学进去

Tony Randall stars as the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in the director Frank Tashlin’s extravagant 1965 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders,” infusing the sleuth’s punctilious style with 1．nerdiness. When Poirot turns up in London to see his tailor, he learns that a circus clown named Albert Aachen has been killed, and he decides to solve the case. Then a bowling instructor named Betty Barnard is murdered, and Poirot 2． the killer of working his or her way through the alphabet. Tashlin transforms the mystery into a giddy parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s films: borrowing his highly inflected, riotously 3． visual styles, Tashlin creates a sort of live-action cartoon, with distorting 4．yielding disorienting juxtapositions, whether from the explosive results of a dish of kidneys flambé or during balletic capers at a bowling alley. In an intricate set piece, Tashlin transforms a casino’s glossy formalities into a theatre of horror, though his subject isn’t bloody murder but its irresistibly macabre, media-friendly allure—the power of such tales to liberate creative energy and 5．the oppressive dullness of daily life an invigorating jolt.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Amazon and playing Sept. 3 on TCM.)

Russell Crowe teams up with the director Ron Howard for the story of the boxer James J. Braddock, who fell from 6．during the Great Depression, only to claw his way back and snatch the world heavyweight title in 1935. Crowe lends the character a 7．dourness (冷酷), refusing to tum Braddock’s bewildering comeback into a victory parade—a good thing, too, for without that unsmiling restraint the whole saga might sound too good to be true.

Braddock is presented as a man without sin; his wife, Mae (Renée Zellweger), 8．a rosy-cheeked optimism even when food is scarce; and their children form a group portrait of well-scrubbed 9．. Anybody whose memory resounds to “Raging Bull,” with its bedevilled hero, will feel badly shortchanged by this picture, yet Howard is the right man for 10．simplicity, and his casting is on the money. Braddock’s opponents are gratifyingly bisonlike, and Paul Giamatti, looking natty in a gray plaid suit and tie, has a ball in the role of Joe Gould, the trainer who stood by his man. Released in 2005.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 6/6/05.) (Streaming on Amazon, HBO Max, and other services.)