Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)

Cast: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Jonathan Pryce, Bruce Altman, Jude Ciccolella, Paul Butler. Screenplay: David Mamet, based on his play. Cinematography: Juan Ruiz Anchía. Production design: Jane Musky. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: James Newton Howard. 

David Mamet's play about a group of real estate salesmen won the Pulitzer Prize, and Mamet did a fine job of adapting it for the screen, even adding an opening scene in which Alec Baldwin's hyper sales executive presents the group with an ultimatum: close sales on the leads provided them or get fired. It's a play that demands a top notch ensemble, and it gets one on film. Unfortunately, what works for Mamet on stage doesn't work as well on screen. He has a superb ear for the way people talk, the repetitions, non sequiturs, and idiosyncrasies of common speech. On stage, Mamet's verbal rhythms, repetitions, pauses, tics, spasms, and obscenities -- the play has been called "Death of a Fuckin' Salesman" -- become hypnotic. But they lose their coherence in a film, from which we demand visual as well as verbal gratification. The cutting from set to set and from character to character chops up the flow of language and reveals that what these guys have to say to and about each other lacks substance. Even the most sympathetic of the group, Jack Lemmon's aging loser, begins to grate on us. Still, as a portrait of men caught in the rat race of capitalism and awash in toxic masculinity, it has some value. 

State and Main (David Mamet, 2000)

Cast: William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Paymer, Clark Gregg, Julia Stiles, Charles Durning, Patti LuPone. Screenplay: David Mamet. Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton. Production design: Gemma Jackson. Film editing: Barbara Tulliver. Music: Theodore Shapiro.  
 

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990)

Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, and Scott Glenn in The Hunt for Red October

Jack Ryan: Alec Baldwin
Marko Ramius: Sean Connery
Bart Mancuso: Scott Glenn
Capt. Borodin: Sam Neill
Admiral Greer: James Earl Jones
Andrei Lysenko: Joss Ackland
Jeffrey Pelt: Richard Jordan
Ivan Putin: Peter Firth
Dr. Petrov: Tim Curry
Seaman Jones: Courtney B. Vance
Capt. Tupolev: Stellan Skarsgård
Skip Tyler: Jeffrey Jones

Director: John McTiernan
Screenplay: Larry Ferguson, Donald E. Stewart
Based on a novel by Tom Clancy
Cinematography: Jan de Bont
Production design: Terence Marsh
Film editing: Dennis Virkler, John Wright
Music: Basil Poledouris

What to make of the fact that the KGB man assigned to be "political officer" on the Red October (and swiftly offed by the defecting captain) is named Putin? Coincidence, of course, but it's one of the things that make John McTiernan's film of Tom Clancy's blockbuster novel The Hunt for Red October still relevant. The film turns on the perpetual dilemma summed up in the oxymoronic Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan turned into a foreign policy, "Trust, but verify." This first Jack Ryan movie is a bit overplotted and occasionally slow to generate the tension a thriller needs, but it has weathered the fall of the Soviet Union better than a lot of stories about the Cold War, and having a character named Putin (though he's Ivan, not Vladimir) with a background similar to the current Russian strongman's does tickle the imagination a bit. The best thing about the film itself is its casting. Even though this was Alec Baldwin's only outing as Jack Ryan (he was replaced by a bigger box-office draw, Harrison Ford, in the next two Tom Clancy movies, Philip Noyce's 1992 Patriot Games and 1994 Clear and Present Danger, and the role has been played by Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski), Baldwin gets the souped-up everyman quality of the role right. But he's overshadowed -- as who isn't? -- by Sean Connery, as well as by those two exemplars of Actors Who Make Every Movie They're in a Little Better: Sam Neill and Scott Glenn. The fantasy of Neill's Capt. Borodin is one of the screenplay's high points: "I will live in Montana and I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck and maybe even a recreational vehicle." It makes the character's dying words, "I would like to have seen Montana," an unexpectedly poignant moment for an action thriller. Glenn similarly finds the humanity within a character who could be just a stereotype, the tough-talking cowboy with an empathetic streak that keeps him from shooting first and asking questions later.

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

One of the things that make me think Tom Cruise is smarter than his involvement with Scientology suggests is that lately he has been willing to surround himself in his films with actors who are more appealing than he is. In the case of Rogue Nation, they include Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson. He has also shed the tendency to flash the famous toothy grin on any occasion, though his Ethan Hunt in this film doesn't have much to grin about. As the movie begins, the Impossible Missions Force is about to be disbanded and its members labeled "shoot to kill" by CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). It's a good premise for a thriller, if perhaps an over-familiar one: Make your good guys the target not only of the bad guys but also the other good guys. So off we go on a round of stunts that don't bear summarizing, but McQuarrie's script and direction keep the gee-whiz response pumping for an enjoyable couple of hours. Some critics thought the chief villain, a rogue MI6 agent named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), wasn't villainous enough, but I have liked Harris's work since I first noticed him as Cesare Borgia's gay henchman Micheletto on the Showtime series The Borgias (2011-2013). He underplays in Rogue Nation, and the decision to dye his hair blond was probably a mistake, but I thought his subtlety was an effective contrast to Cruise's usual tendency to overplay. It has to be said that, at 55, Cruise is just beginning to be a bit implausible in his action sequences, especially the one at the film's beginning that has him leaping onto the wing of a cargo plane and clinging to it as it takes off, Perhaps it's true that he still does his own stunts, but in this golden age of camera tricks and CGI, that seems unnecessary: Audience are going to think it's faked anyway. There may in fact be a nod or two in the movie to Cruise's aging: After the extended underwater swim, Hunt has to be resuscitated, and there are a few moments, played mostly for comic relief by Pegg, when Hunt's disoriented state becomes a matter for concern. A sixth M:I film is evidently in the works. It will be interesting to see whether age plays more of a factor in it.

Still Alice (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2014)

After four previous nominations, Julianne Moore was overdue for an Oscar. I just wish she had won for a more challenging film than Still Alice, a middlebrow, middle-of-the-road movie that unfortunately suggests a slicked-up power-cast version of a Lifetime problem drama. It goes without saying that, with her luminous natural style, Moore can act the hell out of anything she's given: When she played Sarah Palin in Game Change (Jay Roach, 2012) on HBO, she even made me forget Tina Fey's great caricature of that eminently caricaturable politician, and did it without resorting to caricature. What bothers me most about Still Alice is its choice of an affluent white professional, a linguistics professor with a physician husband (Alec Baldwin) and an attractive family, to carry the burden of what the movie has to say about Alzheimer's. Why couldn't the film have been about the effect of early-onset Alzheimer's on a black or Latino family, or someone faced with meeting the bills -- a waitress or a secretary or a factory worker, perhaps? The screenplay (by directors Glatzer and Westmoreland, from Lisa Genova's novel) even shamefully asserts at one point that the disease is particularly difficult for "educated" people. The movie has its good points, of course. Kristen Stewart, as Alice's younger daughter, is a revelation. I haven't seen any of the Twilight movies, but I gather that even those who have were startled by the skill and maturity of Stewart's performance. And the scene in which Alice discovers the suicide instructions left by herself before the disease had progressed is deftly handled, as the disease itself prevents Alice from remembering and following through on the instructions. The film also has some poignancy in the fact that director-screenwriter Glatzer, who was Westmoreland's husband, suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and died from the disease in 2015. But I think the use in Still Alice of excerpts from Tony Kushner's Angels in America, suggesting a parallel between Alzheimer's and AIDS, is unfortunate.