rdoyle29 Reviews

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Not among Hitch's best

[7/10 · 28 June 2023]

Cary Grant is a reformed cat burglar. When someone starts stealing jewels following his old M. O., the police suspect him. He decides to clear his name by finding the thief himself. This puts him into the company of Grace Kelly and romance and thief-finding ensue.

I was pretty underwhelmed by this one. It's a romantic mystery thriller and I found both the romance and the mystery to be uncompelling.

The romance is the better part of this. It's nice to see Grant and Kelly on screen together (he was persuaded to unretire for this film ... which lasted another 11 years). That said, the romance is the kind that only really exists because the actors are beautiful and the film asserts that it does. Like the French Riviera settings, handsome cars and costumes, and pretty VistaVision tableaus, it's attractive, super light and doesn't really stick with you.

The mystery is actually pretty dreadful. It's difficult to believe that Grant is ever in any real danger of going to jail for a series of crimes that can't be connected to him by any actual evidence. His "M. O." seems to be "stealing jewels and leaving no evidence", which is hardly a decisive signature. Apparently the police believe he'd go out a steal a bunch of jewels and then just sit around the house waiting for them to show up. The idea that he has to go on the run is a real stretch.

Even if you buy that, the big hunt for the real thief is mainly hanging around beaches and villas until the real thief falls into his lap. Not the most compelling manhunt.

I don't think it's bad film by any stretch, but like a lot of mid-tier Hitchcock, it goes down easily and then instantly evaporates.

99 River Street (1953)

Another tough noir from Karlson and Payne

[8/10 · 21 June 2023]

John Payne is former boxer working as a cab driver. His boxing career was cut short by an eye injury sustained in his last match, and his wife Peggie Castle is becoming increasingly discontent with their new modest lifestyle. She's having an affair with jewel thief Brad Dexter, which Payne becomes aware of when he sees them together.

Dexter plans on fencing a bunch of diamonds he stole and running off with Castle. His fence Jay Adler calls off the deal due to Castle's presence. Dexter compensates by murdering Castle and framing Payne for it. Payne has to find Dexter and clear his name. Aspiring actress Evelyn Keyes, a friend of Payne's, inadvertently becomes involved and helps Payne.

Payne and director Phil Karlson team up for another tough little noir following "Kansas City Confidential". This one doesn't quite equal the Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef, Neville Brand trio of baddies from KCC, but Dexter is always a great psycho and tough guy Jack Lambert shows up too.

The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969)

One of Kramer's better films

[8/10 · 21 June 2023]

In the aftermath of Mussolini's removal from office, buffoonish wine merchant Anthony Quinn is made the new mayor of the small town of Santa Vittoria. Shortly after, the town learns that the German army is intending to occupy the town. Their chief resource is wine ... over 1,000,000 bottles ... that they produce and sell to Cinzano. Knowing that the Germans plan on confiscating it, they hatch a plan to hide it in old Roman caves on the edge of town.

The Germans arrive, lead by Hardy Krüger. Quinn puts on an obsequious front, allowing Krüger to believe that the few thousand bottles they have left for him to confiscate is all they have. All seems fine until word comes down to Krüger from Cinzano about how much wine the town really should have.

Like most Stanley Kramer's directorial output, this is quite a long film. Most of the reason for it's length is the large number of characters in a large number of subplots. Anna Magnani is Quinn's wife who, sick of him being a drunken clown, kicks him out of the house. Virna Lisi is the widowed contessa who falls in love with army deserter Sergio Franchi. A very young Giancarlo Giannini falls in love with Quinn's daughter.

The heart of the movie is the Quinn/Krüger interactions, and both are in top form. This is the rare Kramer film that's very light on social messages and it's kind of better for it. Shot in Italy at Cinecittà, it has wonderful cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

Interesting if not exactly profound

[8/10 · 21 June 2023]

Gian Maria Volontè kills his mistress Florinda Bolkan and deliberately leaves clues pointing to himself as the murderer. He's a policeman ... the head of the homicide squad in fact, although he's just been appointed to a new job, leading the division that investigates political radicals.

We essentially follow two plot lines. The investigation of Balkan's murder proceeds, and any time the investigators seem to be veering towards other suspects, Volontè leaves clues pointing back to himself. We also chart the course of his sado-masochistic relationship with Bolkan, and how the gradual shift in power dynamics back to her lead to his desire to kill her.

This is a pretty dazzling film with two magnificent lead performances. It poses as a crime film, but is really a character study of the fascist mindset. It's kind of bogged down by some fairly outdated psychoanalytic ideas, but that's not really the film's fault.

Thieves' Highway (1949)

A nifty radical truckin' noir

[8/10 · 18 June 2023]

Richard Conte comes back from the war to find that his truck driving dad (Morris Carnovsky) has been crippled by crooked produce seller Lee J. Cobb in an effort to avoid paying him. Conte throws in with trucker Millard Mitchell to haul a couple of shipments of apples to San Francisco where Conte plans on getting even with Cobb.

You don't see many noirs focused on trucking and produce markets, but this one scripted by the great A. I. Bezzerides (adapting his own novel) and directed by Jules Dassin uses the setting well as a sort of our-society-in-miniature take down of exploitation and corruption. It's a genuinely radical film where Valentina Cortese's immigrant prostitute, who helps Conte after initially being hired by Cobb to set him up, turns out to be far more loyal and upright than Barbara Lawrence's blonde girlfriend character who dumps Conte at the first sign of trouble.

This is a tough, scrappy little film with a surprisingly great role for Jack Oakie.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

A nice Hollywood confection

[7/10 · 18 June 2023]

You'd have to be a real curmudgeon not to get pleasure from watching this film. It's an exceedingly nice film with a really wonderful lead trio and the message that love is more important than worrying about what assholes think. I mean ... yeah ... it is, right?

I think it has the standard Stanley Kramer flaws. It's a fairly shallow movie about serious issues that ends up selling it's thesis way too softly. Pairing Sidney Poitier's amazingly accomplished doctor (who works teaching medicine to the Third World no less) with the rather unremarkable Katharine Houghton inadvertently implies that it takes a remarkable specimen of a black man to marry an average white girl. I'm fairly confident Kramer didn't mean to imply this.

I'm being a bit facetious, but I do think the movie paints the mildest scenario imaginable and then just patches over the problem with love. It's not racial prejudice that leads Spencer Tracy to have pause about this marriage, but rather the fairly regular desire for his daughter not to have a tough time in life. It's a pretty easy problem to overcome with an appeal to emotion. Actual prejudice is a thornier problem.

In this film's case, these issues feel like nitpicks. While it's a far from perfect film, it's a beautifully crafted bit of Hollywood filmmaking, with a really wonderful final performance from the great Tracy.

The film's titular question does came up in the film, but the answer is not Poitier.

The Misfits (2021)

Who cares?

[5/10 · 18 June 2023]

Pierce Brosnan is an international thief recruited by a team of blah blah blahs to steal blah blah from a high security prison in a made up Middle Eastern country. They want to steal the blah and give it to charity ... and who cares?

Renny Harlin was never a great director, but he could put together a competent action film. This really does not feel like the same man. I'll grant him that he's working with a terrible script with only one of two characters with any dimensions to speak of, terrible dialogue and a boring, confusing heist. But even the simplest action sequences are just incompetently staged and vastly uninvolving.

The only thing that saves this from total disaster is Brosnan, who exhibits some spark.

All the President's Men (1976)

Simply brilliant

[10/10 · 15 June 2023]

This is such a difficult film to pull off.

It was made less than 5 years after the events depicted. It was made 2 years after Richard Nixon resigned. It's a suspense film that everyone knows the ending of.

It's not about a criminal investigation. It's about journalists. Most of the "action" involves talking on the phone, reading documents and typing.

It must have been so tempting to inject drama into this. Give Woodward and/or Bernstein some personal drama to goose up the temptation.

This movie takes the high road and succeeds brilliantly. It sticks to the story of two relatively inexperienced journalists getting the story of their life and working the details with tenacity and courage. William Goldman and Alan J. Pakula generate tension and suspense from telephone calls and conversations. It's an accurate depiction of just how tedious this kind of work can be, but it creates tension out of tedium.

The most dramatic scene in this film involves Robert Redford sitting at a desk while having two different telephone conversations.

The film magnificently and subtly works in the political climate of the times. The television is always on in the news room, and news reports of the key political events of the day are in the background. The sequence with Redford on the phone is a split diopter of him at the desk and people in the newsroom watching Nixon's nomination.

This film is the model for nearly all subsequent films about journalism.

Aftersun (II) (2022)

We never really know who are parents were

[8/10 · 14 June 2023]

Eleven year old Frankie Corio is on vacation with her father (Paul Mescal) at a resort in Turkey some time in the late 1990's. Her parents are clearly no longer together, but they have a good relationship. It's not always amicable, but Mescal is a caring and attentive father who takes responsibility for his mistakes. Corio clearly adores her father, but is also starting to branch out as her own person, asserting her own wants and wandering off to hang out with older kids.

We also get a lot of clues that things are not completely right with Mescal. He's nervous about money and profoundly disappointed with his life. He has books on meditation and Tai Chi, but something about the situation suggests these are new pursuits meant to help him with anxiety and depression. We occasionally see him crack a bit, but not in front of Corio. We do see that Corio is not completely oblivious.

I've seen this film positioned as an adult remembering childhood events, but it's not quite that straightforward. We see a fair number of scenes where Corio is absent or asleep, so these aren't exactly her memories. It's more like we see what happened with a strong element of her point of view, mostly only seeing hints of the adult side of the situation as a child would, but we also get a strong sense of how the now adult child would piece together the truth.

We almost inevitably come to the realization that our parents were adults just like we are too late to benefit from that knowledge. Both of my parents have been dead for many years, and I've come to realize that most of my knowledge of who they were at my age comes from the perspective of a child. There are string suggestions in "Aftersun" that Mescal has passed away before adult Corio (Celia Rowlson-Hall) could come to grips with who he was. It's never stated in exactly those terms, but you can feel the sense of profound regret in the last act.

Even without this angle, it's beautiful depiction of a good, but complicated father-daughter relationship. Mescal and Corio have a wonderful rapport.

Deep End (1970)

What if Polanski had made a colourful, sexually charged romantic comedy?

[8/10 · 13 June 2023]

Teenager John Moulder-Brown gets a job at a run down public bath house in London and is shown the ways of the place by his older co-worker Jane Asher. She's a bit promiscuous with a fiancé (Christopher Sandford) and a lover (Moulder-Brown's former teacher Karl Michael Vogler) and she tries to teach Moulder-Brown how to get better tips by occasionally servicing the opposite gender. (Moulder-Brown has a surreal, sexually charged encounter with Diana Dors.)

Moulder-Brown develops an obsession with Asher, who sometimes encourages him, but alternately pushes him away. He takes to trailing her and Sandford wherever they go. It doesn't end well.

Polish ex-pat Jerzy Skolimowski first rose to international prominence by co-scripting Roman Polanski's "Knife in the Water". There's a real tonal similarity to Polanksi's European thrillers of the period, even though it's mostly played more as a sexually charged romantic comedy. The use of extremely vivid colour stands out, as does the soundtrack that uses Cat Stevens and Can to striking effect.

Burt Kwouk pops up as a Soho hot dog vendor. Hard to top that.

The Queen of Hearts (2009)

Yeah ... alright ...

[7/10 · 12 June 2023]

Valérie Donzelli's boyfriend dumps her, so she moves in with her cousin (who's eye is slowly decaying).

Donzelli is deeply depressed and has no job, so her cousin doesn't want her to stay alone in her apartment all day. She hangs out in the park across the street where she meets an art student. They form a close bond.

Donzelli gets a job babysitting, and the husband falls in love with her.

Donzelli meets another guy she becomes sexually obsessed with.

All of these men are played by Jérémie Elkaïm.

Donzelli's directorial debut is ... amiably strange. It's the kind of comedy you never actually laugh at, but you are quietly amused by much of it.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

Hey ... that was okay

[8/10 · 12 June 2023]

I had never seen this before because I was 31 in 1999 and far too cool for teen comedy adaptations of Shakespeare. I've been recently trying to catch up with popular movies I have never seen, and at 54, I'm no longer too cool for teen comedy adaptations of Shakespeare.

I'm glad I did. This is a solidly okay film that both amused and entertained. It's not a perfect film. The plot is EXTREMELY predictable, but in ways that are more comforting than annoying. It raises a few comic dead-ends, but generally speaking ... it was a spend an hour and a half.

I didn't expect Julia Stiles to kind of steal the movie away from Heath Ledger and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but damn if she didn't manage it.

They let Ledger just talk in his Australian accent.

The Magic Flute (1975)

A beautifully filmed opera

[8/10 · 11 June 2023]

Bergman sets himself a very difficult task here, and he succeeds. He stages Mozart's "The Magic Flute" as if we are watching it in an 18th century theater complete with all the mechanical apparatus used to create effects. (He recreated the stage of the Drottingholm Court Theater, an 18th century theater in Stockholm, on a sound stage.) He stages the opera on that stage, and provides an audience watching it. He even shows some of the backstage mechanics.

He also wants us to be completely swept up in the story ... watching an 18th century staging of an opera while forgetting that it's only a staged opera. Bergman is uncharacteristically fluid with his camera work, using dramatic movements and close-ups to sell the magical, fairy tale narrative.

It's amazingly successful.

The Boys in the Band (1970)

Interesting, but not very good

[6/10 · 9 June 2023]

Kenneth Nelson is throwing a birthday party for Leonard Frey and all of their friends are invited. Peter White, Nelson's college roommate, is not, but he shows up unexpectedly distraught about something. White doesn't know that Nelson is gay, so the situation is unstable and only gets more so when Nelson starts drinking and everyone's demons are unleashed.

I'm of two minds about this film. Mart Crowley's play is an important one, and it's good to see it preserved with a screenplay by Crowley and all of it's original cast. I also think there's something oppressively about the way Friedkin films it, and many of the performances are not bad, but are bad film acting. Nelson, in particular, is very mannered and much too big. This isn't helped by the way Friedkin shoots everything in tight close-ups.

It's a film I admired, but didn't really like.

High School Hellcats (1958)

Okay female JD flick

[6/10 · 8 June 2023]

Yvonne Lime is the new girl in school, and on her first day, she meets the Hellcats, an all-girl gang lead by Jana Lund. Lund tricks Lime into wearing slacks to school the next day, which is not allowed. (!!!) Having proven that she has guts, Lime is initiated and joins the gang and starts living wildly. It's all fun until a girl falls down the stairs and dies, and Lime turns against the gang with the help of her stand-up boyfriend Brett Halsey and sympathetic teacher Rhoda Williams.

This flick was one of two juvenile delinquent pics produced by Buddy Rogers (Mary Pickford's husband) and Ferde Grofe Jr. (son of film composer Ferde Grofe) for A. I. P. It's like a slightly inferior versions of the films Roger Corman was turning in during the same period. It's fun, but nothing to get excited about.

Nightfall (1956)

A delightfully weird noir

[9/10 · 7 June 2023]

Aldo Ray meets fashion model Anne Bancroft at a bar and they hit it off. Unfortunately Ray is being pursued by Brian Keith and Rudy Bond, two bank robbers who ran into Ray and a friend camping ... an encounter that resulted in a dead friend and Ray running off with their money. Ray misplaced the money, but they aren't having any of that.

This is a delightfully eccentric noir. How eccentric? It features Ray and Bancroft as a romantic couple. She's really great, bringing a really atypical energy to the role. Of the two robbers, Bond is a talkative, joke cracking psychopath which amps up the weirdness. It all leads to everyone heading up to the snowy mountains of Wyoming where Ray lost the money, with insurance investigator James Gregory tailing them.

Don't Look Up (2021)

It's emblematic of how stupid this film is that it's defenders blandly assume that people who don't like it are climate change deniers

[5/10 · 6 June 2023]

Adam McKay was a moderately talented writer/director of moderately funny goofy comedies until "The Big Short" convinced him, and I guess a bunch of people holding the purse strings, that he was a serious political thinker. He really is not.

This would be a terrible film if it weren't stuffed to the gills with talented actors. It's central metaphor isn't very good. It can't decide on a target. It meanders all over the place, taking very light swipes at everything McKay dislikes. It's so dumb and unfocused that it fails to notice that the way it tries to use the titular phrase is completely nonsensical. Like everything else in the film, it's just a cheap shot at something McKay dislikes.

McKay has the temerity to bemoan the descent of societal discourse into cheap one-upmanship. What the hell is this? None of the characters scan as real people. None of the targets of his humor are anything more than wildly exaggerated versions of McKay's political enemies. It's shallow political sniping inflated by a huge budget and lots of stars.

My American Uncle (1980)

Kind of a silly film

[7/10 · 6 June 2023]

Alain Resnais tells three interconnected stories interspersed with an occasional narration by psychologist/philosopher/physician Henri Laborit (best known for discovering chlorpromazine and revolutionizing the use of drugs in psychiatric treatment) describing his theories of human behavior. The stories turn out to ... illustrate/demonstrate/confirm (???) ... his views.

Knowing too much about the subject matter of a movie can really ruin it. I think the stories Resnais chooses to tell here are entertaining, but I doubt they completely stand alone without their connection to Laborit. I was deliberately vague above about what that connection is supposed to be because quite frankly I don't understand what Resnais thinks he's doing.

I really do think that Resnais thinks that only by viewing these stories through the Laborit lens (which is a rather sophisticated version of behaviorism that uses biology to fill in the blanks in cruder forms) do we really understand what we're seeing, This simply isn't true. Like most narratives, the stories are so high level that any number of incompatible psychological theories could be imposed on them and be equally explanatory.

I think it's really a kind of silly film.

My Kid Could Paint That (2007)

Can a 4 year old make real art? Apparently not.

[8/10 · 6 June 2023]

Marla Olmstead is 4 years old. Her father, factory manager Mark Olmstead, is an amateur painter of extremely modest talent. When Marla expressed interest in painting, Mark set her up with paints and a canvas on the dining room table. Although still in diapers, Marla produced complete abstract paintings that really aren't bad at all. On a lark, a friend of the family put some up in his coffee shop, and patrons expressed interest in buying them. A gallery show, local newspaper articles, NY Times articles all followed, and soon Marla's paintings were selling for five figures.

Enter documentarian Amir Bar-Lev, who sets out to make a documentary on the media sensation and the question of what is modern art. Then "60 Minutes" enters the picture. What seems to be just another of many media appearances the Olmstead family has been making turns into an expose that accuses Mark of being the real artist.

This is an interesting documentary that turns fascinating in the 2nd half, even if that fascination is a bit like watching a slow motion car wreck. Marla's paintings are ... decent. They are esthetically pleasing abstract works that are pretty clearly not worth anything like the money being paid for them. Their value gets caught up in a frenzy involving their origins and a lot of values and ideas that people are imposing on the work of a four year old.

But are they really the work of a four year old? The Olmsteads are never able to demonstrate that they are, and it's clear that Bar-Lev no longer believes them at all. Early supporter and gallery owner Anthony Brunelli admits on camera that his real interest is debunking the whole idea of the abstract art that he resents for selling better than his own meticulously photo realistic work (which is technically admirable, but aesthetically worthless).

My own impression is that the completed painting we see are not the work of the child we see painting.

The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)

A pretty interesting take on this material

[8/10 · 5 June 2023]

One of my issues with most film adaptations of this story is that they fundamentally alter Jekyll's motives and they end up being pretty nonsensical. This Hammer adaptation doesn't exactly fix this problem initially, but takes a few turns and nearly ends up back where the literary Jekyll started.

This Jekyll (Paul Massie) is kind of an unpleasant, obsessive drudge who ignores his wife (Dawn Addams) in pursuit of his formula. When he succeeds, he turns into a handsome, suave Hyde who discovers that Addams is having an affair with is pal Christopher Lee, who keeps borrowing money from him. Hyde insinuates himself into their company.

This Jekyll ends up having an almost Dorian Gray quality about him. He's not a monster as he's typically portrayed on film, but rather a conscienceless dandy who delights in doing bad things. While Jekyll goes through the motions of trying to stop him, you get the distinct sense that he also gets a thrill out of letting Hyde act out his resentments.

Massie does a good job here, crafting two quite distinct characters out of nothing more than attitude and a fake beard. Lee does a really phenomenal job with a relatively small side character. Speaking of small ... a young Oliver Reed pops in for a couple of minutes.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Really atmospheric horror outing

[8/10 · 5 June 2023]

Canadian nurse Frances Dee is hired to tend to plantation owner Tom Conway's ailing wife on a fictional Caribbean island. The wife (Christine Gordon) had been planning on running off with Conway's half-brother James Ellison when she was stricken with a terrible fever that has left her in a sort of trance. Dee is convinced that the island's voodoo practitioner's may be able to help Gordon, but they become convinced that she's a zombie.

The second film from Val Lewton's B horror unit at RKO is a highly abbreviated take on "Jane Eyre" transplanted to an island setting.

Jacques Tourneur helms this one too, and it's an intensely atmospheric film with a lot of dreamy nighttime sequences and only one thing approaching a shock effect ... Darby Jones in effective makeup as a zombie guard.

The film suffers a bit from it's very short running time. The romance between Conway and Dee is highly unconvincing. However, in an era that tended to treat this kind of subject matter for laughs or cheap exotic thrills, it really takes voodoo and Caribbean culture quite seriously. Calypso singer Sir Lancelot has a small role, and it would be the first time Americans heard calypso in a film.

Pressure Point (1962)

An interesting subject treated in an almost completely uninteresting manner

[6/10 · 3 June 2023]

Sidney Poitier is a prison psychiatrist trying to help prisoner Bobby Darin who is unable to sleep. The problem is that Darin is in prison for being a Nazi and hates Poitier. He manages to help with his issue anyway, but then clashes with prison officials over Darin's parole.

Both Poitier and Darin are good in what's virtually a two man film. The issue is that this film is very consumed with it's period's obsession with psychoanalysis, so much so that this feels like a story about two archetypes, not real people. Despite having quite a few inventive visual ideas, it's ultimately a not very interesting examination of some interesting questions, chiefly a doctor's ethical obligations when dealing with morally repugnant patients.

Stanley Kramer produced the film, but he also directed a wrap-around segment that has Peter Falk as a psychiatrist asked to treat a young black patient who hates white people. An older Poitier is his boss and he tells Falk the film's story. Truth be told, other than the minor pleasure of seeing Falk on screen for a few minutes, it adds almost nothing to the film.

Lights in the Dusk (2006)

Film noir as bleak existential comedy

[9/10 · 1 June 2023]

Janne Hyytiäinen is a loser. He works as a security guard. All his co-workers and his boss dislike him. He dreams of starting his own company. He goes to night school to learn how, but the bank refuses his loan and openly mocks him. His only "friend" is Maria Heiskanen, who runs a hot dog stand he frequents.

One day Maria Järvenhelmi sits down at his table in a café. She is nice to him. They go out on a date. When things are looking up, she callously walks out on him. It turns out to have been a ploy to rob a jewelry store he guards and hang the crime on him. He realizes, and plays along anyway.

Aki Kaurismäki strips film noir down to its barest elements and plays it as existential deadpan comedy. When everything is at it's very darkest, he eeks out the tiniest happy ending.

I absolutely love this film.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

One of Kramer's better films ... unfortunately Kramer directed it

[8/10 · 31 May 2023]

The thing about Stanley Kramer is that he took big, important idea/questions and crammed them into the framework of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. Sometimes he did this pretty successfully. Frequently he did not.

The danger is that even when it does work ... and it does work here ... the ideas get distorted as they get stuffed into a popular drama. This film, which dramatizes the 1948 trial of four judges who worked for the Nazi regime, tackles so many questions that most of them are just left hanging by the end of the film. The film spends a lot of time talking about the conflict between one's personal moral responsibilities and one's responsibilities to a job or country. That's an interesting question, but the film spends a lot of time establishing that the judges convicted people regardless of the evidence, which would be illegal within the confines of German law, even during the Nazi regime. Much of the film seems wildly overdetermined in this way, making a hash out of the questions it raises.

What the film seems to be ultimately about is not whether your average German state functionary was even partly responsible for the Holocaust, but whether the thought processes that lead even decent people to be complicit in these kind of crimes is an ongoing problem that persists outside of the confines of wildly criminal regimes like the Nazis. The Soviet blockade of Berlin is introduced in the film's final act and provides a strong motive for the Americans to go easy on the defendants. The overall picture is of even decent people repeatedly being asked to do questionable things "for the good of their country".

Finch (2021)

It's Tom Hanks, a dog and a robot ... what more do you want?

[8/10 · 31 May 2023]

A huge solar flare has blown a hole in the ozone layer and the world has become an uninhabitable wasteland cooked by solar radiation. Tom Hanks, a former robotics engineer, survives by combing St. Louis for canned food in a makeshift radiation suit, and hiding out in a fortified lab with some robotic gadgets and his beloved dog. When he starts to exhibit signs of radiation poisoning, he builds a much more sophisticated robot (voiced by Caleb Landry Jones) to care for the dog when he's gone. Impending serious weather necessitates leaving St. Louis, so the three head for San Francisco in a highly modified RV.

It's hard to argue with Tom Hanks, a dog and a robot wandering through post-apocalyptic America. There's nothing startlingly original here, but Hanks is really great and the dog is really cute and the robot is both funny and kind of poignant. It's an extremely entertaining little flick.