Permanent Vacation (Jim Jarmusch, 1980)

Chris Parker and Leila Gastil in Permanent Vacation

Cast: Chris Parker, Leila Gastil, John Lurie, Richard Boes, Sara Driver, Charlie Spademan, Jane Fire, Ruth Bolton, Evelyn Smith. María Duval, Lisa Rosen, Frankie Faison, Suzanne Fletcher, Felice Rosser, Eric Mitchell, Chris Hameon. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Tom DiCillo, James A. Lebovitz. Film editing: Jim Jarmusch. Music: Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie. 

Jim Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation is the quintessential student film, even if Jarmusch was no longer a student at NYU when he made it. It springs out of an environment, the way New Orleans gave birth to Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Cleveland and Florida spawned Down by Law (1986), and Memphis informed Mystery Train (1989), New York City is what gives Permanent Vacation its soul. It's a "student film" because those of us who are familiar with Jarmusch's later works can see in it how he's learning to use a sense of place as a reflection and an explanation of who his characters are. And it's also the work of a gifted but still uncertain student, learning that quirky and deadpan and offbeat are useful attitudes for a novice filmmaker but they aren't ends in themselves. Good things were yet to come from Jarmusch, but you won't find more than a hint of them in Permanent Vacation. 

Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Madonna and Harvey Keitel in Dangerous Game

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Madonna, James Russo, Nancy Ferrara, Reilly Murphy, Victor Argo, Leonard L. Thomas, Christina Fulton, Heather Bracken. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Alex Tavoularis. Film editing: Anthony Redman, Shivo Andrew Stewart. Music: Joe Delia. 

Oscar Wilde's dictum that life imitates art gets a workout in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game. At the beginning we see movie director Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) taking leave of his wife (Nancy Ferrara) and child (Reilly Murphy) to fly from New York to LA, where he is making a film. There's a little tension at the departure, but nothing extreme. The extremity begins when he starts shooting about a marriage violently on the rocks with method actor Francis Burns (Joe Russo) and rising star Sarah Jennings (Madonna), who seem to dislike each other as much as the characters they're playing do. And it intensifies when Eddie's wife and child suddenly arrive just as Sarah has left his bed. From then on, what Eddie is trying to put on film begins to echo what is happening off-screen, not only with Eddie and his wife but also between his two stars. Even though it contains one of her best performances in a movie, Madonna bad-mouthed Dangerous Game when it was released. Not without reason. Though the performances are solid, it's heavy-handed and one-note, with a narrative so poorly constructed that there's no satisfactory way to end either the film being made or the one about its making. 

Maidstone (Norman Mailer, 1970)

Rip Torn and Norman Mailer in Maidstone

Cast: Norman Mailer, Rip Torn, Ultra Violet, Buzz Farbar, Leo Garen, Joy Bang, Lee Cook, Beverly Bentley, Jean Campbell, Robert Gardiner. Screenplay: Norman Mailer. Cinematography: Nick Doob, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker. Nicholas J. Proferes, Sheldon Rocklin, Diane Rocklin, Flame Schon, Jan Welt. Film editing: Lana Jokel, Norman Mailer, Jan Welt.

Why has no one done a biopic of Norman Mailer yet? Or would it be redundant? He put so much of himself on paper and on film that maybe there's not much left to say about him. But he's a key figure in that pivotal era in American cultural and political history, roughly the span of time from the Kennedy assassination to the Nixon resignation. The stressors of that period are on full display in his movie Maidstone: the psychic wounds of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X;  the rise of Black power; the emergence of feminism and the reaction against it. It's a mad, almost unwatchable film, that fortuitously contained its own climax: the fight between the brothers played by Mailer and Rip Torn, which was a real fight between director and actor, the culmination of a five-day shoot at estates in East Hampton, New York. Much of Maidstone was improvised, with a resulting 45 hours of footage, that Mailer and others eventually edited into an 119-minute movie. It's ostensibly about a film director who wants to be a presidential candidate, launching his campaign while casting and beginning to film a movie. But really it's about the obsessions of Norman Mailer, and you really have to be interested in that to justify the time spent watching it. 

The Little Sister (Hafsia Herzi, 2025)

Rita Benmannana, Melissa Guers, and Nadia Melliti in The Little Sister

Cast: Nadia Melliti, Park Ji-min, Amina Ben Mohamed, Melissa Guers, Rita Benmannana, Rizzak Ridha, Louis Memmi, Waniss Chaouki, Anouar Kardellas, Joven Etienne, Madi Dembele, Mahamadou Sacko. Screenplay: Hafsia Herzi, based on a novel by Fatima Daas. Cinematography: Jérémie Attard. Production design: Dièné Béreté. Film editing: Géraldine Mangenot. Music: Amine Bouhafa. 

In The Little Sister Hafsia Herzi succeeds in taking an almost too familiar coming-of-age story and giving it freshness and universality. Seventeen-year-old Fatima (Nadia Melliiti) is athletic and likes to hang out with the boys more than the girls, but she has a boyfriend who wants to get married as soon as she finishes school. She's afraid of breaking with her traditional French-Algerian family if she acknowledges that she's sexually more attracted to women than to men. She explores lesbianism furtively by hiring a prostitute to educate her on what women do sexually with other women. She's also asthmatic, and during a treatment she strikes sparks with a nurse, Ji-Na (Park Ji-min), and they begin an affair. When she starts university, she finds a thriving gay community and joins it, a little warily, still fearing that she'll be exposed to her family. A breakup with Ji-Na sends her into a tailspin, and she seeks help from an imam at a mosque, but he gives her the conservative religious line about her sexuality that a rabbi might give a Jew, a priest might give a Catholic, or a minister might give a Protestant. In the end, she is left to find a way of being herself rather than what her family, her society, or her religion say she should be. The film gets much of its strength from its cast, some of whom are non-professional actors, and from an insightful screenplay based on the autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas. The Little Sister tells us nothing new, but like the best old stories, it's anchored deeply in the truth about humanity and sexuality.    

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)

Marcia McBroom, Dolly Read, and Cynthia Myers in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Cast: Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, John Lazar, Michael Blodgett, David Gurian, Edy Williams, Erica Gavin, Phyllis Davis, Harrison Page, Duncan McLeod, James Iglehart, Charles Napier. Screenplay: Roger Ebert, Russ Meyer. Cinematography: Fred J. Koenekamp. Art direction: Arthur Lonergan, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Dann Cahn, Dick Wormell. Music: Stu Phillips. 

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a spoof of racy melodramas like Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls, which made a lot of money for 20th Century Fox in 1967. And of the T&A-filled sexploitation movies in which Meyer specialized. And of the kind of movies that Roger Ebert used to give a thumbs-down to at the Chicago Sun-Times and on the TV show he shared with Gene Siskel. The movie was Ebert's one venture into screenwriting, and he and Meyer concoct a lot of perilous situations for the trio of girl rockers who are at the center of the movie. Kelly (Dolly Read), Casey (Cynthia Myers), and Pet (Marcia McBroom) hit LA with high hopes, and are immediately swept up into a whirlwind of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. There's a nefarious financial advisor (Duncan McLeod) who wants to cheat Kelly out of an inheritance, and a sleazy producer (John Lazar) who wants to make his fortune off of them. The group's manager (David Gurian), loves Kelly but gets involved with a porn star (Edy Williams). A fashion designer (Erica Gavin) seduces Cynthia into a lesbian affair. A young law student (Harrison Page) takes up with Pet but is edged out by a heavyweight champion boxer (James Iglehart). And there are some deaths and an abortion and a surprise gender reveal.... The movie is busy, noisy, and packed with outrageous incidents, but the one thing it isn't is funny. The dialogue and  jokes are leaden, like the "moral lessons" attached to each of its principal characters at the end of the film. Can it be that Ebert, earnest in all of his film criticism, didn't have much of a sense of humor? The movie is one of John Waters's favorites, as you might expect from that connoisseur of trash, but I wonder if it isn't because he secretly knows that he did this sort of thing a lot better.

Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994)

Elina Löwensohn in Nadja

Cast: Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan, Peter Fonda, Galaxy Craze, Suzy Amis, Jared Harris, Karl Geary, David Lynch. Screenplay: Michael Almereyda. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Kurt Ossenfort. Film editing: David Leonard. Music: Simon Fisher-Turner. 

The title character of Nadja, Michael Almereyda's languid, somewhat campy take on the Dracula story, is Dracula's daughter, prowling Manhattan at night accompanied by Renfield (Karl Geary). When she learns that her father has been killed, Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) claims the body by putting a spell on a morgue attendant (the film's producer, David Lynch) and has it cremated, then stops at a bar where she meets a woman named Lucy (Galaxy Craze), who just happens to be married to Jim (Martin Donovan), who is the nephew of the man who has killed Dracula, Van Helsing (Peter Fonda). Jim is occupied with bailing out Van Helsing, who has been arrested for the murder, so Nadja accompanies Lucy back to her apartment, where they have sex. Then Nadja goes to Brooklyn to take the ashes to her twin brother, Edgar (Jared Harris), who is under the care of a nurse, Cassandra (Suzy Amis). Eventually, this collection of the living and the undead will collide, of course, with more or less predictable results. It's all played with straight faces -- a skill that Löwensohn and Donovan mastered in films directed by Hal Hartley -- and a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek humor: At one point, for example, Edgar receives a telepathic message from Nadja that he calls a "psychic fax." The film blends crisp black-and-white images with grainy, blurry ones shot on a toy camcorder, though to no great effect.

Distant Journey (Alfréd Radok,1949)

Blanka Waleská in Distant Journey

Cast: Blanka Waleská, Otomar Krejca, Viktor Okásec, Zdenka Baldová, Eduard Kohout, J.O. Martin, Josef Chvalina, Anna Vanková, Jirí Plachy, Sasa Rasilov, Jirí Spirit, Rudolf Deyl, Zdenek Hodr. Screenplay: Erik Kolár, Mojmir Drvota, Alfréd Radok. Cinematography: Josef Strecha. Art direction: Jan Pacák, Frantisek Troster. Film editing: Jirina Lukesová. Music: Jirí Sternwald. 

Films about the Holocaust are so much a part of cinematic history now that it's surprising to see how well one of the earliest, Afréd Radok's Distant Journey, has maintained its power to disturb and move us. The film centers on a Jewish doctor, Hana Kaufmannová (Blanka Waleská), whose marriage to a gentile, Antonin Bures, initially spares her from being sent to the camps along with the rest of her family. Radok intercuts their stories with scenes of the Nazi rise to power, many of which come from Leni Riefensthal's infamous propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). It also includes scenes shot at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which was planned by the Nazis as an intermediate stop before internees were sent to the extermination camps. The word "transport" becomes a recurring motif in the film. By today's standards, Distant Journey is mild in its depiction of the horrors of the camps, but the psychological tension is unabated and the moral impact remains intense. The story is all too familiar: a family uprooted, separated, and sent to detention and possible death. How, we wonder, could people let such things happen? Wouldn't we be outraged if such injustice were taking place in the United States today? But no, that's all in the past, right? 

The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979)

Abel Ferrara in The Driller Killer

Cast: Abel Ferrara, Carolyn Marz, Baybi Day, Harry Schultz, Alan Wynroth, Maria Helhoski, James O'Hara, Richard Howorth, Louis Mascolo, Tommy Santora. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Film editing: Bonnie Constant, Michael Constant, Abel Ferrara, Orlando Gallini, Veronika Rocket. Music: Joe Delia. 

Abel Ferrara isn't much of an actor, but he doesn't have to be in The Driller Killer, his grindhouse classic. He's not surrounded by people who can act, or even need to: All they have to do is show how intolerable life is in 1970s New York City. Ferrara (under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine) plays Reno Miller, an artist who lives in a rundown apartment with two women, Carol (Carolyn Marz) and Pamela (Baybi Day), who are more interested in each other than they are in him. When a punk band called the Roosters moves in next door and starts practicing at all hours, Reno flips out. He begins prowling the streets with an electric drill, using it to off any poor derelict who manages to come into his sights. Apart from one gruesome scene in which Reno drills into the forehead of a victim, it's less bloody than the slasher films it inspired, which may be why the producers chose to reproduce that scene in a notorious poster that got the movie banned, especially in the United Kingdom. Ferrara went on to hire better actors and find better scripts to create more convincing urban nightmares in King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992), so The Driller Killer is probably of interest mainly to students of his work and devotees of the genre. The minimal budget for the movie is evident throughout, but the coherence of its director's vision of an urban hellscape helps it transcend schlock.

Brick and Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)

Taji Ahmadi and Zackaria Hashemi in Brick and Mirror

Cast: Zackaria Hashemi, Taji Ahmadi, Jamshid Mashayekhi, Mehri Mehrnia, Forugh Farrokhzad, Parviz Fanizadeh, Munuchehr Farid, Akbar Meshkin, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Ebrahim Golestan  (voice). Screenplay: Ebrahim Golestan. Cinematography: Amir Karari, Soleiman Minasian. Film editing: Ebrahim Golestan. 

Taxicabs are irresistible tools for filmmakers, providing intimacy and mobility, both the close contact of driver and passenger and exploration of the variety of the city. The classic of the taxicab drama is, of course, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), but it has also inspired filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, whose Night on Earth (1991) consists of minidramas set in taxis in five different cities. In Ebrahim Golestan's Brick and Mirror the taxi both provokes the drama and allows for a satiric exploration of life in the city of Tehran as it was before the Islamic revolution. One night, cabbie Hashem (Zackaria Hashemi) picks up a fare, a woman in a black chador, and drives her to a remote site where construction has been abandoned. After she leaves, he hears a noise in the back seat: the cry of a baby. He searches for the woman but finds only a few derelicts at the site who claim not to know of any such woman. At this point, most of us would go straight to the police or the nearest hospital, but this is not a film in which people do the expected things. Instead, he takes the baby with him to a cafe: He's late turning over the keys to the cab to the next driver. He seeks advice from some friends there, but they respond only with ponderous philosophizing and caveats about going to the authorities. When he finally goes to the police, he is thrust into a Kafkaesque scene of bureaucratic indifference. He meets with his girlfriend, Taji (Taji Ahmadi), who helps him feed and change the infant, sleeps with him, and sees the opportunity to marry Hashem and start a family. Hashem is more worried about what the neighbors will think about her spending the night with him, and in the morning he takes the baby to an orphanage, which is unwilling to take in an undocumented foundling and sends him to the courthouse to provide the documentation he will need. As expected, he encounters still more bureaucracy. Brick and Mirror begins as film noir, shifts into urban parable, and ends poignantly and painfully. In short, it's an astonishing and exasperating work that should be more widely known and celebrated. 

The Story of a Three Day Pass (Melvin Van Peebles, 1967)

Harry Baird and Nicole Berger in The Story of a Three Day Pass

Cast: Harry Baird, Nicole Berger, Hal Brav, Tria French, Pierre Doris, Christian Marin. Screenplay: Melvin Van Peebles, based on his novel. Cinematography: Michel Kelber. Film editing: Liliane Korb. Music: Melvin Van Peebles, Mickey Baker. 

The Story of a Three Day Pass is a tale of expatriation made by an expatriate, Melvin Van Peebles. Turner (Harry Baird), a Black American soldier stationed in France, is granted a three day pass by his captain (Hal Brav), which he plans to spend in Paris. There he meets Miriam (Nicole Berger), a young French woman, and goes with her to the coastal town of Étretat. In the midst of a romantic weekend, in which they declare their love for each other, they are spotted by a trio of his fellow servicemen. Turner fears the worst: They will tell the captain that he was seen there with a white woman, and he will suffer for it. The film that Van Peebles develops from this situation is highly influenced by French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard, using surprise cuts and unusual camera angles -- in one scene, for example, when the couple enters the hotel room they've rented, they're seen from overhead, like participants in an experiment. Van Peebles emphasizes Turner's isolation and loneliness, as in a scene when he goes to a sidewalk café and sees three Black men at another table. Although they acknowledge one another with a wave, they don't make contact, suggesting that African expatriates in France have little in common with an American expatriate. Van Peebles maintains a steady tension born of Turner's displacement throughout the film, sometimes with a sly humor. When Turner and Miriam have sex, we enter their fantasies: He imagines himself as a prince arriving at a castle; she sees herself as the captive of African tribesmen. A low-key, bittersweet film, The Story of a Three Day Pass touches and amuses while also seething with a repressed anger.