by Joseph Houlihan

Mo’ Better Blues, the 1990 film by Spike Lee, still crackles with an enduring intensity. Set in a world of black Brooklyn at the beginning of the 1990’s, the film follows Denzel Washington, a working jazz trumpeter, as he approaches maturity. Wesley Snipes plays Washington’s foil as a Saxophone arbiter of New Jack sensibility against Post-bop traditionalism. Spike Lee plays a friend, and his sister Joie Lee plays against Cynda Williams as the women who would love Washington.
 
Coming after She’s Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), and the sensational hit Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues captures the ferment of the Fort Greene Brooklyn creative elite at its fever pitch.

by Joseph Houlihan

Kaili Blues, the first feature film by director Bi Gan set in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou, offers a vivid and dreamlike meditation.
 
It begins with the text of the Diamond Sutra, a central sutra for Mahayana Buddhists, emphasizing non-attachment and the world as illusion. This sutra especially empowers the persistent interrogation of human laws, and perceptions of reality. The plot follows a doctor at a small clinic, as he navigates the relationship with his brother and nephew, and the persistence of loss surrounding parents.

by Joseph Houlihan

If you only see one Kazakh wife-stealing comedy this year, make it Walnut Tree. Even though it probably won’t be the Kazakh wife-stealing comedy you’re expecting.
 
The film, from director Yerlan Nurmukhambetov, is a small triumph, like a walnut. It’s perfectly paced, and it never abandons a sense of quiet, musing, comedy.

The Asphalt Jungle, the 1950 noir caper directed by John Huston and co-written by W.R. Burnett is a canonical film. It was a classic upon release. In 1950, Huston was already at the top of his mainstream success, having directed films like The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of Sierra Madre. And the film builds on some of the themes that this director and screenwriter pair had previously explored in High Sierra. It’s filmed on location. The dialogue is hardboiled. And the criminals are the film’s protagonists. The Asphalt Jungle is one of the first caper films, and it’s close to perfect in many ways.

The Heights Theater
February 4, 2016

Director: John Huston
Producers: Arthur Hornblow Jr., John Huston
Writer: Ben Maddow, John Houston, W.R. Burnett (novel)
Cinematographer: Harold Rosson
Editor: George Boemler
Music: Miklós Rózsa
Cast: Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, John McIntire, Marilyn Monroe
 
Runtime: 112m.
Genre: Crime/Drama/Film Noir
Countries: USA
US Theatrical Release: May 23, 1950
US Distributor: MGM

by Joseph Houlihan

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the new documentary film out from Stanley Nelson and Firelight Media. Nelson has a long career as a filmmaker; two of his most recent projects for PBS include The Murder of Emmett Till (2003) and Freedom Riders (2010). Moving forward through the civil rights movement, Vanguard follows the emergence of the Black Panther Party.

by Joseph Houlihan

In 2012, Robert Bales, a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army, massacred 16 unarmed Afghan civilians, many of them children. One Afghan farmer lost his whole family in the incident. When he was asked how he felt after losing his children, he replied, “I loved them all like they were parts of my body.”

The Cut, a new film by German-Turkish director Fatih Akin, explores a similar example of the intersection between mass violence and personal loss.

Lagoon Cinema

Director: Fatih Akin
Producers: Fatih Akin, Karl Baumgartner, Reinhard Brundig, Fabienne Vonier
Writers: Fatih Akin, Mardik Martin
Cinematographer: Rainer Klausmann
Editor: Andrew Bird
Music: Alexander Hacke
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Simon Abkarian, Makram Khoury, Hindi Zahra, Kevork Malikyan, Bartu Küçükçaglayan, Zein Fakhoury, Dina Fakhoury

Runtime: 138m
Genre: Drama, History
Country: Germany/France/Italy/Russia/Poland/Canada/Turkey/Jordan
Premiere: August 31, 2014 – Venice Film Festival
US Theatrical Release: August 7, 2015
US Distributor: Strand Releasing

by Joseph Houlihan

The oil derricks and the thirsty gardens of Los Angeles
And the ravines of California at evening and the fruit market
Did not leave the messenger of misfortune
Unmoved
    ~ Bertolt Brecht

The rise of fascism in Germany and the Second World War sent that country’s luminaries abroad. And the emergence of a German émigré community in Hollywood is responsible for one of the great strange collaborations of film history: Hangmen Also Die! (1943) with a screenplay by Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht.

Blu-ray/DVD
Amazon Instant/Google Play

Director: Fritz Lang
Producers: Fritz Lang, Arnold Pressburger
Writers: Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, John Wexley
Cinematographer: James Wong Howe
Editor: Gene Fowler Jr.
Music: Hanns Eisler
Cast: Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee, Gene Lockhart, Dennis O’Keefe, Margaret Wycherly, Nana Bryant, Billy Roy, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Lionel Stander, George Irving

Runtime: 134m.
Genre: Drama/Noir/Thriller
Country: US
Premiere: March 23, 1943
US Distributor: United Artists

by Joseph Houlihan

Cartel Land, a documentary directed by Matthew Heineman, offers a strange and ambivalent look at vigilante groups that have sprung up in both Mexico and the United States in response to the ongoing violence of the Mexican “drug wars.”

This documentary is timely as news broke Saturday, July 11th that Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel, had once again escaped imprisonment. This will have been his second escape. Loera, boss of a vast crime empire worth over $1 billion, trafficking meth, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, along with people, is personally responsible for more than 2,000 deaths, a startling number, and according to a May article in The New Yorker, probably a gross underestimate: “Nobody knows exactly how many people have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars over the past decade, but between the dead and the disappeared the number likely exceeds eighty thousand.”

Lagoon Theater

Director: Matthew Heineman
Producers: Kathryn Bigelow, Matthew Heineman, Tom Yellin
Cinematographers: Matthew Heineman, Matt Porwoll
Editors: Matthew Heineman, Matthew Hamachek, Bradley J. Ross, Pax Wassermann
Music: H. Scott Salinas, Jackson Greenberg

Runtime: 98m.
Genre: Documentary
Country: Mexico/US
Premiere: January 23, 2015 – Sundance Film Festival
US Theatrical Release: July 3, 2015
US Distributor: The Orchard

by Joseph Houlihan

Originally framed as a reunion for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, Summer Stock follows the traditional, “Hey, kids let's put on a show,” format of many of those successes.  But in 1949, Rooney was no longer the box-office draw he was and Gene Kelly was brought in for star power.

The Heights Theater

Director: Charles Walters
Producer: Joe Pasternak
Writers: George Wells, Sy Gomberg
Cinematographer: Robert H. Planck
Editor: Albert Akst
Music: Conrad Salinger
Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Gloria DeHaven, Marjorie Main, Phil Silvers, Ray Collins, Nita Bieber, Carleton Carpenter, Hans Conried

Runtime: 108m.
Genre: Musical, Romance
Countries: USA
US Theatrical Release: August 31, 1950
US Distributor: MGM

by Joseph Houlihan

As Netflix rolled out Grace and Frankie, a comedy series starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, now seems like a good time to revisit their canonical 1980 workplace comedy Nine to Five. In Nine to Five, Tomlin and Fonda star alongside Dolly Parton in a comedy about the travails of working women. And while the issues they address are serious, the touch is light.

Netflix

Director: Colin Higgins
Producer: Bruce Gilbert
Writers: Patricia Resnick, Colin Higgins
Cinematographer: Reynaldo Villalobos
Editor: Pembroke J. Herring
Music: Charles Fox
Cast: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, Dabney Coleman, Sterling Hayden, Elizabeth Wilson, Henry Jones, Lawrence Pressman, Marian Mercer

Runtime: 110m.
Genre: Comedy
Countries: USA
US Theatrical Release: December 19, 1980
US Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox