by DON WALLACE

Like the tasting menu of a fine restaurant, there are a lot of subtle pairings at the Doris Duke’s annual Francophile festival this week, including Francois Truffaut’s 1962 Jules and Jim and Ilmar Raag’s 2012 A Lady in Paris. Both feature the great Jeanne Moreau, one at the very beginning and the other near the close of an iconic career, and if you pick your screenings right (hint: May 12 and 15) you can even see them back to back.

by DON WALLACE

It was supposed to be a bank robbery to fund the Weather Underground, but a guard was shot and killed. The once-brave band took false identities and started new lives: straight jobs, wives and husbands, children.

by DON WALLACE

To be a fan of Terrence Malick can feel like rooting for the Cubs or the Jets–a neurotic need disguised as noble loyalty. Sure he made the playoffs with Badlands and won a championship with Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line (best adult war movie, ever) but he’s got this one problem: He thinks he’s an Artist.

by BOB GREEN

This juicy-sounding documentary, by San Francisco filmmaker Debbie Lum, is not, as the title might suggest, about either exploitation or exploration. Truth to tell, it’s a little bland.

by Bob Green

In one of his last messages, the late Roger Ebert pronounced 56 Up, the eighth film in Michael Apted’s Up series, which began in l964, a “great film.” And so it is, but it’s perhaps the most modest film ever made. It doesn’t thrust its greatness upon us, doesn’t insist itself: Beginning unpretentiously, it offers a tad of introduction, and then moves on, and deepens as it goes, but the depth is scarcely realized until you leave the theatre, and realize that, besides the thirteen characters, this film is about us, as indeed are all the Up films.

by Don Wallace

This is a movie for boys. Big boys.

by DON WALLACE

In a way it’s sad that “To Earth With Love,” the annual green film festival at the Doris Duke Theatre at the Honolulu Museum of Art, is of such high quality this year–because the better the movie, it seems, the more dire the problem. Fortunately for our spirits, these are also extraordinarily beautiful films.

by BOB GREEN

Trance is one of those supersleek, visually beautiful suspense pieces, smartly acted and laid out (for its first hour and fifteen minutes) with the precision of a chess game. But then–and you’ve all seen the like–it can’t disentangle itself, having set up a conceit in which part of what you see is trance-memory, part of which is actually memory and the rest of which is “memory” implanted by a hypnotist.

by Will Caron

Goro Miyazaki has some massive tabi to fill. After 28 years of beautifully painted films, Goro’s father Hayao is a living legend and the animator most responsible for transforming the cult following for anime into a mainstream fad–especially after his 2001 film Spirited Away won the Oscar for best animated feature.

by Don Wallace

You read the papers; know what this movie is going to be about. Some retired heads of Israeli intelligence talking about the Palestinian stalemate?

by BOB GREEN

He’s been around on small screens and large for more than 15 years–always promising and peripatetic, if somewhat short on delivery (except for his sublime stoner in Pineapple Express). Now James Franco comes of age.

by Don Wallace

Going in, the main question in my mind was “How long before the alt music kicks in and a bottle of Budweiser and a Ford 150 show up?” Product placement, I figured, would be where this noble attempt at getting Jack Kerouac right would meet its fate. How can Hollywood resist the mother of all road movies?

by BOB GREEN

In l943, Alfred Hitchcock, writing (uncredited) with his wife and Thornton Wilder, directed Shadow of a Doubt, in which a somewhat mysterious Uncle Charlie pays an extended visit to his family and, as the story unwinds, is revealed as The Merry Widow serial killer and nearly dispatches his niece. In his first film in English, South Korean helmer Chan-wook Park (Oldboy), also working in suspense, uses an “Uncle Charlie” who enters a stricken family scene on the day of his brother’s funeral.

by Don Wallace

A neighborhood is on fire, the rooftops of an upscale Colorado housing tract spouting flames as red as a punk rocker’s mohawk. As a cloud of glittering embers sweeps over the windshield of a moving car, a woman’s sobs punctuate her shaky-cam filming of the scene.

by BOB GREEN

Beautifully turned out, the first American film from the director of the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo–the unhelpfully titled Dead Man Down–is moody, dark and tangled, with marvelous action set pieces and absolutely first-rate performances by Colin Farrell, our most underrated male lead under 40, and Noomi Rapace, the original dragon tattoo lady. It is two revenge tales in one, each dovetailing at its bullet-ridden climax with bodies strewn Hamlet-like all over the place, except for the two leads (surprise, surprise) who find other fates.

by Don Wallace

A trendy set of young people and one or two older men chatter in a chic urban space. Before our eyes and ears, through quick asides and jokes traded between tables, it becomes a den of sleek upscale iniquity.

by Don Wallace

After settling in for a 3-D screening of Oz the Great and Powerful, I patted my pockets in alarm: OMG, I’d forgotten my inner child! The prospect of sitting through another cloying, in-your-face, crackhead-paced blockbuster from the marketing boys in Hollywood suddenly turned dire.

by Bob Green

Fairy tales, legends, fables and public domain myths have been pouring out of Hollywood lately, usually to no avail. The worst of these are last season’s Riding Hood take (with werewolves yet) and this season’s Hansel and Gretel steal (grow’d up, they’re witch hunters); the Oz tales (mostly owned) are being re-“done” (see separate review, opposite page).

by Bob Green

In 1981, Journey–sometimes called the Grateful Dead on steroids–had the number one album in the world. That same year a homeless Manila kid, who could sort of sing a little, was performing in an obscure boy band in city parks for food and change.

by James Cave

What happens when we get old, when our abilities leave us and we wake up one day with more life behind us than ahead? Hopefully it’s a nap, but eventually, something’s gonna kill us.

by Don Wallace

The question of the hour isn’t “What are we to do about the fiscal cliff” but “What are we to do with Mom and Dad?” With the great bulge-in-the-python of Baby Boomers worldwide, it sometimes seems as if the entire focus of civil society has turned to long-care insurance vs. Medicare vs.

by Bob Green

Betrayal is great fodder for a thriller, especially in the upscale versions that classy Steven Soderbergh usually directs. One character (or more) betraying another (or others) leading onwards to murder is good for guessing games if shot slickly and/or wittily.

by Robert Pennybacker

This was a stellar year for movies, which makes for stiff competition in the 85th Best Picture Oscar contest. But what if an award was given not once every year, but once every ten years?