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Decade

Good Morning Vietnam – 1.5 stars

July 24, 2026
1 star, 80s, Comedy
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Based on a true person if not story, Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) is a popular disc jockey stationed in Vietnam where he entertains the troops with his wacky hijinks, falls in love with a local gal, has a run in with her Viet Cong brother, and finds out that the true enemy is not the North Vietnamese, but an uptight sergeant (J.T. Walsh) who hates his funny so much he routes him through a VC-controlled highway, presumably, because he hopes he will be killed.

Because Cronauer is a wise ass, and later, a humanitarian, he must die. 

Barry Levinson’s (Diner, The Natural) schmaltz fest is really just a vehicle for Williams to be zany. He more than delivers. In the doing, the men love him and snigger at the squares who do not, including the sergeant who so hates bits, sound effects, impressions, and double entendres he tries to have Cronauer killed. 

But our watermelon-smashing Gallagher Christ, he won’t be held down.  Not after this pep talk:

EDWARD

And I literally think that you owe it to all of them to get your ass back on the air.

ADRIAN

If you haven’t noticed, the army doesn’t really want me, Ed. They’ve been harassing me since the day I got off the plane.

EDWARD

So what? It’s the guys in the field that matter, remember? Those are the guys that are dyin’.

A homogenous 80s sit-com fluff ball with half-hearted altruistic pretensions, powered solely by Williams’ manic energy, which, to be fair, can be entertaining.   

Q&A – 0 stars (incomplete)

June 29, 2026
0 stars, 90s, Crime/Mystery
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I recently watched a documentary on the estimable Sidney Lumet and ran across one of his later films on one of my streaming queues. Q&A is a New York City potboiler about an idealistic and ambitious young assistant district attorney (Timothy Hutton) and his quarry, a corrupt, enigmatic detective (Nick Nolte). The film opens with Nolte executing a perp and planting a gun. Hutton is brought in by the district attorney (Patrick O’Neal) to investigate the shooting.  It is clear from the outset that Hutton is supposed to play ball and not dig too deep. Hutton is more than happy to perform the task.

Then Hutton has lunch with an old mentor (Lee Richards). Hutton tells Richards that O’Neal is tough but fair, and decisive.

Richards, who once worked with O’Neal, does not tell Hutton to be wary. Rather, he tells him that O’Neal is a prick, a racist and an anti-Semite who manufactures evidence to put people in the electric chair. He also tells Hutton a story. In one case, O’Neal went to go witness one of the black defendants he railroaded “fry” at Sing Sing, and when he came back to the DA’s office, he crowed about it, telling the other lawyers that he sure hoped that the guy was guilty. Hardy har!

“Fuck him. Now and forever,” says Richards. 

To this, Hutton eats his corned beef sandwich. He does not object. He does not ask any questions. He does not say to his mentor, “Come on. You must be exaggerating.”  He just eats. 

Then Richards tells Hutton that the case he drew is all wrong, suggesting that Nolte must’ve planted a gun, because the decedent never carried a .45, only a .32. 

More chewing of corned beef.  Ho hum.

That is when I turned this intolerably stupid film off.

22 minutes in. 

We already know from the outset that Nolte is dirty, and now we know that the district attorney is even dirtier and everyone knows Nolte is dirty.

At 22 minutes, we also know that the script is dogshit and the Hutton character may have been lobotomized.

On Tubi.

Busting – 3.5 stars

June 15, 2026
3 stars, 70s, Comedy, Crime/Mystery
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Like Walter Hill, Peter Hyams is a workmanlike director with several efficient and entertaining movies under his belt. Capricorn One, Outlander, and Narrow Margin are crisp commercial fare with occasional flair. While Hyams does not have a masterpiece in his oeuvre, unlike Hill (The Long Riders), after watching this flawed debut, you feel one was in there.

Busting tracks its’ early buddy cop kin, Freebie and the Bean, but swaps out the verbose and frenetic James Caan and Alan Arkin for the dour and focused Elliott Gould and Robert Blake. The latter are two LA vice detectives who are becoming disillusioned with the pointlessness of rousting massage parlors, gay bars and porno shops. They become obsessed with a corrupt crime lord (Alan Garfield) who thwarts their work by paying off the cops, politicians, and judges.

It’s an uneven picture, sometimes quietly comic, then discordantly violent. The camera work, however, is superb. In particular, a stunning extended foot chase shootout through Grand Central Market at night. The dolly shot was filmed decades before the pool scene in Boogie Nights and the nightclub scene in Goodfellas and was made all the more difficult because the leads flow, dodge and weave through dozens of terrified extras screaming and crouching as bullets whiz about. The scene is not an anomaly. Hyams has a deft feel and eye that portended a more illustrious career.

Other notes. 

Gould is an LA detective who wears a Washington Redskins winter hat, which is cool. 

As with Freebie and the Bean, if they showed this politically incorrect picture at Oberlin, the student body would revolt.

The movie is also said to have been the inspiration for Starsky and Hutch. 

During the shootout, Hyams does things often ignored in such scenes. People fall. An innocent bystander get shot. And lo and behold, both Blake and Gould reload their revolvers. 

Quentin Tarantino’s take:

On Amazon. 

The Birdcage – 5 stars

June 10, 2026
Comedy, 5 stars, 90s
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My daughter has been keeping an eye out for special screenings of older films, and Sunday, we went out to Tyson’s Corner to see Mike Nichols’ adaptation of La Cage au Folles, The Birdcage.

The film is a classic combination of crack timing, unrestrained joy, and comedic generosity. If you haven’t seen it (and it is currently on any number of streaming services, including Netflix), you are engaging in unnecessary self-neglect.

Since it is a well-known classic, I’ll just offer a few observations.

1. It is a crime no one was nominated from the picture. Not the uproarious Nathan Lane, the surprisingly canny Gene Hackman (who was just coming into his own as a comic force after the prior years’ Get Shorty), or the gut-busting Hank Azaria, the butler who can neither cook nor walk in shoes. Not even …

2. Robin Williams, who plays well-off character as the straight man, allowing Lane to fill the zany and manic spaces he normally occupies. Williams is the glue. Sure, he is funny, but he’s largely setting up everyone else, and in the rare moments of genuine drama (which are smartly short and tender), he packs a wallop.

3.  The set-up is ingenious. The daughter (Calista Flockhart) of a scandal-escaping conservative moral majoritarian senator (Hackman) falls in love with the son (Dan Futterman) of a gay couple who own and perform at a South Beach drag club (Williams and Lane). At the behest of the smitten son, Williams and Lane try to tone down their gayness and play as straight, conservative Greek diplomats (Williams the father, and Lane, the uncle) while entertaining the senator and his wife (Diane Wiest) for dinner. In the wrong hands, that same set-up could portend a preachy lesson-fest that has a few yuks, but Nichols (or rather, his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Elaine May) is having none of that. May is about the laughs and any zingers are broadly comic, more cultural than political, and woven tightly in the larger bit. Her bon mots never get in the way of the physical comedy, they enhance it.

Case in point.

Wonderful picture.            

Charley Varrick – 3.5 stars

May 23, 2026
3 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery
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A smarter than average bank robber (Walter Matthau) robs a small town New Mexico bank that, unbeknownst to him, is holding $750,000 in mob money. The job goes terribly bad. Matthau’s wife and wheel woman (Jacqueline Scott), an accomplice, and several deputies are shot dead. When Matthau and his surviving accomplice (Andrew Robinson, the memorable Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry) hear on TV that the robbers only got away with several thousand dollars, he susses out the massive shitstorm that is coming in the form of mob money man John Vernon and enforcer Joe Don Baker. Matthau has to figure out how to survive the ordeal.      

This is a competent and serviceable Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz) crime flick. The picture is no great shakes but it has its moments, and the cat-and-mouse machinations of the characters are compelling.  

The picture is also very very weird.

First, apparently, in the 70s, all you had to do to a woman to transform her to putty in your hands was rough them up a bit. Sure, 1960s James Bond could get away with it, but a majority of those women were play-acting for the post-coital kill, so, all’s fair. Not so the women of this flick. A slap or threat, and they positively melt. Times change.

Second, there are several actors who should not be kissing women in film. John Wayne is probably number one. Brad Pitt, with his blasé remove, is three.  Matthau has got to be number two. In this flick, he kisses his dead wife on the lips – twice – and then he beds a live woman (Vernon’s executive secretary, Felicia Farr). It’s hard to tell which woman was less enthralled. Matthau looks ridiculous and uncomfortable.

Last, has there ever been a luckier actor than Joe Don Baker? “Oh, so, you want me to be a quirky Southern tough guy who can exude jovial sarcasm followed immediately by swift violence?  I can do that.” And a career playing basically the same role – and playing it well – followed.

On Amazon Prime.       

Against All Odds – 1 star

May 20, 2026
1 star, 80s, Crime/Mystery, Romance
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In these sensitive times, I’ll risk observing that Rachel Ward was exceedingly attractive. In various states of undress, even more so.

So, a steamy semi remake of Out of the Past featuring an on-the run Ward, coveted by her jealous and obsessive boyfriend, sleazy LA fixer and club owner James Woods, who enlists recently cut NFL player Jeff Bridges to find and recover her for him … it has promise.

Alas, the smoldering Ward is the only good thing about this Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Ray) dog.

Bridges does indeed find Ward. They fall in love and press the flesh in the steamy environs of Mexico.

So far, so good.

But soon, they are back in LA, propelling a paper-thin plot that lazily meshes real estate and political corruption, game-fixing, and blackmail.

Bridges is badly miscast as a jock. He is too effete for the role. Woods is working way too hard to do something with nothing, and everyone else is stock.

The script also calls for characters to do bizarre things. Case in point – Swoozie Kurtz is a legal secretary who meets Bridges briefly early on, is smitten, and on that connection alone, risks her life to help him gets files from her offices when he shows up out of nowhere later in the picture. Similarly, Alex Karras is a football conditioning coach who, after Bridges betrays Woods with Ward, comes down to Mexico to … bring her back forcibly, at gunpoint. Which means, by my estimation, even taking Bridges out of the equation, a ferry, a small plane and then a jet back to LAX, gun in hand.    

Worse, the score is cheezy tech crap that makes every scene feel like you’re watching 70s porn or at a sketchy massage studio.

Bad through and through, as the ending will attest, as if Hackford said, “Well, we need to wrap this turd up with more Rachel and the Phil Collins hit.”

I did read that after this film, Ward took a sabbatical to study acting. That tracks.   

I Knew It Was You – 5 stars

May 2, 2026
00s, 5 stars, Documentary
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John Cazale did five films and then tragically passed away from lung cancer. When you lament the early loss of a Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you at least have the comfort of a significant body of work, 60 plus films even in his too short life.

Cazale had 5. And not one was Pirate Radio.

The Godfather

The Godfather II

The Conversation

Dog Day Afternoon

The Deer Hunter

This documentary, available on Youtube and Tubi, remembers Cazale through the interviews of directors and actors who worked with him (Coppola, Lumet, DeNiro, Pacino, Hackman, Dreyfus) as well as Meryl Streep, who was his lover and co-star on his last picture, The Deer Hunter. We also get insights from character actors like Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, and Steve Buscemi, guys who are used to doing a lot with a little in terms of screen time.

A tight 40 minutes, the documentary is a taut and moving remembrance with specificity. Hoffman, Buscemi, and Rockwell are particularly incisive in highlighting certain choices Cazale made in pivotal scenes, and the observations of Coppola and Lumet on the “I’m not dumb, like everybody says” scene in Godfather II is fantastic. A really great watch.

Ice Station Zebra – 3 stars

February 12, 2026
3 stars, 60s, Action/Disaster, Drama
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A serviceable John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) Cold War action/espionage thriller from 1968, currently on Tubi. The Soviets take photographs of our missile installations from space, but in attempting to retrieve the film, things go awry. The canister lands near a British scientific weather station in the Arctic, and the race is on for retrieval before the Soviets get there. The mission is led by nuclear submarine skipper Rock Hudson, who has MI6 spook Patrick McGoohan, friendly Soviet Ernest Borgnine, and Marine squad leader Jim Brown along for the ride.

I watched the flick when I was a little kid on TV. It was thrilling.

50 years later, it still holds up somewhat. It’s really worth catching for three particularities.

First, clearly of its time, a significant portion of this rather long picture (it has both an overture and an intermission) is devoted to the inner workings of a nuclear submarine, sometimes, pedantically so. But you have to remind yourself that in 1968, film audiences would have been thrilled with a long dissertation on the inner workings of a nuclear submarine.

Second, I never understood why McGoohan was not a massive star. He is a great villain, but he also has a charming smile and twinkle in the eye that communicates humor and a little menace.

I read up on him. He was swallowed up by television, which probably suppressed a budding film career. He was also extremely Catholic, and would not take any role in which he was required to kiss a woman other than his wife, thereby taking him off the James Bond list (and apparently, he was on it).  Modern audiences would know McGoohan as the villainous king who steals and chews scenes in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

Lastly, Jim Brown is still cool, even in a winter parka.

The Deep – 3.75 stars

January 26, 2026
3 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery, Drama
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I signed up for Tubi because it has a lot of older movies that don’t get run on some of the other streaming services. This very competent Peter Yates (Bullitt) flick from 1977 beguiled me as a young teen for a couple of reasons. First, it was a Peter Benchley, post Jaws vehicle, with Robert Shaw as yet another boat captain, though this time his quarry is treasure, not a shark.

Second, well … I was 13 years old, Jacqueline Bisset, enough said.

My prurient childhood fascination aside, this is a pretty solid picture. Two tourists (Nick Nolte and Bisset) happen upon two collided shipwrecks while snorkeling. They cross a local drug lord (Louis Gossett) who also has an interest in what they’ve found (tens of thousands of vials of morphine from an old WWII medical ship) and must enlist a wily old diver and antiquity collector (Robert Shaw) to help them find treasure from the other vessel, deliver the drugs, and otherwise negotiate their way out of the mess.

Nolte exudes charisma as the thrill seeker captivated by the jewels of the sea. Shaw is Shaw, commanding and interesting even when he is probably phoning it in. Gossett is oozily charming as a lethal Haitian trafficker interested not in treasure, but in the drugs, until he learns of the treasure and gets greedy.

Bisset is every bit as alluring as she was when I was 13, and it turns out, now that I can focus, she can act. She is menaced throughout the picture and her terror is palpable.

The film gets balky when Gossett inexplicably harasses the trio even though they are working on his behalf, and the ending is the cheesiest finale in movie history. But otherwise, sexy and solid.

The Battle of the Bulge – 1 star

December 3, 2025
1 star, 60s, War
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Tediously directed by the same person who helmed The Longest Day, once dubbed “The Longest Movie,” Ken Anankin’s resume’ does not inspire confidence. The picture takes forever to start, and when it gets going, it is permeated with flat ahistorical battle sequences and clunky dialogue. All the actors seem to be taking their cue from Henry Fonda, who plays the lone officer who foresaw the Nazi surprise attack through the Ardennes. Fonda sports a ho hum bemusement that screams, “Did the check cash?” The usual suspects for WWII flicks – Telly Savalas, Robert Ryan, Charles Bronson – make their bank as well, and similarly phone in their personas.

A bore through and through, it looks cheap and inauthentic, particularly when they put the leads in tanks with the actual film footage on a screen behind them.

Very Batman and Robin TV show driving.

Though it maintains a soft spot in this old heart for reasons having nothing to do with artistic merit.

When I was in high school, due to economic strain, my mother was forced to take in boarders. One, Klaus Kristmas (name changed because if my Googling is correct, he’s a rather accomplished German government official) was a smart, ramrod straight, punctilious young man whose father was in the Bundestag. Klaus was great fun, and my mother immediately made him part of the family. He even came to the beach with us, where we recoiled in horror as he pulled down his shorts to reveal a European look, the mini-Speedo.

At home, I would hang out with Klaus and watch TV. One night, sure enough, we watched this flick, which is all Germans kicking ass for the majority of the picture. When Robert Shaw, as the lead Panzer commander, nears the oil depot that will allow his continued advance, however, things have shifted. Shaw burns to death when a fuel drum hits his tank.

Klaus: “Oh nooooooooooooooo,”

14 year old Filmvetter : “USA, USA, USA!!”

On Tubi.