Heat and Dust (1983)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapts her own Booker Prize novel for director James Ivory in a Merchant Ivory production that really will stand the test of time.  It tells the story of an English woman named Anne investigating her Great Aunt Olivia's scandalous life in India.  It's a mystery, a love story, a look at opposing cultures and a drama about finding ones self in a foreign land.  Both Julie Christie and Greta Scacchi hold the movie together with fine performances.  If you love Merchant Ivory films and you haven't seen this one yet, do.  It's wonderful.  Grade: A

Breaking Bad (Season 5)

There's no way I can stop watching this show after the last season.  This show is a lot like the drug it dissects.   Like meth it makes you really high and makes you want more, while at the same time it destroys your moral understanding of the world.  Is Walter White a villain or just a guy trying to survive?   Is Jesse Pinkman a good guy too or a bad guy unwilling to see his destiny?   This short half season will leave you breathless, gasping for more even know you'll have to wait until August to see how it ends.   How else can this story end but in a tragic climax where Walter White loses everything he loves?   Something tells me the writers have a lot up their sleeves and I can't wait to find out what they have in store for us.  Best show on TV land, or at least of those shows I'm watching.  Grade: A

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1975)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first in a trilogy dealing with women after WWII.  This is Hanna Schygulla most cherished role, that of the lead character Maria.  What Maria will do for her husband has less to do about love and more about self-empowerment.  Even against her own feelings, she will conquer the new Germany using her brains and her sexuality.  Layered with metaphors and sexual politics and shocking turns of fate, this is probably Fassbinder's most welcoming of films.  It challenges every aspect of story and character making for a work of art that will leave you with a knot in your throat and an emptiness in the gut.   More intellectual than emotional, it's hard to really become attached to these cold and distant characters, but they will engage you with ideas, which was always Fassbinder's first goal.  Grade: B+

Seven Beauties (1975)

Giancarlo Giannini plays Pasqualino, a comic Italian anti-hero who has one talent and that's to seduce women, or so he believes being he's the only son of a family of eight.  He certainly isn't very good at being a murderer or a soldier, but it's as a seducer of women, and the seducing of one peculiar ugly female guard of a concentration camp, that might just save his life.   Lina Wertmuller writes and directs a film that stands out for telling a morbid tale in the most ironic and sardonic manner.  The main character is so despicable that on paper you'd think a horrible hero except for Giannini's portrayal and Wertmuller's odd yet insightful sensibilities.  Highly recommended. Grade: A-

Sahara (1943)

Humphrey Bogart commands a group of soldiers who must hold off an entire division of German troops in the African desert.  This is one of those classic WWII thrillers where a rag-tag group must come together and perform an impossible task.  The film still holds up as one of the best of its kind.  It's brilliant in its way of letting you care about each of the characters and in upping their stakes with each stage, whether it be the lack of water, the scorching heat or an approaching enemy.  Grade: A-

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Famous cinematic masters Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger present a film about life in a small village near Canterbury, England during WWII.  The central mystery is who is the Glue Man, a creep who  likes to put glue in girls' hair.  The latest victim, a young British girl come to work the land while the men are away to fight, joins up with two soldiers, an American and a Brit, to find out the Glue Man's identity as well as his motive.   It's not one of the due's best works, although it's still quite good.  The leads are very likable and the plot, while pedestrian, still is able to keep one entertained.  Grade: B+ 

Breaking Bad (Season 4)

Easily one of the best shows on television, Vince Gilligan and company take the epic story of Walter White (AKA Heisenberg) to new and brilliant heights with this their fourth season.  If this season had a subtitle it would be the Showdown between White and Fring or maybe The Chicken Man Rises.  The writing for this show is so good and the drama so intense I can't imagine being able to watch one of these episodes on AMC with commercials.  I'd wear out my floor from pacing as I waited.  Thank god I stream this show, which is the only real way to be able to withstand all of these characters' entanglements.   If you have not started watching this show, you need to start, from season one and catch up.  Something tells me that this one's going to go down in history as one of the best shows of all time.  Grade A.