This is not a movie I would have chosen to watch on my own. Unfortunately I have been sharing the joys of classic Tom and Jerry cartoons with my housemate and thus we watched this together. It is…. not good. The human scenes, involving a wedding no one should care about, are all a waste of anyone’s time and they make up the vast majority of the movie’s runtime. The scenes with Tom and Jerry themselves are mostly fine though could have gone much farther in their Tom and Jerry zaniness. The animation of Butch, Topsy, and the other classic cats were off and the voicing of Spike was wrong. The one thing I did appreciate is that all animals were animated, which is a nice bit of commitment to world-building. I still could have done without singing pigeons.

Paul Newman finds himself in a role that would have gone to Humphrey Bogart in an earlier age as a PI searching for a missing man whom everyone hates. It’s a bit meandering and predictable as the Harper character pieces together all the little clues, but Newman is convincing as the investigator who is smarter […]

This movie is bizarre in a way that only seemed possible in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Six damaged characters interacting on an Army post in the south, the choice to have the entire film shot through a gold filter just adds to the feeling of oppressive sultriness that I associate with the South. The ending is completely whack-a-doodle, but may be worth watching the entire film just to experience its conclusion. The cast is quite stacked with Marlon Brandon, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Harris, Brian Keith, and Robert Forrester playing five of the main characters and directed by the incredible John Huston.

Production on The Thief of Bagdad was put on hold to make this piece, so it was included on the Criterion DVD for that film. Overt propaganda films are fascinating to me and I have a hard time believing that they are capable of inspiring or changing minds, but I could be wrong. More than half of this film is spent with a narrator who goes through the history of the rise of Hitler to the early days of World War II, including all the reasons why there is no other possible conclusion than Britain winning big time. There is an additional fictional story involving RAF pilots and their families to moisten some of the dryness of the rest of the narrative.

I do enjoy a good creepy horror film, versus the outright scary ones, especially if they include Bette Davis (see my childhood love for Watcher in the Woods). Even though I don’t quite understand the popularity of Karen Black in the 70s, I still gave this one a try. A mysterious house is a predictable setting for such a story, as are the eccentric owners, but sadly in this case, it was too predictable and the results weren’t quite creepy enough for me. It does have some nice touches reminiscent of The Shining and the aforementioned Watcher, but they aren’t enough..