Some films I've seen and re-seen lately (ratings out of a possible four-star maximum) ...

Brazil (1985)
Terry Gilliam's futuristic fantasy of a government drone ensnared in a web of terrorism, bureaucracy and a horsefly-induced clerical error is every bit as weird and wonderful as it is when it first blew me away in '85. If it eventually exhausts its welcome — Gilliam is less of a storyteller than he is a crazy street prophet, running on bluster and psychotic appeal — Brazil still works for its wildly imaginative Kafka-meets-Orwell-meets-Monty Python vision of the future.
***1/2

I Heart Huckabees (2004)
A film that nearly defies description, it is nominally about a frustrated environmental activist (Jason Schwartzman) trying to make sense out of some odd coincidences while locked in a battle with a Wal-Mart stand-in called Huckabees. That threadbare narrative provides director David O. Russell with an excuse for a comic farce about existentialism, nihilism, Zen and everything else we learned in college (and forgot promptly afterwards). Either you will find this stuff tedious or irresistible; I'm in the latter camp. The cast is first-rate and obviously having a hoot, especially Mark Wahlberg as a firefighter obsessed with the evils of petroleum, Jude Law as a smarmy Huckabees exec, and Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin as a pair of "existentialism" detectives left over from the hippie days. Accented by Jon Brion's beautiful score, Huckabees is a playful hug for humanity and the philosophical mind.
***1/2

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Why had I never seen this before? The final Indiana Jones installment is head and shoulders above Temple of Doom and damned close to the kinetic charms of the original. The opening bit, featuring River Phoenix as a young Indie swinging through a circus train, is a blast — and Steven Spielberg's goofy B-movie valentine never loses steam. While ultimately it might be forgettable fluff, that's hard to hold against a movie in which such silly fun is the whole point.
***1/2

Lola (1961)
One of the more audience-friendly film icons to emerge from the French New Wave was Jacques Demy, who made his feature-length debut with this romance linking a handful of characters searching for true love (It's interesting, really, to see such contrivances as a distant ancestor to something like Hitch). Nothing in Lola matches Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but it's a pleasant trifle, nonetheless.
***

A Man for All Seasons (1966)
Engrossing, if stagy, screen adaptation of the Robert Bolt play about Sir Thomas Moore, who apparently died for the sin of being a big pain in the ass to Henry VIII. The movie must have been a cinch for the Best Picture Oscar it earned in '66; it's the sort of self-important, occasionally ponderous story that Academy voters always dig. Still, director Fred Zinnemann deserves credit for having the good sense to let the remarkable writing tell its own story, and Paul Scofield lends a calm to the role of the somewhat prickly hero.
***