New in November: Tough to Choose

A lot of good stuff this month. A lot. Which is why it's taken me longer than usual to sort through it all and decide which titles to write about. Let's start with something easy:

TV

It's hard not to be happy at new seasons of Portlandia, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and (hooray) Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (a series I reviewed earlier this year). Also The Bletchley Circle, which I hear good things about but haven't seen. Making its Netflix debut (on the 10th) is the first season of the sci-fi thriller Helix, which was executive produced by Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D. Moore and should be worth a look or two. If you're more in the mood for science than science fiction, there's the debut of the three-part Your Inner Fish (2014), an entertaining and�to some�provocative look into what we were before we became the sophisticated movie-watching bipeds of today.

Classics

A fairly idiosyncratic mix of pre-1980 movies are on hand, starting with 1962's Hell Is for Heroes, an acclaimed WWII actioner directed by scrappy Don Siegel and starring Steve McQueen and James Coburn. If those two stars aren't steely-eyed enough for you, check out Charles Bronson in Breakheart Pass (1975), a rough-and-tumble western that also features tough guys Ben Johnson and Richard Crenna.

O'Toole, Hepburn

Distinctly less action-heavy is Cleopatra (1963), which, if never exactly considered a good movie, its notoriety makes it a genuine curiosity for a) Dick and Liz fans, b) Joe Mankiewicz fans (he did All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives), c) fans of historical epics, and d) those who are physically capable of sitting in front of their screens for 4 hours.

But no need to torture yourself�not when you can treat yourself to something bubbly like 1966's How to Steal a Million, a romantic heist comedy directed by William Wyler (Roman Holiday) that features Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn alternately wooing and outwitting each other. Or maybe you're still feeling Halloweeny, in which case you might try laughing yourself scared with The Crimson Cult, a 1968 B-horror movie by way of Brit stalwarts Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, and Barbara Steele in green (or is it blue?) body paint. And then there's something that tries just a bit harder...

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