A Walk in the Sun (1945)

Considering when the movie was made, it's a little curious that the narrator makes 1943 sound like a long time ago. But that's basically the only curious thing about this no-nonsense war piece. It even has Lewis Milestone of All Quiet on the Western Front fame at the helm.

Unlike AQotWF, it doesn't skimp on details to give you the impression of generic soldiers in any number of battles in any modern war. It starts pretty much in medias res, with an American platoon sailing to rural Italy under fire, having already seen substantial action elsewhere. Their objective: hike to a certain bridge near a farmhouse and blow it up. As war films go, that's a pretty small scope, running in real time or close to it.

Murmur of the Heart (1971)

Netflix describes this as a coming-of-age comedy. IMDb assigns it only the genre of drama. I definitely side with IMDb on this one. While French comedies are an even bigger gamble to me than other comedies (sometimes you'd think they found nothing funnier than rich people), I can at least tell when they're trying to be funny. I sure hope MotH is a "comedy" only in the sense of a happy ending; it doesn't even have an appropriate title for humor.

Yes, there is a literal heart murmur in the story. It serves primarily to initiate a midway change of scene for 14-year-old protagonist Laurent, from his ritzy Dijon home to a sanatorium, affecting which characters interact with him. For the most part, I take the title as metaphorical, as he's sorting out his sexual interests. And that should tell you right away that this film is, well, not for the faint of heart.

Kes (1969)

While popular internationally, this film saw limited release in the U.S. I could easily tell why: Never have I had more trouble understanding an English accent. For the first hour or so, I had to listen carefully to parse even half the sentences, especially those spoken by teens like the star. (Kids still said "thee" in northern England then?) It probably doesn't help that director Ken Loach favored amateur actors. Only later, reading the essay booklet included in the case, did I discover that the DVD offered an alternate dubbing -- and even that wasn't so easy. Why not offer subtitles?

Mercifully, unlike the last movie I reviewed, this one doesn't rely much on dialog. Oh, there's plenty of it, but I could get the gist of events by watching. I might go so far as to say that I didn't really need to hear any of it.

Hakuchi/The Idiot (1951)

I've long known Akira Kurosawa to take inspiration from westerns and Shakespeare plays for his samurai epics. But while I'd seen some dramas of his set in contemporary Japan, it didn't occur to me that they, too, might owe something to foreign artists. In this case, it's the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel with the same title in English.

I picked this one out of curiosity, not for its literary basis but for its DVD case description as having had an especially troubled production and an initially lukewarm reception. It certainly gained popularity after spreading to other countries, judging from its 7.5 on IMDb and 75% on Rotten Tomatoes. The main signs of production problems come in the form of strange scene shifts and inconsistent handling of narration (or lack thereof): Early on, we get a few intertitles, despite this being far from a silent movie; later we get a brief anonymous voiceover, and that's it. We may have to blame the cutting of more than 1.5 hours, tho it still runs more than 2.5.

The Wolfpack (2015)

When my mom described this to me, both before and after seeing it herself, I wasn't interested. Part of the problem is that I've lost some of my taste for documentaries, which often strike me as disturbing when not dull. But while house-sitting for my folks this weekend, I decided to see what was playing in walking distance, and TW was due in only a few minutes. It seemed as good a way as any to support the "independent" theater (which needs all the help it can get to stay open).

TW follows...well, "follows" is a stretch. It's about seven mostly male siblings in Manhattan who, at their dad's behest, almost never (zero to nine times a year) left their apartment, always accompanied and not talking to anyone when they did, until one teen dared to rebel in secret. Much of the footage is home video; other parts involve either the older boys or their parents. Their prime passion: movies. No wonder Mom thought of me.

The Lost World (1925)

No, it wasn't the release of Jurassic World that prompted me to watch the first dinosaur feature film ever. The AFI Silver Theater celebrated the latter's 90th anniversary with a screening and live expert musical accompaniment -- probably the best reason to watch a silent in a theater. Of course, the ticket costs about the same as a 3D movie ticket, so I won't blame you for declining the opportunity. But at least the standing ovation afterward doesn't feel as silly as applause at a regular screening.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle briefly appears at the beginning (the credits say "by himself" rather than "as himself"). A fairly famous other Arthur, Hoyt, gets a supporting role, his brother Harry O. being the director. The other likely familiar face is Wallace Beery, as the improbably named Professor Challenger.

The Big Clock (1948)

Rarely has a Netflix jacket description been so misleading. It says that this story concerns a man, George Stroud (Ray Milland), framed for murder by his boss, Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). In truth, Janoth wishes to frame the one witness to his whereabouts at the time of the murder, believing said witness not to be Stroud. He even orders Stroud, in charge of investigative journalism, to dig up as much as he can about the mysterious fugitive. With self-protective deceptions on both sides, no character fully comprehends the situation until near the end of the 95 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, such intrigue and complexity, which can be confusing and amusing in turn, come from a novel that debuted a couple years earlier. Kenneth Fearing (appropriate name for a thriller novelist) wrote it partly to express his anger at his own overbearing boss at TIME, hence the otherwise curious obsession with clocks at a news magazine corporation. Funnily enough, contemporary reviews in TIME praised both the book and the movie.

United 93 (2006)

IMDb helpfully listed 50 movies with (vaguely) patriotic American themes for the 4th of July. As usual for cinematic lists, I'd seen most and was not interested in most of the rest. I considered Clear and Present Danger, but it sounds pretty run-of-the-mill and I'd seen Patriot Games last year. Besides, U93 is about a half-hour shorter.

In truth, it could've stood to shave off another half-hour. The story of the one American plane that got hijacked on 9/11 but hit only the ground starts with a peek at the hijackers getting ready and then spends a bit too long on the regular passengers getting ready. To anyone who's flown commercially before, it's an utterly familiar scene. Maybe we're supposed to learn to relate strongly to the ordinary people, but my attention wandered as easily as if I were on a plane myself. It takes about 17 minutes for a sense of conflict to kick in, and when it does, it's not on the plane.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

The latest re-adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel inspired me to move an old one up in my queue, though it had a very long wait. Both movies presently have a 7.3 on IMDb; the newer has the higher Rotten Tomatoes rating. I've learned that newer ratings are less trustworthy, prone to going down later, so I knew my priority.

If people really don't like the oldie as much, I suspect that a significant difference in run time has something to do with it. Back in 1967, people still accepted epics with overtures and intermissions. The plot synopsis may not sound like enough to sustain nearly three hours, either: Victorian rural heiress Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) gets courted by a shepherd (Alan Bates), a landowner (Peter Finch), and a soldier (Terence Stamp). Of course, the relative familiarity of those actors' names was another reason I had less interest in the 2015 version.

Chimes at Midnight, a.k.a. Falstaff (1965)

You can tell it was pretty late in the directing career of Orson Welles. Not having enough friends left in Hollywood, he turned to European production companies I'd never heard of before. His use of black and white at this point probably had more to do with budget than artistry. Oh, other famous people still got involved -- Harry Saltzman, John Gielgud, and Jeanne Moreau come to mind -- but a sizable portion of the (rather few) credited names reflect Switzerland, France, or especially Spain for a reason. Thanks to contested distribution rights, you'll be lucky to find the film in the U.S. My luck took the form of a Welles festival at the AFI Silver Theater.

As you might have guessed from the second title, Welles plays Sir John Falstaff, a popular minor character from several Shakespeare plays. His moderate-length screenplay combines mostly relevant portions of the tetralogy consisting of Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V, plus some dialog from Merry Wives of Windsor and details from a 16th-century history text. Believe it or not, Welles saw fit to lose weight for a role consistently described as obese.

Cinderella Man (2005)

Perhaps the most notable thing about the second collaboration between Russell Crowe and Ron Howard is the discrepancy between its reception by both critics and the general audience (great) and its box office take (inadequate). I blame the title, which may have confused audiences on what sort of movie it would be. When Damon Runyon gave real-life prizefighter Jim Braddock the nickname in reference to his rags-to-possible-riches situation, it had previously been a known insult. Who wants to see a girly boxer?

I wasn't sure what I'd get out of it myself. Sports mean little to me, and boxing is one of my least favorite. Even highly acclaimed movies about boxers (which somehow have become disproportionate in the sports film genre) rarely entertain me much. Sports films in general are prone to exaggerating the seriousness of the climactic game, in keeping with major fans. But CM has a pretty good excuse.