FILM FRENZY

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights (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.)

BEND OF THE RIVER (1952). One of the five Westerns made by director Anthony Mann and star James Stewart between 1950 and 1955, Bend of the River was part of the growing breed of oaters that added psychological underpinnings to the usual shoot-‘em-up antics (many scribes insist that this development began in the 1950s, but ‘40s-era Westerns like My Darling Clementine and Red River clearly reveal that this wasn’t the case). The Mann-Stewart sagas often allowed the actor to play soiled versions of the squeaky-clean heroes he essayed earlier in his career and similarly portrayed the landscape not as wasted territory ready to blossom under the care of Caucasian crusaders but as terrain as ambiguous as the characters who were coming to settle it. In Bend of the River, Stewart is Glyn McLyntock, whose willingness to lead a wagon train through dangerous conditions might be masking a dark past. Along the way, he meets the equally enigmatic Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy), and they form a testy if mutually appreciative partnership. The McLyntock-Cole dynamic is the most interesting part of the film, and it’s lamentable (though expected) that the third act severs that bond for the sake of more conventional thrills. Rock Hudson co-stars as a cheerful gambler who joins the men on their adventures, although his sketchy role often feels like an afterthought.

Blu-ray extras consist of a pair of film historian audio commentaries; the theatrical trailer; and trailers for other films released via Kino.

Movie: ★★★

DEATH OF A GUNFIGHTER (1969). Film fans know that “Alan Smithee” is the name slapped onto a movie when the director doesn’t want credit (usually either because the studio wrested control away or the film simply stunk), but what picture was the first to be “directed” by Alan Smithee? That would be Death of a Gunfighter, helmed by TV vet Robert Totten (Gunsmoke) before he had run-ins with star Richard Widmark, and finished by Don Siegel, who just a year earlier had made Madigan with Widmark. When nobody stepped up to take credit for the film, the Directors Guild created the name Alan (here Allen) Smithee to plaster on prints and posters. Released in that ‘60s-‘70s stretch when many Westerns examined aging cowboys coping with a rapidly progressing world, this is one of the worst of the bunch, offering little insight or empathy. Widmark plays Frank Patch, the Marshall in a small Texas town circa the turn of the century. The town leaders despise Patch, some because he’s a brutish man still hanging on in a more enlightened era and others because he knows shameful secrets about all of them (this angle is woefully underdeveloped). Since he refuses to resign, the council members begin contemplating murder. Filmed with little style or imagination, this dour film builds no sympathy for its leading character, with Widmark merely grunting his way through a series of clumsy confrontations. Lena Horne is wasted as Patch’s sweetheart while Carroll O’Connor is miscast as a duplicitous saloon owner.

Blu-ray extras consist of film historian audio commentary; the theatrical trailer; and trailers for other Kino offerings.

Movie: ★½

GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER’S JOURNEY (1984). With a pair of Oscars for directing A Place in the Sun and Giant, and as the helmer of further classics like Gunga Din (see From Screen To Stream below), Shane, and The Diary of Anne Frank, it’s long been established that George Stevens is a great filmmaker. What this documentary from his son George Stevens Jr. makes perfectly clear is that he was also a great American. In 1943, he joined the war effort, leading a film crew that among other achievements shot the only color footage of the war in Europe, tagged along on D-Day, captured the liberation of Paris, and recorded the horrors still visible at the Dachau concentration camp. On the home front, he was part of one of the few battles won against the heinous Red Scare zealots, as he and John Ford defended Directors Guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz when the foaming-at-the-mouth Cecil B. DeMille tried to have him ousted for not being a right-wing tool (DeMille lost and was roundly criticized). As the ample interviews with various colleagues and collaborators (Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Warren Beatty, and more) demonstrate, he was respected for both his gentle nature and his filmmaking skills, and clips from several of his best movies are analyzed. Incidentally, the credentials of George Stevens Jr. are every bit as impressive as those of his dad: He’s the founder of the American Film Institute, creator of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and co-creator of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Extras consist of discussions about select Stevens movies with Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Guillermo del Toro.

Movie: ★★★½

PRIMATE (2026). Think Cujo with less slobber and that’s basically Primate, a horror yarn with a chimp subbing for a Saint Bernard. Be warned, though: Cujo may have been rated R, but it looks as deserving of a G as For the Love of Benji when compared to this new R-rated effort, which opens with a scene in which the flesh of a man’s face gets ripped off from the left eye right down to the chin. That’s just the kickoff for a movie that attempts to cater to both fans of suspense-building thrillers and of unrelenting gorefests. The great ape is Ben, who lives in a remote Hawaiian home with his owner, deaf author Adam Pinborough (CODA Oscar winner Troy Kotsur), and his daughters, college-age Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and teenage Erin (Gia Hunter). While Adam is away on a book tour, Lucy, Erin, and various friends find themselves trapped once Ben develops rabies and begins to slaughter the surrounding humans in gruesome fashion. The characters are thinly sketched even by undemanding slasher flick standards — only Jessica Alexander, as the feisty Hannah, makes any sort of impression — and even Ben is afforded all the personality of a Jason Voorhees, playing with a toy in one single scene and then turning into a killing machine immediately thereafter. Still, it’s an above-average funhouse ride, and it was a sound decision having Ben be played by a man in a suit (Miguel Torres Umba) rather than created via fakey CGI.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by writer-director Johannes Roberts and producer Walter Hamada; a making-of feature; and a piece on creating Ben.

Movie: ★★½

PRIVATE BENJAMIN (1980). Bob Hope joined the army; so did Danny Kaye, Andy Griffith, and the teams of Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, and Martin & Lewis. Stepping into this tried and true tradition of military comedies, Goldie Hawn enlisted and consequently found her signature role in Private Benjamin. She’s Judy Benjamin, a Jewish American Princess whose husband (Albert Brooks) dies of a heart attack while they’re boffing on their wedding night. Suddenly directionless, she joins the army after a recruiter (Harry Dean Stanton) convinces her that basic training is like a paid vacation, complete with condos and yachts. The reality of the situation hits her after she meets her commanding officer, Captain Doreen Lewis (Eileen Brennan), and her drill instructor, Sergeant Ross (Hal Williams, Sanford and Son’s Smitty). Hopeless at first, Judy eventually blossoms into a first-class soldier, but she’s soon forced to choose between the military and her new suitor, French doctor Henrí Trémont (Armand Assante). Private Benjamin isn’t just a goofy comedy about Judy’s wacky army adventures but the journey of one individual to accept herself and assert her independence — it’s a worthy angle, but it does slow down the final stretch as Judy throws herself at a man who’s an obvious lout. One of the top 10 grossing films of 1980 (#6), this earned Oscar nominations for Best Actress (Hawn), Supporting Actress (Brennan), and Original Screenplay.

Blu-ray extras consist of two episodes of the CBS TV spin-off (1981-1983) starring Lorna Patterson as Judy Benjamin and Brennan reprising her film role as Captain Lewis (and winning an Emmy Award in the process), and the theatrical trailer.

Movie: ★★★

RIDER ON THE RAIN (1970) / 10 TO MIDNIGHT (1983). Two Charles Bronson faves make their transition to 4K, one from his European phrase and one from his more prominent Hollywood stretch.

Like Clint Eastwood, Bronson was a major box office draw in Europe before he became one in the U.S., thanks largely to his willingness to head to foreign lands to star (and often be dubbed) in international productions. Along with Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West, Rider on the Rain was largely the film that put him over the top — a French production helmed by René Clément (Purple Noon), it begins with a quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and continues to include related cues throughout (such as “curiouser and curiouser” and a Cheshire Cat). Certainly, Mellie (Marlène Jobert) finds herself plunging down a fantastical hole of mystery and intrigue, as this small-town woman kills her rapist, disposes of the body, and then finds herself repeatedly confronted by an American (Bronson) with fuzzy motives. A Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Rider on the Rain benefits from Clément’s stark approach as well as fine turns from Bronson and especially Jobert.

“The way the law protects those maggots out there, you’d think they were an endangered species!” While this quip sounds like it could have come from any number of films in which a lawman feels frustrated by the system’s coddling of criminals, its source is 10 to Midnight, an alternately nifty and nasty police procedural. Bronson is the one spitting out those words — he plays Leo Kessler, an L.A. cop who figures out that it’s a creepy misogynist named Warren Stacy (Gene Davis) who’s been slaughtering local women. But because Warren has always been careful not to leave any incriminating evidence, nailing him might require some bending of the law on Kessler’s part. Director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) spent his final years before retirement cranking out subpar programmers, and nine of his last 15 films were made in collaboration with Bronson. This is one of the better of those joint efforts, with a script that addresses the absurdity of the insanity plea and how it’s never been anything more than a loophole for the benefit of shyster lawyers and their guilty clients. The violence against women is tough to stomach, but as in other vengeance vehicles, we tolerate it in anticipation of the climactic catharsis showing the villain getting what’s coming to him. In the case of this film, it’s a disappointing denouement, providing minimal release.

The 4K edition of Rider on the Rain contains both the 114-minute U.S. version and the 118-minute French cut. Extras include film historian audio commentaries and theatrical trailers. 4K + Blu-ray extras on 10 to Midnight include audio commentary by producer Pancho Kohner and casting director John Crowther, and an interview with actor Andrew Stevens (who plays Kessler’s partner).

Rider on the Rain: ★★★

10 to Midnight: ★★½

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO (1952). Anyone with any sense of Ernest Hemingway need not have read his 1936 short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to know that the 1952 film version does not end like its print source, what with Hemingway being Hemingway and Hollywood being the land of Hollywood endings. Yet despite some significant changes — and, given the shortness of the original story, the necessity for screenwriter Casey Robinson to pull in other material to get the flick to an acceptable length — this is a fairly successful interpretation, even if the stars never left the confines of the Fox studio while the second-unit crew flew to Kenya, Tanzania, France, and Egypt to shoot background footage. Harry Street (Gregory Peck) is a bitter writer who awaits death due to a severe infection obtained while on safari in Africa. Camped at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and bickering with his wife Helen (Susan Hayward, Peck’s co-star in the previous year’s David and Bathsheba, defeated here by a thin role), a feverish Harry reflects on his past, particularly the compromises he made in his career and the two women before Helen who informed his life, Cynthia Green (Ava Gardner, Peck’s co-star in 1949’s The Great Sinner, in a role created for this film) and the Countess Elizabeth (Hildegarde Neff). A huge hit — it was #3 for ’52, under the Best Picture Oscar winner The Greatest Show on Earth and the documentary This Is Cinerama — this handsome if occasionally static production nabbed a pair of Oscar nominations for its color cinematography and art direction.

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Movie: ★★★

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2026). Over the years, there have been approximately 30 filmic adaptations of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, with Merle Oberon, Claire Bloom, Juliette Binoche, and Erika Christensen among those tackling the role of Catherine Earnshaw and Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, and Tom Hardy among those essaying the part of Heathcliff. Adapted and directed by Oscar-winner Emerald Fennell (whose Promising Young Woman topped my list of the 10 Best Films of 2020), the latest version offers a radical reworking of the source material, which is SOP when it comes to this literary chestnut. Like most versions, including the 1939 classic with Olivier and Oberon and the 1970 adaptation starring Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall, this one also ends well before the book, lopping off chapters 18 through 34. Where it differs the most from the other screen versions as well as the novel is in its sexually charged nature — for instance, I’m pretty sure no other take found Catherine (Margot Robbie) pleasuring herself behind a boulder while Heathcliff (recent Frankenstein Oscar nominee Jacob Elordi) tried to sneak a peek. Fennell has stated that she approached the story with the mindset of when she first read the book as a teenage girl, and that’s reflected with the heightened passions, playful interactions, messy morality, and modern music (Charli XCX). Purists may carp, but this is actually one of the more entertaining adaptations.

Blu-ray extras consist of audio commentary by Fennell and a trio of making-of featurettes.

Movie: ★★½

WYATT EARP (1994). A notorious box office flop when it debuted 32 years ago (it didn’t help that the so-so Tombstone, which covered much of the same material, had been released six months prior), Wyatt Earp was probably doomed from the start: Audiences in the mood for escapist fare during the summer months don’t generally line up for downbeat, three-hour character studies (Oppenheimer obviously excepted). Yet writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s handsomely mounted Western deserved a better fate — clearly the most comprehensive of all screen Earps, it’s a thoughtful drama that illustrates in painstaking detail how a person’s foibles can over time fall by the wayside, leaving us with only the legend. The movie doesn’t shy away from frequently presenting Wyatt (Kevin Costner) as a lout, yet it also doesn’t strip him of any heroic attributes, still allowing him to come off as a fearless lawman hell-bent on maintaining order. The large supporting cast includes Gene Hackman, Bill Pullman, Isabella Rossellini, Martin Kove (Cobra Kai’s John Kreese), and Dennis Quaid as Doc Holliday. Spitting out one-liners even as he’s spitting up blood (caused by his tuberculosis), Quaid turns Doc into a memorable anti-hero, a man who acknowledges (even relishes) his own weaknesses yet does the right thing when the chips are down. This earned an Oscar nomination for Owen Roizman’s masterful cinematography.

Blu-ray extras include deleted scenes and a pair of 1994 promotional pieces, Wyatt Earp: Walk With a Legend and It Happened That Way.

Movie: ★★★

FILM CLIPS

VIRIDIANA (1961). Viridiana finds Luis Buñuel doing what he does best: both challenging and shocking the status quo. Banned in his homeland of Spain but finding favor at Cannes (where it took the Palme d’Or; see also From Screen To Stream below), this centers on the title character (Silvia Pinal), an icy blonde whose plans to become a nun are interrupted when she agrees to visit her estranged uncle (Fernando Rey). Typically outrageous, this finds the filmmaker serving up one of his most unforgettable images, a facsimile of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” populated exclusively by violent, drunken bums!

Extras in the 4K + Blu-ray edition consist of an archival interview with Pinal; a critical analysis of the film; a look at Buñuel’s early career; and theatrical trailers.

Movie: ★★★½

THE WARRIOR AND THE SORCERESS (1984). It takes less than 10 minutes after its opening to figure out that The Warrior and the Sorceress is a rip-off of Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, although it goes without saying — err, typing — that star David Carradine is no Mifune (or Eastwood), and director John C. Broderick is clearly no Kurosawa (or Leone). Carradine plays Kain (the same name as his Kung Fu character, albeit with a different spelling), a taciturn swordsman who stumbles across a village fought over by two different factions and decides to alternately offer his services to both sides. This OK fantasy flick takes place on a planet with twin suns, although it’s unlikely that Luke Skywalker lives on the other side of the world. And, yes, the rumor is true: Lead actress Maria Socas does indeed play nearly her entire role topless.

There are no Blu-ray extras.

Movie: ★★

FROM SCREEN TO STREAM

BELLE DE JOUR (1967). It’s been nearly 60 years since Luis Buñuel’s biggest commercial success first hit the screen, and yet its subject matter — humankind’s perennial struggle to deal with the many facets of sex — makes it as relevant as ever. In a perfectly pitched performance, Catherine Deneuve stars as Séverine, a frigid Parisian housewife who harbors masochistic fantasies even as she ignores the advances of her caring but clueless husband (Jean Sorel). She learns about a brothel that’s willing to employ her for a few hours during the afternoons; initially reluctant to join and, once she does, hesitant to perform the acts she witnesses being carried out by the other prostitutes, she eventually grows more bold than any of them, finally entering into a dangerous relationship with a brutish, steel-toothed client (Pierre Clémenti). A typical Buñuel rant against bourgeoisie hypocrisy, Belle de Jour also lashes out against unjust patriarchal standards and rigid marital conformities, and the director, writing the script with Jean-Claude Carrière (they adapted Joseph Kessel’s novel), blurs the lines between reality and fantasy to a startling degree. (Buñuel had stated on more than one occasion that even he didn’t understand his own ambiguous ending!) Often erotic, often disturbing, and packed with intriguing scenarios (the contents of a certain box prove to be as mysterious as the contents of the more famous containers in Pulp Fiction and Kiss Me Deadly), Belle de Jour is beautifully bold.

Movie: ★★★½

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN (2003). The original version of Cheaper By the Dozen was a big hit in 1950; I’ve never seen it, yet something inside me — call it my sixth sense for cinematic sacrilege — tells me that it didn’t feel compelled to include a sequence in which a fat kid slips in the puddle of puke that his brother produced moments earlier in the hallway. Sure, it’s a gut-buster for the under-12 set, and had the movie limited its idiocy to merely including yuck-o moments like this one to appease the crusty-snot-noses in the audience, it might have been mildly tolerable. But this dirty Dozen is incompetent at every turn and shameless on every level, with its heartwarming moments more likely to cause heartburn and its comedic bits about as funny as a mad hornet in the mouth. And the movie’s morals — that there are no compromises in life, and that a parent’s happiness means absolutely nothing — may even have family advocates raising their eyebrows. As the dad forced to baby-sit a houseful of kids while Mom (Bonnie Hunt) tries to make it as an author, Steve Martin again embarrasses himself. Lizzie McGuire star Hilary Duff appears as a daughter who acts, talks, and walks just like, well, Lizzie McGuire. And Ashton Kutcher appears as an annoying model-actor who realizes his looks are his meal ticket and who even admits that he has no acting talent whatsoever. Sometimes they make it too easy.

Movie: ★

DELIVERY MAN (2013). Flaccid as a comedy and even more limp as a heart-warmer, this stars Vince Vaughn as David, an irresponsible guy who’s a disappointment to both his father (Andrzej Blumenfeld) and his pregnant girlfriend (Cobie Smulders). Working as the delivery truck driver for the family meat business, he’s shocked to learn that all those hundreds of anonymous sperm donations he gave back in the 1990s have resulted in 533 children — and 142 of them have filed a lawsuit against the clinic in an attempt to learn the identity of their father. Brett (Chris Pratt), David’s lawyer and best friend, urges his client to lay low until he can file a countersuit, but sensing an opportunity to add meaning to his life, David instead assigns himself the role of guardian angel, injecting himself into the lives of these now-grown kids while keeping his identity hidden. This leads to countless vignettes of wavering mediocrity, including David helping one son (Jack Reynor) become an actor and persuading one daughter (Britt Robertson) to kick her heroin addiction (which she does in less time than it takes to brush one’s teeth). Delivery Man is a remake of 2011’s Starbuck, with that film’s writer-director, Ken Scott, assuming the same positions here; I haven’t seen that picture, but surely it must contain more humor and heart than the synthetic slop presented here. Pratt scores the only laughs as the perpetually fatigued father of four, but a dull Vaughn merely shoots blanks in a feeble attempt to arouse audience sympathy.

Movie: ★½

GUNGA DIN (1939). Loosely based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Gunga Din has served as the inspiration for countless adventure yarns over the decades, not the least being Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Set in colonial India in the late 1800s (the film’s unquestioning embrace of British colonialism has stirred some ire during more PC times), director George Stevens’ rollicking epic finds three army sergeants, Archibald Cutter (Cary Grant), Tommy Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), and Mac MacChesney (Victor McLaglen), discovering that the murderous Thuggee cult is again in operation — to stop them, they end up needing invaluable assistance from Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe), an unassuming Indian water carrier who dreams of becoming a soldier in the British army. The knockabout humor keeps the entire story in high spirits even when matters become grim, and the battle that climaxes the picture is marvelously staged by Stevens and remains one of cinema’s all-time best fracases. Of course there was never a sequel, but amusingly, it should be noted that in Blake Edwards’ 1968 comedy The Party, the Indian character played by Peter Sellers, Hrundi V. Bakshi, is an actor who’s starring in a Hollywood epic titled Son of Gunga Din.

Movie: ★★★½

IF…. (1968) / ELEPHANT (2003). The 79th annual Cannes Film Festival kicked off earlier this week, making it a good time to focus on two of the past pictures — both with school settings — to have won the fest’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

A key British film of the 1960s, If.… has retained its topicality over the decades, as its story about rebellious students who turn to violence as a last resort maintains a spooky resonance in this era of GOP/NRA-approved school shootings. Immediately controversial upon its release, Lindsay Anderson’s biting picture stars Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, among the more maverick students attending a repressive all-boys boarding school in England. The administrators and professors are largely clueless about the state of affairs at the institute, placing all the power in the hands of a small band of seniors who lord over their fellow students by treating them as slaves and whipping them for even the smallest of transgressions. Mick and his two mates (David Wood and Richard Warwick) prove to be the most anarchic of all the lads, meaning that they’re the ones constantly singled out for the strongest abuse. If…. made a star of McDowell and served as a launching pad for many others: Assistant director Stephen Frears later emerged as a renowned director (The Queen, Dangerous Liaisons), assistant director Stuart Baird became an accomplished film editor (Superman, Casino Royale), and camera operator Chris Menges eventually copped two Oscars as a cinematographer (The Killing Fields, The Mission).

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant also earned the Palme d’Or, which says less about the movie’s merits than it does about the festival’s tiresome tendency to reward controversial films regardless of their quality (countless past winners have been simultaneously cheered and jeered by the attendant crowds). Filming in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, Van Sant has made a minimalist movie about a typical American high school and what happens when a pair of students go on a shooting spree. Obviously drawing upon Columbine, Elephant is neither exploitative nor informative, although it’s certainly a crock. Van Sant’s desire to go for a documentary feel is completely undermined by Harris Savides’ camerawork, which looks as studied and bleakly beautiful as any art magazine spread. And despite Van Sant’s claims that the movie provides no facile answers as to why these kids do what they do, he includes enough background material — these boys play violent video games and watch documentaries about Nazis — to make it clear the writer-director is tipping the scales as blatantly as any more commercially minded filmmaker. Detached to a fault, Elephant seeks to encapsulate the high school experience but instead ends up grabbing at straws.

If…: ★★★½

Elephant: ★★

KILLER ELITE (2011). Killer Elite is basically what The Expendables series would look like if everyone except Jason Statham decided to bail. A fussy action film that’s heavy on the firepower and the testosterone but short on anything resembling complexity or wit, this stars Statham as Danny, a former assassin whose mentor (Robert De Niro) is being held captive by a Middle Eastern sheik. The wealthy ruler wants Danny to avenge the deaths of his three sons by taking out the overzealous British operatives responsible for their grisly slayings; Danny is forced to accept the assignment to save his friend’s life, and he’s thereafter pursued by a maverick British agent named Spike (Clive Owen). Anyone hoping for an intriguing game of cat-and-mouse between Statham and Owen — on the order of, say, Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive or De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat — will soon realize that their skirmishes, both mentally and physically, can’t even match the feud between Tom and Jerry… or Punch and Judy, for that matter. De Niro has long been merely content collecting paychecks with the same frenzy as Pac-Man eating all those dots, but even without trying, he does provide the picture with its most humane moments. But top acting honors go to Owen’s mustache, which would have been the envy of any ’70s-era porn star.

Movie: ★½

A MOST WANTED MAN (2014). This adaptation of the John le Carré novel may not be in the same class as 1965’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (featuring that incredible Richard Burton performance) or The Constant Gardener (which earned my vote as the best film of 2005), but it’s nevertheless an intelligent and absorbing watch, and it earns its keep by featuring yet another excellent turn by the late, lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman. The actor here plays Gunther Bachmann, the head of a German counter-terrorist outfit whose latest target is Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a half-Chechen, half-Russian Muslim newly arrived in Hamburg. Bachmann isn’t after Karpov to arrest him but rather with the idea that this immigrant might lead him to bigger game; to that end, he works alongside Karpov’s lawyer (Rachel McAdams), a prominent banker (Willem Dafoe), and a CIA agent (Robin Wright) to achieve his goal. Director Anton Corbijn and scripter Andrew Bovell keep their heads down as they dutifully relate this low-key thriller, but even they can’t do anything with a plot twist (I believe ported over from le Carré’s novel) that’s so obvious, it forces the viewer to mark time during the climax waiting for its inevitable appearance (it involves a double-cross by a duplicitous character whose intentions are glaringly obvious from their first scene). Still, the plot intrigues and the cast excels, making this a good bet for an evening viewing.

Movie: ★★★

MRS. DOUBTFIRE (1993). While there isn’t a single element in Mrs. Doubtfire that wasn’t handled better in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, this cross-dressing comedy is nonetheless an assured crowd-pleaser that nicely mixes laughs with a warm message about the sanctity of family. And like Tootsie, it was a gargantuan box office smash, earning $219 million stateside (Tootsie racked up $177 million 11 years earlier). Robin Williams stars as Daniel Hillard, an unemployed actor whose wife Miranda (Sally Field) has just divorced him. Since she has custody of their three kids, he comes up with a plan to remain near them: He disguises himself as an elderly British woman and infiltrates the premises as the family’s new housekeeper. The script by Randi Mayem Singer and Leslie Dixon (based on Anne Fine’s Alias Madame Doubtfire) takes a full half-hour to set up the high-concept premise, meaning it admirably doesn’t rush through any important situations or relationships. Furthermore, the film treats all its characters with warmth and respect; this courtesy extends to Miranda’s dashing new suitor (Pierce Brosnan), who would have been portrayed as an irredeemable cad in most other movies but here is shown to harbor genuine affection for Miranda and her children. Williams and Field provide this with a surprisingly tender center, and the picture has the decency not to cop out with the expected (but illogical) happy ending. This deservedly won an Oscar for Best Makeup.

Movie: ★★★

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2012). With her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, director Andrea Arnold elects for her film to serve as a treatise on race as well as class. Her Heathcliff is a young black man (played by Solomon Glave and later James Howson) forced to deal with the prejudices of those around him, even as he pursues a tempestuous relationship with the doomed Catherine (Shannon Beer, then Kaya Scodelario). Natalie Portman and Michael Fassbender were initially attached to this production that went through many hands, but once Arnold became its guiding light, she jettisoned all professional actors (Portman and Fassbender were already long gone by then), made the pointed changes to the screenplay she co-wrote with Olivia Hetreed, and opted to go with newcomers. For the most part, the amateurs hold their own, although the first half of the picture — focusing on the younger versions of the lovers — is more potent and inventive than the second half, which becomes more rigid as it works overtime to follow the dictates of the source material. This won’t replace the 1939 Laurence Olivier-Merle Oberon classic as the definitive screen version, but Arnold’s atmospheric direction and the stunning camerawork by Robbie Ryan help counteract a certain degree of lethargy in a respectable retelling that fails to scale any new heights.

Movie: ★★½