Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric, 2021)

Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight

Cast: Vicky Krieps, Arieh Worthalter, Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet, Sacha Ardilly, Juliette Benveniste, Aurèle Grzesik, Aurélia Petit, Erwan Ribard, Cuca Bañeras Flos, Samuel Mathieu, Jean-Philippe Petit. Screenplay: Mathieu Amalric, based on a play by Claudine Galea. Cinematography: Christophe Beaucarne. Production design: Laurent Baude. Film editing: François Gédigier. 

"I don't like movies that make me think," said a woman on a social media site recently in an argument about Kathryn Bigelow's latest  film, A House of Dynamite. "I have enough to think about already." I wouldn't recommend Mathieu Amalric's Hold Me Tight to her, then. It makes the viewer work to sort out what is going on in actuality or in the mind of the protagonist, Clarisse (Vicky Krieps). When we first see her, she is laying out a bunch of Polaroid photographs on the table, turning them over as if they were tarot cards that might provide a revelation of some sorts. Then we see her sneak out of the house, careful not to wake her husband and children, and set out on what will become a solitary road trip. We then see her family, her husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), her daughter, Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet), and her son, Paul (Sacha Ardilly), as they start the day without her. But gradually we realize that what we have just seen may not have happened at all, at least not in the way it's presented to us, and we have to assemble what is being shown to us into a coherent and ultimately painful reality. The question may arise whether the way Amalric chooses to tell Clarisse's story justifies itself: Does it reveal something about her experience that a straightforward narrative would lack? Or is it just like a jigsaw puzzle in which putting it together is the point, rather than the picture itself? After waffling back and forth between those questions, I find myself coming down mushily in the middle: I think the complications of the narrative verge on self-conscious filmmaking, but that the ultimate effect is to make Hold Me Tight an unusually compelling story of memory and desire, heightened by Krieps's performance and a soundtrack full of evocative music.    

Love Under the Crucifix (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1962)

Ineko Arima in Love Under the Crucifix

Cast: Ineko Arima, Tatsuya Nakadai, Ganjiro Nakamura, Mieko Takamine, Osamu Takizawa, Koji Nanbara, Manami Fuji, Yumeji Tsukioka, Hisaya Ito. Screenplay: Masahige Narusawa, based on a novel  by Toko Kon. Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima. Art direction: Junpei Oosumi. Film editing: Hisashi Sagara. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.  

As deliberate and slow as the tea ceremony that it features, Kinuyo Tanaka's Love Under the Crucifix is a story of love thwarted by conflicting codes: Christian moral doctrine vs. the laws and traditions of 16th century Japan. Ineko Arima plays Ogin, daughter of Rikyu (Ganjiro Nakamura), a master of the tea ceremony. When a wealthy merchant seeks her hand in marriage, Ogin is forced to accept, even though she has loved Takayama Ukon (Tatsuya Nakadai) since they were children together. Ukon, however, is not only already married, but also a Christian and opposed to divorce. When Christianity is banned in Japan, he is forced into exile. Eventually Ogin and Ukon will meet again under perilous circumstances and their enduring love will be tested. Beautifully designed and filmed, Love Under the Crucifix is weighed down by exposition-heavy dialogue and its somewhat over-familiar story line. Arima is superb as Ogin, but Nakadai is wasted in a role that gives him little to do.  

Compensation (Zeinabu Irene Davis, 1999)

John Earl Jelks and Michelle A. Banks in Compensation

Cast: Michelle A. Banks, John Earl Jelks, Nirvana Cobb, Kevin L. Davis, Christopher Smith, K. Lynn Stephens. Screenplay: Marc Arthur Chéry. Cinematography: Pierre H.L. Davis Jr. Production design: Katharine Watford Cook. Film editing: Dana Briscoe, Zeinabu Irene Davis. Music: Atiba Y. Jali, Reginald R. Robinson. 

Zeinabu Irene Davis's Compensation was partly inspired by a poem with that title by Paul Laurence Dunbar: 

Because I had loved so deeply, 

Because I had loved so long, 

God in His great compassion 

Gave me the gift of song.

Because I have loved so vainly,

And sung with such faltering breath,

The Master in infinite mercy

Offers the boon of Death. 

The film tells parallel love stories, one set in the beginning of the 20th century and the other at its end, with the same two actors playing both pairs of lovers. Michelle A. Banks plays Malindy Brown in the earlier story, and Malaika Brown in the other. Both young women are deaf, as is the actress -- Marc Arthur Chéry rewrote his screenplay to accommodate that fact when Davis discovered Banks in a play and recognized her rightness for the role. The change added another layer to a film about the changes in Black lives over the course of the century. Malindy falls in love with Arthur Jones (John Earl Jelks), who has just arrived in Chicago from Mississippi -- part of the great migration from the South that changed America in the century. Jelks also plays Nico Jones, who falls for Malaika at the end of the century. The intermingled stories focus on communication problems -- Malindy not only has to teach Arthur sign language but also to read -- and the impact of serious illness on the lovers. Davis beautifully integrates archival footage of life in Chicago, and uses silent movie-style intertitles and captions to tell the story, an illuminating approach to depicting both the transformations and the continuities in the Black experience.  

The Living Skeleton (Hiroki Matsuno, 1968)

Kikko Matsuoka in The Living Skeleton

Cast: Kikko Matsuoka, Yasunori Irikawa, Masumi Okada, Asao Uchida, Asao Koike, Keijiro Kikiyo, Kaori Taniguchi, Kaiko Yanagawa, Nobuo Kaneko, Ko Nishimura. Screenplay: Kikuma Shimoiizaka, Kuzo Kobayashi. Cinematography: Masayuki Kato. Production design: Kyohei Morita. Film editing: Kazuo Ota. Music: Naboru Nishiyama. 

Hiroki Matsuno's The Living Skeleton is a potpourri of horror movie tropes. In addition to skeletons, there are bats, thunderstorms, a ghost ship, an elaborate disguise, an ill-fated romance, a mad doctor, a quest for revenge, and even a body hidden in a suit of armor. It begins with the gunning down of the shackled crew of a ship being raided by modern-day pirates, and continues three years later as the events on that ship begin to resurface, largely because of the interest of Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka) in what happened to her twin, Yoriko (also Matsuoka), on board the ship. She's aided by her boyfriend, Mochizuki (Yasunori Irikawa), and to some extent by a Catholic priest (Masumi Okada), for whom she works. The print shown on the Criterion Channel hasn't aged well: the gray tones have faded into black so much that in some scenes the action amounts to little blobs of light moving around in the darkness. Following the plot sometimes feels like that too, but the creep factor of the story remains high. We've seen it all before, of course, but never quite in this configuration.

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.