First Word

This movie is based on an actual incident in Matewan, West Virginia (more…)

A fictional story about one of the greats, well played as far as (more…)

A movie made from the [Marvin] Neil Simon stage comedy. A couple old men that worked for decades together in vaudeville are to get (more…)

The title probably scares a lot of movie-browsers off — another (more…)

David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is a non-descript middle-aged traveling salesman on a routine road trip through the California steppe, day-dreaming, listening to talk radio, worrying about a tiff with his wife the night before, when he catches up with a big, smoky, mean-looking truck. He passes it, but it then speeds up and passes him. Thus begins an hour and half of a road-rage “duel” between Mann and truck. (more…)

This is a modern cloak and dagger based on a true story. Twenty-five year FBI man Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) is nabbed for spying just before he would have retired. The movie depicts the FBI’s effort to catch him in the act of making a “drop” so that conviction would be certain. (more…)

The plot and message of this movie can be summarized (more…)

Young woman (Anne Hathaway) wants to be a writer but needs (more…)

The premise of this film is very simple and very implausible. An aged former Nazi (Laurence Olivier) has “escaped justice,” ending up in New York. He has a stash of diamonds in a safety deposit box worth tens of millions of dollars. He wants to get them out and go back to safety in Uruguay, but he’s afraid he is being watched and might be robbed while leaving the bank with such a hoard. Put yourself in his shoes and guess which of the following plans would make sense to get the loot out of the bank: (more…)

Original German: Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (”Golem: How He Came Into the World”). This is an early silent masterpiece. It is a telling of the most famous golem-legend, which takes place in Prague during the Elizabethan period. Using astrology, kabala, and invocation of an evil spirit, Rabbi Judah Löw (Albert Steinrück) succeeds in animating a clay model of a man. With this Golem, Löw is able to defend the jews from persecution by the Empire; in addition, the Golem (played by Paul Wegener who also directs) is marshaled to kill the Gentile lover (more…)

This was an HBO series aimed at modern young women that is now available on DVD. It was a six-year sensation spanning the new millennium. (more…)

This may be the first east-west German reconciliation movie ever, having been begun on the east side before the wall fell, and completed after. (more…)

This is a cloak-and-dagger story in the manner of a gritty, black-and-white Raymond Chandler flick. The setting is post-war Vienna. The city is divided, being conjointly ruled by the four allied powers. American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to visit his friend Lime, only to arrive in time for Lime’s funeral. He can’t resist investigating what happened, getting pulled into a situation dominated by a creepy underworld, and an overworld almost as creepy. (more…)

This is another post-reunification attempt to come to terms with the story of communist East Germany. Other efforts with this motive include two reviewed earlier in these pages, The Tunnel and Goodbye, Lenin.

The two parties to the conflict are several officers of the Stasi (state security force/secret police) on the one hand, and a circle of artistic types on the other. The Stasi group (led by Ulrich Mühe and Ulrich Tukur) is portrayed, not just with chilling and inhuman competence, but (more…)

This is one of those movies that is quite stunning and moving in the watching, but afterwards you realize you’ve been cheated. (more…)

Russian sub runs aground on New England island. Crew comes ashore to try to acquire a power-boat to help dislodge the sub. As more and more islanders realize there are Russians around (recall: this is at height of cold War), crazy, tongue-in-cheek panic breaks out everywhere. At length, an armed Mexican standoff between the Russians and islanders develops, when a boy falling out of a church window leads to an unexpected resolution. (more…)

During WW2, a british freighter is sunk by a U-boat, at the same time the U-boat is destroyed. Several survivors of the freighter, plus the German U-boat captain manage to clamber onto the only surviving lifeboat. This group, thrown together into such cramped quarters in the middle of a vast sea, have to figure out how to eat, drink, deal with a gangrenous infection, and sail toward some definitive goal. (more…)

This is a detective story set in a fictional pair of towns straddling the US-Mexican border. The car of a rich man is blown up. By chance, Mexican federale Vargas (Charlton Heston) is honeymooning in the town, and somehow ends up on the case in parallel with Quinlan (Orson Welles), the rotund, cigar-chomping local cop.

Quinlan works by hunches and intuition, while Vargas works by strict legal procedure. The problem is, (more…)

This movie intersperses funny and shocking. The former derives from Charlie Chaplin’s parody of the fascist leader “Phooey” (= Führer), which is quite funny even if not entirely fair; the latter is the sudden violence of storm troopers breaking things up in the ghetto. Even these scenes often have comic relief in the second Chaplin figure, the amnesic (more…)

Cary Grant is a newspaper big shot. His girl friday Hildy (Rosalind Russell) was his assistant that wrote great stories, and was also his wife before she divorced him in disgust at his preoccupation with work. She shows up at his office to tell him to stop phoning a dozen times a day, and sending 20 telegrams: she is to be married to insurance salesman Ralph Bellamy (one of the Duke brothers in Trading Places 43 years later) the very next day. But Cary Grant would like to remarry her, and makes all kinds of plots to delay Hildy’s trip to the place of the other wedding. (more…)

Hilary Swank is bright-eyed, idealistic teacher in a recently-integrated LA public high school. Her class of freshmen is divided into at least four ethnic groups. Each group (except of course the honky — but no matter, there’s only one of him anyhow) has a strong sense of tribal loyalty; this fact is exemplified by turf wars in their respective neighborhoods. The first day of class brings the ongoing war into the school, (more…)

Another roaring Preston Sturges movie. (more…)

Beautifully filmed statement of the key events in the life of Martin Luther. It seems to include the same main facts as Roland Bainton’s great biography, with the exception of ignoring the role of the knights; but liberties are taken with the details, and an episode with a suicide is, so far as I can ascertain, completely made up (though for an acceptable thematic purpose). (more…)

Hitchcock remade this play a couple decades later in the better-know version starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. (more…)

Kane, a powerful newspaper magnate, dies. The news team fans out to get a story on his last word, “Rosebud.” This leads to a series of interviews with various associates, through which the entire story of his life is told from several perspectives. The upshot is that he was a man that came into great wealth, and tried to buy the love of the proletariat and women by starting progressive newspapers and opera houses; but he died (more…)

This is a one-hour version of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, done in 1954. The characters actually make sense; Bond’s sarcasm is haughty yet brave, and nested in a context that makes it enjoyable. Peter Lorre is right in his element as the bad guy. (more…)

Another holocaust film, this one a heavily fictionalized story of SS officer Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein is portrayed as an officer in charge of pesticides and hygiene, who in 1942 gets pressed into service supporting human extermination facilities in Poland. He is horrified, and tries to slow down the system by various artifices, even while remaining at his post for the entire three years of the war that remained. He tries to notify the world via a discussion with a Swedish bureaucrat that he bumps into on a train ride, and also by visiting Roman Catholic and Protestant officials. (more…)

This is not an “important” film, but it is very funny, and funny movies are so rare that I will try to mention them whenever I find one. Also, it is less than an hour and a half, which is also desirable. (more…)

German Der Blaue Engel; directed by Josef von Sternberg, it was the first major German sound movie.

Emil Jannings is a professor at the Gymnasium (advanced high school) whose pupils are becoming more and more unruly; he catches them with some girly pictures from the local cabaret, the Blue Angel. Something tweaks his interest, (more…)

Ben Kingsley plays a former Colonel in the Iranian Army who with wife, son, and daughter flees to America when the Shah is deposed. A “great man, who interacted with kings and queens” is reduced to laboring on road crews and selling candy to teenagers. But he sees a great opportunity to buy a house for a song when it goes on the block at a Sheriff’s auction.

Jennifer Connelly is a recovering alcoholic who owned the house before falling delinquent on taxes. It turns out, the taxes were almost certainly assessed in error, but by the time she seeks legal relief, the house is already sold.

Willy-nilly, these two parties become antagonists, and we can understand the point of view of each perfectly. (more…)