The Panic in Needle Park (1971) doesn’t have a very memorable ending, but the movie in toto is penetrating. Filmed in New York City, it concerns a man and a woman, lovers, in the grip of heroin addiction. Helen, the woman (Kitty Winn), a transplant from Indiana, knows that what’s going down in her new surroundings, in the pathetic big city, is questionable and indeed bad. But she becomes a user like her boyfriend Bobby (Al Pacino), an extroverted, unemployed nonentity. The subjects of experimentation, compromise, drift, squalor—the film presents them all. And it isn’t dated. Helen’s encounters with medical workers because of her neediness and suffering are true and disturbing.

Scriptwriter Joan Didion didn’t have all that much to do since Needle Park is based on a novel by James Mills and she collaborated with her husband John Gregory Dunne. Jerry Schatzberg directed. Pacino is piercingly strong in his acting job, expert at exhibiting thought. Winn is shattering as an evidently complex character.

The first half of The Last Run, from 1971, was directed by an interesting American film artist, John Huston, but Huston’s angry arguments with leading man George C. Scott drove the director to abandon the film. He was replaced by Richard Fleischer, a lesser talent. Run doesn’t pass muster. It’s a bland thriller—still worth seeing, nonetheless, for Huston’s early shots and scenes and Scott’s committed performance. Too, because of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography, it looks decidedly better than numerous other U.S. movies from decades past. Plus, Trish Van Devere is a lovely actress. I’m glad The Last Run wasn’t Huston’s last run.

The story told in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) was invented by Dorothy Parker and Frank Cavett, but Parker did not write or co-write the script; John Howard Lawson did. All the same, Parker resembled the alcoholic wife and mother, Angie, depicted in the film; and it is doubtless as personal a fiction as Parker’s good story, “Big Blonde.”

Angie is a vulnerable ex-nightclub singer married to another performer, Ken (Lee Bowman). She starts drinking way too much, and losses pile up. It is, by now, a very conventional but perceptively written picture, which is even sympathetic to the unattached woman (Marsha Hunt) who secretly loves Ken. Apparently Miss Hunt was not very fond of Susan Hayward‘s attitude toward her co-workers (a pity), but as Angie, Hayward is a superlative thespian. There is no phoniness in those drunk scenes. . . Smash-Up, directed by Stuart Heisler, eventually turns pretty powerful. The positive ending is a bit easier to accept, though only a bit, than the finis of The Lost Weekend.

I shan’t read the Alistair MacLean novel, Breakheart Pass, but I found satisfying his screenplay for the Tom Gries-directed 1975 film. It’s an 1800s action movie which is more of a murder mystery than a Western (rather un-transporting as it is), starring Charles Bronson in an interesting role. Reprobate whites join reprobate Indians in a homicidal scheme for gain. Few here possess a conscience. There is some exemplary moving train action, along with suspenseful scenes of violence. And very attractive outdoor shots. In the Seventies, filmmakers could make good—and non-sensationalistic—entertainments if they put their minds to it.

A goodly number of critics liked Steven Soderbergh‘s Presence (2024), but why did a lot of them pan it? Written by David Koepp, it’s a mainly agreeable spook tale with nifty shooting and editing by Soderbergh and some fine acting. A worried but giving ghost, or spirit, is in the new home of a married couple with two kids. Dad—Chris Sullivan—hires a woman with an extra sense who is not a psychic (mysteries abound here) to discover what’s going on. The failure of death to prevent a spiritual or supernatural existence is a theme in the film, as is familial near-despair. The denouement is weak but Presence as a whole is recommendable.

(Does Lucy Liu get a comeuppance?)