On the Basis of Sex (2018)

ON THE BASIS OF SEX  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mimi Leder
    Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux,
    Sam Waterston, Kathy Bates, Wendy Crewson
A dramatized account of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's early days as a wife, mother, law student, university professor and finally plaintiff's attorney in her first big gender-equality case. Felicity Jones plays the brilliant, forceful, unstoppable RBG. Armie Hammer plays her husband Marty, who lends a hand with the cooking (at which Ruth does not excel), while she helps him through law school when a cancer diagnosis threatens to derail his career. Sam Waterston plays the starched-collar dean of Harvard Law, and in the context of recent events, his resemblance to Robert Mueller is hard to ignore. If Ginsburg wasn't a real-life folk hero already, the movie's final shot should just about seal the deal. 

Fedora (1978)

FEDORA  (1978)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Billy Wilder
    William Holden, Marthe Keller, Hildegarde Knef,
    José Ferrer, Frances Sternhagen, Henry Fonda,
    Stephen Collins, Michael York, Mario Adorf
An impoverished producer flies to Corfu on borrowed money to try to coax a Garboesque movie star into reading a script he's trying to sell. Then things start to get perverse. This is like a throwback to Wilder's "Sunset Blvd.", with an aging William Holden cast as the producer and an aging actress again at the center of a seriously twisted story. There's little of the dark, morbid wit that Wilder brought to the earlier film - it's plenty dark and morbid, but the wit has mostly gone missing - and while Marthe Keller (as the actress) and Hildegarde Knef (as the countess who houses and protects her) aren't bad, neither has the star power their roles demand. (Apparently, Wilder had hoped to cast Faye Dunaway and Marlene Dietrich.) Henry Fonda plays himself as the president of the Motion Picture Academy, and Michael York plays himself as Michael York. 

Suspiria (2018)

SUSPIRIA  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Luca Guadagnino
    Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Grace Moretz,
    Sylvie Testud, Mia Goth, Angela Winkler, Alek Wek,
    Elena Fokina, Ingrid Caven, Fabrizia Sacchi
A horror art film starring Dakota Johnson as an Amish girl from Ohio who moves to Berlin in 1977 to join a modern dance company. Berlin looks drab and colorless, terrorism is all over the news, the dance studio is full of shadows, and there's something sinister about the women who run the place. What's going on here? Our Amish girl from Ohio is about to find out. This isn't a remake of Dario Argento's 1977 "Suspiria" as much as it is a reimagining. The story's told in six acts and an epilogue, and if the dots don't always seem to connect, it's good to remember that dreams don't always make perfect sense, either. Just keep an eye on what Guadignino puts on the screen, and especially keep an eye on Tilda Swinton - all three of her. She does something here that not many actors could pull off. If you know what that is in advance, you'll still be amazed at how well she does it. The movie itself is a trip to hell - at the end, literally. If the best horror movies are nightmares at 24 frames per second, this one achieves that, for sure.

The Lost Tribe (1949)

THE LOST TRIBE  (1949)  ¢ ¢
    D: William Berke
    Johnny Weissmuller, Myrna Dell, Elena Verdugo,
    Joseph Vitale, Ralph Dunn, Nelson Leigh 
Johnny Weissmuller fights a crocodile and kills a shark, and a lion fights a gorilla and then Johnny fights the lion and stabs it to death. Also, there's a lost city deep in the jungle and some thieves want to steal all the treasure there, but they'll have a tough time doing that as long as Johnny's around, at least that'd be my guess.

Hal (2018)

HAL  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Amy Scott
A documentary on Hal Ashby, the shaggy-bearded, pot-smoking filmmaker who turned out some of the most influential movies of the 1970s, battling the studios he worked for every step of the way. "Harold and Maude", "The Last Detail", "Coming Home", "Bound For Glory" and "Being There" are all Ashby films, all made within a period of about seven years when he was at his creative peak, and a time when a director with a reputation for reckless independence could still make films more or less on his own terms within the system. The era didn't last, and Ashby's work fell off in the decade that followed, but for a few years there, he was as good as anybody around, and his movies prove it. Ashby died at 59 in 1988.

The Face Behind the Mask (1941)

THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Robert Florey
    Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe,
    George E. Stone, John Tyrell, James Seay
Peter Lorre plays a Hungarian immigrant who has some terrible luck and ends up running a criminal gang. An efficiently paced thriller and a textbook example of a really good B movie. Lorre gives one of his best performances. 

West Side Stories (1972)

WEST SIDE STORIES  (1972)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Tristram Powell
    Jonathan Miller, Patti Smith
A ground-level  portrait of New York City, with your tour guides, British theater director Jonathan Miller and punk poet Patti Smith. Miller, who's 12 years older than Smith, first came to New York with "Beyond the Fringe" in 1961. He comes back when his work requires it, but he's an outsider who still finds the city intimidating. It's definitely not his home. Smith turned up a few years later, a scrawny kid from South Jersey, and unlike Miller, moved in. She looks like a thrift-store rag doll, at home on the streets and alive to the city's rough energy. So you've got these two creative artists with two sets of eyes and two distinct appraisals of a place where they've both done time. It's not clear from this whether Smith and Miller ever met. They appear in alternating segments, but never together. It'd be fun to see them talking over coffee somewhere, comparing notes. Call it an opportunity missed. Produced for the BBC.

Jonathan Miller

(1934-2019)