Apostasy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Ryo Ikebe in Apostasy

Segawa: Ryo Ikebe
Oshiho: Yoko Katsuragi
Tatsutaro Inoko: Osamu Takizawa
Ginnosuke Tuchiya: Jukichi Uno
Takayanagi: Eitaro Ozawa
Inoko's Wife: Sachiko Murase
Segawa's Father: Kenji Susukida
Keinosuke Kazama: Ichiro Sugai
Bunpei Katsuno: Akira Yamauchi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Based on a novel by Toson Shimazaki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Isamu Motoki
Film editing: Hisashi Sagara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's film Apostasy is generally acknowledged to be a bad mistranslation of the original, Hakai, which has a variety of meanings, including "destruction." The film is not about someone abandoning his religion, which is what the English "apostasy" means, but instead it's about the discrimination against Japan's feudal pariah class, the burakumin, literally, "people who live in villages." Which is again misleading if we think of villages as small communities of farmers, artisans, and merchants, all of whom had acceptable roles in feudal society. The burakumin were considered untouchable because their work associated them with death: butchers, tanners, undertakers, executioners, and so on, who, unable to associate with the "respectable" classes, formed communities and villages of their own. The taint of their work extended to their children's children -- even to those who managed to improve themselves with education and work in other fields, like the protagonist of Kinoshita's film, Segawa, who loses his job as a schoolteacher because he has hidden the fact that he's a "villager," as the English subtitles somewhat misleadingly call him. His secret is exposed when he goes home to his village, remote in the mountains near Nagano, for his father's death. The action of the film takes place in 1901, well after American influence had caused the Japanese government to lift the legal restrictions placed on the burakumin, though without erasing the deep-seated prejudice against them. But Kinoshita has a more contemporary purpose for his film: After World War II, Japan was adopting a new, and of course again heavily American-influenced, constitution, guaranteeing civil rights to all Japanese citizens. So Apostasy is a heavily didactic film about tolerance -- not unlike some of the preachier American films that promoted better race relations in the aftermath of the war. Its bigots are despicable and its heroes -- including a descendant of the burakumin who has become a lawyer and a crusader for equality -- are noble. There's a love threatened by prejudice that triumphs, and a tear-filled ending in which the children Segawa has taught come out to wave goodbye as he departs the town that scorned him. In short, it's Kinoshita at his most sentimental.

Le Deuxième Souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966)

Lino Ventura in Le Deuxième Souffle

Gustave "Gu" Minda: Lino Ventura
Commissioner Blot: Paul Meurisse 
Paul Ricci: Raymond Pellegrin
Manouche : Christine Fabréga 
Jo Ricci: Marcel Bozzuffi 
Inspector Fardiano: Paul Frankeur 
Antoine Ripa: Denis Manuel 
Alban: Michel Constantin 
Orloff: Pierre Zimmer 
Pascal: Pierre Grasset 

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: José Giovanni, Jean-Pierre Melville 
Based on a novel by José Giovanni
Cinematography: Marcel Combes 
Production design: Jean-Jacques Fabre 
Film editing: Monique Bonnot, Michele Boëhm 
Music: Bernard Gérard

I have to admit that I didn't pay a lot of attention to the plot of Jean-Pierre Melville's  Le Deuxième Souffle, other than to sort out the major relationships among the characters. And I think I'm right about that, just as I think it's foolish to try to unravel the plot of, say, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). Because the point is not what story Melville (or Hawks) is telling us, but how he's telling it. It's a film full of ironic twists, starting with the jailbreak scene that frees our protagonist, Gu. He and one of his accomplices make a leap from a roof to a facing wall and land just short enough to find themselves clinging to that wall. But the third accomplice leaps well across the gap. We think he's the one who made it to the other roof with room to spare, except that there's no "other roof" -- it's a sheer wall, as we discover when Gu and the other man rappel down the far side and find the third man fallen to his death. And so the film goes, with Melville undermining our expectations at every turn. When Commissioner Blot arrives at a crime scene where a man has been murdered, we expect the standard interrogation of witnesses. Instead, Blot, jaded by too many such crime scenes, tells each of the witnesses what lies they are about to tell him and lets them go. Even the big set piece, the elaborately planned platinum heist, undermines our expectations because nothing goes especially wrong. There is one innocent guy who arrives on the scene, but he's neatly dealt with. Usually, in big thriller heists, there's a major screwup that causes the thieves to come up with a Plan B, but not here. The big screwups come when the crooks have to deal with sharing the loot. There's also a witty setup for the confrontation of one of the conspirators with several others, in which we see him case the joint and plant a gun on top of an armoire. Then we see another conspirator find and remove the gun. We expect the guy who planted the gun to get shot when he goes for the hidden gun, but it turns out that he's anticipated this move and has the element of surprise on his side after all. So it goes throughout Melville's film, which is sometimes seen as a story of "destiny, death, and bleak existential choice," full of "elemental concerns."  It may well be that, but it's also a kind of very dark comedy. There are also scenes that I cherish for their slight absurdity. After being badly beaten by the cops under the direction of Inspector Fardiano, Gu is confined to a hospital bed under guard. When a pretty nurse comes in to check on Gu, the guard follows her out into the hallway, giving Gu a chance to rip out his IV and get the jump on the distracted guard. Standard thriller stuff, but I was amused to notice that the nurse was wearing high heels. I doubt if French hospital nurses have ever made their rounds in Louboutins, so it's possible to think of this as a kind of gaffe on Melville's part, but I rather suspect that he wanted the nurse to look as sexy as possible and couldn't care less about verisimilitude. In short, he loved movies more than he loved realism. For all its existential subtext, Le Deuxième Souffle is a movie movie. 

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017)

Jacob Batalon and Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Homecoming

Peter Parker / Spider-Man: Tom Holland
Adrian Toomes / Vulture: Michael Keaton
Tony Stark / Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr.
May Parker: Marisa Tomei
Happy Hogan: Jon Favreau
Ned: Jacob Batalon
Liz: Laura Harrier
Michelle: Zendaya
Pepper Potts: Gwyneth Paltrow
Aaron Davis: Donald Glover
Flash: Tony Revolori
Herman Schultz / Shocker #2: Bokeem Woodbine
Anne Marie Hoag: Tyne Daly
Abe: Abraham Attah
Coach Wilson: Hannibal Buress
Principal Morita: Kenneth Choi
Mr. Harrington: Martin Starr
Mrs. Toomes: Garcelle Beauvais
Mac Gargan: Michael Mando
Jackson Brice / Shocker #1: Logan Marshall-Green
Karen, the Suit Lady (voice): Jennifer Connelly

Director: Jon Watts
Screenplay: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers
Cinematography: Salvatore Totino
Production design: Oliver Scholl
Film editing: Debbie Berman, Dan Lebental
Music: Michael Giacchino

Although he looks closer to 21 (his real age) than to 15 (his character's age), Tom Holland makes Peter Parker into a charmingly geeky and impulsive adolescent in Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Homecoming, the latest iteration of the comic book hero, and I think the best. It benefits greatly from a good and refreshingly multiethnic cast, and most of all from Michael Keaton's participation as Adrian Toomes, whose work clearing up the rubble from the Battle of New York, which we saw in The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), allows him to salvage some alien technology and turn himself into a supervillain called Vulture. So far, this is standard superhero movie stuff. What makes it fresh is that Toomes is also the father of Liz, a girl on whom Peter has a crush, leading to the best scene in the movie: the moment that Toomes realizes that the boy who is taking his daughter to the homecoming dance is actually Spider-Man, with whom Vulture has already tangled. It elevates the familiar teen-movie awkwardness of meeting a girlfriend's father into something deliciously awful. Both Keaton and Holland make this mutual recognition scene a small classic, more memorable than the big chopped-up, noisy, CGI-flattened action sequences. (Although even there, I admired the wit of the scene in which Spider-Man tries to use his webbing to glue the halves of a bifurcated Staten Island Ferry back together.) The set-up for the film is that Peter, after being mentored by Tony Stark in the conflict at the center of Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2016), has his head full of glory and plans to join the Avengers. But Stark wants him to grow up, and insists that he stay in school -- a STEM-focused high school in Queens for budding geniuses. He can become "the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in his down time, handling bicycle thieves and purse-snatchers, but nothing more than that. He does have a fancy new suit, but its powers are limited by a "training-wheels protocol." Naturally, Peter and his best friend, Ned, who discovers Peter's secret identity by accident, manage to hack into the suit's wiring and disable the protocol, launching the naïvely ambitious superhero into a world of trouble. I enjoyed Spider-Man: Homecoming more than the usual comic-book movie because its hero's dilemmas are familiar real-world ones, unlike those of gods like Thor and Wonder Woman, visiting aliens like Superman, rich dilettantes like Iron Man and Batman, or time-shifted science projects like Captain America.

Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926)

Estelle Taylor and John Barrymore in Don Juan

Don Jose de Marana/Don Juan de Marana: John Barrymore
Adriana della Varnese: Mary Astor
Lucrezia Borgia: Estelle Taylor
Cesare Borgia: Warner Oland
Count Giano Donati: Montagu Love
Pedrillo: Willard Louis
Mai: Myrna Loy
Marchesia Rinaldo: Hedda Hopper
Marchese Rinaldo: Nigel De Brulier
Donna Isobel: Jane Winton
Leandro: John Roche
Neri: Gustav von Seyffertitz

Director: Alan Crosland
Screenplay: Bess Meredyth; Titles: Walter Anthony, Maude Fulton
Cinematography: Byron Haskin
Art direction: Ben Carré
Film editing: Harold McCord
Music: William Axt, David Mendoza

Alan Crosland's silly action movie Don Juan has two things in its favor. One of them is historical: It was the first film with a synchronized sound track, though it's all music and no dialogue, which would have to wait a year for Crosland's The Jazz Singer. The score is played by no less than the New York Philharmonic. The other is the cast, starting with John Barrymore, first hamming it up in a death scene as Don Juan's father, and then doing some Douglas Fairbanks-style leaping about and sword-fighting as the great seducer. But the female cast is even more interesting, with Mary Astor teamed again with her Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924) co-star and former lover Barrymore, as well as some actresses who went on to different sorts of fame. Before she became Hollywood's favorite wife and/or mother, Myrna Loy was often cast as a vamp or a sinister type; here she slinks around as Lucrezia Borgia's lady-in-waiting, spying and tattling and stealing scenes from Estelle Taylor's Lucrezia. And before she became one of Hollywood's two most feared purveyors of gossip -- the other being Louella Parsons -- Hedda Hopper had a long career as a supporting actress; here she's the Marchesia Rinaldo, who kills herself when her husband discovers her affair with Don Juan. As for the rest of the movie, it's predictably junky, "explaining" Don Juan's treatment of women as a product of witnessing as a child his father being murdered by a cast-off lover. This psychological trauma is, I guess, supposed to make us believe that Juan has been cured of his hypersexuality by the love of a pure woman, Astor's Adriana della Varnese, with whom he literally rides off into the sunset at the end of the film.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Barbara O'Neil and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas

Stella Dallas: Barbara Stanwyck
Stephen Dallas: John Boles
Laurel Dallas: Anne Shirley
Helen Morrison: Barbara O'Neil
Ed Munn: Alan Hale
Mrs. Martin: Marjorie Main
Charlie Martin: George Walcott
Miss Phillibrown: Ann Shoemaker
Richard Grosvenor: Tim Holt

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty and its dramatization by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Gertrude Purcell
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Sherman Todd
Costume design: Omar Kiam
Music: Alfred Newman

I'm bothered by an inconsistency in the title character of King Vidor's Stella Dallas. When Stella's estranged husband, Stephen, shows up unexpectedly at Christmastime bearing gifts for her and their daughter, Laurel, Stella makes a determined effort to look "respectable": She rummages through her closet, rejecting all the flowery, overtrimmed dresses she usually favors, and chooses a black dress, removing most of its trimmings, and even goes so far as to wipe off the lipstick she has just applied. But later, when she takes Laurel to a snooty resort, she's a blowsy horror again, swaggering vulgarly through the amused upperclass crowd -- and thereby precipitating the final separation between her and Laurel. What happened to the self-aware Stella who knew how to present herself as a suitable mate for Stephen Dallas? But the thing about this inconsistency, and other little melodramatic clichés that infest the film, is that it doesn't matter: Stella Dallas triumphs because Barbara Stanwyck believes in her and because King Vidor knows how to manipulate our responses to the characters. Stella's appearance at the resort is played as simultaneously comic -- who doesn't laugh at the way she's dressed, swanning around with a white fox fur? -- and tragic -- Stella's insistence on being herself is her fatal flaw. Similarly, when Ed Munn shows up drunk, wagging around a large turkey he has brought for Stella and Laurel's Christmas and stuffing it head, feet, and all into the oven, the scene is hilarious -- Alan Hale is wonderful here -- until it isn't, until we realize the damage it is going to do to Stella and her daughter. And the celebrated final scene, of Stella watching Laurel's wedding through the window, is beautifully performed by Stanwyck, chewing on her handkerchief, and magisterially staged by Vidor. Tears are flowing in the audience as Stella strides across the street, but she's beaming, having accomplished her chief goal: to see Laurel happy. Critiques of the movie's treatment of maternal self-sacrifice, or of marriage as the consummation of a woman's happiness, are many and cogent. But let's just take a moment to reflect on the skill with which these ideas and attitudes, retrograde as we may find them, have been presented on film.

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

Tommy: Fionn Whitehead
Gibson: Aneurin Barnard
George: Barry Keoghan
Mr. Dawson: Mark Rylance
Peter: Tom Glynn-Carney
Farrier: Tom Hardy
Collins: Jack Lowden
Commander Bolton: Kenneth Branagh
Col. Winant: James D'Arcy
Shivering Soldier: Cillian Murphy
Alex: Harry Styles
Dutch Seaman: Jochum ten Haaf

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Production design: Nathan Crowley
Film editing: Lee Smith
Music: Hans Zimmer

I've said it before: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? I'm sure Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was something to see in an IMAX theater, but truth to tell, I'm just as happy to have watched it in HD on my 32-inch Samsung. I don't mind losing the giddy spectacle of riding the waves or flying in pursuit of German fighter planes, so long as there's real artistry in the storytelling, the acting, and the production. I've liked Nolan's work with some reservations since I first encountered it in Memento (2000). I admired his ability to revivify the Batman story, but found the films in his trilogy a little wearying. I was kind of bowled over by the audacity of the concepts and their execution in Inception (2010), but Interstellar (2014) made me fear the worst: that he was so infatuated with cutting-edge film technology and with far-out science fiction speculations that he might never come back down to Earth. So Dunkirk was a relief to me: This is traditional war-movie filmmaking with a splendid contemporary spin, mostly in the way the story is told through cuts back and forth in time. This so-called "non-linear" narrative technique bothered some traditionalists, but I found it both illuminated the characters and suggested some of the tension and chaos of the actual Dunkirk evacuation. Best of all, Nolan forgoes CGI for the most part, using actual ships and planes or convincing models of them, giving the action a much-needed solidity. He also doesn't yield to the temptation to lard his film with star cameos, letting mostly unknown young actors carry the burden of the story. The stars who do appear -- Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy -- behave themselves, blending into the cast nicely. Hardy, for example, is capable of scene-stealing physicality, but he spends most of the film acting with only his eyes, the rest of his face covered by his pilot's breathing apparatus. (When he's liberated from that restriction at the end, I almost feared for the Germans who captured him.) Every genre movie has its clichés, of course, but a good writer and director -- Nolan is both -- knows how to work them, how to avoid stumbling over them and instead give them just enough weight to satisfy our expectations, as he does in the scene in which the returning soldiers, fearful that they'll be cursed and spat upon for losing the battle, are greeted at the train station with people cheering and handing them bottles of beer. He also handles the celebrated speech by Winston Churchill with finesse, never introducing Churchill as an on-screen character and having the speech itself read by the rescued men, as it should be. It's as stirring a moment as one could wish.

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)

Pîtâ in Funeral Parade of Roses

Eddie: Pîtâ
Leda: Osamu Ogasawara
Gonda: Yoshio Tsuchiya
Guevara: Toyosaburo Uchiyama
Tony: Don Madrid
Eddie's Mother: Emiko Azuma
Jimi: Yoshimi Jo
Juju: Koichi Nakamura
Greco: Flamenco Umeji
Mari: Saako Oota
Nora: Taro Manji
Philosopher: Mikio Shibayama
Sabu: Wataru Hikonagi
Piro: Fuchisumi Gomi
Okei: Chieko Kobayashi
Radon: Yo Sato
Humpback: Keiichi Takanaga

Director: Toshio Matsumoto
Screenplay: Toshio Matsumoto
Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki
Art direction: Setsu Asakura
Film editing: Toshie Iwasa
Music: Joji Yuasa

Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses both participates in and parodies the late-1960s avant-garde "underground" film movement, with its reliance on eccentric cuts and random inserts. There's a scene in which the filmmakers are shooting a badly tuned television set, and keep fiddling with the set to get the kind of distorted image they want. And at one point someone quotes the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas -- and then gets his name wrong, calling him "Menas Jokas." Matsumoto's film keeps the viewer off-balance at all times, moving in and out of what we take to be "reality" to expose that it's all moviemaking. There is, for example, a scene in which the cross-dressing protagonist, Eddie, and a black man, Tony, seem to be having sex, with lots of pornographic gasping and facial contortions. But then the camera angle shifts and we see that there's a camera crew surrounding the bed where Tony is propped up by himself on the headboard while the camera is focused on the face of Eddie, simulating ecstasy. Even the main story of the film gets its distancing when we cut to the actor who plays Eddie, Pîtâ (or Peter, as the English language screen credits have it), being interviewed about the role he's playing. It's much like his own life, he says, except for the incest part. At this point in the film, we don't know about the incest part, which precipitates the crisis in Eddie's life. Suffice it to say that Matsumoto based a large part of the film on Oedipus Rex. The central story deals with the rivalry between Eddie and Leda, the "Madame" of a club that caters to salarymen who want to sleep with gei boi, for the affections of Gonda, a man who turns out to have more significance in Eddie's life than is at first apparent. There are some longueurs in Matsumoto's film, mostly having to do with the avant-garde sequences but also with a too-long drugged-out orgy scene. (Other people's orgies are invariably boring.) But there are some genuine shocks and some real emotion in the film, and the performance by Pîtâ -- best known as the androgynous Kyoami, the analogue to the Fool in Ran (1985), Akira Kurosawa's reworking of King Lear -- is outstanding.