Mostly Short Movie Reviews

Mostly Short Movie Reviews

A Day in the Country (Partie De Campagne) a film by Jean Renoir, 1946.
Brilliant.  A masterpiece.

All About Eve

Still chillingly good, brilliant in parts, but the dialog seems almost too quick and, dare I say it, starting to sound a little dated.

Amadeus 
Entertaining fiction. 

American Beauty

A stupid and even reprehensible movie. Don't bother watching it. American Beauty exemplifies much of what's dreadfully wrong with both America and American movies. All the characters quickly turn into caricatures and the film runs out of anywhere to go long before a senseless murder brings it to an end. This film is sick on many different levels; in it's senseless violence especially. Like many American films (Barton Fink comes to mind) this film runs out of ideas before it can resolve any of the dramatic situations it has set up so, not knowing what else to do, has a horrifying, cold blooded murder. In it's juvenile view of relationships, sex is only a masturbation fantasy that can never be fulfilled and a cast of unremittingly dysfunctional characters offers no hope of redemption or salvation. This film is the anti-Rocky; it will leave you feeling life is hardly worth living.

An American in Paris  - Gene Kelly

Only one of the best movie musicals ever.

And When Did You Last See Your Father? - 2007 British drama directed by Anand Tucker. The screenplay by David Nicholls is based on the 1993 memoir of the same title by Blake Morrison. - Very good.  Worth watching.

April in Paris 1952

When there's singing and dancing it's wonderful. When Doris Day is singing it's magic; she is so gorgeous you want to bite her. Otherwise, a slow start and and very uneven with a lot of filler between the numbers.

Anastasia 1956

A fascinating and thought-provoking if not exactly sophisticated vehicle for Yul Brenner, Ingrid Bergman and Helen Hayes. Brenner is mesmerizing and Bergman compelling.

Anomalisa

Boring; stopped watching after 25 minutes (thought I'd give it a chance).

The Artist
Very good. Worth watching.

Au Hazard Balthazar -  (b&w) directed by Robert Bresson
Profoundly moving.  A brilliant film.  The adventures of a donkey and the girl who loved him.

Bootleg film directed by Masahiro Kobayashi 
A boring, repetitious film with a stupid script, punctuated by brutal, senseless violence.

Good acting and camera work can't save this attempt at an “art” film.

The Band Wagon

The ultimate singing and dancing musical comedy extravaganza. Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse are as smooth as silk. Great songs, including the classic, “That's Entertainment.” There is real romance and drama along with lots of buffoonery.

Between the Folds Origami and Paper Art | Independent Lens …

Fascinating. Mind-boggling. People's creativity is boundless.

The Big Sleep 1946 directed by Howard Hawks with Bogart and Bacall
Not to be missed.  Classic Hollywood.

Black Dahlia

Starts out with all the potential to re-create in color a great noir film from the fifties but bogs down in lackluster performances and a growing sense of boredom and histrionics. I stopped watching about 2/3rd's of the way through. The film is at it's most interesting in bringing to life post WW11 1940's Los Angeles. The street scenes are eye-catching.

The Bells of St. Mary's

Engaging and charming for the first 45 minutes then suddenly flat and predictable.

Bernard and Doris (2006) starring  ‎Susan Sarandon‎; ‎Ralph Fiennes - tobacco heiress Doris Duke  and her Irish butler Bernard.  I really liked this movie.

La Bete Humaine (1938)

Grabs you from the first frame and never lets up. A masterpiece of suspense brilliantly directed and acted. A great movie that has lost none of it's immediacy.

Blue Jasmine written and directed by Woody Allen 
A not very interesting film about not very interesting people. Sally Hawkins gives the Oscar 

deserving performance, not that Cate Blanchett isn't very good. Alec Baldwin plays his usual

character.  The writing sheds little light and no heat; the film is well crafted at least.

Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2)

Slow, repetitious, dull, self-indulgent. Fine acting and sensational sex scenes are not enough to save this pretentious and overlong film. If you like extended and intimate footage of people eating spaghetti then this is your film.

Bright Star

Supposedly the story of the poet John Keats and Fanny. Begins with some of the worst music and singing I've ever heard in a movie. And it doesn't get any better. Overacted, underwritten, glib and glossy and twenty minutes was as much as I could take.

Bye Bye Birdie

The first half-hour is brilliant but the film soon bogs down in the

gracelessness behavior of Birdy and the cliches of family home comedy

Capitalism: A Love Story  2009 ‧ Documentary

"Michael Moore's ... film looks at the successes and failures of the American capitalist system, where the richest one per cent have more than the bottom 95 per cent combined; a system that claims to reward free enterprise but in fact rewards greed. He coaxes an explanation of what derivatives are from experts."  - An important film.  Everyone should see this film.

La Chienne - Jean Renoir
Stark and powerful; a brilliant film.  The remake, Scarlett Street with Edward G. and Dan Duryea is equally good.

The Counterfiters (Die Fälscher) 2007 -
Another film that didn't need to be made.  Difficult to watch,not that interesting, and lacking redeeming social values despite the Nazis, Jews and WWII.  A bloodless recreation although horrifying and bloody enough. 

Covergirl - Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly  1944
Gorgeous to look at and quite dramatic.

The Day the Earth Stood Still directed by Robert Wise, starring Michael Rennie.

Excellent. One of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Thought-provoking,

D'est (Documentary)

Images from the world of post-Soviet eastern Europe. Silent and slow.

Diary of a Chambermaid - 1936, directed by Jean Renoir starring Paulette Goddard.

Silly; too broad to have much point.

The Debt – viewed July 2013

This movie should never have been made; it is a pointless, self-indulgent, repetitious film. The gratuitous violence just makes it worse. Capable acting can't save this stupid and depressingly unoriginal film.

Desert Dancer - 2015
Set in Iran amid a time of increasing suppression of the arts this film documents the extent authorities will go to ensure conformity and the lengths artists will go to express their creativity. The film itself is more polemic than art. 

 
"Desert Flower is a 2009 German biographical film directed by Sherry Hormann. It stars Liya Kebede, Sally Hawkins and Craig Parkinson, and is based on the Somali-born model Waris Dirie's autobiography" - Well worth seeing.

The Devil's Miner -  "a 2005 documentary film directed by independent film directors Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani. The film follows a fourteen-year-old Bolivian boy named Basilio Vargas who along with his twelve-year-old brother Bernardino work in the mines near the city of Potosí." - A compelling, beautiful, heartbreaking film.

Dodesukaden directed by Akira Kurosawa

Don't bother. Not worth watching.

The Duel – viewed July 2013

Adapted from the Chekhov play (which I've never seen) this is a gorgeous movie, well acted, beautifully shot, well directed. The action is incomprehensible, the relationships unfathomable, the dialog seems to come out of nowhere, the reasons why the people do what they do is mysterious, their past and future hidden; but still, it's a gorgeous movie.

Elgar's Tenth Muse

Good.  Worth watching.

  

Elles -  2011, directed and co-written by Polish director Małgośka Szumowska

Another film that doesn't know what it wants to be, where it wants to go or what it wants to say.  Brilliant acting, great cinematography, high production values, compelling stories along the way, but in the random snippets of life presented here, there is no resolution and there is no illumination or even comprehension, for us or for the participants. Our heroine, Juliet Binoche, plays Anne, a journalist doing an article for Elle (hence the title, and also the double entendre, as the film is about three women, Anne and two college students who turn to prostitution to support themselves in the style to which they would like to become accustomed) and the woman who documents their lives.  

 

In following our reporter as she interviews the two students, we are in documentary mode; a sociological study of why these students chose prostitution.  We learn of the near impossibility of obtaining a job that pays enough to support yourself when you're young and unskilled, and that everything in Paris is expensive (did we not know both these things?)   Especially if you want to be chic, or even just live well.  And there is an abundance of older men willing to pay for your services.  In case we don't get the picture, there are many explicit sex scenes with a series of clients.  But this is not documentary style, this is X rated, staged.  Is the idea here to slip in some some pornography to make this "art" film sexier?  It is prurient and exploitative film-making no matter what it's intentions.

 

Soon we are in murkier waters; one of the girls, Alicja, becomes flirtatious with Anne and seems to be looking to break down her inhibitions about sex and the social gulf between them.  Is Anne attracted? She seems to be, but the most intimate we see them is drunk, with their open mouths full of pasta.  It's not a pretty sight.

 

Does Anne envy them their sexual adventures?  Their liberated attitude towards sex? She is spending hours shopping, preparing food, getting ready to entertain her husband's boss and an important client.  Of course she cuts her hand on a knife in the kitchen, you can see that coming.  Her day is difficult, her teenage son is recalcitrant, stoned and skipping school, her husband not available, emotionally distant and possibly having (or had) an affair.  She is struggling with a deadline for her article and a demanding editor. 

In the end of the day, she pulls it off with style.  The dinner is served, she looks gorgeous, everyone is enjoying themselves but not her.  She has a full-on hallucinatory, psychotic episode where she sees the girl's  clients, none of whom she has actually met, sitting around the table in place of her guests.  Next, she gets up from the table without saying a word, goes to the front door and walks out into the night, leaving her husband to deal with the consequences. When she returns hours later, her next action is to get down on her knees and try and take her husband's pants down.

 

I can just see the director thinking  "... how am I going to resolve this long and complicated film?  I know, I'll have our protagonist go temporarily mad, act completely out of character and then show her at breakfast with the family the next morning freshly scrubbed and all is normal. No comprehension of anything by anyone. Brilliant!  The end.

 

Elmer Gantry

A great film.  The story of America.  One of the best American movies.

 

 

Eros - Three short films, one each from Directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, and Wong Kar Wai,

The best of the threAe features is Soderbergh's. It's smart, funny, sexy and intriguing. Wong's feature, Hand, is the least erotic and appealing of the three. A desperate and

despairing story of doomed love that starts with embarrassment and humiliation and spirals downward into sickness and ruin. There is nothing erotic about it. Even the beauty and style of Gong Li are made so overripe and decadent it's hard  to see her as attractive or sensual. The Antonioni film is beautiful, mysterious, unabashedly sensual and arousing but also somewhat vague and pretentious, as Antonioni can be. It doesn't matter much in this brief fantasy of frustration and fulfillment and there are trenchant observations of the hidden lives of people in relationships and the abrasiveness that can result.

The Five Deadly Venoms – directed by Chang Cheh, 1978

Slow, dated. Too much talk and not enough action.

Friday Night – a film by Claire Denis

Dull,dull,dull; did I mention that this film is extremely slow moving? I stopped watching after half an hour. I just couldn't take one more close up of a cigarette being lit. Is this what the French consider “atmospheric?”

From Here to Eternity 
A classic.  Sizzling performances from Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. An all star cast including Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Cliff and Ernest Borgnine.

The Gatekeepers (Documentary)

A sobering look at the realpolitic of the Israeli security services.

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould – documentary

Excellent.

Gilda

A taut, glittering, exotic film noir with bravura performances by all but especially by Rita Hayworth. What a woman!

Gosford Park - 2001 British film directed by Robert Altman and written by Julian Fellowes. The film stars an ensemble cast, which includes Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Emily Watson - Brilliant!  Not to be missed.

The Harmonists

Overly elaborate, overly produced, less than satisfying historical drama with singing.

The Handmaid's Tale

A movie that promises a lot and delivers little. Wooden, stilted acting and formulaic plot had me turning it off after an hour. None of the characters are engaged or engaging or even believable. A waste of talent and resources.

The Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire

I really like this movie. It's not as tight as it could be but if you want singing and dancing this film has it. A trip back to another time.

The Innocents 1961 British film directed and produced by Jack Clayton, and starring Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave and Megs Jenkins. Based on‎: ‎The Turn of the Screw‎; by ‎Henry James - Effective and atmospheric rendering of the James story.

Invasion of the body Snatchers – viewed February 2013

Good but not great. The same can be said of the re-make.

 

Jackie Brown - Quentin Tarantino

 Should have been good but it wasn't.  Too slick and pat. So much talent and so little to work with.

Jailhouse Rock – viewed November 2012

The number Jailhouse Rock is the best thing in the movie. Otherwise, a surprisingly gritty and tough minded piece of Americana. Why is Elvis so hard?

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975 – written and directed by Chantel Ackerman

A dreary film. The consummate acting of Delphine Seyrig is the only thing that makes this film bearable. She makes even the most mundane tasks interesting but it's hard to sustain an interest in mundane tasks even when performed by a stylish and graceful woman. As she starts to crack up under the stress of her double life and the self-imposed narrow confines of that life, the viewer is also feeling the strain of her endlessly repeated motions.  Is this what I go to the movies for? I have enough of it at home, thanks. Actually, if you watch the film in 20 minute segments it can be refreshingly meditative. So little happens you actually can go into a state of relaxation before a state of impatience ensues. Everything is artificial in this film. The kitchen where most of the inaction takes place is not a real kitchen, the apartment is not a real apartment, the people are not real people and the life portrayed is not life at all but the artifice of a self-conscious auteur with little vision and little patience for humanity. How much can we learn from the lives of artificial people in an artificial world? The cold, stone and pavement of a colorless urban Brussels is the only contrast to the tidy, almost sterile rooms of the apartment. Like many other films (think Barton Fink, American Beauty) this film is unable to resolve the dramatic tensions so the director resorts to a senseless murder to end the film.This failure of imagination, and the lack of a fully realized story (which is why so many good films come from literature) leaves the viewer none the wiser when the movie is over. Whatever sympathies and hopes you had for our heroine are dashed when she is revealed to be a psycho. And aside from her there is really nothing else going on.

Jimmy P. - The Psychoanalysis of a Plains Indian (based on a true story)

Not an interesting or substantial film. The Hollywood idea of film making, formulaic and very glossy but doesn't get below the surface. As James Baldwin said of Roots, “the truth is in there somewhere shrieking from it's grave.”

Julie and Julia with Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci

A delight!

The King's Speech

Brilliant! Superb acting. An absolutely compelling drama without a single car chase, gunshot, sexual encounter or fist fight. A film only the Brits could make.

Kung Fu of Eight Drunkards - directed by Wu Ma  2002 
Not as interesting as it sounds.  

Les adieux a la reine 2012 directed by Benoît Jacquot (Based on, Les Adieux à la reine 

by Chantal Thomas) 
Excellent!

The Letter 1940 American film noir crime drama directed by William Wyler, starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall; screenplay by Howard E. Koch, based on the 1927 play of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham derived from his own short story. The story was inspired by a real-life scandal involving the wife of the headmaster of a school in Kuala Lumpur who was convicted in a murder trial after shooting dead a male friend in April 1911.  

Atmospheric, suspenseful and dramatic.

Life is Beautiful

 

London Boulevard - a 2010 British-American independent modern crime noir film with Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley,- Not a good film. Ends badly.

Lonely

So slow moving and repetitious it was impossible to finish but there are some charming moments.

Lolita

A gorgeously filmed rendition of the Vladamir Nabokov novel and it is mesmerizing until we reach the midpoint of the film where it suddenly loses its way and becomes absurdly repetitious and senseless. Jeremy Irons, who is usually so interesting to watch, falls out of character and the film falls flat. Not even distantly faithful to the novel.  Not that it matters but it might have been  more interesting if it had tried to follow the book.

Lions for Lambs

Garbage

The Loveless

Very stylized, moody and atmospheric with some shockingly frank sexual encounters. The pace would be better suited to half-hour television episodes.

Lust, Caution

 

The Magician - (b&w) written and directed by Ingmar Bergman.
 A fascinating film; strange and wonderful. Masterful film-making.

Major Barbara

This play by GBS must have been more resonant in it's day. One even gets tired of the always engaging Wendy Hiller. Filmed in 1941 on location in London at the time of the Blitz.

Mao's Last Dancer

Fascinating real life story of  Chinese ballet dancer, Li Cunxin, and his journey from China to Houston Ballet.

Midnight in Paris written and directed by Woody Allen 

Couldn't avoid seeing some of this in-flight movie. Absolutely dreadful. Pathetic and 

pretentious. Five minutes of it is too much.

 

The Misfits

Muriel (French, 1963) - a film by Alain Resnais

An almost interesting film that doesn't go anywhere. Any 5 minute segment of it contains all of it; like a fractal.

O Brother Where Art Thou

Silly, trite and self-indulgent. One song by the Blue Grass Boys is worth more than this entire film.

Okuribito (Japanese) Departures - A minor masterpiece.

Oldboy

Dreadful. Stopped watching after half an hour

On the Waterfront 1954 - directed by Elia Kazan and filmed on location in and around the docks of New York and New Jersey.

One of the greatest, if not the greatest, urban drama in American films. The performances of Marlon Brando Eve Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and Lee J. Cobb are indelibly etched in the mind's eye once you have seen them. They are searing. This film is so true and poignant that many lines from it have become part of the vernacular and the film is so powerful it's woven into the very fabric of our society and culture. This story of the struggle against corruption and mob influence, the difficult and dangerous lives of those working on the docks, forms a backdrop for much of the politics and history of 20^th century America,

Once Upon a Time in China 
Wonderful.  Not to be missed.

Open Your Eyes (Spanish 1997)

A disappointingly juvenile movie. The radiant Penelope Cruz is wonderful to watch but not even her luminous presence can save this film. The world would be a better place if this movie had never been made.

The Ornithologist (2016 Portuguese film directed by João Pedro Rodrigues)

A compelling start soon turns bizarre and half way through the film looses all coherence and devolves into a pastiche of clichés. When you can't think of where to go with your film just substitute postcards of the grotesque, gruesome and supernatural in place of a story.

Outrage Beyond 2012 Japanese yakuza film directed by Takeshi Kitano  

The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse. If men in suits shooting each other with 

pistols, in between scenes of men in suits snarling at each other, is your cup of tea, than this is your film. Really, there's not much else. Despite an elaborate production and good acting this film is just plain flat.

Pianomania 2009 German-Austrian documentary film by directors Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis.

The film presents Stefan Knüpfer, a virtuoso piano tuner from the piano company Steinway & Sons, in his work with pianists such as Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Essential viewing if you attend piano concerts or recitals,

The Princess of Montpensier (French: La Princesse de Montpensier) is a 2010 French period romance film directed by Bertrand Tavernier, inspired by the novel of the same name published anonymously by Madame de La Fayette in 1662. - Beautiful to look at.

Prometheus

Another movie that begins with the promise of something mysterious and exciting but soon devolves into a really stupid and and juvenile piece of Hollywood techno babble with nothing to recommend it. Every cliché in the sci-fi genre film genre for the last 30 years is used to no effect. A flat and tasteless variation on Aliens aimed at the under 16 crowd. Couldn't take more than 40 minutes of it.

The Queen

Brilliantly done. Moving recounting of Princess Diana's life and death. Helen Mirren is the Queen.

 Rear Window directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Still as good as ever. A masterpiece of suspense.

La regle du jeu (The rules of the game) - created and directed by Jean Renoir
Not good; far too broad.

Red Riding, 1974

If you enjoy seeing the extended torture of a young man this is your film. Otherwise, don't bother.

Romeo Must Die

Slick, glossy, violent, improbable, Saccharine sentimentality contrasted with horrific violence with some social commentary thrown in but not enough for this film to have any redeeming social value.

Room with a View (from the E.M. Forster novel)

One of the best movies ever made. Can be watched over and over.

Samurai Rebellion

1967 Japanese film directed by Masaki Kobayashi starrng Toshiro Mifume (b&w)

Excellent. Suspenseful. Gripping, beautifully filmed and with masterful direction. A tragic story of the abuses of corrupt nobles compelling an honest man to defy authority to protect his family.

Separate Tables
One of the best movies ever made.

Searching for Sugar Man

An amazing story about a remarkable man and musician; sensitively filmed.

Smiles of a Summer Night - (1955) directed by Ingmar Bergman - Wonderful. Delightful and mysterious.

Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) staring Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward and Ava Gardiner.
Based on the story by Ernest Hemingway. - Starts woodenly and soon becomes petrified.

Stones in Exile

If you danced to The Rolling Stone's “Exile on Main Street when you were young you'' be interested in this peek behind the scenes. A document of the times.

Shield for Murder (co-directed by, and starring, Edmond O'Brien, 1954)

Surprisingly hard edged, even brutal, film noir takes a look at the lives of police detectives in an anonymous city. Star turn by Marla English who could easily have rivaled Liz Taylor had she continued in films. Greed and hate are too strong for love in this action thriller.

South Pacific 
Powerful and gorgeous screen adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical.  Shot on location on the north shore of Kauai. An iconic film with songs that have since become part of the vernacular and standout performances from all.  The film plumbs the racism of the time and ventures where few films of the time dared to go.

Sex and Lucia

Like so many movies that suffer from a paucity of imagination, not knowing where to go, this film  gives way to scenes of grotesque and lurid violence and collapses into confusion and hysterics about two thirds of the way through. At least that was as much of it as I could bring myself to watch.  Very disappointing as the story, acting and filming were compelling up to that point.

Sweet Dreams 

Excellent performances by Jessica Lange and Ed Harris can't save this not very interesting film about not very interesting people. Get a Patsy Cline record instead. It will be all this movie attempts to be and more.

The Three Swordsmen - 1994 Hong Kong film directed by Taylor Wong

Thrilling. Wonderful. Incomprehensible, but no matter. A costume spectacular with beautiful women and handsome men.

Too Late for Tears (1949)

Film noir at it's best. Suspenseful and rich with characters. Dashing men, a dangerous woman, and Los Angeles at night. People are capable of the most extraordinary things when led into temptation.

Two Faces of January

None of the characters in this film are worth a second look. Their beauty is entirely on the surface. Just another film without any redeeming moral, social, political, cultural or aesthetic values. I could only take 45 minutes; it would have been better not to have started at all. How can there be suspense when you don't care what happens to anyone?

Tea for Two with Doris Day

The inimitable Doris Day delivers a song like nobody can. The first half of the movie sparkles with singing and dancing but the second half stalls on overmuch silliness. Gene Nelson is another Gene Kelly; just amazing moves. Characters you actually care about.

13 Assassins (Japanese) b & w

Excellent period piece. Violent. Japanese.

Thunder Heart

A not very good film about some very important issues: corruption in the FBI, abuse of authority by government agents, the exploitation of Indian lands by unscrupulous, murderous whites and their Indian collaborators. This is not a new story. What are we going to do about the seemingly endless corruption that comes from the FBI?

The Last Picture Show – directed by Peter Bogdanovich

One of the best films ever made. A film against which all films about small town American life must be measured.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - staring Gary Oldman - Not good. The TV drama with Alec Guinness was better in every respect.

Tous Les Matins du Monde

Striking, mesmerizing French period piece. Filled with baroque music and musical instruments. The story of Viola da gamba player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle) and his two musical daughters. Also stars Gérard Depardieu

The Transporter

Terrible. Don't bother.

Vincere - Italian

The story of Mussolini's first wife.  A fascinating glimpse into the tortured life of woman caught up in forces beyond her control and subject to male domination

Where Danger Lives (1950) - staring Robert Mitchum

Very good.  Film noir. A wild delirious ride.  Starts in San Francisco and ends in Mexico.

West Side Story

Brilliant. One of the best musicals ever filmed.

Where to Invade Next – a film by Michael Moore

Brilliant. Puts the world in perspective.

Wild Strawberries – written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. B & W 1957 - Wonderful, poignant, gentle and trenchantly observant.

The Wolfpack - documentary.  Astonishing, sad, poignant. A remarkable achievement.

You Were Never Lovelier - 1942  Musical romantic comedy directed by William A. Seiter and starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. It also features Adolphe Menjou and Xavier Cugat. Music composed by Jerome Kern and  lyrics by Johnny Mercer. - Wonderful dancing adorns this rather flimsy melodrama.  So who needs plot when you have Fred and Rita?

You'll Never Get Rich - Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth; music by‎ Cole Porter  1941 - When Astaire and Hayworth dance it's magic, otherwise not.

Zardoz - starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling.  Lame. Dated. Don't bother.