The Crooked Way (1949) is nice and humorless; it’s film noir. A war hero (John Payne) was wounded all the way into amnesia. So, back in the States, he can’t remember his criminal past, unlike his enemies. He was a bad dude, albeit his ex-wife (Ellen Drew) begins to love him again.

Directed by Robert Florey, the movie is crisp, sobering and violent. Semi-opaque cinematography? You bet; a lot of it by John Alton. Payne is a good, handsome fit for his role, as comely Drew is for hers. Sonny Tufts is a scary criminal avenger.

“In another blow for Disney, the live-action remake Snow White was beaten at the box office by a middle school recorder recital in Rushville, Nebraska.”

Thus reports the satirical webzine The Babylon Bee about the new Snow White movie starring the noisy, woke Rachel Zegler. It bombed.

The face of modern age catastrophe through human evil obtains in the Tim Fehlbaum film, September 5 (2024). ABC Sports becomes a brief arm of ABC News as it covers the stupefying kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches—an actual occurrence—at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. It is done by Palestinian terrorists known as Black September: a mini-October 7, 2023. Roone Arledge, the head man for Sports, provides something less than competence in the situation (as do the Germans). Not so Geoff Mason, and the Jewish Marvin Bader sometimes knows what is best. The acting of Peter Sarsgaard (Arledge), John Magaro (Mason) and Ben Chaplin (Bader) unerringly deepens the film, and the script sizzles. The movie seems eager to capture history.

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.