FILM FRENZY

William H. Macy (back), Burt Reynolds, and Ricky Jay in Boogie Nights (Photo: Warner Bros.)

By Matt Brunson

(View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, 4K, and DVD. Ratings are on a four-star scale.)

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997). Watching One Battle After Another take most of the critics groups’ Best Film awards and land on more Top 10 lists than any other 2025 release reminds me yet again that I’m clearly not the biggest Paul Thomas Anderson fan out there. I’ve certainly liked but have rarely loved the majority of his movies to date — the whopping exception would be his sophomore effort, which stands not only as his finest picture but also one of the great movies of the 1990s. Centering on the adult film industry in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, this dazzling achievement casts Mark Wahlberg as Eddie Adams, a sweet kid with a 13-inch schlong. Ready for his shot at X-rated stardom, Eddie, now going under the screen name Dirk Diggler, joins a company of porn players that includes visionary director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), soft-hearted leading lady Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), aimless school kid Rollergirl (Heather Graham), nerdy crew members Little Bill (William H. Macy) and Scotty J. (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and amiable studs Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly) and Buck Swope (Don Cheadle). Boogie Nights is a grandly ambitious project, by turns funny, violent, poignant, and, uh, penetrating, yet Anderson isn’t content to merely make a time capsule piece. He also uses his characters to represent the dysfunctional family in modern American society, while the milieu itself serves as a metaphor for the shifting attitudes that defined this nation nearly a half-century ago. Moore and Reynolds are particularly phenomenal, with the latter delivering a career performance in every sense of the term. This earned a trio of Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Reynolds), Supporting Actress (Moore), and Original Screenplay.

Extras in the 4K edition include audio commentary by Anderson; audio commentary by seven cast members (including Wahlberg and Moore); a Q&A with Anderson and Reilly; and deleted scenes.

Movie: ★★★★

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002). From its snazzy opening credits — the type normally found in frothy romantic comedies of the early 1960s — to John Williams’ infectious score, this Steven Spielberg hit feels like nothing so much as pure old-fashioned escapism, with the director in an especially playful mood. Inspired by a true story, this finds Leonardo DiCaprio delivering a smooth performance as Frank Abagnale, who, while still a teenager, manages to successfully impersonate a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and a teacher, all the while cashing false checks to the tune of more than $2 million. Frank stays ahead of the law for years, but never too far ahead, as his every move is dogged by a persistent FBI agent (Tom Hanks, very good) determined to put the cuffs on this enterprising kid. Because this is a Spielberg project, you can bet that some poignant subtext involving splintered family units will come into play, and Christopher Walken does a nice job as Frank’s perpetually weary dad. For the most part, this is engaging, stress-free entertainment — just kick back and enjoy. This earned a pair of Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Walken) and Best Original Score. (For a review of Spielberg’s other 2002 hit, Minority Report, head here).

Extras in the 4K edition include a making-of featurette; a look at the various characters, including supporting ones played by Martin Sheen, Amy Adams, and Jennifer Garner; a piece on the character of Frank Abagnale, with the real Frank Abagnale among the interviewees; and an interview with Williams.

Movie: ★★★

DEAD OF NIGHT (1945). The granddaddy of all horror anthology flicks also remains the best of such portmanteau pics, with much of the credit for its classic status given to one stupendous sequence. It’s indeed a marvel, but let’s not shortchange the other segments, all of which hold their own. At a remote English estate, the gathered relate a series of stories involving the supernatural. In the first tale, based on a short story that also inspired an excellent episode of The Twilight Zone, an injured race car driver (Anthony Baird) has an odd encounter with a hearse driver (Miles Malleson). The second involves a woman (Sally Ann Howes) learning of a murder involving siblings. The third finds a haunted mirror wreaking havoc on a marriage. The fourth is a comic yarn with Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, playing off their roles in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes for the umpteenth time, as two golfers in love with the same woman (Peggy Bryan). And the legendary final story centers on a ventriloquist (Michael Redgrave) tormented by his own dummy. Ealing Studios, renowned for its comedies, had no problem occasionally making quality films in other genres, and Dead of Night was its note-perfect attempt at horror, with directing chores divided up between four of the outfit’s most reliable helmers (including The Lavender Hill Mob’s Charles Crichton).

When Dead of Night first played the U.S., its nitwit distributors removed two entire segments, reducing the original 103-minute running time to a mere 77 minutes. Fortunately, that cut has largely been deep-sixed, and all official home video versions are of the complete U.K. release — that includes this new one, which offers the film in 4K for the first time (a Blu-ray is also included). Extras consist of audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas; a feature-length retrospective documentary; and trailers for other Kino titles.

Movie: ★★★★

I’M STILL HERE (2024). Of all the winners at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, the one that gave me the most joy was the Brazilian release I’m Still Here taking the Best International Feature Film Oscar, a score even more sweet since it toppled feeble frontrunner Emilia Pérez. There was also a nice symmetry in the fact that, 26 years after directing Fernanda Montenegro to a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Central Station, Walter Salles similarly oversaw Montenegro’s daughter Fernanda Torres receive a Best Actress nod for her equally exemplary effort here. And the piece’s third nomination was a somewhat unexpected one in the Best Motion Picture category, which of course was merely its due as one of the finest flicks of 2024 (on my own 10 Best list, it was #3). The target of a failed boycott by Brazil’s right-wing faction, this forceful, fact-based picture takes place in 1971, during that lengthy period when the country was ruled by a military dictatorship responsible for the torture, disappearance, and/or murders of 20,000 dissidents. Torres plays Eunice Paiva, whose architect husband Rubens (Selton Mello) is carted away from their home one day, forcing Eunice to comfort their five children while also seeking answers regarding his disappearance. Every family member is perfectly cast, the coda is enormously moving, and the closing text will infuriate those witnessing our own country’s hard shift toward autocracy. For another exemplary political thriller from Brazil, check out the current release The Secret Agent, which will likely land its own handful of Oscar nominations come early 2026.

The only Blu-ray extra is a making-of featurette.

Movie: ★★★½

LAUREL & HARDY: YEAR THREE (1929). Forget “Garbo Talks!” — here we have Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy discovering the gift of gab. The third year of the L&H partnership (read up on Year One here and Year Two here) finds the odd couple making a highly successful transition from silent cinema to the talkies. They headlined both types in 1929, and this set showcases the vast majority of their shorts that year, most of them silent but a handful featuring their first forays into sound. There are nine fully restored shorts in this collection, including their final silent film, Angora Love, and their first all-talking picture, Unaccustomed As We Are (offered in both its silent and sound versions). There are also unrestored versions of two of their talkies, The Hoose-Gow and They Go Boom! As for the contents of the shorts, they’re the usual inspired hijinks common of the comic duo, with slapstick dominating the silents and new elements added in the sound pics (now we can actually hear Stan’s blubbery crying fits). The first of their shorts released in 1929 is also one of the best of the bunch: Liberty is certain to get those acrophobic juices flowing, mixing laughter and thrills as Stan and Laurel find themselves stranded on the beams at the top of an unfinished skyscraper. Also highly recommended is Big Business, which just continues to pile on the mayhem as the boys try to sell a man a Christmas tree; instead, their clumsiness results in a no-holds-barred feud that leads to ample property destruction. And that first talkie, Unaccustomed As We Are, serves up madcap mirth as Oliver invites Stan to dinner, a move that inadvertently kicks off a pair of marital spats.

Blu-ray extras include film historian audio commentary on all nine films; an excerpt from the Best Picture Oscar nominee The Hollywood Revue of 1929 that features Stan and Ollie; a fragment from the Spanish version of their short Berth Marks; and an image gallery.

Collection: ★★★

NACHO LIBRE (2006). Nacho Libre turns out to be a surprisingly mild affair, one of those films where the creative juices dried up at some point between conception and execution. The premise held promise: Nacho (Jack Black), the lowly cook at a Mexican monastery that doubles as a home for orphaned boys, realizes that becoming a wrestler would not only earn him enough money to better take care of the lads under his watch, it might also instill enough self-confidence so that he won’t remain tongue-tied around the lovely new nun (Ana de la Reguera). But because the monks frown upon wrestling, Nacho is forced to disguise himself by donning a mask. He also picks up a sidekick in the form of a scrawny street dweller (Hector Jimenez), and together they become a less-than-dynamic duo who grow accustomed to getting hammered in the ring when pitted against professionals. Writer-director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and co-scripter Mike White (The School of Rock) serve up a few fine gags (love that corn in the eye), but they’re spread mighty thin throughout the picture’s running time. The remainder of the film is split between the sort of scatological humor we can find anywhere else — See Jack Black break wind! See Jack Black sit on the toilet! See Jack Black smear animal excrement on Jimenez’s face! — and lazy south-of-the-border caricatures that aren’t funny, offensive or offensively funny. After a while, this disappointing film just lays there, like a wrestler body-slammed one time too many.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition include audio commentary by Black, Hess, and White; a behind-the-scenes featurette; a joint interview with Black and Jimenez; an interview with de la Reguera; deleted scenes; and promo spots.

Movie: ★★

NIGHTS IN RODANTHE (2008). Diane Lane and the Tuscan countryside prove to be a more dynamic duo than Diane Lane and the Outer Banks, an assertion that immediately becomes clear when placing Under the Tuscan Sun and Nights in Rodanthe side by side. The former made the most of its setting and its star, resulting in a winning romantic comedy whose love-struck spirit rubbed off on viewers eager to lap up its sense of joie de vivre. The coastal-Carolina-shot Rodanthe, on the other hand, starts off well as Tuscan Sun‘s more serious-minded cousin but eventually sinks under the weight of the shameless plot devices thrust upon it by author Nicholas Sparks and adapters Ann Peacock and John Romano. Lane, teaming with Richard Gere for the third time (following 1984’s The Cotton Club and 2002’s Unfaithful, the latter reviewed in From Screen To Stream below), plays Adrienne Willis, who agrees to look after her best friend’s (Viola Davis) beachfront inn at the same time that her philandering husband (Christopher Meloni) is begging her to let him come back. Gere co-stars as Paul Flanner, a doctor brooding over a minor surgery procedure that went tragically wrong. As the only two people stuck at the inn, Adrienne and Paul open up to each other and gradually fall in love. Initially, this works as a mature and even touching drama, but then the melodramatic devices take over with the force of a hurricane. And speaking of hurricane, the second-act emergence of this force of nature is but one of the hoary aspects that sink the production, along with a sour twist that is as expected as it is defeatist. Astonishingly, acclaimed Broadway director George C. Wolfe (Angels in America) chose this project to mark his big-screen debut, but the end result is strictly water-logged.

Blu-ray extras include deleted scenes and the music video for Gavin Rossdale’s “Love Remains the Same.”

Movie: ★★

PRIDE & PREJUDICE (2005). In adapting Jane Austen’s literary staple, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach have done an exemplary job of making us care all over again about the plight of the Bennet sisters, five young ladies whose busybody mom (Brenda Blethyn) sets about finding them suitable husbands against the backdrop of 19th century England. The oldest daughter Jane (Rosamund Pike) immediately lands a suitor, but the independent Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) finds herself embroiled in a grudge match with the brooding Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen). As usual, Blethyn does enough acting for everybody, although she did leave enough air on the set so that her co-stars had a chance to make their mark. Romanticists who fell hard for Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC miniseries may or may not warm to MacFadyen (who’s fine in the role), but there’s no quibbling over Knightley’s intuitive, note-perfect work as Elizabeth. Donald Sutherland is a treat as Mr. Bennet, although it would have been nice to have someone less predictable than Judi Dench cast in the role of the haughty Lady Catherine de Bourg. Kudos, also, to Roman Osin’s endlessly inventive camerawork, the sort not usually found in period pieces of this nature. This earned four Academy Award nominations, including one for Knightley’s lead performance (alas, Osin was overlooked).

Extras in the 4K edition include audio commentary by Wright; comments from various cast members; a piece on Austin; the HBO First Look segment on Pride & Prejudice; and a look at the stately homes utilized in the film.

Movie: ★★★

RENT (2005). Giacomo Puccini premiered his opera La Bohème in 1896, and it was exactly 100 years later that Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning update created seismic waves in the theater world. (Tragically, Larson never enjoyed the spoils of victory, dying a few days before his show opened.) Unfolding in the late 1980s, the story centers on a group of bohemians trying to get by while living in New York City’s East Village — these include a filmmaker (Anthony Rapp), a songwriter (Adam Pascal), a street drummer (Wilson Jermaine Heredia). a stripper (Rosario Dawson), and a kooky performance artist (Idina Menzel). If it occasionally plays like Melrose Place on welfare, the story’s defining characteristic is that half of its leading players are HIV-positive, contracting the illness through sex or drug use. This is where the piece’s poignancy makes itself right at home, as the afflicted characters movingly cope with the illness in different ways, whether through withdrawal, studied acceptance or living life to the fullest. For a musical, there isn’t much dancing per se, and director Chris Columbus and choreographer Keith Young stage the few numbers competently if not excitingly. The film is ultimately most similar to Richard Attenborough’s 1985 adaptation of A Chorus Line, with a catchy (if occasionally clunky) score and some good performances making up for the helmer’s lack of imagination.

Extras in the 4K edition include audio commentary by Columbus, Rapp, and Pascal; a feature-length making-of documentary; deleted scenes; and public service announcements for the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation and the National Marfan Foundation.

Movie: ★★½

SCARS OF DRACULA (1970). The most underrated of all the Dracula pictures produced by Hammer Films, Scars of Dracula was also the last period Drac flick for star Christopher Lee as the studio opted to then transport the character to the 20th century for 1972’s Dracula A.D. 1972 and 1973’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula. To compete with the new wave of horror cinema (particularly the efforts coming out of the U.S.), Hammer started adding more gore and nudity to the proceedings, and while this one arrived during that period, its adult content nevertheless doesn’t feel quite as gratuitous as in later efforts from the studio, with the explicitness mostly woven into the fabric of the story. The manner in which Dracula is resurrected is particularly daft (bloody saliva dripped from the open mouth of a hovering bat!), but otherwise, this is a sturdy and suitably grim effort in which a young couple (Jenny Hanley and a miscast Dennis Waterman) search for his missing brother (Christopher Matthews); naturally, their quest leads them straight to Castle Dracula, where the voluptuous beauty catches the eye of both the Count and his scruffy manservant (Patrick Troughton, best known to TV fans as one of the earliest Doctor Whos and to movie fans as the priest who gets speared in The Omen). Lee’s role is larger in this than in many of the other Dracula sequels, which is a definite plus.

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition consist of audio commentary by Lee, director Roy Ward Baker, and Hammer Films historian Maecus Hearns; audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas; a making-of retrospective; the theatrical trailer; a double-feature theatrical trailer for Scars of Dracula and Hammer’s The Horror of Frankenstein; and trailers for other Kino titles.

Movie: ★★★

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

ALEXANDER (2004). Oliver Stone’s worst movie (along with Savages) is unremittingly dull, visually unappealing, narratively muddled, inadvertently campy, wretchedly performed — and that’s just for starters. Colin Farrell gets trampled under the weight of Stone’s expectations in tackling the role of Alexander, the warrior king whose claim to fame was conquering most of the known world by the time he was The Little Mermaid Halle Bailey’s present age (25). Anthony Hopkins provides the doddering exposition — lots and lots and lots of exposition — as Alexander pal Ptolemy, who, 40 years later, relates their adventures with all the enthusiasm of a theater employee removing bubble gum from under the armrests. As Alexander’s parents, Angelina Jolie (sporting an accent that suggests she’s channeling Bela Lugosi) and Val Kilmer get to bellow and howl and gnash their teeth, to little avail. The battle sequences, which seem to have been shot by a camera while it was tumbling around inside a dryer, remain as murky as the characters’ relations toward one another. The homoerotic content (Alexander was bisexual) is conveyed through an endless series of demure looks between the male players; this skirting around the issue may make the movie more palatable to a nation that’s passing anti-LGBTQ measures with Aryan/Trumpian expediency, but it also adds a campy quality furthered enhanced by laughable dialogue and bug-eyed performances. In fact, given the woeful results, Stone would have fared better had he just turned the whole picture into a comic romp on the order of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Where’s Biggus Dickus when we really need him? Stone followed the 175-minute theatrical release with a 2005 167-minute Director’s Cut, a 2007 214-minute Final Unrated Cut, and a 2014 206-minute Ultimate Cut. Some suggest these are better, but at those lengths, I’ll never know.

Movie: ★

ALL IN THE FAMILY (1971-1979). I expect most people think of Rob Reiner (RIP) as a director thanks to such hits as This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally…, and A Few Good Men, but to me he will always be Mike Stivic. All in the Family has long earned my vote as TV’s all-time greatest series, as Norman Lear’s groundbreaking sitcom courted controversy from the start by tackling subjects most other boob tube fare refused to even acknowledge. Yet what primarily made the series work was the core quartet at its center: irascible bigot Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), his flighty yet paradoxically complex wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), their loving daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers), and their liberal (and perpetual thorn in Archie’s side) son-in-law Mike. Picking the best episodes can be a daunting task, but among them would be “Sammy’s Visit,” in which Sammy Davis Jr. (playing himself) visits the Bunker household; “Edith Has Jury Duty”; “Archie Gets Branded,” a shocking episode about anti-Semitism; “The Games Bunkers Play,” with terrific work by Reiner; “Everybody Tells the Truth,” a comic take on Rashomon; “Joey’s Baptism,” guest-starring Clyde Kusatsu as Rev. Chang (“Chong.” “Whatever.”); and pretty much any episode featuring George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) or Maude (Bea Arthur), characters so popular that they ended up landing their own long-running shows. All in the Family scored approximately two dozen Emmy Awards during its nine-season run, winning Outstanding Comedy Series four times and scoring multiple statues for O’Connor (four), Stapleton (three), Reiner (two), and Struthers (two). It also set the record for the most consecutive years at #1 in the Nielsen ratings (five), eventually tied by The Cosby Show and (depressingly) surpassed by American Idol.

Series: ★★★★

INHERENT VICE (2014). Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling 2009 novel locates a mystery worthy of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and basically sends in Cheech and Chong to crack the case. Joaquin Phoenix, sporting sideburns that outflank even Wolverine’s, is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pothead of a private eye who agrees to help his former squeeze, one Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), come to the aid of her lover, a married millionaire (Eric Roberts) who’s suddenly MIA. And so off goes Doc to gather clues, receiving limited assistance from his friends (Reese Witherspoon and Benicio Del Toro as attorneys), ample interference from a coiled cop (an intense Josh Brolin), and mixed signals from various strangers (Owen Wilson’s surfer dude, Martin Short’s patently bizarre dentist). With its loopy sensibilities and labyrinthine plot, this ambitious effort has screen antecedents aplenty; they start with Robert Altman’s 1973 The Long Goodbye, starring Elliott Gould as an unkempt Philip Marlowe dropped into the unblinking L.A. of the 1970s. Want a more recent one? Fine, but you probably won’t like it. Like 2013’s critically and commercially lambasted The Counselor (from the noggin of another literary giant, Cormac McCarthy), Inherent Vice is a freewheeling orgy of misdirection (from Anderson), misunderstanding (from the audience), and Method-tinged emoting (from an eye-popping cast). It hurtles along from one seemingly tangential situation to the next, all with an insouciant attitude that suggests no one involved really cared whether audience members kept up with the shenanigans or not. That’s OK: Inherent Vice might be a mess, but it’s a curiously endearing mess, not unlike a shaggy dog that expects to be loved even after it leaves muddy paw prints all over the lush living room carpet. This earned Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costume Design.

Movie: ★★★

THE LIBERTINE (2005). Bawdy period sex comedies are nothing new — they’ve been around at least since 1963’s Tom Jones hightailed it back to England with the Best Picture Oscar in hand. At first glance, The Libertine appears to be a modern attempt to jump-start the sub-genre, to wrest the costume epic away from the prim and proper Austen adaptations and steer it back to a sensibility that owes as much to Benny Hill as to any literary tome. But it soon becomes apparent that The Libertine is marching to its own beat: The humor is dipped in poison, and the end result of its sexual revolution isn’t bare arses and jiggling breasts but rather the physical deformities and uncontrollable bowel movements brought on by syphilis. Based on a stage play (and it shows), this tells the story of John Wilmot (Johnny Depp), aka the second Earl of Rochester. At the film’s outset, this 17th century poet, playwright, and sex fiend turns to us and insists that we won’t like him, at which point he proceeds to spend the remainder of the running time cruelly berating nearly everyone who enters his atmosphere, even Charles II (John Malkovich). The one exception is the budding stage actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton), yet she proves to be the one person that a smitten Rochester cannot best. In casting the role of Rochester, the filmmakers had the right idea by turning to the fearless Depp, but ultimately, he’s not required to do more than mix profanity with profundity and allow himself to be subjected to lengthy sessions in the makeup artist’s chair. For all its attempts to startle us with its vulgarity, this underdeveloped movie never locates a defining method to its messiness; ultimately, it possesses all the shock value of a toddler yelling, “Poopy!”

Movie: ★★½

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH (1940). Often described as a film made in the style of Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed’s WWII-set Night Train to Munich certainly shares common ground with the Master of Suspense’s 1938 gem The Lady Vanishes: Both find much of the action unfolding aboard a train, both were written by the prolific team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (in this case, adapting a story by Gordon Wellesley), and, interestingly, both share a pair of supporting characters, even though one film has nothing to do with the other. That would be the stiff-upper-lip duo of Charters and Caldicott, two comically pompous Brits (and proud of it!) played (as in The Lady Vanishes) by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. They figure in the proceedings late in the game; initially, the story keeps its eye on the intrigue surrounding Axel Bomasch (James Harcourt), a Czech scientist sought by the Nazis, and his daughter Anna (Margaret Lockwood), who’s captured and tossed into a German concentration camp. Fellow inmate Karl Marsen (Paul von Hernried) helps her escape, but it’s ultimately up to British agent Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison) to save both her and her father. There’s a nice surprise involving Marsen and his motives, and the midsection, in which Bennett disguises himself as a German officer in order to infiltrate a Nazi stronghold in Berlin, stirs memories of the same ploy later seen in Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be or Not to Be. Paul Von Hernried later changed his name to Paul Henreid and embarked on a successful Hollywood career, including co-starring roles in Now, Voyager and (as Ingrid Bergman’s husband) Casablanca. Night Train to Munich nabbed an Oscar nomination for Best Original Story.

Movie: ★★★

OLD GRINGO (1989). This adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novel was a colossal bust upon release: Costing $27 million and positioned as an Oscar contender, it grossed $3 million and landed on a couple of critics’ 10 Worst lists. Truthfully, it isn’t that bad, registering less as an out-and-out disaster and more as a missed opportunity. The story offers a fictionalized version of what happened to American author Ambrose Bierce (Gregory Peck) after he disappeared into Mexico in the 1910s at the height of the Mexican Revolution. According to this speculation, he spent his final days (he was 71 at this point) traveling with a band of Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries and vying with one of Villa’s officers, the fiery Tomas Aroyo (Jimmy Smits), for the affections of an American spinster, the meek Harriet Winslow (Jane Fonda). Argentinian writer-director Luis Puenzo, whose previous picture was 1985’s universally acclaimed The Official Story (an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film), has difficulty providing the movie with the epic grandeur such a story demands, although all the technical ingredients are certainly in place (the production design by Bruno Rubeo and Stuart Wurtzel is especially noteworthy). Smits and especially Peck invest their roles with steely passion, but Fonda delivers the worst performance of her career (it’s the only time she received a Worst Actress Razzie nomination): Staring doe-eyed at her guys and hanging tightly onto their every utterance, she comes across more as a naïve schoolgirl hearing the word “penis” for the first time than as a sexually stifled woman finally coming into her own. Fonda magnifies every gesture to comical proportions — I think she sets the record for the greatest number of fluttering blinks in a motion picture — and if there’s such a thing as repressed overacting, this is a model of its kind.

Movie: ★★½

SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993). It didn’t take long for director Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama to establish its foothold in the annals of cinema: In 1998, a mere five years after the picture’s release, the American Film Institute placed it #9 on its list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time (a 2007 reworking of the list moved it up a notch to #8). It’s doubtful the film will relinquish its lofty status any time in the near future, not so long as its message of hope existing and even thriving within horrendous circumstances continues to resonate in a world whose inhabitants seemingly never tire of committing atrocities against each other. The brutality displayed in this film is raw and in-your-face, yet Spielberg and writer Steven Zaillian (adapting Thomas Keneally’s book) do a terrific job of instilling a sense of humanity by focusing on one positive aspect: Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a war profiteer and Nazi Party member who single-handedly saves thousands of Jews from extermination. In a role that Harrison Ford turned down, Neeson delivers a nicely shaded performance, and the supporting parts are equally well-cast, highlighted by expert work from Ben Kingsley as mild-mannered Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern and Ralph Fiennes in a career-making turn as sadistic SS commandant Amon Goeth. Many (including me) might argue that, for all its excellence, Schindler’s List isn’t Spielberg’s best movie, but it’s certain to retain its standing as his most important. Nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including Best Actor (Neeson) and Best Supporting Actor (Fiennes), this won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Movie: ★★★★

UNFAITHFUL (2002). British filmmaker Adrian Lyne clearly has had sex on the brain for much of his career, directing huff’n’puff features both good (the 1987 zeitgeist smash Fatal Attraction, the 1997 adaptation of Lolita) and bad (1986’s 9½ Weeks and 1993’s Indecent Proposal, both dreary 1-star efforts). Thankfully, Unfaithful rests toward the upper end of the spectrum. Based on a 1969 French film (La femme infidèle) by Claude Chabrol, the movie sports a Continental demeanor that seems wholly appropriate. Diane Lane’s standout performance is what elevates the first half, which could easily be dismissed as a straight-to-cable soaper: Connie Sumner, a well-to-do housewife content with her husband Edward (Richard Gere), her son Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), and their home in a quaint New York suburb, unexpectedly enters into a torrid affair with French book dealer Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez). Lane’s complex portrayal of a woman caught between the borders of reason and risk is simply smashing, and she deservedly landed a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. Yet she’s not required to carry the picture by herself, as Gere also does some of his best work here. After the fairly conventional first half, the second part heads off in some interesting — and not always expected — directions that ultimately lead to a wonderfully ambiguous final shot. Unfaithful is the type of movie that only works for viewers willing to put some thought into it — those seeking cheap thrills will probably be disappointed, but those willing to accept this as a cautionary tale about the illusion of eternal bliss will find it eerily satisfying.

Movie: ★★★