A Walk On the Moon (1999)

A WALK ON THE MOON  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tony Goldwyn
    Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen, Liev Schreiber,
    Tovah Feldshuh, Anna Paquin, Bobby Boriello
Anybody who ever tried to get it on in the back seat of a Studebaker will be able to relate to the scene in this movie where Diane Lane and Liev Schreiber struggle to do that. They play Pearl and Marty Kantrowitz, a going-on-middle-aged couple whose dreams and ambitions and passion have faded with the day-to-day reality of work and marriage and kids. It's the summer of 1969, and they're at a family camp in upstate New York, and a couple of  landmark cultural events are about to transpire. In July, Neil Armstrong will walk on the moon, and in August, coincidentally not far from the camp, a little outdoor music festival is going to take place. At the same time, while Marty keeps getting called away to work - he fixes televisions - Pearl catches the eye of a counterculture hunk who sells ladies' blouses out of a customized bus, and he catches hers. The "blouse man" is played by Viggo Mortensen, and to Pearl he represents everything she feels she's missed. They end up in the bus, making out during the moonwalk. (It has more room than the Studebaker, and anyway, Marty's taken the Studebaker back to the city.) They go skinny-dipping. They go to Woodstock. And, of course, there are consequences, and confrontations, and guilt. Great, heaping piles of guilt. The melodramatics kick into high gear toward the end, when Marty learns what's going on. At the same time, it's not hard to imagine where these characters are coming from, or why they behave the way they do. It's where Douglas Sirk meets the Age of Aquarius. The Dead, Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan are just some of the artists who turn up on the soundtrack - a more evocative late-'60s playlist would be hard to find - and the songs and stage announcements at the festival sound like actual audio from Woodstock.

3000 Nights (2015)

3000 NIGHTS  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mai Masri
    Maisa Abd Elhadi, Nadira Omran, Rakeen Saad,
    Raida Adon, Abeer Zeibak Haddad, IzabelRamadan
This movie's about finding humanity in a hellhole, along with a lot of hell. Its protagonist is a young Palestinian schoolteacher sentenced to eight years in an Israeli prison for her role in a terrorist incident she claims she had nothing to do with. There's no real evidence against her, but she was in the wrong place at the wrong time helping somebody out, and that's enough. It's a formula prison flick, but it's handled with skill and a sense of purpose, and the political dimension gives it a definite edge. There are a couple of hard lessons you can learn from a movie like this. Don't ever get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in the occupied territories, even if you're just doing somebody a favor, and especially if you're Palestinian. And whatever you're planning to do with the next eight years of your life, spending any part of it in an Israeli prison is not a good idea. 

Road To Morocco (1942)

ROAD TO MOROCCO  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Butler
    Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour,
    Anthony Quinn, Dona Drake, Vladimir Sokolof
Ski Nose and the Groaner are shipwrecked off North Africa and goof their way through another itinerant musical comedy. Bing sings "Moonlight Becomes You", and the camels talk.

Night and Fog (1956)

NIGHT AND FOG  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Alain Resnais
A grim, unsparing documentary about concentration camps, with shots of the camps and their peaceful surroundings ten years after the war juxtaposed with horrific footage showing exactly what went on in them between 1940 and 1945. It's hard to believe anybody could deny the Holocaust after watching something like this, but, of course, there are those who do. They're probably the same people who wouldn't object if it happened again. 

The Fifth Estate (2013)

THE FIFTH ESTATE  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Bill Condon
    Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Anthony Mackie,
    David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander, Laura Linney,
    Stanley Tucci, Peter Capaldi, Moritz Bleibtreu 
The cyberadventures of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who blew the lid on a million secrets by hacking computer systems around the world and posting what he found online. The movie's not especially sympathetic to Assange. Played by Benedict Cumberbatch, he's an egotistical bastard who claims to be serving the common good by giving people the information that governments and corporations don't want them ever to have, but turns spiteful and malicious whenever the spotlight shifts away from him. Apart from that, you don't really learn much about Assange, and the allegations of sexual misconduct that drove him into exile are mentioned in passing only at the very end. He's a renegade genius - maybe that's what makes him attractive to his loyal team of hackers - but he's also, as one character accurately describes him, a manipulative asshole. He's made his mark, though, and the impact of that is still playing out. If the information genie has escaped from its digital bottle, it's at least partly because of Julian Assange. 

Rodan (1956)

RODAN  (1956)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ishirô Honda
    Kenji Sawara, Yumi Shirikawa, Akihiko Hirata,
    Akio Kobori, Minosuke Yamada, Yoshifumi Tajima
Giant flying reptiles  terrorize Japan, and many miniature sets are laid waste before the creatures themselves go up in smoke. Oh, did I just give away the movie? Sorry about that.

Hardcore Henry (2015)

HARDCORE HENRY  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ilya Naishuller
    Sharlto Copley, Tim Roth, Haley Bennett,
    Andrei Dementiev, Danila Kozlovsky
Insane, point-of-view mayhem about a biomechanical killing machine. So you get killing, killing and more killing, and then just for a change of pace, more killing still. As an exercise while you're watching it, see if you can count how many guys the title character dispatches to Valhalla in just 96 minutes.