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3 stars

Ice Station Zebra – 3 stars

February 12, 2026
3 stars, 60s, Action/Disaster, Drama
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A perfectly serviceable John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) Cold War action/espionage thriller from 1968, currently on Tubi. The Soviets take photographs of all 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 picdture (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.

28 Years Later – 3 stars

February 2, 2026
2025, 3 stars, Scary
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No doubt, Danny Boyle movies are easy on the eyes. This one is no different. But as good-looking as the film may be, tonally, it’s a mess.

Boyle updates us on the world 28 years after the release of the rage virus, and we find ourselves in the Scottish Highlands, where an isolated community is celebrating a 12 year old boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), and his passage into manhood. No, they don’t put Spike outside the gates of the town to fend for himself, like the Spartans. But he does accompany his father (Aaron Taylor Johnson) to the mainland, which has been quarantined for 28 years, to get Spike his first kill. There are a few fraught moments, and Spike does … okay. But he shows very natural terror during the terrifying chore, and when they return to their small burg to tell tales of his bravery, he is a bit ashamed.

He shouldn’t be. During his trip, we see that the infected have either regressed, stayed the same, or progressed. So, they are either crawling sloth-like behemoths who move at a glacial pace and eat worms (unless they can get near a human) and standard rage lunatics who speed attack in packs and have learned to eat. There is also an Alpha, a rage survivor so big and powerful that when he grabs your head, he can pull it off your body and your entire spinal column will follow. Spike also sees a fire, suggesting the presence of an un-infected.

Things go awry shortly after Spike’s return. He learns of a mysterious doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who may or may not be a lunatic, but is still on the mainland and may be the keeper of the fire. Spike’s mother )Jodie Comer) is bedridden, afflicted by crippling headaches and memory issues. After Spike sees his father with another woman, the revelation pushes him into a decision so monumentally stupid, all allowances you might give other failures in the film are immediately expended.

Looking to find the doctor who can help his mother, Spike enters the dangerous world of the mainland, but this time, not with his adroit and capable father, who got them out of several close calls the first trip, but with his infirm mother. On their first night, Spike almost buys it from one of the sloths, who was moving 30 yards over at least an hour, such is his capability.

Regardless, after some time on the mainland, which is beautifully rendered by Boyle, they find a pregnant infected. Spike’s mom and the woman hold hands to get her through delivery, a laughable conceit. Then, Mom and Spike tote the baby around (unlike the baby in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, this baby “appears” healthy, though the immediate acceptance of that reality is in keeping with Spike’s guileless approach to the dangerous mainland) and find the doctor. They also defeat the Alpha, who, lo’ and behold, is the baby’s father.

Before and after that victory, a bunch of pseudo philosophical mumbo-jumbo about love and death is bandied about.

And then Spike meets up with some locals who have been roving and fighting the infected.

They all look like members of A-ha. Or a grubbier Duran Duran.

A watchable, scenic, silly, pointless film.

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 Bridge at Remagen – 3 stars

August 11, 2025
3 stars, 60s, War
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Another war flick I watched in grade school with my Dad. Cynical Lieutenant George Segal is being ridden by gung ho Major Bradford Dillman to save or blow (the mission changes) the last bridge across the Rhine in the waning months of World War II.  Segal in turn rides Sergeant Ben Gazzara, who eclipses Segal’s cynicism (he’s a looter of the dead) and then some. On the other side, cynical German Major Robert Vaughn is sent by his superior officer to save or blow (the mission changes) the bridge.  All the subordinates are let down by their superiors, and they wear their hard-bitten sensibilities on the bedraggled sleeves of their fatigues (or in the case of Vaughn, his snappy leather trench coat).

The picture is competent if forgettable, with a few interesting facets. This is one of several World War II pictures that carry a Vietnam mentality, where the mission is FUBAR, the line of authority weak, the sense of duty subordinated to the futility and the carnage. Even the coda – that the bridge collapsed 10 days after Segal’s unit gave so much blood to take it – is steeped in Hamburger Hill pointlessness (the filmmakers leave out that in those 10 days, 25,000 American troops crossed and three tactical bridges above and below Remagen were built). The picture is also notable for the introduction of the sympathetic Nazi. Here, it is Vaughn, juxtaposed with the evil SS officers in impeccably tailored outfits who are busily shooting civilians and deserters. The same dichotomy can be found in Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (James Coburn), as well as The Eagle Has Landed (Michael Caine). The phenomenon petered out (along with WWII films) until years later, in Band of Brothers (the surrender scene and subsequent speech by a German general to his defeated troops), Land of Mine, Das Boot, Stalingrad, and, later, more controversially, Downfall, which rankled many given Bruno Ganz’s commanding performance, which elicited some innate sympathy.  Per one reviewer, “the very thought of humanizing Hitler makes me queasy. If he had a good side, I don’t want to know about it.”  

Historical note: when the movie was near complete, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, where it was being filmed. Most of cast and crew decamped to a hotel in Prague, where they voted on whether to split or stick it out. They split, to Germany, in a long wagon train of cars, until things simmered down.

On Amazon Prime.

Miami Blues – 3.5 stars

April 28, 2025
3 stars, 90s, Comedy, Crime/Mystery
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Amazon Prime is loaded with old crime pictures and though it pains me to categorize a 1990 flick as an “old crime picture,” there you have it.

George Armitage (Grosse Pointe Blank) directs an adaptation of a Charles Willeford Detective Hoke Mosely novel (Willeford is a Florida crime novelist less heralded and a lot better than Carl Hiaasen). Alec Baldwin is a quirky thug just out of prison who lands in Miami, accidentally kills a Hari Krishna at the airport, and lands with small town and just starting out call girl Jennifer Jason Leigh. He evades arrest by Detective Mosely (Fred Ward), who is investigating the death of the Hare Krishna, and in the process, steals Mosely’s gun, badge, and dentures, thereafter ripping people off with the imprimatur of authority. The movie is absurdist and light, Armitage’s direction is workmanlike and industrious, and the result is more soft than hard boiled, a fun jaunt through weird 80s Miami. Enjoyable and mostly forgettable.

Mostly. Baldwin is so talented, loose and committed, his weirdo ex-con is fascinating and often gut-splitting. Literally every time he flashes Mosely’s badge, it is laugh out loud. As everyone he tries to hoodwink responds with a weary “ya’ gotta’ be kidding me,” Baldwin amps up his TV cop persona and the result is even funnier. These were early days for Baldwin, a hell of a dramatic actor but stellar in comedies. His choices are brazen and risky, and they all hit. The performance screams “star.”

To complement him, Jason Leigh as the hooker with a heart of gold is so earnest (she is saving up to start a fast food franchise) she actually moves you. Baldwin matches her with a crazy sweetness as they play house (until Mosely closes in).

Worth it, flaws and all, for the performances.

Sorcerer – 3.75 stars

March 20, 2025
3 stars, 70s, Action/Disaster, Drama
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William Friedkin’s follow-up to the massive successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, the film has met with greater favor in recent years, but at the time, it was a dud at the box office. While it has its charms, the tepid response at its release was deserved.

By way of set up, Roy Scheider is part of a 4 man stick-up crew in New York City that robs from the mob. Three are killed in the caper and Scheider goes on the run, to a small town in Chile, There, he works as a laborer under an assumed name on subsistence wages for an American oil company. He is joined by a French financier, an Arab terrorist, and a hit man of indeterminate background, all incognito and under the gun for their own reasons. None has the means to get out of town. Guerillas, however, blow up an oil well 200 miles away, and the four men are hired to ferry highly combustible dynamite containing nitroglycerin in two trucks through a hellacious terrain of winding mountain roads, dismal swamps, and, at times, torrential rain. The dynamite is necessary to cap the well and extinguish the geyser of fire.

The problems.

First, Roy Scheider is not a lead. Never has been. His intensity is unquestioned but his range is limited, and he’s only asked to be wary and furious, which he does fine. He’s just not very interesting.

Second, given the massive jostling and bouncing in the trucks during the expedition, one does wonder, “Why again was a helicopter out of the question?” Assuming it just was because somehow the flight was more unstable than the truck (which when you see the journey, is ludicrous), I’m still with one commenter, and I don’t think this is niggling:

“This big oil company calls in a helicopter and asks the pilot to transport unstable nitro that would be unsafe to handle, but never thinks to ask the helicopter pilot to bring with him some stable explosives that they can use right away. Was it more cost-effective to pay 40000 pesos (plus supplying two large trucks and apparently a bunch of additional new auto parts) and risk a 218-mile land journey than it would have been to just fly in some new explosives?

Third, other than the French financier (Bruno Cremer), with whom we spend a lot of time explaining his backstory, we don’t really get to know these men, and in their journey, they share very little.  

On the plus side, many of the ordeals are stunning (getting the trucks over wooden, swinging bridges is one of the most riveting things I’ve ever seen in movies); the visual grit of the film is palpable, which in the age of sterile CGI, is always welcome; there is also a matter-of-fact lack of sentimentality that melds well with the harshness of the environment; and the picture introduced Tangerine Dream (Thief, Risky Business, Near Dark) and the synthy soundtrack is dissonant but effective, as the environs seem almost otherworldly.    

Bill Burr, Quentin Tarantino, and my son (his biting rejoinder pending) are decidedly more enthusiastic. Hell, Tarantino deems it “one of the greatest movies ever made.”  

On Amazon, for $3.99.

The Apprentice – 3 stars

December 13, 2024
2024, 3 stars, Drama, Historical
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There are figures who defy biography. Some are dolts who we lionize because of an electric public persona, but after we peel back the skin, dig in, and nothing but soft goo is revealed, we adorn them with meaning if only to combat the dullness and our disappointment. Some are opaque, having lived a purposefully secretive life that does not lend itself to exposition. Some are so mythic, hagiography follows, lest a god be sullied. And many are just boring through and through, even if their impact was monumental.

How best to approach Donald Trump? I was thinking about why Saturday Night Live has such a problem caricaturing Trump and concluded that it is difficult to lampoon a cartoon. Trump is thuggish, brash, bombastic, ridiculous, and his persona – both before and during his political career – is that of someone who is already playing a part, man as product. Someone once observed that Bill Clinton was the most authentic phony they’d ever encountered, which makes him Trumpian on one level. The persona so effectively swallows the person that the former becomes innate.

Now, I don’t know what Donald Trump (or Bill Clinton, for that matter) is like privately, and Hollywood has yet to take on Clinton in biopic (we’ve had snippets, most recently Ryan Murphy’s rendition of the Lewinsky scandal, but nothing penetrating or overarching). And neither does screenwriter Gabriel Sherman. But he takes a fair stab, and it’s a game effort, for a time.

We meet Trump (Sebastian Stan) in the 70s, an ambitious son of an old-fashioned real estate developer who strives for entrée’ into tony Manhattan clubs while working for Daddy, collecting his rents in cheap New Jersey apartment housing. Donald has a dream – to develop a hotel in the then-hellscape of 42nd Street – something his father (Martin Donovan) considers an ill-advised fantasy. But Trump persists and soon, he meets another father figure, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who becomes his tutor and mentor. Cohn, a sybaritic fixer, protégé’ of Joe McCarthy, and executioner of the Rosenbergs, blackmails those who attempt to thwart his new charge, facilitating Trump’s rise. We watch Trump ascend, while negotiating the death of his alcoholic brother, eclipsing his father, and falling in love with Ivana (Maria Bakalova), all the while with Cohn in his ear. This is the part of the film that works, as we see a progression, both maturation and degeneration.

When we hit the 80s, Trump is on top, Cohn is crippled by AIDS, and their relationship deteriorates. With what feels like the snap of a finger, Trump is callous and brutal, as he repeats the Cohn mantra (attack, deny, always claim victory). But we don’t really see him ever employ those rules. In fact, he just reappears as a brute, and we are treated to the litany of rumor, concoction or well-known unflattering fact without context or explanation. Trump abandoned his brother, raped and verbally abused Ivana, tried to take financial advantage of his doddering father, gave Cohn fake diamond cufflinks, swung and missed in Atlantic City, took a lot of speed, wrote The Art of the Deal, mused about a political future, got liposuction and a scalp reduction, and is a germaphobe. One box after the other perfunctorily ticked. Just overt capsules, with all character-development jettisoned for dizzying visuals of the corrosive jet set life.

I suppose Sherman was trying to portray the seduction of Trump in concert with the go-go 80s, but it was done much better by Oliver Stone with Bud Fox in Wall Street, and even that movie can be garish and obvious.  

What does work, however, works very well. The Trump-Cohn relationship is beautifully drawn. The elder sees talent and vitality in the son he never had and a young man he refrains from seducing sexually, while the understudy finds the father who truly believes in him. When the former imparts his wisdom, it would have been nice if Sherman could have employed it more directly as the basis for Trump’s rejection, but it is enough that the devil gets his comeuppance from his Frankenstein, and you know it works, because you kind of feel bad for the devil.

Stan and Strong are riveting and I expect both actors to be nominated. Even if they were undeserving, Trump is irresistible bait for the Oscars and given the unflattering vignettes of the film and the fertile environment for decrying the Bad Orange Man, we and the Academy shall not be denied.  

Luckily, the actors are deserving. Strong is quickly becoming one of the most innovative character actors of his generation (I cannot so on enough about his turn in last years’ Armageddon Time, which, ironically, also included a young Trump character), and Stan manages to humanize a cartoon while incorporating the now ubiquitous Trump cadence and physicality, but doing so in a way that shows the features in infancy, so we can envision what they will be when we turn on our TVs today. Per Sherman, “And I think what Sebastian did so brilliantly is that he doesn’t try to impersonate Trump. He finds his own version of the character. And it works in a way where you feel like you’re watching a real person. You’re not watching Sebastian trying to be Donald Trump.” Dead on.

A solid, game, entertaining, very flawed near-hit that peters out.

On demand.

The Seven-Ups – 3.75 stars

November 13, 2024
3 stars, 70s, Crime/Mystery
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Director Phil D’Antoni produced The French Connection, and he struck while the iron was hot in this gritty, noir follow-up. The pictures seem familiar, sometimes distractingly so. There is no Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle, but in his stead is Doyle’s partner, Roy Scheider, a New York City detective heading up a specialized team, untethered from bureaucracy, with its sights on the mob. Scheider has a mole (Tony LoBianco), a connected guy and childhood pal, who gives him tips. We see some stakeouts and takedowns, a lot of steamy subway grates and bleak streets, the Big Apple as hellscape.

D’Antoni also produced Bullitt, and stayed true to what he knows again, inserting a boffo car chase very reminiscent of McQueen’s ride through and to the outskirts of San Francisco.

But Scheider is no McQueen or Hackman. McQueen had the gravitas that told you everything you needed to know and more about his character, even as he wordlessly dined with the stunning Jackie Bisset or loaded up on TV dinners at the corner market. He had depth and heft. Hackman as Doyle was even more fleshed out, a driven, bigoted, brutal thug, the kind of guy who doesn’t stop chasing you even after he accidentally shoots a cop.

Here, Scheider just isn’t given anything. His relationship with LoBianco is seminal, but we learn little through their clandestine meets. D’Antoni must have realized the problem, as he has a scene of Scheider walking through his old neighborhood, but it feels perfunctory. We don’t know who he is or what makes him tick and that’s a problem.

But not an insurmountable one. Solid, no-nonsense, brisk flick, good nostalgia.

Horizon: An American Saga-Chapter 1 – 3.5 stars

September 3, 2024
2024, 3 stars, Western
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Kevin Costner had a dream.  Four theatrical releases for an ongoing Western. As foretold in the title, a “saga.”

Well, the dream is a bit deferred. Or curtailed. Hard to say.

The first picture – Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 – clocked in at 3 hours, cost $50 million, and returned about $30 million, after which, it was quickly deposited on HBOMAX, where I caught it this weekend.

The story is ambitious. Set in the early 1860s, there are four separate threads that will converge, spanning the Montana territory to the San Pedro Valley in Arizona. There is a fair amount of exposition which is strange, given that Costner’s last two westerns (the overpraised Dances with Wolves, and the under-heralded Open Range) were downright laconic. There’s a lot of chatter, and some of it is sharp (Costner and a would-be assassin walking up to the same cabin, neither knowing the aim of the other until they reach their destination, is a master class in tension building), and some of it anachronistically wearying (can we finally let go of the noble Apache, who dresses down his violent son, “for now the white man will come and make us miserable and throw trash at our feet on a highway in the 1970s, which will make us shed a single, terrible tear”?)

Overall, it is fine, and if you like westerns, you’ll like this. You won’t love it. But you’ll like it.

Even if you don’t dig the picture, the film is shot so beautifully, you often thrill to the visuals without a sense or care as to what is going on.

But it ends just terribly. Horizon 2 is in the can and releases in November, thought likely not in theaters.  Horizon 3 is filming.  Horizon 4 – who knows, but Costner is putting on a brave face.

At the end of Horizon 1, there is a long preview of what is to come, no dialogue, just visuals, as if Costner is desperate to keep you engaged. I stopped it because it showed the intersection of characters and violent, maybe lethal encounters, threatening to ruin what may be coming.

But the gambit seemed a bit needy. Poor choice.  

Longlegs – 3.25 stars

July 24, 2024
2024, 3 stars, Scary
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There are very real and unsettling moments of dread and terror in this story about FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) tracking a serial killer in the rural areas of Oregon, circa 1990s. The film is eerie, creepy, and meditatively brooding. It also commendably avoids gore porn and hackneyed, now seemingly obligatory jump scares, while credibly blending the occult with the manhunt. Director Oz Perkins is deft and ingenious with the camera, particularly in flashbacks to various murders. He, or his editor, know how to cut a film.

But … the picture is loaded with plain dumb choices. Perhaps the dumbest being the selection of Nicolas Cage as the serial killer.

I’m not spoiling anything. He appears in the first scene and he is most definitely the serial killer. Ghostly white, screechy voice, clearly deranged, and yet, comfortably ensconced in the same community that has been suffering mass killings for a significant period of time. He’s almost as bad as Pennywise, the clown in It, who lives in a burg where children have a 43% mortality rate. Okay, the FBI can’t really do anything about a supernatural clown that haunts the sewers, though people inexplicably stay in whatever preposterous New England town Stephen King presents (“But honey, the teacher-to-student ratio in Londonderrychester is to die for!”). But a clearly deranged loon who looks like the adult child of Edgar Winter and Phyllis Diller flipping out when he buys supplies at a hardware store that he frequents, and no call to the police? Too much.

The story also relies on a plot device that could work if some care were given. A little bit of a spoiler does follows in this paragraph. The supernatural force controls individuals, and thus they are possessed, for lack of a better word, into doing the Devil’s work. The explanation of how that possession works, is, shall we say, lacking in elucidation (a trusted film correspondent writes, “The silver ball. WTF? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb”). There is also the problem of how the ball is deposited. Better suited to the 1950s and early 60s in terms of getting a foot in the door. Not in Bill Clinton’s America.

There’s also the issue of Agent Harker, who appears to be on the spectrum and whose own tortured background plays heavily into the story. She just doesn’t seem like an FBI agent. She veers between catatonic and stilted, but Monroe can’t imbue any heart. It is critical you care about her fate, but as presented, she’s often just above a mannequin. Worse, other characters (her boss, Blair Underwood and family) are supposed to somehow warm to her, which, given her clear aberrant mien, is asking way too much. 

And for a picture that in many ways rejects some of the formula and tropes of the genre, are we really going to put a rookie agent on the floor, poring over spread-out photos and reports as she tackles the conundrum of Phyllis Winter, who practically wears a sash emblazoned with, “Been Killin‘ Families Since the 70s!”?

 And light switches. Nobody seems inclined to turn on the lights. That’s Jimmy Carter’s America!  

Okay. I’m being hard on a film that ultimately, I recommend. Because the feel and tone and a lot of the choices are right. And it was directed by Anthony Perkins’ son. Who played this guy in Legally Blonde. Which is, like, my favorite movie ever.