Hell or High Water (2016)

Whew, now I've seen half the Academy Best Picture nominees in time for the awards show. This was the only one available to rent that I hadn't seen yet, and it's not showing in a theater near me. Fortunately, it doesn't lose much on a small screen.

In what I take to be present-day Texas, brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) commit a series of bank robberies. Although Tanner's unhinged and Toby's a rookie, they're relatively careful as robbers go; for instance, they leave the larger bills behind and take too little at any given branch for the FBI to bother investigating. Nearly retired Ranger Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) decides he'll finally see some action, setting out with dubious comrade Parker (Gil Birmingham) to track them down. The title, which gets spoken at one point, refers to an imminent deadline for the boys to make a big payment....

Port of Shadows (1938)

Had I paid closer attention to both film similarities and Netflix waits, I would not have arranged to watch this right after Waterloo Bridge. It was made around the same time and involves a romantic drama with a soldier. Fortunately, that's about where the similarity ends. It's a stretch to lump one of the first designated films noir in the same group.

Jean deserts his army post and hitchhikes to the port city of Le Havre, which turns out to have a thriving criminal element. He gets caught up in the troubles of 17-year-old Nelly, who has been avoiding her sketchy, persistent godfather, Zabel. If that's not trouble enough, a mob led by one Lucien hopes she'll give them her absent ex-boyfriend, among other things. Jean uses some of his soldier skills to protect her. Of course, he can't very well let the authorities know about him....

Waterloo Bridge (1940)

The last time I saw Robert Taylor directed by Mervyn LeRoy, it was in Quo Vadis, which I dug. That may be the main reason I took a suggestion to see this. It was also the personal favorite of both Taylor and co-star Vivien Leigh, who had just made it big as Scarlett O'Hara at the time.

In World War I London, Capt. Roy Cronin (Taylor) escorts ballet dancer Myra Lester (Leigh) to safety during an air raid. They soon take interest in each other and are eventually engaged, but Roy gets deployed before they can marry. Myra's effort to give him a proper sendoff means missing a rehearsal and getting kicked out of the troupe. She later reads Roy's name in a list of fallen officers. Between financial desperation and romantic despair, she takes up the world's oldest profession -- only to run into Roy again, as he'd been a POW, not dead. (It's not a spoiler if other summaries say it, right?) He has no idea what she's been up to, and she'd rather keep it that way, but the secret complicates their engagement, particularly in light of his haughty aristocratic relatives....

La La Land (2016)

Between its record-tying Oscar nominations and its high ratings across the main review sites, you might think this the best movie not just of the year but of the decade to date. I went in with no such assumption. One family member had had high expectations and was disappointed; another had low expectations and was impressed. It seemed only fair that my expectations be middling.

I had heard that it pays tribute to old-school musicals but is not like Glee. Nor, it turns out, is it to musicals what The Artist is to silents. It follows two present-day people who love different aspects of the past: Mia (Emma Stone), a barista who wants to be an actress and covers her room with classic film posters; and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a pianist/keyboardist with little interest in things outside of jazz, which can make it difficult for him to stay employed. As circumstances repeatedly bring them together, they fall in love, but the relationship has an awfully shaky foundation, tested by the dilemmas of whether to follow their dreams or settle....

Arrival (2016)

My poor dad wasn't feeling well enough to come watch this with me. I suppose I could've waited another week for him, but I've been getting antsy to see the most talked-about Academy Award nominees and hadn't given much thought to Lion yet. In retrospect, La La Land, which he's already seen, would've been a better choice, but I keep feeling reluctant: Ryan Gosling hasn't been in many movies I like, and Damien Chazelle is best known for something that disturbs me. Had I noticed that Arrival was directed by the ever-disturbing Denis Villeneuve, the latter reason wouldn't have worked for me.

Giant alien ships land at twelve seemingly random points far apart on Earth. U.S. Army Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker) invites renowned language professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to translate messages from the two known aliens at the U.S. landing site. Unable to work remotely, she comes to meet them face to...face?...and slowly learn their reason for visiting -- hopefully before someone in power jumps to the wrong conclusion. Her biggest help in the endeavor is Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who's more partial to science than language, but that doesn't stop the obvious signs of a budding romance.

There Was a Crooked Man... (1970)

The '70s were a strange time for westerns. After late '60s classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, and the works of Sergio Leone, there must have been some pressure to try things a little differently. We got the kooky, offbeat Little Big Man and the contrary, brothel-focused McCabe & Mrs. Miller, both rather popular but neither up my alley. And sometimes quirks came together with R ratings, as in this, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's only effort at the genre.

Paris Pitman, Jr. (Kirk Douglas -- don't worry; I'll take a long break from him after this review) goes to a prison from which, according to an elderly cellmate known as the Missouri Kid (Burgess Meredith), no one has ever escaped with his life. But Paris has a lot of loot well hidden and would hate to let it go to waste. The first warden (Martin Gabel) offers to free Paris for 50% of it, but a more conscientious replacement (Henry Fonda) isn't on board. Paris uses the promise of riches to enlist the help of all his cellmates to escape, including a pathetic youth on death row (Michael Blodgett); a lazy swindler (John Randolph) and his effete, resentful, but loyal and talented assistant (Hume Cronyn); a strong, silent, seeming simpleton (C.K. Yang); and a violent drunkard (Warren Oates).

Young Man with a Horn (1950)

It's a little late for me to be continuing my celebration of Kirk Douglas, but why not do it anyway? Other people must be doing it too, because several of the films I wanted to see have a wait on Netflix. I made a point not to get a western this time, because my last viewing of him came awfully close. It's also from relatively early in his career, when he was not quite my current age.

Adapted from a novel based loosely on the life of Bix Beiderbecke, it centers on Douglas as Rick Martin (no, nobody calls him Ricky), who starts trumpet lessons as a tween orphan thanks to jazz band leader Art Hazzard (Juano Hernandez). In adulthood, he makes the professional and friendly acquaintance of narrating pianist "Smoke" (Hoagy Carmichael) and singer Jo Jordan (Doris Day). At first his main problem is a tendency to deviate from the sheet music, which doesn't sit well with most employers of the era. A bigger problem arrives in the form of Jo's friend Amy (Lauren Bacall), who draws his attention away from his music....

Moonlight (2016)

It's unlike me to go to a screening on a whim, but I had walked past the theater in the afternoon and made a note to see something in the evening. I still have a lot of films to catch up on before the Academy Awards. This one had a more convenient timing than Arrival, as well as more esteem in the AFI's book.

The movie is set and authentically filmed mostly in the Miami area. None of my sources say which decades it takes place in, but from the opening song, I suspect the '70s to the late '80s or early '90s. At any rate, it focuses on Chiron (pronounced shy-ROAN) at three stages: around nine, when most people call him "Little" or "Little Man"; in high school, when he's transitioning between nicknames; and as a twenty-something, when he's adopted the alias "Black" from a...sort of friend, Kevin. In the first two stages, he faces verbal and physical bullies, partly for his scrawniness and partly for his mother's earned disrepute. (Naomie Harris had had a policy against playing such a woman, but she caved upon learning that director Barry Jenkins based her on his own mother.) His best support comes from a relatively noble drug dealer and his girlfriend (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe, again), the former of whom has the only line about moonlight. Then Chiron and Kevin come to occupy special places in each other's hearts....

Hidden Figures (2016)

We shouldn't hear many #OscarsSoWhite complaints next month. While I have yet to check out Moonlight, Fences, or Loving, they get enough positive press outside the Black community to suggest a few nominations at least. But only HF presents a focus on Black women in particular, facing sexism as well as racism.

Specifically, they're three NASA employees in the early '60s, more united than the other Black women in their position if only because they ride to work in the same lemon. The one with the most screen time is Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), whose mad math skills get a room full of White men to rely on her to check vital calculations. Despite exhaustion, she is receptive to the hints from everyone, including her young daughters, that she should hook up with one Col. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali). Meanwhile, Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) has been pulling her weight as an unofficial supervisor in the "colored" female mathematician division without the benefits; when NASA finally installs a room-sized computer, she takes the initiative in learning how it works, not just to help NASA but to avoid layoffs. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) doesn't appear to make any great contributions to the space race in the course of the film, but she does pursue an engineering education and career -- in a Virginia that does not respect Brown v. Board of Education.

Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Having enjoyed the first two in the series, I was rather dismayed to sense a lukewarm reception for this. Sure, it blew away Norm of the North in its first duel, but even weeks before Zootopia stole its thunder, few people seemed interested in it. Even the dumb-looking Sing is ahead by a majority of estimates. Well, as one of the minority of viewers who preferred the second movie to the first, I thought I might beg to differ again. Besides, I saw nothing to lose by streaming.

You've likely seen ads indicating that fanboy-turned-champion Po (Jack Black) finally reunites with other pandas, whom he had presumed wiped out. As hinted at the end of KFP2, the first one to find him is his original father, Li (Bryan Cranston), provoking the jealousy of adoptive father Mr. Ping (James Hong). This is not as incidental to the main conflict as you'd think, for the latest national menace, the oddly solid spirit of a bull named Kai (J.K. Simmons), can be defeated only by a "master of qi" -- pandas' historical area of expertise. Po accepts Li's invitation to the hidden panda village, where, if he doesn't master qi in time, at least he'll learn more about his identity, the question of which is plaguing him once more.