Phillips Holmes, an uncommonly beautiful leading man of early talkies, got killed in a plane during WWII and today is largely forgotten. He’s very good in this bit of small-town Americana as Mike Bolton, the freshly graduated son of the town barber. The father (quietly masterful character actor Grant Mitchell) has just been paroled from prison after 18 years for killing a man. “He was right to kill him,” says one of the father’s friends, for the man had killed the barber’s brother in a drunken fight. Be that as it may, the son bursts with confidence and sauvity when nobody knows who he is, but turns bashful and self-conscious in his home town. He’s especially awkward and strained around the father he’s never known. This will be tested during the crisis over two thousand dollars that goes missing from the bank where Mike works.

Early talkies have a reputation for stagey-ness that’s unfair, at least with certain directors. Veteran Allan Dwan and photographer Ira Morgan use what I’d call a sophisticated simplicity, generating visual interest with a variety of angles, traveling shots, and deep compositions, with at least half the movie occurring outdoors in picturesque, even lovely locations. There’s an excellent early moment when Mike is “parking” with his college girl by a railroad bridge and tells her about his father’s murder conviction, the rumor of which is scotching his chance at being class president. Shocked, she pulls away and says of course it won’t make any difference to her, and then Dwan cuts to a longshot of the train rushing above them, visually crushing them. In the next scene, Mike rides inside that train looking out upon the passing image of the girl parked with another boy in another car.

During the 1930s, Tennessee belle Gwen (Carroll Baker) is swept off her feet by the handsome, courtly, yet in many ways alien Terry Terasaki (James Shigeta), a Japanese diplomat on assignment in Washington DC. He too is attracted by her alien-ness as well as her beauty and spirit, and at first tries to remake her into a proper Japanese wife—at which she’s lousy. While they overcome their personal prejudices and misjudgments and negotiate those of others, Terry’s political conscience is tried by his country’s imperial aggressions. After the attack on Pearl Harbor leads to America’s declaration of war in December 1941, this couple faces a new set of trials and the suspicions of all sides.

This remarkable story is true, or as true as a movie can get. Charles Kaufman adapted it from Gwen Terasaki’s autobiographical novel, which made a splash and presumably got optioned early by MGM. That’s the best explanation for why a French company, Cité Films, made this movie as a US co-production shot in Japan. Only 15 years after the war, it seems unlikely that a major Hollywood studio would have initiated a sympathetic project from the Japanese point of view (actually Gwen’s conflicted view) in which love is the only thing preventing this “bridge” of cultures (materialised in their daughter) from tearing apart.

Twenty-six years ago, in a small municipality named Pripyat in what was then the Soviet Union (now the Ukraine), the local business literally exploded. The village, created for the family and workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, was quickly abandoned with little advance warning. As Reactor #4 ‘became airborne’ and started spreading hazardous fallout, a ghost town was created overnight. Families fled without time to take anything with them. Now, two-plus decades later, the eerie locale with its cinderblock ruins is an extreme tourism destination, the radiation levels low enough to allow outsiders in for brief periods of time - or at least, that’s the premise of the latest from Paranormal Activity creator Oren Peli. He has taken this intriguing backdrop and fashioned it to a sort of urban legend look at what…or who…might have been left behind.

Sadly, the answer is a bunch of nonsense. The software programmer turned fright franchise mastermind did indeed produce and co-author the promising Chernobyl Diaries, bringing newcomer Bradley Parker to aid in the scripting and directing. Avoiding the found footage conceit that made Activity the buzzed about blockbuster of 2007, we get a group of American tourists visiting Eastern Europe. There, they meet up with a mysterious ex-military tour guide named Uri and a couple of British backpackers. The idea - take a quickie tour of Pripyat before heading to Moscow. The problem - the supposed deserted area is apparently thriving with someone…or something…with an insatiable bloodlust and a desire to kill. Naturally, they all end up stuck there for the night.

When it was originally announced, Men in Black 3 instantly earned the reputation as the franchise revisit no one really wanted or needed to see. Set up like yet another vanity project for the fading film superstardom of Will Smith, the property appeared poised to be either highly anticipated by those who adore it, or ripe for ridicule for those who thought the previous unnecessary sequel sank the concept forever. Walking the balance beam between kiddie fare and smug sci-fi silliness, it’s been a decade since we last saw Agents K (Tommy Lee Jones) and J (Smith) shuttling around Manhattan, confronting Rick Baker’s tepid takes on ET. This 3D update tries to tie everything up in a brazen ball of sentimental sap. But for all its feigned emotion, it’s the core concept that fails the film this time out.

After 14 years of working together, Agents K and J are facing a bit of a crisis. The latter can’t quite understand why the former is so cold and emotionless and it’s starting to drive a wedge between them. When talking with new supervisor O (Emma Thompson), J learns that K was involved in a mission back in the late ‘60s that changed him forever. Apparently, an evil alien named Boris the Animal (Jermaine Clement) tried to start an invasion, but our aging hero thwarted his efforts, establishing the MIB manned protective safety net around the Earth in the process. Now, 40 years later, the villain has escaped his lunar jail, traveled back in time, and figured out a way to erase K from history. It is up to J to go back to 1969, find his much younger cohort (Josh Brolin) and defeat Boris one more time.

As of this month, May of 2012, I will have been a “professional” film critic for a grand total of ten years. Ten years. I can remember the first reviews I ever wrote, my entrance into the biz built on the back of Something Weird Video and their desire to bring old school exploitation to the early Ought masses. Initially hired (somewhere else) to be “Mr. Sh*t”—a title given to the writer in charge of all the bad films found in the site’s inbox—my responsibilities eventually broaden toward more mainstream (read: quality) fare. I still maintained by connection to the grindhouse, but soon realized that I had entered the fray just as the format, DVD, was coming into its own. Like a window on a world I had never known before, the influx of outsider titles, as well the changes in technology, meant almost anyone could make a movie…and it showed. Often. 

Over the years, I have been lucky enough to watch the growth of several significant artists. I’ve also experienced the flash in the pan passing of many should-have-beens. With the anniversary on my doorstep, I decided to go back through my 3,000-plus reviews and pick 10 movies I really need to revisit. Oddly, I had started this process at the beginning of the year and realized more times than not, I was right in my original fawning praise (or instantly dismissal) of efforts I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Listed in alphabetical order, here is a collection of seven strange and three mainstream movies that I need to personally go back to and reevaluate. In each case, my reaction was strong, instantaneous, and powerful. Rarely does an opinion change upon review, but when you’ve stayed this course as long as I have, nothing is ever set in stone.