A Confucian Confusion (Edward Yang, 1994)

Chen Shiang-chyi and Suk Kwan Ni in A Confucian Confusion

Cast: Chen Shiang-chyi, Yiwan Chen, Danny Dun, Hung Hung, Elaine Jin, Chen Limei, Richie Li, Suk Kwan Ni, Bosen Wang, Weiming Wang, Yeming Wang. Screenplay: Edward Yang. Cinematography: Chang Chan, Hung Wu-hsiu, Li Lung-yu, Arthur Wong. Production design: Ernest Guan, Tsai Chen, Edward Yang, Yao Jui-chung. Film editing: Chen Po-wen. Music: Antonio Lee. 

Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion is a satiric but ultimately benign look at yuppies in a boom town, Taipei in the '90s. Nothing is fixed and stable about their lives, as they rise and fall, couple and uncouple in their pursuit of fortune. It's animated by the lively performances of its ensemble and the typically novelistic detail of Yang's narrative. The film itself had deteriorated somewhat since it was released, and has been restored, but I still found some of its scenes less clearly lit than they could have been. 

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999)

James Earl Jones in The Annihilation of Fish

Cast: James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder. Screenplay: Anthony C. Winkler. Cinematography: John L. Dempsey Jr., Rick Robinson. Production design: Nina Ruscio. Film editing: Nancy Richardson. Music: Laura Karpman. 

I was surprised that The Annihilation of Fish was written for the screen and not adapted from a play. Anthony C. Winkler's script is mostly talk, the action is largely confined to one setting, and it makes use of only three characters. James Earl Jones plays Fish, a man who believes he is being harassed by a demon; Lynn Redgrave is Poinsettia, who believes that her lover is Giacomo Puccini; and Margot Kidder is their landlady, Mrs. Mudroone, and God forbid if you ever spell her name without the final E. The plot, such as it is, comes from bringing the three together in Mrs. Muldroone's Los Angeles rooming house, where the two misfits, Fish and Poinsettia, fall in love (and into bed) while dealing with Fish's invisible demon, whom he literally wrestles and she finally kills, precipitating a crisis that threatens to end their affair. All three performers are wonderful, and some people find the film charming and funny, but I began to be more annoyed than intrigued by their eccentricities. 

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

Masaki Suda in Cloud

Cast: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masaaki Akahori, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Yugo Mikawa, Maho Yamada, Toshihiro Yashiba. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Yasayuki Sasaki. Production design: Kyoko Matsui. Film editing: Koichi Takahashi. Music: Takuma Watanabe. 

A cloud is just a fog that keeps its distance. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, it's that place in cyberspace where we do and store things, but it descends upon Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) as a miasma filled with people who wish to do him harm. He has been raking in the yen as a reseller of dubious goods, buying them from distressed sellers and putting them online at marked-up prices. He has made enough money to quit his factory job and move with his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), to a place in the country, where he continues his work with the aid of a young man called Sano (Daiken Okudaira), whom he hires as an assistant. But then he starts getting mysteriously harassed and threatened, and before long he discovers that a group has formed online of people who would do him real harm. They include his former boss, a rival reseller, retailers whose goods he has bought and resold, and dissatisfied customers -- some of the products he sold were fakes. Things escalate until he is fighting for his life, aided to his surprise by Sano, whom he has fired. Cloud is a bit of a mashup: It's a satire on capitalism, an old-fashioned revenge thriller, and a moral fable, and its ending suggests that there's more going on in the background of the story than has met the eye. The film disappointed some of Kurosawa's fans, who expected more of the psychological horror for which he has become known, but I found it skillfully made and provocative. 

Judgment Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993)

Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven, Emilio Estevez, Stephen Dorff, and Michael DeLorenzo in Judgment Night

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Denis Leary, Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven, Peter Greene, Erik Schrody, Michael Wiseman, Michael DeLorenzo, Relioues Webb, Will Zahrn, Eugene Williams. Screenplay: Lewis Colick, Jere Cunningham. Cinematography: Peter Levy. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Tim Wellburn. Music: Alan Silvestri. 

Judgment Night is a routine thriller about four suburban knuckleheads who head into the big bad city and wind up in a preposterous amount of trouble. They're the usual types: the Good Guy (Emilio Estevez), the Kid Brother (Stephen Dorff), the Adrenaline Junkie (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and the Jerk (Jeremy Piven). In the Dark City -- the Chicago of Donald Trump's imaginings -- they face off against the Sneering Gang Boss (Denis Leary), his Menacing Sidekick (Peter Greene), and a host of undifferentiated Thugs. They're chased through a Bleak Railyard, into a Decaying Housing Project, and everything winds up in a place where there's a lot of Stuff to Break. Director Stephen Hopkins, working from a much-rewritten script, treats it all as if it were new and interesting, but this is a case where if you've ever seen an action thriller you know what to expect. 

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, 1976)

Joel Grey, Geraldine Chaplin, and Paul Newman in Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Cast: Paul Newman, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster, Allan F. Nicholls, Geraldine Chaplin, John Considine, Will Sampson, Frank Kaquitts, Robert DoQui, Mike Kaplan, Burt Remsen, Bonnie Leaders, Noelle Rogers, Evelyn Lear, Denver Pyle, Pat McCormick, Shelley Duvall. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph, Robert Altman, suggested by a play by Arthur Kopit. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Production design: Anthony Masters. Film editing: Peter Appleton, Dennis M. Hill. Music: Richard Baskin. 

"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be," says Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) in Robert Altman's deconstruction of the Wild West myth that Bill Cody, with the help of the novelist Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster), had created. Buffalo Bill and the Indians premiered in the bicentennial year of 1976 and was poorly received by both critics and audiences, though probably not because of any offenses to patriotism. It's overlong and unfocused, relying more on Newman's charisma than on any attempt at giving the character depth and substance. It's no revelation that the man who made the myth of the Wild West was a racist and an egomaniac. There are amusing moments: Joel Grey delivers the malapropisms of Nate Salisbury, the producer of Bill's show, with sly finesse, and Geraldine Chaplin and John Considine spar nicely as Annie Oakley and Frank Butler. Bill's supposed infatuation with opera singers lets Evelyn Lear, as a soprano called Nina Cavallini, beautifully sing "The Last Rose of Summer" in Italian. But the movie has nowhere to go. If Sitting Bull does teach Buffalo Bill a history lesson, as the subtitle suggests, it doesn't seem to have any effect.  

Alucarda (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)

Tina Romero and Susana Kamini in Alucarda

Cast: Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, Claudio Brook, David Silva, Tina French, Brigitta Segerskog, Lili Garza, Adriana Roel, Martin LaSalle. Screenplay: Alexis Arroyo, Juan López Moctezuma, Tita Arroyo, Yolanda López Moctezuma, based on a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. Cinematography: Xavier Cruz. Art direction: Kleomenes Stamatiades. Film editing: Maximo Sánchez Molina. Music: Anthony Guefen.

Juan López Moctezuma's lurid, loony Alucarda takes place mostly in the environs of an orphanage run by nuns, who seem to belong to no usual order: Instead of black, their habits and wimples are a dingy white -- the better to get soiled and bloodied, as we'll see. The plot, such as it is, centers on Justine (Susana Kamini), a teenager who comes to the orphanage on the death of her parents, and is immediately taken under the wing of another teenage orphan, Alucarda (Tina Romero), who seems not to have given the nuns much trouble until Justine arrives, and then ... well, for once the cliché "all hell breaks loose" seems appropriate. Both girls go nuts, but it's Justine in particular who causes the attending priest, Father Lázaro (David Silva), to intone "we must do [portentous pause] an exorcism!" [Gasp from the assembled nuns.] In this case expelling the demon appears to involve stripping Justine naked, chaining her to a forked cross, and poking holes into her. This goes on until the attending doctor (Claudio Brook, who also doubles as an avatar of Satan) arrives to put a stop to it, whereupon Father Lázaro and the nuns go into a frenzy of penitential flagellation. But the doctor's efforts to use reason don't work either. Alucarda has some of the clunkiest dialogue and most wooden delivery of it that I've encountered in many a month of movie-watching. But it's also compulsively, perversely watchable, and not just in a condescending way because of its campiness or its exploitative nudity and blasphemy. In this tale of God vs. Satan, Satan seems to get the upper hand, despite the efforts of both religion and science to thwart him.  

Hard-Boiled (John Woo, 1992)

ChowYun-fat in Hard-Boiled

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan, Phillip Kwok, Anthony Wong, Kwan Hoi-san, Stephen Tung, Bowie Lam, Lo Meng, Bobby Au-yeung. Screenplay: John Woo, Barry Wong, Gordon Chan. Cinematography: Wang Wing-heng. Production design: James Leung. Film editing: John Woo, David Wu, Kai Kit-wai, Jack Ah. Music: Michael Gibbs.

About as much fun as you can have watching people die by the dozens. Don't get me wrong: I laughed out loud several times during John Woo's action masterpiece Hard-Boiled, as when Tequila's pants caught fire and the baby he was carrying peed and doused the flames. It's a rush of kinetic effects, and Chow Yun-fat as Yuen (aka Tequila) and Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Alan (or perhaps Ah Long, as the subtitles put it) have chemistry and charisma to spare. But once the dizzying, exhilarating action is over, you're not left with much beyond a pleasant buzz and in my case a nagging feeling that maybe you shouldn't really enjoy mindless violence so much. It's an "it's only a movie" movie that depends on your assurance that those are stuntmen firing fake guns and flinging themselves about and the blood is red stuff packed into squibs. Yet maybe, living as we Americans do in a gun culture, we ought to have an occasional afterthought about what we enjoy so much.

Brief Encounters (Kira Muratova, 1967)

Vladimir Vysotskiy and Kira Muratova in Brief Encounters

Cast: Kira Muratova, Nina Ruslanova, Vladimir Vysotskiy, Lidiya Bazilskaya, Olga Viklandt, Aleksey Glazyrin, Valeri Isakov, Tatyana Midnaya, Kirill Marinchenko, Svetlana Nimolyaeva, Grigoriy Kogan. Screenplay: Kira Muratova, Leonid Zhukovitsky. Cinematography: Gennady Karyuk. Production design: Aleksandra Konardova, Oleg Perederiy. Film editing: O. Kharakova. Music: Oleg Karavaychuk. 

Kira Muratov's first feature, Brief Encounters, is a deftly handled romantic drama about a middle-aged woman, Valentina (Muratova), her not-so-faithful husband, Maksim (Vladimir Vysotskiy), and a pretty young woman, Nadya (Nina Ruslanova), whom Valentina hires as a housekeeper. What neither Valentina nor Nadya realizes when the hiring takes place is that Nadya and Maksim have already met. The process of discovering that fact and dealing with it constitutes the plot. In the meantime, we see the satire-tinged portrait of Valentina's life as a bureaucrat in the city of Odesa, dealing with contractors who cut corners and people anxious to occupy the apartment houses they're building. Muratova wittily fragments the narrative, with flashbacks to the on-the-road encounter of Nadya and Maksim, who is a geologist exploring the rural Ukraine that Nadya is eager to leave. It's the kind of movie whose narrative technique demands attention, but it's also engaging enough that you want to go back and watch it again once you've sorted out the relationships of the characters. 

A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu-tung, 1987)

Leslie Cheung and Joey Wong in A Chinese Ghost Story

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Joey Wong, Wu Ma, Lau Siu-ming, Lam Wai, Xue Zhilun, Wong Jing, David Wu. Screenplay: Yuen Kai-chi, based on stories by Pu Songling. Cinematography: Poon Hang-sang, Sander Lee Kar-ko, Tom Lau Moon-tong, Wong Wing-hang. Production design: Yee Chung-man. Film editing: David Wu. Music: Romeo Diaz, James Wong.

I hadn't expected a Chinese ghost story, or rather a film with that title (the original Chinese title translates as The Ethereal Spirit of a Beauty), to be so funny. But Chiung Siu-tung's frenetic melange of horror tropes, legend, slapstick, martial arts, and satire is just that, thanks to a charming comic performance by Leslie Cheung. He plays a novice tax collector trying to do his job in a village and meeting more than the usual resistance. Forced to spend the night in an abandoned temple, he encounters a beautiful young woman (Joey Wong) and a Taoist priest (Wu Ma). The latter informs him that the young woman is a ghost, but his infatuation persists. It turns out that she's under the control of a tree demon from whom her soul can only be freed if he disinters her remains and takes them to safety. He and the priest set out to do that, but the tree demon, who possesses, among other powers, a threatening tongue, puts up a fight. There are other spirits to be dealt with, too, including a horde of the undead. The barrage of special effects fortunately never overwhelms the performers.  

Requiem for a Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1972)

Mireille Dargent and Marie-Pierre Castel in Requiem for a Vampire

Cast: Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille Dargent, Philippe Gasté, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle, Antoine Mosin, Olivier François, Dominique Toussaint, Angès Petit, Agnes Jacquet, Anne-Rose Kurat, Paul Bisciglia, Jean-Noël Delamarre. Screenplay: Jean Rollin. Cinematography: Renan Pollès. Film editing: Michel Patient. Music: Pierre Raph. 

We never find out why the two young women dressed as clowns are fleeing a pursuing car at the start of Jean Rollin's Requiem for a Vampire or how they got the guns or why they never seem to run out of ammunition. It's clear that Rollin will do anything within his budget (which includes torching the car they're escaping in) for an effect. It's part horror movie, part skin flick, cobbled together from whatever's available, which includes a picturesque setting, the Château de la Roche-Guyon and environs in Normandy. There are vampires, of course, cheesily outfitted with fake fangs. For Rollin, vampirism is a form of rape, of which there are several exploitative scenes involving naked women in chains. Our heroines get naked, too, cuddling in bed until they're interrupted by creepy noises. It comes as no surprise that, in order to make his "serious"  films, of which this is considered to be one, Rollin also directed porn. The effect of this film on me was mostly "what the hell?"