The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I like the dark and violent Joe with Nicholas Cage and young Tye Sheridan of Mud.   The Unknown Known, master documentarian Errol Morris’ exploration of Donald Rumsfeld’s self-certainty, is a Must See for those who follow current events.

You can still find Jake Gyllenhaal’s brilliant performance in two roles in the psychological thriller Enemy. Like all Wes Anderson movies, The Grand Budapest Hotel is wry and imaginative, but it’s not one of his most engaging. Dom Hemingway is a fun and profane romp. In the most bizarro movie of the year so far, Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who lures men with her sensuality and then harvests their bodies; it’s trippy, but I found it ultimately unsatisfying.

I liked Run & Jump, now available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video. It’s successful as a romance, a family drama and a promising first feature.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is Martin Scorsese’s funniest film, The Wolf of Wall Street, in which the sales meetings make the toga party in Animal House look like an Amish barn-raising. The Wolf of Wall Street is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

This week Turner Classic Movies is showing one of my all-time favorites, the noir mystery Laura, with the detective (Dana Andrews) falling in love with the murder victim he has never met (the lustrous Gene Tierney); Clifton Webb steals the show with a brilliantly eccentric supporting turn. TCM is also showing perhaps the greatest Western movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a mature John Ford’s contemplation of all those shoot ’em ups from earlier in his career; it features James Stewart and John Wayne, along with Andy Devine, Woody Strode, Vera Mills, Edmond O’Brien and Lee Marvin. And speaking of the Duke, in The Shootist, he plays an aged gunslinger dying of cancer at the end of the Old West; poignantly, Wayne himself was fighting cancer himself and The Shootist was his final film.