C- Elles, Bridge, Shattuck, opens Friday. This NC-17 French/Polish co-production has a lot of sex, and a lot of nudity (both male and female), but is in no way erotic. That’s odd, because it stars Juliette Binoche, who could be erotic cleaning a cat box. In this self-important yet shallow drama, she plays a freelance journalist researching an article about young prostitutes working their way through college. Binoche does her best, which is always excellent. But the screenplay gives her so little to go on that she appears to be emoting in a vacuum. Read my full review.

Shorts in Brief, Rafael, Sunday, 2:00. The name sounds redundant, but this collection of Pixar shorts looks like a fun afternoon.

A+ Children of Paradise, Castro, Saturday through Monday. Shot while the Nazi occupation of Paris fell apart, Children of Paradise may be the most ecstatically French film ever made. A three-hour epic set in the theater scene of early 19th-century Paris, it follows the life of a beautiful woman (Arletty) and four men who fall under her spell—each in his own unique way. The story is rich, romantic, and deeply in love with theatrical traditions. In this version of Paris, even the violent thugs see their lives as works of art. Written by Jacques Prévert and directed by Marcel Carné. Newly restored, the Castro will be screening Children of Paradise in DCP. That was how I saw it in March, and it never looked so wonderful. In fact, based on the restoration, I’ve upgraded Children of Paradise from an A to a rare A+.  I discuss it in more detail here.

A- Milk, Castro, Tuesday, 7:30. Yep, I’m always a sucker for a historical epic, especially one set in a time and place that I can remember. Sprawling but never boring, and inspiring without preaching. I’ve always known that Sean Penn was a great actor; it’s nice to know that he can do “happy” as well as more tragic emotions. James Franco is also very good as what in a more conventional film would be called the "chick" part. A fund raiser for the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy.

A Monty Python and the Holy Grail, UA Berkeley, Thursday, 9:00. Bump your coconuts together and prepare the Holy Hand Grenade, but watch out for the Killer Rabbit (not to mention the Trojan one). The humor is silly and often in very bad taste, and the picture has nothing of substance to say beyond ridiculing the romantic view of medieval Europe. But the Pythons’ first feature with an actual story (well, sort of) keeps you laughing from beginning to end. The funniest film of the 1970s—and the 1070s.

A- Howard Hawks double bill: Sergeant York & To Have and Have Not, Stanford, Friday through Sunday. The A- goes to Sergeant York. No other event morally challenged pacifists like World War II. So it’s no surprise that, as America entered that horribly necessary inferno, Howard Hawks filmed the story of a deeply religious and pacifistic Christian (Gary Cooper) who first objected to serving, then went on to prove extraordinary skill and courage on the battlefield. Not quite that good, To Have and Have Not ignited the Bogart-Bacall romance, which itself ignites the screen. Aside from the considerable charisma and sexual sparks, it’s an entertaining tale of war-time intrigue, with a couple of great scenes. David Thomson will introduce Saturday’s 7:30 screening.

B- Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, Camera 3, Saturday & Sunday, 9:30. Steve Jobs was a brilliant, charismatic figure who drastically changed the world we live in. But does that mean you’ll enjoy a 16-year-old, 70-minute, videotaped interview consisting of a single close-up? Surprisingly, the answer is Yes—up to a point. That charisma, combined with the simple fact that Jobs had some interesting things to say in 1995, make this a reasonably entertaining and informative document. But there’s no filmmaking craftsmanship whatsoever here, and there’s a limit to how much time you can watch a single close-up. Thus, the Lost Interview begins to wear out its welcome well before it’s through. Read my full review for more.

Harold and Maude, Castro, Wednesday. After Woodstock, this comedy about a young man and a much older woman is the ultimate cinematic statement of the hippie generation. At least that’s how I remember it. I loved it passionately in the 1970′s. But I haven’t seen it in a long time and I’m not sure how well it’s aged. On a double bill with Brewster McCloud, which I only saw once, about 40 years ago, and I hated it then.

Yellow Submarine, Elmwood, Saturday, noon. The Beatles’ one animated feature–which to my knowledge hasn’t played the Bay Area in years–has been restored, and is receiving special theatrical presentations. It’s been too long since I’ve seen this whimsical fantasy for me to issue a grade. If memory serves, Yellow Submarine is a wonderful movie for taking drugs, and equally wonderful for taking your kids. Just don’t take both.

D+ Darling Companion, Shattuck, opens Friday. I hate watching good actors struggle through a bad script. This particular bad script concerns a long-married couple (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline) and several relatives searching for a missing dog. It’s supposed to turn into a search for self-discovery, but the people are too shallow and contrived to be worth discovering. The result is a character-driven comedy almost entirely lacking in believable characters, or laughs. If it were not for the inspired cast, which also includes Dianne Wiest and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, the movie would be an entire loss. Read my full review.

F Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Camera 3, Saturday. Oh, how Terry Gilliam has fallen! Monty Python’s token Yank made three of the best movies of the 1980’s, then his career collapsed and took his talent with it. Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas reeks; a confused, ugly, and meaningless exercise–which would be forgivable, if it also wasn’t boring and witless.

Take Louise Brooks. In silent films, she’s magical, mysterious, and the very embodiment of female sexuality. In a talkie, she’s a pretty girl from Kansas.

When you see a silent film, properly presented, you get more than a movie; you get a concert. When silents ruled the cinema, every movie theater kept musicians on the payroll. Today, more than 80 years after the death of the art form, there’s no lack for talented and creative composers and musicians skilled at accompanying silent files.

And there’s no better way to enjoy the films and the musicians than the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. For four days every July, the Festival takes over the Castro Theater to exhibit well-known masterpieces, forgotten gems, and rare prints, while also bringing in exceptional musicians to accompany them. The Castro’s own gaudy glory, huge screen, and variable-speed projectors add to the atmosphere, as does the large, enthusiastic audience that the festival attracts.

This year, the Festival runs from Thursday, July 12, through Sunday, July 15. Here are just a sampling of the screenings I’m most looking forward to:

• Wings. The festival opens with the first Best Picture Oscar winner. Newly restored by Paramount, it will be accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra (amongst my favorites), with live sound effects by one of Hollywood’s best, Ben Burtt, (for more on Burtt, see The Sound of Wall-E at the Rafael).
• The Loves of Pharaoh. This big, German historical epic, directed by Ernst Lubitsch shortly before he came to America, will be accompanied by Dennis James on the Castro’s Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ.
• Pandora’s Box. Speaking of Louise Brooks, here’s her masterpiece. Newly restored, it will be accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble.
• The Docks of New York. I’ve never seen this highly-praised Josef von Sternberg drama, but I’m looking forward to it. Accompanied by Donald Sosin on the grand piano.
• The Cameraman. Buster Keaton’s first film for MGM, his penultimate silent, and, in many people’s opinions, his last masterpiece. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will accompany both this and the newly restored “Trip to the Moon.”

C- sex drama

• Wrtten by Malgorzata Szumowska and Tine Byrckel
• Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska

Let’s get the expectations raised by this French/Polish co-production’s NC-17 rating out of the way first. Yes, there is a lot of sex, and a lot of nudity (both male and female). And no, I didn’t find anything in Elles to be erotic.

Which is odd, because the film stars Juliette Binoche, who could be erotic cleaning a cat box.

In this self-important yet shallow drama, she plays Anne, a freelance journalist and apparently full-time housewife. While her husband is away at work and her two son in school, she spends her time cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and interviewing two young college students moonlighting as prostitutes (Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig).

She’s working on an article about these young women–why and how they started selling their bodies, how they feel about it, what it’s like to lie to everyone close to them. The film also shows them with their various clients in scenes that stop just short of hardcore. Until quite late in the picture, we’re not sure whether these sex scenes are flashbacks, cross-cutting, or Anne’s fantasies, sparked by the the stories that the prostitutes tell her.

And if there’s anything Anne needs to escape into, it’s fantasy. Her teenage son smokes pot, skips school, and rebels against everything. Her younger son is addicted to video games. Her relationship with her husband is in serious trouble, although the filmmakers never bother to tell us the nature of their problems.

That’s the film’s biggest problem: We never really get to know who Anne is and what’s eating her inside. She’s clearly suffering from depression. Whenever she’s home, she mopes around looking glum. She occasionally takes a masturbation break, but that doesn’t cheer her up much. She just looks sad as she cleans rooms, fights with kitchen gadgets, cooks a dinner for guests she doesn’t like, and wanders around their large, luxurious Paris flat. (Her husband’s job must be quite lucrative. I can tell you from personal experience that freelance journalists don’t make that kind of money.)

She only comes alive when she’s with the prostitutes. She clearly enjoys being with these young women, and hearing about their sex lives. They become her friends–apparently her only friends.

The movie itself comes alive only with one of the prostitutes–the one played by Demoustier. She’s upbeat and  seems to genuinely enjoy getting paid for sex, but the lying involved is getting to her. She has a boyfriend, and he thinks she works in a fast food joint. You know that relationship is headed for a disaster. She also has some interesting johns, including one begins a little foreplay and then starts crying.

Elles would have been a better film if it had stuck to that character. As Anne, Binoche does her best, which is always excellent. But director/co-writer Szumowska didn’t give us enough information about her to make Binoche’s performance work. She’s a brilliant actor, but here she’s trying to emote in a vacuum.

Szumowska had an interesting idea, a great cast, and the willingness to embrace explicit sexuality. Too bad she didn’t make a good film.

I’m not talking about thrillers, which usually involve a relatively normal person stuck in a dangerous situation and having to find a way out. I’m talking about movies with an exceptional hero, a high body count, and absolutely no moral ambiguity.

Some personal history:

I was a very serious young cinephile in the spring of 1974. I loved Citizen Kane, Rashomon, and The Seventh Seal (I still do). I thought of cinema only as a serious art form in the service of fixing the world. I also loved Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers, but I justified these on the grounds that.great comedy was inherently subversive, and thus doing it’s part for making the world a better place.

But action movies? Unless they were black satires, or lessons in the horror of violence, I had no interest in them.

That spring, I attended a special afternoon screening devoted to three-strip Technicolor. It included two features, the second of which was The Adventures of Robin Hood.

That movie was a revelation. I had no idea that a simple action movie, with a silly plot, witty dialog, and beautifully-choreographed but utterly unbelievable fights, could be so much fun. I discovered a whole new purpose for cinema, and I was hooked.

I still consider Adventures of Robin Hood the gold standard for mindless (but not witless) action. Other such movies that I love include the original Star Wars (AKA A New Hope), The Flame and the Arrow, Die Hard, some of the James Bond movies, and the first and third Indiana Jones movies.

None of these movies are entirely amoral. The villains are unquestionably evil, whether they’re imperialists, usurpers, exploiters of the working class, heartless murderers, and/or Nazis. Not using violence would only result in more innocent deaths.(Actually, I don’t really see usurpers as necessarily evil. The fact that your father was king doesn’t–in my book–make you the right person to rule the country. But the usurpers in these movies are always far worse than the rightful king.) But in real life, things are never that simple. Even Nazis have mothers, wives, and children. Most of the hero’s victims are mere henchmen who, for all we know, were forced into serving evil.

There’s a wonderful shot in The Bridge On the River Kwai. A new recruit has just killed a Japanese soldier in hand-to-hand combat. It was, in the context of war, an entirely justified act. But the camera briefly lingers the dead man’s Buddhist prayer beads and a photo of a smiling family. That sort of nuance never shows up in mindless action pictures.

Real conflicts don’t just dirty the hero’s hands–they dirty his (or her) soul. Sometimes, they kill the hero or people very close to him. In Adventures of Robin Hood, with all of its battles, not a single merry man takes a mortal wound. By contrast, Harry Potter is very realistic.

So what do these movies tell us? That violence, when in the cause of good, is trouble-free? That killing the right people will solve your problems and not cost you anything except a minor wound and a few hours’ annoyance?

In these movies’ defense, I could argue that they’re so unrealistic that I have a hard time believing that anyone would take them seriously. I’ve shown these movies to my kids when they reached appropriate ages–and with Robin Hood, that was very young. I don’t regret it. And I’m not going to stop watching them. After all, what serious examination of the horrors of violence can match something like this video (which I unfortunately can’t embed).

But I wonder…

B+ Last Call at the Oasis, Embarcadero, Shattuck, opens Friday. Water covers most of Earth’s surface, yet the human race is rapidly running out of safe drinking water. Jessica Yu’s surprisingly polished documentary  shows us how as more water is tapped upriver, communities downriver are doomed, how industrial pollution makes the water we have unsuitable for consumption, and how global warming worsens these problem. Hollywood-quality flashy graphics and occasional humor help make this doc watchable, but no less frightening. Read my full review.

D+ Darling Companion, Embarcadero, Aquarius, opens Friday. I hate watching good actors struggle through a bad script. This particular bad script concerns a long-married couple (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline) and several relatives searching for a missing dog. It’s supposed to turn into a search for self-discovery, but the people are too shallow and contrived to be worth discovering. The result is a character-driven comedy almost entirely lacking in believable characters or laughs. If it were not for the inspired cast, which also includes Dianne Wiest and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, the movie would be an entire loss. Read my full review.

Spanish-Language Laurel & Hardy, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum (although these are not silent films), Sunday, 4:00. In the early days of talkies, studios often made multiple versions the same movies, in different languages and with different casts. But since no one else could replace Laurel & Hardy, they appeared in all versions, reading their dialog phonetically. Click here for more on these pictures.

A Howard Hawks Double Feature: His Girl Friday & Ball of Fire, Stanford, Friday through Sunday. His Girl Friday wins the A. Hawks turned The Front Page into a love triangle by making ace reporter Hildy Johnson a woman (Rosalind Russell), and scheming editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) her ex-husband. And thus was born one of the funniest screwball comedies of them all–with a bit of serious drama thrown in about an impending execution. It’s been too many years since I’ve seen Ball of Fire for me to grade it. From what I remember, it’s not one of Hawks’ best works, but it’s still a worthy entertainment. Billy Wilder worked on the screenplay. Film historian David Thomson will introduce Saturday’s 7:30 screening.

A- Double feature: The Social Network & Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, Castro, Tuesday, 7:30. The A- goes to The Social Network, clearly the biopic of our times. I don’t know about the real Mark Zuckerberg, but the movie version makes for great drama. A young man with a serious social disorder, he betrays partners, has sex with groupies, and almost inadvertently becomes extremely wealthy. The Steve Jobs movie is for real. Jobs was a brilliant, charismatic figure who drastically changed the world we live in. But this 16-year-old, 70-minute, videotaped interview consisting of a single close-up is only watchable up to a point. Read my full review.

Yellow Submarine, Elmwood, Saturday at noon, and Wednesday at 8:00 (and the two following Saturdays). The Beatles’ one animated feature–which to my knowledge hasn’t played the Bay Area in years–has been restored, and will receive special theatrical presentations. It’s been too long since I’ve seen this whimsical fantasy for me to issue a grade. If memory serves, Yellow Submarine is a wonderful movie for taking drugs, and equally wonderful for taking your kids. Just don’t take both.

A The Artist, Opera Plaza, Shattuck , return engagement opens Friday. Michel Hazanavicius just made a silent movie about the death of silent movies. Even more amazing than that, he pulls it off, creating a warm, funny, heartfelt, and occasionally sad story of a Hollywood star’s fall from grace as talkies ruin his career. Meanwhile, a struggling actress who loves him becomes a star in the new medium of talkies. Hazanavicius fills the picture with funny bits that illuminate the characters, the setting, and the medium. A black-and-white, narrow-screen, silent film is a hard sell in today’s market, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see The Artist find an audience. Read my full review.

F Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Camera 3, Thursday (and next Saturday). Oh, how Terry Gilliam has fallen! Monty Python’s token Yank made three of the best movies of the 1980’s, then his career collapsed and took his talent with it. Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas reeks; a confused, ugly, and meaningless exercise–which would be forgivable, if it also wasn’t boring and witless.

D+ Character-driven comedy

• Written by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan
• Directed by Lawrence Kasdan

I hate watching good actors, some of whom I’ve admired for decades, struggle through a bad script. That made Darling Companion a very difficult movie to sit through. Here we have a character-driven comedy almost entirely lacking in either fully developed characters and laughs. If it were not for the inspired cast, which includes Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, the movie would have been an entire loss.

As it was, it came pretty close.

Darling Companion tries to explore the long and not-altogether happy marriage of Beth and Joseph Winter (Keaton and Kline). But it’s not just about them. Thrown into the mix we have Joseph’s sister (Wiest), plus her boyfriend (Richard Jenkins) and her son (Mark Duplass). And don’t forget the Winter’s Roma (gypsy) housekeeper, Carmen (Ayelet Zurer), thrown in to give us some ethnic stereotyping.

All of these characters all have their conflicts, which are supposed to be interesting.

In Akira Kurosawa’s disappointing final film, Madadayo, he devotes half an hour to the search for a missing cat. Here, the Kasdans expand on this very bad idea, and build the entire picture around the search for a missing dog. You see, Beth rescued and adopted the dog a year ago, against Joseph’s wishes. Now he’s responsible for the mutt running off into the woods. Everyone joins in on the search, which takes them all around a picturesque Rocky Mountain town.

Would you be surprised to learn that everyone’s relationship problems get healed through the act of searching for a missing canine? Me, neither.

Despite its painful predictability, Darling Companion has one genuine surprise. The third-act resolution turned out to be even more idiotic than I expected.

Early in his career, director/co-writer Lawrence Kasdan had a big success with this sort of low-key, character-driven, ensemble material with The Big Chill. He hasn’t succeeded in repeating it here.

I saw Darling Companion at a press screening prior to its local premiere in the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

B+ Documentary

• Directed by Jessica Yu

How do you judge a political documentary? Artistic and technical merit? How well it argues its case? Is it entertaining? How important is the subject? Do you agree with what it says?

Jessica Yu’s examination of the water crisis looming over the human race does reasonably well on all of those criteria. On most them, and especially the first and last ones, it hits the ball out of the park.

Water covers most of this planet’s surface, yet the human race is rapidly running out of safe drinking water. Unless you’re deep in denial, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, and this documentary makes it that much harder to remain in denial. (Of course, if you are in denial, you won’t see the movie. That’s another problem with political documentaries.)

With the help of original and stock footage, news clips, startling graphics,  informative animation, and experts speaking directly into the camera (including the real Erin Brockovich), Yu shows us how, as more water is tapped upriver, communities downriver are doomed, how industrial pollution is making the water we have unsuitable for consumption, and how global warming is making the problem worse.

Many of the stories are heart-breaking. We meet farmers who have had to give up because there is no water for their crops and livestock, and communities with huge cancer rates, courtesy of the industrial plants that share their water table.

The future looks even worse. As water levels drop in the Colorado river, Hoover Dam will stop producing electricity and Las Vegas will become a ghost town. So will Los Angeles. The American way of life will cease to exist.

Many so-called solutions won’t really help. Desalinization (removing salt from sea water) costs a fortune and burns huge amounts of fossil fuels. And America’s favorite personal solution–bottled water–is a scan. It’s no more safe than what comes out of your faucet.

Yu shows us one economical fix that could help solve the problem, but it’s a hard sell: recycled sewer water. There’s nothing wrong with it, we’re told, and it’s probably safer than what you’re drinking. But people’s visceral reaction will be difficult to overcome.

The film’s funniest sequence involves marking experts trying to find ways to sell such recycled water as bottled drinking water. Jack Black comes in to pitch "Porcelain Spring."

Yu either has a bigger budget than Micheal Moore, or she’s a genius at stretching a buck. The movie’s opening credits use expensive-looking flashy graphics of the sort you’d expect on a network commercial or a superhero movie. The graphics continue throughout, and even the talking heads are well lit and made up. All of this gloss, along with the occasional humor,  help make Last Call at the Oasis watchable, but no less frightening.

I saw this documentary at the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Over those weeks, I saw 15 new feature films. If you include the three I saw at press screenings before the festival, and the two on screeners (DVDs sent to press), the total was 20. In addition, I attended four events that allowed me to revisit old classics, and another where I saw short works by a young and interesting animator.

With a few exceptions, the films were very good to excellent this year. I gave seven of them an A or A-. Another six got a B+.

The best new feature? That would be a three-way tie between By the Fire, Headhunters, and Guity. These films were so different that I couldn’t honestly pick one as better than the others.

The worst? Smugglers’ Songs. I never guessed that a swashbuckler could be so boring.

An interesting technical note:

This film festival had barely any film. Almost every picture I saw at the festival as projected digitally. I had a discussion about this with the head projectionist at the Kabuki, and he estimated that only about 7% of the festival was projected off film.

That didn’t bother me, although it apparently caused some headaches for the festival. A great many HD formats had to be accommodated, and DCP (the standard for professional digital projection) doesn’t you to test the picture before it screens. This can cause serious problems for a single screening.

B+ Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey
I’ve never been a fan of Journey, but this music documentary made me a fan of the band’s new lead singer, Arnel Pineda. He’s charismatic, energetic, down-to-earth, and funny. He also has a great set of pipes. Filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz tells his story, the band’s story, but mostly, the story of how he became a part of Journey. Band members, desperate for a new singer, found the poverty-stricken, Manilla-based Pineda on Youtube, flew him out to California, worked with him for a few weeks, then took him on the most successful tour of Journey’s long history. This is a true-life fairy tale with no significant conflict–the worst thing that happens to Arnel is a head cold. That lack of conflict makes the movie drag at times, but Pineda has such a magnetic personality, and what happens to him is so upbeat, that it becomes the ultimate feel-good movie.

After the movie, I road in a bus (supplied by the Festival) to the Closing Night Party at Sloane Squared. It took a long time to get in, thanks to two big bouncers were letting people in only a few at a time. Once inside, it was too crowded and too noisy. I didn’t stay long.

Despite the disappointing party, the movie itself was a great way to end the Festival. I’ll post an overview of the Festival soon.

A Headhunters, Clay, Shattuck, Piedmont, opens Friday. Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) leads the good life. He’s rich, powerful, and has a beautiful wife. But even his high-paying, high-status job can’t pay for his lavish lifestyle, so he moonlights as a burglar, breaking into homes and stealing expensive paintings. But then something goes seriously wrong. Then it gets worse. Much worse. Before long, avoiding the police is the least of his worries. The result is the most entertaining new movie I’ve yet seen this year–a thriller of Hitchcockian quality. Warning: This movie has several very violent scenes. See my full review.

Yellow Submarine, Elmwood, Thursday, 8:00 (with four additional screenings this month). The Beatles’ one animated feature–which to my knowledge hasn’t played the Bay Area in years–has been restored, and will receive special theatrical presentations. It’s been so long since I’ve seen this whimsical fantasy for me to issue a grade. If memory serves, Yellow Submarine is a wonderful movie for taking drugs, and equally wonderful for taking your kids. Just don’t take both.

A- Only Angels Have Wings, Stanford, Friday through Sunday. Cary Grant heads a team of mail plane pilots in a remote corner of South America. There’s little plot here, just a study of men who routinely fly under very dangerous conditions, and how they cope with death as an every-day part of life. The only non-comedy out of the five films that Grant made for director Howard Hawks, who is being honored in the Stanford’s extensive Hawks series (a similar series recently completed at the Pacific Film Archive). On a double bill with a Hawks film I haven’t seen, Air Force. Saturday night, David Thomson will introduce the film.

B The Graduate, Castro, Saturday and Sunday. Maybe it’s no longer the breakthrough movie it was in 1967, but The Graduate is still a well-made romantic comedy with serious overtones. And, of course, it gets Bay Area geography all wrong. The Castro is advertising a brand new 35mm print.

B- The Searchers, Cerrito, Thursday. A bitter Civil War veteran and racist (John Wayne) spends years searching for his niece, who was kidnapped by Comanches. At first he wants to save her, but as the years go by, he starts talking about killing her, because she’s now "more Comanche than white." Talk about an anti-hero. Shot in VistaVision, the movie looks splendid, has many great moments, and contains one of Wayne’s greatest performances. The closing shot itself is unforgettable. Most John Ford fans consider The Searchers his masterpiece. I disagree. It’s marred by a rambling plot and a very unlikable protagonist (probably Wayne’s least sympathetic character). Besides, color always seemed a handicap for Ford, upsetting the delicate balance between myth and realism he achieved so well in black and white.

B- The Dreamers, Castro, Thursday. More so than most cities, Paris exploded with youthful revolution in 1968. While others their age riot in the streets, three young people (Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel), prefer to stay inside, smoking pot, discussing movies and Marxism, and making very close, exact, and detailed studies of each others’ naked bodies. In fact, they do the later in such detail that The Dreamers earned itself an NC-17 rating. The film works on two levels: simple eroticism, and baby boomer nostalgia for the days of sex, drugs, revolution, and passionate cinephilia. In other words, it’s not as deep as it thinks it is, but it’s still enjoyable. On a double bill with The Sheltering Sky.

B Tiger Shark, Stanford, Wednesday and Thursday. I like this minor Howard Hawks effort, despite Edward G. Robinson’s awful Portuguese accent. He plays the captain of a fishing boat –a skilled fisherman and a decent human being, but with a fierce temper and unlucky with the ladies. When he helps a woman in need (Zita Johann), she agrees to marry him out of gratitude. Of course she’s going to fall in love with his tall and handsome best friend (Richard Arlen). I discuss the film in more detail in Two By Howard Hawks. On a Hawks double bill with Barbary Coast.