Young nurse Bibi Andersson temporarily moves to a seaside cottage with Liv Ullmann, an actress who has suddenly stopped speaking, whom she has been charged to care for. While residing there, the two women’s personalities merge in explicable ways. Beyond that explanation, I cannot sincerely explain anything else about the film. The casting of these two actresses is brilliant as they carry enough resemblance to make the twisting of their identities much more eerie.
In 1933, retired schoolteacher Robert Donat falls asleep reminiscing about the last fifty plus years he served at an all-boys British public school. I generally don’t get a lot out of inspirational educator stories, but pleasantly this focuses more on Mr. Chips’s life and how he is affected by events more than being a motivational teacher. The aspects of aging Donat’s character through so many years with makeup and Donat’s own acting is quite well done. Donat’s relationship with Greer Garson is sweet and would have made a cute romance story on its own. It is clever how the same young actors were used to play generations and generations of each family, representing the constants and the changes a teacher experiences being at the same institution for years on end. 
Oscar Win: Best Actor in a Leading Role
Oscar Nominations: Best Picture; Best Actress in a Leading Role; Best Director; Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Sound, Recording; Best Film Editing
Scientist Martin Donovan, who has created a device that allows for the recording and playback of memories, dies under mysterious circumstances. Peter Dinklage, whose brother died in a car accident a year previously, attempts to use the device to solve the murder. I watched this in my attempt to see more of Dinklage’s major roles and he’s strong here, but sadly the film muddily concentrates more on the theoretical concepts of the device over the murder mystery. 
Argentinian restauranteur Ricardo Darín is experiencing a middle aged crisis. He’s being pressured to sell his family’s restaurant, he’s uncertain of his future with his girlfriend, and his elderly father wants his help arranging a church wedding between his father and his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother. Reuniting with a childhood friend and a sudden heart attack help him to reevaluate his priorities. Darín capably anchors the film, but I enjoyed the story most when it focused on his parents instead of the other side plots.
Oscar Nomination: Best Foreign Language Film
After coming into a large sum of money, socially awkward, amateur entomologist Terrence Stamp buys a country estate and abducts Samantha Eggar, a young London art student who has caught his eye. The film disorientingly begins from Stamp’s perspective, providing a chance for the viewer to sympathize with the lonely and traumatized young man only to turn that sympathy into realization of what that trauma has created. It’s very claustrophobic and demanding with solid performances from the two leads. I’m fascinated by old homes with secret hideaways, such as priest holes. 
Oscar Nominations: Best Actress in a Leading Role; Best Director; Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
Struggling to maintain an upper middle class lifestyle with her inventor husband Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert decides that her only option is to get a divorce in Palm Beach and find a rich man to marry and support them both. On the train to Florida, she manages to make headway on the second part of that plan when she attracts the attention of the wealthy Rudy Vallée. A bold Mary Astor provides the necessary second female for the foursome. It’s filled with amiable, silly fun with an unexpected ending that doubles back to the frantic, bewildering beginning. 
If someone doesn’t pay attention to credits, they may never know the expansive body of work many voice actors possess. This documentary attempts to give faces to some of those voices. Unfortunately it doesn’t give a lot of attention to pairing the actors to the roles they portray. It also devotes an inordinate amount of time focusing on producer John DiMaggio (probably best known as the voice for Bender from Futurama) than what I would consider bigger names in voice work. It remains an extremely informative and education look at the craft, provided by those who have made successful careers performing in it.
Bud Cort is the titular character, a young man who lives alone in a fallout shelter beneath the Houston Astrodome whose primary goal in life is to take flight. As Bud prepares himself for his mission, Houston experiences a series of strange murders that all have an inexplicable connection to birds. Typical of many Altman films, there is an expansive cast which includes Sally Kellerman, Shelley Duvall, René Auberjonois, and Margaret Hamilton who finally gets her own ruby slippers. It’s all very expansive and rambly with a lot of details to catch and ponder on while still maintaining a general focus on Cort and his objective.
In post-World War IV United States, a teenaged Don Johnson and his dog companion scavenge the desert while fighting for survival. The dog has been genetically engineered for telepathy, which also somehow makes him unable to forage for his own food, so he uses his keen sense of smell to find the rare woman for Johnson to rape in exchange for food. It’s all as gross and strange as it sounds, getting stranger after Johnson follows a conquest to her underground community that harkens back to the day when America was supposedly ‘great’. The descriptions of this film I had read really downplay/don’t even mention the rape and commodification of women aspects otherwise I can’t imagine I would have checked it out. The dog is a great character, a tough survivalist who has little patience of the nonsense of humans except for what they provide him.
When their colleague Greta Scacchi is found raped and murdered, district attorney Brian Dennehy assigns prosecutor Harrison Ford to the case. Despite his attempts to hide his earlier affair with Scacchi, Ford quickly finds himself the chief suspect in the crime. A pretty decent legal drama, the acting is fairly solid and the tension remains high. There’s a handful of possible suspects to the murder with none of them feeling like blatant red herrings and the mystery isn’t resolved until the very last moments of the film. 