One of Francis Veber's biggest comedy hits remains good fun, with Lino Ventura as a taciturn hit man whose latest job is constantly interrupted by Jacques Brel's suicidal shirt salesman, one of many dopey characters named Pignon to spring from his pen. Ventura plays his part about a quarter-turn funnier than his usual gunmen and the singer-songwriter Brel, not a natural comedian, uses his discomfort to his advantage; the two longtime friends manage to harmonize as Veber maintains his usual…

With a Godzilla-loving boy as a central focus and its anti-pollution angle this could have been a sequel of sorts to ALL MONSTERS ATTACK!/GODZILLA'S REVENGE, and it's interesting to think what Inoshiro Honda might have made of it. But instead we have the weirdest of all entries, one that quickly fell into the Medveds' "Fifty Worst Films" book and only recently emerged from complete infamy (the next three, even more raggedy and poverty-stricken, are objectively worse, until the modest rally…

A cable favorite in my teens, finally available in a good quality DVD, anamorphically enhanced at last. (Why no Blu-ray?) Its frank, febrile atmosphere is one of those things that got me to Asia, though Singapore was a disappointingly authoritarian place by the time I got there. There's nothing disappointing about the film, though, Bogdanovich's return to movies after a string of flops, a Paul Theroux adaptation made with a dummy script to fool the authorities into thinking it was…