Peter Jackson’s 1996 comedy/ghost story starring Michael J. Fox as a “psychic investigator” (who can see and talk to spirits) trying to solve a series of mysterious deaths. Great cast of characters both alive and dead 
. This was Peter Jackson’s first film featuring heavy CGI use – the number of computers required led in part to his work on the LOTR movies. There are over 500 special effects shots and they still look pretty good today.
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, 2007 (free on Amazon Prime as of this post). Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tormei, and Albert Finney star in this rather depressing crime drama about a couple of losers who need some money and decide the best way to get it is to rob their parent’s jewelry store. Things do not go according to plan (of course) and the majority of the film deals with the fallout of their actions and decisions. Sidney Lumet’s last directed film, he was one of the all-time greats.
Here are the three main actors, and Mr. Lumet, discussing this film back in 2007:
We watched the famous French heist film, Rififi. It feels a bit like an American crime thriller, but it’s French. It has a famous, brilliant, half-hour long jewel robbery scene in which no words are spoken, nor is there any music. A lot of subsequent movies have copied this, but none have matched it for quality.
IMDB trivia says they stopped showing this film in Mexico back in the day, because too many would-be thieves were copying the robbery method!
I watched that recently and thought it was very good. The ending though… (spoiler)
Why on earth wasn’t there a police guard on Andy in the hospital?
That sounds quite interesting! Where did you find it? I’m hoping it’s streaming somewhere I can watch…
I can’t remember which channel it was on. TCM? It was a few days ago.
The French Connection (1971). I had heard of it, and I knew it starred Gene Hackman, but I had never seen it, or even any clips. This really is a great movie even though it is a set piece of its time. The acting, especially on the part of Hackman is superb, though I really can’t fault anyone in particular in the movie. The ambiance they manage to create, as well as the tension is great and of course it does have an oft referenced car chase scene that did live up to what I had heard. The ending actually reminded me of the movie The Pledge with Jack Nicholson in how the main character reacts to what has happened. Overall a hard hitting film that although dated, still holds up since it is not trying to be a future, or way in the past, but is a snapshot into the time period it was made in.
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This was a great movie. I agree with what you said about the cast and it’s a creepy, funny story with a few interesting twists.
Time After Time.
I remember reading about Nicolas Meyer writing and directing this movie before his work with the Star Trek franchise and I remember looking for it decades ago but I haven’t seen it until now.
Malcom McDowell is HG Wells, who chases David Warner’s Jack the Ripper through time to 1979 San Francisco. The special effects aren’t great, but the story doesn’t rely on them. Instead, it’s about Wells expecting a future socialist utopia that he dreamed about and seeing years of world wars, noisy cities, and fast food instead. Warner is fine as Jack the Ripper, I suppose, but it wasn’t really written as a role for someone to really sink their teeth into and I think he could have put more into it if he had the opportunity. Mary Steenburgen is fine as Amy, the bank officer who falls for Wells. I found it interesting that she was written as a divorcee who talked about companionship with both men and women. It was a brief conversation but I found it surprising that even if the word bisexuality wasn’t used, it was implied.
It’s worth a watch, imo, I feel like the tension wasn’t really there and time travel has been done better elsewhere (see Meyers’s Star Trek IV for example), but the story and actors make it worthwhile.
I like Mr Rock, and the action and effects are fine.
But I can’t help notice that probably 15M people died, and it seems wrong to celebrate his family surviving when it honestly looks like they are the only CA coastal residents to survive. The devastation must have been incredible.
It was opposite “Reel Music” on our classical station, where they play movie music. So we watched it with closed captions. You may be surprised ti find “Do-re-mi..” isn’t as fun without the music and singing. 
Farewell. adieu…
We recorded it. Isn’t that the one that the Mission Impossible CIA heist borrowed from?
My husband and I rewatched Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. One of my all-time favorites. It’s based on a real family. A widow and widower meet, fall in love and get married combining their families with a total of 18 kids. It was remade in 2005 with Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo. That one was good too, but the original is the best. Some of the kids, include Tim Matheson, Morgan Brittany, Tracy Nelson, and Mitch Vogel. Ben Murphy plays the boyfriend of one of the daughters. I told my husband, I watch Tim Matheson in Virgin River where he plays an old doctor!
It was nice to watch something wholesome and funny for a change. We were getting bogged down in murders.
I’ve never seen Mission Impossible CIA, so I couldn’t say.
I liked that movie as well but the real families weren’t as happily merged. Apparently the real Frank Beardsley was abusive to the North boys.
I read the book Who Gets the Drumstick by Helen North and she never mentioned anything like that;
She also said the kid wanted thme to get married, and her oldest was twelve, unlike the film
And Gary Goetzman whose life Licorice Pizza (2021) is based on.
About a decade ago, Tom North, son of Helen North and eleventh in the blended family, published a book called True North: The Shocking Truth about Yours, Mine and Ours in which he talked about the abuse. Here is an article about his book. Supposedly five of the North children dropped the Beardsley name as adults, to return to the North surname.
We re-watched it last year out of nostalgia (a girl I was in high school with knew the family), but it didn’t do it for me. Too glurgy and fake. Both Fonda and Ball seemed too old for their roles, as well.
On edit: yeah, my friend said the family was not all jolly, and the dad was a jerk.
Forbidden Planet (1956). It’s been mentioned here a few times, but I had not seen it before.
This movie has to be evaluated in the proper context of 1950s sci-fi movies. It makes an attempt to rise above the rest in terms of special effects and story line, and it mostly succeeds – though that’s a pretty low bar. Even the Cinemascope film format strives to be a cut above the rest.
The special effects vary between hokey (a flying saucer suspended by threads) and some of the fairly effective imagery of the Krell laboratory. And there’s also Robby the Robot. The story line tries to be more thoughtful than most. In the 23rd century, the United Planets starship C-57D arrives at the distant planet Altair IV to determine the fate of the ship Bellerophon (which I tend to read as “Bell Telephone”), which disappeared there 20 years before. Dr Morbius, one of the original expedition’s scientists, warns the ship not to land, but they do anyway. Surprises await.
Stars Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and a very young Leslie Nielsen. Young Nielsen is, nevertheless, quite recognizable, and I kept waiting for him to say “don’t call me Shirley!”.
If you’re in the mood for a late-night “science fiction double feature” as recounted in the song of that name from Rocky Horror Picture Show, then Forbidden Planet should be one of them:
Science fiction double feature
Doctor X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
At the late night, double feature, picture show
I think you sell Forbidden Planet way short here. In my opinion, it’s one of the two best science fiction movies ever made, alternating with 2001. The special effects were impressive, and not just “for the period”. There ain’t no visible wires holding up the C-57D.
My only complaint in that regard is that some of it – the Krell Power plant and the Creature – look too cartoony. But I think the rest of it still stands up.
I acknowledge that it was very good for its day, but come on, it can hardly be compared to 2001 or Interstellar. The former had the genius of both Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick behind it, while the latter had Christopher Nolan directing and Kip Thorne as technical adviser, who later wrote a book about the science behind it – much of the science was, if improbable, definitely not impossible. That kind of sophistication in sci-fi simply did not exist in 1956. They did a great job with what they had to work with.
My wife and I are watching a lot of old movies. She had never seen The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, so we watched that this weekend.
I had never realized what a bonkers movie it is, Stacy Keach is an albino gunfighter, there’s a bear, characters talking directly into the camera (including one who tells us that he later dies of dysentery) and a weird time jump to the gangster era complete with Tommy Guns. It was a lot of fun, but man was it weirder than I remember.