Shikoku (1999)

Shikoku is an island where our heroine spent her childhood and left behind her two best friends.  Coming back some fifteen years later, she discovers that the girl friend is dead and that the boy friend is mourning her.  More to the point the dead girl's mother has gone 'round the twist and is on her 16th pilgrimage to the island's 88 temples, visiting them in the reverse order to that prescribed, which is meant to result in her daughter returning from the dead.  Like so many modern Japanese horror films this one is big on spooky atmosphere but short on real jolts and it doesn't help the western viewer that the dead daughter looks just like the ghost that crawled out of the television set in "Ringu".     

The Years Between (1946)

If the actors' lips were any stiffer in this British oldie they would run the risk of disappearing up their own fundaments.  Michael Redgrave and Valerie Hobson are happily married until he goes off to war and she is told that he is dead.  So she takes over his seat as an MP and is about to marry a good old brick when Michael turns up very much alive.  Things have changed in the four or five years and they both suffer from doubts, but in the end everyone does the right thing.  Occasionally one is glad that "they don't make them like that anymore".

Snow Walker (2003)

I don't know quite what I was expecting of this movie, but certainly not the absorbing and moving experience that it was.  Directed by Charles Martin Smith whom I have always liked as an actor, it tells of a bush pilot, Barry Pepper, who is cajoled (or actually bribed) to take an ill Inuit lass as a passenger.  The plane crashes in the arctic tundra and it soon becomes apparent that he is incapable of surviving on his own.  Having left her behind as he went off to "get help", he is effectively rescued by her and it is her native skills that ultimately provide him with the chance to live.  I must confess that Barry Pepper has never struck me as an actor who could carry a film on his own, but he does a reasonable job; the girl, an actual native in her first role, gives him the support he needs (on all levels), despite the fact that they have little language in common.  The photography is quite spectacular as one would hope.

Frenchie (1950)

I wasn't expecting this movie to be any good, but not having seen it previously, I thought I would give it the benefit of the doubt.  Well, I was right.  It's a not very successful riff on "Destry Rides Again" with a young but still chubby and rather blowsy Shelley Winters in the Marlene Dietrich role, but without her charm or songs.  She has come to avenge her father's death some years early and takes over the local saloon.  The pacifist sheriff (not called Destry) is played by Joel McCrea; he's no Jimmy Stewart granted, but I do think he is a remarkably under-rated actor and he has a certain appeal in this role.  Elsa Lanchester, one of filmdom's great eccentrics, has a pretty nothing part as Winters' sidekick.

Waxwork (1988)

The first feature by horror specialist Anthony Hickox (interestingly the grandson of J. Arthur Rank), this utilises a number of actors who were on the way down in their careers, presumably because they were cheap.  It's effectively a teen-slasher movie,  but it is done with a tongue firmly in cheek and an obvious affection for the genre. David Warner opens a waxwork in the middle of a residential street -- yes, a little weird for starters.  He invites young people to visit and after they get sucked into various tableaux, they subsequently become part of the display.  All of the old faithfuls are there, present and correct, from the Wolf Man, Dracula and the Mummy right through to modern monsters like the baby from "It's Alive" and the creatures from "Night of the Living Dead".  It is a gore-fest throughout with some effects that produce chuckles rather than shudders.  There's an all-out battle at the end by the army of baddies and a bunch of rickety evil-slayers led by Patrick Macnee in a fortified wheelchair.  In other words, it's a hoot.

Crossroads (1942)

I knew I had seen this before but just couldn't recall it, but decided that with a super cast which includes William Powell, Hedy Lamarr, Claire Trevor, Basil Rathbone and Felix Bressart that it had to be worth another look. I suppose it was, although I will probably have forgotten it by the next time it comes around.  Set in France in the mid-thirties (for no particular reason) it casts Powell as a successful diplomat newly married to Lamarr; he can't recall anything prior to an accident 13 years previously.  On to the scene come Rathbone and Trevor in the attempt to convince him that he had a previous persona as a thief and murderer.  Did he or didn't he, that's the question.

Arabesque (1966)

Totally forgettable fluff directed by Stanley Donen who has far better films to his credit.  Gregory Peck, slightly more playful than usual, plays an arabic scholar based in England who is abducted to decipher a phony Hittite message which actually reads "Goosey Goosey Gander..."; his foil and love interest is the very glamourous Sophia Loren.  Together they stop an assassination.  All very exciting while it lasts but with little to linger in the memory apart from some very dated dialogue and the classic exchange: "Follow that car"; Cabby: "I've waited all my life for someone to say that".  Now where have we heard that before?

Chasing Papi (2003)

Nowadays one is used to being presented with movies intended for black audiences, but latina-focused films are less in evidence.  However this is one of them -- a rather stupid story about an advertising executive with girlfriends in three different cities and an inability to commit to any one of them.  When they all descend on his Los Angeles home and discover the others we are meant to be presented with an amusing concept.  Unfortunately the film is a totally laugh-free zone until the very last shot which is of two dogs (the four-legged variety).  The women by the way are empowered by their experiences and all dump him.  However there is a tasty latina FBI agent on hand to fill the gap.

The Honeymoon Killers (1969)

It's been a while since I last saw this cult item and it was just as sleazy and fascinating as I recall.  Shirley Stoler in her first film role at age 40 plays an obese nurse who joins forces with a latin lothario with a line in wooing rich old ladies.  She poses as his sister but gets so jealous that most of them end up dead -- as do our two leads who went to the electric chair in 1959.  The basic facts are meant to be true but they are embellished for our benefit.  This was the first and only film written and directed by one Leonard Kastle, but he has earned himself a place in the history of exploitation film.  Rumour has it that Martin Scorsese was involved at an early stage which doubtlessly doesn't figure on his curriculum vitae.

A la Place du Coeur (1998)

This is a very strange movie based on a short story by the American black writer James Baldwin transposed to Marseilles.  It concerns 16-year old Clim and her black boyfriend Bebe.  They have been friends since childhood and eventually become lovers.  She becomes pregnant just as he is framed for rape by a racist local cop and sent to jail.  However the story goes beyond these two to their respective families.  He and his sister were adopted by a white couple; the father is supportive but the mother has become a religious fanatic dragging the sister along with her.  She has a loving family who will do anything to see their grandchild born and their prospective son-in-law freed.  The two fathers engage in minor crime to find the funds for their procrastinating lawyer, while the mother goes off to Sarajevo (as one would!) to find the rape victim and to get her to change her story.  It all ends well but it treads a very peculiar path along the way.

The Station Agent (2003)

A film festival fave and winner of the audience prize at Sundance, this quiet little film depicts the coming together in their loneliness of a dwarf (Peter Dinklage), a woman grieving the death of her son (Patricia Clarkson), and a Cuban refreshment stand operator (Bobby Cannavale).  Dinklage has inherited a redundant rail station and the others gradually find communion in his train-spotting hobby.  There is the odd bit of drama and a great deal of sweet humour, but not much more.  One just enjoys one's time in their company.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

One of the best westerns not directed by John Ford (who before Clint Eastwood revitalized the genre was God).  The director here is Wlliam A. Wellman and the film is a masterpiece.  It tells how a blood-thirsty mob looking to avenge a killing (which as it turns out didn't occur) form a lynch-mob and hang three innocent men (Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, and Francis Ford -- John's brother).  Only seven of their number including Henry Fonda and his side-kick Harry Morgan (Col. Potter from MASH), newly arrived in the town, and the lovely character actor Harry Davenport try to air the voice of reason.  All to no avail, as the vultures have their way.  The film ends with Fonda reading out Andrews' farewell letter to his wife and family, as the culprits look shame-facedly away.  Very moving and no doubt faithful to many such outrages.