Victor McLaglen, Robert Armstrong, Louise Brooks,
    Myrna Loy, William Demarest, Sally Rand
Two swaggering merchant seamen sail the seven seas, getting in fights and cruising for dames. Boys will be boys, I guess, though these guys are a few years beyond being boyish and ultimately care more for each other than for any of the women they hook up with. Then there's Louise Brooks as the Marseilles carnival artist who steals Armstrong's pants and McLaglen's heart. It's a secondary part in the context of the film, but she sure looks swell in a leotard. You can see why Pabst cast her as Lulu after watching her in this. 

Snowpiercer (2013)

SNOWPIERCER  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Joon-Ho Bong
    Chris Evans, Kang-Ho Song, Ah-Sung Ko
    Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, John Hurt,
    Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Alison Pill
In the year 2031, a man-made climate alteration has transformed the entire planet into a frozen wasteland. Hurtling endlessly through the snow and ice is a train, the train, on which all of earth's survivors exist. In the gleaming front of the train are the rich, the elite, the pampered and well-fed, the chosen ones. In the squalid rear are the others, dirty and desperate, reduced to rags and subsisting on gelatinous, foul-tasting "nutrition bars." The movie's about what happens when those in the rear start to make their way to the front. It's not hard to see the metaphorical implications of this, and the movie toward the end spends a little too much time explaining itself. But director Joon-Ho Bong makes the most of the bare-bones premise, taking an idea that's pure, apocalyptic fantasy and gunning it. The result is an exciting, high-speed action movie that delivers the bloody goods while giving you something to think about. Chris Evans plays the gloomy protagonist, with John Hurt as his crippled mentor and Ed Harris as the distant, godlike engineer, but for sheer eccentricity, nothing beats Tilda Swinton's performance as the ruthlessly batty security minister.

The Tender Trap (1955)

THE TENDER TRAP  (1955)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Charles Walters
    Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, David Wayne,
    Celeste Holm, Carolyn Jones, Lola Albright
A mostly disposable Sinatra vehicle with Frank as a swingin' New York bachelor who gets what's coming to him when he meets a marriage-minded girl played by Debbie Reynolds. The highlights are in the supporting cast - David Wayne, Celeste Holm, and a funny, deadpan bit by Carolyn Jones as a helpful neighbor who appears periodically to walk Frank's dog. Sinatra sings the title tune in the striking opening shot.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER 
    D: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo               (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Redford,
    Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan,
    Cobie Smulders, Jenny Agutter, Toby Jones, Stan Lee
In this movie, Robert Redford gets to do what Gregory Peck did in "The Boys From Brazil" and Henry Fonda did in "Once Upon a Time In the West": throw off several decades of often flawed heroes to play a truly despicable villain. He looks like he's having a good time doing it, and that's not a bad reason to watch the movie. I'm normally not a big fan of live-action comic-book recreations, but this one kind of works. Chris Evans, looking digitized to the point of total blandness, plays the hero behind the mask, a World War Two vet who would now be about 95 years old, but, thanks to cryonics and technical wizardry, appears young and buff and can jump out of planes and off tall buildings without a parachute and still not be hurt when he lands on the pavement. The story has the Captain battling an evil organization called Hydra, whose evil commander-in-chief (Redford) wants to control the world by providing its inhabitants with security at the cost of freedom. The action scenes are exciting, and for all the suspension of disbelief required, you actually care about the outcome. There's a decent amount of tension in the storytelling, and the moral arguments that come up are worth having. Plus, there's Scarlett Johansson as a husky-voiced Russian agent, Jenny Agutter in a cameo that's much too brief, Samuel L. Jackson being Samuel L. Jackson, and Redford laying on the charm as he plots the strategic slaughter of 20 million people. The ending leaves most of the characters in play, and even introduces a few new ones. The battle's been won, but not the war, and the sequel's due out in 2016.