Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018)

Constance Wu and Awkwafina in Crazy Rich Asians

Cast: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Gemma Chan, Lisa Lu, Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, Sonoya Mizuno, Chris Pang, Jimmy O. Yang. Screenplay: Peter Chiarelli, Adele Lim, based on a novel by Kevin Kwan. Cinematography: Vanja Cernjul. Production design: Nelson Coates. Film editing: Myron Kerstein. Music: Brian Tyler.

Bright performances and a sumptuous production enhance Crazy Rich Asians, but it's really the novelty of an almost all-Asian cast that brought this otherwise likable but conventionally plotted romantic comedy to widespread notice.

Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)

Sergio Corrieri in Memories of Underdevelopment

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Núñez, Omar Valdés, René de la Cruz. Screenplay: Esmundo Desnoes, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, based on a novel by Esmundo Desnoes. Cinematography: Ramón F. Suárez. Production design: Julio Matilla. Film editing: Nelson Rodríguez. Music: Leo Brouwer.

Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), whose family has fled Cuba for Miami after the revolution, remains in Havana. A disaffected, well-to-do intellectual, he knows his days are numbered, but he remains, having an affair with the working-class Elena (Daisy Granados) as he watches history unfold. A provocative film that was somewhat better received in the United States than in Cuba.

Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973)

Meiko Kaji in Lady Snowblood

Cast: Meiko Kaji, Toshio Kurosawa, Ko Nishimura, Masaaki Daimon, Miyoko Akaza, Eiji Okada,  Sanae Nakahara, Noboru Nakaya. Screenplay: Norio Osada, Kazuo Kamimura, Kazuo Koike. Cinematography: Masaki Tamura. Production design: Kazuo Satsuya. Film editing: Osamu Inoue. Music: Masaaki Hirao.

An often fascinating, often grisly tale, based on a popular manga, of a woman not only born but conceived to take revenge for her mother's rape and her family's murder. Among other things, it's an acknowledged source for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)

Miriam Toews and Maria Pankratz in Silent Light

Cast: Cornelio Wall, Miriam Toews, Maria Pankratz, Peter Wall, Jacobo Klassen, Elizabeth Fehr. Screenplay: Carlos Reygadas. Cinematography: Alexis Zabe. Art direction: Nohemi Gonzalez. Film editing: Natalia López.

A kind of holiness suffuses Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, a film set in a Mexican community of Mennonites who speak entirely in Plautdietsch, their dialect of German. The actors in the film are real people summoned to play characters who might have existed in their own community, so from the outset there's a strange feeling of otherness transcended into universality. One of the universals of the film is the eternal triangle of a man married to a woman but in love with another woman. Another is the cycle of day and night: The film begins with a day's slow dawning. And then there's the mystery of life and death, epitomized in a scene of resurrection that has inevitably made critics compare the film to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955). Silent Light is a simpler story than the one that great film tells, but also entirely worthy of the comparison.

Judge Priest (John Ford, 1934)

Stepin Fetchit and Will Rogers in Judge Priest

Cast: Will Rogers, Tom Brown, Anita Louise, Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, Henry B. Walthall, David Landau, Rochelle Hudson, Charley Grapewin, Berton Churchill. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, Lamar Trotti, based on stories by Irvin S. Cobb. Cinematography: George Schneiderman. Art direction: William S. Darling. Film editing: Paul Weatherwax. Music: Samuel Kaylin.

John Ford's Judge Priest fits neatly into that period, roughly from 1915 (the year of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation) to 1939 (the year of David O. Selznick's* Gone With the Wind), when Hollywood filmmakers were catering to audiences in the American South, eager for validation that their "lost cause" had been sacred and not the act of treason that it really was. So it's not surprising to find in the cast of Judge Priest both an actor from Griffith's film, Henry B. Walthall, and one from Selznick's, Hattie McDaniel. Ford's film, in which there's a joke about lynching and which concludes with a rousing performance of "Dixie" complete with waving of the Confederate battle flag, is hard to watch today, except for its historical interest, not only as an example of what movie audiences tolerated in 1934, but also for its glimpses of a then much-loved star, Will Rogers, and his occasional film sidekick, Stepin Fetchit, a comedian who was attacked as an Uncle Tom, but whose work has since been re-evaluated and appreciated for its skill. Judge Priest is also one of the few films in which McDaniel was allowed to sing, a talent she possessed in abundance. Otherwise, it's pretty wince-inducing.

*Yes, Victor Fleming was the credited director of GWTW, but if ever a movie deserved to be credited mainly to its producer, it's that one.

Kaili Blues (Bi Gan, 2015)

Cast: Chen Yongzhong, Guo Yue, Liu Linyan, Luo Feiyang, Xie Lixun, Yang Zhuohua, Yu Shixue, Zhao Daqing. Screenplay: Bi Gan. Cinematography: Wang Tianxing. Production design: Zhu Yun. Film editing: Qin Yanan. Music: Lim Giong.

The centerpiece of Kaili Blues is an astonishing long take -- a very long take lasting 41 minutes -- that follows the young motorcycle-riding doctor who is the protagonist of the film along his journey. It's not just a tour de force sequence but one integral to the poetic essence of the work. In his first feature, Bi Gan reveals himself as a poet -- he recites some of his verse in the film -- who is playing with time and memory, dream and waking reality in challenging and enigmatic ways.

Dance, Fools, Dance (Harry Beaumont, 1931)

Cast: Joan Crawford, Lester Vail, Cliff Edwards, William Bakewell, William Holden*, Clark Gable. Screenplay: Aurania Rouverol, Richard Schayer. Cinematography: Charles Rosher. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George Hively. Costume design: Adrian.

Although it was the first film in which Joan Crawford appeared with Clark Gable, it's mostly Crawford's movie -- Gable gets sixth billing, below the first William Holden*, who plays Crawford's father. Dance, Girl, Dance isn't quite the musical it sounds like, although Crawford does get to dance a little clunkily. It's a gangster movie in which Crawford's character, a rich girl turned poor by the Depression, goes into journalism and finds herself investigating mob boss Jake Luva (Gable), for whom she of course falls until she finds out that he's a killer. The chemistry between Crawford and Gable led to their teaming in seven more films.

*1861-1932

My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985)

Cast: Gordon Warnecke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey, Shirley Anne Field, Rita Wolf, Derrick Branche. Screenplay: Hanif Kureishi. Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton. Production design: Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: Stanley Myers, Hans Zimmer.

A fusillade across the bow of Thatcherite Britain, My Beautiful Laundrette manages to take on racism, homophobia, and capitalist entrepreneurship all in one breathtaking moment. It also served as a breakthrough film for Daniel Day-Lewis as Johnny, a gay skinhead with an Anglo-Pakistani lover, Omar (Gordon Warnecke).

The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938)

Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Mad Miss Manton

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Sam Levene, Frances Mercer, Stanley Ridges, Hattie McDaniel. Screenplay: Philip G. Epstein, Wilson Collison. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: George Hively. Music: Roy Webb.

If The Mad Miss Manton seems to me a laborious misfire of a screwball comedy, it may be because I can't help comparing it to another film that also stars Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Preston Sturges's sublime The Lady Eve (1941). Stanwyck plays the doyenne of a gaggle of silly socialites who get involved in trying to solve a murder. They tangle with a police lieutenant played by Sam Levene and a reporter played by Fonda in the process, but Stanwyck's character and Fonda's naturally fall in love during the proceedings. It's over-frantic and under-motivated.

My Name Is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis, 1945)

May Whitty in My Name Is Julia Ross

Cast: Nina Foch, May Whitty, George Macready, Roland Varno, Anita Sharp-Bolster, Doris Lloyd. Screenplay: Muriel Roy Bolton, based on a novel by Anthony Gilbert. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Jerome Pycha Jr. Film editing: Henry Batista. Costume design: Jean Louis.

A tidy, twisty thriller about a woman (Nina Foch) who, when she gets hired as a secretary to a wealthy elderly woman (May Whitty) who lives in a lonely, isolated old house by the sea, becomes a pawn in a plot to cover up a murder. It's one of the films -- another is Gun Crazy (1950) -- that suggest that Joseph H. Lewis could have been more than just a B-movie director. Short (65 minutes) and to the point.

Dream Wife (Sidney Sheldon, 1953)

Betta St. John, Cary Grant, and Deborah Kerr in Dream Wife

Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Betta St. John, Walter Pidgeon, Eduard Franz, Buddy Baer. Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon, Herbert Baker, Alfred Lewis Lewitt. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George White. Music: Conrad Salinger.

A romantic comedy so inane and inept that it seems to have driven Cary Grant into retirement for a couple of years, until Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to return in To Catch a Thief (1955). It's certainly a waste of the considerable talents of Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant plays a businessman who gets tired of his fiancée's (Kerr) devotion to her career with the State Department and calls off the engagement when he falls for a Middle Eastern princess (Betta St. John) who has been raised to serve men. Because the princess comes from an oil-rich country, the State Department enlists Kerr's character in handling the negotiations leading to the princess's marriage to the businessman. The result is a queasy 1950s take on feminism and international relations in which no one behaves like the rational human beings they're supposed to be.

Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)

Jeon Do-yeon, Seon Jung-yeop, and Song Kang-ho in Secret Sunshine

Cast: Jeon Do-yeon, Song Kang-ho, Seon Jung-yeop, Cho Yung-jin, Kim Young-jae, Song Mi-rim. Screenplay: Lee Chang-dong, based on a novel by Lee Chung-Joon. Cinematography: Cho Yong-kyu. Production design: Shin Jum-hee. Film editing: Kim Hyun. Music: Christian Basso.

Painful without being oppressive, Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine manages to be a film critical of religion without being either against it or for it. It centers on the great loss suffered by Lee Shin-aie (Jeon Do-yeon in a performance that won best actress at Cannes), a young widow trying to start a new life with her small son. But when he is abducted and murdered, she finds herself seeking comfort in an evangelical Christian community. It's primarily a film about otherness, about the struggles of the solitary spirit, and Lee accomplishes wonders without taking sides in the struggles of his characters.

The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1994)

Cast: Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Charles Durning, Jim True-Frost, John Mahoney, Bill Cobbs, Bruce Campbell. Screenplay: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Sam Raimi. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Dennis Gassner. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Carter Burwell.

Maybe the most divisive of the Coen brothers' movies. It's certified rotten on Rotten Tomatoes at 57%, but even there you'll find reviewers who think it "criminally overlooked and sinfully wonderful" and "A wickedly funny and incisive lampoon of big business." I had avoided it for years, but when I gave in and finally watched it I was occasionally amused and sometimes surprised. What doesn't work for me, however, is its hommage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s. That sort of thing is rarely worth doing, unless you do it with unabashed affection, as Peter Bogdanovich did in What's Up, Doc? (1972). Bogdanovich wisely took the tropes of classic screwball and updated them. The Coens and co-writer Sam Raimi, however, make the mistake of retaining for their film the period in which screwball flourished, and the contrast of their ersatz screwball with the real thing becomes apparent.

The Rocket From Calabuch (Luis García Berlanga, 1956)

Valentina Cortese and Edmund Gwenn in The Rocket From Calabuch

Cast: Edmund Gwenn, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese, Juan Calvo, José Isbert, Félix Fernández. Screenplay: Leonardo Martín, Florentino Soria, Ennio Flaiano, Luis García Berlanga. Cinematography: Francisco Sempere. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Guido Guerrini, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.

In his last film role, Edmund Gwenn plays an atomic scientist who hides out in a small Spanish town, fleeing the demands made on him by the American military. But his cover gets blown when he helps the villagers in their annual fireworks competition with another town. It's the usual droll, loving comedy from one of its masters, Luis García Berlanga.

More (Barbet Schroeder, 1969)

Klaus Grünberg and Mimsy Farmer in More

Cast: Klaus Grünberg, Mimsy Farmer, Heinz Engelmann, Michel Chanderli, Henry Wolf, Louise Wink. Screenplay: Paul Gégauff, Barbet Schroeder, Mimsy Farmer, Eugene Archer, Paul Gardner. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Art direction: Néstor Almendros, Fran Lewis. Film editing: Denise de Casablanca, Rita Roland. Music: Pink Floyd.

A vivid downer film, in which a German student (Klaus Grünberg) and an American hippie (Mimsy Farmer) get more deeply involved in drugs, moving from pot to LSD to heroin. More avoids some of the clichés of films about the counterculture of the late '60s -- it doesn't try to re-create the drug experience with camera tricks but instead views its characters externally as it traces their disintegration. It places its more sordid sequences against the beauty of Ibiza to good effect, and the cinematography of Néstor Almendros makes the most of the location, but the film still feels heavy and dated.

Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959)

Noël Coward and Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana

Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Jo Morrow. Screenplay: Graham Greene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Oswald Morris. Art direction: John Box. Film editing: Bert Bates. Music: Frank Deniz, Laurence Deniz.

Given its cast, its director, and its screenwriter, Our Man in Havana has always seemed to me that it should be a little bit better than it is. I think director Carol Reed may be mostly at fault: His best films, like Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), have just the right mixture of gravitas and wit. Here there's a little too much gravitas weighing down what could have a more pronounced satiric edge: a tale of bumbling British espionage. It's possible, too, that a little uncertainty of tone lingers over the movie because it was filmed on location in Cuba just after the fall of Batista -- Fidel Castro himself visited the shoot -- and the subsequent course of the revolution lends a queasiness to the subject matter. Nevertheless, we are in the hands of masters like Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, and Ralph Richardson here, so there's enough to enjoy. 

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Benjamin Millepied and Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Screenplay: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Clint Mansell.

Overheated melodrama with horror movie elements that seems determined to make ballet into more of a psychological and physical trial by torture than is entirely plausible. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as the tormented dancer, and she gets good support from Mila Kunis as her potential rival and Barbara Hershey as her mother. But I found myself laughing at its excesses when I think director Darren Aronofsky, over the top as usual, meant for me to shudder at them.

Welcome, Mr. Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953)

Cast: Manolo Morán, José Isbert, Lolita Sevilla, Alberto Romea, Elvira Quintillá, Luis Pérez de León, Félix Fernández, Fernando Aguirre. Screenplay: Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, Miguel Mihura. Cinematography: Manuel Berenguer. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Jesús García Leoz.

As he so often did, Luis García Berlanga thumbed his nose at the Franco-era censors with a satiric look at a small Spanish village out to court foreign aid from the Americans under the Marshall Plan. The residents set up a kind of Andalusian Potemkin village, donning costumes they don't usually wear and generally dressing up the place in the fashion they think American tourists will expect. In dream sequences, we see what the villagers not only hope but also what they fear they will get from the Americans.

Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

Peter Lorre in Mad Love

Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Edward Brophy, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty. Screenplay: Guy Endore, P.J. Wolfson, John L. Balderston, based on a novel by Maurice Renard. Cinematography: Chester A. Lyons, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Peter Lorre's American debut made him a specialist in creepy roles. He's Dr. Gogol, a mad physician, obsessed with a lovely actress (Frances Drake) married to a concert pianist (Colin Clive) who, when his hands are injured in an accident, allows the doctor to operate on them. But the doctor replaces the pianist's hands with those of a murderer, a specialist in knife-throwing, who has just been guillotined for his crimes. Naturally, this means that the pianist can't play anymore but develops a new talent for throwing sharp objects. And so on. It's a pretty well made piece of hokum that gained some late notoriety when Pauline Kael accused Orson Welles of stealing from it when he made Citizen Kane (1941), largely because both films had the same cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947)

Cedric Hardwicke and Sally Ann Howes in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Cast: Derek Bond, Cedric Hardwicke, Bernard Miles, Sally Ann Howes, Alfred Drayton, Aubrey Woods, Stanley Holloway, Jill Balcon, Mary Merrall, Athene Seyler, Sybil Thorndike, Fay Compton, Cathleen Nesbitt, James Hayter. Screenplay: John Dighton, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Gordon Dines. Art direction: Michael Relph. Film editing: Leslie Norman. Music: Lord Berners.

Forgettable and rather plodding version of the Dickens novel, kept alive only by some good actors doing their thing well.

Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Jonathan Pryce in Brazil

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. Cinematography: Roger Pratt. Production design: Norman Garwood. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Michael Kamen.

I have to admit reluctantly that I'm not a fan of the kind of dystopian social satire epitomized by Terry Gilliam's Brazil and echoed in such films as Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991) and the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). They seem to me too scattered to be effective as satire, too dependent on production design and special effects to connect with the realities they're supposedly lampooning. I find myself forgetting them almost once they end. That said, Brazil is always worth watching just for the performances of a cast filled with specialists in a kind of British-style muddling through even the weirdest of situations.

Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961)

Cast: Cassen, José Luis López Vázquez, Elvira Quintillá, Manuel Alexandre, Mario Bustos, María Francés. Screenplay: Luis García Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, José Luis Colina, José Luis Font. Cinematography: Francisco Sempere. Art direction: Antonio Cortés. Film editing: José Antonio Rojo. Music: Miguel Asins Arbó.

Luis García Berlanga in fine form with yet another satire that conceals the knife edge within a depiction of village eccentrics. This time, it's the ostentatious and superficial charity of the bourgeoisie that gets the knife, as the title character (Cassen) tries to keep the truck on which he and his family's livelihood depends from being repossessed.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J.A. Bayona, 2018)

Chris Pratt in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon. Screenplay: Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow. Cinematography: Oscar Faura. Production design: Andy Nicholson. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Not quite as inane as its 2015 predecessor, this installment of the Jurassic World series -- if such there is to be, since Covid-19 seems to have put the filming of the next installment on hold -- benefits from making Bryce Dallas Howard's character less of a ditz in heels, and from eschewing the tired kids-in-jeopardy theme from the first. Still, this is one of those movies from which you know what you're going to get, and if you want that sort of thing, have at it. 

Viva (Anna Biller, 2007)

Anna Biller in Viva

Cast: Anna Biller, Jared Sanford, Bridget Brno, Chad England, John Klemantaski, Barry Morse. Screenplay: Anna Biller. Cinematography: C. Thomas Lewis. Production design: Anna Biller. Costume design: Anna Biller. Music: Anna Biller.

The 1970s are generally regarded as the souring of the 1960s, as the Peace and Love of Woodstock turned into the empty hedonism of the golden age of disco. And that's pretty much the way that inimitable auteur Anna Biller sees it in Viva, a parody of the softcore erotic movies of the time. It's all a bit too overheatedly obvious in its satire, but that makes it worth seeing once.

Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926)

Greta Garbo and Ricardo Cortez in Torrent

Cast: Greta Garbo, Ricardo Cortez, Gertrude Olmstead, Edward Connelly, Lucien Littlefield, Martha Mattox, Lucy Beaumont, Tully Marshall, Mack Swain. Screenplay: Dorothy Farnum, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez; titles by Katherine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan.

Greta Garbo's first American film gives her the chance to play rich and poor: She's a Spanish peasant girl whose love for the wealthy, dashing Rafael (Ricardo Cortez) is thwarted by his scheming mother (Martha Mattox), so she goes to Paris where her singing voice earns her wealth and fame but not true love, as the on-again off-again relationship with Rafael takes its course over the years. Garbo and Cortez strike no sparks, but the film was a hit anyway, launching her fabulous career.

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciarán Hinds, Dillon Freasier, Kevin J. O'Connor. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, based on a novel by Upton Sinclair. Cinematography: Robert Elswit. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Dylan Tichenor. Music: Jonny Greenwood.

Extraordinary filmmaking made even more extraordinary by Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, the second of his three Oscar wins. There are some who think the film is a little diffuse and eccentric, especially in its later scenes. But who needs ordinary movies?

The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, 1969)

Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell, Sigge Fürst. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren.

Sometimes linked with Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Shame (1968) as a third element of a trilogy set on Fårö island, Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna is a characteristically intense working out of themes of grief and guilt, involving two couples whose lives intersect against a backdrop of mysterious instances of cruelty toward animals. I find it one of Bergman's more forgettable films, but it has strong admirers. 

The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Bette Davis in The Old Maid

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Jane Bryan, Louise Fazenda, James Stephenson, Jerome Cowan, William Lundigan. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by Zoe Akins and a novel by Edith Wharton. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Max Steiner.

The Old Maid is the kind of melodrama that never really made much sense, except in the original version, the novel by Edith Wharton, where the social taboos and psychological hangups could be dealt with more convincingly. And given that filmmakers under the Production Code had to tiptoe around topics like having a child without being married, the evasions of such key issues became even more ludicrous and artificial. Still, though the movie is fun to watch today because the evasions are so glaring, and because troupers like Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins knew how to make them entertaining. The making of the film is notorious because Davis and Hopkins were constantly feuding over old wrong: The one losing a coveted role to the other who was also suspected of sleeping with her husband, and so on. Davis is more fun when she's scheming and trying to get even in her movies than when she's suffering and self-sacrificing, so The Old Maid is not one of her juicier films.

Arsène Lupin (Jack Conway, 1932)

Cast: John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley, John Miljan, Tully Marshall. Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, Bayard Veiller, Carey Wilson, based on a play by Maurice Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Costume design: Adrian. Film editing: Hugh Wynn.

The brothers Barrymore do some delightful upstaging of each other in Arsène Lupin, with John as the suave duke whom Lionel as the dogged police inspector suspects of being the thief known as Arsène Lupin. There's some sexy business involving Karen Morley as a socialite who may be more than what she seems, and everything culminates in the theft of the Mona Lisa. It's maybe a little more creaky in its joints than is good for it, in the way of early talkies.

Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjærg, 1997)

Stellan Skarsgård in Insomnia

Cast: Stellan Skarsgård, Maria Mathiesen, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Gisken Armand, Bjørn Floberg, Marianne O. Ulrichsen. Screenplay: Nikolaj Frobenius, Erik Skjoldbjærg. Cinematography: Erling Thurmann-Andersen. Production design: Eli Bø. Film editing: Håkon Øverås. Music: Geir Jenssen.

The original Norwegian version of a film remade by Christopher Nolan in 2002, Insomnia had some Nolanesque twists from the beginning. Stellan Skarsgård plays Jonas Engström, a cop who used to be with the Swedish police and still carries the gun he was issued then, a fact that will play a key role in the plot as Engström becomes involved in helping his fellow policemen in the Norwegian force investigate the murder of a young woman. Suffice it to say that the insomnia Engström suffers comes from a guilty conscience that only gets guiltier as the investigation proceeds.

Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)

Gene Evans in Park Row

Cast: Gene Evans, Mary Welch, Bela Kovacs, Herbert Heyes, Tina Pine, George O'Hanlon, J.M. Kerrigan, Forrest Taylor. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: John L. Russell. Production design: Theobold Holsopple. Film editing: Philip Cahn. Music: Paul Dunlap.

Samuel Fuller's favorite film came out of his own experiences as a newspaper reporter in New York City, though Park Row is set in the 1880s, a bit before Fuller's journalism career. It's a thoroughly entertaining melodrama about a man with ink in his blood, Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans), who starts his own newspaper, The Globe, with a bunch of cronies after they're fired from another paper, The Star, after criticizing its timid approach to the news and fawning attitude toward the powerful. Scrappy underdog takes on the big guys, as you've guessed. One of the big guys is actually a woman, Charity Hackett (Mary Welch), the publisher of The Star. In the midst of their newspaper war, Phineas and Charity manage to fall a bit in love, but he puts business before romance and refuses her offer to merge the two papers. A little heavy on the clichés, but full of energy.