Two mini-series, ten movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Archive.org, Criterion Channel, Max, Netflix, Sundance, TCM, YouTube.]

Apple Cider Vinegar (created by Samantha Strauss, 2025). A six-episode mini-series offering a fictionalized version of the real-life rise and fall of Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever), an Australian “wellness” influencer who claimed that she was able to beat brain cancer with proper nutrition. Gibson presents as a deeply disordered personality: lying with impunity, deflecting tough questions with ease, breaking down in crocodile tears when she’s pressed about the truth of her story. The series shows a world in which worthless and dangerous alternatives to medical treatment — coffee enemas, juice cleanses, black salve — draw credulous, desperate customers who, sometimes, end up paying with their lives. Totally compelling television. ★★★★ (N)

*

El minuto heroico (dir. Carmen Vilao, 2024–2025). In the Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei, the heroic minute is the moment of waking up, immediately turning off the alarm clock, getting out of bed, and kneeling to kiss the floor and say “Serviam.” In this four-part documentary mini-series, it’s also the moment when assistant numeraries, female members who perform household chores and live celibate lives in Opus Dei centers, find the will to walk away, with little or no money and little or no preparation for the larger world. The thirteen ex-members interviewed in this documentary tell stories that are much alike, and the effect is not boringly repetitious but deeply eerie, a clear indication of the rigidity with which this organization shapes women’s lives and exploits their labor. Mostly in Spanish, with excellent subtitles. ★★★★ (M)

*

The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943). When I read an essay by John Ashbery naming the “muddled yet marvelous” The Seventh Victim as his favorite Val Lewton film, I had to watch it again. (This 2019 post has my previous four-sentence four-star review.) So many striking moments: the stained-glass window with lines from Donne (“I run to death and death meets me as fast, /And all my pleasures are like yesterday”), the silent sister (Jean Brooks) at the door, the corpse on the subway, the face behind the shower curtain, the poet’s casual “Hi, Mimi,” the hints (or more than hints) of two lesbian relationships, and the conspicuously one-armed Satanist, whose missing limb is never explained. Worth seeking out, wherever it can be found. ★★★★ (A)

*

All the President’s Men (dir. Alan J. Pakula, 1976). I know that I did not see it upon its release, because I would instantly have considered turning knight-errant journalism major. Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) are an unlikely dynamic duo, a chain-smoking old hand and a shiny novice, banging away at manual typewriters and racing through the newsroom to crack the ever-widening story of the Watergate burglary. A great picture of investigative reporting: its drudgery (endless checking of library withdrawals), its risks (meeting an informant at night in an empty parking garage), and its tricks (getting people to reveal what they know). And a sad reminder of what The Washington Post once was. ★★★★ (S)

*

The Big Operator (dir. Charles F. Haas, 1959). “Look, you don’t set anybody on fire unless I tell you, you understand?” Mickey Rooney plays the big operator: Little Joe Braun, the feral boss of the Precision Toolers union, a boss with henchmen who silence dissent with sadistic glee. Union men Bill Gibson (Steve Cochran) and Fred McAfee (Mel Tormé) — who seem more like a married couple than co-workers — are honorable fellows looking for a square deal, which means that they’re looking for trouble. This movie loses two stars for a long, improbable search for a hideout and a preposterous fight scene, but its gets a star back for its odd, surprising cast, which includes Jim Backus, Charles Chaplin Jr., Jackie Coogan, Jay North, Vampira, and Mamie Van Doren. ★★ (YT)

*

The Power of the Whistler (dir. Lew Landers, 1945). One of eight movies in a series inspired by the long-running radio show The Whistler. A bored woman (Janis Carter) in a restaurant draws cards to predict the fate of the stranger sitting at the bar (Richard Dix), who turns out to be suffering from amnesia. Rather than call a hospital, she takes it upon herself — no worries! — to help him figure out his identity from the random items in his pockets (which don’t hold anything as helpful as a driver’s license, say, or a library card). As for that habit he has of killing small animals, it’s hardly noticeable — no worries! ★★ (YT)

*

The Thirteenth Hour (dir. William Clemens, 1947). It’s from our household’s favorite year in movies, but it’s just a B-movie, the next-to-last movie in The Whistler series and the last movie of Richard Dix, who suffered a heart attack while filming and indeed looks a wreck. He plays Steve, a truck driver who picks up a hitchhiker and ends up (it’s complicated) accused of murdering a cop (Regis Toomey). Some remarkable gaffes, including a wrecked motorcycle that shifts location on its own; some good scenes in a diner, with Karen Morley as diner proprietor and Steve’s fiancée; and some menacing voiceover commentary from the never-seen Whistler. I will confess that I am susceptible enough to find the Whistler’s radio and film sign-on more that slightly chilling: “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night.” ★★ (YT)

*

Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of “Blackmail” (dir. Laurent Bouzereau, 2024). A grand tour of Hitchcock’s work, as seen in relation to his 1929 movie Blackmail (made in both silent and sound versions). The grand tour takes just seventy-two minutes, but its density — clip after clip after after — makes it feel much longer (which is not a bad thing). The elements of style explored here, as given in closing: “the blonde, the wrong man or woman, villains, detectives, the chase, the humor, the food, spies, voyeurism, suspense, sexuality, murder, the singular cinematic language, and the MacGuffin.” A total delight, narrated by Elvis Mitchell. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Anuja (dir. Adam J. Graves, 2024). Anuja (Sajda Pathan) is a nine-year-old girl who works alongside her older sister (Ananya Shanbha) in a Delhi garment factory. When Anuja is presented with the chance for a scholarship to a private boarding school (she must have been noticed as a math whiz before leaving school for work), she must choose between a life of poverty with her sister (they’re both orphans) and the unknown. This short film has something of the feel of an Afternoon Special for grown-ups — and I mean that in a good way. It presents a life dilemma while offering no easy answer. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature French Poetic Realism

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (dir. Jean Renoir, 1936). A car pulls up at a lonely inn, a young man (René Lefèvre) and woman (Florelle) thank their driver, and before you know it, they’re in a room and she’s commenting on the quality of the bedclothes: “They sure know how to wash linen here.” In time (via one long flashback) everything becomes clear: she ran a laundry; he worked for a villainous publisher; there was trouble with that publisher (Jules Berry); and now they’re on the run. The quick pace and cheerful amorality of this story put me in mind — I swear it — of Seinfeld : I could even imagine a snapping bassline ending some scenes. My favorite moment: “Suddenly Arizona Jim put his gun on the table and taking a little pink box out of his pocket, he said, ‘Be bold and evermore bold with Ranimax pills!’” ★★★★

[Ranimax? It’s real.]

Port of Shadows (dir. Marcel Carné, 1938). I always think of Jean Gabin as existentialism personified, a fellow who needs nothing more than a cigarette in his mouth and a well-worn cap on his head. Here he’s Jean, an army deserter still in uniform, taking refuge in a crummy bar in Le Havre and meeting up with (the astonishingly beautiful) Nelly (Michèle Morgan), a young woman in flight from her controlling uncle (Michel Simon). As Jean and Nelly fall in love, a gangster searches for Nelly’s missing ex-boyfriend — and something’s about to go wrong. The screenplay, by Jacques Prévert, is sometimes heavy-handed in its poeticality — “Shoes … bottlenecks, an old comb — the seabed’s vast!” — but it fits this story of love, doom, and fog. ★★★★

Le jour se lève (dir. Marcel Carné, 1939). Here Jean Gabin is François, a laborer, who meets Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent), who works for a florist. They share a name; they share orphanhood; and love blooms. But it’s complicated by Françoise’s devotion to the stage performer Valentin (a sinister Jules Berry again) and François’s growing interest in Valentin’s former assistant Clara (Arletty), and what results is a shocking ending. I finally figured out why this movie felt so familiar: it was remade in English as The Long Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1947), and though that’s a fine movie — and has a bear of its own — this movie’s better. ★★★★

[I’ve given the titles as they appear at Criterion for easier searching.]

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)