Yo-Yo Girl Cop (2006)

YO-YO GIRL COP  (2006)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Kenta Fukasaku
    Aya Matsuura, Rika Ishikawa, Erika Miyoshi
    Yui Okada, Hiroyuki Nagato, Shunsuke Kubozuka
A girl armed with a deadly yo-yo goes undercover in a high school that appears to specialize in bullying and bomb-building. Crazy, escapist action from Japan. The catfight with dueling yo-yos is a highlight.

Shadowlands (1993)

SHADOWLANDS  (1993)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Richard Attenborough
    Anthony Hopkins, Debra Winger, Edward Hardwicke,
    Joseph Mazzello, Michael Denison, John Wood
An intelligent tear-jerker about the relationship between the reserved and somewhat stuffy British novelist C.S. Lewis, who wrote "The Chronicles of Narnia", and his decidedly unstuffy American wife, the poet Joy Gresham. A movie about pain and how love helps us live with it. Winger got an Oscar nomination for her affecting, down-to-earth performance. 

Richard Attenborough

(1923-2014)

Words and Pictures (2013)

WORDS AND PICTURES  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Fred Schepisi
    Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche, Amy Tian,
    Fred Negahban, Bruce Davison, Amy Brenneman

Dear Ms. Applebaum,

I saw "Words and Pictures" last night at our local $3 theater. Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche play high school teachers, and they do what they can to look drab and ordinary. Fat chance. He teaches writing and she teaches art, and they get into this war over which means of expression is the best. He's arrogant and she's abrasive, and she's got rheumatoid arthritis, which makes it hard to paint, and he's got a drinking problem, which makes it hard to write, so it's complicated. And (of course) they gradually, grudgingly fall in love. It's one of those movies where you forgive its contrivances because watching the stars go at it is so much fun. Juliette did her own painting, too, apparently. For $3 on a hot summer night, it was just the thing.

Nick

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

THE THIEF OF BAGDAD  (1924)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Raoul Walsh
    Douglas Fairbanks, Julianne Johnston, Anna May Wong,
    Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Sojin, Brandon Hurst
Douglas Fairbanks was at his career peak when he made this sumptuous adventure based on the Arabian Nights. His acting is operatic, even by the standards of silent films, and the movie's a little long, but the production values are outstanding. (At the time of its release, this was the most expensive motion picture ever made.) As for the swaggering grace he brought to his stunt work, Fairbanks couldn't really defy gravity. He just made it look that way.

Sick Girl (2006)

SICK GIRL  (2006)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Lucky McKee
    Erin Brown, Angela Bettis,
    Jesse Hlubik, Marcia Bennett
A woman who's way too fond of bugs gets an unusual specimen in a package from Brazil. She adds it to the insect zoo she keeps in her apartment, and when her new girlfriend moves in, too, and the new bug goes missing, things get icky. An innocuous entry in the "Masters of Horror" television series, played mostly for laughs. Erin Brown, whose claim to screen immortality probably rides on her work as Misty Mundae, the queen of Seduction Cinema's straight-to-video nudie flicks, plays the girlfriend. She still can't act - that's part of her charm - but she does get topless for a moment or two. It's not hard to imagine what Seduction Cinema would do with something like this. 

Goin' To Town (1935)

GOIN' TO TOWN  (1935)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Alexander Hall
    Mae West, Paul Cavanagh, 
    Ivan Lebedeff, Marjorie Gateson
Mae West takes on high society, but is high society ready for Mae West? This is almost certainly the only movie in which Mae West sings opera, and a good example of what she was able to get away with, even after the Production Code took effect. Nobody could slip a winking sexual reference between the lines and past the censors like Mae West. 

No (2012)

NO  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Pablo Larraín
    Gael Garcia Bernal, Alfredo Castro,
    Luis Gnecco, Antonia Zegers
This is where "Z" meets "The War Room", a tense political drama set in 1980s Chile. The government of dictator Augusto Pinochet has called for a referendum it knows it will win, aiming to gain some legitimacy around the world and eight more years of power at home. The vastly understaffed and underfunded opposition hires a commercial ad man (Gael Garcia Bernal) to mastermind its media campaign, while the government hires the ad man's boss and partner to promote Pinochet. The tactics get brutal, but with 15 minutes of national TV time at their disposal each day, the "No" forces can at least get their message out, if they dare to stand up to the increasingly deadly threats to themselves and their families. Shot sometimes crudely on hand-held video equipment, this looks more like a documentary than a dramatization. You feel like you're there, sitting in on the strategy sessions and dodging clubs in the streets. It's a dirty game, no doubt, with a surprise at the end, and a lingering question about what matters more - holding fast to a moral position, or knowing how to sell it. It's a question that's still being asked, and not just in Chile.