every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with random anti-alphabetical cheats)
         

I Bombed Pearl Harbor (1960)
a/k/a Storm in the Pacific

It’s been 80-some years since the attack on Pearl Harbor, which is 20-some years longer than I’ve been alive, so it’s only history, nothing personal for me. Kinda cool, actually, to see this Japanese movie’s flip-side of From Here to Eternity.

The build-up to the attack is low-key but tense, flying along with the bombers toward their destination. The special effects for the big attack scene are not bad, but it’s obvious that models, not ships, are being blown out of the water.

The movie’s American title is a bit of a lie, though. Bombing Pearl Harbor is the set-up, but the rest of the movie is about the Battle of Midway.

It’s told from the perspectives of men following orders, which is the deathblood of every war. Especially for a Japanese film of this era, it’s noteworthy that the movie’s main character begins to question the war toward the end. At its essence, though, this is just a war movie.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Confess (1953)

Right after murdering someone, the killer goes to confession at a Catholic church, and confesses that he done it. By ridiculous tradition, the priest (Montgomery Clift) can’t tell the cops, which makes him uncomfortable when gruff and tough detective Karl Maldon comes nosing around, and that begins to make the priest himself the prime suspect.

Seems to me that’s plenty of drama for one film, but Alfred Hitchcock also gives us Anne Baxter as a woman who’s still in love with the priest from his pre-frocked days. And she’s married.

Baxter is almost embarrassingly bad, or maybe I’ve seen her too many times in All About Eve — she seems way, way too theatrical, overacting the heck out of her role.

Music by Dimitri Tiomkin.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

I Fidanzati (1963)
a/k/a The Fiances

Used to be, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to wear pants and go to a theater and buy a ticket and popcorn and all. The audience was invested in it, literally, so if it took a while for a flick to get interesting, no worries.

The start of this bored me silly, and it’s 2025. My investment is nada, so I paused it and surfed the net for the rest of the night, and came back to the movie the next morning.

There’s a formal dance, with nothing but middle-aged people barely shaking their bodies to middle-aged music, and one woman refuses to dance or even talk with a particular man. But, who cares? The rest of the movie’s better, but I never fully recovered from the dull start.

So this Italian dude gets a promotion at work, and the new position is in Sicily, so he leaves his fiancé behind and moves. She misses him. He misses her. They write letters.

The movie has some great moments. There’s a waiter who starts hilariously whining to a customer about how much he hates his job. There’s a little-kid barista who does his work far too efficiently for a child of maybe 10 years — he’s never had a childhood.

There are lots of little dark moments like that, and lots of local color in black-and-white. Another dance. Another yawn. The main guy remains a blank slate, never frickin’ smiles in the whole movie, and neither did I.

I Fidanzati has its charms, yes, and it’s very Italian, and maybe I’d love it if I was Italian too. But I’m not. It plodded and I nodded off, so it took three tries to see the whole thing.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Batman (1989)

I grew up reading DC’s Detective Comics, starring Batman. There was also a silly TV show, but that was just for laughs. The real Batman was in the comic books, which I read and re-read incessantly. At 11 or 12, I checked out collections of early Batman comics at the library, so I knew every square inch of his backstory, as invented by Bill Finger and Bob Kane decades before I was born.

As an adult I put away childish things, but my Bat-signal lit up in 1989, when I heard that weird moviemaker Tim Burton, who’d previously made Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, would be making Batman into a movie.

The casting of light-comic actor Michael Keaton in the title role worried me, and I doubted the notion of music by Danny Elfman, that Oingo Boingo guy, but what the hell. I was there on opening day, loved the movie, thought the music was perfection, and even Keaton wasn’t a problem.

Seeing it again in 2025, my opinion hasn’t changed: Burton got Batman right. The tone is serious, often exaggerated like a comic book, but it’s neither a joke like the ’60s TV show nor a nightmare like Christopher Nolan’s wretched, overwrought Batman movies.

Sure, Burton got a few things wrong — in the comics (at least of my era) Batman never kills a bad guy, but he has no such hesitation here. He reveals his secret identity to the lovely Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), which is wildly unwise. The movie gets bloated toward the end, and of course, the sequels were all increasingly awful, as sequels seem required to be.

But this movie is still my Batman of choice. Watching it is like reading an 80-page giant.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Heretic (2024)

All the Mormon missionaries who’ve knocked on my door have been squeaky-clean young white men, but this flick gives us two squeaky-clean young white women, knocking on doors to harangue strangers about their eternal souls. Hugh Grant is on the other side of the next door they knock at, and everyone knows from twenty rom-coms that he’s harmless and always a gentleman, so when he warmly welcomes them into his home to discuss salvation, in they go.

Turns out, though, this incarnation of Hugh Grant is not like all the others. He has some unexpected and unorthodox ideas about religion, well thought-out to make good Christians squirm, and soon his conversation with the Mormon missionaries isn’t a Saturday morning annoyance, it’s a horror movie.

These women (Chloe East, Sophie Thatcher) are barely past being girls, and were raised in a very patriarchal religion, so for a distressing but plausibly long time they’re unwilling to raise their voices against this man, even as they’re more and more certain he’s a danger.

Mr Reed (Grant) goes on and on about the nature of religion, and when the women reply, defending their faith, it’s an argument they really can’t win. Trust me, I’m a fair and impartial atheist judge of such matters.

The religious debate is a delight, eschewing the ordinary arguments about proof and faith, and Grant is gloriously creepy, playing almost the same nice guy he played in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. Not sure anyone else could’ve found the sweet spot in this performance, but Grant nails it to a cross.

Eventually, though, the movie has its work to do, so it brushes past its strong points to become a fairly standard horror movie. And it’s scary, yes, but I was itching for more of the brilliant skewering of religion.

There’s a bit more of the good stuff at the end, and the movie never wusses out with an endorsement of Jesus or anything. It’s competent as a horror, but that’s only potatoes; the meat of it is hearing actual arguments against the church, something rarely allowed in a mainstream movie.

It would be a blast to see Heretic with a Christian.

Verdict: BIG YES.

5/27/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

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