The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet, 1971). Based on a Lawrence Sanders novel published one year earlier, The Anderson Tapes follows John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery), a seasoned safe-cracker who completes a lengthly prison sentence and celebrates his freedom by planning a multi-unit robbery in the posh apartment building where his girlfriend (Dyan Cannon) resides, the kind of job that could allow him to walk away from the criminal life for good. The film opens with a monologue comparing the unpunished transgressions of corporate raiders to the comparatively minor societal damage done by small-time crooks, giving the proceedings just a little bit of a class-warfare tang. Much of the film is painfully dated, particularly in its attitudes towards women and gay men, and the crime story that makes up the bulk of the plot is actually fairly dull. There are all sorts of odd compensating pleasures, though, led by a young Christopher Walken showing flashes of his weirdo ingenuity as a fellow ex-con drawn into the scheme and Quincy Jones’s squirrelly score. Of even greater interest is the way director Sidney Lumet cleverly manages the film’s fractured narrative, editing conversation scenes together with shots of FBI agents listening later to surveillance tapes of those encounters and intercutting the robberies with police interviews about the crime.

Wicked (John M. Chu, 2024). I don’t have the expertise to weigh in definitely, but I think the main problems with director John M. Chu’s screen adaptation of the blockbuster musical Wicked come directly from the stage show itself. Employing classic characters from the The Wizard of Oz, the film centers on the friction between the persecuted Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and the chipper, popular Galinda (Ariana Grande) as they attend a wizardry school called Shiz University. Forced to room together after Elphaba is impulsively admitted to the academy by the grand, famed Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the pair squabble noisily until they just don’t any more, forging a friendship that soon includes them traveling to together to meet the mysterious wizard who rules the land (a figure played by Jeff Goldblum, giving in fully to his actorly tics). The story is muddled and most of the songs are so locked into traditional broadway cadences that they wind up feeling repetitive and drab. The game performances of Erivo and Grande go a long way toward elevating the material, and the production values are first-rate all around. Chu made his own kind of magic when transferring In the Heights to the movies, but the bigness of Wicked leaves him too cautious. “What Is This Feeling?” is the only number that approaches his earlier effort’s audacious energy and imaginative use of the expanded possibilities offered by cinematic storytelling.

Monte Carlo (Ernst Lubitsch, 1930). The comedic elements in Monte Carlo fairly crackle, a mark of Ernst Lubitsch’s deft touch behind the camera, but the multiple musical interludes are middling. In the film, Countess Helene Mara (Jeanette MacDonald) flees her wedding to a stuffed-shirt duke (Claud Allister) and tries to make it on her own. She catches the eye of another nobleman (Jack Buchanan), who masquerades as a hairdresser to stay close to her. MacDonald is grand in her leading role, loading personality into her line readings like a locomotive operator stoking the engine. Typical of the era, there’s a lot of busy falderal that sometimes adds up and sometimes seems like vaudevillian bustle crammed awkwardly into a plot that’s not quite strong to contain it. Whatever messiness there might be, the final scene proceeds with joyful ingenuity as an opera performance attended by the main characters mirrors the film’s plot.