Teddy At the Throttle (1917)

TEDDY AT THE THROTTLE  (1917)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Clarence E. Badger
    Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Bobby Vernon,
    May Emory, Blanche Phillips, Charles Bennett
Wallace Berry chains Gloria Swanson to a railroad track, with a speeding locomotive barreling toward her. Can Gloria's faithful dog Teddy get there in time to save her? It could go either way, I suppose, but in a Keystone two-reeler from 1917, I'd put my money on the dog. 

Unlocked (2017)

UNLOCKED  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Michael Apted
    Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Toni Collette,
    John Malkovich, Michael Douglas, Michael Epp
A good, twisty, cloak-and-dagger piece starring Noomi Rapace as an interrogator named Alice Racine, who works for either MI5 or the CIA, it's not clear which. Still lying low after an assignment that ended badly two years before, Alice finds herself being pulled back into the game to help stop some bad guys from releasing a deadly biological weapon somewhere in London. Beyond that, it gets complicated. John Malkovich plays her American minder. Toni Collette plays his British counterpart. Michael Douglas plays a colleague in the trade, Alice's mentor from the old days. Orlando Bloom, looking seedy, plays a thief who might not be merely a thief. You can't trust any of them, really, and in a movie like this one, there's no good reason you should. It's not a key factor in the outcome necessarily, but the actor who appears to be having the most fun here is Malkovich.

Jaws (1975)

JAWS  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Steven Spielberg
    Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss,
    Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Susan Backlinie
Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. You're gonna need a bigger boat.

Silence (2016)

SILENCE  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Martin Scorsese
    Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson,
    Issei Ogata, Yoshi Oida, Ciarán Hinds
Martin Scorsese's meditation on faith and suffering, about two Portuguese missionaries who go to 17th-century Japan to look for a colleague who may be dead or lost. It took Scorsese years to get the movie made, and it's not hard to see parallels with "The Last Temptation of Christ" and Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". It even has crucifixions - there's a lot of torture - and the images of Christ that keep coming up are mostly Christ crowned with thorns or Christ on the cross. It's long, slow, beautiful to look at, and for anybody who doesn't share Scorsese's preoccupation with old-school Catholicism and the concept of salvation through martyrdom, kind of dull. There's no room for comic relief - zealots rarely find anything funny - and the impact might be greater if the roles of the lead actors were reversed. Andrew Garfield has the much bigger part, but Adam Driver has more charisma, combined with the gaunt, ascetic look of somebody who might actually be a 17th-century man of the cloth. It's worth remembering that the church of these missionary priests was also the church of the Inquisition. Here the inquisitors are Japanese and the priests are the tortured, but the effect is the same: institutionalized barbarism in the name of religion, a righteous sense of purpose going hand in hand with unspeakable brutality. 

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World (1961)

SAMSON AND THE SEVEN MIRACLES OF THE WORLD  (1961)  ¢ ¢
    D: Riccardo Freda
    Gordon Scott, Yoko Tani, Hélène Chanel,
    Dante DiPaolo, Gabriele Antonini, Chu Lai Chit
The legendary strongman, roaming the Far East for reasons that are never explained, helps Chinese rebels fight off the invading Mongols. In the interest of concise storytelling, the movie skips most of the seven miracles, but a well-oiled, musclebound Caucasian in a loincloth passing unnoticed through a crowded Chinese city in broad daylight has to qualify as some sort of miracle, don't you think?

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017)

RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Catherine Bainbridge, Alfonso Maiorana
A documentary about the impact of Native Americans on everything from jazz, blues and metal to folk, rock and rap. Charlie Patton, Mildred Bailey, Jimi Hendrix and the Band's Robbie Robertson are among those profiled. Witnesses include Robertson, Tony Bennett, Martin Scorsese and John Trudell. It'd be worth watching this just for the segment on Link Wray, and any movie in which Buffy Sainte-Marie appears, even briefly, is fine by me.

Naked Space (1983)

NAKED SPACE  (1983)  ¢ ¢
    D: Bruce Kimmel
    Cindy Williams, Bruce Kimmel, Leslie Nielsen,
    Gerrit Graham, Patrick Macnee, Ron Kurowski
A zero-budget sci-fi comedy about a handful of astronauts sharing a spaceship with an astronaut-eating alien. It comes down squarely on the stupid side of silly, but Cindy Williams is cute, and there are a couple of fun bits: the alien's song-and-dance number, "I Want To Eat Your Face", and a mock trailer in which Paul Brineger, one of Clint Eastwood's old "Rawhide" co-stars, plays Dirty Harry.