Robert Redford is the titular character, a war veteran who decides to take on the life of a mountain man. At first, he is completely inept and completely unprepared for this role, but before long with luck and grit, his life has become the stuff of legend. The film feels longer than it is, not because it drags, but because of the scope of time and adventure that it encompasses. Redford manages to dirty up his prettiness just enough to pull off the rugged character, but I preferred the interactions with the other people he met during his experiences.  

A relatively low budget, Christian, time travel movie with a baseball theme, I didn’t have a lot of expectations for this one, but was willing to try it out based on the cast and the theme. I was mostly pleasantly surprised. Robert Loggia travels back in time to prevent a young baseball player from making a grave mistake that will adversely affect his future. Loggia is the strong point in the film. He admirably carries off the various moments of lucidity, despair, and desperation that are required of his character. The teen actors aren’t great and I wanted to fast forward through any scene involving the love interest, especially since for some reason she was costumed by a deranged lunatic. Craig T. Nelson was underutilized as the baseball player’s father. Sadly John Amos seemed to only be in the film to push various political points, like coerced school prayer. Despite that, there are some good ideas in the story about the potential costs of taking short cuts and has a fairly solid timeline development.   

Another theatrical themed film featuring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, this could make a good double feature with Noises Off. Though not as laugh out loud funny as that film, there is still a lot of humorous twistiness in this story. Caine is a famous playwright who has lost some of his magic. Reeve is one of his protégés who has written a promising new script. With the encouragement of his wife’s (played by Dyan Cannon), Mike invites Chris to their Long Island home to steal the script and possibly murder the young writer. I didn’t love the ending, but the twists are a lot of fun and the home setting has so many beautiful details that just add to the story.

Ethan Hawke is a time travelling agent trying to catch the one criminal who has alluded him. While temporarily working as a bartender, he meets Sarah Snook who has a tale to tell. It’s a twisty story that moves back and forth through time periods with a singular purpose. That purpose becomes fairly clear the most watchers midway through but it takes Hawke and Snook a bit longer. The science is a bit questionable, but the acting is great especially some of Sarah’s scenes. 

1980s Bill Murray being in this film is just odd. It’s as if Peter Venkman or Frank Cross was inserted into an Ivory and Merchant piece. At the time, he just didn’t have the acting chops, and perhaps the director didn’t know how to guide him, for the performance. He’s not the only off part of the production though. I didn’t realize I’d miss W. Somerset Maugham being a character in the story until he was missing and there wasn’t a good thread holding the various stories together. I’m not a huge fan of the original, but definitely appreciate it more than this version. That film got right into Larry Darnell’s transition, while this one spends a lot of its early parts on the war and explaining why he felt the need.

Al Pacino is a Cuban refugee, arriving in Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift. He arrives as a criminal and remains a criminal through the entire film, quickly moving up in the South American drug trade until he has nowhere to go but down. That last bit is the most interesting part of the film and where there’s some actual character depth from anyone in the entire film. I do enjoy all the 1980s Miami imagery in all its bright colored, white afroed, cocaine-fueled glory. I’ll soon watch the original Scarface and see if that changes my feelings on this one any.

After being double crossed by his most-recent employer, assassin Alan Ladd travels from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a mission for revenge. Along the way he meets up with Veronica Lake who has been hired by the employer to sing in his LA club. He’s also being tracked by Lake’s boyfriend and police detective Robert Preston. It’s an intriguing World War II era noir that also involves stolen chemical formulas and appeals to war-time patriotism. I like Ladd as the assassin; he has an air of mystery while also bringing a mix of menace and humanity to the role. I’m up in the air about how I feel about Lake, especially during her singing performances here which are a bit stiff and unnatural even when they involve magic tricks and black satin fishing costumes. 

Terry O’Quinn is wonderfully menacing as a man who desires and expects his family to be the perfect, All-American ideal. He probably should have stuck to ones without a teenage daughter though. It’s a good 1980s light horror film with just enough jump scares and twists to hold the tension. O’Quinn’s acting really sells his character and the movie, wide-eyed and innocent when he needs to be but changing at the drop of a hat when something threatens his façade. It also has some beautiful Pacific Northwest scenery, even when it’s obvious that British Columbia is standing in for Washington state.