Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. One spoiler, about a move in a chess game. Sources: Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Swamp Water (dir. Jean Renoir, 1941). Renoir’s first American movie, set in and near the Okefenokee Swamp, with a distinct Grapes of Wrath vibe, down to the song “Red River Valley” and the presence of Russell Simpson (who played Pa Joad). The episodic plot has at its center a trapper (Dana Andrews) who, while searching for his runaway hunting dog, finds a fugitive convicted of murder (Walter Brennan) living in the swamp. The dialogue is sometimes strained and the acting heavy-handed (Walter Huston as a volatile patriarch), and the love triangle (Anne Baxter, Andrews, Virginia Gilmore) is beside the point, but the dangers of the Okefenokee add considerable interest. The ending is startling, with another character taking up residence in the swamp. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Juror (dir. Brian Gibson, 1996). Demi Moore plays avant-garde artist Annie Laird, who’s excited about being a juror in the trial of a Mafia boss (Tony Lo Bianco) and who has breezily mentioned during jury selection that she has a young son (talk about witlessness). Annie is soon approached by a suave fellow named Mark (Alec Baldwin), who appears to be an art collector but isn’t, as we figure out when he warns her that she must speak the words “not guilty” during jury deliberations or her son will be harmed, and then — witlessness rising — the mob demands that she persuade her fellow jurors to return a verdict of “not guilty,” which leads to some (unintentionally) comic moments as Annie schools her fellow jurors, 12 Angry Men-style. The danger to Annie and her son rises, as does the movie’s witlessness, with several scenes of inadvertently funny violence. Moore is wooden and strained; Lo Bianco and Baldwin cartoonish (the latter like a crazed Jack Donaphy), but I’m adding a star for James Gandolfini’s performance as a mob man with something of a conscience. ★★ (N)

[As I learned only after watching, Moore won a Razzle Award for her performances here and in Striptease.]

*

The World Before Your Feet (dir. Jeremy Workman, 2018). A documentary about Matt Green, an engineer who gave up his job and apartment and devoted himself to walking, first across the country, and then on every street in the five boroughs of New York (along with parks, paths, beaches, and cemeteries). At every turn, the movie reveals how much there is to take in, even or especially in the most mundane realities (example: the rise of the z, as in cutz , in barbershop signs). Green walks and talks with an incredibly deep knowledge of New York architecture, design, history, and nature, and his random encounters with New Yorkers from every walk of life are heartwarming (especially in these blighted times). Best line: “There are some people out there who just do things for reasons they don’t understand, you know, that other people just don’t quite understand — I mean, I don’t know anybody like that.” ★★★★ (A)

*

Adventure in Manhattan (dir. Edward Ludwig, 1936). Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea? I was sold, and this movie initially showed promise: a newspaper office, fedoras, an editor (Thomas Mitchell) with a pack of Lucky Strikes on his desk, McCrea as a celebrated crime writer, Arthur as a hungry, unhoused victim of the Depression. But against all odds, the movie revealed itself as a would-be screwball comedy, unfunny and inane. There is no reason for anyone else to ever watch this one. ★ (YT)

*

Where the Truth Lies (dir. Atom Egoygan, 2005). Trashy fun, something of a poor man’s David Lynch movie. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth do a credible job as a Martin and Lewis-like comedy-and-music team whose breakup in the 1950s was never explained. And there’s a mysterious death in their backstory, also unexplained. Many years later, a young writer (a lackluster Alison Lohman) attempts to get to the bottom of things, and things get weird. ★★ (CC)

*

Eleanor the Great (dir. Scarlett Johnasson, 2025). June Squibb (b. 1929!) is Eleanor Morgenstein, long widowed in Florida, newly bereft after the loss of her dear friend and roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar), and now beginning a new life in temporary quarters on the Upper West Side (her daughter’s apartment). An early moment in the movie lets us know that Eleanor is not reluctant to tell a lie (what’s the harm?), and when she finds herself in a support group for Holocaust survivors, she begins telling Bessie’s story as her own. And if you think that things can’t possibly go well after that, you’ve already forgotten the title of the movie. Squibb is great, but the movie trades too much in Hallmark tropes, with an unlikely friendship (Eleanor and an NYU journalism student (Erin Kellyman)), a remarkable coincidence, and a crisis late in the story, simply (or simplistically) resolved. ★★★ (N)

*

Thelma (dir. Josh Margolin, 2024) June Squibb FTW: here she’s a feisty (and sometimes alarmingly selfish) grandmother who sets out to reclaim the $10,000 she lost to a “This is your grandson, help, I’m in jail” scam. A funny, poignant look at adversity in old age, as Thelma and her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree) head out into Van Nuys on an electric scooter to find and get the money. Best moments: Ben’s meditations on old age, Thelma and the oxygen tube. With Fred Hechinger as grandson Daniel, Parker Posey and Clark Gregg as his parents, and Malcom McDowell as the proprietor of an antiques store. ★★★★ (H)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Gangsters, Gold Diggers, and Grifters: Mervyn LeRoy’s Pre-Code Films

Big City Blues (1932). The story isn’t much: young Bud Reeves (Eric Linden) leaves small-town Indiana to make a life in New York, and many things go wrong. But atmosphere is the appeal here: an Indiana stationmaster’s soliloquy, a wild party in a hotel room (with labels affixed to the bottles because ladies will be present), a packed speakeasy, a swank club with an upper floor devoted to gambling. With Joan Blondell, Walter Catlett, Guy Kibbee, and an uncredited Humphrey Bogart. As in Vanity Street, there’s a glimpse of a character reading The Well of Loneliness, but the most Pre-Code moment goes to Bud’s cousin Gibboney (Walter Catlett), a foppish urbanite. He places one finger atop another and says, “Why, Harry and I are pals — we’re just like that. That’s me on top.” ★★★

[“We’re just like that”: Cousin Gibboney says the same thing about himself and Constance Bennett.]

Five Star Final (1931). “I’ve been in this business too long to be ashamed of myself,” says newspaper editor Joseph Randall (Edward G. Robinson). Randall has caved to his publisher’s demand for increased circulation, skimping on politics and world affairs and leaning into the lurid. Thus he resurrects a twenty-year-old murder story, with catastrophic results. With Aline McMahon, George E. Stone, H.B. Warner (Mr. Gower of It’s a Wonderful Life), Boris Karloff as T. Vernon Isopod (look it up), and striking cinematography by Sol Polito. ★★★★

*

Queen of Chess (dir. Rory Kennedy, 2026). A documentary about grandmaster Judit Polgár, whose chess career began in early childhood, as one of three daughters subjected to a father’s monomaniacal dream of familial success. With copious archival footage and present-day interviews, the movie tracks Polgár’s rise in the chess world, her vexed history playing Garry Kasparov, her difficult relationship with her father, and the marked misogyny in a male-dominated game. I wish there had been more sophisticated analysis, and I say that even after many years away from playing in tournaments: too often the commentary on games is limited to declarations that someone is playing aggressively: perhaps the equivalent of saying that someone at bat is trying to get a hit. Spoiler alert: Kasparov did touch and let go of that piece, no question. ★★★ (N)

*

Yellow Canary (dir. Herbert Wilcox, 1943). I watched in 2021 but didn’t remember a minute of it until a scene, late in the story, with two people sitting on a park bench. The story moves from England to Nova Scotia on a ship carrying a British Nazi collaborator (Anna Neagle), a Polish military man (Albert Lieven), and a British intelligence officer (Richard Greene). A highly discontinuous narrative, with a strong Hitchcock flavor. The movie gains in excitement as we near the end and the shape of things becomes clear. ★★★★ (TCM)

[As we discovered after watching, a print available at YouTube has ten minutes of missing footage from the start of the movie that dispel all discontinuity and confusion. But we like the confusing version better, and I’ve added a star to my earlier rating.]

*

Crime and Punishment (dir. Josef von Sterberg, 1935). The director despised this film, but I admire it greatly and (true confession) prefer it to the novel (I’m not a Dostoyesky fan). Edward Arnold is a cunning Porfiry; “the celebrated European Star” Peter Lorre (looking even stranger than he did in M ) is Raskolnikov; Marian Marsh is a fragile, courageous Sonya. Everything about this film is brilliant: the acting, Lucien Ballard’s cinematography (light and dark), Richard Gooson’s sets (bare tenement hallways, Raskolnikov’s Expressionist-looking stacks of books, Porfiry’s ornately furnished office). What’s not to like?! ★★★★ (YT)

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All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)