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It would be something of an overstatement to call Robert Aldrich an overlooked filmmaker. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and The Dirty Dozen (1967) remain well-known, and at least two of his other films—Emperor of the North (1973) and The Longest Yard (1974)—were regular fixtures on network TV for decades. But if you know Aldrich from only those titles, you’re missing out on one of the most interesting and challenging filmographies in U.S. narrative cinema. From his earliest movies (Apache, Vera Cruz) to some of his last (Twilight’s Last Gleaming), Aldrich employed tough, efficient genre storytelling to advance a caustic view of American society. On Monday the Northwest Chicago Film Society will screen his 1972 western-cum-Vietnam-War allegory Ulzana’s Raid; it’s the subject of this week’s long review. We also have a short review, by Andrea Gronvall, of The Spectacular Now, which considers the movie’’s humanist bent, and a critic’s choice, courtesy J.R. Jones, of the harrowing documentary The Act of Killing.
