Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings

[Precious Doll]

Benilde or the Virgin Mother (1975) Manoel de Oliveira 4/10
Peter Rabbit (2018) Will Gluck 4/10
Animal (1977) Claude Zidi 4/10
The Divine Order (2017) Peta Biondina Volpe 7/10
The Butterfly Tree (2017) Priscilla Cameron 1/10
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017) Angela Robinson 8/10
Ready Player One (2018) Steven Spielberg 4/10

Repeat viewings

Cool Hand Luke (1967) Stuart Rosenberg 4/10
Society (1989) Brian Yuzna 6/10
Doc (1971) Frank Perry 6/10
Guys and Dolls (1955) Joseph L. Mankiewicz 5/10

[Sabin]

/Carol/ (Todd Haynes) - 8.5/10

Sad day. I rewatched Carol at Cuties in East Hollywood, and I found myself terribly conflicted about a film that I had very recently considered a work of art. And now? I think it's a gorgeous piece of filmmaking and a great script, and occasionally the two of these things are not in sync. Phylis Nagy's screenplay was deservedly nominated for an Oscar (and should have won) but while Haynes' film cineaste approach is more successful here than Far From Heaven (I think...it's been fifteen years) some of his choices aren't dramatically satisfying. I'll risk heresy: I think these two leads were perhaps miscast or misdirected. Both Carol and Therese represent cinematic callbacks to yesteryear, the clash of old Hollywood and new Hollywood. But I never sense attraction between them, let alone love. They both exist too much in their own worlds to be interested in people besides themselves. Haynes is more interested in the swoony quality that they evoke...and it is a beautifully swoony experience. Watching the film, one gets the sense that to Carol, Therese is an indulgence, but nowhere near as important as her home-life drama. That can be effectively dramatized, but it requires a meaner plot...or a meaner Carol. I certainly don't buy Carol's admission of love at the end, nor do I remotely want Therese to return to her over Carrie Brownstein (who must have been edited).

It's a strong mood piece assisted by a strong plot and beautiful dialogue. And truly, the film's MVP is Carter Burwell. Although at times I noticed that the film tends to autopilot over his beautiful score, that might just be due to how often I listen to the soundtrack.

Not the film of 2015. Just a very, very good one.

[Precious Doll]

Bloody Milk (2017) Hubert Charuel 6/10
See You Up There (2017) Albert Dupontel 9/10
The Breadwinner (2017) Nora Twomey 6/10
Mary Magdalene (2018) Garth Davis 2/10
My Dearest Señorita (1972) Jaime de Arminan 6/10
End of Innocence (1957) Leopoldo Torre Nilssonn 7/10
Novitiate (2017) Maggie Betts 4/10
Justice is Done (1950) Andre Cayatte 6/10

Repeat viewings

Executive Suite (1954) Robert Wise 6/10
Golden Boy (1939) Rouben Mamoulian 6/10
Shark (1969) Samuel Fuller 6/10
Holiday (1938) George Cukor 6/10
Henri-Georges Cluzot's Inferno (2009) Serge Bramberg & Ruxanra Medrea 7/10
Murder, My Sweet (1944) Edward Dmytryk 6/10

[Precious Doll]

Giant (2017) Aitor Arregi & Jon Garano 5/10
The Mercy (2018) James Marsh 2/10
Ismael's Ghosts (2017) Arnaud Desplechin 1/10
The Death of Stalin (2017) Armando Iannucci 6/10
Normandy Nude (2018) Philippe LeGuay 4/10
Montparnasse Bienvenue (2017) Leonor Serraille 6/10
The Workshop (2017) Laurent Cantet 4/10
Thelma (2017) Joachim Trier 4/10
Losses to Be Expected (1992) Ulrich Seidl 7/10
La Prisonnière (1968) Henri-Georges Clouzot 6/10

Repeat viewings

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) Monte Hellman 6/10
Vanishing Point (1971) Richard C. Sarafian 4/10
I Never Sang For My Father (1970) Gilbert Cates 6/10
Georgy Girl (1966) Silvio Narizzano 6/10
None But the Lonely Heart (1944) Clifford Odets 6/10

[Precious Doll]

Rodin (2017) Jacques Doillon 2/10
Barbara (2017) Mathieu Amalric 4/10
Tomorrow and Hereafter (2017) Noemie Lvovsky 1/10
Redoubtable (2017) Michel Hazanavicius 7/10
Number One (2017) Tonie Marshall 3/10
Maryline (2017) Guillaume Gallienne 4/10
Jungle (2017) Craig Mclean 3/10
Reinventing Marvin (2017) Anne Fontaine 6/10
Safari (2016) Ulrich Seidl 6/10
Casting JonBenet (2017) Kitty Green 7/10
State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters (2002) Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger, Ulrich Seidl & Michael Sturminger 7/10
War in Vienna (1989) Michael Glawogger & Ulrich Seidl 6/10
Golden Years (2017) Andre Techine 3/10

Repeat viewings

The Ritz (1976) Richard Lester 7/10
Interlude (1957) Douglas Sirk 4/10
Electra Glide in Blue (1973) James William Guercio 6/10

[Precious Doll]

Black Panther (2018) Ryan Coogler 4/10
Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017) Dan Gilroy 7/10
Double Lover (2017) Francois Ozon 7/10
Madame Hyde (2018) Serge Bozon 4/10
Custody (2017) Xavier Legrand 8/10
Catch the Wind (2017) Gael Morel 4/10
The Guardians (2017) Xavier Beauvois 7/10

Repeat viewings

Home From the Hill (1960) Vincente Minnelli 4/10
Remember the Night (1940) Mitchell Leisen 6/10
David and Lisa (1962) Frank Perry 6/10
Johnny Belinda (1948) Jean Negulesco 9/10

[Precious Doll]

The 15:17 to Paris (2018) Clint Eastwood 2/10
The Human Surge (2016) Eduardo Williams 4/10
Finding Your Feet (2018) Richard Loncraine 6/10

Repeat viewings

Caged (1950) John Cromwell 8/10
Keep It Quiet (1999) Benoit Jacquot 7/10
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) Steven Spielberg 6/10
The Pom Pom Girls (1976) Joseph Ruben 6/10
The Awful Truth (1937) Leo McCarey 7/10
Baby Doll (1956) Elia Kazan 8/10
The Wanderers (1979) Philip Kaufman 4/10
My Life As a Dog (1985) Lasse Hallstrom 7/10
Born Innocent (1974) Donald Wrye 6/10
Cabin in the Sky (1943) Vincente Minnelli 7/10
Tempest (1982) Paul Mazursky 5/10
The Window (1949) Ted Tetzlaff 6/10

[mlrg]

The Post - 4/10
All the Money in the World - 3/10
Roman J. Israel, Esq. - 5/10
Mudbound - 6/10

[Precious Doll]

Flavia, the Heretic (1974) Gianfranco Mingozzi 4/10
Molly's Game (2017) Aaron Sorkin 4/10
Marshall (2017) Reginald Hudlin 5/10
Lady Bird (2017) Greta Gerwig 6/10
Fun Mom Dinner (2017) Alethea Jones 4/10

Repeat viewings

The Sundowners (1960) Fred Zinnemann 7/10
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) Douglas Sirk 9/10
He Ran All the Way (1951) John Berry 6/10
Sammy Going South (1963) Alexander Mackendrick 5/10
The Garden of Allah (1936) Richard Boleslawski 4/10
Stage Door (1937) Gregory La Cava 7/10
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968) Robert Ellis Miller 8/10

[Reza]

Hell's Half Acre (John H. Auer, 1954) 8/10

Interesting and very offbeat little noir set in Hawaii and filmed totally on location. A retired ex-syndicate partner (Wendell Corey) takes on a murder rap and goes to prison when his girlfriend (Nancy Gates) shoots a blackmailer - the murder sequence is quite memorable. Later when she too is murdered he goes on the lam looking for the killer in a seedy part of Honolulu known as "Hell's Half Acre", a very crowded tenement area housing gamblers and prostitutes. Meanwhile arriving from the mainland is the man's wife (Evelyn Keyes) in search of him having thought he had died a hero at Pearl Harbor. The action all convenes in the seedy section of town as more murders take place, the wife is drugged, menaced and almost raped, a couple of eccentric characters add colour - a female taxi driver (Elsa Lanchester) and a drunk floozie (Marie Windsor) - and the story ends on a very bleak but memorable note. The ending is not quite "Chinatown" but brings back strong memories of the classic Polanski film. This film needs to be re-discovered as it is one of the gems of the noir genre.

[Reza]

The Long Night (Anatole Litvak, 1947) 6/10

Hollywood liked remaking french classics and here they tried hard with this one - it took the European emigrée director, Anatole Litvak, to attempt a remake of Marcel Carné's "Le Jour Se Lève". RKO bought the rights of the original and then had the audacity to try and destroy all the prints of the original film. Luckily during the 1950s copies of the 1939 classic re-appeared and it's status was restored while this version not only flopped but virtually disappeared. It is an interesting attempt but censorship destroys the gritty quality of the original story and of course nobody in Hollywood could come upto par with the classic version's cast in particular the great Jean Gabin and Arletty. A man is shot on the stairs of a tenement building and the killer (Henry Fonda) holes up in an apartment as the police close in on him and start shooting at the room from all sides. A flashback reveals how he came to this predicament having become involved in a love triangle with an innocent young girl (Barbara Bel Geddes) who in turn is the mistress of a seedy magician (Vincent Price). Also involved is the magician's assistant (Ann Dvorak) who falls in love with the man with whom she has an affair. Although Fonda is good he cannot match Gabin's magnificent tough performance as the world weary man caught between the love of two women. Price is amusing as a bitchy snob while Bel Geddes (in her film debut) and particularly Dvorak (whose character in the original was a hardened prostitute but here watered down due to censorship) are excellent. The hard hitting original was banned a year after it's release by the Vichy government as it considered the story too demoralizing. After the war's end it was re-released to even greater acclaim. This noir remake, which has a different ending, is an interesting companion piece to the very bleak original.

[Reza]

Peking Express (William Dieterle, 1951) 7/10

You cannot really go wrong with a plot that involves a train carrying a group of passengers in danger. It also helps that this is an updated remake of Josef von Sternberg's "Shanghai Express" but this time set during the communist era. The plot was the result of that charming time in America's history where everything that reeked of communism got a number of people hot, bothered and petrified. So Hollywood got into the act to churn out an endless supply of anti-communist films which was one way that the studios and their employees assured the witchfinders that they were true blue Americans. As with the original the train carries a disparate group - a WHO doctor (Joseph Cotten) on his way to operate on a patient, his ex-lover (Corinne Calvet) now with a shady past, a young rabid communist reporter (Benson Fong), an old priest (Edmund Gwenn) and an Oriental outlaw (Marvin Miller) and his gang who stop the train and hold everyone hostage. Cotten and Calvet play well together even though the sexy and smouldering Calvet is no Dietrich from the original film. Ignore all the preaching and this is an enjoyable action packed film.

[Reza]

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015) 8/10

Quirky coming of age drama which is a John Hughes-Wes Anderson hybrid. "Me" (Thomas Mann) is a geeky high school student who is harshly self critical and prefers being "invisible". From childhood he and his buddy, Earl (RJ Cyler), enjoy making movies which are funky parodies of classic films. His life suddenly comes into the limelight when his mother forces him to befriend Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a schoolmate who has been diagnosed with leukemia. Their gradual offbeat friendship helps him come out of his shell while his gentle but bristling humour gives her the strength to cope with her illness. The trio of characters - quirky white kid, his unlikely black friend and the terminally ill cancer ridden girl - make for an unusual combo but which hit all the right buttons making this teen weepie an uplifting tale full of bittersweet moments which are often very funny and full of heart. Winning little film is lovingly directed with great wit.

[Reza]

Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017) 1/10

The screenplay unfortunately takes a breezy and tongue-in-cheek approach much to the detriment of this particular franchise - not that the previous two installments were any better. Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the extremely bland superhero with flowing golden locks, matches wits with his form-shifting step-brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston looking like a waxwork) when they are both informed by their almost catatonic sage-like father (Anthony Hopkins) that they both have a sister, the death goddess Hela (Cate Blanchett), who arrives to take over the throne of Asgard. Thor is banished to the far corners of the Universe where he is imprisoned by the Grandmaster (a flippant Jeff Goldblum) and forced to participate in his gladiatorial games - fighting the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) his former colleague and the one with the giant green penis. The relentless buffoonery pales against Blanchett's campy turn rolling her eyes, annihilating complete armies and dripping venom with every line of dialogue - she looks great though. One of the worst Marvel super hero films with absolutely no redeeming factor. Oh yes, for some unexplainable reason another Marvel hero also makes an appearance - Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) - who briefly banters with both Thor and Loki before disappearing. A complete mess.

[Reza]

The Prince Who Was a Thief (Rudolph Maté, 1953) 6/10

Colorful but fun-filled swashbuckler has Tony Curtis in his first lead performance (which made him an instant star) as a Bronx accented Moroccan Prince kidnapped at birth and raised as a thief. Typical Hollywood version of the "Arabian Nights" where everybody is dressed in colorful veils, pantaloons, turbans and decked with jewels and swearing by the Almighty "Allah" or calling each other a camel as an insult. The action packed plot has Curtis romancing a street urchin (Piper Laurie who would form a team with Curtis in a number of Universal productions) and his cousin, a Princess (Peggy Castle), while trying to regain his Princedom by using a stolen giant pearl to get to the throne by usurping his evil Uncle. Pure hokum has dazzling (but very fake) production values and a sense of joie de vivre which is exuberant and fun in an old fashioned way.