The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

Shauna Macdonald in The Descent

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone, Oliver Milburn, Molly Kayl, Craig Conway. Screenplay: Neil Marshall. Cinematography: Sam McCurdy. Production design: Simon Bowles. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: David Julyan.

Neil Marshall's The Descent is notorious for having two endings, one for American audiences and a darker, more ambiguous one for the rest of the world. Neither ending, it seems to me, is satisfactory, but the choice itself points out the difficulty with genre films: What sort of conclusion do you put on a movie that has potential spinoffs lurking in its plot? Structurally, The Descent reflects the influence of sequelitis. As a claustrophobe, I was suitably terrified by the film when it looked like it was going to be an exciting and scary survival adventure. But then, midway, The Descent turns into a monster movie, and at that point it became "just a movie" to me: actors in makeup on obvious sound stage sets. I also preferred the movie when it seemed that there were going to be real characters in it, but then Marshall fails to provide distinct personalities for each of the six women who brave the adventure. Four of them fall by the way as the hero (Shauna Macdonald as Sarah) and the villain (Natalie Mendoza as Juno) battle each other along with the threatening creepers. We know Sarah is the hero because she has previously suffered a terrible loss, just as we know Juno is the villain because she's an adrenaline junkie likely to put them in danger. Skillfully made, and undeniably involving, The Descent sadly falls into genre clichés. 

REC (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007)

Manuela Velasco in REC

Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Teraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Pablo Rosso, David Vert, Vicente Gil, Martha Carbonell, Carlos Vicente, Maria Teresa Ortega, Manuel Bronchud, Akemi Goto, Kao Chenmin, Maria Lanau, Claudia Silva, Carlos Lasarte. Screenplay: Jaume Balagueró, Luiso Berdejo, Paco Plaza. Cinematography: Pablo Rosso. Production design: Gemma Fauria. Film editing: David Gallart. 

Messy and unsettling, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's REC takes the camera's viewpoint as a vapid young TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman (cinematographer Pablo Rosso, voiced by Javier Coromina) tape an episode for a TV series. They ride along with a small crew of firefighters on what sounds like a routine call: The screams of a woman in a locked apartment have disturbed her neighbors. Once there, however, they and the cops who join them not only encounter the unexpected, but they're also forced to stay in the building after it's quarantined by the authorities for a suspected biohazard. I wish that Velasco's character had not been allowed to grow so screechy and hysterical as the events they encounter escalate -- they're nerve-wracking enough on their own -- but REC does the "found footage" approach to horror as well as I've ever seen it done. Though it winds up as pretty much a routine "zombie virus" movie, it has a bloody actuality that's quite disturbing.
 

The Glass Shield (Charles Burnett, 1994)

Michael Boatman and Lori Petty in The Glass Shield

Cast: Michael Boatman, Lori Petty, Erich Anderson, Richard Anderson, Bernie Casey, Linden Chiles, Wanda De Jesus, Victoria Dillard, Elliott Gould, Don Harvey, Tommy Hicks, Ice Cube, Michael Ironside, Natalija Nogulich, Drew Snyder, M. Emmet Walsh. Screenplay: Charles Burnett, based on a screenplay by John Eddie Johnson and Ned Welsh. Cinematography: Elliot Davis. Production design: Penny Barrett. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton. Music: Stephen James Taylor. 

Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield starts as a movie about racism and sexism, but then wanders into whodunit territory, becomes a trial drama, and winds up as an indictment of the corruption-breeding cronyism of police departments. Michael Boatman and Lori Petty play rookies in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department who, because they're the first Black and first woman in the department, immediately become outsiders, regarded as "diversity hires." Petty's Deborah Fields, trained as a lawyer, remains on the defensive, while Boatman's J.J. Johnson decides to go along and get along. They find themselves, however, investigating a murder that has been pinned on a young Black man (Ice Cube), whose arrest Johnson had a part in bringing about. Boatman and Petty are too lightweight for the roles they've been asked to play, especially since the cast is loaded with such heavyweight character actors as M. Emmet Walsh, Michael Ironside, and Elliott Gould. This miscasting causes the film to lose what focus its rather complicated screenplay possesses. To its credit, The Glass Shield, which was made after the Rodney King trial but before the O.J. Simpson trial, feels prescient, and it doesn't come up with pat answers to the problems it exposes. 

Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973)

Marlene Clark in Ganja & Hess

Cast: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn, Sam L. Waymon, Leonard Jackson, Candece Tarpley, Richard Harrow, John Hoffmeister, Betty Barney, Mabel King. Betsy Thurman, Tommy Lane, Tara Fields. Screenplay: Bill Gunn. Cinematography: James E. Hinton. Production design: Tom H. John. Film editing: Victor Kanefsky. Music: Sam L. Waymon. 

Bill Gunn's astonishing Ganja & Hess is a deconstruction of both the vampire legend and Christian mythography posing as a horror movie. It focuses on the common element of both: blood. And it does it so effectively that perhaps its most chilling scene comes at the end of the film: children singing the hymn "There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood." Made on a small budget, Gunn's film premiered at Cannes to an enthusiastic reception, but failed at the American box office and was pulled from distribution except for a radically recut version called Blood Couple that Gunn had his name removed from. Spike Lee attempted a remake in 2014 called Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, but it lacks the rawness and authenticity of the original. I can think of no other "vampire movie" that has a comparable effect except perhaps Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025).  

Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986)

Brigitte Lin, Cherie Chung, and Sally Yeh in Peking Opera Blues

Cast: Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh, Cherie Chung, Mark Ho-nam Cheng, Cheung Kwok Keung, Kenneth Tsang, Wu Ma, Ku Feng, Lee Hoi-sang, Leong Po-Chih, Huang Ha, Sandra Ng. Screenplay: Raymond To. Cinematography: Hang-Sang Poon. Production design: Kim-Sing Ho, Chi-Heng Leung, Vincent Wai. Film editing: David Wu. Music: James Wong. 

All flash and dazzle and most of all color, Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues is a nonstop action comedy that uses the elaborate costumes of Chinese opera to kaleidoscopic effect. The plot is a tangle of nonsense about stealing some documents that support a revolutionary movement in China in 1914, but mostly it's designed to provide excuses for gunfights and hair's-breadth escapes. The protagonists are three young women who wind up as collaborators, aided by two young men. They don't escape harm: One of the men is seriously wounded by gunfire and one of the women is captured and mercilessly tortured, but both bounce back with a resilience that tests credulity but keeps the action going. There's also a good deal of queerness: One of the women dresses as a man, and the fact that women in Peking Opera were played by men provides some not exactly tasteful humor. Fortunately, Hark keeps things going so fast and furiously that it takes an effort of will to be offended by the movie. 

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later

Cast: Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Edvin Ryding, Chi Lewis-Parry, Christopher Fulford, Stella Gonet. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle. Production design: Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: Young Fathers. 

Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later is an installment posing as a sequel, so no wonder it frustrated many who were expecting a self-contained film. The next installment, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is due in January 2026. But although this installment begins and ends with a character who gets very little screen time, there's a nice coherence to what Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have put together, centered on young Spike (Alfie Williams). It's a coming-of-age fable about living up to society's idea of manhood, in which Spike is initiated by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a hunt for the infected, the zombiefied humans introduced by Boyle and Garland in 28 Days Later (2002). Spike's disillusionment and loss constitute the plot of the film, which is also a satire on post-Brexit Britain posing as a monster movie. Good performances, especially by Williams and by Jodie Comer as his mother, suffering from an illness that the post-apocalyptic community in which they live is unable to diagnose, carry the installment as far as it was designed to go. On the other hand, it's not a movie that left me hungry for more.  

Lips of Blood (Jean Rollin, 1975)

Catherine Castel and Marie-Pierre Castel in Lips of Blood

Cast: Jean-Loup Philippe, Annie Bell, Natalie Perrey, Martine Grimaud, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel, Hélène Maguin, Anita Berglund, Claudine Beccarie, Béatrice Harnois. Screenplay: Jean-Loup Philippe, Jean Rollin. Cinematography: Jean-François Robin. Production design: Alain Pitrel. Film editing: Olivier Grégoire. Music: Didier William Lepauw. 

Would Jean Rollin's Lips of Blood be as creepy if it had been made on a generous budget with capable actors? Or is it the very cheesiness -- the fake fangs, the clumsy continuity, the gratuitous nudity, the patchy editing -- that makes it more interesting and memorable than slicker Hollywood horror movies? Because even when I'm laughing at some of Rollin's dodges and exploitative moments or wondering why he paces the action so slowly, I find myself drawn into the movie. Rollin is a master at finding and using real settings, from the crumbling Château Gaillard in Normandy to the Métro, the Trocadero gardens, and the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, which provide the right atmosphere and give the preposterous vampire love story an actuality that it doesn't deserve.   

The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova, 1971)

Oleg Vladimirsky and Zinaida Sharko in The Long Farewell

Cast: Zinaida Sharko, Oleg Vladimirsky, Yuriy Kayurov, Svetlana Kabanova. Screenplay: Natalya Ryazantseva. Cinematography: Gennady Karyuk. Production design: Enrique Rodriguez. Film editing: Valentina Oleynik. Music: Oleg Karavaychuk. 

Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) has just returned home to his mother, Yevgeniya (Zinaida Sharko), from a visit to his father in Novosibirsk, a long way away from their home in Ukraine. His parents separated when he was very small, but now that he's a teenager, about to set out on his own, Sasha thinks he might just go live with his father. Yevgeniya, naturally, isn't very happy about this. That situation gives Kira Muratova's The Long Farewell its substance; there is no plot. It's a film that depends greatly on our empathy with the characters, and empathy was not valued very much by the Soviet ideologues who got Muratova into a bit of trouble. (The same attitude seems to be true of the right-wingers currently in charge in the U.S.) But Muratova and her two lead performers know exactly how to generate it in the audience, which makes the film such a quietly memorable one. Most of it deals with the fraying relationship between mother and son, as they get on each other's nerves, but there's a key scene that brings the movie's themes into focus. Yevgeniya is in the post office where she's asked by a man to write a letter to his family for her -- he has forgotten his glasses. As he dictates it to her, the things he says about being separated from them clearly resonate with her. Sharko, who was a celebrated stage actress in the Soviet Union, is marvelous. Vladimirsky, an actor whose career is otherwise undocumented on the internet, is equally good, with a presence reminiscent of the young Anthony Perkins. The Long Farewell is a slender but poignant film much enlivened by Muratova's sly finesse with the camera and in the editing room.  

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Demi Moore in The Substance

Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Edward Hamilton-Clark, Gore Abrams, Oscar Lesage, Christian Erickson, Robin Greer, Tom Morton, Yann Bean (voice). Screenplay: Coralie Fargeat. Cinematography: Benjamin Kracun. Production design: Stanislas Reydellet. Film editing: Jerome Eltabet, Coralie Fargeat, Valentin Féron. Music: Raffertie. 

The fluids and textures of body horror have seldom been used for a satirically intense purpose as in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance. But the film wouldn't work without the courageous performance of Demi Moore, who brings her own image as a fading superstar to the movie. She provides a core of actuality to what is often an absurdly tongue-in-cheek film, in which people (including the character she plays) blithely do stupid things and in which plot holes and improbably over-the-top doings are abundant. The scene in which she prepares for a date in front of a mirror, applying and wiping away her makeup and then applying and removing it again, is more effective in its way than any of the scenes in which she is smothered in slimy and oozing prosthetics. As a fable about Hollywood's exploitation of women by men, embodied by Dennis Quaid as the producer named (with obvious aptness) Harvey, The Substance is sometimes blatant and a bit shrill, but the deeper target is our own body-consciousness, and in this area the film leaves us queasily examining our private obsession with age and decay.  

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.