Public Enemies (2009)
In 2009, you couldn’t beat a cast as stacked as the one for Public Enemies. Depp was coming off the huge success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, while Bale and Cotillard were on the cusp of getting anointed their richly deserved Oscars. Add in Michael Mann, one of the best directors working then and now, and you have a gorgeously stylized gangster picture with one foot in the past and the other in the present. It’s almost as violent as any Quentin Tarantino movie, but sports a sensibility with the gangster pictures Warner Bros. made in the ’30s and ’40s.
Depp stars as infamous gangster John Dillinger, a career criminal who was labeled “Public Enemy No. 1” by the FBI in the 1930s. After escaping prison, he is chased by Melvin Purvis (Bale), an FBI agent determined to get his man. Complicating matters for Dillinger is his flirtation with singer Billie Frechette (Cotillard), who shares her lover’s anti-authoritarian attitude, if not his killer instincts.
Like Mann’s classic modern caper Heat, Public Enemies boils down to a story of two men locked in a long chase that only has one possible ending: one of them has to die.
A Walk in the Woods (2015)
When you think of a typical buddy comedy, you may remember such classics 48 Hrs. with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte or Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. A Walk in the Woods is not your typical buddy comedy. For starters, it’s not an action movie, unless you consider hiking on the Appalachian Trail comparable to Mel and Danny chasing drug dealers in L.A. But the 2015 movie is a great example of opposites-attract comedy that’s played pretty straight and, at times, seriously.
Robert Redford stars as Bill Bryson, a retired author who decides to explore nature over the objections of his wife, Catherine (an underused but still very good Emma Thompson). He teams up with his old friend Stephen Katz (Nolte, as grizzled as ever) and, along the way, rediscovers his passion for writing and how much he missed Stephen.
A Walk in the Woods doesn’t tread new ground, but it gives you the opportunity to hang out with three of the most charismatic actors working today. That alone is worth taking, you guessed it, A Walk in the Woods.
The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)
The Catcher Was a Spy tells a story that’s so far-fetched, it has to be true. Moe Berg, a Boston Red Sox baseball player, is recruited by the American government to serve as a spy. His mission? To gather intel on Germany’s plans for building an atomic bomb, information that could help America create its own weapon of mass destruction. (You can watch Oppenheimer on Peacock to see how that turned out.)
Again, all of this sounds unbelievable, but the movie does its best to ground it in reality. That’s largely due to Paul Rudd, who stars as Moe and gives him an all-American aw-shucksness that hides his incredible intelligence and capacity for deception. The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania actor is backed by an impressive supporting cast that includes Sienna Miller, Mark Strong, Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce, Shogun’s Hiroyuki Sanada, and Paul Giamatti.
Moe’s story is one that needed to be told, and it makes The Catcher Was a Spy an entertaining watch for a lazy summer weekend.
