Seeps with time-stamped era like a John Hughes picture - - only this one is a historical recreation, polished off with an atmosphere out of the almost too scary The Goonies and boasting characters that could have come out of Beetlejuice or River's Edge (no, seriously, Bones appears to have been dolled up in Layne's digs with Matt's conflicting casual cruelty and genuine sensitivity). By the way, I regret the prior review's insinuation that "It's akin to watching a movie's worth of outtakes patterned after other films". It's doing its own thing in every respect, from the outlandishly grand narrative, to the thematic comparison of puberty and mourning by way of accepting change: Monster House is still one of the best films of the year.

Its stop-start-momentum doesn't always serve it, part of the time slowly chewing away at us with bizarre romantic infatuation asides and part of the time using the main character as a buoy for all kinds of nasty war images to cling to, but Come and See, with its expansive vision of displacement and savagery as the Nazis loot, rape and pillage the villages of Byelorussia, succeeds on a visceral level, finally, during a lengthy sequence where the camera pans around a massive setup of barbaric murder and drunken plundering, Klimov finally pinpoints a smattering of actual absence of humanity that seems almost foreign (how could so many people become so evil?) in how believable they are. Draining, shocking.

Reed's terrifically suspenseful take on Graham Green's novella "The Basement Room" (I can't seem to find a consensus to support or decry how closely the film follows its source work), The Fallen Idol is spartan and efficient, masterfully crisscrossing the confused loyalties of an ambassador's son (who was raised by servants) and the marital derailing of the housekeeper and the butler (complete with infidelity, espionage and a corpse). Its a sharp little number (particularly for its time - look at how taboo the word "intimate" is made to seem), and Ralph Richardson is a pleasure to watch in it.

Colorful and farcical, but I kept feeling like I didn't get it, like I was watching a film meant to comment on a sociopolitical worldview but the exclusivity of the thing kept anyone unfamiliar at arm's length, with only the churlish plotline about a Don Juan-type juggling lovers under the false impression that he was a goner. Obviously, in 1991, the film probably seemed ripple-worthy; Dated is still dated, in my book, though.

I watched it before reading all the Kubrick interviews surrounding it (all of three, I believe), but I'm writing this after having read these interviews. Barry Lyndon, while considered "opulent", remains one of Kubrick's finest works, endearing in its treatment of the false narrator, flat-out gorgeous from start to finish and worth all the risk it incurred on its journey to the screen. There was a time when I saw it as the stand-in period piece for the Napoleon film he never made, but I think that's readily unfair. Barry Lyndon, for all its face value celebration of a misguided scoundrel and bounds comma leaps in the technology department (its one of maybe two or three of the most palpable-looking period films ever released), is enthralling from start to finish, the mark of Kubrick I've always had scratching at the back of my mind: As the greatest filmmaker to date, he could have made any story transcend itself and any shortcomings it might have drug along with it.