May 2026

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (1976) and

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS… (1976)

       Nineteen seventy-six, one of the most memorable years in Hollywood history, saw the release of all-time classics “Taxi Driver,” “Network,” “All the President’s Men” along with the popular best picture winner, “Rocky.”

      The five-year period starting the year before (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Nashville,” “Shampoo,” “Jaws”) and ending in 1979 (“Apocalypse Now,” “Manhattan,” “All That Jazz,” “Being There,” “Alien”), with “Annie Hall,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Star Wars,” and “The Deer Hunter,” among others, in 1977 and ‘78, represents the most substantial run of great films the American film industry ever produced. In this small pocket of time, writers and directors were given free range and audiences were rewarded.

       For me, the year marks the beginning of my interest in movies as more than just entertaining diversions, as I recognized the cinema as a complex artform, the best films offering a strong point of view expressed by a screenwriter and a director. The journey had begun the previous year when I finally saw “The Godfather Part II” and “Last Tango in Paris,” seminal works of the era.  

      I could wax excessively about “All the President’s Men,” having first watched it just as I segued from an English major to journalism, but too much has been written about that influential docu-drama.

     Two underappreciated pictures from 1976 that deserve revisiting are John Cassavetes’ street-wise tale of a seedy businessman, “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” and Robert Altman’s free-wheeling, historical satire, “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson.”

      Altman, in the midst of his most productive period—"McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Nashville,” 3 Women”—drops viewers into the world of Buffalo Bill Cody’s vaudevillian show of the Wild West, a theatrical circus that thrived from the 1880s until the early 20^th Century, creating a mythology about the white settlers’ “conquest” of the American West and casting the Native Americans as villains.

     Paul Newman, giving one of his most underrated performances, plays Cody as an egotistical moron who can barely ride a horse, but strides about like the hero he never was. In a coup, the federal government allows the still regal Sitting Bull, the most famous tribal chief, off the reservation to join the troupe. As ridiculous as the entire set-up seems, it actually happened.

     The supporting cast, like in every Altman picture, is essential: Kevin McCarthy (“Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) is hilarious as one of Cody’s assistants; Joel Grey, after providing MC duties for “Cabaret” (1972), does the same for Buffalo Bill; Geraldine Chaplin plays the emotional sharp-shooter Annie Oakley; Harvey Keitel is cast against type as Bill’s sycophant nephew; and fresh from his memorable performance as Chief Bromden in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Will Sampson confounds Cody as the stone-faced spokesperson for Sitting Bull.

      The best performance in the film is delivered by the venerable Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline, the dime novelist who turned Cody from a minor figure into a Western legend. “[It was] the thrill of my life to have invented you,” he tells Buffalo Bill as he departs. Every line Lancaster speaks is a gem (Altman penned the film with fellow director Alan Rudolph), dripping with sarcasm.

      The picture offers the ultimate critique of movie Westerns and their depiction of American history: the ungilded truth fades, replaced by a more comfortable narrative and make-believe heroes. While the filmmakers are clearly condemning the casual racism expressed by the white characters, I can’t imagine the film being made today.

      Ben Gazzara, one of Cassavetes’ best friends, an intense actor who gave as many bad performances as good ones, is perfectly cast as Cosmo Vittelli, the high-stepping proprietor of a low-rent strip joint on Hollywood Boulevard. Like many of the writer-director’s movies, “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” feels unrehearsed, documentary style with long takes of Cosmo strutting through the club or on the mean streets of Los Angeles, always well dressed and full of confidence, but never very far ahead of his creditors.

      There’s not much of a plot—Cosmo is the plot—but the title comes from a favor he’s asked to do to clear a gambling debt. Among the mobsters keeping Cosmo in line are played by Seymour Cassel and the scariest of all actors, Timothy Carey. 

      “Chinese Bookie” fits into one of the most interesting movie trends of the 1970s: aimless, but insightful examinations of individuals who don’t fit neatly into society.   

      Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in “Scarecrow” (1973), Hackman again in “The Conversation” (1974), Dustin Hoffman in “Straight Time” (1978), Jill Clayburgh in “An Unmarried Woman” (1978), Warren Oates in “Two-Lane Blacktop” (1972), every ‘70s role of Jack Nicholson and Gena Rowlands in her husband’s “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) are just a few of examples of this long-lost sub-genre.    

  

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 (2026)

      Considering Hollywood’s love affair with sequels, it’s surprising that it took 20 years to revive the world of fashion journalism that made “The Devil Wears Prada” a major hit in 2006.

     Bringing back Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt, the new production straddles the line between offensive extravagance and consideration of the importance of ethics and loyalty, but let’s not take the film too seriously—this is well-acted, overly plotted eye candy. It tones down the pretentiousness of the original with Streep’s Miranda (a not very subtle comic portrait of former Vogue editor Anna Wintour) coming off as an actual human with a touch of humility and vulnerability.

       Hathaway’s Andy is now an award-winning journalist who, after the paper she writes for folds, returns to Runway, where Miranda and Nigel (Tucci) still run the fashion magazine. After helping them dodge a PR nightmare over third-world labor issues, Andy works behind the scenes to unravel an ownership change for the publication.

     Blunt’s arrogant Emily, once, like Andy, a lowly assistant under Miranda, is now a major player in the fashion world, running Dior.

    Director David Frankel, who has mostly toiled on television since the first film, returns to smoothly guide the sequel and the fluctuating relationship between Miranda and Andy. Both actresses are sharp; for Hathaway the performance is something of a comeback, her most prominent role since her Oscar win for “Les Misérables” in 2012.

      By the last third of the picture, the scheming reaches such pointless levels that even someone as fashion-ignorant as I was more interested in the haute couture than the story.

  

CONFESSION (1937)

    The biggest winners at the dawn of the sound era were actresses. In no decade since the 1930s (and continuing in the early ‘40s) have stories about women played such a large part of the industry’s output. The number of actresses who were the stars (not just co-stars) of pictures is overwhelming when one considers the course of movie history since then.

       While even causal movie fans remember Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box office attractions of the era, Kay Francis, has been virtually forgotten.

      In the past few weeks, courtesy of TCM and YouTube, I’ve seen more than a half dozen of Francis’ films she starred in for Warner Bros. after her initial success at Paramount. “The Keyhole” (1933), “British Agent” (1934), “The House on 56^th Street” (1935), “I Found Stella Parish” (1935), “Stranded” (1935) and “Secrets of an Actress” (1938) are all stories of romantic heartbreak and sacrifice, classic “women’s pictures.” All told, she made 50 films during the 1930s, most as the top billed performer, yet Francis never scored an Oscar nomination.

     Probably her finest performance and most interesting role is in “Confession” as washed-up Polish opera singer Vera Kowalska who, minutes after she’s introduced in the film, shoots and kills her one-time mentor (Basil Rathbone) as he leaves a nightclub in “Confession.”

      Much of the movie’s story is shown in flashback as Vera is forced to tell her story in court. Director Joe May, a pioneer of the German film industry who emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1930s, brings the influences of German Expressionism to “Confessions,” fearing more camera movement and stylish touches than you see even from Fritz Lang or Ernst Lubitsch. According to IMDb, the film is an almost identical copy of the 1935 German picture “Mazurka.”

      The film opens with the Svengali-like Michailow (Rathbone) seducing a young piano protégé Lisa (a wide-eyed Jane Bryan), a romance that ends abruptly when Vera shoots him. In flashback we see how years earlier Michailow did his best to breakup Vera’s marriage to a war hero (Ian Hunter). Rathbone, who was a villain right up to his career-changing Sherlock Holmes series, plays the most despicable character I remember ever seeing in a 1930s picture; it’s pretty clear he rapes Vera after getting her drunk and has similar plans for Lisa.

     Francis’ Vera provides the moral center of the film, a stand-in for women mistreated by men in power, as she goes from a European opera star to a second-rate cabaret singer who has lost everything she loved. She creates a powerful image in the courtroom dock, her hair dyed blonde and her piercing eyes staring hopelessly into space, unconcerned with the charges against her.

     Also memorable is the great character actor Donald Crisp as the murder-trial judge who must weigh the cost of justice in this complicated case.

     By the mid-1940s, good roles weren’t coming her way; she retired at 41 after “Wife Wanted” (1946), ironically about a washed-up movie star. Too bad she didn’t hold off until film noir caught on—like Davis, Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, she could have revived her career.

     Retiring early and having just a single great film—“Trouble in Paradise,” in a supporting role—explains why she’s not remembered but Francis was a subtle, thoughtful actress, often a sharp contrast to her male co-stars who were still learning how to act in talkies.

  

THE STRANGER (2026)

     One of the essential novels of the 20^th Century, Albert Camus’ manifesto on an absurdist approach to life creates a challenge to filmmakers looking to adapt the book. The simplistic plot—a taciturn shipping clerk’s mother dies and then he thoughtlessly shoots a man to death—is just the frame that the French writer used to hang his theory concerning a pointless existence; his rejection of traditional ideas of happiness and morals. 

    The great Italian director Luchino Visconti tackled the novel in 1967 with Marcello Mastroianni as the dour protagonist. I’ve only seen a fuzzy, VHS-transfer of that picture on the internet so I can’t compare it to the new version. But Mastroianni’s natural charisma undercuts the emotionless portrait of Meursault.

      Benjamin Voisin, star of the acclaimed French film “Lost Illusions” (2021), walks through the impressionistic film with world-weary detachment, attending his mother’s funeral, commencing an affair with a former co-worker (Rebecca Marder) and his accidental involvement with Raymond (Pierre Lottin), his shady neighbor. 

     Like the novel, the picture is set in early 1940s Algeria amid the background of the French military incursion into the African colony, adding a racial aspect when, after a scuffle with three Arab men near a friend’s beachside home, Meursault fires five shots into one of them.

     Director François Ozon (“Under the Sand,” “Swimming Pool”), who adapted the novel with Philippe Piazzo, emphasizes the contrast of the intense North African sun with interior shadows, superbly shot by Manuel Dacosse. The retro black and white cinematography adds to the film’s fog of ennui.

  

THE GIRL IN THE NEWS (1940)

       Before he directed three of the finest British films of the century—“Odd Man Out,” “The Fallen Idol” and “The Third Man,” all in a row in the late 1940s—Carol Reed first signaled his filmmaking potential with three 1940 pictures.

      Reed, the illegitimate son of the British stage legend Herbert Beerbohm Tree, worked in film companies from an early age, rising to director in 1935; 1940 proved to be a turning point. Central to the success of all three, “The Stars Look Down” and “Night Train to Munich” along with “The Girl in the News,” is leading lady Margaret Lockwood.

     Coming off international success playing the amateur sleuth determined to find a missing elderly woman in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” (1938), Lockwood had risen to the top of the British film industry. In “Stars Look Down,” she’s the unhappy wife of a school teacher (Michael Redgrave), a local who returns from university determined to help the coalminers working in dangerous conditions. Foreshadowing John Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley” (1941), Reed’s film isn’t the visual masterpiece that Ford’s film is, but pushes for reform much more directly. As Jenny, Lockwood plays a complicated, unsympathetic woman, unsure of her loyalties.

In “Night Train to Munich,” Lockwood’s character and her father, a Czech scientist, find themselves caught between the Germans and the British after the Nazis invade their country. Rex Harrison plays a British undercover agent who attempts to extricate father and daughter from the Third Reich, and, of course, falls for Lockwood’s Anna. The film is one of the best war thrillers of the era.

     While those two films are recognized classics of British cinema, I was unfamiliar with “The Girl in the News” before stumbling upon it on YouTube. It might be the most challenging role of Lockwood’s career, portraying a home-health nurse who, as the film begins, has been accused of participating in the death of her patient. In a high-profile trial, she is acquitted, but to find work she  changes her name.

     You don’t need to have seen a thousand crime films to guess what happens to her new employer. While the first death was clearly suicide, Anne’s innocent or guilt is muddier the second time around. One of the strengths of the film is its underlining theme of class distinction and how it weighs on justice. Sidney Gilliat, who contributed to the scripts of “The Lady Vanishes” and “Night Train to Munich,” penned the screenplay, based on a Roy Vickers’ novel.

       The supporting cast is filled with familiar British actors, including Emlyn Williams (also in “The Stars in the Crown”), Roger Livesey, Basil Radford, Leo Genn, Michael Hordern and Felix Aylmer.

    While these 1940 releases only hint at the dramatically flamboyant direction seen in Reed’s later pictures, they are first-rate films willing to address controversial topics.

  

WORTH (2021)

       In contemporary cinema, there’s a thin line between a hit movie and one relegated to being buried among the streaming lineups of bad thrillers. Why some pictures fall between the cracks and fail to receive studio promotion is nearly impossible to explain. This Michael Keaton vehicle, barely released even though the actor had just starred in back-to-back Oscar-winning films (“Birdman” and “Spotlight”) takes on a seemingly unfilmable subject and delivers a compelling movie.

     In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, the airlines faced another fear: being sued into bankruptcy. In response, the federal government created the Victim Compensation Fund and recruited lawyer Ken Feinberg (Keaton) to run it. After developing a formula for payouts, Feinberg and his team find resistance from both ends of the spectrum—survivors of regular folks killed, whose cases are argued by Charles Wolf (a quietly memorable Stanley Tucci) and the advocate for the wealthy who want a bigger cut of the pie.

     Like a police procedural, the picture follows Feinberg, and assistant Camille (the always solid Amy Ryan) as they build a consensus among the relatives of the victims. The movie has the feel of a TV movie as it portrays a few of the families’ stories, but the subject is fascinating enough (the original title was “What Is Life Worth”) to sustain its seriousness. The arc of Feinberg’s character—he’s a numbers guy who slowly understands the humanity of those affected needs to be recognized—is superbly portrayed by Keaton.

        Director Sara Colangelo (“The Kindergarten Teacher”) and screenwriter Max Borenstein (the recent “Godzilla” series) turn a story that seems more typical of a 20-page New Yorker article than a feature film into thoughtful cinema.

 

 PHOTOS:

 Paul Newman is Buffalo Bill in Robert Altman’s film. (United Artists)

 Ben Gazzara in “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (Criterion Collection)

 Kay Francis with Ben Welden in “Confession.” (Warner Bros.)

 British director Carol Reed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 2026

 

TRUE CONFESSIONS (1981) 

     It’s easy to name the highlights of Robert Duvall’s career—his business-like lawyer Tom Hagen, the adopted son of the Corleones; war-loving Lt. Col. Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now; the disciplinarian in “The Great Santini”; the soft-spoken country singer in “Tender Mercies”; Frank Hackett, the snarling television exec in “Network” and a great man of the West, Gus McCrae in “Lonesome Dove”—but what made him memorable was his consistency through more than five decades of performances, as both a star and supporting player. His death last month marked the end of one of finest acting careers in American film history.    

       Memorably, the same actor who tearfully whispered to Marlon Brando “They shot Sonny on the Causeway. He’s dead” also observed with bravado to anyone within earshot “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” He didn’t disappear into roles, but, like the classic pre-war film actors, Duvall brought a vast array of characters alive, convincingly revealing their humanity, flaws and virtues.  

     By my account, Duvall should have been nominated for 10 Oscars (the Academy gave him seven, including a best actor win for “Tender Mercies”) and deserved three supporting awards, for “The Godfather,” “Network” and “Apocalypse Now.”

     Like his roommates from the early 1960s, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman (what are the odds?), he was primarily seen as a character actor, yet all three became star-actors. One of Duvall’s best starring roles was in the crime film “True Confessions,” little-seen at its release and quickly forgotten. 

      In this perfectly structured and superbly scripted film, Duvall delivers the kind of underplayed performance, not unlike his work in “The Godfather” pictures, that should be studied by every young film actor. He does more with a turn of the head, his trademark throaty guffaw, squinting eyes and toothy grin than most actors deliver with a page-long monologue.  

      “True Confessions,” directed by Broadway veteran Ulu Grosbard, matches two of the finest actors of our time, Duvall and Robert De Niro, as brothers; De Niro as a Catholic priest and Duvall as a police detective in postwar Los Angeles. The script by the married couple Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (based on his novel) was clearly inspired by the classic Warner Bros. pictures of the 1930s—when cops and priests were always Irish—and the real-life Los Angeles “Black Dahlia” 1947 murder of a young actress. But unlike “Angels with Dirty Faces” and other pictures of that era, the church in “True Confessions” finds itself connected to the sex crime and a pornographer. The script also astutely captures post-war L.A.: the influence of the Catholic Church, the city’s Mexican roots and the corruption of law enforcement.

     But at its heart, “True Confessions” is about the blood connection, despite their varying views of life, that remains between the brothers. Watching these two actors together for the only time in their long careers (obviously, they were both in but had no scenes together in “The Godfather, Part II”), De Niro taking the more reflective, less showy role, is a reminder that in the 1970s and early ‘80s the power of acting fueled American movies.

      Duvall’s most overlooked great performance can be found in “Tomorrow,” the 1972 Horton Foote-adaptation of a William Faulkner short story set in rural Mississippi. Duvall stars as the taciturn workingman Jackson Fentry, who takes in and bonds with a pregnant woman. This plaintive, black-and-white movie (it plays like a forgotten movie from the early sound era) is miles away from the mob lawyer and fixer he played the same year in “The Godfather,” a testament to Duvall’s ability to use his recognizable acting method to create people from very worlds.

      In his later years, Duvall’s theatrical duality, pairing soft-spoken readings and explosive anger, often came off as predictable and hammy, including “The Apostle,” “A Civil Action,” and most of his supporting roles in the last 20 years; the exceptions being his New York editor in “The Paper,” an amusing cliché; and the aging tyrant in “The Judge.” But even with all his distinctive tics, he made every film better. Just as telling, his absence from “The Godfather, Part III” created a huge hole in Francis Coppola’s film.

      Legendary New York Times film critic Vincent Canby once wrote that Duvall was “America’s Olivier.” And though he never reached the stardom of his contemporaries De Niro, Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson, he brought acting precision and unbridled commitment to some of the most memorable characters of the last half-century of American cinema.

  

CRIME 101 (2026)

     There’s nothing spectacular about this well-plotted, Los Angeles-set jewelry heist thriller. But that’s fine. We need more pictures that don’t strive for raves from influencers and simply provide a lively, thoughtful two hours at the cinema.

     Based on acclaimed crime writer Don Winslow’s novella of the same name, the movie follows a determined police detective (a Colombo-like Mark Ruffalo) who seems to have figured out the MO of a shy, cautious thief (steely-eyed Chris Hemsworth) who robs stores up and down the California coast.

    The story kicks up a notch when Davis, the thief, turns down a job from his handler (Nick Nolte, even more gravelly voiced than usual) and it’s botched by his replacement, a punk on a motorcycle played sneeringly by Barry Keoghan, a 2022 Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin.”

     Meanwhile, we’re introduced to event insurance agent (who knew?) Sharon (Halle Berry, under-utilized by Hollywood since her 2001 Oscar win), who Davis enlists in his latest heist plan, which, of course, he promises, will be his last.

     Winslow and director Bart Layton (“American Animals”) bring it all together in a snappy finale set inside the famous Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

     Hemsworth, the Australian best known as Thor in “The Avengers” films, is well cast as the inarticulate, but clever thief. Needless to say, Ruffalo fits this type of off-kilter, smart-as-hell character like a glove.

      The superb cast also includes two more previous Oscar nominees: Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lou’s separated wife, who deserved more screen time, and Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown”) as Davis’s love interest who manages to find the heart of this secretive man. I can only dream that more pictures can boast of a supporting cast of six Academy Award nominees.  

  

THE BLACK PIRATE (1926) and SPARROWS (1926)

    One hundred years ago, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were the most famous couple in the world. Since the marriage of these two Hollywood stars in 1920, nearly every movie they made was a hit and when they travelled the world—which they seemed to nearly every year—they were mobbed by crowds. From China to Chicago to Paris, movie fans fought to get a glimpse of the pair.

     Fairbanks, who specialized in acrobatic derring-do, came to Hollywood in 1915, already a star on Broadway. By 1920, when he began his run of swashbuckling adventure films (“The Mark of Zorro,” “The Three Musketeers,” “Robin Hood,” and “The Thief of Bagdad”) his movie popularity was matched only by his best friend, Charlie Chaplin. The year before, the two buddies along with Pickford and director D.W. Griffith, in the hopes of giving actors more control over the final product, created United Artists, a releasing company that continues today.

     Pickford, who came to Hollywood as a teenager in 1909 with Griffith’s company (appearing in about 50 shorts that first year), soon became known as the “Girl with the Curls” for her roles as a young innocent and trademark hairstyle. Pickford was so beloved by audiences in heartwarming adolescence roles that she continued to play children into her 30s.  

     In “Sparrows,” she’s a teenager tasked with playing mother to a half-dozen toddlers (and a couple of infants) at a horrific, back-woods “baby farm.” Primarily unwed mothers would pay to have someone care for their child, a version of foster care popular in the early years of the 20^th Century. Minus regulations, “Sparrow” shows the evil owner mistreating the children and using them to tend his farm.

     The picture doesn’t have much to offer until the final 20 minutes when Pickford’s Molly helps the children escape, leading them through the swap land that surrounds the farm, avoiding deadly quicksand and hungry alligators. It reminds one of some of Griffith’s thrilling chases. Of course, a teary ending follows.

     “The Black Pirate” is one of Fairbanks’ best films, as he plays a nobleman who pretends to be a pirate to seek revenge on the man (Sam De Grasse, legendary bad guy of silents) who killed his father. The pirate ship setting gives Fairbanks the chance to glide up and down the mast and showoff his fencing prowess.

      The film is also one of the most successful uses of two-strip Technicolor process. Though far from the quality that the company would achieve by the early 1930s, it was popular with audiences. The print available on YouTube has a distinctive look that certainly makes it stand out among the usual black-and-white silents.

     Among the stars of the film is Donald Crisp (originally set to direct the film), playing a shipmate loyal to Fairbanks’ Black Pirate. The actor, part of Griffith’s company for many years, became a beloved character actor during Hollywood’s Golden Age, memorably in “How Green Was My Valley.”    

       Not long after “The Black Pirate,” Fairbanks lost interest in moviemaking, preferring to travel the world and golf. His career wasn’t helped when rumors of an affair put an end to the fairytale of Pickfair, the couple’s Beverly Hills mansion. The couple divorced in 1936 and three years later, Fairbanks died of a heart attack at age 56. (Pickford marriage to “Wings” star Buddy Rogers lasted for 42 years, until her death in 1979.)

      Not only did Fairbanks almost single-handedly invent the adventure film but he was among the first free-spending stars (by 1920 both Doug and Mary were earning over $1 million a year), pioneering the lifestyle that movie stars would become famous for. One of the most interesting figures of the early 20^th Century, Fairbanks is entertainingly profiled in “The First King of Hollywood” by Tracey Goessel, both a well-researched bio and an excellent introduction to silent film and early Hollywood.

  

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

      Because of my dismissal of “La La Land” and “Barbie” as nonsensical junk, I failed to pick up on the fact that Ryan Gosling has become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. That’s why he finds himself as a virtual one-man show in this big-budget sci-fi epic that combines elements of “Interstellar” and “E.T.” While the film doesn’t reach the heights of either of those films, it’s an entertaining mix of save-the-world gadgetry and heartwarming close encounters.

      The picture opens with Gosling’s Prof. Ryland Grace realizing he’s the only crew member left on a space ship headed to a star in a distant galaxy, having only a vague idea of why he’s there. Through flashbacks, Grace remembers, and the audience sees, what led to his current dilemma. (He doesn’t know how to navigate the spacecraft, but it seems to be pretty much self-driving.)

    To put it simply as I can (most of the details went way over my head), an alien energy force is weakening our Sun and Project Hail Mary’s mission (named for the football lingo) is to find a way to stop it. For reasons that can’t be determined by Earth’s scientists, this distant star Grace is bound for seems to be immune from this energy force. 

     But before the tech talk gets too thick, our one-man crew meets up with a creature who shares the Earth’s concerns. His planet faces extinction from the same molecular troublemaker.

     In what seems like record time, Grace and this crab-like rock learn to communicate (voiced by James Ortiz) and start working together on the problem. Once Grace christens him “Rocky,” their relationship becomes the heart of the movie---almost to the point that their shared existential fears are secondary to their bromance.

    The flashback scenes are anchored by Sandra Hüller (the wife in both “The Zone of Interest” and “Anatomy of a Fall”), as the all-business director of the project who never stops reminding Grace (and us) of the seriousness of the situation.   

     Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (“The Lego Movie,” the “Jump Street” comedies) do a good job of mixing the pre-flight scenes with the space scenes—brilliantly shot by Greig Fraser—to maintain the mystery in the first third of the film and deepening our understanding of Grace in the last third. I was less impressed with Drew Goddard’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel (he also scripted Weir’s “The Martian” for the 2015 film), in that he both overloads the picture with scientific details while never making non-astronaut Grace’s space feats believable.

      Gosling’s screen presence holds the film together, a giant step-up from his recent efforts (“The Fall Guy” was unwatchable), but it still doesn’t come close to his best work from early in his career, including “Half Nelson” (2006), “Lars and the Real Girl” (2007), “Blue Valentine” (2010) and “The Place Beyond the Pines” (2012). But I guess that actor is long gone—he’s now a star.

  

TALES OF MANHATTAN (1942)

     Anthology films pop up every so often, but have never been a popular trend. A list of the best of this offbeat genre includes “Fantasia” (1940), “Dead of Night” (1945), “O. Henry’s Full House” (1952), “New York Stories” (1989), “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (2018) and two Jim Jarmusch pictures, “Mystery Train” (1989) and last year’s “Father Mother Sister Brother.”

     Highly entertaining and featuring one of the best casts ever assembled, “Tales of Manhattan” follows a man’s old-fashioned tailcoat, which brings both good and bad luck to its owners after being cursed by its maker.

     The first segment stars Charles Boyer as a suave suitor of flirty Rita Hayworth, leading to a showdown with her alcoholic husband (Thomas Mitchell) at a party. Superbly acted and elegantly written (it’s not clear which screenwriter worked on which episode), this is the one segment that easily could have been a full-length feature. Adding a comic element to the episode is the always memorable Eugene Pallette as Boyer’s faithful butler.

     After two clichéd segments---Charles Laughton as a musician whose big moment is ruined by the jacket and a love triangle featuring Henry Fonda, Ginger Rogers and Cesar Romero—Edward G. Robinson plays a desperate man living in a low-rent hotel who puts on the dog at his college’s 25^th reunion. He’s renewed by reconnecting with classmates until one arrogant classmate (George Sanders) calls him out. It’s one of Robinson’s finest performances.

     Surprisingly, 20^th Century Fox included a Black segment in which the jacket filled with cash gets tossed out of a plane, landing on a farm of singer-actors Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters. They take it to the village minister (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson of “Jack Benny Show” fame), who decides to make the prayers of every member of the community come true. Typical of how African-Americans were treated by Hollywood in that era, they are portrayed as wide-eyed innocents who burst into song at the drop of a hat.

     Another episode filmed by French director Julien Duvivier (“Un Carnet de bal,” “Pepe le Moko”), and then later cut by the studio, stars W.C. Fields as Prof. Pufflewhistle, a snake-oil salesman who entertains a room filed with upright citizens, covertly getting them drunk. The segment also features Marx Bros.’ alumni Margaret Dumont. Both the film and the Fields’ outtake are available on YouTube.    

      The director’s next picture was another star-studded anthology film, “Flesh and Fantasy” (1943), also featuring Robinson and Boyer along with Barbara Stanwyck.

            

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

    This gruesome nightmare of a film opens in a ballroom featuring a robotic pop band (Dr. Phibes’ Clockwork Wizards), a costumed female dancer and an elaborate church organ, which rises from below floor level, played by Anton Phibes. Vincent Price, of course, is Phibes, looking like his face is a mask, sporting a gray Beatle-like wig and draped in an oversized black cloak.

     Falling somewhere between the Price-Roger Corman Poe adaptations and an early version of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” this creepy British horror movie, lingering over the hideously defaced murder victims more than earns its cult status. The film’s palette emphasizes reds, blacks and purples, all deeply saturated contrasting with Phibes’ cadaver-like face.

    The plot follows Dr. Phibes’ Bible-based scenario to kill everyone involved in the failed attempt to save his late wife. Even after Scotland Yard catches on to his pattern, they are too inept to stop it. Between murders, the film presents musical and dancing interludes; at one point the Clockwork Wizards play a version of “One for My Baby,” the Frank Sinatra standard. 

    Saved for last is Dr. Vesalius (a slumming Joseph Cotten), who cooperates with the detectives in hopes of apprehending the insane criminal. For reasons that are made clear by the end, Price’s Phibes never speaks but his voice is heard via a recording he controls.

      I found this oddball relic on YouTube as part of an on-line show called “Creature Features,” modeled after those late-night movie programs popular in the 1970s and ‘80s. (Watching the film includes endless ads and silly skits to click through.)    

     The picture, beyond its distinctive look, is well directed by Robert Fuest, who also directed the nearly as insane “The Devil’s Rain” (1975), with Ernest Borgnine as the devil and William Shatner as his determined foe. He also was behind the camera for “Dr. Phibes Rises Again” (1972), which adds Peter Cushing to the cast.

 

DEAD OF WINTER (2025)

      For nearly 40 years, Emma Thompson has been among the most consistently excellent actresses in both American and British films. No one was more impressive during the 1990s, starring in “Howards End,” “The Remain of the Day,” “In the Name of the Father” and “Sense and Sensibility,” which also earned her an Oscar for adapted screenplay.

     Since then, she has shined as a woman dying of cancer in the TV movie “Wit,” in her three roles in the television version of “Angels in America,” as Prof. Trelawney in a handful of “Harry Potter” films, as Goneril opposite Anthony Hopkins’ “King Lear” and as a talk show host making a comeback in “Late Night.”

     Deserving more attention is her most recent film, “Dead of Winter,” streaming on HBO/Max in which she plays an ordinary woman who finds herself facing deadly circumstances. After getting used to Thompson’s Minnesota accent (it sounds as if she watched Francis McDormand in “Fargo” over and over), she perfectly captures the will-do, determined attitude of Midwesterners.

     Barb, seeking directions to a frozen lake, stumbles on the kidnapping of a young girl, held by a gun-toting couple (Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca) holed up in a camp house deep in the snow-bound hinterland of northern Minnesota.

     The why and wherefores are revealed in drips by screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, leaving the viewers with just their resolve that Thompson won’t stop until she’s freed the girl or is killed trying. Much of the action takes place on the frozen lake, with the deadly water below the ice a constant threat.

      Part of the appeal of the film is that you don’t expect to encounter murder and mayhem with Emma Thompson in the middle of it. But she turns out to be a refreshing, very humane, alternative to the usual action hero.
 

 THE GREAT SILENCE (1968)

    Most spaghetti Westerns are a mix of tough-guy attitude, lingering shots of the hills of Spain or Italy and jolting closeups, in support of a childishly simple plot.

     What elevates this creation of Sergio Corbucci, best known as the writer-director of “Django” (1966), is the casting of two of the era’s most interesting actors, France’s Jean-Louis Trintignant (“A Man and a Woman,” “Z,” “The Conformist”) and Germany’s Klaus Kinski (“A Bullet for the General,” “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”) as rival gunmen in the Old West.  

       Kinski’s Loco leads a ruthless group of criminals who live in the mountains of Utah, killing indiscriminately in hopes of scoring bounties. Among their victims is the husband of Pauline (Vonetta McGee, later in “Blacula” and “Shaft in Africa”), a black woman living in a small Utah mountain settlement.

       After she nurses Trintignant’s Silenzio, a mute gunfighter, back to health, he becomes her protector, facing desperate odds versus Loco’s gang.

      Adding to the intensity of the film is the unrelenting snow drifts that make the simplest actions more difficult; few films look as achingly cold as “The Great Silence.”

     Along with the fine acting, dominating geography and surprisingly diverse casting (for the late 60s), the film’s ending is among the most cynical you’re likely to see. Proving that not all spaghetti Westerns were made with cookie cutters.

 

 

PHOTOS:

Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall as brothers in “True Confessions.”  (United Artists)

Douglas Fairbanks is “The Black Pirate” (United Artists)

Ryan Gosling in "Project Hail Mary." (Amazon MGM Studios)

Vincent Price as a twisted doctor-musician in “The Abominable Dr. Phibes.” (American International Pictures)

Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a mute gunfighter in “The Great Silence.”  (The Criterion Channel)