Review – Side Effects

As medical thrillers go, this one wasn’t too bad. A psychiatrist (Jude Law) “consulting” for a pharmaceutical company prescribes a new antidepressant for a suicidal patient (Rooney Mara) with disastrous results. As the plot slowly thickens into a “wrong man” mystery, it picks up the unfortunate side effect of “you could have backed out of this at any time.” Despite some fairly obvious holes in the plot, the script is reasonably good and the execution well-crafted. Mildly amusing

Review – Death on the Nile (2022)

After finding some success with his version of Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh once again pastes on Hercule Poirot’s ridiculous moustache for this similarly familiar Agatha Christie classic. Between the cast, the costumes and the sets, they spent a pretty penny on this production. And as a result they got a pretty picture. Despite all the red herrings, the ending seemed kinda obvious, especially for Christie. But the journey was entertaining enough to keep the destination from being too much of a disappointment. Mildly amusing

Review – Knives Out

I can’t claim to know enough about murder mysteries to be able to say for certain whether this works as an actual mystery, a mystery parody, both or neither. But I’m confident that I had fun watching it. Daniel Craig’s Southern drawl is so terrible it’s hard to picture it as anything other than British revenge for Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins. But the rest of the cast does a fine job playing their parts in this tale of the squabbling heirs of a murdered patriarch. Mildly amusing

Review – Fingersmith

This tale has the longest first act of any production I’ve ever seen. The story is divided into a two-part miniseries, and almost nothing happens in the entire first half. The second half is packed with no end of fun twists and turns, but sadly you have to sit through an hour and a half of set-up or none of it will make any sense. Though the production is ever-so-BBC, here it kinda works. If nothing else, it’s nice to see a lesbian relationship portrayed with some actual affection and emotional complexity rather than as a matter of pornographic entertainment for the male characters (and audience members). Mildly amusing

Review – Winter’s Bone

This movie is an extended, unpleasant lesson in Ozark ethics codes. When a 17-year-old girl’s family faces eviction from their shack, she sets out in search of her wayward father who put the place up as security for a bail bond. Along the way she must make her way through no end of elaborate exchanges with her fellow rustics, trying to get them to tell her what apparently nobody wants her to know. The result is approximately 15 minutes’ worth of mystery drawn out to feature length by a great big load of awkwardness. Though the production is over-arty by far, the scenery is pretty in a bleak way. I just wish it had been a little more “tell me a story” and a little less Boogen Emily Post. Mildly amusing

Review – The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

The capsule description on the DirecTV guide made it sound like this production was going to directly confront the ambiguously gay nature of the relationship between Holmes and Watson. The picture does tiptoe around the issue, but apparently way back in 1970 it was still too early for a genuinely frank consideration. Homosexuality aside, the movie turns out to be something of a mess. Director Billy Wilder’s original cut was nearly double the running time of the version released by the suddenly-epic-shy studio. What remains is a cluttered tale of spies, little people, monks and so on. We even get a taste of the Loch Ness Monster. Thus the tale lacks the simple elegance of Doyle’s stories and many of the more successful pictures based thereon. Mildly amusing

Review – The Night of the Generals

This movie reminded me of the line in Apocalypse Now about how trying to punish someone for a crime in the middle of a war is sort of like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. Add the Nazis to the equation, and the story becomes still more bizarre. A German officer (Omar Sharif) investigating the murder of a prostitute in Warsaw in 1942 learns that a Wehrmacht general committed the crime. Suspicion falls on three individuals (Charles Gray, Donald Pleasance and Peter O’Toole), but investigating such high-ranking suspects proves difficult. Two years later a similar killing occurs in Paris, but this time the chase is further complicated by the extra layers of secrecy among commanding officers involved in the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and depose the Nazi regime. I was disappointed by the lack of clever twists, about which I can say no more without giving the whole thing away. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes and the Woman in Green

Somehow I managed to miss this one when I watched the Rathbone/Bruce Holmes marathon on TCM at the end of last year. Well, at least this completes the set. It also came along in 1945, after the studio got over the need to pit the famous detective against Nazi spies. This still lacks the Victorian thrills of the original stories, but at least the bad guy is the dreaded Professor Moriarty, backed by a woman who blackmails wealthy men by hypnotizing them into thinking they’ve committed heinous crimes. Mildly amusing

Review – Spellbound (1945)

If you’re going to make a did-he-or-didn’t-he murder mystery about a reality-challenged mental patient, this is the way to do it. The story is told not from the perspective of the suspect (Gregory Peck) but from the point of view of his doctor (Ingrid Bergman). Thus we don’t get stuck with two hours of rug-yanking what-is-reality nonsense. The all-too-infrequent dream sequences are clearly identified as such. Further, Salvador Dali designed them. Occasionally the plot takes an awkward twist, but for the most part this is the kind of expert storytelling one expects from Alfred Hitchcock. Worth seeing

Review – Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese helms an uneven blend of pretty pictures, mediocre acting and bad writing. Of course even Shakespeare couldn’t have saved a premise as dreadful as this. A marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner arrive at an asylum for the criminally insane to search for a patient who escaped from a locked cell. And if you’re now asking yourself “why would an escaped mental patient be a concern to the U.S. Marshal Service?” then you’ve got your first taste of the deliberate absence of logic that pervades the entire picture. This “nothing makes sense because everything’s a delusion” approach to storytelling makes it impossible to care about the characters or the probably imaginary problems they face. Though Scorsese commands a big budget and a stellar cast, everyone involved has done better work elsewhere. The result treads some of the same ground as Hitchcock’s Spellbound without being anywhere near as good. See if desperate

Review – Off Limits

Funny how a combination of the Vietnam War movie and the murder mystery can end up working as a representative of neither genre but still have at least a little entertainment value. Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines play Army detectives investigating crime in Saigon in 1968. They end up on the trail of a serial killer who’s slaughtering prostitutes, but their investigation starts hitting dead ends as it becomes more and more apparent that the culprit is a high-ranking American officer. Though the Vietnam angle is fraught with clichés and the mystery elements are likewise weak, the production does a few things right. The hot, sweaty, noisy milieu of the city is skillfully captured. The stars and supporting cast (including Scott Glenn, Keith David and a host of other familiar faces) do a solid job. And if nothing else, at least the relationship between Dafoe’s character and a novitiate nun doesn’t blossom into a vow-busting romance. Mildly amusing

Review – After the Thin Man

Though not quite as good as the original, this one still packs the same class and charm. Nick and Nora are back in San Francisco, this time trying to unravel a murder mystery involving her side of the family, which made it an interesting culture clash of American wealth encountering the seamy side of the street. A young Jimmy Stewart turns in quite a performance in one of the supporting roles. Worth seeing

Review – The Thin Man

The Hoffman Lens crew all agree that when we were kids we thought this was what being grown-ups would be like. The witty repartee. The fabulous apartment with all its jazz-age architecture and furnishings. The elegant outfits. The endless flow of cocktails from fancy shakers. Indeed, Dashiel Hammett’s well-crafted mystery plot is almost superfluous. William Powell and Myrna Loy are both at their best as Nick and Nora Charles. This is a must-see for mystery fans and highly recommended even for people who don’t generally enjoy the genre. Worth seeing

Review – Sherlock Holmes in Terror by Night

The title implies that something terrifying happens during the course of the production, when in truth barely anything happens at all. Holmes and Watson are set to the task of guarding the famous Star of Rhodesia diamond on a rail journey from London to Scotland. The resulting murder, theft and assorted misdemeanors all take place inside a train car or two. Though I’m sure this saved money on sets, it tended to limit the plot a bit. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes in Pursuit to Algiers

After outings battling Nazi plots to take over the world, Holmes seems only moderately challenged by this garden-variety series of assassination attempts. Our heroes serve as bodyguards for minor royalty on a boat voyage from England to Algiers. The would-be killers are inept, and the drama is occasionally interrupted by musical interludes. The result isn’t exactly one of the world-s greatest detective’s finest moments. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes in Dressed to Kill

This is the last of the Universal Holmes and Watson pictures starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Apparently Rathbone was so sick of the role that he refused to do it anymore after this. If the scripts he was getting weren’t any better than this one, I for one don’t blame him. The crime here is one of the most elaborate the genius of Baker Street ever faced: a convict knows the location of currency printing plates stolen from the Bank of England, and he’s somehow managed to encode the location into the tunes played by three music boxes. But before his partners in crime can pick them up at auction, the boxes are bought by other bidders. And so the chase is afoot, with Holmes trying to unravel the riddle and track down the boxes before the vicious criminals can get their hands on them. However clever the scheme might have been, unfortunately it doesn’t make for a particularly interesting story. Too bad one of the best series in mystery movie history ended on such a mediocre note. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw

Though this is basically The Hound of the Baskervilles relocated to Canada, it’s still a fun Holmes adventure. While in the Great White North for a discussion about the supernatural, our heroes find themselves caught up in a mystery surrounding a murderous moor monster. In one particularly eerie scene, Holmes is pursued across the bog by a “specter” wearing luminous clothing, a strange use of special effects for this otherwise fairly low budget series. The final turn of the screw turns out to be a bit lame, but otherwise this is one of the better entries in the set. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death

Here’s an interesting twist: Holmes under public pressure to remedy his own blunder (or at least apparent blunder). A thief make off with the priceless Borgia Pearl during Holmes’s demonstration of the ineffectiveness of the security system designed to protect it. Fleeing hot pursuit, the thief conceals the pearl in the wet plaster of a bust of Napoleon, one of a set of six in a workshop. So our heroes end up in a race not only to recover the pearl but also to stop the bad guys from murdering the people who bought the busts. One of the highlights of the picture is The Creeper, a sinister killer played by Rondo Hatton. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes and the House of Fear

After a string of “original” plots, this Holmes flick is actually based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle. A group of gentlemen pool their life insurance into sort of a tontine. So really it should have come as a surprise to none of them when they start to die one by one, each murder heralded by an envelope of orange seeds. The final twist has a somewhat illogical Murder on the Orient Express flavor, but otherwise it’s a decent outing. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes in Washington

In my review of Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror I griped about Holmes and World War Two propaganda being an uneasy mix. Here the famous detective once again finds himself transported to contemporary times and pitted against Nazi spies. But at least this time around he actually gets to use his wits to solve the crime and save the day. Fearing attack by enemy agents, a British document courier sneaks a microfilm-laden matchbook into the purse of an unsuspecting woman. So we get not only some solid sleuthing by our hero but also some fun sequences in which people pass the matchbook back and forth unaware of its importance. If given a preference, I like Holmes better in his original Victorian surroundings. But if he has to be sucked into the 20th century and pitted against the Axis, at least this picture sports a plot that’s more his traditional style. Mildly amusing