Identity

Seems to be a rather bloody variant of the English drawing room mystery, with 10 characters stranded by a storm at night in an isolated motel. Then they start dying gruesomely. Can’t say much more, but all is not what it seems, and the ending will leave you looking back over the whole thing in a different light. It worked for me.

The Ides of March

I’ve always known politics is a dirty game, but I’ve seldom seen it played as dirty as this. And in this movie the Democrats, fighting it out in the Ohio primary! No telling what the Republicans were doing. It would have been so much easier for director George Clooney to have this be Republicans doing all these shenanigans, but I think it has more of an impact ... Read more »

Idiocracy

I was wondering why many of my favorite SF movies lately are comedies, or even more to the point, parodies. In fact, just about all of them. It’s been a long time since there has been a “serious” SF movie that I could take seriously. What’s going on here?

I recall that the two SF movies that rocked me the most were 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Read more »

Idiot’s Delight

Made from a rather forgettable anti-war play by Sherwood Anderson. Clark Gable is an itinerant entertainer, doing anything that comes to hand, from trained penguins to mentalist acts, and Norma Shearer is more or less a con woman. They meet after a 20-year separation in an unnamed alpine country as the border is closing due to Nazi aggression. She is married to a Nazi and posing as a ... Read more »

If Only You Could Cook

Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur in a minor screwball comedy. Marshall is the head of a car company, about to be married to a conniving bitch, who gets fed up and walks out of everything. He meets Arthur on a park bench. She’s desperately looking for a job and mistakes him for another victim of the depression. She persuades him to pretend they’re married so they can take jobs as cook and ... Read more »

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

SPOILER WARNING. Clive Owen was a feared member of the London underworld, but gave it all up several years ago and lives a simple life now. But his younger brother is found dead in his bathtub, his throat slit, an apparent suicide. Clive returns to the big city to find out why. We already know why, because we have seen him held down by two thugs and brutally raped by Malcolm McDowell. ... Read more »

The Illusionist

When Jacques Tati died in 1982 he had directed only 5 feature films in a career spanning more than 40 years as actor, writer, producer and director. But he left behind this screenplay, written in the 1950s, that he never tried to produce because of some disputes with his family that I don’t want to get into. Eventually his daughter gave it to Sylvain Chomet, the incredibly inventive man ... Read more »

The Illusionist

This is one of those movies where even a spoiler warning wouldn’t do much good, because I wouldn’t want to be discussing the ending, but the marvelous set-up, and by doing that I’d be clueing you in to more than I want to. About all I can say about the plot is that the title of the film gives you a warning, and that it then proceeds to bamboozle you with that most useful ... Read more »