The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

8/10
This has to be a real anomaly in Hitchcock's filmography...it's an out-and-out horror movie, and more than a little campy. In terms of horror, I think Psycho aged a lot better than this one. But at the same time, I think Hitchcock was having more fun with it than maybe some people realized - I think quite a bit of it is tongue-in-cheek. There are still some remarkable sequences, usually involving the birds slowly assembling near Tippi Hendren's character. A scene with her smoking on a bench while they materialize is exquisite.
I also have to point out that, despite Hitchcock's work with leading ladies, Tippi Hendren was god awful. No idea what he saw in her, but I digress. Still very enjoyable.

Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

7/10
I liked the first half (the plotting and execution of the ultimately botched murder) a lot more than the second (the investigation and the sting to nab the real guilty party). Actually it reminded me a lot of Kurosawa's High and Low in that sense, which was kind of funny. The dialogue (there's so much of it) is incredibly sharp, almost encyclopedic...it's amazing the amount of detail crammed into this one crime.

High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

8/10
High and Low is clearly divided into three acts - the first act focuses on the moral struggle of Gondo, forced into paying a ransom for his chauffeur's son. It seems very much of the theatre - virtually all the action takes place in the living room, with a small cast of characters as the issue is dissected from all sides. I enjoyed this act quite a bit - it's certainly an interesting dilemma for the viewer himself to struggle with as he watches the film.
The second act shifts into a police prodecural. Aside from the brilliantly-shot sequence on the train that opens this section, I thought this was easily the film's weakest moment. It could definitely have been trimmed down. But I did enjoy the double meaning the title takes on as they search high and low for the kidnapper.
The third act is the sting the cops set up to nail the kidnapper, and the best of the three, if only because it's so unexpected - chasing a scarred kidnapper with mirrored sunglasses and a carnation in his pocket through drugged-out slums and fast-moving clubs seems like something out of a Seijun Suzuki movie and not something you'd immediately associate with someone like Kurosawa. It definitely made the film that much more endearing to me.

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

8/10
Last Sunday I saw a Hitchcock double-feature, The 39 Steps and Vertigo. An average Hitchcock followed by a much better one. On Friday it was Spellbound and Rear Window, one I'd never seen followed by my favorite (as a second viewing confirmed). Spellbound is better than The 39 Steps, and similarly features characters racing to unlock a secret. In Spellbound however, the secret is inside Gregory Peck's mind, and Ingrid Bergman is the psychiatrist trying to unravel it all. The plot has a built-in magnetism to it, and the brief-but-exquisite dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali is worth the price of admission alone. The ending too is something else. It's on a tier below Rear Window, Psycho and Vertigo but still very enjoyable.

The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

6.5/10
I thought this one was pretty average, compared to the other Hitchcock movies I've seen. The plot only really picks up when the wrongfully-accused hero and the woman caught in the middle meet up and we partake in their enjoyable odd-couple shenanigans. The thing is, if you've seen It Happened One Night (released one year earlier), you've seen that sort of thing done much better and with much better chemistry.

Visitor of a Museum (Konstantin Lopushanskiy, 1989)

8/10
It seems like in Russian arthouse cinema, generally there are three main pillars of discussion: early films by Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Vertov, etc; recent films by Sokurov, Zvyagintsev, Balabanov, etc; and then a vast expanse in the middle seemingly dominated by Tarkovsky alone. Little talk ever seems to be made of his peers, but surely he wasn't the only one making progressive cinema in Russia at the time? The director of Visitor of a Museum, Konstantin Lopushansky, was a student of Tarkovsky and in fact assisted on the making of Stalker. Even though Visitor was released three years after Tarkovsky's final film, it certainly bears his influence at least aesthetically speaking.
If Stalker somehow anticipated the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, Visitor is fully conscious of it, even though it never directly references it. A man wanders a destroyed, trash-heap landscape populated by "degenerates" (actually portrayed by disfigured or physically handicapped actors and extras...can't imagine that flying these days), who are looked down upon by the remaining human survivors of this catastrophe. The man is attempting to reach the ruins of a museum, but along the way gets caught up in the degenerates' uprising and is made for a Christ figure for their revolution. These threads hang together pretty loosely - the film shifts from the journey to the museum to the degenerates' uprising in such a way that you wonder if the previous story was abandoned altogether, only for it to reemerge towards the end. What the film lacks in storytelling prowess it makes up for with visual style: like many of Tarkovsky's films, shots are sometimes completely monochromatic (usually a sickly red), takes are long and uninterrupted, and locations easily call to mind lesser versions of Tarkovsky's Zone in Stalker or the planet Solaris.
To be sure, the surrounding features may sometimes be more interesting than the movie itself, but if you appreciate oddities of cinema, this one has it all. And it's available to watch in its entirety with excellent English subtitles on Youtube.

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

5/10
There really isn't much to say about a movie like The Help - if you've seen the commercials, you've seen the movie. About the only worthwhile thing here are the performances - Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis and Jessica Chastain are all very good. I like Emma Stone in comedy roles but I thought she seemed kind of out her element here - like a kid trying to play grown-up. In terms of the white guilt films Hollywood loves to churn out, this isn't nearly as offensive or braindead as The Blind Side of a couple of years ago, but it has zero artistic merit and doesn't strive to convey any more of a message than can conveniently fit inside a 2-minute trailer. So watch that instead and save your self 2 and a half hours.