Seconds (1966)

John Frankenheimer serves another perfect thriller with “Seconds” after “Manchurian Candidate” and “Train.” This is a “Twilight Zone”-like sci-fi-horror about that foolish notion we all wonder: What if I zagged left not right? Moved there not here? You get it. What if’s never end. This is the hell-pit answer. John Randolph is banker Arthur -– bored empty nester pissed at the capitalist lie he swallowed from birth –- who finds himself with a crazy proposition: He can fake his death and get a new identity in the form of Rock Hudson. Newly renamed, Antiochus joins a hippie commune. Sex. Freedom. Is liberalism as much a mirage as white-shirt conservatism? Beautifully played with a barrage of warped lenses – the cinematography is by James Wong Howe of “Sweet Smell of Success” fame -- this movie is a true deep shocker that left me breathless long after the credits. As a man with a new body and voice who cannot shake old gestures and hesitations, Randolph and Hudson pop brilliant, actors who could have shared a Best Actor Oscar. Frankenheimer is my favorite director and this is another hit in a series of paranoid-heavy movies that crack men’s psyches open, baring dark truths. A+

Ginger and Rosa (2013)

In 1962 London BFF girls “Ginger and Rosa” (Elle Fanning of “Super 8” and newcomer Alice Englert) do that teen thing that many teens do: Piss on chores and curfew, dabble in romances, and smoke. They also strain under paranoia from the Cuban Missile Crisis and a far closer atomic bomb of the emotional kind involving Ginger’s anarchist dad and fragile mom (Alessandro Nivola and Christina Hendricks). Despite the obvious turn, I won’t spill details, but director/writer Sally Potter (“Orlando”) lights the fuse early. Porter has a beautiful-looking film here, picture-wise, and perfects the myriad details of teens from clothes to petty jealousies. But it’s also top heavy with too many Jiminy Crickets for Ginger. Annette Bening plays a leftist with no purpose in life but to dispel advise to our gal, and the same is true of Ginger’s gay godparents (Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt). More so, the only time a radio plays, it bears only doom and gloom like some Orsen Welles production. (TV, movies, nor newspapers figure at all.) All that said, Fanning is spectacular, a Yank going Brit on screen, and as flawlessly as Streep did Thatcher. B

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

“Delirious Lynchian mind-screw” doesn’t come to the mind when one sits for an action flick (and fifth in a series) starring Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, but that exactly is “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning,” a skull-smashing, gun-heavy treat. 

Director John Hyams (son of Peter) daringly switches-up the concept of the first (and awful) film about slain U.S. soldiers genetically reengineered as unstoppable warriors, and plops them right in the U.S. of A., playing on Tea Party paranoia, government black ops, and “Apocalypse Now” showdowns with Van Damme as Kurtz, ghoulish in heavy makeup. 

The plot follows a man (Scott Adkins) who awakens from a coma nine months after watching his family slain by mysterious intruders. Grieved and lost, he obsesses over the attackers. He’s also hunted by seemingly unkillable men who unexplainably like his own body can grow back appendages after they are chopped off. 

The less you know the better, because it’s a kick of a nightmarish journey with hidden meanings about NRA kill-or-be-killed addictions so off kilter from this typical genre, I wanted more. The junk dialogue and headache-inducing strobe-light effects are easily forgiven. B+

Pi (1998)

Darren Aronfsky knows how to work a theme: The artist/lover/addict who drives himself/herself mad or dead with dark passion. “Pi” is his first chapter in his seemingly endless, bottomless Bible of Woe. Made in 1998, filmed in stark black and while and featuring unknowns, our story focus on Max (Sean Gullette), a paranoid math genius obsessed with breaking a hidden code within the Stock Market. Max’s story begins with him already long broken: When he was six, he stared at the sun, and it blinded him for days, and fried his brain. Forever. He fears about every human being (a bad trait in New York City), and ingests meds by the handful to calm his nerves and quiet the metal-grinding sound in his brain. He owns a power drill. When some shady people come looking for Max, to get the coded secrets of Wall Street, his crumbled psyche shatters. This is a rough, messy, amazing film, shot on a shoestring budget, full of razor ends, a work of pure art. The audience has its own code to break: When does Max sink into full madness, a prison as endless as 3.1415926535… A

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

“Martha Marcy May Marlene” left me dead cold. That is a compliment. This Sundance hit is a dark psychological drama-cum-thriller about a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of toddlers-turned-tabloid stars Mary Kate and Ashley) who runs from an upper-New York State cult/farming commune and reunites with her estranged sister (Sarah Paulson of “American Horror Story”) at the latter’s posh lake-front home. There, our girl of many names and pains unravels as a scared, paranoid and wounded woman who will wonder into a bed during sex, and yet fear a falling pinecone. Martha declares herself a “leader and a teacher,” but who is talking? She, or the vile/musician/ rapist/father figure (John Hawkes, again mesmerizingly sinister) who ruled her life for two years? Newcomer writer/director Sean Dirkin leaves no easy answers as his jump editing, changing film stock, and inscrutable screenplay leaves the viewer aloof and, in the final shot, horrified. Its best trick is to equal the rich, capitalist “green” American consumer as a cultist all their own. Ms. Olsen is a phenomenal actress, leaving us unbalanced as victimized (sinister?) Martha Marcy ... A-