rate the last movie you saw

[Monterey Jack]

-X-Men: First Class (2011): 9/10



1.) The second prequel to the existing X-Men trilogy is a damn sight better than the limp Origins: Wolverine...in fact, it's one of the most sheerly pleasurable entries in the entire series. Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn (coming off the disreputably entertaining, gleefully R-rated Kick-Ass), bringing us back to the early 1960s era that birthed the characters in the original Marvel comics, has crafted a terrific superhero saga brimming with Connery-era 007 swagger, Mad Men glamor (replete with Betty Draper herself, January Jones, as diamond-hard villainess Emma Frost) and even a dash of Austin Powers cheekiness.

2.) That said, anyone paying attention to strict series continuity would be best served heeding the old MST3K title song lyric, "You should repeat to yourself / it's just a show / I should really just relax". There are moments here involving previously unhinted-at character connections and interactions that will drive you bonkers if you try to line them up with the previous trilogy. When Patrick Stewart purred the line, "When I was seventeen, I met a young man named Erik Lehnsherr" in the first [DIRECTOR'S NAME REDACTED] film...uh, yeah, James McAvoy as the young Charles Xavier is clearly not that young. And wait...Charles and Mystique (now Jennifer Lawrence) lived together as brother and (adopted) sister?! Well, she seemed awfully cavalier about sabotaging Cerebro and sending Charles into a coma in the first movie. Arrrgh….

3.) You've gotta like a movie that gets the lovely Rose Byrne running around in her unmentionables for a solid five minutes barely seconds after she's introduced as CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (but, wait...this character was already in X-Men: The Last Stand, decades later -- played by Olivia Williams -- yet the same age. That maddening continuity again...)

4.) The kaleidoscopic F/X used for Emma Frost when she shifts into her diamond-skinned mode are absolutely striking and beautiful.

5.) Michael Fassbender is marvelous as a young Erik on the cusp of full Magneto-hood. He's has the suaveness of a cutthroat, Nazi-hunting James Bond as well as perfectly channeling Erik's mixture of cold rage and empathy.

6.) Jennifer Lawrence, as Raven/Mystique, has NEVER looked more attractive in a movie, still sporting her pre-Hunger Games crash-diet baby fat and looking enticingly ripe and curvy. It's also her best performance in he role, without the blasé Contractual Obligation lethargy that would settle in two movies later. Bonus points for a sneaky cameo by her future self in one amusing scene.

7.) The best use of an F-Bomb in a PG-13 movie I can think of.

8.) The look of the film is terrific, with Vaughn, his ace DP John Matheson and the production design team filling the film with great homages to 60's cinema icons like Ken Adams' early James Bond films, Dr. Strangelove and with a great "mod" use of split screens during a training montage.

9.) Knocking off a point just for the "black guy dies first" trope. Really...?

10.) Slick, exciting, witty and assured, First Class is one of the most aptly-titled films in the series, righting the franchise after a pair of wildly mediocre efforts and setting the stage for future installments with a renewed creative vigor. Yeah, baby, yeah...!

[Paul MacLean]

I really got a kick out of First Class. The previous X-Men movie were very entertaining, but a little too preachy with the "metaphor" angle. Vaughan just tells an adventure story, and tells it exceedingly well. Agreed on J-Law's performance. McAvoy and Fassbender are also excellent. The continuity errors didn't really bother me tho. (I couldn't be a fan of Bond movies if that kind of thing did!)

[Monterey Jack]

The continuity errors didn't really bother me tho. (I couldn't be a fan of Bond movies if that kind of thing did!)

Oh, it's definitely not a deal-breaker in this case (I'm sure Fox viewed it as a "soft reboot" at the time), but for obsessive-compulsive types, I'm sure they were driven up the wall by certain plot diversions. Then again, I can't think of a prequel that doesn't have at least a smattering of continuity errors with "later" films.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Wolverine (2013): 8/10



1.) Wolvie's second solo feature finds him as a masterless Ronin (following a vague, undefined estrangement from his fellow X-Men) living like a...well, animal on the outskirts of a remote Canadian town when he's approached by Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a fellow mutant with limited pre-cognitive abilities -- as well as peerless mastery of the Katana blade -- who convinces the shaggy, homeless Logan to accompany her back to Japan, where her elderly, dying adoptive benefactor Ichiro (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), whom Logan met in an a WWII internment camp right before the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, presents him with the tempting offer to take away his healing abilities...and seemingly endless lifespan.

2.) Fukushima's Yukio rocks. With her cherry-colored Bettie Page bangs, teasing smirk and ragamuffin fashion style she cuts a striking figure, and her fighting skills are impressive. I just wish we got a whole string of sequels with her and Logan travelling the world and going on adventures.

3.) Oh, and Logan -- when he's not being tormented by haunting visions of lost love Jean Grey (a ghostly Famke Janssen, perpetually clad in a wisp of a slip) -- finds himself strongly attracted to Ichiro's comely granddaughter Mariko (the willowy Tao Okamoto). This humanizes Hugh Jackman's surly brooding and gives the film enough of an emotional skeleton to make it more than just an action-fest, although Jackman and Okamoto don't have all that much chemistry (especially compared to him and the devilishly charismatic Fukushima).

4.) Director James Mangold is, to me, the perfect modern-day equivalent of on old-school Hollywood craftsman like Robert Wise or Richard Fleischer...he's the kind of guy who always delivers a polished, sturdy film no matter the subject matter or genre, with a minimum of auteurist pretentiousness. Considering how stripped-down and modest in scale this film is compared to previous X-Men movies, that's just the right tone to take.

5.) I can't BELIEVE the film's best action sequence -- Logan and Yukio taking on an army of ninja assassins during a feverish climactic mission to rescue the kidnapped Mariko, replete with grinding up their opponents with a snowplow(!) and Logan getting pierced by enough arrows to stock a half-dozen Kurosawa samurai flicks -- was almost entirely cut from the film's theatrical cut. Check out the extended version only available as part of the 3D Blu-Ray set to get a scene that's ridiculously iconic and entertaining, Marvels Comics meets Kill Bill. I know that the only reason they'd leave this out was to preserve a PG-13 rating, but come ON.

6.) Really pay attention to Yukio's prediction of a specific future event in Logan's life, and compare it to his third solo feature. it's surprisingly spot-on.

7.) Logan vs. Mariko's father (Hiroyuki Sanada) is a great deal of brutal fun. Adamantium claws vs. samurai swords? COOL.

8.) Also impressively staged is Logan's fight on top of a Japanese bullet train (rocketing along at 300 MPH!) with a pair of Yakuza thugs armed with knives.

9.) The presence of Dr. Green aka "Viper" (Svetlana Khodchenkova) seems shoehorned in because the studio was nervous about not having enough mutant-on-mutant action.

10.) A HUGE improvement on the first solo Wolverine movie, and yet not as emotionally-gripping as the forthcoming third entry, The Wolverine is nevertheless a strong, exciting, well-acted entry, but then again I have a fetish for Japanese culture and iconography in cinema (despite the fact that this was shot almost entirely on the Fox lot in Jackman's native Australia!).

[Paul MacLean]

The Ten Commandments (9/10)

There's not much else to say about one of the best and most-seen religious epics of all time. Watching it for the first time in HD however, some things leapt-out at me.

The early matte shots -- while innovative for their time -- don't hold up too well by today's standards. A nitpick perhaps, but it's very noticeable on Blu-ray.

On the other hand, there is an impressive attention to detail in this movie. For example, in the scene where the infant Moses is discovered by Bithiah, there is a visible current in the water. Most directors (especially back then) would have been content to let the water sit stagnant in the tank, but it is DeMille's obsession with these small details that sets this movie apart from others. Conversely, DeMille never allows the colossal scale of The Ten Commandments to swallow-up story or characters in his quest to be "epic".

The caliber of performers -- and performances -- in this movie, is phenomenal. Apart from Heston and Brynner, you have Shakespearean greats like Sir Cedric Hardwick and Judith Anderson, while Vincent Price is deliciously slimy as Bakka (some people laugh at Price's casting today, associating him with The Fly and other low-rent horror flicks, but this was made before he was typecast in that kind of dross).

I never realized Woody Strode played the king of Ethiopia, and unless I am mistaken that is also him playing one of Bithiah's slaves later in the film.

Although a very pious film which treats its subject with the utmost veneration, The Ten Commandments is incredibly entertaining too. It has action, romance, humor, thrills, grand spectacle -- without sacrificing the imperative reverence which the subject demands. Many other biblical epics of the time were serious, ponderous and dour, likely for fear of looking "impious". But DeMille knew how to strike the right balance, and deliver a movie that was appropriately respectful of a prophet -- and the Almighty Himself -- but exciting (and at times even fun). Heston's performance is of a character who is not just a venerable instrument of God -- but dashing and brave as well. Moses is a hero, who rescues a slave woman from being crushed to death, valiantly defends shepherdesses from thugs, etc.

Subsequent takes on the Book of Exodus -- the Burt Lancaster Moses in the 1970s, the 2006 miniseries with Dougray Scott, Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings, etc. -- had their appeal, but to my mind sacrificed the due sense of reverence in order to entertain. IMO none have managed to outclass, or equal, DeMille's 1956 effort.

[Eric Paddon]

Yes, that is Strode again as one of Bithiah's attendants. I remember the commentary for the film explaining this but can't recall the specific explanation for how that happened.

The film does indeed strike the right balance without losing it the more important dimension of the reverence being more important ultimately. A lesser film would likely end up making the audience think Moses should never have become God's prophet and instead gone back to his life in Egypt!

[Eric Paddon]

Anatomy Of A Murder (1959) 6.5 of 10

-Another case of a movie I hadn't seen in over a quarter century that I'd seen several times in the 80s in the early days of home video. In the intervening years since I last saw this I have seen countless episodes of "Law And Order" and gotten a larger appreciation of how the movie was "groundbreaking" in a lot of ways that I really didn't fully appreciate as a younger viewer. When I first saw this movie as a teen and young adult the frank subject discussion by 50s standards didn't faze me, but where I was naive was how I was so instinctively "rooting" for Jimmy Stewart just because he was......Jimmy Stewart. It's only with mature adult eyes a quarter century later that my new viewing of this film makes me realize that Stewart is not playing one of his old-fashioned "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" type heroes (and that was my frame of reference for Stewart as a young devotee of vintage movies) he's playing a much more nuanced figure who resorts to what are meant to be shady lawyer tricks at times for the sake of trying to win his case (and in a modern context a LOT of what Stewart does in the courtroom really comes off as sleazy.) In addition, there was a greater taking for granted in my earlier viewings about the justification of Ben Gazzara's actions that on a nuanced adult viewing I realize doesn't stand out 100% and that was Preminger's intent. So as a result, this new viewing was fascinating and also at the same time made it easier for me to understand how disturbing on a subjective level the film really was back in the day.

-The Duke Ellington jazz score I have to say really doesn't work. If this were a movie set in New York or some other big city that would be one thing but out here in rural Michigan it clashes completely. From a plot hole standpoint, I found it odd that there was nothing about why the Army didn't provide a lawyer for Gazzara and why Stewart never talks to a superior officer of his for further insights.

[Monterey Jack]

-X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014): 9/10



1.) [DIRECTOR'S NAME REDACTED] returns to the franchise he initiated almost fifteen years earlier with this elaborate entry that fuses the future and past into a whole that enriches both periods. In the obligatory Orwellian near-future dystopia, where Mutantkind has been hunted to the point of near-extinction and humanity itself has been reduced to their basest, ugliest instincts, the remaining X-Men rally their final attempt to alter the timeline and prevent their awful present from ever occurring, by transporting the current consciousness of Logan (Hugh Jackman as always) into the his own body circa 1973 (shades of the great Lost episode "The Constant").

2.) Once back in the era of bell-bottoms, disco balls and wakka-chi-wakka music, Logan must convince Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) of the looming mutant holocaust, despite Charles' current malaise over losing most of his best and brightest students to the then-concluding Vietnam War, drowning his sorrows with copious amounts of alcohol and a serum that restores his ability to walk...as it suppresses his telepathic gifts. McAvoy delivers his finest performance in the role, essaying his character's damaged sense of empathy with palpable anguish as well as his growing sense of renewed hope with Logan's terse assistance.

3.) Also back is Nicolas Hoult's Hank McCoy, using the same serum that suppresses Charles' telepathy to keep his inner Beast at bay, resulting in a more volatile Hulk-like Jekyll/Hyde personality as he switches between forms to suit the needs of the plot.

4.) Waitaminute...now Kitty Pryde can send people's consciousness back in TIME?! When was this established in any of the previous movies? I know that this film adapts a popular comics run from the early 80s, and that it's an at-best loose interpretation of the source material, but as enjoyable is it is to see Ellen Page back, there wasn't any other mutant they could have given this ability to?

5.) Speaking of which, the "Rogue Cut" of the movie (available on its own separate Blu-Ray release) gives a significant supporting role to Anna Paquin's Rogue (reduced to a fleeting cameo in the theatrical cut) where she borrows Kitty's mind powers in order to keep Logan's consciousness back in '73 after he injures Kitty badly with his claws. Again, nice to see Paquin back in the role that eased audiences into this cinematic universe back in the day, but this cut of the movie is just too long and protracted, despite some additional nice character beats.

6.) Some of those excised beats belong to Hank and Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), whose shape-shifting mutation holds the key to the future apocalypse. Shame they were dropped, as they build upon the flirtation the two characters shared in First Class. So, if you have an additional 20 or so minutes to kill, The Rogue Cut is certainly a worthwhile and interesting alternate version of the film.

7.) Peter Dinklage is great as Bolivar Trask, the billionaire industrialist whose fascination with weaponizing the abilities of mutants -- particularly Mystique's -- is the linchpin holding together past and future.

8.) Debuting here is Quicksiver (Evan Peters), the quippy speedster whose lickety-split abilities are utilized to break the incarcerated Magento (Michael Fassbender) out of a concrete prison cell located undeath the Pentagon. This results in one of the film's special-effects highlights, a gorgeously-designed slo-mo sequence where he whips around a room at Speedy Gonzalez velocity to deflect the bullets of a group of security guards set to Jim Croce's beautiful "Time In A Bottle" on the soundtrack. It's a witty, delightful moment where you can sense the filmmakers' glee in designing and executing it.

9.) Considering how many superhero sagas conclude with an endless, numbing assault of F/X overkill, I kind of love how Days Of Future Past hinges on a specific character choosing not to take a life. It's a moving, beautifully acted moment.

10.) Still riding high, this second installment of the prequel "decades trilogy" (soon to be a quadrilogy with the forthcoming Dark Phoenix) is a fantastic film that pays apt tribute to the original three films and their cast while setting the stage for future installments with a wiped-clean slate that might drive time-travel theorists absolutely crazy, but is nevertheless one of the most snazzy, emotionally-resonant films in the series.

[Monterey Jack]

-X-Men: Apocalypse (2016): 7/10



1.) Third entry in the prequel "decades trilogy" (and the first set in the post-"reset" timeline established in Days Of Future Past) jumps the action to my childhood stomping grounds of 1983, where a mutant from ancient Egyptian times named En Sabah Nur, aka "Apocalypse" (Oscar Isaac), awakens after millennia of slumber, finding himself disgusted with a modern-day worship of "false Gods" and collecting a quartet of mutant "Horsemen" to his cause of wiping the planet clean of the weak so that the strong may flourish under his "benevolent" guidance.

2.) Okay, I'm gonna launch a spirited defense of this overly-maligned series entry using the old Howard Hawks yardstick of "Three good scenes, no bad scenes" by starting off with one of the best sequences in the entire franchise, where returning speedster mutant Quicksilver (Evan Peters) does a slo-mo evacuation of the exploding X-Mansion set to the synth-pop beat of Annie Lennox's early-80s classic "Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This". It's a callback to his similar "Time In A Bottle" scene from Days Of Future Past, but returning director [DIRECTOR'S NAME REDACTED] and his tech team have topped themselves here, with a gleefully exciting montage full of witty visual gags.

3.) That said, I must be fair and address the film's inherent flaws, as well, starting with Isaac's terribly uninteresting performance as Apocalypse. Isaac is a terrific, charismatic actor, but buried under his ugly, inexpressive makeup (which makes him look like an alien species from a particularly lame Star Trek sequel) and with his voice electronically processed into a monotonous drone, his proclamations of doom come across in the most generic manner possible, not helped by being the five-thousandth comic book villain obsessed with "saving" the world by devastating a large portion of it (it all started with Batman baddie Ra's Al Ghul in the 1970s, I believe). They could have stuck any random stuntman into Apocalypse's costume and the result would have been the same.

4.) Good scene #2: Apocalypse's admittedly ominous disarmament of the globe's cache of nuclear weapons with the aid of Charles Xavier's Cerebro, scored chillingly to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. It's a beautifully-constructed moment of awestruck helplessness.

5.) Here we're re-introduced to teenage versions of Scott "Cyclops" Summers (Ready Player One's Tye Sheridan), Jean Grey (Game Of Thrones' Sophie Turner) and Kurt "Nightcrawler" Wagner (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who all take on their established roles adroitly enough.

6.) Good scene #3: The extended, fanservice cameo by our favorite, stogie-chewing mutant, which looks forward to the R-rated brutality of his next solo adventure.

7.) This franchise may have the worst movie-to-movie continuity of any series I've seen since the 80s run of Friday The 13th. Even taking the time-travel reset established in the previous movie into account, it's impossible to ignore the ages of certain characters not lining up, not to mention the fact that returning actors look barely any older than they did in First Class, despite this film taking place 21 years later. As nice as it is to see Rose Byrne back as CIA agent Moira MacTaggert, couldn't they have at least added a few streaks of gray to her hair? She should be in her mid-50s by this point.

8.) Oh, gee, a climax with a character surrounded by a orbiting ring of CGI debris. Haven't seen THAT before in a superhero movie.

9.) A moving scene with Michael Fassbender's Magneto mourning his lost wife and daughter is marred by the obligatory howl to the heavens, the kind of hackneyed visual shorthand I would think that [DIRECTOR'S NAME REDACTED] would have been too intelligent and thoughtful to bash us over the head with by this point, especially compared to how subtly he handed character interactions in the first two movies.

10.) Apocalypse was greeted as the same "Ya BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO atttttttttttttttt!" trilogy-capping disappointment that The Last Stand was for the original films when released (with a lampshading moment featuring Scott, Jean and Kurt emerging from a summer-of-'83 multiple showing Return Of The Jedi and remarking that, "The third is always the worst"), and yet, for all its flaws, it's still a slick, exciting, and enjoyable entry in the franchise, much like Sam Raimi's unfairly-maligned Spider-Man 3.

[Monterey Jack]

-Logan (2017): 9/10



1.) The end of the line for Hugh Jackman's popular portrayal of Wolverine, this finds Logan a broken-down wreck of a man and working as a limo driver in the not-too-distant future of 2029, a world where no new mutant has been born in over 25 years (shades of Children Of Men) and those who remain live in isolated fear of being rounded up by cruel scientists like Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant!) and his posse of cutthroat henchmen (led by Boyd Holbrook with a mechanical T-800 arm) for nefarious purposes.

2.) Logan's self-exile is due in large part to having to care for a now very-elderly Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), now slipping into senile dementia and prone to uncontrollable seizures that paralyze everyone within a close radius. As the film's plot vaguely defines, this may have resulted in a catastrophic event that led to the death of several of Charles' X-Men a little over a year earlier. Stewart delivers one of his best performances in the role, leaping between his trademark erudite elegance, a touchingly wounded confusion, and a lacerating, self-loathing anger at his vast mental powers being allowed to harm others.

3.) There's also a new complication to Logan's life...a young girl named Laura (the amazing Dafne Keen) who is, technically, his "daughter" (thanks to Dr. Rice's cruel experimentation utilizing his leftover DNA), and is every bit as dangerous an animal as he. Keen has the angelic, androgynous features of a Witness-era Lukas Haas, and yet that expressive, placid face splits open into a shockingly feral snarl as she slices open an array of disposable henchmen with the brutal abandon of Chloe Grace Moretz's Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass. It's a fantastic performance.

4.) Returning director James Mangold (who previously guided Jackman through his previous solo Logan adventure, The Wolverine) has an affinity for the iconography of classic Hollywood westerns, from his excellent remake of 3:10 To Yuma to his modern-day 1997 riff on the formula, Cop Land, and Logan, with it's dusty, lonesome, wide-open spaces and loner hero drawn into a conflict he never asked for and yet compelled to do what's right and protect the innocent, is a great example of how the old formulas never go out of style.

5.) Yes, it's finally an R-rated Wolverine movie where Logan is allowed to use his Adamantium claws without the restrictions of a PG-13 rating, and it's awesome to see Jackman given the freedom to slice n' dice to his heart's content.

6.) All of the expensive F/X frippery of the previous X-Men movies has been stripped away in this modestly-scaled production, but that's all to the good, letting character and theme take the fore. Director Mangold, along with co-screenwriters Scott Frank and Michael Green, even earned a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for their efforts (based loosely on the "Old Man Logan" storyline from the comics, which a surly Jackman refers to cheekily as "ice-cream for bedwetters" in the film).

7.) As technically-impressive and exciting as it is to see Jackman fighting himself (as a younger, more able-bodied Logan clone), it's a worn comic book cliché to have the hero fight a villain who has all of the same powers or technology. Hardly a deal-breaker, considering how good the rest of the film is, but a slight disappointment.

8.) Yet another Fox production where the climax is set in a visually-boring Canadian forest.

9.) The black-and-white "Logan Noir" version of the film included on the Blu-Ray is an interesting novelty (and bonus points for opening with the 1950s Fox CinemaScope logo), but the severity of the film's violence is tamped down by making all of the blood squibs look like spurts of chocolate syrup. Frank Darabont got a lot more mileage out of the idea of re-tinting a color movie into B&W with his Stephen King adaptation The Mist.

10.) From its bracing violence to its sense of mournful inevitability, Logan is the ideal swan song for an actor who has stamped an indelible trademark on a pop-culture icon that will be hard to match (I pity the poor actor who has to snap on Logan's claws once Disney inevitably started seeding the X-Men characters into the MCU), and the film's powerfully moving conclusion makes this the ultimate Guy Movie weepie. Godspeed, you magnificent animal.

[AndyDursin]

Superb analysis on these films MJ. I'm getting the 4K cranking next week on the original trilogy.

[Monterey Jack]

Thanks, Andy. It's always interesting to do a soup-to-nuts rundown on an entire franchise when the latest sequel is about to drop (especially considering that Dark Phoenix will almost certainly be the end of the line for the "Fox run" of the X-Men series, before Disney starts sticking the characters into future MCU movies so Iron Man's hologram can invent a funny nickname for Wolverine 2.0. ).

[Paul MacLean]

I really enjoyed Days of Future Past, and the way it blended the timelines. I also loved the finale, which could have come across as a cop-out and "too tidy", but worked.

Logan was a very good actioner, but a bit too dark for me (with Logan's days clearly numbered, Professor X's death and the grisly slaughter of that family), but I liked the way it developed Woverine's relationship with the girl, and the ending -- where she alters the cross to make it an "X" -- was very touching.

[Eric Paddon]

At Mother's Request (1987) 3 of 10

=Last week I watched the six hour 1987 miniseries "Nutcracker" with Lee Remick as NY socialite Frances Schreuder, who manipulated her son into killing her father to get at his money. Today on YT I found the competing miniseries that came out at the same time "At Mother's Request" which starred Stefanie Powers in the role (at the time I remember the TV critics noting the irony that Remick and Powers had played sisters in "Experiment In Terror") and gave that a look. While I have always liked Powers in "Hart To Hart" and even saw her in a great production of "The King And I" once, this project proves that she wasn't in Remick's class as an actress at all. Remick gave a spellbinding performance that held my attention for a three part miniseries. By contrast, Powers is incredibly one-note, showing only the deranged side of Schreuder that makes her repeated rantings so tiresome that it made this production drag by comparison, even though it was two hours shorter! It also didn't help that because it was shorter, the narrative was more compressed and it also was poorly written with an ill-advised attempt to frame the two parts in an unconvincing "whodunit?" fashion regarding which of Schreuder's two sons pulled the trigger.


To complete the symmetry, earlier in the week viewed:

Experiment In Terror (1962) 8 of 10

=The early to mid 1960s I think gave us some truly great films in the horror/terror genre in that by this point, they were more daring yet were still being made under the overall Production Code format which still necessitated some restraint. "Psycho", "Wait Until Dark" and this movie I think are three great examples of how the envelope could be pushed to create a terrifying mood yet if these films had been made after 1967 they would have been dragged down by lack of restraints in language and gore. The opening scene where Ross Martin terrorizes Remick is outstanding and genuinely scary as is a later scene where Martin kills a woman in her studio apartment filled with mannequins. Plotwise I think the film suffers a little bit later in that we never get some necessary context for why Martin's Chinese girlfriend is so protective of him. We hear her talk about how nice he is to her son, but it would have I think helped to *see* Martin in this mode because that would have allowed the menace he shows to great effect to be even more terrifying if we'd had one scene of him acting normal and charming. The climax at Candlestick Park (when it was brand new and had not yet acquired fully its negative reputation) is beautifully staged and photographed though it does reveal that Martin didn't exactly think out his planned getaway well. Glenn Ford and Remick are great, and Powers as her teenaged sister is quite convincing as a 19 year old playing 16. Clifton James (J.W. Pepper) is amazingly convincing in a serious role as a cop! (though he sports a bad toupee)

=I'm somewhat disappointed Twilight Time made its Blu Ray a barebones presentation with just an isolated score. But at least I was spared a Julie Kirgo commentary since her liner notes are her usual pretentious pablum where she totally overreads the significance of Remick having no boyfriend in the film or that no romance ever develops for her. It doesn't seem to occur to her that since Remick is forced to be guardian for a minor age sister, that's likely going to put *any* would-be love-life of hers on hold until her sister is out of the house and it has nothing to do with making some pre-feminist statement.

[Paul MacLean]

We're No Angels (8/10)

Another picture I never got around to seeing until now. David Mamet's and Art Linson's followup to The Untouchables is a very different type of project, but allied with Neil Jordan's superb direction, We're No Angels proves an outstanding comedy / thriller, rife with suspense, laughs and first-rate performances from stars Robert DeNiro, Sean Penn and Demi Moore. The supporting cast (which includes Wallace Shawn, Hoyt Axton and Ray McNally) is equally impressive. Mamet's script is not a laugh-out-loud knee-slapper, and I do think the film gets off to a slow start, but one it's rolling We're No Angels is very entertaing (DeNiro in particular furnishes many of the laughs), and is high on suspense, with a riveting climax and touching finale (and moving affirmation of faith).

Wolf Kroger's sets are fantastic, as is Philippe Rouselot's photography. George Fenton's score is one of his very best -- likably tuneful, with wonderful subtlety in the intimate moments, and bold and dramatic at the climax. What a shame that Fenton seems to have been totally forgotten in Hollywood.

I was surprised to learn this film was a bomb; I thought it was outstanding.