Profound Desires of the Gods (Shohei Imamura, 1968)

Cast: Kazuo Kitamura, Choichiro Kawarasaki, Hudeko Okiyama, Kanjuro Arashi, Rentaro Mikuni, Yukuo Matsui, Yoshi Kato. Screenplay: Kenji Hasebe, Shohei Imamura. Cinematography: Masao Tochizawa. Production design: Takeshi Omura. Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji. Music: Toshiro Mayazumi.

Shohei Imamaura's Profound Desires of the Gods makes many demands on the viewer in addition to its 172-minute length. The chief demand lies in the characters, most of whom are the incestuous members of the Futori family, outcasts on the isolated Kurage Island. Theirs is an insular life indeed, at least until Kanya (Kazuo Kitamura), an engineer, is sent there by his company with a view to developing a sugar cane mill there. The engineer's search for a source of fresh water puts him into intimate contact with the Futoris, particularly the highly sexed and mentally challenged Toriko (HIdeko Okiyama). There's also a cult religion maintained by priestesses that's an obstacle to the developers. The culture clash on which the film centers is familiar enough, and it takes a predictable course. Some critics consider it Imamura's masterpiece, but it's a difficult film to engage with because of the eccentricities of the characters. The images of the island -- it was filmed on Ishigaki, part of the Yaeyama Islands archipelago southwest of Okinawa -- are often spectacular. The remote location led to cost overruns and delays in the filming, which took 18 months, and the film was not a commercial success.    

You're Next (Adam Wingard, 2011)

Sharni Vinson in You're Next

Cast: Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, Wendy Glenn, A.J. Bowen, Joe Swanberg, Margaret Laney, Amy Seimetz, Ti West, Rob Moran, Barbara Crampton, L.C. Holt, Simon Barrett, Lane Hughes. Screenplay: Simon Barrett. Cinematography: Andrew Droz Palermo. Production design: Tom Hammock. Film editing: Adam Wingard. Music: Mads Heidtberg, Jasper Lee, Kyle McKinnon, Adam Wingard. 

When a horror thriller starts with a couple having sex, you can bet that they're not long for the world. And after these first and apparently unrelated victims, when you see a family gathering in a somewhat isolated house, it's exactly as if you're being introduced to the killer's bill of fare. Adam Winberg's You're Next is predictable like that. It's a reunion of siblings and their plus-ones with Mom (Barbara Crampton) and Dad (Rob Moran), and it doesn't take long before the dinner table, after Dad says grace, is alive with arguments and old animosities. The squabble is cut short, however, when one of the plus-ones,Tariq (a cameo by horror director Ti West), gets shot through the head by an arrow coming from a crossbow outside. There's a lot of panicky scrambling and the body count rises. The assailants appear as a trio in animal masks, a tiger, a lamb, and a fox. Eventually, one of the beleaguered house guests takes charge: Erin (Sharni Vinson), the girlfriend of Crispian (A.J. Bowen). He volunteers to try to slip out of the house and go for help, while she marshals the survivors and arms them with whatever sharp objects and blunt instruments they can find in the house. It turns out that Erin is the daughter of a survivalist who got her training back in her native Australia, and her skills at fighting back are many. There are a few surprises as the who and why of this massacre are revealed, but mostly You're Next is routine bloodshed passably executed.  

Lydia (Julien Duvivier, 1941)

Joseph Cotten and Merle Oberon in Lydia

Cast: Merle Oberon, Joseph Cotten, Alan Marshal, Edna May Oliver, Hans Jaray, George Reeves, John Halliday, Sara Allgood. Screenplay: Julien Duvivier, Leslie Bush-Fekete, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: William Hornbeck. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Produced by Alexander Korda with his usual opulent taste as a showcase for his wife, Merle Oberon, Julien Duvivier's Lydia takes a sentimental romance and subtly undercuts its romanticism. Oberon's Lydia starts out as a giddy girl under the watchful eye of her grandmother (Edna May Oliver), who thrills to her first ball, keeps the sensible man who is infatuated with her at arm's length, falls for a football player and almost elopes with him, turns to charitable work with blind children, meets a blind pianist and composer  who also falls for her, has a passionate affair that ends badly, and decides to stay unmarried and concentrate on charity work. The film is structured as a flashback -- with flashbacks inside flashbacks -- from a reunion with her old flames: the sensible Michael (Joseph Cotten), the quarterback Bob, and the pianist Frank (Hans Jaray). Richard (Alan Marshal), the passionate fling, is invited, but doesn't show until the end, when he makes the film's point: we remember what we want to remember, and not what actually happened. The production values, including Lee Garmes's cinematography, Vincent Korda's sets, and Miklós Rózsa's score, are first-rate, although the old-age makeup in which the principals spend most of the film isn't entirely convincing. Lydia is a little too leisurely in its story-telling, and while its ironic anti-romantic structure and ending give the film some bite, they feel at odds with the romantic fluffiness of its production.   

Pacific Heights (John Schlesinger, 1990)

Matthew Modine, Melanie Griffith, and Michael Keaton in Pacific Heights

Cast: Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine, Michael Keaton, Mako, Nobu McCarthy, Laurie Metcalf, Carl Lumbly, Dorian Harewood, Luca Bercovici, Tippi Hedren, Jerry Hardin, Dan Hedaya, Beverly D'Angelo. Screenplay: Daniel Pyne. Cinematography: Amir Mokri. Production design: Neil Spisak. Film editing: Steven Ramirez, Mark Warner. Music: Hans Zimmer. 

Drake Goodman and Patty Palmer, a young couple played by Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith, splurge on fixing up a Victorian house in San Francisco, thinking they'll be able to afford it by renting out two apartments on the first floor. But one of the tenants turns out to be a psychopath. It's a simple horror/thriller premise that depends on the audience's identification with the beleaguered homeowners, And it works as long as the tenant is a plausible nutcase in disguise, a role that Michael Keaton ably pulls off. But John Schlesinger's Pacific Heights goes awry when Drake, the homeowner, turns out to be something of a nutcase himself, unable to control his temper and his urge to get even once the tenant, who calls himself Carter Hayes, is revealed as a conniving and malicious fraud. Modine is normally a rather bland actor, and the part might have made more sense if it had gone to someone used to playing guys with a short fuse, but the script by Daniel Pyne is also at fault for not tipping us off earlier that Drake is thin-skinned and volatile. Once Drake implodes and winds up in jail, it falls to Patty, who has suffered a miscarriage under the stress of trying to evict Hayes from the house, to turn detective and exact revenge. The movie actually begins with a bit of Hayes's backstory, which doesn't become clear to anyone until Patty sleuths it out. The more complicated the film becomes, the more implausible Keaton's character and the machinations of dealing with him also become. There's also a curious side plot about a Black man (Carl Lumbly) who applied for the apartment before Hayes turned up, but lost out when his application was accidentally tossed in the trash. It serves only to make a gratuitous point about perceived racism and not to advance the story. Griffiths's mother, Tippi Hedren, has a cameo as a wealthy woman being courted by Hayes, and an unbilled Beverly D'Angelo does good work as his former girlfriend. Laurie Metcalf is wasted in the small role of Drake and Patty's lawyer. Pacific Heights works only as long as you don't think about it too much or expect more than a few mild shocks.

The Kaiju Kid

Son of Godzilla (Jun Fukuda, 1967)

Cast: Tadeo Takashima, Akira Kubo, Bibari Maeda, Akihiko Hirata, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Kenji Sahara, Ken'ichiro Maruyama, Seishiro Kuno, Yasuhiko Saijo, Haruo Nakajima, "Little Man" Machan. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa, Kazue Shiba. Cinematography: Kazuo Yamada. Production design: Takeo Kita, Mutsuma Yoyoshima. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Masaru Sato. 

All Monsters Attack (Ishiro Honda, 1969)

Cast: Tomonori Yazaki, Hideyo Yamamoto, Sachio Sakai, Kazuo Suzuki, Kenji Sahara, Machiko Naka, Shigki Ishida, Haruo Nakajima, "Little Man" Machan, Yu Sekita. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa. Cinematography: Sokei Tomioka. Production design: Takeo Kita. Film editing: Masahisa Himi. Music: Kunko Miyauchi. 

For all their violent destruction and anti-nuke subtext, it was always evident that the Godzilla films were in large part aimed at kids, as the toy market demonstrated. And as the big guy himself began to morph from a malevolent force that needed to be destroyed into a creature deserving of our understanding, it became inevitable that he should turn out to have a family. Hence Jun Fukuda's Son of Godzilla, in which a group of scientists visit a Pacific island (one of the remnants of Japan's ill-fated empire building) and encounter not only Godzilla and some fearsome giant mantises, but also his hatchling offspring, who would eventually be dubbed Minilla. Son of Godzilla is a pretty good installment in the series, centered on the usual human meddling with nature, in this case an attempt to manipulate the weather on the island. The plot creaks as it introduces the sole female member of the cast, the castaway Saeko (Bibari Maeda), daughter of an earlier researcher on the island, who is useful in warning the crew of its perils, including a giant spider called Kumonga. Eventually, Godzilla and son help fend off Kumonga and the mantises and allow the humans to escape, but not before their weather-control technology freezes the island, along with Godzilla and Minilla, who, we are assured, are merely in hibernation. All Monsters Attack returns us to the island, but only in the imagination of Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki), a small boy who dreams of traveling there to meet Minilla and his father. Ichiro is a latchkey kid in the slums on the outskirts of an industrial city, who is often bullied by larger kids. Generally regarded as one of the weakest movies in the franchise, All Monsters Attack relies heavily on footage from earlier films, including Son of Godzilla. Director Ishiro Honda liked it, however, as the similarity of the name of the film's protagonist to his own suggests. It's explicitly a movie for kids, in which Minilla's discovery of his own ability to stand up to other monsters inspires Ichiro's triumph over his bullies. 
 

Homebodies (Larry Yust, 1974)

Paula Trueman in Homebodies

Cast: Peter Brocco, Frances Fuller, William Hansen, Ruth McDevitt, Paula Trueman, Ian Wolfe, Linda Marsh, Douglas Fowley. Screenplay: Howard Kaminsky, Bennett Sims, Larry Yust. Cinematography: Isidore Mankofsky. Art direction: John Retsek. Film editing: Peter Parasheles. Music: Bernardo Segall. 

With a better director, Homebodies might have been a black comedy gem. It has an engaging, even meaningful premise, a well-chosen Cincinnati location, and a skillful cast of experienced character actors. But director and co-writer Larry Yust is unable to find a consistent tone for the film, which is sometimes sentimental, sometimes grotesque, sometimes comic, and sometimes painful. A group of elderly people, residents of an apartment house in a block that's been slated for demolition to make way for high-rise buildings, decide that they will not be moved from the place they have spent most of their lives. The most stubborn of them all, Mattie (Paula Trueman), spearheads the resistance, which starts with a series of apparently accidental deaths of workmen in the construction side, and eventually leads to the murder of the woman in charge of relocating the tenants and the particularly gruesome one of the man whose high-rise is the cause of their displacement. The trope of sweet senior citizens turning murderous is an old one, and the writers of Homebodies are to be credited for turning it into a statement about the callousness of urban redevelopment and gentrification. But the plot twist in which the old people begin to turn on one another sends the film off in another direction, one the filmmakers seem unable to resolve satisfactorily.

Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026)

Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Elizabeth Marvel, Hettienne Park, Tommy Martinez. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Sarah Broshar. Music: John Williams. 

David Koepp's screenplay for Disclosure Day reportedly went through 42 drafts, and it shows. There are scenes that have no important plot function, like the one in which Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) finds himself in the middle of a crop circle just as it's being created. There are characters such as Jackson (Wyatt Russell), the boyfriend of the film's protagonist, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who don't have enough to do. There are too many car chases and hair's-breadth escapes. There is the pointlessly meticulous (and improbable) reconstruction of Margaret's childhood home. It's as if there was something in each of those drafts that Steven Spielberg thought was too good not to include in the final product, a rather frantic and fractured attempt to recapture the wonder that his earlier films evoked. The movie's thrills, such as the scene with the car and the freight train, are skillfully executed, but they come across as set pieces that any competent director might have staged, and not as part of a fully envisioned narrative. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) are classics that felt in touch with the audience, set in the middle-class families that Spielberg knew and embraced as his milieu. Disclosure Day makes a feint at that by re-creating Margaret's childhood, but only in passing. It's a thriller without roots in ordinary experience, out to surprise the audience rather than embrace it. Good work by Blunt, O'Connor, Colin Firth, and Colman Domingo makes the characters come alive, but the film crafted around them is a coldly mechanical collection of half-baked ideas about the possibility of a governmental and corporate cover-up of alien life among us.      

Mothra vs. Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1964)

Cast: Akira Takarada, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Yu Fujiki, Kenji Sahara, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Yoshifuma Tajima, Jun Tazaki, Kenzo Tabu, Haruo Nakajima, Katsumi Tezuka. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa. Cinematography: Hajime Koizumi. Production design: Takeo Kita. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Akira Ifukube.

The contest between the benevolent insect god Mothra and the rampaging Godzilla sounds unequal. What's Mothra going to do, flap Godzilla to death? It turns out in Ishiro Honda's Mothra vs. Godzilla that the giant lepidopteran has a few unexpected tricks in her repertoire, not the least that she has progeny in the form of larvae with teeth. As usual, the humans are clumsy spectators, prone to do as much harm as good, but fortunately they have the help of Mothra's diminutive acolytes, the Shobijin (Emi Ito, Yumi Ito). We begin with a typhoon that washes a giant egg ashore, whereupon greedy promoters set out to make a fortune exploiting it. The egg, of course, is Mothra's, and fortunately we have an intrepid newspaper reporter (Akira Takarad) and a photographer (Yuriko Hoshi) who are more interested in getting the story than in making money. (The demise of newspapers is going to make such plots obsolete: Can we rely on intrepid podcasters to save the world in future encounters with giant monsters?) The movie is bright and busy entertainment with just enough sermonizing about human foibles to make it feel like the time watching it wasn't misspent.  

Two Evil Eyes (George A. Romero, Dario Argento, 1990)

Adrienne Barbeau in Two Evil Eyes ("The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar") 

Harvey Keitel in Two Evil Eyes ("The Black Cat")

Cast of "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Waldemar": Adrienne Barbeau, Ramy Zada, Bingo O'Malley, Jeff Howell, E.G. Marshall, Chuck Aber, Tom Atkins. Cast of "The Black Cat": Harvey Keitel, Madeleine Potter, John Amos, Sally Kirkland, Kim Hunter, Holter Graham, Martin Balsam, Jonathan Adams, Julie Benz. Screenplay: George A. Romero, Peter Kober ("The Facts in the Case of Mr. Waldemar"); Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini ("The Black Cat"), based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematography: Peter Reniers ("The Facts in the Case of Mr. Waldemar), Giuseppe Maccari ("The Black Cat"). Production design: Cletus Anderson. Film editing: Pasquale Buba. Music: Pino Donaggio. 

The title Two Evil Eyes seems intended to suggest that its two directors, George A. Romero and Dario Argento, have different visions when trained on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and they do. Romero takes a straightforward approach to updating one of Poe's less familiar tales as "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Waldemar." Argento's is a stylistic embroidering on "The Black Cat," loaded with allusions to other Poe stories. Neither is a particularly memorable addition to the corpus of either director's work, but devotees of their films will find much to like in both. 

Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster (Ishiro Honda, 1964)

Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hisaya Ito, Haruo Nakajima, Masanori Shinohara, Shoichi Hirose. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa. Cinematography: Hajime Koizuma. Production design: Takeo Kita. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Akira Ifekube. 

This time the monster terrifying Japan comes from outer space, not spawned by atomic testing here on Earth. Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster centers on a creature that destroyed civilization on Venus before directing its attention toward this planet. Fortunately, it meets its match in some terrestrial monsters, Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra, although Mothra has some difficulty persuading the other two lunkheads to join forces against a common enemy. But the parts of the film that deal with humans are even more screwy than usual, involving a princess (Akiko Wakabayashi) from another country, visiting Japan on a good-will trip.  Somehow, the princess gets possessed by the spirit of a Venusian who witnessed Ghidorah's destruction of her planet, and she's able to aid the earthly scientists and good guys once he starts his rampage. But the princess has her own human enemies, assassins from a rival political faction, who only complicate things once the monster action starts. Also there to help are the Shobijin, a pair of fairy acolytes to Mothra who facilitate communication with the larval creature. They're played by the twins Emi Ito and Yumi Ito, who are also a musical duo known as Peanut. Fortunately, you don't need all the backstory of these creatures to watch Ghidorah. It's the usual non-stop mixture of dated but charming special effects, with some sly humor thrown in.