Simplicity permeates a grand con thwarted by an old woman (Aline MacMahon). A prisoner in her own house as criminals (lead by the menacingly proper Basil Rathbone) employ the services of an art expert in attempt to sell off her paintings, this savvy octogenarian turns the tables Staminated. style. Ultimately, its the satisfaction that lingers after it ends. Based on the play by Edward Chodorov. Re-made in 1951 with the same title.

Delicately told and, ultimately, moving story of a successful actor forced to face his illegitimate son. My first Ozu was pretty much as I expected: long, slow and full of rewards for the discerning viewer who is willing to watch the paint dry to experience the final vibrancy of its color. (That's a metaphor, by the way - - - if you're not impressed, get there!)

So crafty is this story of an ex-con (Edward G. Robinson) who buys a luggage shop for use of its basement (which faces a bank vault he's planning to rob), that Woody Allen managed to pare it down and turn it into a completely flat first act in last year's Small Time Crooks. But don't be fooled by that watered down take, Larceny, Inc. boasts a barrage of smile inducing twists sweetened by golden eared, rapid fire dialogue. Takes the concept of confusing an audience with multiple subplots (a technique meant to misdirect a viewer from the weakness of sed subplots) and turns it on its head by making each separate thread of this story equally appealing. A delightful film. Based on Laura Perelman's play.

How creepy is Tod Browning's The Unknown? Lon Chaney plays a tough carnival performer pretending to be armless. When he realizes it is the key to a young woman's heart, he blackmails a surgeon into lopping off his arms for real. Instead of wasting time doting on how ultimate and beautiful the created irony is, Browning goes right for the throat in close-up after close-up of Chaney's born loser as he sinks further and further into an amoral hole of heartless schemes. I always enjoy Browning's movies for one of the chief reasons most films are lacking today: his premises exceed my expectations and his execution is consistently spot-on.

While Truffaut was high on Hitchcock (he was interviewing him for a book) when he made this dark fable, The Soft Skin is often praised for its realism and its objective approach to the subject of adultery. Though it seems to drag on forever - and it lacks a smidgen of hope and sunshine - the real marvel of Truffaut's film is how beautifully he shows the flaws in the nature of human methodology. The protagonist's path from beginning to end is so clear and so ungussied, it plays like the master list of an adulterer being read aloud by a filmmaker desperate to create the quintessential moral tale. So, essentially, more than Hitchcock, Truffaut appears to be aping Eric Rohmer. The film succeeds in clarity, but comes off in more of a "it's the thought that counts" manner than it seems to be anticipating.

Yup, it's still funny. Yup, we're still going to hell for watching it.

If there is a God, thy name be Bruce Campbell : messiah of the B-actors.

So little charges the air in the perpetual medium shot that is a modern Japanese film. As if the real goal of a film was to render comatose your audience while delivering an otherwise chilling world, Kurosawa (no relation to the master) gives us the story of an obsessive cop hunting down a serial killer who hypnotizes ordinary people and makes them killing others. While eruptions of violence that seem more like gentle afterthoughts and arguably the most laid back villain I've seen in some time capture our fascination perhaps a touch too abstractly, the anchored mind fuck techniques blending with a brilliant genre entry will leave you disquieted in a visceral way.

Hatched with "the formula to end all formulas", Roger Kumble's The Sweetest Thing painfully reaches into every successful female-themed film (and its respective genre) and adds a thin coat of its own half-baked, sub-Farrelly Bros. (must I mention them again, you ask?) gross-out nectar, spawning what I could only call an incoherent mess as I secretly regarded it as a shameless candidate for the worst film I've seen since The Next Best Thing. I can't accurately describe how horrifically bad this film is without bringing to your attention the number of garish, excruciating sing along musical numbers, thoroughly weather beaten sexual shock attempts and yet another vehicle relying on a population of seemingly blind moviegoers who couldn't possibly have the luxury of seeing just how unbelievably silly Cameron Diaz looks while she tries to look pretty (and, in my opinion, fails miserably) and act all at the same time (God help us, Scorcese has taken her up as his actress/cross to bear in this December's Gangs of New York). If that weren't bad enough (even worse, poor Thomas Jane and Parker Posey are so under used these days that they have to scrape the bottom of this colossal, repulsive barrel for a paycheck), Selma Blair's character appears to have been transplanted directly from Cruel Intentions and allowed much less than the bare minimum of character development. If I were to point out that the first act doesn't have a single scene that leads fluidly into the next scene, that a mis-timed road movie is the second act and that a string of abrupt, undeserved narrative shifts (think: deciphering the content that slips by as you channel surf) standing in for a third act, you'd probably say to me, "Why bother?" And I saw this monster for free.

Funny, you build a movie up to your wife for weeks and weeks and then, when you watch it, it somehow doesn't live up to your last viewing. Still funny. Still devilishly clever.

Mom, I won't do heroin anymore, I promise! Just don't make me watch this movie ever, ever, ever again. It hurts me so.

Funny, you build a movie up to your wife for weeks and weeks and then, when you watch it, it somehow lives up to your expectations - and then exceeds them. This is a magnnificent, utterly compelling film.