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36 Fillette (1988)
Filmmaker(s): Catherine Breillat

Lili, a pouty and voluptuous 14-year-old, is caravan camping with her family in Biarritz. She's self-aware and holds her own in a café conversation with a concert pianist she meets, but she has a wild streak and she's testing her powers over men, finding that she doesn't always control her moods or actions, and she's impatient with being a virgin. She sets off with her brother to a disco, latching onto an aging playboy who is himself hot and cold to her. She is ambivalent about losing her virginity that night, willing the next, and determined by the third.

Evenings of Cabiria In the late seventies, actress/writer Breillat made a film (“Young Girl”) about the nearly suicidal angst of female sexual discovery/fantasy. It is worth watching for the raw honesty, but it misses being a whole film. Five years later, she wrote a Fellini film,...


Published December 6, 2022
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13 Assassins (2010)
Take up your sword.
Filmmaker(s): Takashi Miike

A bravado period action film set at the end of Japan's feudal era in which a group of unemployed samurai are enlisted to bring down a sadistic lord and prevent him from ascending to the throne and plunging the country into a war-torn future.

The Rustic in the Woods There are some directors that you just consider geniuses. They innovate, walking into new modes, vocabularies. My list of these artists is short. They greatly enrich because they expand and challenge. Other filmmakers may be talented and even capable of making personal...


Published December 6, 2022
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Terminator Genisys (2015)
Reset the future
Filmmaker(s): Alan Taylor

The year is 2029. John Connor, leader of the resistance continues the war against the machines. At the Los Angeles offensive, John's fears of the unknown future begin to emerge when TECOM spies reveal a new plot by SkyNet that will attack him from both fronts; past and future, and will ultimately change warfare forever.

Reincarnation What do you do if your strategy is copying old successes, and the copies don’t do as well as you like? This strategy of ‘rebooting’ is mainstream now. We accept it, so long as the new franchise shows promise. That means that some storylines can...


Published December 6, 2022
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The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935)
Filmmaker(s): Leslie S. Hiscott

Holmes, retired to Sussex, is drawn into a last case when his arch enemy Moriarty arranges with an American gang to kill one John Douglas, a country gentleman with a mysterious past. Holmes' methods baffle Watson and Lestrade, but his results astonish them. In a long flashback, the victim's wife tells the story of the sinister Vermissa Valley.

Inserted Americans This is the second of the early Holmes film experiments. In The Sign of Four, they messed up by showing us the entire history before Holmes appears. Here, they do something similar. While Holmes interviews a woman about her recently dead husband, we have...


Published December 6, 2022
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The Phantom of Chinatown (1940)
A Slight Case Of Murder... Solved by Jimmy Wong!
Filmmaker(s): Phil Rosen

In the middle of a pictorial lecture on his recent expedition to the Mongolian Desert, Dr. John Benton,the famous explorer, drinks from the water bottle on his lecture table, collapses and dies. His last words "Eternal Fire" are the only clue Chinese detective Jimmy Wong and Captain Street of the police department have to work on.

Conspiratorial Filmmaking I maintain that some very important conventions were worked out in 30s mysteries. The Charlie Chan series was instrumental in some of these, and this is the last of them. It incidentally has Charlie’s son as the detective, the first Asian playing the character. The...


Published December 6, 2022
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The Crime of the Century (1933)
AD 2031, the passengers in the train are the only survivors on Earth.
Filmmaker(s): Bong Joon-ho

In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.

In Front of your Face A mystery the way they used to make them, full of clues, an onscreen detective and the expectation that the audience is working hard to make sense of everything. Near then end, they stop the film and an announcer appears to...


Published December 6, 2022
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The Extendables (2014)
Filmmaker(s): Brian Thompson

A struggling and publicly disgraced Hollywood icon gets another shot at mega stardom when he is hired to star and direct an action movie in Uzbekistan.

Terminatered When you push the steroids, you do damage to your body. Your ability to have sex goes away and you get depressed. Your mental acuity suffers. These are known effects that are accepted by actors who have little to offer other than muscles. One expects...


Published December 6, 2022
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Confess, Fletch (2022)
A dead body. A stolen Picasso. And this guy.
Filmmaker(s): Greg Mottola

The roguishly charming and endlessly troublesome Fletch becomes the prime suspect in a murder case while searching for a stolen art collection. The only way to prove his innocence? Find out which of the long list of suspects is the culprit - from the eccentric art dealer and a missing playboy to a crazy neighbor and Fletch’s Italian girlfriend. Crime, in fact, has never been this disorganized.

Padre For some reason, the noir detective — and the companion trope of sky — is easy to turn comedic. One of the tried and true techniques is the Nick Charles model of coolness, plus joke lines intended directly for the viewer not the on-screen companion. I...


Published December 5, 2022
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50 First Dates (2004)
Imagine having to win over the girl of your dreams... every friggin' day.
Filmmaker(s): Peter Segal

Henry is a player skilled at seducing women. But when this veterinarian meets Lucy, a girl with a quirky problem when it comes to total recall, he realizes it's possible to fall in love all over again…and again, and again. That's because the delightful Lucy has no short-term memory, so Henry must woo her day after day until he finally sweeps her off her feet.

Drew Draws I’ve come to appreciate this actress. Women can do things in that space between the film and us that male actors just cannot. Blame it on the feminine nature or cultural imperatives, depending on your views. But there is no denying that the art...


Published December 5, 2022
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The Kennel Murder Case (1933)
William Powell returns as Philo Vance
Filmmaker(s): Michael Curtiz

Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue.

Surprised I’m trying to find where film audiences started to accept the mystery as merely a surprise ending. You know that the successful mysteries for many decades were “detective stories” that had very clear rules about how the viewer could outwit the writer and guess, actually...


Published December 1, 2022
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