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

The Inglorious Bastards (1978)

Here’s plenty of intrigue behind enemy lines during World War II, with many gunshots, much blowing up of stuff, bodies flying through the air in slow-motion, etc. There’s even a long action sequence on a train, and I love action sequences on trains.

Bo Svenson, Ian Bannan, and Fred Williamson star in this better-than-average mid-budget drive-in action movie. No complaints, and I’ll even recommend it, but it’s best at delivering exactly what you’d expect and never a smidgen more. If you’re hoping, like I was, to see something that might’ve inspired Quentin Tarantino to borrow the title, no such luck.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Inglorious Basterds (2009)

Inglorious Basterds begins with an eloquent but savage Nazi colonel interrogating a French farmer about Jews that may be hiding in the area. It ends with a buttload of Nazis coming together to attend the premier of a new propaganda movie glorifying the Aryan race. In between, two different schemes are underway, both intending to kill numerous members of the German high command, though neither group of schemers knows about the other scheme.

Tension is ratcheted higher and higher, with terrifying Nazis, Jews seeking vengeance, a Reservoir Dogs-style standoff, but also a sense of humor, something most WW2 war movies generally lack.

Everything is exaggerated and fun, especially Christoph Waltz as the Jew-hunting Nazi officer. The over-the-top tone is precisely right for this picture. And like most of Tarantino’s movies, this one is also about movies, which makes it even better for anyone who likes movies.

In addition to Waltz (who absolutely owns this flick), Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, and Brad Pitt also star, with B J Novak, Mike Myers, Eli Roth, Rod Taylor, and a cameo for Bo Svenson from the original Inglorious Bastards.

Seeing Basterds when it first came out, I remember enjoying it, but being bothered by the misspelled word in the title, and also complaining that Tarantino’s script had the American good guys commit war crimes. Times have changed, and I no longer find fictional violations of the Geneva Conventions by fictional good guys troublesome. Still hate the misspelling, though.

And that’s a bingo — this is Tarantino’s masterpiece.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Inherit the Wind (1960)

Stanley Kramer made movies with a political point, earnest and leftist, so I’m a fan. His movies tend to be a bit sanctimonious, but they’re good, if only because there hasn’t been much competition — nobody else made a career out of making aggressively progressive features.

Here he’s filmed a play fictionalizing the infamous Scopes “Monkey trial.” In a small Southern town in 1925, a high school teacher named John Scopes taught Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, even after the state passed a law forbidding any teaching that contradicts the Bible. Scopes was arrested, and his case drew buckets of national attention when Clarence Darrow signed on to defend Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan signed on to front the prosecution.

Here the names are changed, the drama heightened, but the crazed and frenzied atmosphere is accurate to what happened. And I won’t bother keeping tract of the new names, sorry. Spencer Tracy plays Darrow, and Fredric March plays Bryan. Dick York, who later married a witch on TV’s Bewitched, plays Scopes, and Gene Kelly hams it up as a reporter from the big city.

The movie opens with “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” and it’s sung too many times, and when they’re not singing that hymn an instrumental version is on the soundtrack, all of which is awful to any thinking person’s ears. The Christian crowd, aghast that public schools don’t teach their myth, seems like a caricature of Christians, but Christians often do.

The play was written during the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, though Kramer couldn’t make the movie until some years later. Its point, of course, is that ignorance shouldn’t be enshrined into law, because people need the freedom to think for themselves. Though, of course, almost none of us do.

It’s a very good movie, tragically no less urgent and topical now than when it was made. It would be better still, with about half as many renditions of “Give Me That Old Time Religion.”

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Inner Circle (1946)

A cocky and conceited private eye named “Johnny Strange, of Action Incorporated” places a breathtakingly sexist ad in the newspaper’s “Help wanted: Female” section:

Responding to the ad, he hires a mysterious new secretary — or rather, she hires herself. Soon comes murder and intrigue, a whodunit with comedic undertones that sometimes don’t stay under, and it all ends with a highly unlikely live radio broadcast.

All murders should be solved live on the radio!

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Inner Circle (1991)

Tom Hulce is hired as Stalin’s projectionist, showing the iron-fisted commie leader whatever movies he wanted to watch, and they better be in focus because the boss wasn’t known for his compassion. Hulce’s character is a big fan of Stalin, so the job is perfect, he thinks, even though he’s not allowed to tell anyone what he does for a living.

Lolita Davidovich and Bob Hoskins co-star, and the movie was filmed on location in Moscow, but it’s a misfire on almost every level. Hulce seems to be going for laughs though the movie is not a comedy, and it’s a disastrous mistake to have all the actors speak English with badly-faked Russian accents. They might as well be saying, “This is silly,” with every line of dialogue, making it a challenge to take any of this seriously.

Verdict: NO.

9/17/2025

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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