Romería (Carla Simón, 2025)

Llúcia Garcia in Romería

Cast: Llúcia Garcia, Mitch Martín, Tristán Ulloa, Celine Tyll, León Romagosa, Hans Romagosa, Marina Troncoso, José Ángel Egido, Miryam Gallego, Sara Casonovas. Screenplay: Carla Simón. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. Art direction: Mónica Bernuy. Film editing: Sergio Jiménez, Ana Pfaff. Music: Ernest Pipó. 

Who are you if you don't know where you came from? That's the question that haunts Marina (Llúcia Garcia) in two ways: technically, because she needs documentation that establishes her parentage, and emotionally, because both of her parents are now dead and what little she knows about her father came from her mother, who raised her. She needs her grandparents, whom she has never known, to certify that he was her father, a fact that she discovers went unrecorded on his death certificate. So she visits his birthplace in Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain, and is plunged into a vibrant, fractious family with some secrets they'd rather remain unknown. In Romería, Carla Simón follows Marina's pilgrimage into the past, first as a kind of detective story and then, with a beautifully accomplished segue, as she imagines the life of her mother and father before she was born. It's not a sentimental film, however. Marina's story is haunted by family pride and greed, by drug trafficking, drug use, and AIDS. Simón defily handles these sometimes conflicting elements, skillfully avoiding melodrama.  

Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987)

Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui in Rouge

Cast: Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alex Man, Emily Chu, Irene Wan, Tam Sin-Hung, Chu Shui-Tong. Screenplay: Lee Pik-Wah, Chiu Kang-Chien, based on a novel by Lee. Cinematography: Bill Wong. Production design: Pan Lai, Horace Ma. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Lai Siu-Tin.

Stanley Kwan's Rouge is a bittersweet love story about a ghost in search of the man who joined her in a suicide pact half a century earlier. Fleur (Anita Mui) and Chan (Leslie Cheung) overdosed on opium after Chan's well-to-do parents refused his request to marry Fleur, who worked in a Hong Kong brothel. Failing to find him in the afterlife, Fleur enters the world of the living, appearing one day in a newspaper office, wanting to place an ad in hope that it will somehow get his attention. Yuen (Alex Man), who takes her request, is initially frightened to discover that she's a ghost, but her plight intrigues him. He enlists his girlfriend, Chor (Emily Chu), in an attempt to reunite Fleur with Chan. They succeed, but not without some surprise narrative twists. Kwan maintains a nice variation of tone in the film, from languorous to comic, with the substantial help of the quartet of actors.    

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

Micky Dolenz in Head

Cast: Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, Timothy Carey, Logan Ramsey, Abraham Sofaer, Vito Scotti, Charles Macaulay, T.C. Jones. Screenplay: Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson. Cinematography: Michael Hugo. Art direction: Sydney J. Litwack. Film editing: Michael Pozen, Monte Hellman. Incidental music: Ken Thorne. 

Bob Rafelson's Head feels like an attempt at an apology for creating the Monkees, the pop rock quartet that emerged full grown from the heads of Rafelson and fellow producer Bert Schneider in the mid-1960s as the stars of a musical sitcom. They were meant partly to spoof groups like the Animals, the Byrds, and above all, the Beatles. After they became commercially successful not only on TV but also on records, it became inevitable that they would make a movie. So, fueled by LSD and some other drugs, Rafelson sat down with his friend Jack Nicholson to come up with a screenplay. Watching it today, it's hard to believe that any of Head was ever set down on anything so tangible as paper. Much of it consists of what would become music videos a decade later, linked by something that never really qualifies as a story, but instead as a linked series of crises and outrageous situations. Cinematic genres like war movies, Westerns, and detective stories get lampooned. Camera tricks abound. Guest stars and celebrities like Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, Sonny Liston, Carol Doda, Frank Zappa, and even Rafelson and Nicholson pop up almost randomly, and newsreel clips hint that the movie has an intended relevance to what's going on in the real world, like the Vietnam war. But although television, the medium that gave birth to the Monkees, seems to be the movie's primary target, Head never coalesces into anything that can comfortably be called satire. It was a box office failure, partly because Rafelson misguidedly took charge of promoting it, and it exists today because of a cult following. But it's really not much more than an artifact of an era.  

Baxter, Vera Baxter (Marguerite Duras, 1977)

Claudine Gabay and Delphine Seyrig in Baxter, Vera Baxter

Cast : Delphine Seyrig, Claudine Gabay, Gérard Depardieu, Noëlle Châtelet, Claude Aufaure, François Périer ( voice ). Screenplay : Marguerite Duras. Cinematography: Sacha Vierny. Film editing : Dominique Auvray, Caroline Camus, Roselyne Petit. Music : Carlos D'Alessio. 

Static in the extreme, Marguerite Duras's Baxter, Vera Baxter gets what little energy it has from the music of Carlos D'Alessio, a kind of nagging on-again, off-again presence throughout the film that is explained as coming from a nearby party, although Duras clearly doesn't intend us to take the explanation seriously. Otherwise, it's a movie about people talking about the title character (Claudine Gabay) and her husband, Jean (François Périer's voice), and a man named Michel Cayre (Gérard Depardieu in what amounts to a cameo). Most of this talk is generated by a woman who remains anonymous (Delphine Seyrig), who hears the name Vera Baxter in a hotel bar and decides to know more. It takes her about 90 minutes to explore the marriage of Vera and Jean and its relationship to Michel, and if you're like me, you may be wondering why we should care. This is cinema as contemplative object, which goes against the very nature of the medium. 

Days and Nights in the Forest (Satyajit Ray, 1970)

Subhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja, Soumitra Chatterjee and Rabi Ghosh in Days and Nights in the Forest

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Subhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja, Rabi Ghosh, Pahari Sanyal, Sharmila Tagore, Kaberi Bose, Simi Garewal, Aparna Sen. Screenplay: Satyajit Ray, based on a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay. Cinematography: Soumendu Roy. Production design: Bransi Chandragupta. Film editing: Dulal Dutta. Music: Satyajit Ray. 

Four men from the city take off for the country in search of adventure and encounter the unexpected. Satyajit Ray's Days and Night in the Forest has a setup similar to Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972). In both films, the city guys are condescending to the rurals with unexpected consequences. But Ray's amusing, low-key story is focused on character more than action. Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), Hari (Samit Bhanja), and Shekhar (Rabi Bhosh) leave Kolkata for the district of Palamu in eastern India, their heads full of tales about beautiful tribal women and peaceful forests. They're all bachelors, though Hari has just had a bruising breakup with his girlfriend. They hire a local boy to guide them to a vacation home, where they bribe the caretaker to let them stay there although they don't have a reservation. After symbolically severing their ties to civilization by burning a newspaper from back home, they go out to a village to get drunk and flirt with women, one of whom, Duli (Simi Garewal), hits it off with Hari. The next day, they discover that one of their neighbors is the owner of a country home who is currently being visited by his daughter, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (Kaberi Bose). Suddenly their decision to go native takes a turn in another direction, when Ashim is attracted to Aparna and Sanjoy to Jaya. Only Shekhar is left to his own devices. With his usual insight into human nature, Ray beautifully produces a satire on urban attitudes and a comedy of manners that transcends both genres.

Clean, Shaven (Lodge Kerrigan, 1993)

Peter Greene in Clean, Shaven

Cast: Peter Greene, Megan Owen, Jennifer McDonald, Jack McDonald, Molly Casteloe, Jill Chamberlain, Alice Levitt, Roget Jolly, J. Dixon Byrne, Eliot Rockett, Lee Kayman, Rob Benevides, June Kelly. Screenplay: Lodge Kerrigan. Cinematography: Teodoro Maniaci. Production design: Tania Ferrier. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Hahn Rowe. 

Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven is a sensitive, accomplished portrait of a schizophrenic somewhat undermined by the imposition of a detective story on the material. Peter Greene hauntingly plays a deinstitutionalized mental patient, Peter Winter, searching for the daughter, Nicole (Jennifer McDonald), who was put up for adoption after he was hospitalized. When a girl Nicole's age is found bludgeoned to death, a detective (Jack McDonald) in charge of the case begins to suspect that Peter may have been her killer. Eventually the two men come together, but the film never resolves the question of whether Peter actually killed the little girl. This inconclusiveness, and the absence of some of Peter's backstory, including his experiences while institutionalized and his ill-fated marriage, leaves us with more questions than the film needs to be fully satisfactory. Its real strength lies in the ambiance that Kerrigan creates around Peter, a haunting mixture of radio static and voices, along with natural sounds like wind and bird calls, amplified to suggest his perpetual edginess and lack of balance. 

Detention (John Hsu, 2019)

Gingle Wang in Detention

Cast: Gingle Wang, Fu Meng-po, Tseng Ching-hua, Cecilia Choi, Hung Chang Chu, Hsia Chang-ting, Jessie Chang, Moon Lee. Screenplay: John Hsu, Lyra Fu, Chien Shih-keng. Cinematography: Chou Yi-hsien. Production design: Wang Chih-cheng. Film editing: Shih Meng-ju. Music: Luming Lu. 

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," said Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. It's also the nightmare that haunts Wei Chung-ting (Tseng Ching-hua) in John Hsu's debut feature Detention, an atmospheric horror film set the period of political and ideological repression known as the White Terror that persisted in Taiwan for more than 20 years. Wei is one of its victims, whose story is told in flashbacks to 1962, when he was a high school student. Wei and his classmates met secretly with some dissident teachers to read and discuss forbidden books, and when the authorities discovered this, the students and their teachers were arrested and tortured to elicit information about other nonconformists. The story largely centers on Fang Ray-shin (Gingle Wang), who was not a member of the group, but had a crush on an art teacher, Chang Ming-hui (Fu Meng-po), who was a participant. Fang's actions led to the betrayal of the group. The film takes place partly in the real world of the past but also in a dream world, part Fang's and part Wei's, filled with monsters and ghosts -- in short, the fantastic equivalents to the political repression. It's not an easy film to follow because of the temporal switchbacks and the lack of clear delineation between the actual and the imagined, but it succeeds at evoking a pervasive malaise and paranoia.  

Man Bites Dog (Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992)

Benoît Poelvoorde in Man Bites Dog

Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde, Valérie Parent, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Jean-Marc Chenut, Alain Oppezzi, Vincent Tavier, Jacqueline Poelvoorde-Pappaert, Nelly Pappaert, Hector Pappaert, Jenny Drye, Malou Madou. Screenplay: Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, Vincent Tavier. Cinematography: André Bonzel. Film editing: Rémy Belvaux, Eric Dardil. Music: Jean-Marc Chenut, Laurence Dufrene, Philippe Malempré. 

Man Bites Dog dares you to laugh and then punishes you for it. Trigger warnings are inadequate for this mockumentary about a serial killer called Ben, played with sleazy charm by Benoît Poelvoorde, who also co-wrote and -directed, and whose own family members were reportedly tricked into playing the roles of his mother and grandparents. His fellow writer-directors play the reporter (Rémy Belvaux) and cameraman (André Bonzel) who initially plan to document Ben's murder spree and eventually get caught up into it as participants. Their documentary in fact becomes financed by the cash Ben gleans from his murders, including what's found under the mattress of an old woman he literally scares to death. Other murders are not so bloodless as that one, and the film reaches its horrifying climax with the murder of a small boy during a home invasion and a rape and murder in which the victim is disemboweled. The targets of the film as satire are many, including the compromised nature of documentary film itself, as well as the audience's own prurience. Much censored, much censured, and much praised, it pushes the limits of how scabrous a film can be and still retain an audience. You have been advised. 

The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Meg Ryan and Val Kilmer in The Doors

Cast: Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon, Kathleen Quinlan, Michael Wincott, Michael Madsen, Josh Evans, Dennis Burkley, Billy Idol, Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman. Screenplay: Randall Jahnson, Oliver Stone. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: David Brenner, Joe Hutshing. 

Oliver Stone's hyperactive The Doors does exactly what you might expect of a biopic of one of rock's live fast, die young legends. It never gives us a moment to think about what Jim Morrison might really have been like when he wasn't performing. It treats him as what he has become: an emblem of the mad era when the '60s were becoming the '70s, when to be young was to be performative. Stone montages the political and social background with clips of riots and assassinations, but despite a committed and compelling performance by Val Kilmer, Morrison ends up as a figure flailing in a sea of clichés. There's even a mystical shaman figure to represent the pseudo-spiritual side of Morrison's experimentation with psychoactive drugs. If you want music, there's plenty of it. If you want insight into the life and times of Jim Morrison, go elsewhere.

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.