Tunes of Glory (1960)

I haven't seen many movies that depict the military outside of wartime. This one is set in Scotland in 1948, so only the freshest soldiers wouldn't have seen action a few years earlier.

Maj. Sinclair (Alec Guinness) has had significant successes and honors, but instead of getting promoted to colonel, he learns that he will no longer be acting commanding officer of his regiment in peacetime. His replacement is Lt. Col. Barrow (John Mills), who's much bigger on discipline and thus less popular with the men. Sinclair finds himself under more stress than any of those men, not least when he illegally takes his anger out on a corporal piper (John Fraser) who's dating his daughter (debutante Susannah York) on the sly.

Hamoun (1990)

Allegedly, Iranian critics in 1997 selected this as Iran's best picture ever, tho I can't find a solid citation for this repeated claim. At any rate, it doesn't appear to rate that high on any international list of more recent vintage, but it still enjoys high esteem.

Hamid Hamoun (Khosro Shakibai) is already under a bit of stress -- amid work at an import-export firm, study for a Ph.D., and effort to establish himself as a writer -- when his wife of seven years, Mahshid (Bita Farahi), blindsides him by suing for divorce. Against lawyer advice, he doesn't acquiesce, hoping to rekindle her love or at least understand, partly via flashbacks, why that won't happen. People start accusing him of mental instability, and as he fails to find comfort or satisfying answers, that assessment becomes increasingly true.

White Nights (1985)

The title refers to the far-northern phenomenon of sunlight way into summer nights. Sure enough, the story takes place in that setting, and while the white nights themselves are not important to the plot, they serve as a symbol of confusion and frustration. I had not known this when I saved the DVD for the start of daylight saving time.

Famed first-generation American dancer Nikolai (Mikhail Baryshnikov himself) has a stroke of bad luck when his malfunctioning commercial plane (I assume this was never an in-flight movie) has to make an emergency stop in the USSR, from which he defected. In his unsuccessful haste to hide his identity, he does not brace himself for a rough landing and thus gets injured and knocked out. When he wakes, he's not in prison in the conventional sense, but neither is he allowed to go much of anywhere unless he agrees with the proposal of Col. Chaiko (Jerzy Skolimowski) to dance for Soviets again. In the meantime, in addition to being on camera, he's supervised by roommates Raymond (Gregory Hines), a stage actor and tap dancer who defected in the opposite direction; and Darya (Isabella Rosselini's U.S. debut), Raymond's wife. Can Nikolai persuade them to take the risks needed to let him flee, bearing in mind that the KGB could very well claim he died from his crash injuries?

The Adam Project (2022)

Having nothing to do with Adam, this brand-new release didn't tempt me until a friend and I were perusing our Netflix options. He's big on time travel stories (so I've recommended Time Bandits to him), and I hadn't seen one in more than a year. Plus, this one has several Marvel movie alumni.

Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds), son of accidental time travel inventor Louis (Mark Ruffalo), attempts to fly a time jet from 2050 to 2018, the last known time point for his wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana). The tyrannical Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener) forbids him, and a gunshot from her right-hand man (Alex Mallari, Jr.) forces Adam to stop in 2022, too injured to fly unassisted for a while. There he meets his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell), whom he reluctantly needs to reactivate his jet. Their mission becomes bigger than rescuing one woman: As the trailer reveals, they may see fit to use time travel to prevent its own invention.

Shaolin (2011)

This must be the first movie I've seen because it was excerpted in a video where an expert rates on-screen kung fu veracity. I decided it had been long enough since my last martial art viewing.

In the 1920s, Hou Jie (Andy Lau) is a warlord as brutal and treacherous as the next -- until his daughter (Shimada Runa) gets killed, his wife (Fan Bingbing) walks out on him, and he becomes a powerless fugitive with a bounty on his head. Not knowing what else to do with his life, he joins Shaolin Monastery, which he had recently desecrated, the abbot (Yu Hai) being more forgiving than most of the monks. He finds a new level of emotional peace, but his fighting days aren't over: His former deputy and "sworn brother," Cao Man (Nicholas Tse), is perhaps even worse than Hou used to be, at least with regard to refugees. And these monks are not the hands-off, super-pacifistic kind of Buddhists.

Triple Feature: Smallfoot (2018), Missing Link (2019), Abominable (2019)

When I realized that I could watch all three of these dueling movies on one flight, I couldn't resist. They all came out within a year of each other and are animated adventure comedies involving humans who discover that bigfeet of some sort not only exist but are hardly monsters. Now I would know my personal preference among them.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)

For some reason, on my return flight, I felt like watching only animated features. Eh, different airline, different options. This animation hadn't especially tempted me before the Academy Award nomination announcement, tho I did have it tentatively on my Netflix list. Regardless, it was the first one I found available that I hadn't seen or rejected.

The Mitchells are all a little quirky, but that doesn't mean they get along swimmingly like the Addams Family. In particular, narrator Katie (Abbi Jacobson), who's about to start film school, has trouble finding common ground with her Luddite dad, Rick (Danny McBride). He decides to take the family on a long road trip to the school for bonding's sake. It's during this ride that an AI called PAL (Olivia Colman), shown as a crude face on a smartphone, goes Skynet and everything with an intact related chip -- which is nearly omnipresent, especially in the latest robots -- does her bidding. Thanks to sheer luck and an old car, the Mitchells are soon the last known uncaptured humans. Will they have the teamwork and other skills to save everyone else?

Star Wars, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Boy, how unpopular does a modern Star Wars movie have to be for me to wait more than two years to check it out? This isn't even a stand-alone; it's the conclusion of the numbered series, and I'd hate to end my knowledge with the unresolved prior episode. Well, what finally spurred me to watch it was a set of diminishing options for passing time on my flight. Most of the remaining movies were either unknown to me, even more panned, or not suited to my mood at the time.

One of the first things we learn is something I never saw coming: Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is back, and not as a ghost. He claims credit for directing the First Order behind the scenes and corrupting Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), whom he now bids kill the last Jedi, Rey (Daisy Ridley). As impressive as Rey was before, she feels that she has a lot to learn before taking on Palpatine. Good thing she still has plenty of allies, old and new, and Kylo isn't as committed as he once was.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

Given the underwhelming performances of Suicide Squad (2016) and Birds of Prey (2020), I figured that this would be OK at best. I took more interest in it after seeing an episode of the ensuing TV series, Peacemaker. Then I learned that this was the kind of sequel that makes very few allusions to past events, so I wouldn't feel too left out.

The title refers to a ragtag bunch of talented convicts who have opted to do ostensibly heroic black ops in exchange for lighter sentences, albeit with the threat of remote execution if they don't follow orders (no actual suicides herein). Their current mission: Sneak onto the island of Corto Maltese and wreck the lab of a powerful secret project before the new tinpot dictator (Juan Diego Botto) can use it against the U.S. Don't get too attached to the first several squad members we see, because most don't make it past the beach. Fortunately, the B team hasn't been intercepted yet....