Cary Grant stars in this post-war feel-good flick about three beleaguered naval officers whose precious 4-day shore leave is threatened at every turn. At first, it’s disappointing to see Grant slumming it in a party movie, but then there’s a little anti-war sentiment that threatens to elevate the material… before ultimately sinking it. Kiss Them For Me is ultimately an overbearing message movie, with Grant’s character repeatedly explaining to lay people and press alike that war isn’t glorious. Maybe the film served an important function counterbalancing war propaganda from the ’40s, but taken on its own, the message gets tedious very quickly. The line should have been drawn after Grant’s first dramatic outburst (a fine moment for him and the movie), and well before a wounded soldier is wheeled out for exhibition, full of hope and oblivious to his terminal diagnosis.
Gravity is so harrowing, I’m tempted to call it crisis porn. The movie stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts stranded in orbit over Earth after debris destroys their spacecraft. Director Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, A Little Princess) warns us from the get-go with some on-screen text that life in space is impossible, and then proceeds to throw everything you can imagine at Bullock and Clooney’s characters. They’ve got dwindling oxygen supplies, they’ve got the debris looping back around at them every ninety minutes, their spacesuits are running out of propulsion, and their connection to Huston has gone dark. There are the threats of burning alive, freezing to death, drowning, and slipping into coma. They see other members of their crew frozen solid, flesh exposed to the vacuum of space — one guy with a tidy hole clean through his head.
Against a backdrop of the Bangkok underground fighting scene, a reticent drug smuggler (Ryan Gosling) is caught in a vicious cycle of brutal revenge after his brother is murdered for committing rape. Only God Forgives plays out like a fever dream, a far more operatic and surreal effort from writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn than his earlier mainstream hit, Drive. There is precious little dialogue, hyper-stylized photography, a brash score by Cliff Martinez, and a willful tendency to blur the line between reality and the characters’ imaginations.
The sixth entry in the Rocky franchise is far better than it has any right to be. Sylvester Stallone is back in the writing and directing chairs, presenting a melancholy portrait of a hero fighting against decline. At the film’s start, we see the Italian Stallion still reeling from the death of his beloved Adrian two years prior, while trying to maintain a relationship with his estranged son (Milo Ventimiglia). While Rocky tries to break his lonely spell by making friends with a single mother (Geraldine Hughes) and her son (James Francis Kelly III), a TV sports show tries to create a fantasy boxing match between the current heavyweight champion, Mason Dixon (Antonio Tarver) and a past legend, our man Rocky. The idea catches fire, pulling Balboa back into the ring after years of retirement.
