Month: December 2021

With their mothers arrested for drug possession and prostitution, the title characters are left to fend for themselves over a New York City summer. It’s a harrowing look at two youths’ struggle to survive in the inner city with the title directing them towards worse and worse circumstances. Skylan Brooks and Ethan Dizon are incredible as the two young boys and work well together, but the film itself is incredibly bleak even when portraying the perseverance of the duo.

Robert DeNiro is a Los Angeles bounty hunter hired to bring in Chicago mob accountant Charles Grodin. What should have been an easy job becomes a cross-country road trip with the two being followed by mob enforcers, the FBI, and another bounty hunter trying to get in on the score. Grodin plays a cunning, neurotic mess with De Niro coming behind at every step. The whole affair is an amusing buddy comedy with a supporting cast that includes Yaphet Kotto, Joe Pantoliano, and Philip Baker Hall.   

When they find themselves as the only guests at their hotel because of a snowstorm, bitter divorcee Mary Astor and grumpy widow Melvyn Douglas develop feelings for each other much to the chagrin of their young children. A relatively new addition to my collection of Christmas films, I really enjoy the chemistry between Astor and Douglas here. The development of their relationship from adversaries to romantics is lovely. Sadly he attention is taken away from them and their relationship in the lesser second half. It instead is focused more on the kids’ shenanigans in trying to keep their parents apart. It’s still fun seeing children in a film misbehave in a realistic way rather than the precocious cutesiness that is usually seen in movie kids.  

Living in a Reno boardinghouse while awaiting her quickie divorce, Claire Trevor discovers the body of one of her roommates along with that of the roommate’s suitor. Instead of calling the police, she hightails it to her sister’s home in San Francisco, followed by the killer, a private investigator, and the boardinghouse’s suspicious matron. The assumption might be that Trevor is simply a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it’s soon apparent that she’s not going to be playing the victim. It’s an incredibly dark noir where there doesn’t seem to be a single character of quality and loyalties are discarded and picked up again at the drop of a hat.