movie gourmet

The Last Movie Title

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Timothy Bottoms, Ben Johnson and Sam Bottoms in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

This will sound random – because it IS random. I realized that there have been a wide range of movies with “Last” in the title, and was surprised to learn that, since 2010, I had written about SEVENTEEN of them myself. What really struck me was how disproportionately good these “last” movies have been. Among the very best in their genres:

  • The Last Picture Show – among the most evocative coming of age dramas.
  • The Last of the Mohicans – on anybody’s short list of great adventure movies.
  • The Last Waltz – one of the top four concert films of all-time.
  • The Last Emperor – an epic that won Best Picture and nine total Oscars.

And then there’s The Last Detail (Jack Nicholson at the height pf his powers), The Last Samurai (Tom Cruise), The Last Movie Star (Burt Reynolds’ poignant farewell), The Last King of Scotland (Forest Whitaker won an Oscar), The Last Vermeer, Last Action Hero (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Suddenly Last Summer, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Last Days (with Michael Pitt’s haunting performance as the doomed Kurt Cobain). And Jeff Bridges followed The Last Picture Show with The Last Unicorn and The Last American Hero.

Just recently:

Dr. John, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Rick Danko, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson in THE LAST WALTZ

Now, I must point out that there are “last” movies, even iconic ones, that I don’t like:

  • Last Tango in Paris: There’s no question that Marlon Brando’s performance as a man imploding in despair and self-loathing is one of most searing in cinema. But, ultimately, why should we care about him? After reading Maria Schneider’s account of the shoot, where Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci contrived a situation where she felt raped, I just can’t bring myself to watch it.
  • Last Year at Marienbad: it’s part of the cinema canon, but it’s so pretentiously abstruse that I’ve hated it since my college film class; four decades later, I watched it again to see whether I had missed something about it and I came to the same conclusion.
  • The Last Tycoon: This film had lots going for it – an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel directed by Eli Kazan, starring Robert De Niro and with a cast including Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson, Jeanne Moreau, Theresa Russell, Dana Andrews, Ray Milland, Peter Strauss, Donald Pleasance, Angelica Huston, John Carradine, Jeff Corey and Seymour Cassell. Unfortunately, the filmmakers bet big on Ingrid Boulting as an ingenue who would obsess De Niro’s studio exec, and she just wasn’t leading lady material. Boulting, a South African model, went on to make only two more forgettable features. I just rewatched The Last Tycoon, and it really drags,

But some of the “last” movies are grievously overlooked. So, over the next two weeks, I’ll be featuring four of the most underrated “last” movies, including, notably, The Last Movie itself.

Jonathan Majors and Jimmie Fails in THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO.
Photo: Peter Prato/A24

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.

This Week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of the character-driven indie drama To Kill a Wolf. If you missed today’s TCM broadcast of my TV pick, the rare serial killer movie El Vampiro Negro, you can still stream it on kanopy. And you can stream Caught by the Tides, the top film on my Best Movies of 2025 – So Far, on Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango and Criterion.

CURRENT MOVIES

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Tamara de Lempicka (right) in Julie Rubio’s THE TRUE STORY OF TAMARA  DE LEMPICKA & THE ART OF SURVIVAL. Courtesy of Mill Valley Film Festival.

Coming up on TV: a rare, unforgettable serial killer film

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Photo caption: Nathán Pinzón in THE BLACK VAMPIRE

Set your DVR to record the September 26 early morning airing of El Vampiro Negro on Turner Classic Movies. This is NOT a vampire movie – it is a serial killer movie – and an unforgettable one. Restored by the Film Noir Foundation, it is on my list of Overlooked Noir, and is very hard to find, although you can stream it on kanopy..

The Argentine suspense classic The Black Vampire opens with a man stumbling on steps, then with a Rorschach test, and then with a nightclub in which each of the patrons is a different version of Up To No Good. We’re in the underworld, but an underworld that is rocked by serial murders. And we can tell that this is no run-of-the-mill crime movie.

The city is consumed by a child murderer on the prowl, and the police are turning the city upside down. With the cops disrupting business, the criminals launch their own man hunt. If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because The Black Vampire is a remake of Fritz Lang’s 1931 M. As in the 1931 M, there is a blind balloon vendor, a killer whistling In the Hall of the Mountain King and and an underworld dragnet.

As the lead, Nathán Pinzón is AT LEAST AS GOOD as was Peter Lorre in the original M. Often sweat-beaded, Pinzón tightropes the line between scary and pathetic. This character is a complete pervert, but he’s aware of and tries to restrain his horrific compulsions.

Pinzón was chiefly known as a usually comic actor; he played the leering, cynical Carpax in The Beast Must Die. Pinzón’s birth surname was Garfunkle.

In contrast to the monstrous killer animated by Pinzon’s charisma, the prosecutor (Roberto Escalada) is a stick-in-the-mud; but, for some perverse spice, he is sexually frustrated because his wife is physically disabled.

The director Román Viñoly Barreto is known for beginning and ending each film with a Biblical verse – and for the death of a child in each movie. Here he makes The Black Vampire as trippy as any 1953 movie could be. It’s best when it’s set in the nightclubs and streets and the haunts of the lowlifes, and highly stylized. When it is set in the prosecutor’s office and his apartment, The Black Vampire drags.

The Film Noir Foundation restored both Román Viñoly Barreto’s The Black Vampire and The Beast Must Die. I attended the premiere of both restorations at Noir City in 2020. The Film Noir Foundation has since DVD. You can also stream El Vampiro Negro from kanopy.

One of the highly stylized nightclub scenes in THE BLACK VAMPIRE

TO KILL A WOLF: mysteries revealed

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Photo caption: Maddison Brown in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.

In the character-driven indie drama To Kill a Wolf, a reclusive woodsman in the Pacific Northwest (Ivan Martin) finds the seventeen-year-old runaway Dani (Maddison Brown) collapsed in the forest. He brings her back to his isolated cabin, nurses her back to health and tries to learn how he can return her to her home. She’s not forthcoming, so he has a mystery to solve. Meanwhile, the audience is on to other mysteries – why is the Woodsman (that’s the character’s appellation in the credits) living such an isolated life and why is his relationship with local community members so charged? As the Woodsman takes Dani on a road trip to her most recent residence, the answers, one by one, are revealed. It’s an absorbing story.

To Kill a Wolf is the first feature for writer-director Kelsey Taylor, who demonstrates herself to be a very promising filmmaker. A superb story-teller, she doesn’t explain behaviors before you need to understand. We’re continually wondering about the characters and about what will happen next, and are usually surprised about what the Woodsman is doing and why. Music is unusually important to the characters and to the film itself. The way Taylor ends the film is perfect – the final shot is not even a half-second too long.

Ivan Martin in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.

The lead performances are excellent, as are those of the rest of the veteran professional cast. The roles of Dani’s Aunt Jolene and Uncle Carey are especially well-written, realistic and textured, and the performances of Kaitlin Doubleday and Michael Esper are vividly authentic. As the Rancher, David Knell captures the surprises in the character’s attitudes.

To Kill a Wolf begins streaming today on VOD, including Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: James Sweeney (facing) and Dylan O’Brien in TWINLESS. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – I’m focused on NashFilm, The Nashville Film Festival, which opened last night. Here’s my Must See at NashFilm. Plus, new reviews of the fine documentaries Mr. Nobody Against Putin and The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival.

Don’t overlook my first cut at the Best Movies of 2025 – So Far, the running list that I update throughout the year.

Here’s my remembrance of Robert Redford, one of the very most significant filmmakers of his generation.

CURRENT MOVIES

Photo caption: Porshia Zimiga (left) in EAST OF WALL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

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THE TRUE STORY OF TAMARA DE LEMPICKA & THE ART OF SURVIVAL: a daring icon revealed.

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Photo caption: Tamara de Lempicka (right) in Julie Rubio’s THE TRUE STORY OF TAMARA  DE LEMPICKA & THE ART OF SURVIVAL. Courtesy of Mill Valley Film Festival.

The biodoc The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival reveals an astonishing life. The art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka was as groundbreaking in her lifestyle and her self-invention as in her art.

De Lempicka painted her female subjects as confident and comfortable with their sexuality, and her highly-stylized nudes are striking. A de Lempicka has sold for over $20 million, the third-highest price ever paid for a painting by a modern female artist.

De Lempicka lived substantial parts of her life Russian-ruled Poland, France, the US and Mexico. Her adventurous personal life, dotted with rich husbands and affairs with celebrity lesbians, brazenly disregarded all the prevailing societal mores of the first half of the twentieth century. She said, “I live life in the margins of society and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.” Although de Lempicka didn’t care what anyone thought of her sexual behavior, she constructed much of her own image, sometimes embracing fiction as fact.

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival is the third feature and first documentary from Bay Area director Julie Rubio, the producer of East Side Sushi. Rubio’s extraordinary research has uncovered that, in building her flamboyant persona, de Lempicka obscured much of her identity, including her heritage and her real name. Bringing birth and baptism certificates, 8mm home movies and the testimony of family members to light for the first time, Rubio completes a new and accurate understanding of de Lempicka.

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival has been playing select theaters and is at the Palm in San Luis Obispo September 20-21, before Laemmle LA hosts 15 shows in five theaters September 27-29. I originally screened it for its world premiere at the Mil Valley Film Festival.

MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN: the first casualty of war is truth

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Photo caption: Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.

Nothing has changed since Aeschylus observed that the first casualty of war is truth, as revealed in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the blistering exposé of Putin’s outrageous domestic propaganda about his Ukraine War.

Pavel Talankan is an unassuming, goodhearted guy with a small-time job as the events coordinator at the school in a remote Russian industrial town. That also makes him the school videographer, so no no one notices that, as he films school assemblies, award ceremonies and performances, he is also capturing the blatant Big Lie propaganda. It’s a surreptitious documentary filmed in plain sight.

Pavel is an unlikely muckraker. He is a free-thinking nebbish who loves Russia and loves his hometown of Karabash in the Ural region, putrefied by a noxious copper plant and called “the most toxic place on earth”.

More than anything, Pavel cares about his students, and he is increasingly disgusted as Putin ramps up the propaganda. First, a cadaverous party hack, whose heroes are the most vile Commie hitmen in history, spreads empirically false information about Ukraine being the aggressor in the war. Then, horrifyingly, Wagner mercenaries are brought in as classroom guest speakers. Silently, Pavel continues to film, letting the propagandists defile themselves for history.

Pavel is a hero, albeit a non-violent one, who risked his life to gather this material. David Borenstein exquisitely formed Pavel’s footage into a searing exposé of Putin’s soul-crushing impact on Russia. The secret audio from the funeral of a former student killed in Ukraine is heart-rending. The film begins with video of Pavel’s midnight escape from Russia,

I saw Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the SLO Film Fest; it releases theatrically this weekend.

Robert Redford

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Photo caption: Robert Redford in DOWNHILL RACER

Robert Redford was one of the very most significant filmmakers of his generation. With his stunning good looks, magnetism and wry charm, he could have “settled” for mega stardom with the acting roles that he is justifiably best remembered for, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, along with a slew of romance movies. But his own artistic aspirations and his flinty contempt for the phony and the superficial took him to even greater heights.

Redford’s first effort at directing, Ordinary People, won the Best Picture Oscar. He directed nine more films, some of them excellent (A River Runs Through It, Quiz Show, The Horse Whisperer) and none of them bad.

But Redford’s biggest contribution was his developing the Sundance Institute ad the Sundance Film Festival as incubators for other people’s independent filmmaking. His NYT obit highlights Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, James Wan, Darren Aronofsky, Nicole Holofcener, David O. Russell, Ryan Coogler, Robert Rodriguez, Chloé Zhao and Ava DuVernay as directors whose careers were accelerated by Sundance. That would have constituted an indelible legacy, even if he hadn’t become an iconic movie star.

My own favorite Redford acting roles were in Jeremiah Johnson, All the President’s Men and Downhill Racer.

Robert Redford in JEREMIAH JOHNSON
Robert Redford in ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

Must See at NashFilm

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Photo caption: Jeremiah Daniels and William Catlett in COLOR BOOK. Courtesy of NashFilm.

NashFilm, the Nashville Film Festival, opens on Thursday, September 18 and runs through September 24 with its mix of indies, docs and international cinema, including world and North American premieres. I’ve highlighted the highest profile festival events, including Nicole Kidman’s personal appearance, in my NashFilm preview.

Today, I’m focusing on two indie Must Sees at NashFilm. One is an emerging writer-director’s first feature and the other reflects a resurgence from an indie filmmaking icon.

  • Color Book: After the sudden death of his wife, Lucky (William Catlett) is left to parent their son Mason (Jeremiah Daniels), who has Down syndrome. Now grieving and trying to make ends meet on a one income, Lucky faces the unrelenting struggles of single parenting –  why does everything have to be so hard? Although he has a hard time asking for help, in many ways, Lucky is the ideal dad – affectionate, patient and consistent. Lucky wants to thrill Mason with his first major league baseball game, but the two get a bigger dose of Atlanta’s transit system than they would ever want. The journey is far more more meaningful than is the destination. Atlanta writer-director David Fortune has won eight festival awards in the US and France with his inaugural film. The black and white cinematography by Nikolaus Dummerer is exquisite. Without a hint of sentimentality, Color Book is authentic and endearing.
  • The Baltimorons: In this sweet and funny movie about second chances, a cracked tooth sends a guy to an emergency dentist; the misfortune of an impounded car launches the two of them into a raucous nighttime adventure through Baltimore that could result in romance. Cliff (Michael Strassner) is a floundering goof, a comedian who hasn’t performed during his months of new-found sobriety. In contrast, the highly functional dentist Didi (Liz Larsen) is personally reeling from her divorce, which has left her lonely and gashed a hole in her confidence. So, we have two talented people in moments of vulnerability and recovery. What happens is funny, but The Baltimorons succeeds because of its humanity – we really care about Cliff and Didi. The Baltimorons is the first film directed by indie film legend Jay Duplass since 2012. Festival audiences in Austin, Philadelphia and San Luis Obispo loved this film, which won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award at SXSW. I expect The Baltimorons, after its theatrical run this fall, to become a word-of-mouth Holiday hit on the streaming platforms.
Molly Belle Wright, Wyatt Solis and John Magaro in OMAHA. Courtesy of NashFilm.

And here are two other indie discoveries in the NashFilm program.

  • Omaha: This concise, searing drama is a showcase for John Magaro (Past Lives), who stars as an especially devoted dad who has been financially ruined by his late wife’s final illness. His inability to provide for his kids has filled him with desperation and profound shame, but he is determined to insulate his kids from his stress. He bundles the two kids into his barely drivable car for a a road trip across the Great Basin toward Nebraska. The purpose of the road trip is mysterious, and even the whip-smart nine-year-old daughter can’t guess it. Omaha is the first feature for director Cole Webley, working off a screenplay from Richard Machoian (God Bless the Child, The Killing of Two Lovers). Webley has a gift for portraying those seemingly minor life moments that tell the audience so much about relationships and motivations. The emotionally powerful ending is shattering.
  • Peacock: In this droll and absurd comedy, Matthias (Albrecht Schuch of All Quiet on the Western Front) works in a most unusual companion service; he gets paid for jobs like masquerading as a client’s fictional partner. Matthias has so perfected being a chameleon that he has lost all sense of himself. When the vengeful ex-husband of a client terrorizes him, Mattias’ world starts to unravel. Austrian director Bernhard Wenger won a prize at Venice, where it was also nominated for Best Film in the Critic’s Week. If you like Ruben Ostland’s work (Force Majeure, The Square, Triangle of Sadness), you’ll like Peacock.

All in all, this year’s NashFilm presents 140 films from 30 countries. Peruse the program and get tickets. Here’s the trailer for Color Book.

Best Movies of 2025 – So Far

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Photo caption: Tao Zhao in CAUGHT BY THE TIDES: Photo courtesy of Janus Films.

I’ve posted my Best Movies of 2025 – So Far page. Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year.  By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my list of Best Movies of 2024 and Best Movies of 2023. To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.

Of course, I still haven’t seen many of the most promising movies still to be released, including Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, Lynne Ramsey’s Die My Love, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-handed Girl, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3 and the Palm d’Or winner at Cannes, It Was Just an Accident.

Here’s the first incarnation of this year’s list:

  • Caught by the Tides: China evolves, she persists. Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango, Criterion.
  • Pee-Wee as Himself: a man hidden in his own invention. HBO Max. (just won two Emmys for director Matt Wolf.)
  • Twinless: smart, funny, satisfying. In theaters.
  • No Sleep Till: turbulent weather, turbulent lives. Was in arthouses, streamed on Metrograph; will let you know when it streams

This year I’ve created an additional separate category in the list for those films that, to this point, haven’t been available to see in a theater or online. These are films that I’ve screened at US film festivals this year and qualify as among the best films of the year. I’m reluctant to tease my readers with a list of movies that they can’t see, so I created this new Festival Films category (follow the link and scroll down). When they get theatrical distribution or a streaming platform, I’ll move them up to the regular list.

Here’s the trailer for Caught by the Tides.