Highway to Hell (Ate de Jong, 1991)

Patrick Bergin, Kristy Swanson, and Chad Lowe in Highway to Hell

Cast: Chad Lowe, Patrick Bergin, Kristy Swanson, Adam Storke, Pamela Gidley, Jarrett Lennon, C.J. Graham, Richard Farnsworth, Lita Ford, Gilbert Gottfried, Anne Meara, Amy Stiller, Ben Stiller, Jerry Stiller. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland. Cinematography: Robin Vidgeon. Production design: Philip Dean Foreman. Film editing: Todd C. Ramsay, Randy D. Thornton. Music: Hidden Faces. 

If only the performances and the jokes in Ate de Jong's Highway to Hell were as good as the sets, the costumes, the makeup, and the special effects. It's a riff on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth: A young couple, Rachel (Kristy Swanson) and Charlie (Chad Lowe), are on their way to Vegas to get married when Rachel is abducted by a demon in the guise of a highway patrolman (C.J. Graham). Charlie pursues them into hell, which looks very much like the Arizona desert, and eventually rescues her from the ruler of the underworld (Patrick Bergin). There's a nice turn by Richard Farnsworth as the old codger who warns them of the peril they face taking a back road to Vegas and, after the abduction happens, equips Charlie for his pursuit. Brian Helgeland's screenplay is imaginative, though it crams in a few too many inessential elements, including a cute dog and a cute kid. But Lowe and Swanson don't have the wit and charisma needed to make the audience care about whether the characters they play will survive. Some of the gags feel like they came from story conference ideas that were funny at the time but just prove distracting in execution. For example, the couple are traveling in a Ford Pinto that had been a pizza delivery car, to judge from the sign on top. It's amusing, but pointless, which might be said of the entire film.  

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)

Shotaro Hanayagi and Kakuko Mori in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum

Cast: Shotaro Hanayagi, Kakuko Mori, Kokichi Takada, Gonjuro Kawarzaki II, Tokusaburo Arashi VI, Hideo Nakagawa, Yoko Umemura, Ryotaro Kawanami, Yoshiaki Hanyagi, Kinnosuke Takamatsu, Nobuko Fushimi, Benkei Shiganoya. Screenplay: Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Yoshikata Yoda, based on a story by Shofu Muramatsu. Cinematography: Yozo Fuji, Minoru Miki. Production design: Hiroshi Mizutani. Film editing: Koshi Kawahigashi. Music: Shiro Fukai. 

Kenji Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum provides a glimpse into the world of the kabuki theater through the life of an aspiring actor, Kikusone (Shotaro Hanayagi) and his companion Otoku (Kakuko Mori). When the two fall in love, Otoku, who was nurse to Kiku's much younger brother, is expelled from the household headed by his father, a famous actor. Kiku breaks with the family and sets out to prove himself on his own. The problem is, he's not a very good actor, and only when he's reunited with Otoku, who is the only person who will give him helpful advice at getting better, does he begin to make it in the profession. But not after much suffering, during which Otoku develops consumption. It's a familiar tale, reminiscent of the story of Marguerite Gautier (or Violetta Valéry, if you know Verdi's La Traviata) in adaptations of The Lady of the Camellias by Dumas fils. Mizoguchi tells it well with his characteristic long takes and avoidance of close-ups, and it's distinguished by his usual sympathetic treatment of women. It's generally regarded as an important precursor to the director's postwar triumphs, but it will try the patience of those for whom kabuki remains an inscrutable art form, and I found myself getting restless at the protracted treatment of Otoku's final moments.  

The Gift (Joel Edgerton, 2015)

Joel Edgerton in The Gift

Cast: Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall, Joel Edgerton, Allison Tolman, Tim Griffin, Katie Aselton, Wendell Pierce, Beau Knapp, Adam Lazarre-White, David Denman, P.J. Byrne, Busy Philipps, Felicity Price. Screenplay: Joel Edgerton. Cinematography: Eduard Grau. Production design: Richard Sherman. Film editing: Ben Baudhuin, Luke Doolan. Music: Danny Bensi, Saunder Jurriaans. 

Joel Edgerton's directing debut The Gift starts as a stalker thriller and morphs neatly into a revenge tale, Jason Bateman plays Simon Callem, who has just moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Robyn (Rebecca Hall), when they meet Gordo Moseley (Edgerton), who went to high school with Simon. Robyn, who is new to LA, is happy to meet people, and is surprised at Simon's coldness to Gordo, who shows up again uninvited, bringing gifts, after their first encounter in a shopping mall. It's a neat setup for an exploration of the secrets that even people who are married to each other manage to conceal from each other. Edgerton's screenplay and direction handle the gradual change of perspective in the movie nicely, but it's Bateman's performance that makes the story work. He shades Simon from likable and affable, traits Bateman's previous roles have often emphasized, into something much darker. Although the denouement feels a bit overelaborate, the ending leaves viewers to ponder an ambiguity about the nature of retribution.     

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.