A Fistful of Dollars

My running list of Best Movies of 2016 – So Far is out. For movies in theaters right now:

• Our Kind of Traitor is a robust espionage thriller with a funny yet powerful performance by Stellan Skarsgård.
• Free State of Jones effectively combines the elements of political drama, romance and war movies into an absorbing Civil War drama, one which connects the dots between the 19th Century and the 20th and beyond. With a sizzling Matthew McConaughey.
• NUTS! is the persistently hilarious (and finally poignant) documentary about the rise and fall of a medical and radio empire – all built on goat testicle “implantation” surgery in gullible humans.
• Zero Days is a documentary on a jaw-dropping hacker mystery – who and how was able to get Iranian military computers to destroy the hardware for their own nuclear weapons program.
• All the Way is a thrilling political docudrama with a stellar performance. It’s the story of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, warts and all, ending official racial segregation in America with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bryan Cranston brings LBJ alive as no actor has before. All the Way is still playing on HBO.
• Finding Dory doesn’t have the breakthrough animation or the depth of story that we expect from Pixar, but it won’t be painful to watch a zillion times with your kids.

Here’s my early peek at next week’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

My DVD/Stream for the next two weeks is one of my Best Movies of 2016 – So Far.  San Jose native Matt Sobel’s impressive directorial debut Take Me To the River is entirely fresh. Not one thing happens in Take Me to the River that you can predict, and it keeps the audience off-balance and completely engaged. You can stream Take Me to the River on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play or rent the DVD from Netflix.

On July 16 Turner Classic Movies presents the grievously underrated Don Siegel thriller  Charley Varrick.  Siegel was a master of crime movies (and was the primary filmmaking mentor to Clint Eastwood).  I particularly love Siegel’s San Francisco noir The Lineup, the guilty pleasure Two Mules for Sister Sara and John Wayne’s goodbye: The Shootist.  The 1973 neo-noir Charley Varrick is right up there with Siegel’s best.  Walter Matthau stars as the title character, an expert heist man who sets up a “perfect crime” bank robbery which, of course, goes awry.  Worst of all, it turns out that Varrick has stolen a secret Mob fortune being laundered by the bank, and now the underworld organization is after him.  Only his wits can save him.  I’ve rewatched Charley Varrick a couple times recently, and it still holds up for me.

Faithful readers know that I revere the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone spaghetti westerns.  On July 19, TCM brings us A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and, of course, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.