Mirai (2018)

This 2018 Best Animated Feature nominee, the final one I've viewed, must have received the least attention of the five, at least in the West. After all, the director is Mamoru Hosoda, not Hayao Miyazaki, and the production company is Studio Chizu, not Studio Ghibli. But the fanciful poster drew me in.

Kun, age 4, initially welcomes newborn sister Mirai (whose name means "future") but becomes irritable as his parents pay less attention to him and as Mirai proves too limited in abilities to offer fun. When neither parent watches, however, Kun meets people he shouldn't be able to meet. It begins with the household dog turning into a man with a tail. Then Mirai appears as a 14-year-old, incongruously calling him "big brother." Other strange encounters and travels ensue from there, giving Kun new perspectives on his family and himself.

Pale Rider (1985)

If anyone could and would make a serious western in the mid-'80s, it was Clint Eastwood. Indeed, PR made more money at the box office than any other '80s western, partly, I suppose, because Eastwood didn't direct any others that decade. Of course, this was no guarantee of high quality to me.

On the outskirts of a fictional California town named for Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart), who owns most of it, LaHood's not-so-coy hoods, led by his son Josh (Chris Penn), wreak havoc on the less successful gold miners, trying to drive them away. The LaHoods claim to own the land, but their actions bespeak an illegal desperation, and the only "lawmen" ever in the vicinity are mercenaries led by Marshal Stockburn (John Russell). Things start to look up for the prospectors when a man who never gives his name (you know who) comes out of nowhere and protects Hull (Michael Moriarty), one of the few brave enough to go into town anymore. Hull gives him room and board, tho semi-fiance Sarah (Carrie Snodgress) has misgivings -- until they see his clerical collar, whereafter everyone calls him "the Preacher." Nothing like a man of faith to inspire mass confidence in a cause, but how much can the miners depend on a wanderer?

Battleground (1949)

Wings is my favorite war silent this side of The General, so it was about time I saw another William Wellman war flick. This came more than 20 years later -- later than anything else I've seen from Wellman, in fact -- but it still seemed likely to work for me. Even if few people in '49 wanted to see more about WWII.

The titular ground is that of the Battle of the Bulge, specifically during the Siege of Bastogne in Belgium, which places it in December 1944. It actually takes a while for any violence to turn up, and a lot of that is aerial bombing, which doesn't leave much room for honest-to-goodness battle with the focal characters, the 101st Airborne Division of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment. As war movies go, it has a low body count.

Shazam! (2019)

One summary I've seen of why DC Comics movies haven't done as consistently well as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that they aren't as good at individually balancing dark and light. Sometimes they try to recapture the magic of the Dark Knight Trilogy; sometimes we get the pure unseriousness of Teen Titans Go! To the Movies. Both methods tend to produce reputedly bland results. Trailers made Shazam! look like an instance of the latter, but positive responses across rating sites led me to check it out.

Billy Batson (Asher Angel), age "basically 15," finds himself magically transported from Philadelphia (what, not a fictional city as usual for DC?) to the lair of wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou again), who half-coerces Billy to take up his name and mantle as champion against the forces of evil. Doing so turns Billy into an adult super (Zachary Levi), and the old Shazam dies before he can provide further guidance. Not immediately knowing how to turn back, and having no real friends in his new neighborhood, Billy confides in his same-age foster brother, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), who's quite the fan of Superman and Batman. Together they figure out what Billy can do, including turning back into his kid form by saying (usually shouting, for no good reason) "Shazam," which also produces smoke and an apparent EMP. He'll have to master his gifts quickly to take on a new supervillain in town, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong).

Dodes'ka-den (1970)

You won't find the titular term even in a Japanese dictionary, but I expect to remember it for a long time, because it is spoken many times in this Akira Kurosawa film. Specifically, it's teen Roku-chan's impression of a trolley sound as he shuffles around a slum all day. I'm not sure whether he hallucinates or just immaturely (as with mental retardation) likes to pretend to be a trolley driver, but children taunt him, adults generally avoid him, and his mom frets about him. His imagined world isn't ideal; he complains about lazy maintenance men. Nevertheless, he's probably happier than his neighbors.

Roku-chan is more a framing device than a protagonist; our attention is mostly on others in his unenviable environs. These include two filthy drunkards, an overworked and abused girl, a homeless man and his young beggar son, a cuckold who treats all his wife's kids as his own, a henpecked husband who stands up for his wife, a haunted-looking man who never speaks, and an elder gentleman quite kind to troublemakers. None of their stories really overlap; they just alternate in the spotlight.

Brigadoon (1954)

This may be the first film I watched because of a vocabulary lesson. Dictionaries make the titular place sound akin to Xanadu or Shangri-la, albeit often with less emphasis on utopian qualities and more on separation from the outside world. When I learned that the source was a Lerner and Lowe musical and this version had Vincente Minnelli directing and Gene Kelly starring, I opted to take a chance in spite of a mixed reception.

Two New Yorkers, Tommy (Kelly) and Jeff (Van Johnson), go hunting for sport in Scotland and stumble on a curiously unmapped farming town. They can tell that the citizens are unaccustomed to visitors, but Charlie (Jimmy Thompson), feeling great about his imminent wedding, urges their welcome. As it happens, Tommy rapidly falls in mutual love with the bride's sister, Fiona (Cyd Charisse), nearly forgetting his fiancée back in New York. But Jeff can't shake the feeling there's something too fishy about Brigadoon, and he'd like to forget the whole thing....

Old Yeller (1957)

This is one of those movies of which people, at least in my circles, talk about only one moment. In the past, this would tell me that I had no need to watch it. But I learned from The Crying Game that there might be a whole lot more worth viewing.

In the wake of the Civil War, the Kansan Coates family has been subsistence farming long enough that adolescent Travis barely remembers how cash looks and single-digit Arliss didn't know the concept of money before the first scene. Their father goes to rectify this by taking a job that will keep him away from home for months. Soon the remaining family encounters a stray, yellowish (hence the name) mutt who initially causes trouble. Travis would like to be rid of the dog, but Arliss begs to differ, and their mother takes pity on the kid with no playmate otherwise. Gradually, Travis recognizes the redeeming values of "Old Yeller."

Pickup on South Street (1953)

Wow, not only had it been six months since my last arguable film noir; it had been nearly a year since my last black and white film noir. I thought I generally liked this genre, but perhaps I fear on some level that they can negatively affect my worldview if I don't space them.

A man nicknamed Skip (Richard Widmark) stealthily lifts a wallet from a woman named Candy (Jean Peters). This would not be an uncommon New York City occurrence, except that the wallet contains a special microfilm that Candy was supposed to deliver on behalf of ex-boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley). Skip doesn't already know about the microfilm, and Candy has no clue what's on it, but Joey acts as though his life depends on it. He insists that Candy do whatever it takes to recover the microfilm, through legal or illegal channels, with the considerable cash he gives her. She finds his secret dirtier than she thought, and neither she nor Skip likes what they've gotten mixed up with....

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

My parents felt that Spike Lee's first non-honorary Oscar was a long time coming and thus were glad when he got one for Best Adapted Screenplay for this. It sounded like they wouldn't have been surprised if he'd gotten more for it. The film certainly has received a lot of awards at other ceremonies. So I had to check it out, albeit with a little trepidation.

In 1972 Colorado Springs, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, son of Denzel) dares to take an invitation to become the first local Black policeman. When he sees an ad for the Ku Klux Klan, he calls on a whim and, sounding naturally "White" enough, arranges a meeting to join it. Not looking nearly as White as he sounds, he persuades vaguely similar-sounding co-worker Philip "Flip" Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to go in his stead. With a little help from others on the force, they monitor just how much of a threat this Klan chapter is.

Captain Marvel (2019)

Initial reactions by others were unpromising: The movie opened with a lower IMDb score than any other Marvel Cinematic Universe entry currently holds. Thankfully, this was a rare occasion that the score went up in the weeks afterward. Even if it hadn't, I'd probably have checked CM out, partly because I've never regretted an MCU viewing and partly to determine whether the naysayers were having a knee-jerk reaction to what they perceived as bad feminism.

As superhero flicks go, it gets off to a pretty confusing start. A woman (Brie Larson) initially known only as Vers (pronounced "Veers") can't remember anything from more than six years ago, when Starforce commander Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) found her, gave her a transfusion of his Kree alien blood to grant her superpowers, and began training her to use them in a space war against the shapeshifting Skrulls. Skrull commander Talos (Ben Mendelssohn) takes her prisoner and unearths, if you will, memories she didn't know she had, hinting at her hailing from Earth -- and the existence of a valuable experimental engine there. A damaged escape pod lands her in L.A. in what soon proves to be 1995. With help from S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (a youngish-looking Samuel L. Jackson), she hopes to reach the engine before anyone can misuse it, but she also has a priority to learn more about herself, the Skrulls, and the Kree.