Killer Nun (Giulio Berruti, 1979)

Anita Ekberg in Killer Nun

Cast: Anita Ekberg, Alida Valli, Massimo Serato, Paola Morra, Joe Dallesandro, Lou Castel, Daniele Dublino, Laura Nucci, Alice Gherardi, Nerina Montagnani. Screenplay: Giulio Berruti, Alberto Tarallo. Cinematography: Antonio Maccoppi. Production design: Franco Vanorio. Film editing: Mario Giacco. Music: Alessandro Alessandroni. 

In Giulio Berruti's Killer Nun Anita Ekberg plays Sister Gertrude, a hospital nurse recovering from an operation to remove a brain tumor whose erratic behavior outrages the patients -- in a fit of rage she even stomps on an elderly woman's false teeth. Gertrude is addicted to morphine, and when that gets in short supply, she slips away to the city, doffs her habit, sells her mother's ring to buy more, and has sex with a stranger she picks up in a bar. Back at the hospital, patients start dying in unusual circumstances, and Gertrude manages to put the blame on the head physician and get him fired. But among her manifest sins, is she guilty of murder?  Berruti tries to integrate nudity and lurid violence into a story, based on an actual case, divided between two impulses: to shock. or to make the characters into actual people. The latter impulse is partly thwarted by the casting: Ekberg, never much of an actress. can't handle Gertrude's mood swings. In the end, the chief problem with Killer Nun is that its title promises a sleaze that it doesn't deliver in a story it doesn't know how to tell. 

Fool for Love (Robert Altman, 1985)

Sam Shepard and Kim Basinger in Fool for Love

Cast: Sam Shepard, Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid. Screenplay: Sam Shepard, based on his play. Cinematography: Pierre Mignot. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Stephen P. Dunn, Luce Grunenwaldt. Music: George Burdt. 

Even though Sam Shepard wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman's film version of his play Fool for Love, it remains an example of why things written for the stage so rarely work as well on screen. It lacks the immediacy of theater, where we're in the same room with the characters and, although we know they're actors, can more readily imagine them as real people. Altman's Fool for Love is a very well-acted character drama that loses something when it thrusts the characters into a real setting, a rundown motel in the desert, distracting us from the loopiness and individuality of people who live in their own world of self-justification. Altman does more than just give it a setting, he also dramatizes some of the key speeches in the play in flashback re-creations of the incidents the characters are describing. And he does it, puzzlingly, by not showing precisely what the character is saying. When Harry Dean Stanton's Old Man tells of how he and his wife tried to calm a hysterical child, we see a child who is not at all hysterical. And when Kim Basinger's May tells of her mother's search for her father, she speaks of being held tightly by her mother's hand, but what we see is May following several steps behind her mother. The rationale for the discrepancy, I suppose, is that nothing these characters say can be taken for the truth. But that only leaves us to wonder why we should care about them at all. 

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)

Oscar Isaac in Frankenstein

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Christian Convery. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, based on a novel by Mary Shelley. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Tamara Deverell. Film editing: Evan Schiff. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

Handsomely designed and filmed, compellingly acted, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein strives to bridge the gap between literature, Mary Shelley's gothic novel, and film. Del Toro's version has some plot elements that don't quite work: How, for example, does a blind man teach someone to read? His major mistake, though, was giving the Creature superhuman strength and invulnerability; they turn him into a comic book superhero instead of the suffering being that Jacob Elordi's fine performance manifests. Oscar Isaac is one of our finest actors, but he seems to me a little too old for the role: Victor's obsession is a manifestation of youth, when all things seem possible. When Frankenstein fails, it's because the questions it raises, like what it means to be human, are too large for the medium that's trying to deal with them: They get lost in the cinematic spectacle.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (Gareth Edwards, 2025)

Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in Jurassic World: Rebirth

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, Ed Skrein. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: James Clyne. Film editing: Jabez Olssen. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

Director Gareth Edwards and writer David Koepp try nothing new in Jurassic World: Rebirth, delivering what we expect from the franchise: an intrepid heroine, a nerdy but resourceful scientist, a villain, a cute kid, scary critters, hair's-breadth escapes, and a few deaths that aren't so bloody that they'll tip the rating from PG-13 to R. Suffice it to say that the formula is getting stale. Its chief virtue is that you know what you're in for, and the movie provides it even if you won't remember a thing about it the next day. 

City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987)

Chow Yun-fat in City on Fire

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Sun Yueh, Danny Lee, Carrie Ng, Roy Cheung, Maria Cordero, Fong Yau, Victor Hon, Lau Kong, Elvis Tsui, Tommy Wong Kwong-leung, Cheng Mang-ha, Parkman Wong. Screenplay: Tommy Sham, Ringo Lam. Cinematography: Andrew Lau. Production design: Chi Fung Lok. Film editing: Wong Ming-lam. Music: Teddy Robin Kwan. 

In Ringo Lam's City on Fire, Chow Yun-fat plays Ko Chow, an undercover cop who wants to leave the force for a less perilous life. An easygoing, antic guy, Chow knows his days are probably numbered in the job and he wants to spend more time with his girlfriend, Hung (Carrie Ng), who keeps threatening to leave him. But his superior officer, Inspector Lau (Sun Yueh), chafing because he's being passed over on the force by a younger inspector (Roy Cheung), persuades Chow to go along with the gang of robbers he's infiltrated for one more heist. City on Fire is a solid cops-and-robbers movie with more characterization and less stylized action than many Hong Kong thrillers, and it helped establish Chow Yun-fat as a star in the genre. 

Northern Lights (John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, 1978)

Joe Spano, Helen Ness, and Robert Behling in Northern Lights

Cast: Robert Behling, Susan Lynch, Joe Spano, Marianna Åström-De Fina, Ray Ness, Helen Ness, Thorbjörn Rue, Nick Eldredge, Jon Ness, Gary Hanisch, Melvin Rodvold, Adelaide Thorntveidt. Screenplay: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Cinematography: Judy Irola. Film editing: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Music: David Ozzie Ahlers. 

Northern Lights is a tribute to endurance and persistence, not only that of the North Dakota immigrant farmers whose story it tells, but also to writer-director-editors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, and cinematographer Judy Irola, who endured the hardships of the northern plains in winter to tell it. The story is not a commercial one, dealing as it does with a populist movement seeking solidarity of farmers against capitalists in the early years of the 20th century, but Hanson and Nilsson were determined to make it. It works, too, a moving portrait of unsung lives. 

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

Jess Weixler in Teeth

Cast: Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman, Lenny von Dohlen, Vivienne Benesch, Ashley Springer, Laila Liliana Garro. Screenplay: Mitchell Lichtenstein. Cinematography: Wolfgang Held. Production design: Paul Avery. Film editing: Joe Landauer. Music: Robert Miller. 

Poised in the gap between exploitation and satire, Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth doesn't quite make the grade as either. The title refers to legend of the vagina dentata, a physiological anomaly somehow possessed by Dawn (Jess Weixler). a teenage advocate for the save-it-for-marriage movement. When she lets herself and her boyfriend, Tobey (Hale Appleman), give into their urges, he gets a little too aggressive in satisfying them and suffers the bloody consequences. Teeth never really overcomes its sensational premise, an obvious one for a body horror movie with feminist overtones. Lichtenstein, making his feature debut as writer and director, hasn't yet mastered some of the skills he needs to make it work. The pacing feels off and some of the exposition is muddled. When the film succeeds, it does so because of a sly performance by Weixler, who makes Dawn's confusion and eventual determination more plausible than the script does. 

Black Angel (Roy William Neill, 1946)

June Vincent and Dan Duryea in Black Angel

Cast: Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre, Broderick Crawford, Constance Dowling, Wallace Ford, Hobart Cavanaugh, Freddie Steele, John Phillips, Ben Bard, Junius Matthews, Marion Martin. Screenplay: Ray Chanslor, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Cinematography: Paul Ivano. Art direction: Martin Obzina, Jack Otterson. Film editing: Saul A. Goodkind. Music: Frank Skinner.

What Black Angel has going for it is Dan Duryea in a role that departs from his usual villainy, and a setup derived from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, a writer given to nasty surprises. It takes place in a noir milieu that largely consists of bars and nightclubs, the main one presided over by a sinister Peter Lorre with a cigarette constantly dangling from his lip. The result is a solid B-picture that could have been better than that with a more capable leading lady than June Vincent and more imaginative direction than Roy William Neill gives it.

Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell in Bones and All

Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, André Holland, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper, Chloë Sevigny, Anna Cobb, David Gordon Green. Screenplay: David Kajganich, based on a novel by Camille DeAngelis. Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan. Production design: Elliott Hostetter. Film editing: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. 

A horror movie from the point of view of the monsters, Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All features three remarkable performances. Taylor Russell is revelatory as Maren, the young woman who discovers that her compulsion to eat human flesh is not just an idiosyncrasy; Timothée Chalamet once again proves that he's not just a pretty face as Lee, a fellow "eater"; and Mark Rylance skillfully disappears into another role as Sully, Maren's mentor and nemesis. There's enough gore to satisfy sanguinary horror devotees, but the film focuses mainly on the psychology of people whose desires put them on the fringes of society, doing so without becoming heavily allegorical. Released during the ravages of the covid pandemic, Bones and All underperformed at the box office, but although it transcends the horror genre, its subject matter meant was probably never going to achieve a higher status than cult film.    
 

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon, and Chloë Sevigny in My Son, My Son, What Ye Done

Cast: Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Peña, Grace Zabriskie, Brad Dourif, Irma P. Hall, Loretta Devine. Screenplay: Herbert Golder, Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Danny Caldwell. Film editing: Joe Bini, Omar Daher. Music: Ernst Reijseger. 

It took Werner Herzog a long time to get the backing for this odd duck of a film before the exactly right producer, David Lynch, took it on. It's a "true crime" story filtered through Greek myth and the Herzogian imagination with a touch of the Lynchian sensibility, so that it becomes a darkly comic mock tragedy, with Michael Shannon as Orestes and Grace Zabriskie as Electra. There are pet flamingos in the mix, with Brad Dourif in a cameo as a racist and homophobic ostrich farmer and a deadpan performance by Willem Dafoe as the detective trying to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, though fascinating in concept, it gets a little slow in delivery and might easily be dismissed as quirk for quirk's sake.