Ho-ho-ho with ‘Die Hard,’ plus the week’s best films in L.A.

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

I attended Tuesday’s premiere screening of the short documentary “By Kevin Thomas,” directed by Tim Hunter and produced by John Davison and Beverly Walker, at the Laemmle Royal. The film is an endearing portrait of former Times critic Kevin Thomas, who published thousands of reviews and articles in the paper across five decades from the 1960s to the 2000s, covering everything from the Ice Capades and Ethel Merman to the debut Los Angeles appearance of the Velvet Underground in 1966.

It was as a film critic at the paper that Thomas had his biggest impact. In his 2022 book “Cinema Speculation,” Quentin Tarantino dedicated an entire chapter to an appreciation of Thomas, whom he dubbed the “Second String Samurai.”

Thomas reviewed films such as Jonathan Demme’s “Caged Heat” or Russ Meyer’s “Supervixens” with insight and conviction while also writing about international art-house filmmakers such as Lina Wertmüller and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In many ways, his broad-reaching taste and enthusiasms made him a precursor to the encyclopedic, omnivorous movie nerd of the video-store era and the current Letterboxd moment.

As Tarantino noted in his book, “In the end, what made Kevin Thomas so unique in the world of ’70s and ’80s film criticism, he seemed like one of the only few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job and, consequently, their life. I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend.”

The audience at the screening on Tuesday included many of his former colleagues and other Los Angeles-based film critics. Introducing the screening, Hunter joked, “That’s what I need, showing this picture in front of a house of old movie critics.”

Hunter added, “For us, it’s more of a document than a documentary. It’s really more of a mini oral history with illustrations than it is any attempt at making a movie. So I did want to tamp down anybody’s expectations on that front, everything except the subject of the film. And there I don’t want to temper any expectations at all, because Kevin’s really had an admirable career deserving of our praise.”

Noting Thomas’ love for classic Hollywood alongside his passion for discovering up-and-coming filmmakers, Hunter said, “He had a foot in the past and a foot in the future.”

The movie plays like spending time with an old friend: Thomas seated in an armchair in his apartment in Santa Monica, reminiscing. (The interview was shot in two sessions on separate Saturdays.) He recalls in detail the mentorship he received from directors Fritz Lang and George Cukor, as well as his friendship with Mae West. (He still has West’s telephone, with the initials “MW” on the dial.)

Thomas, now 88, took questions after the screening. Asked what was the worst film he ever saw, he said that was tough to say because a pretentious serious film can’t really be compared against a crude, ramshackle exploitation picture.

“Bad is bad,” Thomas said, “but it comes in many varieties.”

Plans for the future of the documentary are up in the air. The filmmaking team hopes to find a way for more people to see it so that it can stand as a tribute to Thomas.

Words spoken by Thomas in the film — as to what kept him heading back to the theater — served as an inadvertent mantra for the evening’s event and perhaps, in turn, the eternal optimism of the movie-going life: “Art is where you find it.”

‘Die Hard’ in 35mm

It’s now widely accepted that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie and not merely a movie set during Christmas. So of course that means this is the time of year to check it out. And on Saturday the Egyptian Theatre will screen “Die Hard” in 35mm from a print from the Academy Film Archive.

In what became arguably his signature role, Bruce Willis plays New York City cop John McClane who arrives in Los Angeles to visit his estranged wife at Christmas. When her office holiday party becomes the nexus of a terrorist plot, McClane springs into action. (And perhaps like me, you often think of the movie as you drive on Olympic Boulevard through Century City, passing the building that would stand in for the film’s “Nakatomi Plaza.”) Directed by John McTiernan, “Die Hard” features cinematography by Jan de Bont, who himself would go on to direct “Speed” a handful of years later.

The original Times review of “Die Hard” was written, it just so happens, by one Kevin Thomas, who was remarkably prescient about the movie. He said the film was “the archetypal big-deal Hollywood exploitation picture. It’s like a giant war toy, a triumph of well-oiled mechanical precision that performs miracles of destruction. As a grand flourish of cinematic technique, it is awesome; as a human drama, it is disgusting and silly, a mindless depiction of carnage on an epic scale. It is also dead certain to give Bruce Willis his movie stardom at last.”

He added, “The filmmakers … [treat] the whole picture as a joke, a ploy grown familiar from expensive action pix in recent years. This is just great for Willis, whose terrific sense of humor makes him a star as much as his broad shoulders do. But the effect ultimately lays bare the film’s bedrock cynicism. More than anything else, ‘Die Hard’ tells us a lot about today’s Hollywood.”

‘The Wages of Fear’ in 4K

Though Henri-George Clouzot’s 1953 adaptation of the novel “The Wages of Fear” might be better known to contemporary movie fans as the basis for William Friedkin’s 1977 “Sorcerer,” the original film is an exquisite study in tension. A new 4K restoration is playing at the Laemmle Noho 7, with an additional showing at the Los Feliz 3 on Dec. 31.

In a remote South American town, four desperate men (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, and Peter van Eyck) are hired for a desperate job, to transport two truckloads of highly volatile nitroglycerin up a mountain.

In his original review from October 1955, Philip K. Scheuer wrote, “Few audiences ever have been dragged through as punishing an ordeal as that which awaits them in ‘Wages of Fear.’ … What follows is a study in detailed suspense. Clouzot’s camera is as concerned with the animate as the inanimate; he uses props like people and people like props, squeezing every last ounce of graphic illustration from each. … Your heart is scarcely out of your throat before another crisis develops.”

Points of interest

Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Fanny and Alexander’

When “Fanny and Alexander” was released, director Ingmar Bergman declared it would be his last film and from then on he would only work in television and theater. Even though his television work would still be released theatrically, at the time it made the film feel like a real event.

The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian will be showing the extended version of “Fanny and Alexander” on Saturday, starting at noon. That’s more than five hours’ worth of end-of-an-era drama set amid one theatrical family’s Christmas celebrations in 1907, with performances by young Pernilla Allwin and Bertil Guve as the brother and sister of the title.

In reviewing the film’s theatrical version in June 1983, Sheila Benson wrote, “Since it is Bergman’s, it is not a world without horrors or cruelty, yet ‘Fanny and Alexander’ is his most generous and life-affirming work. It is ribald, mysterious, generous, reflective, frightening, poignant, romantic and deeply moving. And with this summer’s pleasant, bubble-headed films films bursting around us, it is an anchor for those who need content with their style. … If this is indeed the last we are to have from one of the world’s greatest directors of films for thoughtful audiences, then what a summing-up it is: a letter of love to those of the theater’s ‘little world,’ with enough affection left to spill over generously to us groundlings.”

In a report while the movie was in production in Sweden, Peter Cowie spoke to the director about the film. Though many read the film as autobiographical, as Bergman then said, “ ‘Fanny and Alexander’ is not about my childhood, but parts of my childhood are lodged within it.”

RaMell Ross’ ‘Nickel Boys’

It is rare these days to come out of a movie and be able to say you have never seen anything quite like that before, but “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ adaptation of the novel by Colson Whitehead, is such an experience. Told with a dynamic first-person point of view, the film places the viewer inside the experiences of two young Black men, Elwood and Turner, who are trapped in a reform school in Florida in the early 1960s. The style of the film creates a sense of empathy and understanding that taps into a deep current of emotion that can be at times overwhelming.

In her review of the film, our Amy Nicholson wrote, “This shouldn’t seem like a radical act except that Ross uses the technique to immortalize the days of Black Americans in the South whose lives are more often looked at than through. Outsiders tend to cram people into a box, force them to fit a message that ranges from exploitative to tediously well-meaning. Ross sets them free. The message is simply that Elwood and Turner are human beings.”

Carlos Aguilar spoke to Ross, who said of the film’s subjective camera, “I never questioned whether or not it would work. Allowing [a viewer] to be simultaneous with the experience of someone else is what’s missing from human beings’ capacity to be vicarious.”

Brady Corbet’s ‘The Brutalist’

One of the most talked-about films of the season has been “The Brutalist,” directed by Brady Corbet from a screenplay by Corbet and his wife, Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold. The film tells the story of fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who, having survived a concentration camp and made his way to post-World War II America, is commissioned by industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) to build a monumental institute, intertwining the lives of the two men.

As Amy Nicholson wrote in her review: “Like ‘Tár’ and ‘There Will Be Blood,’ this is cultural psychoanalysis presented as a phony biopic. Anyone who’s ever had a headache-inducing boss or been on the losing end of a dogfight between taste and cash will see themselves in Brody’s kinetic martyr, a figure so scrutinized that in one closeup, you can count his pubic hairs. The movie announces itself as a modern epic and goes on to earn that gilded frame.”

I interviewed Pearce, who really shines in the complicated role of Van Buren, Tóth’s patron and tormentor. Though much has been made of the film’s length and ambition, Pearce sees its true success as rooted in something much simpler.

“It’s also really emotional, and to me that’s the No. 1 thing,” Pearce told me. “It’s amazing to watch great, clever films, but if you feel a bit cold, then you feel a bit cold. Whereas I feel like this, it just tears your heart out and it’s sort of like America sitting there in your face.”