1. 

   Movie poster of The Ten Commandments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

   The acting in Cecil DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments is not always good, so it’s a wonder the thespians manage to exude as much true spirituality as they do.  Not that it is never artificial—of course it is—but the artificiality of the entire picture fails to upend the spiritual feeling DeMille was after.

2. Since the ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods, cats included, surely it is unsurprising to find an Egyptian woman, Anne Baxter‘s Nefretiri, worshipping a handsome non-god, Moses (Charleton Heston).  Baxter is beautiful, her acting nicely precise in its dreaminess.  Debra Paget and Yvonne De Carlo are beautiful too, but do not have much impact here.
3. It was inspired of the screenwriters to have Joshua (John Derek) paint lamb’s blood on the doorposts and lintel of the house where Lilia (Paget) is being kept by middle-aged Dathan (that pig!)  It means firstborn Lilia doesn’t have to die.  Ah, Moses, however, tells the stricken Nefretiri—nothing really goes right for her—that he is unable to save the life of her small son, and yet this is not true.  He simply needs to urge her to arrange the painting of lamb’s blood on her doorposts and lintel.
   

   Cropped screenshot of Anne Baxter with Yul Brynner from the trailer for the film The Ten Commandments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    

Pickup on South Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Sam Fuller  film, Pickup on South Street (1953), is probably the only movie ever made in which a prostitute, or former prostitute, is accused of being a subversive Communist.  But the woman in question, Candy (Jean Peters), simply doesn’t know the company she keeps, and is, it turns out, badly roughed up by a Communist.  Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), a cynical thief, gets rough with her too—welcome to New York City—but later the two become, er, committed lovers.

Fashioned under the studio system, Pickup is better directed, more polished, than Fuller’s White Dog, and just as absorbing.  This despite a couple of defects in Fuller’s screenplay:  e.g. Thelma Ritter‘s character never would have stayed alive as long as she does.  I like most of the acting, except that Murvyn Vye, as a police captain, never changes his scowling expression.

Film poster for True Crime – Copyright 1999 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Clint Eastwood miscast himself as a newspaper reporter in the 1999 True Crime, but a bigger problem is the weak plot.  Based on an Andrew Klavan novel, the film’s serious subject is the death-row conviction of an innocent man (Isaiah Washington).  Steve, the reporter, interviews people for his paper but he also likes to play Dick Tracy, and he doesn’t understand how a male witness, after a homicide, could have seen the innocent convict’s gun through a rack of potato chips.  Nice try, but this won’t fly as a plot device.

On the positive side, the anguish of the convict and his family is handled movingly, and there is a powerful scene of marital breakup featuring Eastwood and an extraordinary Diane Venora.  Both these scenes belong in a better movie—one, in fact, that doesn’t rely on constant profanity and obscenity to hold a viewer’s attention.  (Thanks, Clint, for your use of James Woods in this regard.)  True Crime is somewhat of an offense.

True to Hollywood’s mixed genre tendency, Game Night (2018) is an arrant comedy-adventure starring Jason Bateman and Rachel MacAdams.  Although the action of the adventure is stronger than the zippy comedy, some of the jokes are quite amusing.  Others, though, are desperate or boringly vulgar (stuff about penis size) or not as witty or intelligent as the filmmakers think, as when Bateman wants his unborn child to eventually learn Mandarin because “China is the future.”  This last one, in fact, isn’t even funny.

Game Night is solidly, sometimes scintillatingly (Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons) acted.  I consider it a bit too playful and cheeky for its own good, but it is a fun piece of harmlessness.  And how can the directorial work miss?  The flick has two of them—directors, that is.

True to Hollywood’s mixed genre tendency, Game Night (2018) is an arrant comedy-adventure starring Jason Bateman and Rachel MacAdams.  Although the action of the adventure is stronger than the zippy comedy, some of the jokes are quite amusing.  Others, though, are desperate or boringly vulgar (stuff about penis size) or not as witty or intelligent as the filmmakers think, as when Bateman wants his unborn child to eventually learn Mandarin because “China is the future.”  This last one, in fact, isn’t even funny.

Game Night is solidly, sometimes scintillatingly (Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons) acted.  I consider it a bit too playful and cheeky for its own good, but it is a fun piece of harmlessness.  And how can the directorial work miss?  The flick has two of them—directors, that is.