Former baseball pro Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is hired as a catcher for the minor-league Durham Bulls, but only so he can help to shape player Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) into a more self-controlled pitcher. Perfectly loyal to the oft-defeated Bulls is unmarried Annie (Susan Sarandon) to whom baseball is a religion. In point of fact, she is a spiritual force for the team, though with a spirituality affiliated with sex (as well as poetry). Every year she gets intimately involved with a different Bulls player and, as it happens, Crash is interested. Currently, however, Nuke is enlisted to be her partner.

Thus on the one hand in Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham (1988) there is baseball, and on the other hand, sex. The only thing they have in common is that they are not religions. But, although baseball in the late ’50s remains pretty much the same, the country itself is slowly changing philosophically and sexually, not without quirkiness.

Durham is intelligent without being profound. Seldom hokey, it is also sensual nearly to the point of vulgarity, and it has an appealing cast. Robbins is memorably convincing as a pitcher based on the real-life Steve Dalkowski, who died recently at 80. Like Nuke, Dalkowski had an often wayward power pitch—one that likely reached speeds of over 105 mph.

No Man’s Woman (1955) stars Marie Windsor as Carolyn Grant, a very unsympathetic character even more immoral than Christine Blasey Ford. After wronging several men, she ends up murdered. The police have their suspects. . . Unlike such actors as Patric Knowles and Nancy Gates, Windsor and Jil Jarmyn (Carolyn’s co-worker) are effective. They’re also marvelously attractive (as is Gates).

As a mystery tale, Franklin Adreon’s film is lacking but it doesn’t matter. The pic is meant to be noir, but it is further interesting for its Douglas Sirkian soap-opera drama during the first 35 or 40 minutes. Windsor is sort of the anti-Lana Turner of “Imitation of Life.”

“No Man’s Woman” is only an hour and ten minutes long—not a bad length if the movie was boring. It isn’t, though. I hurried to see it on Amazon Prime lest it become unavailable, and it rather pleases me that I did.

A primary character in the Wes Anderson film, Moonrise Kingdom (2012), 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman) is the least popular boy in his Khaki Scout troop, and he’s an orphan.  Infatuated with the troubled Suzy (Kara Hayward), also 12, Sam makes plans to meet and run away with her after abandoning his troop.  This he does, after which there is a search party dispatched to find the two kids, who now claim to love each other.

The action in this whimsical work takes place in 1965, and at least one implication about the Sixties in America pops up.  It was, as James Bowman tells us, “a period in which it was common for children to pretend to be adults and adults to pretend to be children”—and so it is here.  The Sixties were also a period in which Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was going strong.  Anderson, who directed MK and co-wrote the script with Roman Coppola, admires Peanuts enough for his film to have been influenced by it.  For example, Suzy wears a dress which looks a lot like the one the Little Red-Haired Girl wears in the 1977 TV special, It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown.

There is no surprise here.  Moonrise Kingdom is a comic-strip movie, PG-13 rated.   In essence it is about nothing but itself, with its fey foursquare visuals and Britten music.  It’s the straight-play counterpart to Moulin Rouge.   It’s entertaining.

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A dandy long shot—in House of Sand (2006)—of Brazilian travellers and their donkeys treading a sand flat in 1910 precedes a close-up of two bone-weary women walking side by side.  They are mother and daughter, Donna Maria (Fernanda Montenegro) and Aurea (Fernanda Torres), the latter married to a loony gent named Vasco, the payer of Aurea’s debts, who intends to construct for his young wife a figurative house of sand among the dunes of Brazil.  In other words, he has moved Aurea and her mother to start a new life in this barren place.  But a house of sand is still a house of sand.  The trip is a miserable failure:  Vasco dies in an accident and Aurea and Donna Maria, hating the sand dunes, are henceforth stranded.  They can’t get out on their own—Aurea is pregnant—and except for an itinerant man who finally dies, during a ten-year period no one can help them.

Unpredictably, Donna Maria starts liking the place, stating there is no man there to tell her what to do.  The women in the film do depend on men, though, and willingly have sex with them.  Screenwriter Elena Soarez is not trying to make a feminist point in Casa de Areia.  And it must be pointed out that after Aurea’s daughter Maria (she, too, is played by Fernanda Torres) grows up, still in the sandy locus, the house of sand she lives in is partly of her own making.

Nevertheless, time keeps passing.  In 1919 there is an eclipse; in the Forties there is World War II aircraft in the sky.  Geological permanence in this northeastern part of Brazil contrasts with the impermanence of the human situation, with the aging of Aurea and others.  In 1969 a middle-aged Maria informs her mother that men have recently landed on the moon.  Aurea wants to know what they found there.  ‘Nothing,” Maria replies.  “I heard they just found sand.”  Along with the passage of time, then, there is the final acceptance of the women’s lot in life: really, of Aurea’s decision to remain in Maranhao when she didn’t have to, for decades.  I believe this is what Soarez is implying in the above bit of dialogue.

House of Sand has something to say, then, and the script is an essentially brilliant one.  The expert director is Andrucha Waddington, Torres’s husband and Montenegro’s son-in-law—and what gratifying performances these two women give!

House of Sand is in Portugese with English subtitles.

The 1956 crime picture, The Killer Is Loose, is standard and harsh and thoughtfully directed by Budd Boetticher.

Herein, Leon Poole (Wendell Cory), a bespectacled “loser,” robs a bank, and, hot to catch him, Detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotton) accidentally kills the robber’s wife.  Poole naturally hates the male aggression sometimes inflicted on him, or that he believes is inflicted on him, and it transpires that he is a sociopath.  He wants revenge on Wagner via murdering Wagner’s wife Lila (Rhonda Fleming).

At best Corey’s Poole is interesting, nothing more.  Cotton is fine with his necessary verve and a kind of odd-man-out appeal.  Fleming is a beautiful June Cleaver without kids:  she plays a middle-class wife soothingly and estimably.  Also respectable is John Larch as a man who was in the army with Poole and was insulting to him.  The Killer Is Loose is disposable but worthwhile, its camera consistently trained on the great American suburbs while uncommon pathology stands to the side.