Q: This is one of Joan Crawford's best Talkies. It was the first Gable-Crawford pairing, and made it evident to MGM and to audiences that they were a sizzling team, leading the studio to make seven more films with them as co-stars.

The film convincingly depicts the downward slide of a brother and sister who, after their father loses everything in the stock market crash, must fend for themselves and work for a living. Life is hard in the Depression, and soon even their attempts at finding legitimate work prove futile, and they resort to underworld activity.

Joan Crawford is excellent as the socialite-turned-moll. She's smart, complex, and believable. She even tempers the theatrical stiffness of the other actors' early Talkie acting style. Clark Gable is a diamond-in-the rough, masculine and gruff as the no-nonsense gangster who becomes involved with Crawford's character. The same year he would play a similar and even more successful role opposite Norma Shearer in "A Free Soul", securing his position as top male sex symbol at MGM.

If you like Crawford in this type of role, don't miss "Paid", which she did a year earlier, which is also among her best early Talkie performances.

A: positive
Q: There's something frustrating about watching a movie like 'Murder By Numers' because somewhere inside that Hollywood formula is a good movie trying to pop out. However, by the time the credits roll, there's no saving it. The whole thing is pretty much blown by the "cop side" of the story, where Sandra Bullock and Ben Chaplin's homicide detective characters muddle through an awkward sexual affair that becomes more and more trivialized the longer the movie goes on. Although Bullock is strong in her role, it's not enough to save the lackluster script and lazy pacing. Ben Chaplin's talents are wasted in a forgettable role (he did much better earlier in the year in the underrated 'Birthday Girl') as well as Chris Penn, who has a role so thanklessly small you feel sorry for a talent like him. Anyway, the plot really isn't even a factor in this movie at all. The two teen killers played by Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt are the only real reasons to see this movie. Their talent and chemistry work pretty good and they play off of each other quite well. It's too bad they weren't in a much better all-around film. Barbet Schroeder is treading way too safe ground here for such a seasoned filmmaker. Bottom Line: it's worth a rent if you're a genre fan, but everyone else will live a fulfilled life without ever seeing it, except maybe on network TV with convenient commercial breaks.
A: negative
Q: Released as Zentropa in North America to avoid confusion with Agniezska Holland's own Holocaust film Europa Europa, this third theatrical feature by a filmmaker who never ceases to surprise, inspire or downright shock is a bizarre, nostalgic, elaborate film about a naive American in Germany shortly following the end of WWII. The American, named Leo, doesn't fully get what he's doing there. He has come to take part in fixing up the country since, in his mind, it's about time Germany was shown some charity. No matter how that sounds, he is not a Nazi sympathizer or so much as especially pro-German, merely mixed up. His uncle, who works on the railroad, gets Leo a job as a helmsman on a sleeping car, and he is increasingly enmeshed in a vortex of 1945 Germany's horrors and enigmas.

This progression starts when Leo, played rather memorably by the calm yet restless actor Jean-Marc Barr, meets a sultry heiress on the train played by Barbara Sukowa, an actress with gentility on the surface but internal vigor. She seduces him and then takes him home to meet her family, which owns the company which manufactures the trains. These were the precise trains that took Jews to their deaths during the war, but now they run a drab day-to-day timetable, and the woman's Uncle Kessler postures as another one of those good Germans who were just doing their jobs. There is also Udo Kier, the tremendous actor who blew me away in Von Trier's shocking second film Epidemic, though here he is mere scenery.

Another guest at the house is Eddie Constantine, an actor with a quiet strength, playing a somber American intelligence man. He can confirm that Uncle Kessler was a war criminal, though it is all completely baffling to Leo. Americans have been characterized as gullible rubes out of their element for decades, but little have they been more blithely unconcerned than Leo, who goes back to his job on what gradually looks like his own customized death train.

The story is told in a purposely uncoordinated manner by the film's Danish director, Lars Von Trier, whose anchor is in the film's breathtaking editing and cinematography. He shoots in black and white and color, he uses double-exposures, optical effects and trick photography, having actors interact with rear-projected footage, he places his characters inside a richly shaded visceral world so that they sometimes feel like insects, caught between glass for our more precise survey.

This Grand Jury Prize-winning surrealist work is allegorical, but maybe in a distinct tone for every viewer. I interpret it as a film about the last legs of Nazism, symbolized by the train, and the ethical accountability of Americans and others who appeared too late to salvage the martyrs of these trains and the camps where they distributed their condemned shiploads. During the time frame of the movie, and the Nazi state, and such significance to the train, are dead, but like decapitated chickens they persist in jolting through their reflexes.

The characters, music, dialogue, and plot are deliberately hammy and almost satirically procured from film noir conventions. The most entrancing points in the movie are the entirely cinematographic ones. Two trains halting back and forth, Barr on one and Sukowa on another. An underwater shot of proliferating blood. An uncommonly expressive sequence on what it must be like to drown. And most metaphysically affecting of all, an anesthetic shot of train tracks, as Max von Sydow's voice allures us to hark back to Europe with him, and abandon our personal restraint.
A: positive
Q: I just have to say, this is one of my favorite movies of all time. I cannot even count the number of times I've seen it. I was already in love with John Travolta, but the first time the camera pans up his body after he's all clean-shaven looking beautiful for his first trip to Gilley's, I was in awe. Debra Winger, as always, delivers a perfect performance as the young, naive wife of Bud, but with the necessary attitude to be married to a stubborn and hard-working cowboy. If you're not a country music person, which I wasn't, this is 1 soundtrack that'll have you singing right along with every word. If you get a chance, please see this movie-it won't disappoint.
A: positive