Five-and-seventy, and away we go.
Now Playing: Honestly, I'm running out of catchy titles for these things.
WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005, Steven Spielberg)- starts off awesome, with some of the tensest sequences Spielberg has ever committed to film (my favorite being the single shot where the stolen minivan careens down the highway full of broken-down cars just after the initial attack, as the family struggles to maintain sanity within). Too bad the second hour kinda blows. Rating: **1/2.

UNDERGROUND (1995, Emir Kusturica)- The Palme d’Or winner tackles a heavy, ambitious topic (nothing less than fifty years of Yugoslav history) but is surprisingly raucous. Miki Manojlovic is awesome here as and opportunist who deceives his best friend and others into thinking the war is still going long after it has ended, for his own profit. Many details might mean more to me were I more familiar with Serbo-Croatian history, but even now the film is pretty transfixing. Rating: ***1/2.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE: PARTS I and II (1945/1958, Sergei Eisenstein)- Nikolai Cherkassov’s highly theatrical title performance carries this film, not a womb-to-tomb biopic but the story of one man’s rise to power and his defeat of his enemies. There’s less incident than one might expect, as Eisenstein wisely pares down the story in a way that increases the impact of the climactic sequence. The Technicolor sequences in Part II are gorgeous, as is Sergei Prokoviev’s score. A classic, and rightly so. Rating for both films: ***1/2.

MY SUMMER OF LOVE (2004, Pawel Pawlikowski)- Point seems to be that Mona is the only principal character who is completely straightforward- Tasmin (SPOILER!) sees her relationship as a lark, a way divorce herself from serious life before returning to school, and Phil’s born-again Christianity is largely self-deluding, as he tries to will himself free from his violent nature. However, it all feels too inevitable- both Tasmin and Phil feel like they’re trying too hard, blunting the impact of the final realizations. Rating: **.