Apollo 13

Apollo 13 (1995) starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan. For fans of space travel, this is a movie not to be missed. The ill-fated Apollo 13 flight is depicted brilliantly, warts and all. The glitches started early, with astronaut Ken Mattingly (Sinise) being bumped from the flight and replaced by Jack Swigert (Bacon). Jim Lovell (Hanks), commander of the mission, reassures his wife Marilyn (Quinlan) that 13 is just the number that comes after 12. But 13 indeed proves an unlucky number, as an explosion disables the spacecraft and forces the crew of Apollo 13 to go into survival mode. As we see in this movie, they just barely survived. It's an exciting and intense film, and even though I knew the outcome, I got caught up in the drama of the moment. Very, very good. (English subtitles for the hearing-impaired are available on the DVD.) Grade: A 

Antwone Fisher

Antwone Fisher (2002) starring Derek Luke, Denzel Washington, Joy Bryant, Salli Richardson. Directed by Denzel Washington. A troubled sailor (Luke) is sent to see a Navy psychiatrist (Washington) to try to unravel his behavioral problems. From their sessions emerges a tale of incredible abuse and neglect, and a resolve to overcome his past and push through into a better future. In the process, the sailor ends up helping the psychiatrist in unanticipated ways. This is a well told, and ultimately very moving, story. Not a great movie, but certainly worth watching. Grade: B+ 

Heavenly Creatures

Heavenly Creatures (1994) starring Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent, Clive Morrison. Directed by Peter Jackson. Based on a true story, two teenage girls in New Zealand (Lynskey, Winslet) form an obsessive, exclusive friendship. They develop their own little fantasy world, and feed off each other until they reach a state of hysteria,  ending up collaborating on a murder. It's a beautifully made movie, with the girls' fantasy life vividly shown. The fact that it's a true story makes it all the more chilling. (English subtitles are supplied for the hearing-impaired, and are very legible and well done -- even the songs are subtitled.) Grade: A-   

The Great Beauty

The Great Beauty (2013) starring Toni Servillo. Jep Gambardella (Servillo) is a 65-year-old Italian who once wrote a novel but has not done much since. He writes magazine articles and goes to parties. In this movie he wanders around Rome and observes various weird things. This film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, though for the life of me I can't see why. It just doesn't turn me on. (In Italian and other languages, with English subtitles.) Grade: C 

The Color of Money

The Color of Money (1986) starring Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Helen Shaver, John Turturro. Fast Eddie Felson (Newman) takes on a protégé named Vincent (Cruise) who has huge amounts of natural talent. But Vincent refuses to play the game (nine ball) according to Felson's rules, and the two eventually come to a parting of the ways -- until they meet in a huge nine ball tournament in Atlantic City. There are many things in this script which didn't make sense to me, and the movie's main redeeming feature is Newman's performance (he won an Academy Award). Cruise was just irritating, but Mastrantonio, as his girlfriend Carmen, was extremely fetching. (The film has English subtitles for the hearing-impaired.) Grade: B-  

Rachel, Rachel

Rachel, Rachel (1968) starring Joanne Woodward, James Olson, Kate Harrington, Estelle Parsons. Directed by Paul Newman. Affecting story of how spinster teacher Rachel (Woodward) tries to break out of her confining life of living with her widowed mother (Harrington). She has a brief fling with a childhood friend home for the summer (Olson) and suspects that she might be pregnant, and this provides the impetus she needs to take a giant step. Good, adult entertainment. Nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Woodward, and Best Supporting Actress for Parsons. (Subtitles in English are available for the hearing-impaired.) Grade: B+ 

Married Life

Married Life (2008) starring Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan, Rachel McAdams. Cooper is happily married to Clarkson, but wants to leave her for McAdams. An interesting premise, perhaps, but one I don't get to explore because the disc doesn't have English subtitles for the hearing impaired!
Grade: F

The Swimmer

The Swimmer (1968) starring Burt Lancaster. A middle-aged man named Ned Merrill (Lancaster) sets out to swim through all the swimming pools in his neighborhood to get back home to his wife and two daughters. At first, the people around the pools he swims are friendly, but gradually they become more and more hostile, and we learn more and  more about Ned's sordid past. Lancaster is really pretty good as the man who we learn, as time passes, just might be crazy. (The English subtitles are almost too small to read. There are no closed captions.) Grade: B

Belle de Jour

Belle de Jour (1967) starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel. Directed by Luis Bunuel. A young wife (Deneuve) cannot (or will not) have sexual relations with her handsome husband (Sorel), but she soon takes to working as a prostitute at a brothel in the same city where they live. She frequently has fantasies and dreams about strange sexual tableaux which include her husband, but for some reason she just can't have sex with him. This is certainly an interesting movie to watch, and there are intriguing developments in the plot which keep the viewer involved. (In French, with English subtitles.) Grade: B 

The Angel Levine

The Angel Levine (1970) starring Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte. Morris Mishkin's (Mostel) wife is on her deathbed, and God sends a probationary angel (Belafonte) to help him. The angel has some unresolved issues that he has to work on, too. This movie has not aged well, and I didn't care for it too much. Belafonte's not much of an actor, and I found the soundtrack irritating. (English subtitles are available for the hearing-impaired.) Grade: C 

Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club (2013) starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto. McConaughey won an Oscar for his portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a real-life AIDS patient who in the '80s formed a "club" of people who found their own experimental treatments for the disease, which was then new and not well understood. Leto won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rayon, a transsexual who also had AIDS and who went into business with Woodroof supplying non-FDA approved drugs to AIDS patients. Garner is also good as a compassionate doctor who sees that AZT is not working on her patients and befriends Woodroof. This movie was nominated for Best Picture, but of course didn't win, losing to "Twelve Years a Slave." This film was a little too gritty for me to say that I enjoyed it, but after watching it I can say that it is a good movie, and worth seeing. (English subtitles for the hearing-impaired are available on the disc.) Grade: B+   

Philomena

Philomena (2013) starring Judi Dench, Steve Coogan. An unemployed journalist named Martin Sixsmith (Coogan) helps a retired nurse named Philomena Lee (Dench) search for the son she was forced to give up for adoption 50 years before, when she was a teenager. The search takes them to an abbey in Ireland, then on to America. The movie is a delightful examination of the contrast between their two personalities and world views, and it's all squeezed into an economical hour and a half. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Dench. The film was based on a true story, and is an exemplar of how the evil nuns in Ireland took pregnant teens and virtually imprisoned them and then sold their babies (in this case, for a thousand pounds). It's a very clean movie, with scarcely a wasted word or a wasted motion. (English subtitles for the hearing-impaired are available on the disc. Closed captions are not.) Grade: A-    

The Accused

The Accused (1988) starring Jodie Foster, Kelly McGillis. Foster won an Oscar for her performance as Sarah Tobias, a young woman who is gang-raped in a bar, only to see her rapists plead to a lesser charge. McGillis plays the prosecutor who decides to try and get justice by bringing to trial the men who cheered the rapists on. (The English subtitles are very good -- very clear and legible.) Grade: B+

Angel on My Shoulder

Angel on My Shoulder (1946) starring Paul Muni, Anne Baxter, Claude Rains. Gangster Eddie Kagle (Muni) is killed by one of his henchmen, goes straight to Hell. But Mephistopheles (Rains) has a use for him, and Kagle gets to return to Earth and take on the identity of an honest judge. The judge is loved by a good woman (Baxter) and she turns Kagle from evil to good. The problem with this disc is that it has no subtitles for the hearing-impaired, and also lacks closed captions. As a result, many passages of dialogue were unintelligible to me, and this disc earns a Grade: F   

Another Woman

Another Woman (1988) starring Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm, Mia Farrow, Blythe Danner, John Houseman, Sandy Dennis, Philip Bosco, Martha Plimpton, Gene Hackman. Written and directed by Woody Allen. It's one of Allen's "serious" films, in which a fifty-something philosophy professor (Rowlands) rents a small apartment in which to write a book, and finds that she can hear, through the heating vents, the conversation in a psychologist's office next door. She overhears a woman (Farrow) talking about the meaninglessness of life, and it starts her (Rowlands) thinking about her own life. Much of the structure of the movie seems derived from films by Ingmar Bergman, although of course Allen adds his own signature touches. I found the film a bit too introspective, and I'm not particularly enamored of Rowlands, who is in almost every scene. This is a quality film which has had much thought put into it, but I just didn't like it very much. (Subtitles in English are not provided, but closed captions are available.) Grade: B  

Diary of a Chambermaid

Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) starring Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli. Directed by Luis Bunuel. Bunuel takes a look at the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930s and a chambermaid's view of  bourgeois society in the same time frame. Moreau stars as a chic domestic worker who travels from Paris to the hinterlands to work for a decidedly eccentric family. She witnesses men talking with satisfaction about killing "wops" and "kikes." She suspects Joseph, the groundskeeper of her employer, of raping and killing a little girl who lived next door. (The omniscient camera knows that she is right.) It's a strange movie with some strange characters, but more conventional the Bunuel's usual offerings. It's in French, with English subtitles. Grade: B+   

Tristana

Tristana (1970) starring Catherine Deneuve, Franco Nero, Fernando Rey. Directed by Luis Bunuel. Tristana (Deneuve), upon her mother's death, becomes the ward of a family friend named Don Lope (Rey). Though Lope is a trusted family friend, he soon seduces the innocent Tristana, who is, after all, only a teenager. Later, though, Tristana becomes disgusted with Don Lope and begins going out on her own. She falls in love with an artist named Horacio (Nero) and eventually ends up running away with him. This has been called by some the quintessential Bunuel film, and it is filled with deformity and scary dream sequences. The more I studied it, the more I liked it. It's in Spanish, with English subtitles. Grade: B+ 

The Grandmaster

The Grandmaster (2013) starring Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi. Actually a fairly typical chop-socky movie with high production values, will be of interest only to martial arts enthusiasts and perhaps people of Chinese ancestry. I found it to be pretty much a bore. In Chinese, with English subtitles. Grade: C

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Donald Sutherland. Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) takes another giant step toward becoming the leader of a revolution. In this film, the evil President Snow (Sutherland) contrives to have past winners of the Hunger Games come together as Tributes to battle each other -- thus, he believes, snuffing out any revolutionary sentiments among the people of Panem. But his plan backfires as the past Victors unite behind the saying, "Remember who the real enemy is." This was a very entertaining, if far-fetched, movie. Hoffman makes one of his final film appearances as a Gamemaker who is secretly a revolutionary. (Subtitles in English are available for the hearing-impaired.) Grade: A-

Scenes from a Marriage

Scenes from a Marriage (1973) starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. A married couple, played by Ullmann and Josephson, seem perfectly matched, except that he goes and falls in love with someone else, named Paula. This movie explores the years in which they fall apart, contemplate filing for divorce, get divorced, and eventually end up married to other partners. But still, at the end, they meet up while their spouses are away for a liaison at an old country cottage. It's basically a relationship movie, and it's very talky. In fact, almost all the action is talk. That's not necessarily bad, but in this case that talk is in Swedish, translated into English, and I can't help but think that something was lost in the translation. It's certainly a watchable movie, even mildly entertaining, but I didn't find it to be the great Bergman movie that some have made it out to be. It is, of course, in Swedish with English subtitles. Grade: B