This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“The Spiders: Kino Classics Edition”

Long before Steven Spielberg directed the globetrotting adventures of dashing archeologist Indiana Jones, the estimable German filmmaker Fritz Lang plotted out intriguing derring-do for a more-than-worthy predecessor named Kay Hoog, a high-society sportsman whose cliffhanging escapades are featured in “The Spiders,” due out on DVD Tuesday.

This 1919 silent is actually composed to two short featurettes from a series of four that Lang had planned. They focus on the exploits of Hoog (Carl de Vogt, whose stony countenance often earned comparisons with American cowboy star William S. Hart), a wealthy San Francisco adventurer who regularly crossed swords with a secret criminal cabal known as the Spiders.

The first adventure, titled “The Golden Lake,” takes Hoog to the jungles of Peru in pursuit of a hidden cache of Incan gold. There, he comes up against Spiders mastermind Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) as they clash with primitive tribesmen and fight off efforts to turn them into human sacrifices.

The second adventure, “The Diamond Ship,” finds Hoog navigating a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the streets of Chinatown in search of a legendary lost jewel known as the Buddha Head Diamond. Along the way he again encounters Spider henchmen and a devious plot to rule all of Asia.

Packed with more than enough treasure maps, double-dealing, mysterious twists, exotic sets, coded puzzles, wild plot turns and death-defying escapes, Lang’s pulpy, rapid-clip tales possess enough serial zest to propel several Indiana Jones movies.

Though the Kino prints are seriously worn and scratched, the tales still seem as fresh and urgent today as any of Spielberg’s affectionate tributes to serial adventures in the Indiana Jones series. Unfortunately, Lang never got around to making the last two features in the Kay Hoog quartet.

“The Spiders: Kino Classics Edition” is not rated and runs 150 minutes. It’s being released by Kino International.

- Dennis King

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Before he was cast in the crucial role as young Albert Narracott in Steven Spielberg’s stately “War Horse,” British actor Jeremy Irvine had never been in a movie – and had never even ridden a horse.

Jeremy Irvine, Joey

“I was in a theater show with no lines pretending to be a tree at the time that I was going up for ‘War Horse.’ And I was really struggling as an actor,” Irvine said. “I wasn’t getting recalls for commercials, let alone for movies.”

During press interviews hosted by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures at the Regency Hotel, Irvine described the long, arduous audition process that eventually landed him the coveted role.

“It was probably over two months, I think, and I was going on tape with a casting director and knowing that what I was taping in London was being shown to Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles that night,” Irvine said. “The thing is, I never even had the thought that I’d get this role. As far as I concerned it was just a good audition experience, and I was getting to spend time with a wonderful casting director. That was my main thing.

“And as you do when you’re struggling as an actor you put 100 percent into every audition,” he said. “I was teaching myself to ride and helping out at local stables and things. And then one night about 10 o’clock in the evening I get a phone call saying, can you come meet Steven Spielberg the next morning for tea at Claridge’s (Hotel)? And I think I did what every actor would do – I freaked out.

“But it’s funny, because one of Steven’s best assets as a director is that within five minutes of being in a room with him all your nervousness is gone,” the actor continued. “He puts you so easily in your comfort zone, and you feel very comfortable around him and therefore you do your best work.”

That work involved a rigorous pre-production schedule of riding lessons and stable chores designed to help Irvine and fellow cast members become easy and natural around horses.

“I’d never been on a horse in my life or acted in a movie. So I had quite a lot to learn really,” said Irvine, a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. “We all had these two months to really have it beaten into us and for anyone who’s ever had to learn to ride from scratch, it’s pretty uncomfortable for a little bit, especially for guys. There’s a reason that John Wayne walked like he did. It was tough, but at the same time but in a way it was the most fun, learning to ride.”

For director Spielberg, taking a chance on an untried young actor in a key role of a big, important production is nothing new.

“I’m a veteran of foolhardy casting choices,” Spielberg said with a wry smile, “giving Drew Barrymore her first chance to help carry ‘E.T.’ and giving Christian Bale his first film to basically totally carry ‘Empire of the Sun.’

“I’ve risked everything on new people who I really believed in,” he said. “For me, I have no risk aversion. I don’t feel any anxiety any longer in casting someone who literally has to carry a movie if they’ve never done a movie before. Because if I think they’ve got it then I can work with what they bring to me, and Jeremy had it. He had a gift. He’s affable; he had a tremendous connection with these animals, although he didn’t ride until he made ‘War Horse’ with us.

“But there was just something about the spirit of his naïveté, being sort of a young actor in training but never having been given the break,” Spielberg said. “It reminded me Joey (the horse). He never acted before, either. So I had Jeremy, who’d never acted before, and I had a horse that had never been in a movie before, and I figured what the heck – put them together and see what happens. And yet Jeremy has great intuition; he has a great intuitive heart, he has a great personality. I just knew it was raw material I could work with. And he was instantly adopted by the other cast members who had vast experience and really took him under their wing.”

And he had unbridled enthusiasm and a newfound sense of awe for the horses he acted with.

“I got to ride on Black Beauty,” Irvine chimed in like a child at Christmas. “One of the original Black Beauties was one of the horses I got to ride. It’s still around and going strong.”

BY GENE TRIPLETT

You can dress up a turkey in IMAX, 3-D and ear-shattering Surround Sound and throw it up on the biggest screen in town, but if there’s no great story, direction or acting to go with the visual feast, it’s still just a big fat turkey that gobbles loudly. Here are 10 that weren’t turkeys in 2011.

Ryan Gosling in "Drive."

1. “Drive” — Nicolas Winding Refn’s powerful film about a loner (Ryan Gosling) who works as a mechanic and part-time Hollywood stunt driver and moonlights as a wheelman for small-time heisters quickly reveals itself as a high-octane, 21st-century “Shane” in a souped-up Chevy, with all the action, suspense, heart, soul and heroism of that classic Western, as the driver comes to the aid of a threatened family. There’s a surprisingly tender love story in the midst of this bloody battle between good and evil, and Albert Brooks is unexpectedly chilling as the coldblooded boss of the bad guys. Unfortunately, Oscar will dismiss this one as just another ultraviolent popcorn seller.

2. “The Descendants” — George Clooney has never locked into the humanity of a character with more depth of sensitivity than

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley

 he displays here as a Hawaiian landowner who’s just trying to do the right thing by his money-hungry relatives, two troubled daughters and a wife who’s been cheating on him — a fact he discovers only after an accident has rendered her permanently comatose. Director/co-writer Alexander Payne couldn’t have wished for a better lead in this superb trouble-in-paradise comedy-drama that delivers laughter and pathos in generous equal measures.

Michael Shannon, "Take Shelter"

3. “Take Shelter” — The ever-intense Michael Shannon stirs an emotional tempest as a working-class family man tortured by visions both real and imagined that seem to portend an apocalyptic climatological disaster — or his impending loss of sanity. It’s through Shannon’s tour de force performance that writer-director Jeff Nichols fashions an extraordinarily effective allegory on a more widespread fear gripping the world at large, of nature and economics spinning irreversibly out of control. Shannon is memorably electric and moving as a man unsure of whether the real threat to his family is a brewing storm or his unraveling self.

4. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” — Director Thomas Alfredson’s riveting screen version of John le Carre’s Cold War cloak-and-dagger classic is a classroom study in slow-burning

Gary Oldman

suspense, and Gary Oldman rewrites the book on perfectly-pitched stillness that speaks volumes as seasoned, bespectacled spymaster George Smiley, who’s pitted against deadly treachery and his own desperate loneliness as he plots to flush out a mole in the top echelon of British intelligence. No tricked-out Aston Martins or rocket packs here. Just gripping, gritty realism and a superb cast that also features John Hurt and Colin Firth in powerful turns.

Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes

5. “Martha Marcy May Marlene” — Elizabeth Olsen steps out of the shadows of her famous twin sisters with a mesmeric big-screen debut performance in the title role of a young woman who steals away from a cult “family” and attempts to re-enter the “normal” world. Writer-director Sean Durkin takes an auspicious first bow as well with this chilling psychological thriller, quietly and cunningly unfolding one disturbing secret after another, but the film’s lasting impression owes no small debt to John Hawkes’ dark presence as the deceptively warm, enormously sinister, predatory communal overlord adept at holding impressionable young people in his thrall.

6. “Another Earth” — The Earth has a newly discovered twin, looming larger than the moon overhead and promising all the mind-blowing

Brit Marling

possibilities of a parallel reality that may exist there. That’s the speculative element of director Mike Cahill’s exceedingly imaginative and moving first feature, which he co-wrote and co-produced with his fledgling star Brit Marling, whose screen presence and physical and emotional beauty are as mesmerizing as the film’s sky-gazing visual effects. Shot on a startlingly low budget, Marling and Cahill’s story of tragedy, self-confrontation, desperately sought-after redemption and forgiveness is a provocative and heartfelt examination of human fragility and healing love effectively designed to be at once haunting and hopeful.

7. “The Help” — Writer-director Tate Taylor’s awards-worthy adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s novel about black housemaids and the white

Viola Davis

women who employed them in the early 1960s South is brought to vivid life by an ensemble cast that could very well clean up during awards season. Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain give uniformly unforgettable performances in a story rife with poignancy, hope and big-hearted humor. Just try to stay dry-eyed. Betcha can’t.

Saoirse Ronan

8. “Hanna” — Once upon a time, a man (Eric Bana) raised a little girl named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) in the frozen woods of Finland to be a perfect killing machine. Then he turned her loose to fend for herself in an unfamiliar modern-day culture and a treacherous high-tech spy-world in this supercharged fairy tale from screenwriters Seth Lochhead and David Farr and director Joe Wright. Yet another cloak-and-dagger thriller, but the originality of this one is mind-blowing, as is Ronan’s hypnotic turn as a sweet-faced but lethal, unlikely action hero going up against the brilliant Cate Blanchett as the evil witch-agent of the West. Better watch out, my pretty.

Rooney Mara

9. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” — Another great tough-girl tale, this one is based on the first novel in the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster trilogy about Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), punked-out, street-savvy, street-savage survivor of childhood abuse who teams with blackballed journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to solve the ugly mystery behind decades-old serial killings. Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist have earned raves in these roles in the Swedish film versions of the series, but fierce and brooding Mara and un-Bond-ishly seedy and world-weary Craig acquit themselves handily in a harsh, noire-ishly brooding atmosphere expertly crafted by director David Fincher.

10. “War Horse” — Director Steven Spielberg shamelessly plays audience heartstrings like a Playskool piano, and those of us who are suckers for

Jeremy Irvine, "War Horse."

tear-tugging boy-and-his-horse tales (or boy-and-his-dog, as the case may be) happily dance to his predictable tune based on British author Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book about a British farm boy (Jeremy Irvine) who is separated from his beloved horse, Joey, when the animal is drafted into World War I combat duty and suffers the cruelties and tragedies of war. Add the vivid sweep and color of Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography and a rousing John Williams score, and this one comes in a good old-fashioned winner reminiscent of such family classics as “The Story of Seabiscuit,” “National Velvet” and “Lassie Come Home.”

BY DENNIS KING

Like lemmings, we movie critics line up every late December to release our lists of the year’s 10 best movies.

It’s a necessary chore, but try as we might to be independent minded there’s a numbing sameness to most critics’ lists. Dictating the year’s “best” films is so often a rote ritual, driven by urgencies of the upcoming awards season and marked by a certain inevitability as studios march out their prestige pictures and promotional blitzes to generate maximum holiday fanfare. Thus, most top 10 lists are necessarily top-heavy with these inescapable Oscar contenders.

The fated suspects show up on every list – “The Artist,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Descendents” and so on. And rightfully so. These are indeed among the year’s indisputable best. (* Below, see the 10 best voted by members of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. A worthy roster indeed.)

In a mild act of contrariness, we hereby issue our highly subjective list – not of “bests” but of spiffy double features comprised of some of the year’s coolest flicks. Not all of these movies will show up on others’ lists and they might not all figure into the manufactured hype of the pre-Oscar run-up. But they’re popcorn pairings we found to be neat and natural fits.

So, here are our top five double features for 2011:

“The Artist”/”Hugo” – A film buff’s dream double: French director Michel Hazanavicius’ silent valentine to silent cinema and Hollywood’s rocky transition to the era of “talkies,” and American master Martin Scorsese’s 3D epic of a mechanically gifted Parisian boy and his encounter with visionary French film pioneer Georges Melies. (Add in “My Week With Marilyn” and the knockout performance of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe and you have a cinephile’s eureka trifecta.)

“The Tree of Life”/”Melancholia”- Two brainy, abstract movies that address philosophically wonky, cosmic questions: Oklahoman Terrence Malick’s visual poem couches in its dead-on evocation of a 1950s boyhood in America’s heartland multiple big questions about creation, the afterlife and God; Danish trickster Lars von Trier’s dreamy duel examination of clinical depression and the end of the world is both beautiful and terrible to behold.

“War Horse”/”Buck” – Equine magnificence in all its earthy glory: Steven Spielberg’s painterly adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s classic young adult tale and the Tony-winning stage play is a gloriously old-fashioned horse opera; documentarian Cindy Meehl’s aw-shucks film portrait of original “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman is a life lesson in the intricate relationships between horses and people, one that brings out the best in both.

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”/”Project Nim” – Monkey business, low and high: The chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that populate director Rupert Wyatt’s surprisingly smart and emotionally resonant reboot of the fallow franchise based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 sci-fi novel are indeed a gnarly, frighteningly feral and hyper-realistic bunch; Oscar-winning documentary director James Marsh takes an unflinching and unsentimental look at Nim, the chimpanzee who was the focus of a landmark experiment aimed at showing that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. A sad, funny and unsettling biography of an animal we tried to make human.

“Moneyball”/”Seven Days in Utopia” – The Zen of baseball and golf: Director Bennett Miller’s portrait of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) shows that nerds, with the obsession over stats and box scores, can indeed win baseball games; director Matt Russell marshals the gnarled, wizened countenance of Robert Duvall to tell the spiritual tale of a troubled young pro golfer (Lucas Black) who recaptures his mojo by hanging out in the rustic, sagebrush environs of Utopia, Texas.

* Here’s the OFCC Top 10 films of 2011

1. “The Artist”
2. “Drive”
3. “The Descendants”
4. “Hugo”
5. “Shame”
6. “Moneyball”
7. “Midnight in Paris”
8. “Melancholia”
9. “The Tree of Life”
10.“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Steven Spielberg never envisioned “War Horse” as a war movie.

Steven Spielberg

Instead, the celebrated, Oscar-winning director of such classic war pictures as “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List” said he saw the World War I-era story based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel and the Tony Award-winning stage production as something much more intimate, more delicate.

“I’ve done other pictures about war, but I do not consider ‘War Horse’ to be a war movie at all,” Spielberg said during a press conference hosted by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures at the Regency Hotel. “I consider it to be a character story. I consider it to be a love story between a horse and a young man. Also, it’s a story of great hope and great connection that this horse makes to every character, both German and British, as the horse travels on an episodic journey, almost an odyssey.”

“War Horse” follows the episodic story of a spirited colt named Joey as he bonds with young farm boy Albert (newcomer Jeremy Irvine) in the flinty English countryside of Devon, as boy and horse are torn apart by the arrival of World War I, as Joey is shipped off for cavalry duty, falls under the gentle care of a sickly French girl, is forced into cruel labor by German artillery officers and finally ends up stranded and injured amid the carnage of No Man’s Land at the Battle of the Somme.

“The war is a backdrop. It provides the necessary drama to pull these characters apart and eventually reunite them,” Spielberg said. “So war is more of a catalyst than the cause celeb. This is a human narrative. It’s about the connectivity that an animal can bring human characters. It’s really much more a story about hope that can exist in extremely dark circumstances because hope is always in Joey’s face.

“It’s always in Joey, the way he moves, the way he breathes, the way he doesn’t look at what’s gonna happen tomorrow,” the director said. “He just exists and brings so much connectivity to the characters on both sides of the war. So I never looked at this as a war movie, and I think that’s probably why we don’t have an ‘R’ rating because I didn’t shoot it the way I shot ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or the way I produced ‘Band of Brothers’ or the ‘The Pacific’ with Tom Hanks.”

Several critics have noted echoes of classic Westerns in this film, especially evocative of the work of the great sagebrush auteur John Ford.

“Certainly, John Ford’s work factors not just into my films and not just ‘War Horse,’ but a lot of us who studied film and love film really admire John Ford,” Spielberg said. “And yet I didn’t consciously create a tome to John Ford with ‘War Horse.’ I didn’t consciously do that. I simply went to England, looked at the locations, and became very emotionally involved in how important the land and the sky were going to be.

“And obviously I become very involved in the look of the film,” he said. “We knew because it’s such an epic story that the land is a character. And nature is a character. It determines whether the crop you bring in is going to be a success; it determines whether you’re going to lose your farm or not to a foreclosure. The land was so important to these poor farmers, and the land makes such a strong statement later in France at the Somme, No Man’s Land, it’s called. It just seemed like I was going to use wider lenses, and rather than shoot everything in close-up I was going to fall back and let the land help tell the story.

“And John Ford, of course, did a lot of that with Monument Valley in all of his Westerns,” he said. “But so did other directors like David Lean and Akira Kurosawa in celebrating the land that they were shooting their pictures on. So it wasn’t really about John Ford, it was about an opportunity that availed itself to me because of how spectacular these locations were.”

Spielberg said because of the popularity of Morpurgo’s 1982 young adult novel and the stage production (which garnered five Tony Awards) he felt there were some special challenges in bringing the story to the screen.

“The greatest challenge for me was in realizing why I even wanted to make it in the first place,” he said. “So many people came out of the play talking about the brilliant puppetry of the horses. But I came out of the play respecting the puppetry and thinking indeed it was brilliant. But I came out of the play affected not because they were puppets playing horses and great puppeteers creating a reality with those kinds of maquettes. I came out of the play admiring the story that was being told to me, a very strong narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. And I was very struck emotionally by the storytelling of the people who adapted Michael Morpurgo’s book into a play.”

Still, Spielberg said he was nervous about tackling a project that carries such high expectations from fans of the book and play. He used the Yiddish term “schpilkis” (meaning on pins and needles) to describe his anticipation.

“I always hide my nervousness because everyone else is nervous, so why impose my burden on them?” he explained. “They’ve got their own problems to solve, memorizing their lines, figuring out how to play the scene that day. So I don’t really expose my own process to anybody else because it’s hard making movies.

“But I need to stay nervous. If I don’t stay nervous I’m not going to direct anymore, because nerves keep me honest,” he said. “I don’t rely on confidence to tell my stories. I just literally show up on the set and hope there’s a little bit of mojo stirring around in there that day. Some days there’s not and those are really hard days. But the days that there are it’s better for me to come to the set with an open mind and an open heart than to come to the set with everything figured out like I’ve just built the iPad and I’ve tested it and I’ve test marketed it and I know it’s going to work.

“I don’t know what’s going to work until it works,” Spielberg said. “And I also don’t know what’s not going to work until it fails. I just don’t know. This is how I’ve directed all my life. And that little bit of nervousness everyday keeps me honest and keeps me from thinking that I have all the answers.”

As for “War Horse,” Spielberg said he hopes the movie raises people’s awareness and encourages them to be kinder to animals.

“In this day, people don’t have exposure, they don’t have interaction with horses,” he said. “I hope this movie makes people appreciate the innate and natural intelligence of horses. And I also hope this movie brings an awareness to the plight of horses both after World War I and the plight today in a very sad turn of evens in which the slaughtering of horses is being permitted for food as a renewed export industry, which makes us all very sad.”

Some wags – or, perhaps, nags – have glibly dubbed Steven Spielberg’s visually majestic “War Horse” as “Black Beauty on the Western Front.”

Joey, Jeremy Irvine

It’s an often stirring, beautifully mounted and rigorously retro epic that draws on the familiar conventions of classic equine sagas (“Black Beauty,” “National Velvet” and so on) and on well-known tropes from the “war to end all wars” genre.

Although the master director of “Saving Private Ryan” maintains this is not a war movie, it portrays some of the most gritty and stunning depictions of World War I battle – from a stately, old-school cavalry charge to the grimy, hand-to-hand horrors of trench warfare – to appear on film since “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Paths of Glory.”

Spielberg also asserts that this is not a children’s movie, although its original source material is a best-selling 1982 young adult novel by Michael Morpurgo, and it falls staunchly in line with the filmmaker’s sentimental, square-jawed vision of youthful adventure and childhood longing for home and family.

The episodic story, ably scripted by Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) and Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and synthesized from both Morpurgo’s book and dramatist Nick Stafford’s grand, Tony Award-winning stage play, follows a classic narrative arc of meeting, bonding, separation, grim hardship and uplifting reunion that has informed boy-and-animal tales through the ages.

Opening in the flinty, hardscrabble farm country of Devon, England, the tale centers on young Albert (newcomer Jeremy Irvine), whose parents Ted and Rose Narracott (Peter Mullan and Emily Watson) are struggling tenant farmers on a rocky plot leased from an aristocratic, Simon Legree-style landlord (David Thewlis). When the rascally Ted goes to a rural auction to buy a much-needed plow horse, he impulsively plops down the family’s savings instead on a young colt, a spirited animal that seems totally unsuited for farm labor.

Albert quickly takes the horse under his care, names him Joey and through determined, patient training forms a special, spiritual, bond with the animal.

But when financial hardships persist and World War I looms, Ted is forced to sell Joey into service with the British army. Capt. Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), a noble young cavalry officer, takes to the steed and promises Albert he’ll respect and care for Joey. But war is war, and in France Joey finds himself embroiled in a series of harrowing adventures.

He comes under the fleeting care of a kindly widowed farmer (Niels Arestrup) and his sickly granddaughter Emilie (Celine Buckens) and is eventually conscripted into labor, pulling massive artillery pieces through the muck, for the German army.

Meanwhile, Albert enlists in the British infantry and finds himself slogging through the trenches at the bloody Battle of the Somme. All this sets up a not surprising but nonetheless heartrending climax amid the rubble and barbed wire of No Man’s Land (a scene that recalls several classic Christmas truce tales, notably the 2005 French film “Joyeux Noel”).

While cynics might sneer at the bald emotions and the obvious manipulation at work in “War Horse,” the movie falls squarely in the heart-tugging tradition of horse movies past – with the added bonus of Spielberg’s populist sensibilities in full glory and his creative collaborators working at the height of their powers (especially artful cinematographer Janusz Kaminski).

Indeed, “War Horse” is a shamelessly old-fashioned horsey movie, but old-fashioned in the best possible sense.

- Dennis King

“War Horse”

PG-13
2:26
3 stars
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, Tom Hiddleston
(Intense sequences of war violence)

The upcoming release of Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse” calls to mind a long and storied bloodline of great horse movies in Hollywood history.

Generations of filmmakers have been drawn to the allure of horses and man’s long, close history with magnificent equine steeds. In fact some of the first moving images ever shot were of horses galloping.

In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge photographed a horse named Occident in fast motion using a series of 12 stereoscopic cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse’s, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire that was triggered by the horse’s hooves.

So as we prepare to take a journey in the hoof prints of a horse named Joey in “War Horse,” we’ve dusted off 10 of our favorite equine epics from the movies:

“Into the West” (1993) – In this enchanting Irish tale from director Mike Newell, two young Dublin brothers get the gift of a white stallion named Tir na nOg from their grandfather. When authorities threaten to impound the animal and sell it, the lads set off into the west on a wild flight to save their horse.

“National Velvet” (1944) – Elizabeth Taylor was a blue-eyed, brunette ingénue when she played the spirited young girl, Velvet, who wins the feisty horse Pie in the town lottery and teams up with a rootless young trainer (Mickey Rooney) to prepare the horse for the Grand National – England’s greatest racing event.

“The Black Stallion” (1979) – In this post-World War II story, a 10-year-old boy becomes shipwrecked on an island with a spirited Arabian stallion and the two bond. Once they are rescued, the boy and horse team up with a trainer (Mickey Rooney again) to prepare for a daunting challenge match against the fastest racehorses in the world.

“Seabiscuit” (2003) – This true, Depression-era tale examines the life and times of Seabiscuit, the small, unconventional champion steed with a slight limp, and the horse’s inspirational, redemptive effect on the struggling nation and on two down-on-their-luck human partners – the man who trained him and the jockey who rode him.

“Phar Lap” (1978) – Another true story, this one follows the legendary racing career and the mysterious death of the Australian horse Phar Lap, who rose from obscurity with the help of a dedicated stable boy and left behind an intriguing “murder” mystery when he died suddenly just before an important and lucrative race in Mexico.

“Hidalgo” (2004) – An American cavalry dispatch rider (Viggo Mortensen) takes his plucky mustang, Hidalgo, around the world to race in the Ocean of Fire – a 3,000 mile survival race across the Arabian desert that pits cowpoke and pony against the world’s greatest Arabian horses and Bedouin riders.

“The Man From Snowy River” (1982) – A prized stallion and a decades-long feud between bickering twin brothers (both played by Kirk Douglas) animate this love story – based on a poem by Aussie legend A.B. “Banjo” Patterson – about a poor Australian farm boy and the girl he wants to marry.

“My Friend Flicka” (1943) – Roddy McDowall was a veteran teen actor when he took the role of young ne’er-do-well Ken, whose parents put him in charge of a sorrel chestnut filly, who becomes injured and tests the rebellious Ken’s abilities to stick to a task and nurse the horse back to health.

“A Day at the Races” (1937) – A horse named Hi-Hat figures prominently into the zany antics of the Marx Brothers in this chaotic comedy about veterinarian Hugo Hackenbush (Groucho), who is posing as a human doctor in a scheme to save Maureen O’Sullivan’s farm by winning a big race with her misfit horse.

“Buck” (2011) – This sensitive and inspirational documentary examines the life of acclaimed “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman, a soft-spoken cowboy who recovered from years of child abuse and went on to master the Zen-like intricacies in the interactions between horses and people.

- Dennis King

To those who’ve experienced the more kid-friendly sci-fi fantasies that bear Steven Spielberg’s name, “Super 8” will seem like all too familiar narrative terrain. The formula calls for a bunch of troubled, under-supervised kids who are free to roam the streets at all hours, and the varied ways that they react when they encounter a situation totally unexpected, foreign and frightening to them.

In this case six kids in a small Ohio steel town are spending the summer of 1979 making their own zombie movie, armed only with a Super 8 camera, a makeup kit and their wild imaginations. It’s during one of their late-night filmmaking forays, shooting on location down at the dimly lighted, vaguely spooky train station, that they witness a catastrophic freight train derailment, barely escaping the tumbling, airborne chunks of wreckage.

They also witness what caused the crash and are sworn to secrecy about what they’ve seen, believing something sinister is behind the disaster.

Very soon after, unusual disappearances begin to occur in town. First, such simple things as kitchen utensils and tools go missing, then the local dog population begins vanish and, finally, missing persons reports begin to pile up in the office of Deputy Sheriff Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler). Since the sheriff is suddenly nowhere to be found, it falls to Jackson to solve the mystery.

Meanwhile, the six kids have set out on the same mission, and what they find is more terrifying than anyone has imagined.

It’s true that J.J. Abrams (“Mission: Impossible III,” “Star Trek”) gets sole credit for writing and directing “Super 8” while Spielberg is listed as one of the producers. But Spielberg’s stylistic fingerprints are all over this film, from camera angles and distinctive atmospheric lighting to character quirks and storytelling from a child’s-eye view. And it’s a matter of record that both Abrams and Spielberg began shooting narrative movies on 8 millimeter film when they were still children.

It’s a good bet Spielberg made plenty of suggestions if he didn’t take an actual hand in the actual writing and direction of this film, but there is obviously a conscious intention on Abrams’ part to pay homage to the kind of warm-fuzzy/heart-stoppingly thrilling filmmaking Spielberg practiced with “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.”

The kid cast is uniformly excellent and likable, particularly Joel Courtney as Joe Lamb, son of the recently widowed Deputy Lamb, and Elle Fanning as Alice, the object of Joe’s unspoken affection, also living with a grieving single father. Abrams’ spot-on portrayal of chaotic, dysfunctional families is at once hilarious and heartbreaking and full of truth, in the true Spielberg tradition. The trademark goofy kid-humor is there as well, triggering laughter from adults and youngsters alike. And kids and grown-ups alike will find this film’s keen sense of adventure exhilarating, even though the momentum occasionally falters from dialogue overload.

And the final bittersweet scene, although we won’t give it away, is tailored to jerk tears. But the ending, like the rest of the film, is naggingly familiar and expected, and just not as easy to fall in love with as the films that inspired it.

- Gene Triplett

MOVIE REVIEW

“Super 8”

PG-13

 1:52

 2½ stars

Starring: Kyle Chandler, Elle Fanning, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso, Noah Emmerich, Ron Eldard, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills.

(Intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and some drug use)

BY GENE TRIPLETT

There were certain advantages to being a kid on the set of “Super 8.”

For one thing, Ryan Lee, 14, found it easy to interact with the film’s storied producer, Steven Spielberg, and writer-director J.J. Abrams, who’s helmed such megahits as “Mission:

J.J. Abrams

 Impossible III” and “Star Trek.”

“He was a really cool guy,” Lee said of Spielberg in a recent phone interview his hometown of Austin, Texas. “At first he was really intimidating for me, but as soon as you’re about to shake the hand of one of the most influential men in the world, it’s an experience I’ll never forget. After that, I mean after you get to the point of the first second of meeting him, you’re already friends with him.

“He would talk to us about things, about like what apps to get on your iPhone or, you know, stuff like that. And he would tell us how good we were doing in our movie.”

Lee also rated Abrams high on the kid-friendly chart.

“He’s the best,” he said of the director. “You always hear those horror stories of directors getting mad, and J.J. never lost his temper once over the 60 days (of shooting). And I mean with six kids, to not lose your temper once, I think that’s pretty amazing.”

Indeed, no one could be better suited to making a movie about six kids making a movie than the team of Spielberg and Abrams, whose childhood experiences closely resembled those depicted in “Super 8.”

Abrams was 8 when he discovered the wonders of a Super 8 camera, a format introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1965. It was at that tender age that Abrams started shooting his own movies about epic chases and intergalactic battles and very scary monsters.

Spielberg also began shooting his own 8 millimeter films in his early teens, sometimes staging wrecks with his Lionel electric train set.

When Abrams was 15, he and childhood friend Matt Reeves (later the director of “Cloverfield”) entered their work in a Super 8 film festival and caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times, which dubbed them “The Beardless Warriors” in a feature article. Soon after, they were contacted by Spielberg assistant Kathleen Kennedy and offered the chance to cut together Spielberg’s childhood home movies. It was the beginning of a beautiful working relationship.

Flash forward to 2011. Abrams and Spielberg (now 44 and 64, respectively) have fashioned a potential summer blockbuster around a screenplay written by Abrams about six kids in a small Ohio town making a zombie movie in summer 1979. While shooting with their Super 8 camera, they witness a catastrophic train crash, barely escaping injury themselves.

And they soon learn that the wreck was not an accident.

Lee outlines the story this way:

“Once they escape it, they go home and things start to go weird. Things go missing, like household appliances, dogs and even people. And nothing can really be explained.”

Lee plays Cary, the mischievous loose cannon of the group and the provider of comedy relief.

“He’s the one in the group who wants to have a fun time,” he said. “He’s like the crazy pyromaniac, and he loves to blow up anything he can get his hands on — with fireworks, of course. And he’s also the cameraman for the zombie movie, and he’s very daring. … He would act first and then think later. Yeah, he’s one of those kids. And when he sees the train wreck he’s actually the only one who is, like, pumped about it. He’s excited. He’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, did you guys see that?’ And everybody else is really scared. That’s kind of the difference between my character and everybody else’s characters.”

Very much the young athlete, into everything from football and baseball to tennis and skateboarding, Lee first became interested in acting when he and his parents were looking for something new and different for him to do during the summer. They found an acting camp.

It was there that Lee discovered another game he was good at: the dramatic arts. He was good enough to land an agent and soon found himself appearing in recurring roles on such TV series as “Friday Night Lights” and “Breaking Bad.”

“But five years later, and this happened,” he said of his role in “Super 8.” “It’s like a dream come true.”

And the biggest advantage to landing a part in “Super 8” is the understanding Lee has of his character, Cary. They seem to like the same kind of “stuff.”

“You know, just anything that has to do with having a good time,” Lee said of himself. “Just like Cary.”

Since the candid and revealing “Steven Spielberg: A Biography” was published in 1997 – causing a major re-evaluation of the filmmaker as more than a facile, boy-wonder entertainer – much of import has happened in the life and career of America’s most consistently successful and influential movie mogul.

Now there is a new edition of film historian Joseph McBride’s biography that adds four new chapters to a life story that obviously is still unfolding with new and innovative work.

“Steven Spielberg: A Biography” (second edition, University Press of Mississippi, $30) takes up where the earlier edition left off, chronicling the extremely productive years from 1997 to the present. In that period, Spielberg helped found his own movie studio, DreamWorks SKG, with partners Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, and directed an ambitious string of movies that includes “Amistad,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” “Minority Report,” “The Terminal” and “Munich.”

As McBride notes, Spielberg’s rise to eminence has had its ups and downs. Initially hailed as a wunderkind with early successes such as “Duel” and “Sugarland Express,” followed by blockbusters “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and the Indiana Jones movies, Spielberg was largely painted by critics as “a child-man … incapable of dealing with the darker side of life.”

That is, until, “Schindler’s List,” which changed his critical profile radically and positioned him as a truly important filmmaker building a body of work that was not only commercially lucrative but socially and artistically ambitious.

McBride, an associate professor in the cinema department at San Francisco State University, is author of several respected film books, including “Hawks on Hawks” and “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career.” Having devoted years of research to Spielberg’s life and career, and having conducted more than 300 interviews, he’s uniquely qualified to assess the filmmaker’s career from a solid critical footing.

Clearly it was the author’s challenge to find anyone in the movie business willing to publicly criticize Spielberg. Most of the filmmaker’s friends, relatives and colleagues declined to assist McBride. But while largely admiring his subject’s films, the biographer nonetheless casts a hard eye on several of Spielberg’s directing failures (such as “1941” and “Always”) and his spotty record in producing others’ films and TV series.

Much about Spielberg’s personality and person life remains clouded in myth (some of it cannily promoted by the filmmaker himself). But with thoroughly researched and insightful detailing of Spielberg’s nomadic childhood and contentious relationship with creative but difficult parents, plus thoughtful analysis of his works, McBride creates an entertaining and human-scale portrait of this modern movie giant that’s as engaging as any of his film epics.

- Dennis King