Desk Set (1957)

I usually wait longer between comedies, partly because there aren't a whole lot that I want to see. But it's good to have one on hand on a day when you receive sad news, as I had (details not to be described here). This color comedy sat near the front of my streaming list.

A group of library reference clerks takes notice when an eccentric stranger with few people skills, Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), starts measuring their work space. Their boss told Sumner not to explain his purpose, but they can guess: The company plans to buy an "electronic brain," which usually means layoffs. Head clerk Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) gradually, accidentally develops some sort of closeness with Sumner, despite her hopes to marry the exec (Gig Young) she's been seeing for years.

The Best Offer (2013)

You may have seen this described as an Italian film. That's a little misleading: None of the major actors are Italian, all the original dialog is in English, and it wasn't obvious to me that most of the story took place in Italy. But in a subtle way, the Italianness still matters.

Virgil (Geoffrey Rush), a world-class auctioneer specializing in paintings and antiques, is prone to superstition and unfriendliness. This may explain why he takes interest in one client, Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), who begs him to break from his routine and pay house calls -- er, mansion calls -- to assess her inherited property, on the grounds that she hasn't allowed anyone to see her in 12 years. She's not deformed; she just stopped wanting to be seen, even by a doctor in an emergency. Virgil turns to his craftsman associate, Robert (Jim Sturgess), for advice on how to get her to open up to him.

Nine Queens (2000)

Offhand, I think I've seen only one other Argentine movie in my lifetime, and it was about 20 years ago. I don't recall what first got me interested in this one, but I felt in the mood for a modern crime caper story.

Veteran con artist Marcos meets young con artist Juan and offers to take him under his wing to replace an accomplice. The next big job: selling a counterfeit of nine famously misprinted stamps with a queen's face on them. The collector in question, Gandolfo, is rich but about to be deported, so he doesn't have much time to authenticate them, nor could he do much if he found out later. It gets more complicated than Marcos anticipated, not least because Gandolfo is staying at a hotel where Marcos's sister works, and the siblings do not get along well.

Nosotros los pobres (1947)

This may be the most foreign DVD I have ever used. The menu is in Spanish; you have to either know some already or recognize cognates to find the subtitles, which contain a handful of errors. The extras offer no subtitles at all. But I'm something of a Hispanophile, so I felt a bit drawn to the movie.

Set in a Mexico City slum (the title means "We the poor," after all), the story follows quite a few characters, but mostly a lady's-man carpenter nicknamed Pepe el Toro and his family. They include a preteen called Chachita, who has to adopt an unusual amount of responsibility in her mother's longtime absence; Pepe's quadruplegic mother; and Yolanda, diagnosed with consumption, who doesn't live with Pepe but shows up pretty often. Things get much worse for the already poor heroes before they get better, usually thanks to scumbags rich or poor. Don't expect much in the way of justice.

Gold Diggers of 1933

Yeah, I don't even have to add the date in parentheses. Back then, musicals about stage productions were sickeningly common, and some titles had dates as the only way to distinguish them from others. This one, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, could be taken as a companion piece to Footlight Parade and/or 42nd Street, involving many of the same names in the same year.

What makes GDo1933 stand out, not just among musicals but among non-dramas at the time, is that it does not try to make the audience forget the Depression. Opening number "We're in the Money" gets interrupted due to the inability of the stage director (Ned Sparks) to pay bills. Soon after, three dancers -- amusingly named Carol King (Joan Blondell), Trixie (Aline McMahon), and Polly (Ruby Keeler) -- are sharing an apartment, hunger, and sporadic contact with frenemy Fay (Ginger Rogers). Fortunately, Polly's neighboring crush, undiscovered composer/pianist/singer Brad (Dick Powell), agrees to give not just his talent but considerable startup funds to the next show. Where did he get this money, and why does he insist on remaining a mystery? You can probably guess....

Breaking the Waves (1996)

I had been content to let Dancer in the Dark (2000) be my only exposure to Lars von Trier. Oh, I liked it well, but he has a reputation for further darkness. More importantly, he has claimed to direct under God's direction and thus be the greatest director in the world. That level of arrogance deserves scorn. Nevertheless, a Meetup group invited me to this installment of a '90s film festival, and I got curious. Now I know it to be part of a loosely defined series with DitD, called the Golden Heart Trilogy. (The Idiots [1998] gets a middling reception.)

In rural '70s Scotland, young Bess (Emily Watson) marries foreign atheist Jan (Stellan Skarsgård) despite the protests of her church elders and family, which stem in part from her past breakdowns -- possibly bipolar. She clearly didn't put much thought into it, because she feels horrible as soon as he returns to his job on an oil rig. She appears to converse with God (hmm, see the previous paragraph), closing her eyes to speak His words to herself. When a rig accident leaves Jan paralyzed and in otherwise critical condition, Bess blames her selfish wish to have him back. To make him not just feel better but recover, she indulges his wishes that she commit adultery and tell him the dirty details.

Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)

A film based loosely on a real-life dog famous for waiting years for a dead master does not sound like a good time. Do you even have a reason to watch, or is knowing that it exists enough? Well, its continued presence on IMDb's top 250 told me to check it out.

The most obvious departure from the truth lies in the setting: The real Hachiko lived in Japan in the 1920s and '30s, not some unidentified corner of the U.S. in the '90s and 2000s. In this telling, an Akita puppy gets shipped from Japan and breaks loose in a train station. The next human he meets, dance instructor Parker Wilson (Richard Gere), decides to take care of him temporarily, but the rightful owner never calls and Parker learns to love Hachi enough that Mrs. Wilson (Joan Allen) gives up on finding a substitute. The occasional narrator is Parker's grandson (Kevin DeCoste), now a preteen, who doesn't remember Hachi personally but deems the dog his hero.