Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999). Lee certainly wasn’t lacking in ambition with this film. It depicts the sweltering New York summer of 1977, marked by an ascendant Yankees ballclub, record-setting heat, and paralyzing fear over the unpredictable Son of Sam serial killer. Bringing his own distinctive flourishes to a screenplay by actor friends Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli, Lee piles more story and heavy import than just about any film could bear. Discotheques and punk rockers, gritty urban newscasts and brash bellowing neighborhoods, and it quickly collapses under its own weight. As with all of his more compromised efforts, Lee weaves together ingeniously constructed set pieces with completely tone-deaf scenes that tip over from clumsiness to embarrassment. The actors often push through the clutter, especially Mira Sorvino, who demonstrates that her career deserved a better fate.

Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994). The third film in Kieslowski’s famed Three Colors trilogy stars Irene Jacob as a Parisian model who accidentally strikes a dog with her car, an accident that eventually leads her to the animal’s owner, a sour former judge who has a habit of eavesdropping on the phone calls of his neighbors. After the misstep of White, Kieslowski complete the closing cinematic statement of his life in smashing form. He achieves real poetry in his depiction of people cast adrift, making fragile connections in the face of different grades of lingering sorrows that resist definition. It can be as profound of coming to an understanding of someone’s unique way of reaching out to the world, or as seemingly insignificant as helped an elderly woman, invisible to or ignored by others, deposit a weighty bottle into a recycling bin. Kieslowski delivers it all with an empathy that is almost palpable, and a visual elegance that is occasionally breathtaking.

Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944). Based on a hit stage comedy by Joseph Kesselring, the film betrays its stage origins every step of the way, despite the clockwork professionalism of Capra’s directing. For one thing, everything is pitched just a notch or two more broadly than it needs to be, playing towards the backseats of the theater with little apparent adjustment for the intimacy of movies. It still has it’s charms, first and foremost the deft, loopy anxiety of Cary Grant as a freshly engaged gentlemen who discovers that his elderly aunts have been disposing of the lonely old men who come to rent a room in their home with a toxic mixture of poison and elderberry wine. By the time his twisted brother returns to the homestead, the film starts swerving between tones like a motor car that’s popped a couple key lug nuts. It’s often amusing, but there are also many times where it starts to seem more like a fascinating mess.

Last Chance Harvey (Joel Hopkins, 2008). An American jingle writer travels to London for the wedding of his somewhat estranged daughter. Tension over his crumbling professional prospects and saddened by the emotional distance between him and his offspring, he winds up turning to an English airport employee, and an unexpected romance blossoms. Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson play the two participants in this dance, and whatever pleasure that might be derived from seeing a movie love story played out between actors in an age bracket that often gets ignored when such happy baubles are assembled is undercut by the painfully bland execution. The movie has no zing, no zest. It’s a completely inert piece of filmmaking.

Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950). A plodding science fiction adventure from the time when merely having a rocket ship in a movie was expected to maintain enough interest in an audience that other niceties of filmmaking–you know, like character and plot–could be safely set aside to be used by some movie that didn’t perform the impossible feat of bounding across the stars. Legendary science fiction author Robert Heinlein was a integral contributor to the screenplay, which may help explain why the details of the story at least seem fairly sound, all the more impressive given that the film came out almost two full decades before the moon was a reachable destination. The other curiosity is a cameo appearance by Woody Woodpecker, touting the grand possibilities of space exploration in a short that the film’s scientists use to try and rope in some investors.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)