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A wise man once said that the best war movies are anti-war movies. Nine years ago Clint Eastwood made two of the very best. Flags of Our Fathers was a film about the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. Letters from Iwo Jima told the story of the battle for the island from the Japanese perspective. In one key scene, one of the Japanese soldiers surrenders to the Americans. The unit commander leaves behind two soldiers to guard him and another man who has surrendered. Anxious to move on, one of the Americans shoots and kills both men. Later, a Japanese survivor of the battle who had found his friendโ€™s body, goes crazy when he is captured, fully expecting to be shot in the same way. Instead he is subdued and placed on a stretcher alongside wounded American soldiers. It is a brilliantly compassionate scene that like most of the scenes in the film suggests that weโ€™re all the same. There is nothing like that in Eastwoodโ€™s most recent film, the box office phenomenon American Sniper.

American Sniper, though expertly made, is in a way a throwback to the early Hollywood westerns in which there is no such thing as a good Indian, the contemporaneous World War II war movies in which there is no such thing as a good โ€œJapโ€ and a myriad of films that stress the โ€œusโ€ in โ€œus vs. them.โ€ There is no sense of why or what America was dong in Iraq, of who the bad guys were. In the opening scene crack sniper Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is about to kill a young boy who has been armed with a bomb by his mother. The film flashes back to a scene in which his father takes the young Chris on his first hunt. It gives one the unfortunate impression that to Kyle shooting the kid is like shooting an animal in the woods.

The war scenes are otherwise competently done as one would expect from a world-class director and his team. The film also does a nice job of contrasting the hell of war with Kyleโ€™s almost zombie-like life at home between his four tours in Iraq. Unfortunately, it skimps over his post-war life, showing just a glimpse of his work with physically- and emotionally-wounded veterans. It fails to show what a strong influence the former Navy SEAL had on the Heroes Project which provides free in-home fitness equipment, individualized programs, personal training, and life-coaching to in-need veterans with disabilities, Gold Star families, or those suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was his work with an emotionally-scarred veteran that led to his murder in early 2013 which concludes the film.

Clint Eastwood could have made a better movie overall, and in fact has, more often than most directors of his caliber. Its greatest appeal has to be to those who know the full Chris Kyle story, not just what they get in the filmโ€™s depiction of him no matter how skilled Cooperโ€™s performance is.

American Sniper is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Charlie Chaplin spent his first twenty-one years in his native England and the next forty-two in the U.S. where he enjoyed his greatest success. The beloved โ€œLittle Trampโ€ and legendary writer-producer-director-star of The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator made sporadically between 1921 and 1940, faltered with the release of 1947โ€™s Monsieur Verdoux. While the film had been lauded by critics, it was a box office failure. His next film, Limelight, had to be a success.

Chaplin first got the idea of making a film about an emotionally scarred ballet star when he met the great Nijinsky in 1916. The idea percolated in the late 1930s but didnโ€™t come to fruition until the late 1940s. Now too old to play a ballet star, the idea shifted to a story about a washed up vaudevillian and a young ballerina, played by Chaplin and newcomer Claire Bloom. With a superb supporting cast including his son Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce, Norman Lloyd, and the legendary Buster Keaton as Chaplinโ€™s vaudeville partner, the film was highly anticipated when ready for release in 1952.

The film, which once again walks a fine line between laughter and tears, is one of Chaplinโ€™s best. It is also his last great film and his last made in the U.S. Chaplin, who ran afoul of HUAC (The House Un-American Activities Committee) for his alleged Communist sympathies, had never become a U.S. citizen despite his long residency in the country and while sailing to England with his family for the London premiere of the film was notified via cable that he was denied re-entry by the U.S. He and his wife Oona decided to settle in Switzerland rather than fight the denial of re-entry.

The film was released in New York in October 1952 and shown all around the world but had no further showings in the U.S. until it was released in Los Angeles in 1972 when it unexpectedly won an Oscar for Best Score the year after Chaplin returned to Los Angeles to receive an honorary Oscar. The State Department had granted him a 72-hour visa for that show-stopping appearance.

Limelight has been given a sparkling Blu-ray upgrade by the Criterion Collection with numerous extras.

Bette Midler had been an actress since the mid-1960s and a major cabaret and recording star from the early 1970s, but did not make her starring screen debut until 1979โ€™s The Rose.

Originally conceived as a biography of singer Janis Joplin, the Joplin family, which disapproved of her lifestyle, objected and neither Midler nor directed Mark Rydell was comfortable interpreting Joplinโ€™s unique singing style so the film is about a 1960s Joplin-style megastar instead. It works primarily because of the exquisitely filmed concert sequences and the acting of Midler and Frederick Forrest as her chauffer-lover. Both Midler and Forrest received Oscar nominations for their brilliant performances.

The newly-restored Blu-ray release by Criterion, featuring numerous extras, does the film full justice.

Rydellโ€™s 1991 film For the Boys brought Midler her second Oscar nomination for playing a World War II USO singer that was too close to the life of singer-comedienne Martha Raye for comfort. Raye sued Midler and the filmโ€™s producers but lost in court when the judge ruled she didnโ€™t have a case.

The film has been given a sparkling Blu-ray release from Anchor Bay.

Robert De Niro gave one his best late-career performances as the retired cop who suffers a stroke trying to stop the killing of a prostitute in Flawless, but the film belongs to Philip Seymour Hoffman in his breakthrough role as the drag queen who helps him regain his speech.

Marketed as a comedy, the film has a great deal of humor but is mostly a stark drama about the denizens of a rundown apartment house on Manhattanโ€™s lower east side where murder and mayhem await at every turn. It deserves to be seen for Hoffmanโ€™s, ahem, flawless performance.

Flawless is available on an excellent new Blu-ray release from Olive Films.

This weekโ€™s new releases include Jupiter Ascending and McFarland, USA.

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