Movie Diary 1/18/2011

Cornered (Edward Dmytryk, 1945). A year after Dmytryk and Dick Powell made Murder, My Sweet, they re-teamed for this hard-boiled tale of a Canadian vet looking for the collaborationist French who killed his wife. Darned if this isn’t at least as good as Murder, My Sweet, even if the plot gets pretzeled. Powell has some great jaundiced one-liners, expertly delivered, and he sports a zig-zag scar across the side of his crewcut head.

Enemies of the People (Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath, 2010). Bone-chilling documentary, virtually hand-made, in which an extremely humble Cambodian journalist takes it upon himself to get Khmer Rouge murderers (from various levels of order-giving, including the very top) on tape talking about what they did in the killing fields. (full review 1/21)

Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (Hideaki Anno, 2009). Part two of an anime blockbuster. Anime people are crazy. (full review 1/21)

Undertow (Javier Fuentes-León, 2009). Kind of hard not to invoke Brokeback Mountain with this one. But there must be some way. Two men in a small village on the Peruvian coast, one of them married. (full review 1/21)

And a couple of new posts at my other website, What a Feeling!: The Wraith, and Nightfall.