Shopworn (1932)

 

SHOPWORN  (1932)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Nick Grinde

    Barbara Stanwyck, Regis Toomey, Zasu Pittiș,

    Lucien Littlefield, Clara Blandick, Oscar Apfel

Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman whose old man gets killed in a dynamite accident but before he goes he tells her she's on her own now and she's got to be tough so she moves to the city and starts waitressing in a hash joint where she meets a young med student and they hit it off and decide to get married but his domineering mother tricks them and arranges to have her sent to a reformatory where she does her time scrubbing floors and when she gets out she becomes a chorus girl and then a famous actress and she meets up with the med student again and he's a surgeon now but she gives him the brush because she thinks he dumped her when it was really his evil old lady who's still around telling him what to do and then some stuff happens involving a gun and the battle-ax has a change of heart and true love and real romance triumph after all fade out the end. Barbara Stanwyck. What a dame. 

Merrill's Marauders (1962)

MERRILL'S MARAUDERS  (1962)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Samuel Fuller

    Jeff Chandler, Ty Hardin, Peter Brown,

    Will Hutchins, Andrew Duggan, Claude Akins,

    John Hoyt, Charles Briggs, Pancho Magalona

An old-fashioned, World-War-Two combat movie about an American volunteer force slugging its way through the mountains and jungles of Burma to take on the Japanese. Sam Fuller knew something about combat, but he also knew that a movie was a movie, and one thing you notice in this is that when guys die (and a lot of them do), they do it in the same graceful, dramatic, stylized way that we did as kids playing soldier in the back yard. I could swear there's even one guy who goes into his death spiral before the grenade that kills him goes off. Not many of the actual Marauders survived the Burma campaign, but they did stop the Japanese from getting to India. There's a whole other movie waiting to be made about whether the death toll - on both sides - was worth it. 

Piaffe (2022)

 

PIAFFE  (2022)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ann Oren

    Simone Bucio, Sebastian Rudolph, Lea Draeger,

    Simon Jaikiriuma Paetau, Josef Ostendorf

An elegant erotic fantasy about a woman who's doing sound design for a commercial that features a horse, and finds herself transforming in a most unusual way. It risks being silly, but Simone Bucio's daring performance transcends that, bringing a whole new dimension to the concept of being trans. And she has a nice tail.

The Outrun (2024)

 

THE OUTRUN  (2024)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Nora Fingscheidt

    Saoirse Ronan, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves

Saoirse Ronan singlehandedly holds this one together as a reckless young woman named Rona who leaves London for the Orkney Islands to try to get sober. The tales, legends and desolate, windswept landscapes of the islands help tell the story, and Ronan goes places she hasn't explored before as a smart, troubled girl whose giddy energy lights up the party till the moment her demon takes over and you can't get away from her fast enough. Anybody who's struggled with recovery, or knows somebody who has, will be able to relate. 

The Seventh Coin (1993)

 

THE SEVENTH COIN  (1993)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Dror Soref

    Peter O'Toole, Alexandra Powers, Navin Chowdhry,

    John Rhys-Davies, Ally Walker, Jill Novick, Gilat Ankori

An Arab boy and a Jewish-American girl get caught up in an adventure that takes them all over Jerusalem, when they come into the possession of a rare coin that dates back to the time of King Herod. It seems there are seven coins all together, dug up in the ruins at Masada, and a murderous criminal played by Peter O'Toole will stop at nothing to have them all in his collection. It's formula stuff, with some nice location work and appealing performances by the juvenile leads. O'Toole looks weary, but with a wide selection of elegant wardrobe options, you can't say he's not well-dressed. 

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

 

RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL  (2020)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Woody Allen

    Wallace Shawn, Gina Gershon, Elena Anaya,

    Louis Garrel, Douglas McGrath, Steve Guttenberg,

    Sergi Lopez, Tammy Blanchard, Christoph Waltz

This is not the worst late-career Woody Allen movie to come along, which is faint praise maybe, but there it is. Wallace Shawn plays a film critic and would-be novelist, tagging along with his wife (Gina Gershon), who's working publicity at the San Sebastian Film Festival. While she spends most of her time with a hot young director (Louis Garrel), he starts to fall for an attractive doctor (Elena Anaya), so here's yet another Woody Allen movie dealing with love, infatuation and infidelity among people who are too smart for their own good. (At least this time, one of the protagonists is not a 20-year-old girl.) The best parts are the dream sequences. (Shawn's character always dreams scenes from classic movies, in black and white.) Welles, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Godard and Bunuel are all represented, so there's at least a faint echo of "Stardust Memories going on, and if you stay till the end, you get a riff on "The Seventh Seal" with Christoph Waltz as Death.

Phantom Ship (1935)

PHANTOM SHIP  (1935)  ¢ ¢

    D: Denison Clift 

    Bela Lugosi, Shirley Grey, Arthur Margetson,

    Edmund Willard, Dennis Hoey, George Mozart

In 1872, a merchant vessel sets sail for Genoa, carrying a cargo of liquor, a crew of 13, a woman, a black cat and Bela Lugosi. This is not going to end well, is what I'm thinking, and when the ship turns up adrift in the Atlantic later on, there's not a trace of anybody on board. A speculation based on an actual incident, one of the unsolved mysteries of the sea. The movie's not much, but Lugosi's good.