Harry and Tonto (1974)

I had seen Art Carney a few times but had trouble remembering who he was. What better than his Academy Award-winning role to rectify that? That said, the bare-bones Netflix jacket description (which neglected to say Carney's first name) didn't inspire confidence in the plot. I'll give you a bit more.

Senior citizen Harry stays in his condemned New York apartment until removed by legal physical force. He spends a little while with extended family but feels a need for a place of his own, preferably in an L.A. neighborhood with less crime than his old one. The same stubbornness that kept him in that apartment now prevents him from taking a plane or bus the whole way, because he insists on the best for his cat, Tonto. Apparently, car vendors back in the day didn't have to check for expired licenses....

One Hour with You (1932)

So much for my prediction that if I ever saw another Maurice Chevalier movie, it would be from late in his career. I seem to have a poor memory for such resolutions. Regardless, I had wanted a '30s picture on the unserious side, and that's just what I got.

In Paris, Andre (Chevalier) and Colette (Jeanette MacDonald) are such passionate spouses that everyone assumes they're unwed or at most newlywed. Enter Colette's friend Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin), whose husband Adolph (Charles Ruggles) rightly suspects her of infidelity. She falls for Andre right away and doesn't even care that he's married to her alleged best friend. As Andre's resolve weakens in the face of Mitzi's aggressive advances, Adolph turns his attention to Colette.

The Summit of the Gods (2021)

The only reason I knew this title is that it was included on someone's list of best animated features from 2021. The exclusion of Luca was, well, fishy, but I didn't dismiss the whole list on that basis. I chose to watch TSotG when I did partly because it's only 90 minutes and partly because it looked different from anything I'd seen lately. Which it was.

In the '90s, a shady stranger in Tibet offers to sell photojournalist Makoto Fukomachi a camera allegedly belonging to George Mallory, who might have been the first to scale Mt. Everest in 1924 but didn't make it back. Fukomachi refuses, but then he sees the vendor get shaken down for the camera -- by none other than Habu Joji, another famous climber who has been missing for years. Could Joji have come across Mallory's remains? He makes himself scarce before Fukomachi can catch up to him. Anxious for a good story, Fukomachi does detective work on Joji's background. By the time they meet again, it's not just about solving the mystery of Mallory; it's about accompanying Joji to record his next attempt to climb Everest -- in the winter, with no third member of the team.

They Live by Night (1948)/Side Street (1950)

It makes sense that these two would be put on one DVD, being the only times Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger were paired in leading roles. Not to mention they're both semi-romantic noirs about criminals on the run. I was planning to watch only the more popular (but unprofitable) TLbN. Fortunately, they're pretty short at 95 and 83 minutes, respectively, so I made time across two nights.

In TLbN, three men escape from prison and team up for bank robberies. Circumstances split Bowie from the others, and despite his less criminal disposition, he develops a bigger reputation. He wants to give up on crime and settle down with his new girlfriend-cum-bride, Keechie, but an old comrade insists he owes them forever. In SS, mail carrier Joe tries to swipe $200 to help his pregnant wife, Ellen, but it turns out to be $30K -- in dirty money, so he's bound to get unwelcome attention from worse than the police.

WarGames (1983)

This is one of those movies with only one moment people are likely to reference, and it's at the end (albeit not a twist like in Soylent Green). At first, I assumed there was nothing else of value in WG. Then it occurred to me that viewers wouldn't know that much if the rest were boring, so I opted in.

David (Matthew Broderick in his first leading role) is too rebellious for school but has a way with machines. In an attempt to remotely hack into a computer game company database and sample an upcoming release, he inadvertently reaches a NORAD supercomputer nicknamed Joshua (voiced by John Wood) and starts a war-planning simulation. Wouldn't you know that the systems engineering chief (Dabney Coleman) had just arranged for Joshua to have full control because the human element was too unpredictable. Joshua's screen displays fool NORAD into thinking that the USSR is making highly threatening moves, and the American response raises Russian alarms. David gets in trouble, authorities believing he's either a prankster or an agent. Oddly enough, for a long time, he's the only one to take the Joshua threat seriously. The computer is more autonomous than widely assumed, makes no distinction between games and reality, and fully expects to launch missiles within a few dozen hours of strategizing. It's up to David, his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy), and Joshua's reclusive creator (also John Wood) to prevent WWIII and the presumed end of the world.

Encanto (2021)

I decided that my last feature of the year should be something that promised to be uplifting. And preferably short, since I got a late start. This one's 109 minutes, about 19 of which are end credits, with no mid- or post-credit sequence.

It's tricky to gauge the era -- we see donkeys and no cars -- but the place is a Colombian village. Thanks to what is attributed only to a miracle, the Madrigal family lives in a house with a life of its own, and not in a scary way. The Casita, as they affectionately call it, can also endow each Madrigal child with a different superpower in a sort of coming-of-age ceremony, but Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz) was denied for some reason. Now 15, she tries to maintain a positive outlook despite her relatives tending to feel ashamed of her. Then the miracle shows more compelling signs of fading, between the Casita developing cracks and the family powers gradually becoming unreliable. Will Mirabel save the day, or is she, as her matriarchal grandmother (María Cecilia Botero/Olga Merediz) believes, the cause of the trouble?