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.  

Cactus Pears (Rohan Kanawade, 2025)

Suraaj Suman and Bhushaan Manoj in Cactus Pears

Cast: Bhushaan Manoj, Suraaj Suman, Jayshri Jagrap. Screenplay: Rohan Kanawade. Cinematography: Vikas Urs. Production design: Tejashree Kapadne. Film editing: Anadi Athaley. 

Tradition inevitably gives way to change, but it's the fight between them that animates our fictions. It falls to Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) to carry the burden of change in Rohan Kanadade's Cactus Pears, his debut feature. Anand is comfortably employed in Mumbai when his father dies, which necessitates a trip into the past, to the village where he grew up, for the ten-day funeral observances. Anand is reluctant to spend the whole ten days there. At 30, he knows that he'll be under constant pressure to explain why he's not married. At one point in the ceremonies, there's even discussion about whether, as an unmarried man, he's eligible to light his father's funeral pyre. But Anand is gay, a fact he feels compelled to hide from the villagers, if only to spare the embarrassment to his mother (Jayshri Jagtap), who already knows. During their stay, Anand meets Balya (Suraaj Suman), a friend from boyhood who knows Anand's secret because he's also gay. The film surveys the multiple tensions that arise as a new intimacy develops between Anand and Balya amid the funereal solemnity and the complex rituals and taboos of community and religion. Cactus Pears is a finely observed, refreshingly new take on a familiar story.   

The Hours and Times (Christopher Munch, 1991)

Ian Hart and David Angus in The Hours and Times

Cast: David Angus, Ian Hart, Stephanie Pack, Robin McDonald, Sergio Moreno, Unity Grimwood. Screenplay: Christopher Munch. Cinematography: Christopher Munch. Film editing: Christopher Munch.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times is that it feels right. Nothing we know about what happened to John Lennon and Brian Epstein afterward feels inconsistent with what's shown in the film: a brief visit to Barcelona by the self-assured Beatle and his repressed manager in which they test the limits of their intimacy with each other. Munch at one point considered making the film's two central characters "just two guys," but it gains immeasurably from our awareness of the sad history that followed in the two men's lives and deaths. The film is just under 60 minutes of sexual tension, as Lennon (Ian Hart) teases and taunts Epstein (David Angus) about his experiences as a gay man. They share a bathtub and a bed in the film, but without apparent consummation, and the ending leaves us to ponder the nature of sexual attraction. Is Lennon sadistically inflicting cruelty on Epstein? Why does Epstein want to go on a trip with a man he knows he can't have? The Hours and Times is a film that ramifies in the mind the more you ponder it, each incident shown -- Lennon's flirtation with the flight attendant and Epstein's with a hotel worker, the meeting with the man in the bar, the phone conversations of Lennon with Cynthia and Epstein with his mother -- casting light on another.  

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, 2025)

Eylul Guven in Blue Heron

Cast: Eylul Guven, Edik Beddoes, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Liam Serg, Preston Drabble, Amy Zimmer. Screenplay: Sophy Romvari. Cinematography: Maya Bankovic. Production design: Victoria Furuya. Film editing: Kurt Walker. 

"Mental illness," "neurodivergence," "social dysfunction," there are many phrases and labels that can be applied to the case of Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the central character in Sophy Romvari's debut feature Blue Heron. And perhaps the problem is that Jeremy is a "case," a subject for study and analysis, which his desperate parents resort to when their oldest child threatens the peace and stability of the family. Unfortunately, the parents and their three younger children have to live with Jeremy's disruption while the psychologists and social workers can only maintain a clinical distance. Romvari tells the story largely through the eyes of the youngest member of the family, Sasha, first as a child (Eylul Guven) and then as an adult (Amy Zimmer), trying to reconstruct their experience twenty years later. Romvari intelligently and artfully bends time, sending the adult Sasha back to scenes from her childhood, putting her in the place of a social worker trying to help the family cope. It's a film full of insights, but not of answers to the plight of families like the one it depicts, well-meaning and loving but driven to the frustrating limits in their attempt to cope. It's a well-written, well-staged, well-acted cry for help. 

The Girl in the Window (Luciano Emmer, 1961)

Bernard Fresson and Marina Vlady in The Girl in the Window

Cast: Lino Ventura, Bernard Fresson, Magali Noël, Marina Vlady. Screenplay: Rodolfo Sonego, Luciano Emmer, Vinicio Marinucci, Luciano Martino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Emanuele Cassuto. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Production design: Alexandre Hinkis. Film editing: Jolanda Benvenuti, Emma Le Chanois. Music: Roman Vlad. 

Luciano Emmer's The Girl in the Window begins as a harrowing account of a cave-in in a coal mine and turns into a romantic weekend spree. This very odd mashup of genres centers on two Italian miners, the seasoned Federico (Lino Ventura) and the novice Vincenzo (Bernard Fresson). After being rescued from the mine disaster, they head for the red-light district in Amsterdam, where they meet two women, Chanel (Magali Noël) and Else (Marina Vlady), who make their living as sex workers, attracting clients by posing in windows. Vincenzo has decided that working in the mine is not for him, and plans to take the train back to Italy. But when he meets Else, who takes a fancy to him, he misses his train and they join Federico and Chanel at the seaside. An on-again, off-again relationship forms among the two couples. Emmer tries to jam a lot of character exposition into the film, and doesn't always succeed. Fortunately, the four actors are more than capable, particularly Vlady, who makes the stereotyped role of the good-hearted prostitute fairly convincing. Ventura also has a comic drunk scene in which he wanders by mistake into a gay bar and is slow to realize it. Tonally, The Girl in the Window is a mess, never quite overcoming the realistic opening scenes in the mine, but it's a watchable mess.  

Full Alert (Ringo Lam, 1997)

Lau Ching-wan in Full Alert

Cast: Lau Ching-wan, Francis Ng, Amanda Lee, Jack Kao, Monica Chan, Chin Ka Lok, Yung Kam-cheong, Raymond Cho, Emily Kwan Po-wai. Screenplay: Ringo Lam, Lau Wing-kin, Poon Yuen-leung. Cinematography: Ardy Lam. Art direction: S.P. Choo, C.C. Wong. Film editing: Angie Lam, Marco Mak. Music: Peter Kam.

There are the usual thriller set pieces, car chases and gun battles, in Ringo Lam's Full Alert, but the film really hinges on the psychological twinning of cop and criminal. Everything in the film builds toward a final showdown between Pao (Lau Ching-wan), the cop in charge of the pursuit of Mak Kwan (Francis Ng), an explosives expert who escapes from prison after Pao arrests him. Both Pao and Mak are obsessive types, and an early confrontation establishes that both are haunted by guilt. Mak has a partner, Chung (Amanda Lee), whom he loves, and Pao has a wife (Monica Chan) and child. Lam deftly plays on these parallels throughout the film, and Lau and Ng give their characters full intensity. The result is a high-powered movie that feels more realistic than it actually is.