Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
"It means something." The soul-searching and self-realization of the 60s and 70s is subsumed as spectacle. But it's a manic agitation, kinetic image as restless anxiety. The opening sequence with its broody, posey suspense has something of the Exorcist quality to it. It's affect but for the sake of plot propulsion. All that is turned around, as is so much sci-fi horror of the ultimate xenophobia, with the ending, and the movie is significant for giving us that different disposition and perhaps calling attention by exception to the preponderance of antagonism in our imagining extraterrestrials. Perhaps all the manic quality of the preceding serves the contrast, but it just as much works the other way. After being won over by the expectant and more receptive awe of the ending, there's a retroactive cast: why was all that so fraught? If the army and whatever organization "Lacombe" -- Francois Truffaut -- represents are really so accepting of this meeting, why the extent of their bogeyman tactics with the public? (How would they prevent that mother ship from being seen well beyond the area anyway?) Is this a confessional, or a justification, of sacrificing for one's art? For movie-making?

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
The rough edge of the original Mad Max also included some clunky story-telling. George Miller was right not to throw off the kinetic tack, but to make things even more on that principle. His sequel was the better movie, making it more bare of a point, smoothing it out as kind of epic simplicity. Now we see he wasn't done, after Fury Road that he could even make this more poetic -- Thunderdome showed more touches on the way to that -- but Road Warrior classed up the action movie, a western with horseless vehicles, and certainly the post-apocalypse or biker gang variety.

The Wild Women of Wongo (1959)
Of all the caveman and primitive tribe dumb projections in jokes, skits and movies, this might take the cake. The Film Crew dug this up from oblivion to unleash on the world again. With the sophistication of a revue show at a fraternal club smoker, this proposes a setup where Mother Nature and Father Time put the ugly men with beautiful women on one island, and vice versa on another. Apemen are a catalyst to lead to the exciting conclusion that the beautiful end up with the beautiful and the ugly with the ugly, setting all right with square-assed simplicity.

Not of This Earth (1988)
Not of This Earth (1957)
The 1988 version came about because Jim Wynorski bet Roger Corman that he could make the movie on the same schedule, and with the same budget adjusted for inflation. Its other claim to fame was the casting of Traci Lords in her first non-porn role. The scripts are the same, most of the lines, but the later version adds some flourishes of its own. Wynorski not only succeeded with the bet, but his version has decent pacing that gives it some snap, especially in the beginning. It bogs down for the same reason as the original, the source material. I saw the later one first, and when the vacuum cleaner salesman shows up, I thought, wow, this guy's another version of Dick Miller. Guess who's the salesman in the original. Wonder why they didn't use him in the remake. Another dubious distinction of the remake: the opening credits are a highlight reel, not of scenes coming in the movie, but of other Corman movies, including Battle Beyond the Stars, Forbidden World, Galaxy of Terror, Humanoids from the Deep, Battle Beyond the Sun and Piranha, and footage from the same is used in the movie.

September 5 (2024)
When the hostage situation broke out at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, it was in the wee hours of the morning and the ABC Sports night shift staff realized they were in place to cover the events well before their own network's news division could get there. This movie takes that perspective, following the segment and frame of the ABC Sports crew improvising it's own coverage of live non-athletic events. There have been other movies about the actual hostage situation, including documentaries, but this is about that attempt at coverage, and is reflexive of that even before other questions are raised in the dialogue about reporting, journalism, live broadcast, exploitation and the involvement of all this with and effect on the events themselves. We get mostly the view from the studio, and archival footage is seen on the monitors in the studio, including that of the real Jim McCay having to report on things other then sports. Director Tim Fehlbaum counteracts the fly-on-the-wall detachment by trying to make it sizzle more, with the jerky camera, suspense music, and lots of storming entrances and exits, but it's effective, and they countered current trend by going shorter rather than longer.

Sea of Love (1989)
Frankie and Johnny (1991)
Sea of Love has a thriller plot but a surprisingly humbler mien with more realistic dimensions, which, as things progressed through the late 80s into the 90s, would become more unlikely or oxymoronic. Al Pacino, returning to movies after about four years, Ellen Barkin, and John Goodman help with this, but they're certainly served well by it, too, the script of Richard Price and especially the direction of Harold Becker. It's more in line with Pacino's 70s material, in between Scarface and the 90s inflated performances that would become the source of Pacino parodies. Even a couple of heavy makeout scenes have interesting touches that are more about behavior and less about some steamy montage graphic ideal. There are also nice touches about personal ads dating, glancing poignant observations. There's no supercop, super killer, no super femme fatale. By contrast, Frankie and Johnny tries to be about humble things, both the charm of the downtrodden and the cross-bearing of romance, and even perhaps tries to be like those hearty Pacino roles of the 70s, but it ushers the experience so baldly, even that as quaint or guileless -- on top of the rest, montages put the various characters together to let us know how much it does care about them, in case we don't pick up on that or care on our own -- it's as if trying to reassure us it's romantic comedy (Terrence McNalley wrote and Garry Marshall directed). A revelation for Michelle Pfeiffer's character comes so late it makes all this more like farcical machination, instead of about the real problem, and this also makes Pacino's character not charmingly persistent, but pushy to the point of creepy. It's more like socially awkward, and he's supposed to have his own foibles, but even the response to the big reveal isn't deferential, not even cautious selfishly, and it's more that sort of behavior justified as true love in movies, like stalking in The Graduate. Sea of Love has the more deft depiction of foibles, apparently as a thriller, while Frankie and Johnny is the more contrived as romance or drama. Both movies make reference to older songs used also as the titles.

Supervixens (1975)
In the 70s Russ Meyer ventured into more nudity and direct treatment of sex, though that treatment was camping it up. All Meyer's movies are essentially the same fabric and plan, not only the movie version of burlesque, but a burlesque of movies: wild angles and attack editing; montage sequences of figures, usually full ones, virtually or literally dancing; voiceover or dialogue haranguing a parody of plot and drama; music of various blaring varieties, wacky west, Nazi marches, Muzak, movie intermission fanfare, stripper jazz and pop. What he loses in the charm of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, he makes up for with focusing on the sex, and his work straddles the divide between porn and, well, non-porn, because it's as much a burlesque of the former. (Rudy Ray Moore gives him a run for the money, especially The Human Tornado.) This may be the most evened-out of his nudie pics, because it gets into more plot, but that's little more than dragging out sequences of action other than sex, mostly violence, like boring hump films.

Hollywood After Dark [aka Walk the Angry Beach] (1961)
Low-budget feature about a strip joint as the front for other criminal activity, but also as exploitation of would-be actresses, including one played by Rue McClanahan. While the movie itself is double-dealing, passing off as concern for the plight of the exploited the same mostly burlesque dancing, it has a pacing conducive to zoning out, with slack-handed long sequences not only of the dancing but lots of other incidental action. Now notable for featuring one of the Golden Girls in striptease, the movie was featured as a DVD release with commentary tracks by The Film Crew, a reformation of Mystery Science Theater 3000 members Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, that was also a precursor to their RiffTrax.

A Real Pain (2024)
Jesse Eisenberg -- he also wrote and directed -- gives an account of heritage past and present that's also in the vein of errant travel movies like Irma Vep or Compartment No. 6. Calling it tragi-comic doesn't do justice to the way the social satire approach is actually more graceful and attentive, handling neither the serious subject matter too sanctimoniously, nor any of it as just wacky humor. As a particular example of the touch, there are elisions, little montage sequences, that make passing reference to things that otherwise might be the banality of situation comedy. The carriage of this is even in the title, the way the movie makes the literal meaning ring out again from the common sense of the expression.

Sesevenen aka Sezen (1995)
David Fincher got it right with Zodiac. That is, if you consider an account of events that's plausible, let alone faithful, as far as serial killers, police procedure, etc., to be any sort of measure. This movie, on the heels of Silence of the Lambs, is more about baking up the lore. Though it has a spine built out of more careful consideration, the dialogues between Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt -- and there's one scene in particular, at a bar, that's very well done, the peak of the movie, and even has statements significant for cooking up and thrill interest -- the crime scene sets alone are Grand Guignol, and the ending, where it all leads, is way overdone.

Weird Science (1985)
It gets right to the point of the premise, and thus makes no bones about it: teen boys want to make their own sex object. Whether director and co-writer John Hughes is intentionally making a reflexive joke that the boys don't know what to do with that, the movie then shoots off on capricious tangents, and if it's about anything other than being madcap, it's social anxiety. Stepping up to character lessons from their fantasy companion -- Kelly LeBrock helps the twist by also giving a performance against expectations -- gets stretched by pulling things out of the air, including figures from other movies like The Road Warrior and The Hills Have Eyes. The gag setup delivery typical of Hughes is at its peak here.

Twisted (2004)
Philip Kaufman directed this, which might be the biggest surprise, depending on what you think of his other work or the auteur theory. It's an even more flashy, hustly thriller than some of the other Ashley Judd vehicles, at times approaching the kind of big movie absurdity that's as good as self-parody as in The Long Kiss Goodnight, Bad Company, or, my favorite, The Temp. There are moments in the middle where it hits notes of an interesting parable about sexism and role reversal, and considering Judd's real history you could make more of that. But the twist is not on twisters. Cf. also, Black and White, a TV-movie thriller with Gina Gershon.

Murder by Decree (1979)
In the line of revisionist Sherlock Holmes set off in the 70s by Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Holmes and the Loch Ness monster), and which included The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (Holmes and Freud), there's this cross with Jack the Ripper directed by Bob Clark (Black Christmas, A Christmas Story, Porky's). There's a more impressionistic approach, the leering streets of London in the fog (not unlike Dickens's chancery opening in Bleak House), but still a lot of it is shot with that strange, part misty, part shiny look sometimes popular in the 70s, meant to be I don't know what -- like everything's inside a tea service? Like those predecessors, this transfers the revelation and explication climax to broader matters, but this one has the most expository and least interesting summation. In this Canadian and British co-production, Christopher Plummer makes the least patronizing Holmes, and he's joined by Donald Sutherland, Susan Clark and Genevieve Bujold on the Canadian side; and James Mason (as his rather fatherly Watson), David Hemmings, Anthony Quayle and John Gielgud on the British.

Blue Velvet (1986) ♠
In memory of David Lynch, I watched this again, the movie of his I had least recently seen. It's included in Film/Script, the "studies" section which is in the print version only, but I was struck again at how great this movie looks. It's singular, even for its era, the 80s when faster film stocks led to easier natural light look, but that to lots of just picturesque sunsets, not always something with a more distinct visual plan. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes began working with Lynch on Eraserhead. What they got for this was a soft-edge contrast: deep darks, soft light, a fuzzy edge, but still contrast. There's a murkiness but also a crispness, the scene with Laura Dern's robin dream, church windows in the background, one of the best examples. The daylight is like this, too, plush, as if not only the color of things, but the darkness in or behind things is blushing through the light. In the night scenes and indoors, there's a kind of iris effect. It's a whole kind of experience here, caught or expressed with this look (and Lynch's sound): home for the summer, hanging out at night and lazy late days, weird conversations, odd and exciting, boring and interesting, life behind the scenes. The way this looks, you can feel and smell the night air.

Juror #2 (2024)
The script, by Jonathan A. Abrams, demonstrates the main problem of juries, the conflict between strict proof and feelings of the jurors otherwise, and the extraneous influences on deliberation, the lives of the jurors outside the case. But it's also constructed toward its more particular end of posing a bigger conflict, like one of those philosophical exercises of moral dilemma. Clint Eastwood's direction is quiet, patient, seems to be allowing consideration and not worried about spectacle, but it doesn't do anything to make the characters much more than the agents of the thought exercise. Nicholas Hoult is the right idea for the lead, but there is so much repetition of his perplexed reaction and smouldering moral conflict that it's hard not to think of the resemblance to John Boy Walton. (Cf. 12, especially for whether law, truth and justice amount to the same.)

The Invisible Raptor (2023)
For a joke on chintzing out on special effects, the production quality is surprisingly decent. For stringing out the the joke as labored, prosaic if not truly serious plot for the repetition of body humor of which the gore is only a part, it has some surprisingly subtle touches. But that's a big pile of dinosaur shit to go through for a few kernels.

Jacknife (1989)
This has a bigger role for Kathy Baker, and the take gives interesting turns to Robert De Niro and Ed Harris. The take is something more like the road of good intentions and more ordinary pitfalls, but what could've been a major chance with -- what compared to most movies is -- a minor key sputters around with its own hesitation and manipulation.

El [aka This Strange Passion] (1953)
I'm struck again at how straight, "classic," Bunuel's movie-making is. Looking up information, I read about Bunuel's "efficiency," which is really more like expedience with respect to the actual shoot. He planned the whole thing in script and drawing board stages, then shot as much to spec as possible, minimizing all the fuss and work of the shoot. Actors, like Catherine Deneuve (Belle de jour), talked about this. Bunuel was somewhat like Hitchcock or Fassbinder in that respect. Bunuel commented about his distaste for "beautiful" excess, the sort of anti-bourgeois sentiment of even the early Surrealist movement. So there is a kind of dressing down, but it's funny that coming from the viewer perspective, this can look like a pretty expedient, bare-bones kind of classic Hollywood shooting setup, "straight" style, or lack of stylization compared to someone like David Lynch. There's a great moment in the movie where the jealous man walks into a central hall with a stairway, by himself, zigzags up the steps, sits, finds some bar or stick, and starts banging it, making it more repetitive. Something like this stands out as a matter of plot or action, but not with particularly any other formal elaboration. There is a tendency towards reducing affect, but it's not Robert Bresson or Pier Pasolini level, and the acting tends to be quite conventional movie acting. It's as if the surrealism is operating at the -- conventional -- movie level. But how inadvertent, coincidental, is this? Is this a characteristic, an attribute? To be sur-real rather than, perhaps, sur-real -- or which way to even go with that? Resorting to something like stylized or sensuous or formal, to create surreal atmosphere -- is there an antithesis here, if only rhetorical?

Into the Deep (2025)
Double-dealing, using sharksploitation as shark conservation message, but also what is now very run-of-the-mill plot about divers encountering great whites as coming of age story. Richard Dreyfuss is the big catch, here, pulled in for the star appeal, and delivering a straight-up shark conservation speech during the closing credits. But his jittery smartass act looks very different nearing 80, and his character is oceanographer, marathon coach, personal trainer, drill sergeant granddad, who gives conflicting dictums like the water is their kingdom, gotta respect that, you're food, don't touch, go there and face them.

Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque [Le fantome d'Henri Langlois] (2004)
Expedient rather than fancy, like Langlois himself, this provides an impressive assembly of witnesses to the life, work and influence of the guardian angel of the 20th century art, the man who started film preservation as almost a hobby, when no one else was thinking of it, and became a curator of film more generally, inspiring particularly the French New Wave, but many others and generations beyond. With the state involvement came scrutiny of the work and the man, and there were comments about his sloppiness, as if a clean office would indicate more than the vast amounts of film he was constantly struggling to shelter. An attempt to remove Langlois sparked an event that was a precursor to the larger 1968 protests (as depicted in The Dreamers). Put this on your double bill with Film: The Living Record of Our Memory for your reminder of the matter of preservation -- the recorded image is not as immortal as we may think. See also See Through Film, which is also in Memories of Unproduction.

Incident at Loch Ness (2004)
Shaggy dog-umentary. The fun and even interest of this are as much in its modesty, not trying to make too big a deal outside the frame, even though they did play the joke that way too (it was promoted as if it were also the actual project within the frame). Zak Penn manages his homage to Werner Herzog with even the intentionally cheap silliness (the uniforms, the cryptozoologist, the Playboy model sonar operator with the U.S. flag bikini), and Herzog shows his gameness, and game, playing straight whether he's the disgruntled director or hosting a dinner party where he serves something he causally explains will be too poisonous if not prepared properly.

Nosferatu (2024)
It's like cut scenes in a video game for interior decorators or theater set designers. Gymnastic actresses, inadvertent comic effects from some of the abrupt cuts intended for horror, others to move away from it -- or maybe it's supposed to be comic and I'm missing the point. Werner Herzog was audacious enough to remake Murnau's 1922 film, mostly as a homage and a link for New German Cinema to pre-war film legacy, but his 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre is one of the greatest movies ever, at least a top 10 favorite for me. This seems to be the opposite of that in just about every way.

The Great Race (1965)
A childhood favorite. The spoof of Victorian or silent movie melodrama cuts the spectacle a la 50s/60s big parade floats, but there's a reverse effect of bloating. For the title matter, there's little automobile action in favor of grand action set pieces, including an entire Prisoner of Zenda subplot. Still, even that tones down the madcap quality from the line of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (also 1965). The cast serves and is used well, with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon following on their Some Like It Hot success, and lots of good supporting work throughout from, e.g., Peter Falk, Keenan Wynn, Larry Storch, and Ross Martin, but it's Lemmon who's really the star, even in a sneaky way, with his more haggard villain Professor Fate and his effete prince. Lemmon's order to his Falk sidekick, "Push the button, Max" was the inspiration for the mad scientist line that ended episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I would still love to have a toy version of Professor Fate's Hannibal Twin 8, steampunk avant la lettre.

Same Old Song [On connait la chanson] (1997)
Directed by Alain Resnais, written by two actors also in it, Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, this borrows the Dennis Potter device of having the actors break into lip syncing of songs that occur "over" the diegetic sound, as if in imagination or another expressive level. There's a dedication to Potter at the beginning, so the connection is explicit. But rather than the grand musical number flights of Pennies from Heaven, this restricts the act to the characters mouthing the words, and it's much more sporadic about cutting into and out of the songs, with a wider variety of them, not like the discrete 30s/40s musical numbers. In this way, it's more like songs popping into our heads as associations. The cutout segment of these lives, the in medias res approach, makes it seem more arbitrary, at first, till you become more accustomed to what's going on, and then it's easier to settle into a kind of toss-off flair to it all. There's a suggestion that various characters also have other idealized or imagined versions of themselves or their situation, and later a jellyfish becomes a visual motif, possibly suggested by a trip to an aquarium. But like that image, there's a whimsy to all of it, not quite concerted as the musical exercise, the ensemble criss-crossing, or even the humor.

Seedpeople (1992)
Here's a case of a movie with lots of conspicuous B-movie or even bad qualities, but delivered with such energy and conviction, it creates even more the effect of grownups playing like children. The special effects are a microcosm of this, a lot of attention and detail to some creatures that still look pretty silly. But the acting and directing carry it most: if not quite the most professional polish, it's more intent than pure amateur.

David Lynch died.



Eraserhead
Blue Velvet
Mulholland Drive
Inland Empire

Vibrations (1968)
Joseph Sarno ventured into the nether region of movies between sex and other depiction, between porn and the rest, or more particularly mainstream commercial movies. That's pretty much, well, where nether regions are not shown. In a society where sex and representation are equally matters of contention and repression, in moving images in particular sex gets separated from other depiction so it's boiled down to the blunt subject, if not very blunt act, while all the other elaboration is left to other movies which can't quite, or don't much use it for sex. In the low-budget realm that wasn't also the porn industry, Sarno tried his own approach to erotic material. The result as you could imagine, and this movie demonstrates, was neither the heights nor deprivation of either. There's attention to the photography, black and white, but certainly not to a script, and playing around with moody interior shadows and exterior ambling tones, as well as with stimulation, if not quite the act. Though people are doffing, the nudity is waist up, which of course also means emphasizing breasts. Although the women are thus mostly the objects -- or subjects in the visual sense -- they're also the main characters and point of view. There's the sensational projection of desire: when one character describes what's supposed to be some special technique or procedure as impossible to describe, and teasing like torment you wouldn't believe, it's laughable for what's shown, the means and scope of the whole thing. For that sort of exploitation, too, there's dropping in that the two main characters are sisters -- incest to outbid lesbianism -- and they're constantly being jumped back and forth over the line of overwrought reaction and provocation, the obsession incorporating the resistance, even burlesquing it. The cut-up slackness of it makes it alternate so that the non-sex scenes are also spacing for the sex, interval, relief and buildup, but then that makes both have the same sort of delirious circularity. All this makes it, perhaps more inadvertently, dreamlike, but that's also repetitive, if not monotonous.

Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me (1971)
Ambitious, as an attempt at non-narrative, about time and memory, at least in popular movies, if that's not a nice way of saying it's an attempt to popularize such form, derivative. But it's so capricious, compulsive in a kneejerk, distracted or impertinent way, at the same time that it's actually slow paced. It's too costumey and gimmicky, too, which ends up more goofy and square than hip about a songwriter associated with rock bands. And as part of that weird distraction, the premise of the title is scarcely used and even so you can guess where it leads. And this is directed by Ulu Grosbard, who did so much better with Dustin Hoffman with Straight Time. But it's worth watching for, even though you have to watch so much of it to get to, Barbara Harris. With her part, as well as some material before and after, it settles down into something you can grasp onto.

Divorce Italian Style (1961)
The movie that gave the name to commedia all'italiana. Not the first to be classed as such but one of the earliest, it's a prime example of the type on the way from Neorealism to comedy, falling somewhere between. It's not slapstick or jokes or really even witticisms so much as a somewhat farcical delivery of serious stuff. You could almost do the same movie scene for scene straight, but the story is being held up in caricaturist quote marks by the acting (Daniela Rocca's beaming devotion, Marcello Mastroianni's self-pitying suffering) and the music (Carlo Rustichelli), which has a clankier glib quality especially to the processional pieces. This is one of the more notable roles in Italian film for Leopoldo Trieste, who may be best known to American audiences for his great bit in The Godfather, Part II as the landlord who trades in too much puffiness for rattled submission.

The Big Lebowski (1998)
An example of the difference between the sum of parts and more. The Big Lebowski has all the parts, all the elements of the Coen brothers, the tone, the satire, the character and detail observations -- Jeff Bridges's Dude alone has that same stroke of prosaic type treated archetypally -- but it doesn't come together, doesn't roll, doesn't sing -- very nice surreal and Busby Berkeley style numbers notwithstanding -- the way their best work does: Fargo, No Country for Old Men, or even Burn After Reading. It lacks the kind of engine or thread or current that drives those.

The Apartment (1960)
This became for New Year's, though by extension also the end-of-year holiday season, what Planes, Trains and Automobiles has become for Thanksgiving, by indirection and more in spirit a better regular than an official holiday movie. The comparison is interesting in other ways. The Apartment was a bigger deal right off, despite some ambivalence among reviewers, for Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, on the heels of Some Like It Hot, and a big breakout for Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, with Oscar nominations for the lot and a win for best picture, while Planes, Trains had its reputation build more slowly after its initial release. Both manage to touch on mores with an apparent comic approach in ways that if not necessarily more serious, end up being more poignant. More social comedy, if not satire, they avoid the direct approach of either the traditional sense of comedy or tragedy, or the more modern sense of melodrama or message movie. Some Like It Hot might seem closer to Planes as comedy, and it probably sticks out more in American movies as an oddball, but heading from one decade to the next, Apartment gets under decorum in a slier way than either 50s social drama or the kind of popularization of non-conformity that became itself conventional in the 60s (including other things featuring Lemmon and MacLaine). Apart from dealing with adultery, sex and pressured favors in the workplace, and suicide, the art direction and cinematography cut wide-screen spectacle with photo journalist realism, with shots of loner Lemmon against endless rows of office desks, an infinite park bench in Central Park, or a Broadway marquee, giving also as great a counterpoint of city life experience as holiday.

Thelma (2024)
It's especially good to see Richard Roundtree (this was his last movie) and Malcolm McDowell, and there are good turns by Parker Posey and June Squibb, and it's all around a solid cast. There's an anti-maudlin tack, even made express, and some nice touches that are against the grain of lots of movies about parents and children, as well as some spoofs of action tropes. But the main thread is similar to Nebraska which also only recalls how much better a movie that was, for Squibb, too. Ultimately it's fluffy.

Bread and Chocolate (1974)
Although fairly distinguished for its time -- and it was esteemed with various international honors -- the social themes that would give it weight are exaggerated more for the commedia all'italiana (the sawed-off furniture in a chicken coop; the drag act in a labor camp à la La grande illusion; a soccer match as irresistible trigger for expression of national identity). Nino Manfredi's lead performance gives decency to measure the madcap, but director Franco Brusati stretches out the bewildered reactions.

A Different Man (2024)
This has a great idea about reversing perspective and approach to living in your own skin, and provides good roles for Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson. But there's an unevenness to it, which seems to come more from the direction, but is somewhat in the script as well. It's like a hesitation between registers, neither quite realistic, nor quite comedic, nor quite surreal, which makes it just seem hesitant overall, timorous, at times. Renate Reinsve straddles these the best, showing how to play the mix in a way that's more impressive than even her big lead in The Worst Person in the World.

The Ice Harvest (2005)
The best things about this are the way it portrays pretense, foibles and bullshitting without making that the complete character, and the little gad about town, mostly barhopping, on Christmas Eve for that stray dog holiday feel. As much as that of Christmas movies, it avoids some commonplaces of capers, the way the script, by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, concentrates on character and director Harold Ramis follows suit with cozy little gossip airs. And with a bit more to the roles, there are good performances from John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Oliver Platt.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
I don't know about Nikos Kazantzakis's book, but at movie length, the problems with compression only open it up more to the problems with the source material for both. There are three main movements: Jesus before accepting his role as messiah, thus in conflict between man and god; Jesus accepting his role as messiah; then the last temptation. The first part is so rushed it makes the dialogue sound like it's trying to be profound, but lurching, groping, reaching. It's as if the confusion of grasping neophytes were the frame itself. Then comes the realization of Jesus's role, but this is only a retelling of the story of the gospels, and as much as Kazantzakis or Martin Scorsese might be giving us another approach, it's going over familiar ground. When we get to the titular subject, the presentation is eliptical, dreamlike, with a solemnity that, if it's at all distinct, is still anchored by the preceding. I just couldn't shake the feeling of too many reverent religious dramas, let alone divine attributes for kenosis.

Ask the Dust (2006)
It's understandable that Robert Towne, who wrote one of the greatest screenplays about Los Angeles, Chinatown, would want to honor John Fante. But he's not the director he is screenwriter, doesn't compose the way, for example, Roman Polanski did for that previous movie to match the way Fante does in writing. As Charles Dickens demonstrates the problem: so many attempts to distill literature to merely plot when Dickens's writing does so many other things that are more cinematic. Here it's not even so much that Towne doesn't compose with scenes or sequences, doesn't create any distinct tone or mood or voice, let alone Fante's, as what he does with the acting. Farcical cute rascal business gives way to melodramatic seriousness, and it's all some key of staginess that lets in no air of candor.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)
Settling into the act means knocking the highs and lows off, but those are kind of the same thing when it comes to hyperactive pandering pop with CG. It may be a matter of staleness or numbness, but at least it's not as loud, showy, cloying. This works well for Jim Carrey, too. Calm down the hyperbolic mugging and there's actually room to see a character or some acting.