Reviewing a 1976 actioner with mob lawyer and BFF race driver Stacy Keach keeping heroin off the streets of San Francisco, Nicholas Ray’s 1949 woman’s picture/mystery/noir with Maureen O’Hara and Gloria Grahame and a 1986 TV-movie with the one-off pairing of Robert Mitchum and Wilford Brimley.

Reviewing the new documentary COVER-UP (co-directed by Laura Poitras) on investigative journalism legend Seymour Hersh, Josh Safdie’s MARTY SUPREME, James Cameron’s AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH and Paul Feig’s THE HOUSEMAID.

A few brief comments on Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer crafting what they hoped to be an Awards Season crowd pleaser with George Clooney as Nowhere Man movie star who glides through life until self-examination happens almost too late.

Reviews of films rejected by mainstream audiences: DIE MY LOVE (which will be an awards contender regardless), CHRISTY (Sydney Sweeney again showing serious acting credentials) and SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (a Bruce Springsteen biopic daring to be more analytical than triumphant underdog cliche).

Discussing, briefly, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, and where I think it should be placed in the Paul Thomas Anderson pantheon. Then, it’s on to AFTER THE HUNT, which wants to provoke in a lazy right-tilting fashion where #MeToo is treated like a Mark of Cain inconvenience for successful people asked to be accountable for misconduct/coercion/assault—plus there’s a side order of Trump-ish excrement thrown at perceived over-sensitive university students by professors/staff. Finally, there’s BLACK PHONE 2, which meanders and gives Ethan Hawke’s Grabber an origin story—and only connects when Madeleine McGraw’s Gwen is onscreen in grainy dreamscape scenes which evoke Zach Cregger’s WEAPONS more than Blumhouse horror fare.

Reviewing William Wyler’s final film, a bleak statement about irresolvable racism in the American South, plus Ernst Lubitsch’s final film at Paramount, a screwball comedy in which Claudette Colbert teaches seven times wed playboy businessman Gary Cooper how to value the institution of marriage.

Films from the Action Couple of the moment: Ana De Armas enters the John Wick universe as Tom Cruise finishes an almost three-decade run as IMF agent Ethan Hunt.

Reviewing a lesser-known Humphrey Bogart circus/carnival film, John Farrow’s teaming of Ray Milland and Barbara Stanwyck—and Willian Shatner going Full Shatner as a grifter/gigolo who also is a psychopathic killer in early 1970S Tampa.