[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Hulu, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]
The Crooked Circle (dir. Joseph Kane, 1957). One thing about a Republic Pictures picture: you know you’ll never see anything remotely like the grotesque mansion of Anora — no money! Here’s a modestly made movie with a familiar premise: clean-cut young fighter Tommy (John Smith) breaks into the big time, with an ex-fighter brother (Don Kelly), an in-need-of-a-Women’s-Studies-class girlfriend (Fay Spain), and a sportswriter (Steve Brodie) behind him. When a crooked manager (John Doucette) and promoter (Robert Armstrong, all the way from King Kong) want Tommy to take a dive, there’s trouble. Okay script, surprisingly good acting, surprisingly realistic (to my eye) fight scenes. ★★★ (YT)
*
Castle on the Hudson (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1939). A cocky little gangster (John Garfield), a compassionate figure of authority (Pat O’Brien): where had I seen that before? Oh, right, in Angels with Dirty Faces (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938). As Tommy Gordan, Garfield channels the James Cagney of Angels; as Sing Sing warden Walter Long, Pat O’Brien channels himself. Ann Sheridan has little to do here; Burgess Meredith, as a Sing Sing inmate, has much more, and he takes over the film in the middle. ★★ (TCM)
*
Dangerously They Live (dir. Robert Florey, 1941). “Listen, the world is turned upside down; words don’t mean what they’re meant to mean; people aren’t what they should be”: so says Jane Greystone (Nancy Coleman), a British agent in New York, suffering from amnesia and targeted by Nazi agents determined to find out what she knows about ship movements. One agent (Moroni Olsen) claims to be her father; another (Raymond Massey) is a distinguished medical man looking to take over her care. A scrappy hospital intern (John Garfield) is all that stands between Jane and doom. A solid story from the brothers Warner, with a trace of Foreign Correspondent, a scene that anticipates Casablanca, and a brief appearance by the great character actor Murray Alper. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (dir. Chris Smith, 2025). A largely uncritical documentary portrait of the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, who’s spending millions in a personal effort to reverse aging and live for an “indefinite” amount of time. Johnson presents as a man in his forties who dyes his hair, wears few clothes (yes, he’s fit), has had work done, has a parasitic relationship with his teenage son (plasma transfusions of younger blood), and is always selling, with branded products and Amazon affiliate links everywhere. “You sound like an infomercial,” someone says off-camera. Yes, much like this documentary itself. ★ (N)
[As The New York Times reports, there’s been lots of trouble for Bryan Johnson that postdates the movie. And Johnson is much stranger than the documentary or Times article suggests: he wants, for instance, to start a country, start a religion, and become God.]
*
How I Escaped My Cult (2025). The stories of believers, almost all of them women, who escaped from a variety of groups: the FLDS, the House of Yahweh, the Nuwaubian Nation, NXIVM, and others. At the heart of each group, an improbably charismatic leader — an angel, a prophet, an ET, a self-styled human-potential expert — who sees her or his followers as things to be used. A certain sameness sets in after two episodes: landscape shots via drone, too-quick cuts from archival image to archival image, commentary by cult experts and prosecutors, and, always, a story of exploitation and escape, which sometimes is a matter of packing and leaving. What’s missing from this series is an unpacking of belief systems and an exploration of how the believer came to believe and obey. ★★ (H)
*
From the Criterion Channel feature Three Noirs by John Farrow
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948). A supernatural noir, in which a stage mentalist, the Great Triton (Edward G. Robinson), finds his power to see the future becoming real. The story centers on the fate Triton foresees for the daughter (Gail Russell) of his old partners in show business (Virginia Bruce and Jerome Cowan). My favorite bit: Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill and the room near Angels Flight in which the tormented Triton hides away for twenty years, fashioning magic tricks and novelties to sell by mail. From a novel by Cornell Woolrich. ★★★★
Alias Nick Beal (1949). Another story of the supernatural, in which a deeply ethical district attorney, Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), meets Nick Beal (Ray Milland), a suave tempter who seems to come from nowhere to help in Foster’s effort to prosecute a gangster. And before long, the prospect of running for governor is within Foster’s reach, and yes, it’s a variation on the legend of Faust. Milland, Audrey Totter (as a prostitute turned politician’s mistress), and George Macready (as a white-haired minister) are brilliant, and this movie might be Thomas Mitchell’s finest hour. Extra credit goes to Lionel Lindon, whose scenes of fog and silhouettes are unforgettable. ★★★★
[Nick Beal: I blacken? I think so. The third movie in this feature is The Big Clock.]
*
A Complete Unknown (dir. James Mangold, 2024). Timothée Chalamet stars in something of a Classic Comics version of Bob Dylan’s early years. Chalamet gives a great performance as an aloof, needy, fabulating, chameleonic young man, but so many moments in the movie made me cringe, starting with the in-hospital performance of “Song for Woody” that floors Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton): torch, passed! So many details of the folk world are left out: if, for instance, you don’t recognize Dave Van Ronk (Joe Tippett), this movie won’t tell you who he is: he appears, speaks, but is never identified (he's one of the movie’s complete unknowns). Biggest cringe: the wholly invented episode of Pete Seeger’s television series Rainbow Quest, with a fictional gin-drinking bluesman and young Bob crashing the show. ★★ (H)
*
From the Criterion Channel feature Starring Penélope Cruz
Jamón, jamón (dir. Bigas Luna, 1992). The movie debut of Penélope Cruz, and at first I thought that the only point was to show her in as little clothing as possible, as often as possible. But the story developed into a charged, loony-tunes tangle of sexual relationships — a mother (Anna Galiena), another mother (Stefania Sandrelli), a father (Juan Diego), a suitor (Jordi Mollà), another suitor (Javier Bardem) — that finally gets sorted out, with a final tableau that made me laugh out loud. I’d describe Jamón, jamón as a movie that out-Almodóvars Almodóvar — and recall that the name of Almodóvar’s production company is El Deseo, The Desire. Don’t miss the closing cast credits: for an English-speaking viewer with even a modest command of Spanish, they’re a delight. ★★★★
*
From the Criterion Channel feature French Poetic Realism
Hôtel du Nord (dir. Marcel Carné, 1938). It’s not a four-star hotel: its residents include a sex worker, Raymonde (Arletty), and her procurer, Edmond (Louis Jouvet). New to the hotel are Renée and Pierre (Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont), lovers who have readied themselves to end their lives. But nothing goes according to plan, and, as Edgar says in Hamlet, “The worst returns to laughter” — more or less. The opening and closing scenes suggest to me a theater curtain opening and closing: we end where we began. ★★★★
They Were Five (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1936). Five out-of-work pals hit it big in a lottery and pool their winnings to transform a dilapidated building into a guinguette. Complications ensue. A beautifully bittersweet story of success and failure, comic and tragic by turns. Jeannot (Jean Gabin): “We had such a beautiful idea.” ★★★★
[Criterion gives the title in English. In French, it’s La Belle équipe, the beautiful team.]
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
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