Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk marks the final film in his Finland Trilogy which includes Drifting Clouds (1996) and The Man Without a Past (2002). Lights in the Dusk gets off to a bit of a bumpy start with Janne Hyytiäinen cast in the lead as Seppo. He must be the youngest and most handsome of Kaurismäki’s protagonists over the years and decades. This feels like a kind of betrayal (he is the auteur that has often worked with Matti Pellonpää and Kati Outinen—Outinen has a small role as a check out girl here). Seppo is blue collar

Deadpan comedy is set up from the opening in Aki Kaurismäki’s Drifting Clouds as a piano player croons romantic paradoxes. Kaurismäki’s rigid minimal approach has rightly drawn comparisons to Jim Jarmusch over the years. In fact, the movie theater within the world of Drifting Clouds has posters for Night on Earth (along with L’argent and L'Atalante). Kaurismäki sharply critiques modern popular contemporary cinema with the blare of machine gun audio echoing out of the theater. Another strong entry or piece of the pie in Kaurismäki’s oeuvre. This is a working class tragedy played as comedy by Ilona (Kati Outinen-

In a small town in Alabama, three (3) friends have a wild night together “You’ll wanna get weird?”  (weird indeed is the shot above) where one of the three dies. A bizarre but strong mystery follows. As the A24 logo that opens the film would suggest, The Death of Dick Long is a very inventive work. The film playfully leans not only into its southern small town surroundings, but also the early 2000s music refences for Zeke (Michael Abbott Jr.) and the constantly vaping Earl (Andre Hyland) with Papa Roach, Lincoln Park, Creed and Nickleback in the mix. Between

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop would make for a great double billing with Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider. This low budget road trip film stars good-looking, long-haired musicians-  James Taylor as “The Driver” and Dennis Wilson as “The Mechanic” who pair up with “The Girl” (Laurie Bird) as they roam around rather aimlessly racing cars for “bread”. Much of this is just the open road, the vacant but cool stare from the models. The only professional among the four leads is Warren Oates (24-minutes into the 102-minute film before he gets any dialogue) as the chatty “GTO”. GTO talks

Robert Wise so often worked in genre cinema that it seems a bit jarring to see him working in a straight drama. I Want to Live! Is a seminal capital punishment film (others would include Dead Man Walking -1995, maybe Monster-2003 is a cousin as they are both about women). “You are about to see a factual story”- the story of Barbara Graham. This is Susan Hayward’s greatest work. She quietly had five nominations in twelve years from 1947 to 1958 (culminating and winning for this). The writer of her stories portrayed in the film is Simon Oakland (would

Jack Clayton’s The Innocents is Truman Capote adapting Henry James on a grand widescreen CinemaScope canvas. It opens with a child singing “O Willow Waly” with haunting lyrics like “tree that weeps with me” and all of this is a good thirty seconds before the 20th Century Fox logo appears—it is just a black screen- a brilliant little choice. Jack Clayton and director of photography Freddie Francis (The Elephant Man, Scorsese’s Cape Fear) are absolutely dedicated to the depth of field photography just like Kurosawa during this fertile period of time in the early 1960s. Early on, Deborah Kerr

Dressed to Kill opens like many of De Palma films- with a complex tracking shot as the camera glides into the bathroom playing voyeur on Angie Dickinson’s Kate Miller character as she is taking a shower. De Palma revels in the seediness of it all- Dressed to Kill is yet another film (much like Body Double to follow) to have scenes that could be straight out of softcore… and this is the second film of De Palma’s already (1976’s Carrie) to open with a slow motion surrealism sequence featuring female nudity in the shower. It is somewhat complex set

Somehow, even in 2019, Shannon Murphy (debut as director) and writer Rita Kalnejais (from her book) add enough to the subgenre of quirky, coming of age comedy dramas where a character passes from a disease, to archive it. Color titles that introduce the scenes “Insomnia” and “It didn’t feel like a love story that day” and “Things Change” In an absolutely hilarious exchange, the mother (Essie Davis- from The Babadook) and father (Ben Mendelsohn) have dinner with their daughter (Eliza Scanlen) as she brings home a questionable boyfriend/friend (Toby Wallace) . Davis’ character is on pain medication

Pedro Almodóvar is just not an auteur with long, quiet stretches between films. He works quickly (doubly remarkable given he writes his own screenplays) so it is certainly notable that between big breakthrough films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and All About My Mother (1999) he can continue to churn out quality work like The Flower of My Secret. The Flower or My Secret finds Almodovar back in the milieu of the writing process with old fashioned romantic typewriters again like Law of Desire (1987). It features Marisha Paredes as Leo Macias, an alcoholic

Dario Argento’s Inferno is the second (2nd) leg in The Three Mothers trilogy starting with Suspiria in 1977 and finally culminating in Mother of Tears in 2007. This is already Argento’s seventh film- his debut was in 1970. Sadly, he is no longer making films in the wider aspect ratio – this is back in the standard 1.85 : 1. Rainy nights and alchemy—the bold neon expressionism in the yellow and red lights off the actor’s face could be right out of Suspiria- immaculate work here. There is very little dialogue- probably a good