Joseph Heller's classic anti-war novel CATCH-22 is a brilliant read, but you could arguably describe it as "un-filmable". In 1970, Paramount Pictures threw a lot of cash, a first rate production team and cast to bring it to the screen and the results are intriguingly mixed. Director Mike Nichols and Writer Buck Henry had "The Graduate" together, capturing the late sixties zeitgeist of rebellion against tradition. With many times the budget and a war size production, they bring their same smart, urbane wit to the story of bombardier Capt. Yossarian (Alan Arkin) and his descent into the madness of World War II. We see the war through Yossarian's eyes and experiences with a massive cast of characters, including the inept Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam), kiss-ass Col. Korn (Buck Henry), unwilling Major Major (a hilarious Bob Newhart). the innocent Capt. Nately (Art Garfunkel), unstable Chaplain Tappman (Anthony Perkins) and the insane Brigadeer General Dreedle, played with gusto by the terrific Orson Wells, who never attends a briefing without his gorgeous young wife. The film is a crazy blend of styles, from the pratfalls of every soldier falling over themselves to get Dreedle's wife a chair, to quiet musings on death and violence as Yossarian comforts a wounded gunner mid-flight. Jon Voight is terrific as 1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder, who manages to turn the entire war into a money making corporation that provides everything from ammo to prostitution. He's a much darker version of Radar O'Rielly in "M*A*S*H" that hit movie screens the same year. Nichols and Henry challenge you with their storytelling. The entire movie is non-linear, with scenes popping up several times and a timeline that's as scattered as Yossarian's bombing efforts. It's a strong choice, forcing you to consider the character's actions in the context of each scene, versus any kind of arc from beginning to end. You can never get too emotionally involved in any scene before it pops to another that might have preceded it in time. The budget is massive, the flight scenes full scale and the madness of it all on full display. CATCH-22 will make you laugh a lot while delivering a very dark message about the military complex and war itself. Like "M*A*S*H", its got a lot to say beneath the laughter. CATCH-22 is inconsistent, difficult, smart, sad and funny. We'll give it an intriguing B.

One of Steven Spielberg’s best films, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN is all the more startling in the fact that it’s the true story of the world’s greatest con man, who accomplished more before turning 20 years old than most of us knock out in a lifetime. The reliably terrific Leonardo DiCaprio stars as young Frank Abagnale Jr. Watching his small time con-man father Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken) dazzle his way through life and his French mother’s love for them both, he seems content. But as his father’s cons start to catch up with them and their suburban life forces their hand, Frank goes on the run. The brilliance of the film is its fast-paced, detailed and fascinating depiction of Frank’s deep and furious descent from small time bad check writer to the most wanted fraud and con man in the USA. Attracting the attention of the FBI and its most dogged agent Carl Hanratty, (Tom Hanks) Frank moves quickly. Soon, he’s masquerading as a Pan Am Co-Pilot, traveling over 2 million miles on the airline’s dime and cashing huge checks all over the world. When the trail gets hot, Frank decides to become a doctor, then a lawyer. How far the young man gets in every thing he pursues is hilarious, impressive and one hell of a story. DiCaprio is excellent in every facet of his portrayal of young Frank. His arc from a scared kid watching his family unit collapsing in front of him to a confident con artist living the high life and facing off with the odds every day is always believable. Hanks matches him step for step as Carl. The two form an odd bond as they begin to realize that they are both alone in life. Their Christmas Eve calls to each other form a solid core for the film as Carl’s chase goes on holiday after holiday. Christopher Walken is excellent, capturing his pride and fear for his son as the game escalates. Martin Sheen adds a ton of fun as an important Louisiana lawyer and a very young Amy Adams is great as Brenda, the girl that Frank truly loves that may end his game for good. John Williams’s music is excellent throughout and the period settings are perfect. Who doesn’t miss the glamour of Pan American? The main titles are fantastic, designed by true artists named Oliver Kuntzel and Florence Deygas. They stand alongside “Bullitt” and “Goldfinger” as the best title sequences of the past 50 years. I stopped the film to go back and watch them three times. It's brilliant visual storytelling that kicks the film off in style. Check them out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaLDyrun_Cc With terrific movies like this, Spielberg will never go out of style. Only he could take some of the dark elements of this story and make them so entertaining. Hanks and DiCaprio make you care about these two men on opposite sides of a crime spree. I was fortunate enough to see the Broadway musical version of this film in New York with Aaron Tviet and Norbert Leo Butz in the roles of Frank and Carl. It was one of the best musicals I’ve ever seen. We saw it again in LA with lesser actors in the roles and it didn’t hold up quite as well, but Tviet and Butz gave DiCaprio and Hanks a run. Speaking of running, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN never stops and earns an A+ and a spot in my all-time Top 100 films.

With very fond memories of 1965's CAT BALLOU being one of my Dad's favorite films, I sat down for some nostalgia from this comedy/western. Jane Fonda is beautiful and funny as Cat, a western school teacher trying to help her father Frankie (John Marley from "The Godfather", having better luck with horses here than he did in that film) protect his ranch from a crooked company trying to steal his land. Cat meets Clay and his "uncle" Jed and they join the Ballou's on their ranch as protection, but the real help arrives with infamous gunslinger Kid Shelleen. Lee Marvin is perfect as Shelleen, a drunken shell of the great gunman he used to be. After a few shots of bourbon though, the skills come back with a vengance. It's a fine line of course, as one more drink turns him right back into a fall down drunk. Lee Marvin won an Oscar for his performance as Shelleen, as well as a ruthless hired gun named Strawn that works for the bad guys. His nose shot off in a battle, Strawn wears a big silver nose guard instead. In either role, Marvin brings the goods, winning an Oscar for Best Actor. Two singing balladeers pop in and out of the story, narrating the tale from beginning to end. Luckily for us, they are played by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye, hugely successful sixties entertainers that bring plenty of old fashioned fun to the proceedings. With a big dance that turns into a brawl, a wild showdown in the main dirt streets of the town and plenty of horses blazing across the landscapes, it's a traditional western with a light touch and plenty of laughs. Fonda carries the film on her back effortlessly, believable as a school teacher and an outlaw in her quest for revenge. My Dad loved physical comedy. Between this and his love for Benny Hill, you get exactly what tweaked his sense of humor. It's with terrific memories of watching this film numerous times with him that CAT gets a nostalgic, enjoyable and very old-fashioned B. Marvin is worth the price of admission, stealing every scene he's in. It grossed over $20 million back in 1965, so plenty of people bought that ticket again and again!

I remember enjoying CAST AWAY in a large theatre in Chicago during its release in 2000. But I had forgot how powerful this mostly quiet story is, driven by another terrific Tom Hanks performance. Hanks is Fed Ex supervisor Chuck Noland, jetting around Moscow as the film opens. We see him at home for a very quick Christmas with his fiance Kelly (Helen Hunt in a reserved, powerful role). When the film isn't quiet, it overwhelms you with noise, including one of the most realistic depictions of a jet liner crash in film history. Noland is plummeted into the ocean in an explosion of fire and water. He drifts onto an island in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from any vehicles searching for the flight. Director Robert Zemeckis (Flight, The Walk) unspools an incredible story, detailing Noland's four years alone on the tropical island. The film crew took one year off after filming the opening scenes, during with time Hanks lost 50 lbs. Noland is a man challenged by the elements and isolation. His conversations with soccer ball Wilson not withstanding, Hanks conveys an incredible range of emotions almost silently. The final 40 minutes detail Noland's return to life and the challenges that await him at home. How do you adapt when everyone thought you were dead for four years? Hanks remains silent in many of these moments too, but you'll feel the heartbreak when he realizes that his life can never be the same. Zemeckis and screenwriter William Broyles (Apollo 13, Flags of Our Fathers) have crafted a huge adventure, a quest for rescue and a personal story that leave you moved. I must be very in sync with Zemeckis' style, because I often like his films a lot more than audiences. "The Walk" detailing high-wire artist Philippe Petit's walk between the towers of the World Trade Center was one of my favorite films of 2015. Very few saw it. Alan Silvestri's music score is very small and used sparingly, but when it fills your ears and it's the first thing you've heard in over an hour other than constant waves, it hits you. CAST AWAY carries a gut punch of emotion during Noland's moments on the island, as well as during Chuck and Kelly's powerful but ill-timed reunion. It's one of Hanks best and Zemeckis' most cleverly crafted films and gets an A. Wilson!!!!!!!!!

Right smack dab in the middle of the Seventies disaster movie craze came one of the more odd entries in the genre, 1976's THE CASSANDRA CROSSING. Terrorists break into the World Health Organization in Geneva and in the midst of a gunfight, shatter vials of a deadly virus and are exposed. One of the gunmen escapes (to much fanfare and one of Jerry Goldsmith's classic disaster flick scores) and boards a transcontinental train with 1000 people on board. Luckily, many of them are movie stars to make the journey more entertaining. We have Richard Harris as Dr. Chamberlain, a handy guy to have on hand for an outbreak, Sophia Loren as his ex-wife, Ava Gardner as an aging wealthy cougar and Martin Sheen as her young, heroin addicted boyfriend. Round that out with OJ Simpson as a priest (?) and Burt Lancaster on the ground as Mackenzie, the army man in charge of containing the deadly virus and you've got quite a cast. The train is rerouted deep into Poland and it must cross an old, abandoned, massive bridge called the Cassandra Crossing to get to quarantine. I lost count of how many times they showed the old dusty bridge and missing rivets with scary music playing loudly to herald the terror, but as long as they didn't let Anne Turkel (married to Richard Harris at the time) sing the god-awful, off key song she does at the beginning of the train ride, I was thrilled. It's silly, its kind of exciting, has enough good sequences to hold your interest and a pretty spectacular last ten minutes. But at the end of the ride, its not exactly a disaster movie classic. We'll call this train ride a C ticket.

What a quirky, goofy, unfunny mess this unofficial entry in the Bond film canon is. 1967's CASINO ROYALE was produced by Charles Feldman, who had the rights to this one Ian Fleming novel. He must have assumed that he couldn't compete with the official OO7 films, as he hired FIVE different directors to put together a big budget comedy about James Bond. David Niven is Sir James Bond, called out of retiement to go after SMERSH. There is virtually no other plot to speak of, with scenes just loudly colliding together without any true flow. Woody Allen is mildly amusing as Jimmy Bond, 007's nephew and William Holden gets some of the biggest laughs in the film playing straight while the lunacy encircles him. Bond film veterans like Ursula Andress and Vladek Sheybal pop up in minor roles while Orson Welles and Peter Sellers wonder through scenes totally wasted by a non-existent script. There is one very funny three minute scene in which all the nations of the world battle over the best way to blow it up, but its the only clever writing in the whole mess. Luckily, EON was able to secure the rights and produce a truly great version of the Fleming novel with the 2006 version in which Daniel Craig debuted as Bond. The best part of this dud is the fantastic movie score by Burt Bacharach, which was widely collected as one of the best engineered and composed movie soundtracks ever. The music score still holds up as the only bright spot. This Casino Royale truly is a massive Bond bomb with a license to bore and gets an F.

Las Vegas mob stories don't get any more captivating and powerful than Martin Scorsese's 1995 hit CASINO. Robert De Niro stars as Sam "Ace" Rothstein, the mob's top man in 1973 Las Vegas. Overseeing billions of dollars, Sam is a smooth operator and everyone involved in the business has a winning hand under his watch. When the wise buy bosses back East decide to add Sam's childhood friend Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) into the mix, things seem to get even better. At first. It's classic good cop/bad cop with De Niro's Sam the intense and professional leader and Pesci's Nicky the volatile hot head with a fast temper and a penchant for blind loyalty. When a beautiful woman named Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone) enters the picture, the boy's balance spins out of control and the power & money begins to shift wildly as well. The screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi and Scorsese is based on Pileggi's book detailing his real life experiences in the Vegas mob. In Scorsese's hands, the film feels real to its core and gets the early seventies Vegas setting exactly right down to the last wide lapel and shag rug. De Niro and Pesci are both terrific. Sharon Stone has the performance of her career as Ginger, who upsets the apple & the cocaine cart with equal abandon. Her Ginger is sad, sexy and dangerous. Supporting players are superb, with Don Rickles perhaps the biggest surprise as Sam's right hand man and Casino pit boss Billy Sherbert. Rickles isn't good, he's GREAT, showing strong dramatic chops. Comedian Alan King is also very good in bad guy role and James Woods is reliably oily. This was director of photography Robert Richardson's first film with Scorsese and its a brilliant match. Richardson (JFK, Inglorious Basterds, Kill Bill) moves his camera almost constantly, becoming a character unto himself as he weaves his way through the casino and the lives of our players on the floor and behind the scenes. Scorsese is a master. I defy you to not get sucked into this three hour character study that feels like less than two hours. He tips his hat on the end of the story in its brilliant opening scene and then drives you through all the backstory with momentum and speed. This was De Niro in his prime, before he started taking lesser films and comedies for paychecks. He's made many great films and this is one of them. Vegas has rarely been more seductive than it is here. When it comes to Scorsese, De Niro and CASINO, bet the house. Loaded with aces, it gets an A+ and a coveted spot in my all-time Top 100 films.

2013's CARRIE falls into the bloody heap of unnecessary horror film remakes, piled on top of Gus van Sant's Psycho and nine or ten re-imaginings of Night of the Living Dead. You can't blame the cast, especially the very talented young Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick Ass, Dark Shadows) as Carrie and Julianne Moore as the disturbed Mrs. White. They are both terrific. The production values are good, the CGI is admirable in execution but somehow routine and some of the supporting characters are made so incredibly unlikeable that they become hard to watch, even as you anticipate Carrie's inevitable revenge against them at the prom. Brian De Palma's original was certainly less expensive, less streamlined and less stupid, with all the creative edges smoothed off the original version to craft the new Carrie sleek and dumbed-down for today's uber violent slasher audience. The prom scene still packs quite a punch, but by the time Carrie was levitating cars and collapsing houses like the Freeling house at conclusion of "Poltergeist", I was rolling my eyes more than I was averting them in horror. Just compare the very last scene in the original to the last scene in the remake. The one opportunity to still pack a punch just fades quietly into darkness, which accurately describes the entire film. There's a reason this sat on the shelves at MGM for a long time before slithering into and out of theatres quickly last year. Carrie gets a shrug and a C-.

Watching 1964's THE CARPETBAGGERS now, it's hard to believe that the film was so controversial, pushing every film decency standard when it was released. Based on Harold Robbins best selling book, this big-budget Paramount film was a HUGE hit in 1964. George Peppard stars as the Howard Hughes like Jonas Cord, buying every company and seducing every beautiful woman he sees. The legendary Alan Ladd is terrific in his last screen role as Cord's sidekick, Nevada Smith. Martin Balsam, Carroll Baker, Bob Cummings and Elisabeth Ashley lead a big cast in this gaudy, trashy two and a half hour drama. Somehow, about 90 minutes in, i found myself getting really sucked in to the trash and having a good time. It's over the top and fun to watch when you think about how horribly ADULT this all was nearly 50 years ago. Then, it was the equivalent of a hard R. Now it would barely register a PG-13! The Carpetbaggers is like a big-screen version of "Dallas" with a little "The Aviator" thrown in the mix. Absolutely fun trash, a relic of its time and a B.

Time had not been kind to the 1956 film version on Rodgers and Hammerstein's CAROUSEL. Classic songs, check. Great photography in a big old widescreen Cinemascope style, check. Powerful leads in Gordon MacRae and a very young Shirley Jones, check. But oh man, this story line is a disaster, caught in a timewarp, wrapped in jaw dropping unacceptability. Billy Bigelow (MacRae) gets one day to come back to Earth to see his daughter and wife. The conclusion seems to carry the message that if a wife loves her man enough, it's okay if he hits her. I am not kidding! This is all the more shocking when you realize that the film is written by Henry Ephron, the father of Nora Ephron, screenwriter of many films with strong women characters, including "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle". Any attributes of the film are completely washed away by it's shocking position on physical abuse. When Tamara and I saw Carousel on Broadway about ten years ago, the London Theatre Company had updated the dialogue and characters to reflect modern times. Seeing this version, that was a VERY good idea........ Strikes a sour note with a D.

Capturing a very different time in both setting and society, CAROL is a powerfully acted drama that somehow still remained distant to me. Todd Haynes is an artistic director and I liked his "Far From Heaven" back in 2002 quite a bit. His eye for period detail is terrific and with CAROL, he truly takes you back to 1950's New York City. Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) stars as Therese, a young photographer working as a sales clerk at a Macy's like NYC department store. She finds herself mesmerized by a wealthy Christmas shopper who oozes style and class. Cate Blanchett is Carol, a married woman with a little girl and a very big secret. As the two find themselves meeting for a drink and then dinner and more, you feel the 1950's oppression on their affair from every angle. As their affair grows into something deeper, Carol's husband (the very good Kyle Chandler) finds himself struggling and growing more combative as his suspicions grow stronger. The back half of the film chronicles a road trip between Carol and Therese that makes you feel the oppression of the two women in powerful ways. Sarah Paulson (American Horror Story) is very good as Carol's best friend, caught between Carol and her husband as secrets unfold. The entire film is perfectly photographed, with a slow build and surprising suspense for what's basically a forbidden love story. Still, I never really connected with the movie. You can't blame Mara and Blanchett, they are reliably great and powerful as two very different women in age, confidence and viewpoint. Every frame is great to look at, but somehow emotionally disconnected for me. I'll give CAROL a B-.

With its high pedigree cast and Roman Polanski as its director, I expected more from CARNAGE. Set wholly during one afternoon's conversation in a Manhattan apartment, Carnage puts together an upscale couple (Cristoph Waltz and Kate Winslet) whose son has beat up the son of a more middle class couple (Jodie Foster & John C. Reilly). Waltz and Reilly are excellent, Winslet is good and Foster is so grating and angry she becomes unpleasant to watch. The constant cell phone interruptions and false exits seem awful forced. Carnage is a sheep in 'Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf's" clothing......C.