Max Manus

Aksel Hennie

Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's Max Manus is a World War 2 film that was released outside of Norway as Max Manus: Man of War, presumably to draw in the action audience. The  2008 film revolves around Manus, Norway's most famous Resistance saboteur when it was under Nazi occupation. The film's structure is trifold. We witness Manus' exploits during the war, mostly scuttling German shipping. We also get a recurrent flashbacks of Manus' volunteer days with Finnish forces fighting off a Soviet incusion. These experiences left him deeply traumatized. Thirdly, we witness the pursuit of Manus by a slick and unrepentantly evil SS officer named Siegfried Fehmer who is well played by Ken Duken. The script by Thomas Nordseth-Tiller does a good job of delineating the doomed band of comrades that joined Manus to fight his country's occupiers. Even actors who only appear briefly, like Petter Næss and Ron Donachie as sensitive superiors, make an impression despite their brief screen time.

Though superior in its characterization than most wartime sagas, the film is better at delineating the nuts and bolts of the saboteurs' operations than fleshing out the film's parallel and ambivalent love stories. The two romantic tales have too many ellipses in their relationship arcs. The film limps to a conclusion with Manus an alcoholic suffering from PTSD. There are two scenes with Manus having visions of his dead comrades, one too many. Aksel Hennie is excellent at portraying Manus as hollowed out by his service to his country. Hennie has had continued success appearing in such international hits as The Martian and Sisu. The directors' acute sense of craft is best displayed in the action sequences which smoothly combine CGI with practical effects. Their skill gained them entrée into Hollywood, but their output has been polished but anonymous. This makes me think that what makes Max Manus a good, if not outstanding, genre flick, is the screenplay. Unfortunately, Max Manus must stand as Mr. Nordseth-Tiller's sole testament. He died of cancer in 2009. He was 28 years old. 

Wild Horse Nine

Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich

I was reasonably entertained by Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, but have grown weary of the thematic and schematic repetition of his cinematic efforts. The man can write dialogue, especially duologues for men, but seems to think that history is psychopathology writ large. His male protagonists are invariably flawed and even, as in Wild Horse Nine, when they are authorized to enforce order, they live outside the law. The problem with Wild Horse Nine is that McDonagh uses the trappings of realism, with 70s period detail and music. to portray the CIA as cartoon villains. I've known CIA agents, even way back in the 1970s, and none of them dressed in the Starsky and Hutch castoffs that Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich don here. Malkovich is a 72 (!) year old cancer ridden agent who wants his younger partner (Rockwell) to ice him while they are taking a vacation on Easter Island. Malkovich is shooting morphine and his superior at the agency (Steve Buscemi) is a heroin addict.

A dark, wacky CIA then. Now I think the CIA is fair game for satire, but Wild Horse Nine boasts few genuine laughs. Malkovich does what he can, his gay cheese countries diatribe will probably win him an Oscar, but Burn After Reading is a funnier film. McDonagh over loads the film into a mythic tableau about Amerika. Malkovich's agent was not only involved with coups in Guatemala, Chile, and the Congo, but also oversaw the JFK assassination on the grassy knoll. This is over egging the pudding. Anyone who believes the CIA were competent enough to off JFK should brush up on their history. When we see Malkovich's estranged brother (Tom Waits), we find he is a hermit living amidst the splendor of, get ready for the over statement, Monument Valley. In a similar vein is the treatment of the wild horses on Easter Island. As in John Huston and Arthur Miller's The Misfits, the wild horses are some sort of half-assed statement about lost freedom, but what they really are is a metaphor too far.

That said I really enjoyed the interplay between Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. It is a pleasure. McDonagh doesn't write as well for women, but I appreciated the efforts of Parker Posey and Mariana di Girolamo. McDonagh facility with dialogue attracts stellar casts, but it seems like, in terms of cinematic output, he has been spinning his wheels since Seven Psychopaths.

The Currents

Isabel Aimié González Sola

Milagros Mumenthaler's The Currents is a riveting portrait of a woman's mental disorientation. Isabel Aimié González Sola plays Lina, a chic designer who we see receive an award for her work in the opening scene. She thereupon bins the ugly trophy (see above) and takes a leap off the nearest bridge into the Rhine. The authorities are not too concerned with her and deposit her back to her luxury hotel. Lina travels back to her home in Buenos Aires, but her husband, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi) and daughter, Sofia, both sense that she is preoccupied and distant. Her able assistant Julia (Ernestina Gatti) also gleans Lina's disconnection.

Lina leads an enviable bourgeois life. The film's display of stylish shoes, dresses lipstick, make-up, and hair treatments stands in contrast to Lina's emotional desolation. Pedro is a bit dim emotionally, but is well intentioned and a doting father. His parents are fabulously wealthy, their home a veritable museum. Lina's lineage remains a mystery till well into the movie and when we finally meet Lina's mother, the audience has more than a clue in regards to the source of Lina's discontent. 

The film is stylish and knotty, but not overly so. As one of the film's characters puts it, there is enough "artifice to fill the void." A light house scene in which Lina blanks out while we see other characters revel in ecstasy and community seems too artsy-fartsy to me, but the film, on the whole, does a good job showing something that often seems invisible. Ms. Sola gives us one of the year's most multifaceted performances. The psychic terrain of Lina is mapped out by Mr. Mumenthaler using Ms. Sola's body. This meditation on the female form presents thanatos rather than eros looming. A brief glimpse of the expanse of Lina's hair across the back of a couch achieves a keening sense of horror and mortality. Highly Recommended.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Jane Schoenbrun's most successful and accomplished film to date. The 1980s inspired mise-en-scene from I Saw the TV Glow is repeated and elevated thanks to a first rate cast and knowingly cheesy special effects. Schoenbrun's themes of transgression, sexual fluidity, and dysmorphia are once again articulated, perhaps overly so. However, Schoenbrun's love for pop culture permeates and lifts the film. The artifacts of pop culture litter the film: 1980s horror film bespoke ephemera, KFC, and lots of brightly packaged candy. Sch💜enbrun 💙s them all, but she is ambivalent enough to fear what pop culture has done to our psyches and bodies. This is the Cronenbergian strain in their work and they toss in a Videodrome reference in acknowledgement.

Teenage Sex... is, of course replete with film references: Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. Schoenbrun is savvy enough about her obsessive cinephilia to joke about an overly academic or meta approach to movies in the flick. Her surrogate in the film, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is a rising queer indie filmmaker who wants to remake a beloved horror film of her youth. The final girl in that film was played by a young actress named Billy Presley who eventually disappeared from view. Now older and embodied by Gillian Anderson, she lives a reclusive existence living, holy Miss Havisham, in the abandoned set of the original Camp Miasma film. The mousy and frigid Kris visits Billy to talk her into participating in the new film. Einbinder reins in her charisma nicely and has a winning rapport with Anderson that papers over the film's flights of fantasy. Anderson is transfixing in full diva mode, Norma Desmond with the voice of Bette Davis. 

Billy gets Kris to loosen, plying her with grass and candy and serving as a sex therapist for the uptight younger woman. Eros and thanatos are at the core of the movie: the monster at the bottom of the lake who comes out to murder campers has an air vent shaped head, a shout out to Silent Hill, and is named "Little Death." The film posits that all one has to do to gain agency is repossess the male gaze and then liberation and orgasms will follow. This aged voice says it ain't necessarily so. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is entertaining on its own terms, but is overly enamored with its own artifice. I also thought it was too long. The satiric scenes of Hollywood players are overly broad and not particularly funny, but Schoenbrun could not resist nibbling the hand that feeds her. Still, I value the personal vision that lies at the heart of the film even if I find it a bit naive. The flirting between a Kwik-Mart clerk and an oblivious Kris is the kind of little touch that uplifts a cockeyed genre film like this.

Sea Devils

Sea Devils is a relative clunker from Raoul Walsh. The film is based on a minor Victor Hugo novel, but Borden Chase's screenplay takes many liberties with Hugo, history, and geography. The film is set around 1800 as a state of war exists between the British empire and Napoleonic France. Napoleon and his chief cop, Fouché, figure in the threadbare espionage plot which binds together smuggler Rock Hudson and British agent Yvonne De Carlo. They are chiefly responsible for the void at the center of this picture. Hudson is terrible, but Yvonne De Carlo is really terrible. I was a fan of The Munsters when I was a tot, so I won't belabor the point, but it is puzzling since she is quite good later on in Walsh's Band of Angels. Anyway, Hudson has more chemistry with Bryan Forbes, playing Rock's wingman, than he does with Ms. De Carlo.

Hudson functions best when he gets to display courtly gentility towards his leading lady. In Sea Devils, Rock kidnaps and gags his leading lady. This is a role for Errol Flynn not Hudson. Hudson never seems at ease in action films, even as late as 1969's The Undefeated he looks uncomfortable in the out of doors. Rock was more adept, both vocally and physically, indoors, as in the tavern brawls in Sea Devils, urbane flirting with Doris Day and with the late, lamented Susan Saint James on McMillan and Wife. On balance, he was also not a good fit for period roles. Despite the film's title, the picture spends little time at sea. Most of the picture is salon intrigue with gorgeous sets by Wilfred Shingleton (Great Expectations) shot in sublime Technicolor by Wilkie Cooper (Seven Men From Now). A good drinking game for this flick would be to have a shot every time Rock takes off his shirt.

Rock Hudson and Yvonne De Carlo

The exteriors for Sea Devils were shot in the Channel islands and France. That coupled with the all UK supporting cast lends one to think that this was a case of the fading RKO channelling European profits into a European production. The supporting players are certainly better than the leads, especially Jacques Brunius as Fouché, Maxwell Reed, and Denis O' Dea. Bryan Forbes said he was "ludicrous in a ludicrous movie", but he was only half right. Perhaps producer David E. Rose wanted to recapture elements of such recent Walsh triumphs as Captain Horatio Hornblower and The World in his Arms, but this is a pale facsimile. One interesting echo is a carrier pigeon sequence lifted straight out of Walsh's Desperate Journey. I find it more of an example of Hollywood as an echo chamber than as proof of the auteur theory.  

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories

Sina Razani

I feel that Shahram Mokri's Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is one of the more impressive feature film debuts of the 21st century. This 2008 release has had very little imprint in the US. It even lacks a Wikipedia page. The picture's IMDB page incorrectly lists it as a color film. It was shot digitally and then rendered into black and white with a few splashes of red. It is a discursive mystery with absurdist humor. The look of the picture matches the tone of the film which seeks to move beyond the then prevailing neorealism of Iranian cinema. The deadpan absurdist tone and manner of Ashkan was influenced, as Mokri has acknowledged, by the films of Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. He has also cited the influence of Quentin Tarantino on Ashkan's script which, like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, plays with time and points of view.

The film leaps about, focusing on a myriad of strange characters whose tales intersect including two blind jewel thieves, two medical students trying to deal with a room full of cadavers, a representative of the police, and a winged sculpture. The titular Ashkan doesn't show up until halfway through the flick. That he is seeing his therapist denotes how Western the film is. Islamic fundamentalism is significant in its absence. The film has a hard bop soundtrack courtesy of Abuzar Saffarian and employs what sounds like a Farsi version of The Windmills of Your Mind for the conclusion. Ashkan is seeing his therapist after his fourteenth suicide attempt. His doc, understandably, terminates their professional relationship. Such is the warped and askew humor that permeates this film. Unlike some absurdist comedies, there are actual laughs that prevent the film from falling prey to artiness.

Ashkan is off-putting in its preposterousness and ramshackle in its production, but I could be describing Breathless. Ashkan is so efficiently shot and cut that its polyphonic saga whizzes by. My mouth was often agape at its visual simplicity and audacity. Unlike some adepts of post-modern clutter, Mokri injects enough heart along with the cleverness to engage the viewer emotionally. Like Godard, he is a devoted cinephile and that permeates his work. Mokri was initiated into the mysteries of the cinema by his father in a country where it sometimes dangerous to pursue that passion. As a lad, Mokri had his head shaved by the local authorities for possessing a VHS copy of a ninja movie. A long dialogue about Melville's Le Samouraï provides a bonding mechanism for two hoods and a way to invoke Mokri's father's favorite actor, Alain Delon. The cast of Ashkan, almost all of them theatrical veterans, enliven the film with arcane riffs and expert beats.

Fish and Cat

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is part of a new box set by Deaf Crocodile entitled The Time-Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri. It incudes his three subsequent features: Fish & Cat, Invasion, and Careless Crime. Biff assures you all that this is one boffo box. Fish and Cat, from 2013, is a serial killer film that ignores the dictates of the genre. There is little gore and the killings around a vacation lake occur offscreen. Instead of an 85 minute quickie it is a discursive and circuitous 2 hours and 14 minutes. Time and perspective are played with as long tracking shots follow the twenty or so characters; mostly hip young students from Tehran. A difficult, but rewardingly immersive picture. The same could be said for Mokri's next feature, Invasion, a Sci-Fi picture of sorts with a vampiric alien feasting on humans. Earth, or at least Iran, is enveloped in darkness and smoke in this 2017 release.The compulsive and repetitive drama is enclosed, occurring almost entirely within a large building that is part college structure, part industrial maze. Invasion functions as a comment on the interiority of gaming. Once again the film is an endless series of tracking shots. As in Fish & Cat, the narrative loop becomes a Möbius strip. To further obfuscate, the characters are played interchangeably by the players. While this jibes with Mokri's absurdism, it also harkens back to Persian ritual dramas known as ta'ziyeh, which Mokri invokes at various points. There is an air of theatrical frivolity that contrasts with the dystopian plot. Invasion will reward multiple viewings.

Careless Crime was released in 2020. The schisms of Iranian life that were undercurrents in the previous films come to the fore as bumbling fundamentalists plot to torch a movie theater. Once again time and perspective shift continually. The action shifts from 2020 to 1979 and back. Yet, the song remains the same as the past is prologue to the future. There are films within the film within the film. Sometimes the satire is half baked, as in the fake feature within Careless Crime, but the cinephilia of the picture won me over. We visit a movie museum and even view an Edison short. Careless Crime is Mokri"s most conventional and mature work and bodes well for Black Rabbit, White Rabbit.

Tuner

Havana Rose Liu and Leo Woodall

Daniel Rohrer's Tuner is a promising first fictional feature. It attempts to affix a crime subplot to a romantic comedy with mixed results. Leo Woodall stars as Niki, a piano tuner apprenticing for an aged mentor named Harry Horowitz, played by an indulged Dustin Hoffman. The duo putter around the tri-state area in a bespoke van servicing the underused pianos of the rich and indolent. Niki is afflicted with an "audio allergy" which enable him to hear pitch perfectly, but also makes him painfully sensitive to ambient noise. He meets cute with a budding composer named Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu) and after initial misgivings they are canoodling in a musical montage set to Dean Martin's version of Almost Like Being in Love. The film's action is mostly set to jazz standards from 1950s by such luminaries as Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, and Charles Mingus. Complications arise when tragedy strikes and Niki is forced to earn major scratch by applying his specialized skills to safecracking for a motley crew of Russian gangsters.

It is here that the flick goes off the rails a bit. The portrayal of the Russians is cartoonish (surprising for the director of Navalny) so that when they bare their fangs, the results are not believable. However, this is primarily a genre exercise, so implausibilities abound; as many as in, say, Golden Boy. The film is able to coast along on the charm of the performers. Ms. Liu makes her character enough of a control freak to be believable and Woodall plays interestingly against the heroic mien of a character with a disability. Best in show is Tovah Feldshuh as Harry's no nonsense spouse. Jean Reno is somewhat miscast as a maestro, but it is always a pleasure to see him. Rohrer directs with a pleasing attention to dramatic convention, tempo, and characterization, but, hopefully, his next script will be less derivative.                            

Ghare Baire

Soumitra Chatterjee and Swatilekha Sengupta

Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) is a historical film foregrounded by a love triangle. This film released in 1984 is based on the 1916 novel of the same title by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore also wrote song lyrics and some of these songs find their way into this film adaptation. Both book and film center on Nikhil (Victor Banerjee), a Bengali noble and his wife, Bimala (Swatilekha Sengupta). Nikhil is Western and progressive leaning, for 1907 and his wife follows suit. Their relative domestic bliss is ruptured when nationalist leader and longtime friend, Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives to visit. Sandip is a charismatic speaker and ladies man who is agitating against British rule. Nikhil doesn't want Bimala to live a cloistered life and practically serves her to Sandip on a plate. She responds to his charms and events lead to a tragic ending.

The novel expresses Tagore's ambivalent attitude towards India's emerging nationalism. As pointed out by Andrew Robinson in his Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, still the best book in English on Ray, the character of Nikhil articulates Tagore's qualms concerning Hindu ethnocentrism. In 1905, Lord Curzon had divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim sections; the latter corresponding roughly to the present state of Bangladesh. This was a portent of the eventual partitioning of India in 1947, at which time Ray first wrote a screenplay adaptation of the novel. Sandip is shown exploiting this issue and stoking ethnic violence by calling for a ban on foreign trade, a measure which would hurt poor Muslim merchants the most. Nikhil sees Sandip for what he is politically and as an exploiter of women, for Bimala is merely a link on his chain of fools. Nikhil's apparent diffidence is a problem dramatically, but Ray, serene in his dotage, captures his peculiar aura of resigned fatalism. Ghare Baire is a studiously conducted chamber play in a languorous mansion full of wonders and wondrous kitsch. We do see scenes of the world outside Nikhil's mansion, but sparingly.

The deliberate pacing of the film and its political background may make this a hard film to get into. It reminds me of late Visconti in its decorous lassitude. What gave me an insight that opened up the film for me was Ray's direction of Gopa Aich, a neophyte cast as Nikhil's widowed sister-in-law. She wears white to denote her widowhood, a portent.The role is ridiculous. The woman is bored and not too subtly enamored with Nikhil. Ray directs the actress broadly, as if she were a diva in a comic opera. The film uses music throughout with songs in both Bengali and English. Ray shoots this chamber play as if it were an opera, again akin to Visconti. There are duos and trios and the usual tra-la-la triangle. The three leads make their characters sing. Ray had a heart attack while filming, his place was taken by his son, Sandip, who followed his father's instructions. This circumstance has led to Ghare Baire being treated as a lesser effort in the Ray canon, but I found it to be a fully integrated masterpiece.

Ghare Baire has just been released on disc by Criterion as part of its Eclipse series in a set entitled Late Ray. The other two films in the set are two other late Ray entries, An Enemy of the People and The Stranger. An Enemy of the People is dull and tired, an overly earnest and static attempt to transpose Ibsen's play to 1989 India. Why Ray tacked on a Frank Capra style ending onto the material is beyond me. The bedraggled Steve McQueen version is more interesting. Ray's final film, The Stranger, shares many of the same players as An Enemy of the People, but is a appreciably livelier film. There is color, song, dance, and even a few exterior scenes. Ray's screenplay is reminiscent of Ghare Baire: an interloper temporarily upsets an established domestic balance. In this case, the stranger of the title is a long lost uncle of dubious provenance. The intrigue is slim, but The Stranger has its modest charms. 

You Can See Everything

 Amanda Seyfried       

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything is, ostensibly, a documentary about the now imprisoned Theranos executive Elizabeth Holmes. The filmmakers were invited to film Holmes, her husband, and two small children in a beachside house they rented in San Diego for the last month or so before Holmes was scheduled to begin her sentence. Mr. Fielder appears onscreen throughout as the couples' interlocutor. I would argue that we learn more about his character than that of the shifty couple. Since I think objectivity in film documentary is a crock, and has been since Nanook waved at Robert Flaherty, Mr. Fielder's presence makes this a more personal picture than the usual talking head fests. The filmmakers were smart enough to know that seeking truth in such a complex and thorny case as this is foolhardy, especially when you are dealing with such slippery customers as Ms. Holmes and her hubby. However, the two are so cluelessly cocooned in their delusional bubble that they help make You Can See Everything the funniest American comedy of 2026. The ellipses of Ms. Holmes' non-answers provide perfect comic beats.

I watched the film at a sold out matinee and and was amazed at the number of gasps, guffaws, and belly laughs the picture elicited. The film is visually monotonous, mostly enormous close-ups of faces, but I and the rest of the audience were largely riveted. The filmmakers seem at sea when Ms Holmes enters the hoosegow, but an entertaining fiction saves the project. Amanda Seyfried, who played Ms. Holmes in a Hulu movie, and Christopher Abbott are enlisted to play versions of Holmes and mate. A pre-filming meeting that displays the dynamics between the couple is reenacted, as is a prison visitation resulting in a documentary film that plays around with the form. You Can See Everything does not attempt to give us facts in a Joe Friday fashion, but gives us much to chew and ruminate on. 

Scenes from a Marriage

Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann

In certain cases, I have reserved a few works of art to contemplate in my dotage. I just read Proust for the first time and was underwhelmed. He reminded me of Virginia Woolf in his self-absorption. There are always a few Dorothy Dunnett and Tom Sharpe novels that I am saving for my deathbed because I love their prose so. Scenes from a Marriage was in this category partially because I am a recovering Bergmaniac. When the shortened film version was released in the US in 1974, I was deep in the throes of my adoration of the Swedish Ubermensch. I grew up in Baltimore where we were able to receive Washington D. C. stations if we pointed the rabbit eared antenna a certain way. WETA ran a series of Bergman films from the Janus collection with commentary from the young Roger Ebert and I was hooked. I was able to see everything from Summer with Monika through Winter Light as a teen and it helped me glom onto cinema as an art form. Scenes from a Marriage had gotten huzzahs from the American critics, but, being the contrary budding aesthete I was, I vowed to wait and view the real deal.

It was worth the wait. The six part (or scenes), 297 minute 1973 television series has a breadth of vision that eclipses the film version which omits two hours of footage. The length of the series opens up our understanding of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), the married and then divorced but always a couple the film chronicles. The series was filmed in color by Sven Nykvist, but the baroque expressionism of Cries and Whispers (an alleged masterpiece I find over wrought) has been discarded. Scenes from a Marriage recalls The Rite, also lensed by Nykvist, in that it is a chamber play, almost entirely shot in interiors. What exteriors that exist in the series usually show the characters tearing around the countryside in a Volvo. They are usually there for a reason, though. Bergman repeats a shot of a parked vehicle at the couple's summer cottage to express what has been lost in the passage of time.  The first instance is when Johan is telling Marianne that he is leaving her. The second is when the couple, now divorced and married to unseen others, arrive at the cottage to rekindle their romance. They are able to do so, but only by leaving that cottage and escaping the ghosts of the past.

The majority of the series focuses on interior duologues between Johan and Marianne. These scenes start out in long shot, establishing the perimeter of the field of marital combat, but they always end in tight close-ups. Sometimes of someone in anguish, usually Marianne, but more often with the couple having found a rapprochement, cuddling. There are a lot enormous close-ups, like the one above, of the couple together as a unit, her yin to his yang as it were. Johan is the rational male side, more self centered and sarcastic. Marianne is the masochistic female empath. As has been pointed out, Bergman's sympathies lie with the distaff side even though Josephson's character, as in After the Rehearsal, can be looked at as a Bergman stand-in. However, I detect glimpses of hope within the usual Bergman battle of the sexes. We get plenty of the hell is other people schtick, particularly in the dinner party with Bibi Andersson and Jan Malmsjo, and Ibsen and Strindberg get the usual shout-outs, but the protagonists display personal growth. Johan becomes a little more empathic or "softer" as Marianne puts it and Marianne becomes more independent and sure of herself.

Ms. Ullmann's performance is one of the greatest of the last century, but the care and the skill of the other performers is not far behind. Wench Foss, Norwegian like Ms. Ullmann, is especially memorable as Marianne's mother in a scene snipped from the film version. The scene, in which Marianne blithely tells her mother that she will not be attending her father's interment, is a signpost of Marianne liberating herself from the rituals and unspoken rules of the previous generation. Liberation is not a concept generally found in the claustrophobic world of Herr Bergman, but it is there in Scenes from a Marriage.

Virginia City

Guinn Williams, Alan Hale Sr., and Errol Flynn

Michael Curtiz's Virginia City is an amiable enough Errol Flynn vehicle, but it is also the least interesting Flynn/Curtiz collaboration Warner Brothers released in 1940, the others being Santa Fe Trail and The Sea Hawk. Flynn is a Yankee Captain during the Civil War who we first view attempting to break out of the infamous Libby prison in Richmond. The commandant of that prison is Randolph Scott who is improbably roped into a plot, by dancehall gal/spy Mildred Hopkins, to move five million dollars in gold from the titular town east in order to prop up a tottering Confederacy. After busting out of the hoosegow, Flynn is tabbed to thwart the rebel plan. A troupe of banditos, headed by a mustachioed Humphrey Bogart, lurks on the periphery threatening mischief at every step.

I'm not referring to the characters in this picture because they hardly exist. The flick has a cobbled together feel with various writers contributing different elements to the formulaic stew. There is a pinch of Gone With The Wind and more than a dollop of Stagecoach. Flynn gets to display his good natured dash, but other familiar elements lack brio. Guinn Williams and Alan Hale are along to provide comic relief as Flynn's cohorts, but the material they are given is feeble. Curtiz's gifts did not include comic raffishness. His exterior scenes lack the dynamism and thematic integration employed by Walsh and Ford, though the scenic vistas, mostly in Arizona, are gorgeous. The most memorable sequences are interior: the Sazerac dancehall where Ms. Hopkins plies her trades and the opening sequences inside and below Libby prison.

Humphrey Bogart

The weakest and most embarrassing element of the film is Bogart's performance as a Mexican bad man. It is among the more ludicrous miscastings in Hollywood history, right up there with Bogart's turn as a vampire in The Return of Doctor X, but it belies the fact that Bogie had not reached the status of an A player, yet. It did not have to be since Bogart was playing a real figure, the outlaw John Murrell, who was, in fact, not a Mexican. Of course, the real Murell died in 1844, but Virginia City is not encumbered by historic fact. I rolled my eyes when a Virginia City town crier announces the simultaneous fall of Southern strongholds Vicksburg and Atlanta; events that were separated by some fourteen months. What is more objectionable than the picture's slipshod treatment of history is its even-handedness to the Union and Rebel cause; a sop to the Southern box-office. Flynn and Scott are both honorable dudes who are just staying true to their cause. Slavery is unmentioned. The ulterior motive for this is that, two years before Pearl Harbor, Hollywood wanted to play down partisan and regional divisions in the US to cement the unity needed to combat the Axis menace.

There are some things I like about the flick. Hopkins and Scott were both Southerners and their accents are nicely relaxed. Compare them to Ward Bond who appears as a Confederate soldier early on. Bond's efforts aren't bad, but pales besides the real things. The songs Hopkins is saddled with are weak, even Dietrich would have flailed with them, but she is a trouper. I kind of like Flynn putting the moves on an older woman for once instead of jailbait like Olivia de Havilland, as was his wont in his surreal life.

Cold Storage

Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery

Jonny Campbell's Cold Storage is a blend of comedy and horror that failed to ignite at the box-office when it was released in the US in February. With loads of goofy gore, it is an amiable formula film that will not stick in one's mind's eye for long. David Koepp's screenplay posits that a chunk of Skylab containing an invasive and toxic fungus dropped to Earth in Kansas and has been sequestered by the government ever since. However, the Feds dropped the ball and the deadly fungus bunker in now a public storage facility whose security staff includes Cold Storage's two leads, Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell. While they hide from creatures affected by the green goo, two retired guv'ment agents ride to the rescue. 

That these parts are played by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville belies the saving grace of this unpretentious little film: superior acting. The timing and nuance of the crack cast lift this just above standard fare. Best in show is Vanessa Redgrave whose extended cameo shows that the old gal has still got it. Based on her recent credits, Georgina Campbell is a real comer. That she can play a character ten years younger than herself here is a triumph of acting rather than make-up. Joe Keery kind of bugs me. He overdoes the wrong side of the tracks schtick here, but he is more than competent with his movements and timing. I guess I think he is more of a Jughead than an Archie. 

Mr. Campbell has primarily worked in television. He is a Brit and I guess that explains the preponderance of thesps from the UK in the cast. He works well with the ensemble, but seems not to be a distinctive visual stylist. Believers in the auteur theory of screenwriting should note that Mr. Koepp recycled the satellite surveillance trope from Cold Storage in the Black Box script. 

Fearless Frank

Good titles, bad movie

There is not much written about Philip Kaufman's Fearless Frank because there is not much to write about. It is a feeble superhero parody that might have made a good fifteen minute Second City comedy troupe skit, but becomes tedious when expanded to the length of a feature flim. Kaufman adds Felliniesque digressions and vaguely narcotic curlicues as padding. Kaufman partisans would just as soon forget about the film, but since I've never championed his work, I will admit that I got a few laughs out of it; more than I laughed at After the Fox or The Producers.

The main reason for the laughs is the topnotch cast who tower over the thin material. A good chunk of the cast came from Chicago's aforementioned Second City. Second City's Severn Darden and Anthony Holland were in Kaufman's first film, Goldstein, and return for Fearless Frank. Fellow comic troupers Joan Darling and David Steinberg joins them for this one. All four would soon be familiar faces in Hollywood films and television. Jon Voight is the titular Frank, who is reanimated by mad scientist Darden into a superhero. All the leads do what they can with much scenery chewing and mugging. Nelson Algren, who also acted in Goldstein, appears as one of the bad guy's henchmen with the sobriquet, "Needles"; a tribute to Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm. Monique van Vooren appears as eye candy and Frank's dream girl, another character aptly named: Plethora. Cult musical figure Ken Nordine delivers droll narration.

Jon Voight

As one can surmise from this plot summary, Kaufman is borrowing a little from Mary Shelley, but the primary source of this parody is the then popular Batman TV series. This is most obvious when Kaufman punctuates Voight's defloration of Ms. Darling with mod titles of "Wham" and "Pow", but, alas, there is no "Biff". However, it is hard to parody something that already verged on self-parody. The film was first shown at Cannes in 1967 and, unsurprisingly attracted no interest. It was eventually released on a double bill with an obscure Dustin Hoffman B picture after the success of Midnight Cowboy in 1969. Kaufman got a deal with Universal Pictures which eventually released his next picture, the far superior Western, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Fearless Frank, at times looks good enough to be a Hollywood feature, but in some sequences, like a superimposed Frank flying over Chicago, it is strictly amateur hour. Kaufman never really evolved into a first rate visual stylist, but his next film would show a quantum leap. Too much of Fearless Frank's widescreen frame contains wasted negative space, meaningless visual clutter that distracts from the players.

I also feel the sophisticated Europhile Kaufman had a rather leaden feel for comedy. There are some amusing bits in ...Northfield and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but he totally muffed Tom Wolfe's satiric jabs at Americana and the space program in The Right Stuff. I find that highly lauded film and his acclaimed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to be gaseous, over long bores. I do like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Henry and June, and Quills. The White Dawn and The Wanderers are watchable and the rest is dross; including Fearless Frank.

Resident Evil

Austin Abrams 

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil is a deserved hit with both the critics and the public. The youngsters and gamers seem to like it. My ticket taker gushed that "it was by far the best in the series even if it didn't have Mila." The audience was young and entranced by the sheer gallop of this genre exercise par excellence. I was worried after the polyphonic breakthrough of Weapons that Resident Evil would be monophonic in its adherence to the project's gaming heritage, but it is more than a rollercoaster ride. It is agitatedly, but rewardingly monophonic in following the adventures of dispatch delivery agent Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he encounters carnivorous alien creatures while he tries to deliver the film's MacGuffin to a lab. It does not end happily, but the film's themes are suited to the rat in a maze structure. Cregger leavens the material with sick humor which the cast delivers sublimely.

Some have objected to the prevalent visual schema of slime, often toxic, that fills the screen during the last act. This is silly because the film's sense of horror is that of human putrefaction. The hero, a modern Ichabod Crane, is trying desperately to outrun the onslaught of mortality. The unease of COVID and whatever the heck happened in Russia pervades the air. What mysterious strain will cause us to putrefy? Thankfully, Austin Abrams gives a sly, visually elastic performance that brings out the absurdity of Bryan's plight. The supporting players whizz by before getting slimed. I was most amused by the efforts of Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry. 

I was reminded of a similar genre exercise that traded off then current fears, Spielberg's Duel. The villain stalking Dennis Weaver is a kin to the good old boys that shot up Captain America and Billy in Easy Rider. The villain of Resident Evil is harder to pin down, something more mysterious in the air. Guns and rifles of many varieties do seem easy to find in this film's version of America. It posits that if life is a First-person shooter game then, soon, we will all be dead.

This is for Carla, a horror aficionado and connoisseur of onscreen putrefaction.

The Devil's Bride

Groovy!

Arunas Zebriunas' dotty film The Devil's Bride is a Lithuanian rock opera released in 1974. Mr Zebrunas was assisted in constructing this slice of counterculture kitsch by composer Vyacheslav Ganelin and poet Sigitas Geda who penned the libretto. The plot is loosely based on the folklore fantasy novel Whitehorn's Windmill by Kazys Boruta. The good people at Deaf Crocodile have released this film on a beautiful disc which contains a host of extras in addition to the 76 minute feature. Ten minutes into this picture, you'll feel as if someone has given you a few shots of mead and a dark rye crust with ergot clusters. 

An agent of the dark lord spreads mischief amongst the inhabitants of a lakeside village. Men sell their souls and brides are left waiting at the altar. The thorough composed score drives the frenetic, cartoon like action. The film hurtles along. If you don't like one tune, here comes another. The tone is akin that of Ken Russell in this period, if Mr. Russell had liked people. The invocation of national myth, Catholic imagery, and pagan folklore stands as a finger in the eye of staid, godless Communism.

As with most rock operas, the score for The Devil's Bride is not rock and roll, but a listenable mishmash. Because of his background in jazz, I'd group Mr. Ganelin with jazz composers who went all in on baroque pop when the commercial opportunity arose, like John Barry, Quincy Jones, and Burt Bacharach. Ganelin injects some fuzz-tone guitar whenever Satan's minions cut loose with orgiastic impishness, but he can't compose around an electric guitar like Morricone. The Devil's Bride is much more engaging than such visual atrocities as Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. And don't get me started about the 1973 Lost Horizon, an all time turkey that put the kibosh to the Bacharach/ David partnership. It was a bad era for musicals, rock opera or not, The Devil's Bride is colorful and kooky fun. The flick is currently streaming on Tubi.

The Love That Remains

Saga Garoarsdóttir

Hlynur Pálmason's The Love That Remains strikes me as one of the more original and impressive pictures I've seen this year. The film repeats the man as a single grain of sand vibe explored in Godland, but adds a depth of characterization that lifts this work to a higher plateau. The film is ostensibly focused on the ongoing separation between artist Anna (Saga Garoarsdóttir) and her mismatched mate, Magnús (Sverrir Guonason). The pair share a teenage daughter named Ida and a set of ten year old twins. Magnús has not quite processed that Anna has given him the heave-ho. He slinks into his former household like a wary sheepdog and is usually graced a meal or a beer. However, he cannot reignite a spark with Anna who is clearly bored and irritated by her more simplistic spouse.

Magnús works on a fishing trawler. He is gone for weeks at a time as it is herring season and is bored and down in the dumps. The fish harvesting sequences alone would make this worth seeing, but The Love That Remains contains multiple strains and themes. Anna is an artist who weathers her work. Not in a random way, but deliberately so that it is infused with the elements of Iceland. The film traces the arc of the seasons from spring to winter. The fractured family joins together to pick wild berries and forage mushrooms. Among Ann's art pieces left out in the open is a Joan of Arc figure affixed to a stake. Her children use the figure for archery target practice, but the figure also stands in contrast to the ever changing face of natural Iceland. Ann's work grounds her to her land. In contrast, Magnús ends the film, literally, at sea.

Pálmason punctuates his narrative with surrealistic asides that amplify the film's themes. Some of these are dropped matter of factly. Some with flashy effects like split screens and whip pans. However, Pálmason never allows his film to be overcome with effects and uses them judiciously. Most of the surreal moments display an aptly unconscious tug. The exception is Magnús' dream of himself being menaced by a giant rooster. This is in response to his having killed a misbehaving cock at Ann's request. The dream is a too literal illustration of guilt, but it pays off when Ida tells off Magnús because of this foul deed and his subservience to his ex. The killing was played for laughs, at Magnús' ineptitude, but it hinges on one of the film's central themes: Are we instinctual beasts preying upon each other or can we deny or self-interest for the common good? The film's humor is predicated on the unease with which we regard out ambivalent state. There are no easy answers or good guys or bad guys in the film.

Ida's animal rights stance and the children's overall attitude towards sex and violence signals another of the film's themes: shifts in generational perspectives. The arrows into Joan of Arc and the recovery of World War 2 mines show that violence is an ever present reality even in peaceable Iceland. Ambivalence, the hallmark of maturity, is in evidence even in the film's appreciation of ugliness and beauty. Even the spectre and reality of death has its strange beauty in The Love That Remains. Brilliantly acted and memorably filmed, this is surely one of the best features released in the US in 2026.

                          

Disclosure Day

Emily Blunt

I was somewhat disappointed by Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day. Technically, the film is superbly wrought, no surprise, and the contributions by longtime Spielberg collaborators John Williams and Janusz Kaminski are noteworthy. This is one of Spielberg's best casts and I enjoyed the efforts of Josh O'Connor, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, and, especially, Emily Blunt. Spielberg's direction has not curdled into aged lassitude. He can still direct a train wreck as well as anybody. However, the presence of an elaborate train wreck in the middle of already overly complicated conspiracy film about UFOs seems gratuitous, as if old Steve signed on so he could recreate the train wreck from The Greatest Show on Earth for the umpteenth time.

David Koepp's script is a mess. The picture involves a lot of cross cutting and chase scenes, yet generates little suspense. From the title of the film, we already know the cache of UFO footage held by Mr. O'Connor's character will be eventually released despite the desperate attempts by corporate titan Colin Firth to suppress "the truth". Firth's motivation for this is shaky, the usual old saw about people not being able to handle "the truth". Regardless, the picture is not named Non-Disclosure Day, so the audience knows in which way the picture is heading throughout. Koepp plunges us into the plot with nary a character sketch or motivation. To start the film, Mr. O'Connor is at a pro wrestling match to trade his alien footage to the corporate baddies who have kidnapped his missus (Ms. Hewson). We eventually get the back story, ad nauseam, but this opening sequence lacks suspense because the audience has no bearings. Spielberg color codes the wrestling sequence in red (capped), white, and blue, but this faint slap at MAGA is the only bit of attempted cultural relevance in Disclosure Day. 

I was also bugged by the film's whole mind melding schtick. Heck, if Colin Firth can read the minds of the good guys, then I think he should be easily able to thwart their plans. Koepp and Spielberg do get some yuks from Ms. Blunt's mind reading capabilities, but this is mostly due to Ms. Blunt's skill at having her face and posture convey what she is thinking. The film's other attempts at humor fall flat, particularly the character of Ms. Blunt's hapless musician boyfriend. While Mr. Koepp is responsible for some of the faults of Disclosure Day, the ultimate responsibility lies with the director. The disclosure footage show provide the director a good opportunity to strut his stuff, but the results are underwhelming. The footage of Nixon showing Jackie Gleason alien remains is botched. How could a scene like that be unmemorable? The CGI bits lack the bite and flair of even Ready Player One. In addition, we get B movie level footage of Roswell and Close Encounters redux. Are we still stuck on little green men after all these years?

As with super heroes, I admit to being less than fascinated with the subject of UFOs. If our alien overlords have not deigned to contact us, I'm sure they have reasons, but I'm not waiting to be enslaved or turned into a cosmic butterfly. You might as well wait for Godot. Though if any alien overlord is reading this and contemplating putting me in their zoo, please take Biff circa 1985 and pair him with a cloned Mary Astor. The fascination with UFOs seems a hallmark of the second rate mind. That is the nature of Steven Spielberg, a first rate film technician who does not possess a rigorous intellect.

Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy

Laura del Sol and Antonio Gades

During the 1980s, Carlos Saura collaborated with dancer and choreographer Antonio Gades on three flamenco oriented films: Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983), and El Amor Brujo (1986). The three films are now available in a new and spiffy blu ray set released by the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series. As with all Eclipse releases, the extras are nonexistent, but the films themselves are choice: dynamic detonations of movement cut exquisitely to stirring music. All the films celebrate Spanish culture, but also mock up the mythos underlying representations of Spain. The scenarios of the three ballets filmed are all based on material that stresses themes of reckless passion, infidelity, and murder. The dancers, singers, and musicians in these films perform as if conjuring the joys and torments of their ancestors. Saura escapes any high culture bugaboo and gives us the thrill of live performance.

Saura had been invited to witness a rehearsal of Gades and his troupe performing a dance adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding. This provided the impetus for a film that stays strictly within a rehearsal studio for its 71 minute entirety. The film is the most like a documentary of the three and the focus remains fixed on the artistic process. We never see a final performance of the piece. Indeed the first half of the film documents the dancers and players filing in, applying makeup, and warming up. Gades discloses a personal anecdote and we get a little insight into the performers by the talismans and gnomes they unpack from the fishing tackle boxes that carry their makeup. Despite the documentary facade, Blood Wedding is shot and cut more like Stop Making Sense or Shine A Light then Gimme Shelter. The three or four camera angles used in the rehearsal space maximize the kinetic impact of the dancers and the editing syncs it perfectly to the thunderous guitar and vocal accompaniment.

Carmen

Pretty much the same performers and their talents will leave viewers similarly agog in the followup, Carmen. The film is also primarily made up of rehearsals, but Carmen has more color, a bigger scope, and the semblance of a plot. Gades has to find a new dancer for his Carmen and, of course, he does so in the person of a young hoofer conveniently named Carmen played by Laura del Sol. Does life imitate art? Well, reality and artifice are so intertwined in the film that it is hard to say what came first. Gades and his fellow performers are not actors, so when he asks guitar great Paco de Lucia for romantic advice, the dramatic interchange comes off a little awkward. However, all my objections were swept by the bravura birthday celebration in which the cast performs a delightful burlesque of Prosper Mérimée's novel. 

El Amor Brujo makes the move to total artifice which Saura also employs in his subsequent musical films: Tango, Flamenco, Fados, Flamenco, Flamenco, and J: Beyond Flamenco. El Amor Brujo is based on Manuel de Falla's ballet and is centered amidst the Roma and Andalusian roots of flamenco. A stylized sound stage represent an expressively colored Granada slum in a lurid love saga with spectral emanations. There is no rehearsal footage this time. We finally get to see a show en toto. As before, there is a wedding, infidelity and a murder in a film that is an apt culmination to the series. This Eclipse set would make an ideal gift to dance and film lovers alike. 

El Amor Brujo

Eagles of the Republic

Fares Fares and Lyna Khoudri

Tarik Saleh's Eagles of the Republic is a twisty and compelling drama about an Egyptian film star who unwittingly becomes involved in dangerous political intrigue. George Fahmy (Fares Fares) is that top-flight movie star with the usual problems of the rich and famous. His films are universally adored in Egypt, but his personal life is a mess. He is separated from his wife, has an uneasy relationship with his teenaged son, and has little in common with his young mistress, Donya (Lyna Khoudri). Government officials give him an offer he can't refuse, the starring role in a hagiographical film about the current (mythical) Egyptian president. Fahmy is a Christian and is uneasy about both Islamic fundamentalism and his country's leaders, but, once his family is threatened, finds he has no choice. The filming is overseen by the stone faced Dr. Mansour (Amr Waked), a government agent who makes plain the fact that Fahmy and all those around him are being surveilled. 

To further complicate the plot, Fahmy embarks on an affair with Suzanne (Zineb Triki), the wife of the Minister of Defense. Fahmy becomes increasingly entangled in a web of many intrigues. An actress friend named Rula (Cherien Dabis) asks him for help after she has been blacklisted by the regime, presuming that he has pull with the powers that be. Fahmy does what he thinks is best, but tragic consequences, most unforeseen, result. Some have labeled Eagles of the Republic a satire, but I feel the body count is too high to describe it as such. I think it is more mordantly ironic than funny, akin to The Threepenny Opera. I also feel that the film has more depth of characterization than satire usually does. The supporting characters, some of whom I haven't mentioned in my summary, are all indelibly drawn and expertly played.

Best of all is Fares Fares. Eagles of the Republic, the third film of Mr. Saleh's Cairo trilogy which includes The Nile Hilton Incident and Boy From Heaven (all starring Mr. Fares), displays the full range of his talent. By the two thirds mark, Fahmy's mask of charm has been discarded for a visage of true terror. The film culminates in a replay of the Sadat assassination: the past as the future's prologue. It helps to know Egypt's recent history, but the picture ranks as one of my favorites released in the US in 2026. Mr Saleh is not much of a visual stylist, but my previous comparison to Sidney Lumet stands. Like Lumet, Saleh is a social realist of the first rank, able to embellish his characters with heart and intelligence. Eagles of the Republic is his most outstanding picture to date. 

Supergirl

Milly Alcock and Matthias Schoenaerts

Indifferently received by critics and audiences alike, I was not very psyched to watch Craig Gillespie's Supergirl, but I ended up being slightly glad I did. The super hero cosmos does very little for me. Even when I was a lad, way back in the 1960s, comic books never floated my boat. Superman is the absolute worst, an übermensch without Nietzchean aggro is not the kind of protagonist I am interested in. However, the super hero genre has yielded a few good films, as even the most despised genres sometimes do. I appreciated the comic and juvenile tone of Ana Nogueira's script for Supergirl. It is reminiscent of the Guardians of the Galaxy films in its use of PG-13 humor. The opening title includes Supergirl's dog, Krypto, urinating. Indeed, urination is a constant motif in the film as the characters mark their territory.

I would be cautious in letting tots see this film, but not because of the pee. The plot hinges on PTSD triggering violence and a search for revenge. Director Gillespie does not emphasize the violent deaths like a Peckinpah, Supergirl couldn't nab an R rating that way, but the film has some dark corners. We first meet Supergirl (Milly Alcock) trying to drink away her demons. In the inevitable flashback, we see the cause of her trauma and the beginning of her unhappy exile on Earth. She really gets PO'ed when a dastardly brigand named Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts) poisons her pooch. Krem has the antidote, so Supergirl must find him and extract her pound of flesh. Joining her in this quest is a younger lass named Ruthye (Eve Ridley). Ruthye's entire family has been massacred by Krem and she is obsessed with revenge. Supergirl is initially leery of Ruthye, but they soon develop a camaraderie. This was the primary charm of the film for me. Gillespie helps create a heathy rapport between his two young actresses that reminded me of the friendship and mentorship between Xena and Gabrielle; without the sapphic tease.   

Supergirl's CGI is on the cheesy side, but it is appropriate to the project. The hair and makeup are outstanding. I love the way Jason Momoa's bounty hunter looked like a cross between Gene Simmons and Randall "Tex" Cobb. Momoa is well cast and seems to have found his groove as a performer. Mr. Schoenaerts offers an amusing comic riff on dumb villainy. He seems well aware that his character has one dimension and is a mere bowling pin made to be knocked down by the hero, like Wile E. Coyote. Only David Corenswet is unsatisfactory. He is too stiff even for the Man of Steel. That cannot be said for Mr. Gillespie's direction. Supergirl is his most likable film since Lars and the Real Girl. It's final reel contains too much Biff, Bam, and Pow for me even, but such are the requirements of the genre.           

The Verdict (1946)

                   Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre                

Don Siegel's The Verdict, released in 1946, is a slightly above average mystery film. It is a B picture filmed entirely on the Warners' lot and set in 1890's London. The fog machines work overtime in this one. Sydney Greenstreet is the lead and plays a police inspector whose faulty investigation results in an innocent man going to the gallows in the film's opening section. Because of this, he loses his job, but a subsequent murder gives him an apparent chance at redemption. Peter Lorre is along for the ride as a dissipated painter who is Greenstreet's best bud, Lorre functions as comic relief and gets the lion's share of the film's best lines. When his landlady, frightened by the recent string of murders, tells him that she is going to bed with a police whistle, he replies, "How would you blow a whistle if somebody cuts your throat?"

The Verdict's script is a series of hoary cliches, but the film boasts solid performances. George Coulouris is enjoyably effective as Greenstreet's successor and bête noir. Joan Lorring, Rosalind Ivan, and Arthur Shields are all sterling in support. This was Siegel's first directoral effort after making his mark in the Warner's editing department with such eye catching credits as Casablanca and Gentleman Jim. His work on The Verdict displays some flourishes that belie a director eager to make his mark. His use of the crane and whip-pans (during a trial sequence) are striking, but are somewhat removed from the no nonsense style he would develop as a mature director. The Verdict is better than most routine programmers, but is more an amusing diversion than the indelible films Siegel would eventually direct.

A night with Lou Reed

Lou Reed

A night with Lou Reed is a terrific concert video taken from a show at The Bottom Line in New York City in February of 1983. The newly sober and married Reed is on his best behavior, clearly chuffed to be playing live with the most accomplished band of musicians he ever toured with. That band--Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on bass, Fred Maher on drums--had recorded The Blue Mask with Reed, his best release in many a moon. The follow up to that album, also recorded with the same band, Legendary Hearts was due to be released in March. Before an intimate audience of yuppies and Andy Warhol, the quartet provides a robust show of new material and oldies, quite a few dating from the days of the Velvet Underground.   

The video is competently directed by Clark Santee, but is missing four numbers from the concert. Still, the world probably doesn't need another live version of Heroin. I slightly prefer the versions of the songs on this video to the versions on the Live in Italy album which was recorded by the same band later that year. Both Saunders and Quine were exemplary improvisers and Reed provided them more leeway than was usual in his touring band. It is particularly unusual for a bass player in a rock band to be given the chance to provide numerous solos and flourishes as Saunders did for Reed, but Saunders was an accomplished jazz player who had already accompanied such guitar luminaries as Jeff Beck and John McLaughlin. Reed's joy at Saunders' solo on New Age here reflects the enormous pleasure he got from Saunders' playing. Saunders ended up contributing to Reed's albums and tours into the 21st century, remarkable given the track record of testy Lou.

Fernando Saunders, Lou Reed and Robert Quine

Such was not the fate of Robert Quine. A lifelong Velvets fanatic, he and Reed parted ways in 1984, never to collaborate again. Quine was not overly fond of touring and retreated to session work. Reportedly, Quine played on Legendary Hearts' followup, New Sensations, but his contributions were erased by Reed after the two wrangled over the writing credits for I Love You, Suzanne. Besides his work with Reed, Quine's sizzling guitar work is best sampled on the two Richard Hell and the Voidoids albums and the explosive passages he lent to Matthew Sweet's albums in the 1990s. While not as ecstasy inducing as 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, A night with Lou Reed is an impressive document of a short lived band in cozy surroundings. Lou doesn't have to hector vocally as much as he does on the Live in Italy. This video was released on VHS and Betamax in 1984 and there is a laser disc from the 1990s floating about which can be had on eBay. Luckily, A night with Lou Reed can be seen and more importantly heard for free currently on Tubi. It will please any and all rock and role fans.