The Sword in the Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963)

Cast: voices of Sebastian Cabot, Karl Swenson, Rickie Sorenson, Junius Matthews, Ginny Tyler, Martha Wentworth, Norman Alden, Alan Napier, Richard Reitherman, Robert Reitherman. Screenplay: Bill Peet, based on a novel by T.H. White. Art direction: Ken Anderson. Film editing: Donald Halliday. Music: George Bruns.

The last animated feature supervised by Walt Disney, The Sword in the Stone is often considered a kind of landmark in the eclipse of Disney animation from which the studio didn't recover until the late 1980s. The first novel in T.H. White's Arthurian tetralogy The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone had been a Disney property since 1939. The success of the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, based on the final two books of White's quartet, may have helped spur the studio to revive the project, but the result is rather unsatisfactory. There are some bright moments, particularly the shape-shifting duel between Merlin and Madam Mim, but the film has nowhere to go after the climax when Wart pulls the sword from the stone and becomes King Arthur, so the plot feels unshaped and unfinished.

Deception (Irving Rapper, 1946)

Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains in Deception

Cast: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, John Abbott, Benson Fong. Screenplay: John Collier, Joseph Than, based on a play by Louis Verneuil. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

The highlight of Deception is a scene in which Claude Rains, as the imperious composer Alexander Hollenius, invites his ex-mistress Christine (Bette Davis) and her new husband, the cellist Karel Novak (Paul Henreid), to dine with him at a fancy restaurant before Novak is to play Hollenius's new concerto. While Christine and Karel stew, both eager to get the composer's approval so the cellist can make a career break, Hollenius plays the epicure, constantly rethinking the menu and the accompanying wines and keeping the couple from their goal. It's Rains at his best. In fact, he's the chief reason for seeing this somewhat overproduced melodrama, with its sometimes laughable skirting of the Production Code's strictures on sex. Would a worldly European like Novak really be so terribly shocked to find that Christine had been Hollenius's lover? Would Christine really be so determined to conceal the secret that she'd kill for it? Davis pulls out all of her mannerisms -- she disliked the film -- while Henreid struggles to rise above his usual passivity as a leading man overshadowed by his leading lady.

Police Story (Jackie Chan, Chi-Hwa Chen, 1985)

Jackie Chan and Ken Tong in Police Story

Cast: Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Kwok-Hung Lam, Bill Tung, Yuen Chor, Charlie Cho, Chi-Wing Lau, Hark-On Fung, Hing-Yin Kam, Mars, Tai-Bo, Ken Tong. Screenplay: Jackie Chan, Edward Tang. Cinematography: Yiu-Tsou Cheung. Production design: Oliver Wong. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Kevin Bassinson.

Jackie Chan's debt to Buster Keaton has never been more fully displayed, or indeed more fully repaid, than in Police Story, which has a Keatonian moment when he latches onto a passing bus with the crook of an umbrella. Chan plays a cop who goes from hero to goat and back again in this story of an almost one-man crusade against a drug lord. The climax involves the near-total destruction of a shopping mall, with one spectacular set-up after another.

Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983)

Peter Riegert in Local Hero

Cast: Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Burt Lancaster, Fulton Mackay, Norman Chancer, Rikki Fulton, Alex Norton, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Christopher Rozycki, Gyearbuor Asante. Screenplay: Bill Forsyth. Cinematography: Chris Menges. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. Music: Mark Knopfler.

Local Hero is one of those small charmers that pop up occasionally, get rave reviews, and then sort of fade into the background. It's worth rediscovering, principally for Bill Forsyth's affectionately whimsical take on human beings. Another writer-director would have played the subject -- an American oil company's plans to exploit a small Scottish fishing village -- for more blatant satire and social commentary. But Forsyth is more interested in the people than the issues, so he keeps sending the film off into little eddies of contingency and irrelevance. On the way to the village, for example, the representatives of the oil company, Mac (Peter Riegert) and Oldsen (a startlingly young Peter Capaldi, years away from Doctor Who), accidentally hit a rabbit with their car and decide to bring it with them and nurse it back to health. The rabbit is doomed for the dinner table, but its presence in the story speaks more about the characters than it does to any larger theme the film might be concerned with. Forsyth keeps us cheerfully off guard throughout the film, with features the larger-than-life Burt Lancaster in one of his most humanizing roles.

Burn After Reading (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2008)

George Clooney in Burn After Reading

Cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Marvel, David Rasche, J.K. Simmons, Oleg Krupa. Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Music: Carter Burwell.

One of the Coen Brothers' goofy dark comedies, and perhaps the darkest if not the goofiest, with a couple of fatalities that tend to take the levity out of the film. Mostly it's a showcase for the comic skills of some usually serious actors, with Brad Pitt the standout as Chad, an addle-brained employee of a gym who happens upon a disc that he thinks is full of government secrets he can sell to its owner for a reward. It doesn't work out well for him or anyone else. This is the Coens at their chilliest, with no one you much want to root for.