The Naked Kiss

A prostitute (Constance Towers) beats up her abusive pimp and takes what is owed to her before relocating to a small village where she is run out of town by a local police chief (Anthony Eisley) and lured back into the life before finding peace as a nurse at a children's hospital and getting engaged to a millionaire (Michael Dante), a situation that proves too good to be true. Highly suggestive and melodramatic Sam Fuller B-movie is sensationalist and shocking, especially for its time. The low budget affair is crisply edited and features several memorable sequences including the opening and the morbid culmination of a strange musical number.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The Player

A narcissistic studio executive (Tim Robbins) who green-lights movie scripts finds his job jeopardized by a rival shark and his life threatened by one of the many writers he has turned down over the years, leading him to commit a dubious murder and cast into a paranoid, Kafkaesque nightmare. From Michael Tolkin's novel, Robert Altman's skewering of Hollywood is both a hilarious black comedy and effective noir showcasing the maverick director at the top of his form. With the spectacular opening tracking shot, to a perfectly cast Robbins, the endless celebrity cameos, and the insider's script, The Player is a masterful Hollywood satire on par with Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful

The Asphalt Jungle

Fringe types including a ruffian career criminal (Sterling Hayden), a seedy attorney (Louis Calhern), a diner cook (James Whitmore), a numbers runner (Marc Lawrence), and an ingenious safe cracker (Sam Jaffe) just released from prison converge to execute an extremely lucrative but ultimately doomed jewelry heist. John Huston's tough, gritty, and influential noir (informing both classics and cheap imitations alike) is starkly shot, exciting and lifelike with a great cast of characters, Hayden, Calhern, Lawrence, and Jean Hagen as Hayden's doting and naive girlfriend standing out among the lot. Marilyn Monroe is unforgettable too as Calhern's mistress in her breakthrough role.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The Immortal Story

A rich, bitter, and spiteful old merchant of Macao (Orson Welles) hears the tale of a wealthy man hiring a sailor to impregnate his young wife and seeks to make it true, through the help of his assistant (Roger Coggio) and two young hires (Jeanne Moreau and Norman Eshley). Intriguing minor Wellesian concoction from an Isak Dinesen story feels like something only Welles himself could have cooked up, beautifully shot and directed with a unique and irresistible story.

 **** out ****

Hobson's Choice

The drunken widowed owner (Charles Laughton) of a Victorian era London boot shop decides to marry off two of exasperating daughters while keeping his eldest Maggie (Brenda de Banzie) for her usefulness in running the business and taking care of himself. Instead, she opts to blaze her own trail by taking up with the simple bootmaker (John Mills) and put her father in a precarious, optionless situation. One of David Lean's rare forays into comedy, Hobson's Choice is a lighthearted work with a bit of gristle and vitriole boasting top of the line camerawork and black and white cinematography. Laughton is in rare, hilarious form and de Banzie and Mills round out the cast with complete, supreme performances.

*** 1/2 out of ****

A Man Escaped

A Resistance member (Francois Letterier) is arrested by the Gestapo, charged with sabotage and sentenced to die, and placed in a concentration camp in Lyon, where over 7,000 perished during the war. There he painstakingly sweeps his cell to develop means of escape, meanwhile acting as an impetus of hope to his fellow prisoners. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escape is an exacting, inward looking meditation, both beautifully and meticulously shot while generating quiet and palpable suspense. Nonactor Letterier is tremendous and reflective as the saintly inmate.

**** out of ****

Harlan County U.S.A.

Barbara Kopple’s film profiling a miner’s strike in Eastern Kentucky, an area of the country with a violent labor history, documents the harsh realities and becomes intimate with the impoverished, impassioned residents. The documentary makes fantastic use of local protest music and contains many memorable moments including life on the picket lines, a sheriff paying a visit in order to have an obstructing vehicle moved, a conversation between a miner and a New York City police officer, and the graphic return to the scene where a young man was shot and killed by company thugs.

*** ½ out of ****

High and Low

After just having secured the funds for a takeover of his shoe company, a businessman (Toshiro Mifune) is torn at having to pay the ransom when his son is kidnapped from their hilltop mansion. Matters become even more cloudy when it comes to light that his chauffer’s son and not his own has been taken, and the local police department launches a major dragnet in order to trap the killer. Kurosawa’s High and Low, from an American crime novel by Ed McBain is a measured, sporadically captivating police procedural, unsurprisingly incredibly photographed with Mifune unfortunately ultimately relegated to a minor role.
*** out of ****

Seconds

A successful banker with a boring wife living a monotonous suburban existence is recruited into a mandatory program where he will be reconfigured as an attractive, artistic type (Rock Hudson) and placed in a California coastal community with like people. John Frankenheimer's Seconds plays like an extended version of a Twilight Zone episode, never dull but still sterilized, shocking and hard to watch. It drives home its theme well though with a solid performance by Hudson who is himself surrounded by strong supporters, and is intriguingly filmed with great camerawork and use of closeup by James Wong Howe.

*** out of ****

Personal Shopper

An American personal secretary (Kristen Stewart) to a demanding Parisian debutante attempts to channel the spirit of her recently deceased twin brother while being digitally stalked by what may or may not be an otherworldly presence. Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper is both an eerie ghost story and sincere character study featuring a commanding performance from Stewart, which is able to succeed in being ambiguous while also carrying meaning.

*** 1/2 out of ****

An Autumn Afternoon

After a series of often drunken encounters with old friends, mentors, and subordinates, a middle-aged businessman (Chishu Ryu) decides he should marry off his daughter (Shima Iwashita) rather than selfishly letting her take care of him and become an old maid in the process. Ozu's final film, made with the same delicate touch and mise-en-scene that predominated the rest of his body of work, is both moving and bittersweet while at the same time lighthearted and humorous. Longtime Ozu collaborator Ryu is wonderful in the lead.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Le Doulos

A recently released low rent criminal (Serge Reggiani) shows up at a crime lord and friends resident, ostensibly to get filled in on a job, and shoots him dead in cold blooded, making out with the loot from a previous heist and stacks full of cash. He returns home and tells his live-in girlfriend and fellow con artist pal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who may or may not be police informants. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos is a hard-bitten, tough talking tribute to film noir made with sudden, shocking violence and intricate, convoluted plotting. Reggiani and Belmondo and perfectly cast.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Le Silence de la Mer

During the German Occupation of France in a quiet village, a German officer (Howard Vernon) boards with an elderly man (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole Stephane) whose only form of resistance is utter silence in the face of their unwanted houseguest who responds with unrelenting courtesy, tales from back home and of love for his assumed country, and horror in response to Nazi atrocities. From Vercors inspirational Resistance short story, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Silence de la Mer is unique and almost daring/high concept (which must have seemed extremely tedious on paper) with great cinematography and moments of tension and insight. Vernon's performance is delicate and wonderful.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The Four Feathers

A young man groomed to be an officer in the Queen’s Army fears himself to be a coward and, believing himself to be in the right, resigns just as his unit is being shipped off to fight the Khalifah in Sudan. Shamed by his friends, he must use his own means and backchannels to prove his mettle to them, his new bride, and himself.  Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers displays a radiant Technicolor decades ahead of its time, a fine cast of characters (including Ralph Richardson and C. Aubrey Smith), and a rousing telling of A.E.W. Mason’s story though some of it is diluted by many protracted sequences.

*** ½ out of ****

Diary of a Country Priest

A young, unpracticed cleric (Claude Laydu), dogged by a stomach ailment which threatens his day-to-day duties, deals with indifference, contempt, and threats of scandal from parishioners at his new pastoral posting. From a novel by Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest is challenging, harsh, protracted, austere, and pristinely filmed, all the elements underlining Robert Bresson's masterful body of work.

*** 1/2 out of ****

The 39 Steps

Shots ring out in a London Vaudevillian theater, an attempt to create a distraction by a female agent who finds herself in the flat of one the show’s attendees (Robert Donat). Now, he is thrust into the serpentine plot that takes him to the Scottish Mores where he is both pursuing and pursued by the deadly, clandestine eponymous spy ring. Slyly conceived and brilliantly realized, The 39 Steps is a supreme entertainment that anticipated not just some of Alfred Hitchcock's future work but also inspired many successful, subsequent thrillers.

**** out of ****

The Lady Vanishes

After being snowed in at a remote Eastern European inn, almost all the members of a passenger train have a motive for concealing their awareness of the existence of a sweet little old lady who seemingly vanished into thin air while a recent acquaintance (Margaret Lockwood) and a cynical musician (Michael Redgrave) suspect a conspiracy and attempt to rally a search party. Sharp and witty, early pre-Hollywood Hitchcock success is a crisply made mystery and veritable entertainment. Lockwood and Redgrave shine in the leads and Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne stand out as nitwit, cricket obsessed travelling companions.

**** out of ****

The Two of Us

During the German Occupation, the Jewish parents of an exuberant juvenile (Alain Cohen) determine it would be safer for all involved if he were to live in the country under an assumed name where a bond quickly develops with the kind and curmudgeonly, anti-semitic elderly shelterer (Michel Simon). Claude Berri's autobiographical ode to his wartime protectors is moving and humorous, with a great performance from Simon and a natural one from Cohen, and tells a story, the likes of which would never even be dreamt of being attempted in today's PC climate.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Amarcord

A series of comic vignettes on life under fascism in a small Italian villa in the 1930s. Among the best include a party parade gone awry, hi-jinx among the local hooligans at school, a mentally disturbed man who refuses to come down from a tree, and an unforgettably filmed convoy of villagers rowing out to catch the massive American bound liner and wish its passengers bon voyage. Federico Fellini's postcard to his youth and hometown is funny, nostalgic, extremely ribald, expertly crafted, and deliberately incohesive.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Seven Samurai

A small feudal village under threat from a roving group parasitic bandits seeks protection from a band of brave, downtrodden warriors. Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, a cornerstone of world cinema, much imitated, celebrated and revered, is a marvel of filmmaking. From quick cutting, high octane action sequences to poignant, thoughtful, contemplative, or very humorous scenes, it is a comprehensive moviegoing experience. Toshiro Mifune as the manically, electrically charged combatant and Takashi Shimura as the group's sagacious leader showcase the film's tone in two remarkable performances.

**** out of ****