[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the aliens-and-cops sequel Men in Black III.]

An aliens-among-us thriller containing social and gender critiques within its body-invasion exterior, The Hidden blends various influences into a fast, funny and surprisingly sharp B-movie. That's not necessarily what you'd expect from helmer Jack Sholder, whose credits include the abysmal A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. Yet his direction has a fleet, no-nonsense quality—highlighted by a few extended handheld shots that give the material some jazzy energy—that's perfect for this tale of L.A. cop Tom Beck (Flashdance's Michael Nouri), who's introduced trying to stop the robbery-and-murder rampage of a trenchcoated everyman (Chris Mulkey). This villain's murderous habits involve stealing Ferraris and listening to hard rock and heavy metal, as well as a more general take-what-I-want attitude that, altogether, makes him a caricature of materialistic '80s greed and entitlement. Moreover, there's a strong sense that he also represents the ugliest side of uninhibited masculinity, an impression that casts him as the diametric opposite of Beck, a do-gooder super-cop on the job and a loving, protective family man to his wife and daughter at home. Beck's roadblock finally stops the baddie's downtown joy ride, which includes running over a man in a wheelchair—and, amusingly, after the thug crashes and vacates the vehicle unarmed, the cops still fire on him, in the process detonating his car and putting him in the hospital.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Hidden (1987)...

Much of what's been written about Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy dilates on the question of whether an afternoon's worth of Italian countryside sparring between "She" (Juliette Binoche) and writer James Miller (William Shimmell) is actually a married couple role-playing a first-time meeting, or if the two are strangers playing a very strange game. Various third options consider the possibility of a film that can't be trusted (Last Year at Marienbad is frequently cited), a mutant text whose every moment must be unceasingly subjected to rigorous questioning to form a remotely plausible hypothesis.

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: Certified Copy...

Something like the Dead Sea Scrolls of 1960s (and '70s) underground comedies, the five films assembled in the new Criterion Collection Eclipse set Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr. have been out of sight for so long that their release this week marks a major rediscovery. Deliriously imaginative and madly subversive, black-and-white romps like Babo 73 and Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight deploy manic pacing and counter-cultural absurdity to critique Mad Men-era America while inhaling deeply on their own stoned grooviness. "I've paid my dues," exclaims one of Downey's impish observers, played by actor friends or maybe someone he met at a phone booth, "why should I pay my debts?"

The best-known feature, Putney Swope, achieved cult status for its outrageous satire of Madison Avenue, proposing what happens when a white, patrician agency is taken over by a black militant who renames it "Truth and Soul Inc." But they're all winners, whether showcasing the mercurial Elsie Downey (the filmmaker's first wife and collaborator) in dozens of roles in Turquoise, or riffing on beatnik reveries in Chafed Elbows, where an insatiable deadbeat chases a shy sexpot (Mrs. Downey as "Rhoda... Rhoda Dendron") across a Manhattan rooftop, telling her: "You put a heavy tremor on my ticker-roo-roo."

Downey, loquacious and leonine at 75, sat down recently in a Criterion conference room to talk about the films, getting tossed out of Yankee Stadium—twice—in order to shoot a scene, his abbreviated pitching career and giving some kid named Robert Downey Jr. his first shot at stardom.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Robert Downey Sr....

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the star-studded babies-'a-poppin' rom-com What to Expect When You're Expecting.]

Never has a movie made having children seem less appealing than It's Alive, Larry Cohen's terrifying examination of personal and parental anxieties. Cohen's genre gem is unquestionably a horror film, but its mutant-monster terror is its least scary element, not to mention the one Cohen cares least about, a fact made plain from a prolonged introduction sequence in which Lenore (Sharon Farrell) awakens in the middle of the night to inform husband Frank (John Ryan) that the baby is ready to go. That news instigates preparations to depart to the hospital, including getting dressed, packing up clothes, and waking their 11-year-old son Chris (Daniel Holzman) and taking him to stay with friend Charley (William Wellman Jr.), arrangements that Cohen depicts with a laid-back sweetness—be it Frank sticking a cat in slumbering Chris' face, or affecting a jokey Western patois as they drive through the night—that immediately creates intense empathy for this happy family on the brink of further joy. Cohen's fondness for his characters is genuine and infectious, but despite the lack of panic in the air, there's trouble brewing, first spied in Lenore clenching her face in unnatural discomfort, and then at the hospital, when she asks Frank for reassurance that the new child won't make him feel trapped "like the last time."

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: It's Alive (1974)...

Elena is didactic filmmaking and in interviews, director Andrei Zvyagintsev hasn't been shy in explicitly stating his fundamental criticism of the contemporary Russian underclass. "This is how they will behave," he noted in an interview conducted at the film's Cannes premiere. "At one point we considered calling the film The Invasion of the Barbarians." "They" are the title character's (Nadezhda Markina) son Sergei (Aleksey Rozin) and his family, notably grandson Sasha (Igor Orgutsov), whose grades are so bad he'll end up serving mandatory army time unless the right college officials are bribed. Former nurse Elena wants far wealthier second husband Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) to provide the money, but he refuses on angry principle, insisting military discipline is just the right education for a directionless young man.

The harshest dialogue's always closest to the director's unambiguous public statements. Vladimir's daughter Katya (Elena Lyadova) is a disappointment ("a goddamned hedonist," father grumbles), but he's still planning to leave her the bulk of his money. Her brusque, cynical affection cheers him up. "We're all bad seeds," she declares in deadpan resignation, declining Vladimir's suggestion to try maternity as a cure for disaffection. "What's irresponsible is producing children you know will be sick or doomed, because their parents are sick or doomed." (This echoes Zvyaginstev's own viewpoint exactly: "It's also a myth that procreation at any cost is a necessity.")

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Elena...

Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, whose career as a filmmaker has yielded such dark and excoriating satirical fare as Shakes the Clown and World's Greatest Dad, has been making the festival rounds for months with his latest comedy, God Bless America. The film, newly released, is the director's answer to Natural Born Killers and Network. Joel Murray (Goldthwait's co-star in One Crazy Summer) is Frank, a middle-aged corporate cubicle denizen abandoned by his wife and daughter and left to stew in his bachelor apartment, festering in anger, frustration and failure. One day, his fantasies of violent revenge on a reality show world spill over when he loses his job and is diagnosed with a brain tumor. With nothing left to lose, Frank goes on a rampage—and he reluctantly takes on a co-pilot in death-dealing, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a teenaged sympathizer who hates the world perhaps even more zealously than he does.

I caught up with Goldthwait during the South by Southwest film festival in March, where he was premiering the film with its stars. During a chat in the lounge of the Driskill Hotel, the trio talked about their favorite reality TV shows, the death of common decency and Diablo Cody (don't ask, just see the movie).

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Bobcat Goldthwait, Joel Murray, Tara Lynne Barr...

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's fish-out-of-water vampire comedy Dark Shadows.]

Pair a flagging comedian with a floundering horror director and what you get is Vampire in Brooklyn, a marriage made in horror-comedy hell courtesy of Eddie Murphy and Wes Craven. The mid-90s-isms of this wretched collaboration are plentiful—cue Salt-n-Pepa's "Whatta Man" to underline Murphy's alpha-male sexiness?— and yet they're the least of this film's problems, so misbegotten and poorly executed is its every element. Working from a story co-conceived by Murphy and a script co-written by Murphy's yet-to-be-Chappelle's-Show-famous brother Charlie, Craven's pre-Scream debacle gets clunky wit' it from the get-go. Before we've even seen him, Maximillian (Murphy) narrates the set-up: with all his brethren dead, Max has left his Bermuda Triangle island home to find and marry the last of his line, who happens to be living (unaware of her vampiric nature) in Brooklyn. Given Craven's Haiti voodoo-themed The Serpent and the Rainbow, Max's nationality suggests that the filmmaker has a particular conception of the Caribbean as a hotbed of exotic evil. Those nonsensical notions, though, are overshadowed by the more basic absence of craft on display, as evidenced by an intro scene in which, after Max's ship crashes into a dock, John Witherspoon's hands-flailing caretaker investigates the vessel and finds a murdered crew in one amusement park ride-style close-up after another.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)...

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda's last film to receive American distribution, 2008's Still Walking, ended with a long shot of trains passing, "a moment whose metaphoric intent is clear," wrote Trevor Johnston. "Those trains have people on them with the same problems as the rest of us." Japanese National Railways' high-speed bullet trains serve a more optimistic function in I Wish, as well as providing some of its financing. Shane Meadows made use of Eurostar's funding for the delightful Somers Town, and Kore-eda is similarly adept in making sure he isn't compromised by his financiers.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: I Wish...