This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is "Time Loops", which is a difficult one for me since I couldn't think of too many films that fit the bill. I came up with three, but one of them I had already used, so I had to think of a replacement. I did come up with a replacement, but it turned out I had used that one too. Ditto yet another replacement. So in the end I decided to go with two I haven't used and one that I used back in 2018:
Repeat Performance (1947). Joan Leslie plays a stage who, on New Year's Eve between 1946 and 1947, kills her husband (Louis Heyward). She tries to seek advice from poet friend Richard Basehart, who suggests she go see her producer (Tom Conway). However, when she gets to the producers apartment, she finds that for him and everyone else, it's January 1, 1946, not January 1, 1947. She's the only one who knows everything that's happened over the past year, and now has a chance to do things differently to change the outcome.
Run Lola Run (1998). Franka Potente plays Lola, a woman in Berlin whose boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) is a courier for gangsters. He's misplaced DM 100,000 on the train, and needs her to help him, possibly coming up with the money in 20 minutes so he can give it to his contact. She tries and the attempt fails. The movie then goes back 20 minutes to give Lola a second chance to get the money, and then a third.
Before the Rain (1994). In this movie that tells us time is in fact a circle, we get three stories. The first is of a monk in Macedonia during the various civil wars in the former Yugoslavia who shelters an ethnic Albanian girl, although the Serbs want her. Cut to London, where the editor of a photojournal who has published photos from the Yugoslav wars is going through a personal crisis. Finally, the photographer who took one of those pictures returns to his home village, where we find out that time is indeed a circle.
1 comment:
I've never seen the last but Run, Lola, Run is a very fine propulsive thriller/drama with a terrific central performance.
Repeat Performance is the first one I thought of as well. It's low budget so it doesn't have the benefit of a heavy hitter cast but aside from Louis Hayward all score strongly. Hayward is okay but a more magnetic actor along the lines of Glenn Ford or Steve Cochran would have made the weasel he played more memorable.
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