BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)

Adam Driver and John David Washington in BlacKkKlansman

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Robert John Burke, Laura Harrier, Jasper Pääkönen, Ryan Eggold, Paul Walter Hauser, Ken Garito, Frederick Weller, Michael Buscemi, Ashleigh Atkinson, Corey Hawkins, Harry Belafonte, Alec Baldwin. Screenplay: Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee, based on a book by Ron Stallworth. Cinematography: Chayse Irvin. Production design: Curt Beech. Film editing: Barry Alexander Brown, Music: Terence Blanchard.

Spike Lee finally received the Oscar nomination for directing that he had deserved for Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992), and he won his first competitive Academy Award -- in 2016 he was given the honorary award that the Academy usually gives to people they've shamefully ignored over the years -- for screenwriting. BlacKkKlansman is based on the experiences of Ron Stallworth, who joined the Colorado Springs police force as its first black officer in the late 1970s, and found himself impersonating a Ku Klux Klansman over the telephone. Eventually, his conversations led to requests for a face-to-face meeting, so a white officer was recruited to directly infiltrate Klan meetings. The film version relies heavily on the chemistry between John David Washington as Stallworth and Adam Driver as the fictitious Flip Zimmerman (the identity of the actual white infiltrator was never revealed), as well as the sinister but often comic performances of the actors playing the Klansmen: Ryan Eggold as Walter Breachway, Jasper Pääkönen as Felix Kendrickson, Ashlie Atkinson as Kendrickson's wife, Paul Walter Hauser as the self-named Ivanhoe, and especially Topher Grace as the blow-dried Grand Wizard, David Duke. There's a somewhat unnecessary romantic subplot involving the activist Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier) and Stallworth, but the film generates plenty of suspense and readily makes its point about racism in the Trump era without turning into agitprop. 

Hunter in the Dark (Hideo Gosha, 1979)

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Yoshio Harada, Shin'ichi Chiba, Ayumi Ishida, Keiko Kishi, Ai Kanzaki, Kayo Matsuo, Tetsuro Tanba. Screenplay: Hideo Gosha, based on a novel by Shotaro Ikenami. Cinematography: Tadashi Sakai. Film editing: Michio Suwa. Music: Masaru Sato.

Colorful but rather confusing film about an 18th-century Japanese crime lord, played by Tatsuya Nakadai, who hires a one-eyed bodyguard with amnesia, played by Yoshio Harada. Violent confrontations ensue.

A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935)

Cast: Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, Henry B. Walthall, Donald Woods, Walter Catlett, Fritz Leiber, H.B. Warner, Mitchell Lewis, Claude Gillingwater, Billy Bevan, Isabel Jewell, Lucille La Verne. Screenplay: W.P. Lipscomb, S.N. Behrman, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Music: Herbert Stothart.

It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies. The best part is that Ronald Colman is a handsome Sydney Carton, who delivers the familiar closing line at the guillotine -- "It is a far, far better thing I do...." -- with the necessary nobility, and that the cast includes such ever-watchable character actors as Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka (an implacable Mme. De Farge), and Lucille La Verne (as The Vengeance, literally but not figuratively toothless). The worst part is that the screenplay leans heavily on the sentimental parts of the novel and Elizabeth Allan is, like most Dickens heroines, a pallid and forgettable Lucie Manette. David O. Selznick produced, but it's not as successful a foray into Dickens as his superb David Copperfield, made the same year and with a better director, George Cukor. 

The Slow Business of Going (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2000)

The Slow Business of Going (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2000)

Cast: Lizzie Curry Martinez, Maria Tsansanoglou, Gary Price, Kenny Strickland, Daniel Aukin, Sandra Carter, Mike Martin, Lauryn Pithey-Petrie, Steve Moore. Screenplay: Jim Davis, Matthew Johnson, Tasca Shadix, Athina Rachel Tsangari. Cinematography: Deborah Eve Lewis. Art direction: Tom Dornbush. Film editing: Leah Bowers, Kyle Henry, Matthew Johnson, Athina Rachel Tsangari. Music: Mark Orton.

She is a camera. The protagonist, Petra Going (Lizzie Curry Martinez), travels the world recording her encounters with a video camera built into her eyes. Then others can access her experiences through the archive of her recordings. Which is pretty much what this oddly fascinating jumble of a film amounts to: episodes often improvised by the actors over the course of five years of filming. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari's first feature will never attract a wide audience, but its enigmas are often dazzling. 

Les Girls (George Cukor, 1957)

Kay Kendall, Mitzi Gaynor, Gene Kelly, and Taina Elg in Les Girls

Cast: Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall, Taina Elg, Jacques Bergerac, Leslie Phillips, Henry Daniell, Patrick Macnee. Screenplay: John Patrick, based on a story by Vera Caspary. Cinematography: Robert Surtees. Art direction: Gene Allen, William A. Horning. Film editing: Ferris Webster. Music: Cole Porter, Saul Chaplin.

It should have been better. It had Gene Kelly's dancing, George Cukor's direction, Cole Porter's song score, and a performance by the wonderful comedian Kay Kendall -- two years before her untimely death. I'm tempted to blame the failure of this musical on Mitzi Gaynor, a performer to whom I've never felt attracted, or to the now long-forgotten Taina Elg. According to one source, it was planned to star Leslie Caron, Cyd Charisse, Jean Simmons, and Carol Haney, each of whom might have given a lift to the movie, but Kelly seems cranky and tired -- it was his last film for MGM -- and the Porter songs are completely forgettable. Cukor's direction is workmanlike: Despite My Fair Lady (1964) and the Judy Garland A Star Is Born (1954), musicals were not his forte.

Dodes'ka-den (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

Cast: Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Junzaburo Ban, Kiyoko Tange, Hisashi Igawa, Hideko Okiyama, Kunie Tanaka, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Ryo Sawagami, Yoko Kusunoki, Noboru Mitani, Hiroyuki Kawase, Hiroshi Akutagawa. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto. Cinematography: Yasumichi Fukuzawa, Takao Saito. Art direction: Shinobu Muraki, Yoshiro Muraki. Film editing: Reiko Kaneko. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Akira Kurosawa's first film in color, Dodes'ka-den was a critical hit, earning an Oscar nomination for foreign language film, but a commercial failure, sending the director into a deep, near-suicidal depression. It's a curious grab-bag of stories of people living in a trash dump, their lives connecting only tangentially for the most part. It has the appearance of such post-apocalyptic films as Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991), Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2014), Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1991), and The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969), though its setting is on the fringes of the actual 20th-century Japan -- apocalypse nigh, if you will. The title comes from what is perhaps its central figure, the mentally challenged Roku-chan (Yoshitaka Zushi), who is obsessed with streetcars and chugs through the dump chanting the nonsense words of the film's title, meant to be an evocation of the sound of the tram on the tracks.

The Newton Boys (Richard Linklater, 1998)

Skeet Ulrich, Dwight Yoakam, and Matthew McConaughey in The Newton Boys

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dwight Yoakam, Julianna Margulies, Chloe Webb, Bo Hopkins, David Jensen, Luke Askew. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Claude Stanush, Clark Walker, based on a book by Claude Stanush. Cinematography: Peter James. Production design: Catherine Hardwicke. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Edward D. Barnes, Bad Livers.

With Richard Linklater directing actors like Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Julianna Margulies, The Newton Boys ought to be a lot better than it is. Not that it's bad, it's just a solid and unmemorable story of the bank-robbing brothers and their accomplices, including nitroglycerin expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam), who plagued Texas and much of the central United States in the 1920s. The shadow of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) hangs long and heavy over this movie. A coda to the film shows the real, elderly Willis Newton, who was played by McConaughey, being interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. It may be more interesting than what precedes it, though it helps illuminate how well McConaughey caught the character.

Paradise: Hope (Ulrich Seidl, 2013)

Cast: Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz, Michael Thomas, Viviane Bartsch, Maria Hofstätter, Leopold Schiel, Rainer Luttenberger, Hannes A. Pendl. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

The third film in Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy completes the story of a family of women: The mother, Teresa, was the focus of Paradise: Love (2012); the aunt, Anna Maria, that of Paradise: Faith (2012); and young Melanie's experiences at a "fat camp" are meant to be taking place at much the same time as Teresa is experiencing pleasures of the flesh in Kenya and Anna Maria is proselytizing for Catholicism in Austria. Like the other two films, Paradise: Hope is scathingly satirical about the inability of human beings to satisfy their wants and live up to their ideals. It's a discomfiting movie, as are the other two films in the trilogy. 

Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)

Cast: Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden, Howard St. John, Frank Otto, Larry Oliver, Barbara Brown, Grandon Rhodes, Claire Carlton. Screenplay: Albert Mannheimer, Garson Kanin, based on a play by Garson Kanin. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender.

Judy Holliday's best actress Oscar win, over the classic performances of Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. and Bette Davis in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, still ranks as one of the award's more jaw-dropping moments. But if there was ever a case for a three-way tie, this might be it. Because Holliday's Billie Dawn is a great performance, and it lacked the comeback aura of Swanson's or the career-valedictory overtones of Davis's. She had, of course, perfected the role on Broadway, but it's also to her credit that she never seems stagy, even in the confines of what is too often a filmed play dogged a bit by the censors.

Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Masao Wakahara, Chikage Awashima, Toshiko Kobayashi, Eiko Miyoshi, Chieko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Hideko Takamine returns as the ditsy strip tease artist, first seen in Keisuke Kinoshita's popular Carmen Comes Home (1951), who really thinks that stripping is an art. She gets involved with an avant-garde sculptor, whose mother is a fierce political activist, but the comedy is rather scattershot. The great character actress Chieko Higashiyama, for example, plays a maid who is terrified of another atomic bomb, freaking out at any loud noise. That this anxiety is played for laughs strikes us as odd, but the film is one of the first that was made after the end of the occupation in Japan, which forbade any mention of the bomb.

Mr. Skeffington (Vincent Sherman, 1944)

Bette Davis and Claude Rains in Mr. Skeffington

Cast: Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Walter Abel, George Coulouris, Richard Waring, Marjorie Riordan, Robert Shayne, John Alexander, Jerome Cowan, Johnny Mitchell, Dorothy Peterson, Peter Whitney, Bill Kennedy. Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, based on a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Franz Waxman.

Although the title role of Mr. Skeffington belongs to Claude Rains, the movie is really centered on Mrs. Skeffington, née Fanny Trellis, played by Bette Davis, a fact reflected in the Oscar nominations to Davis for best actress and to Rains for supporting actor. It's a film that gives Davis the opportunity to run the age gamut, from youthful beauty to haggard old lady. Unfortunately, although the screenplay is credited to the usually reliable Julius and Philip Epstein, who also served as producers, the director is the undistinguished Vincent Sherman, and the resulting film is tediously conventional. It lacks some of the verve of Hollywood movies of the era that was often supplied by a gallery of character players, leaving Davis and Rains to do what they can to carry the story: Spoiled, flighty woman marries a rich man she doesn't love, both of them suffer but are reconciled at the end when she's old and he's blind. It has the distinction of being one of the few films of the period to deal directly with antisemitism, but it doesn't do so with much real conviction. Still, Davis is always fun to watch, even if the nearly two and a half hour run time tends to challenge even that fun.

Paradise: Faith (Ulrich Seidl, 2012)

Maria Hofstätter in Paradise: Faith

Cast: Maria Hofstätter, Nabil Saleh, René Rupnik, Natalya Baranova, Trude Masur, Dieter Masur, Michaela Hurdes-Galli. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

Ulrich Seidl's intermittently fascinating, intermittently shocking, and even sometimes tedious Paradise: Faith is the middle film in his Paradise trilogy. It focuses on Anna Maria, the sister of the central character in Paradise: Love (2012) and the aunt of the teenager in Paradise: Hope (2013). Anna Maria is a religious zealot, who totes around a statue of the Virgin Mary while making door-to-door calls on strangers whom she persuades (sometimes) to pray with her. Her home is meticulously clean and adorned only with crucifixes, before which she prays and sometimes flagellates herself -- and with one of which she performs a sexual act. Before long, we discover that she's married to a Muslim, though we never quite find out how that happened. Seidl's distancing from his  characters allows us a lot of latitude in judging them, so the film is as much a provocation -- an opportunity for us to assess our responses to such religious extremism -- as it is a portrait of faith.

Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Cast: Bette Davis, George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ronald Reagan, Henry Travers, Cora Witherspoon, Dorothy Peterson, Virginia Brissac. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by George Emerson Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner.

Absurd but hypnotically entertaining, Dark Victory is one of the essential Bette Davis movies, if only because she has a great character arc to follow: from spoiled rich brat to repentant dying woman. It was nominated for three Oscars (picture, actress, score) but won none of them -- it was 1939, of course, the Hollywood annus mirabilis dominated by Gone With the Wind. This is the one in which Humphrey Bogart plays an Irish stablemaster with the hots for Davis's Judith Traherne and Ronald Reagan plays an alcoholic playboy whom a later audience would easily spot as her gay best friend. In the end it's her brain surgeon, played by George Brent, who wins her, but not before the brain tumor he has failed to remove kills her. Geraldine Fitzgerald is the faithful friend who sees her through at the end, and together she and Davis make the moment more moving than mawkish. 

Carmen Comes Home (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Toshiko Kobayashi and Hideko Takamine in Carmen Comes Home

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Shuji Sano, Chishu Ryo, Toshiko Kobayashi, Kuniko Igawa, Takeshi Sakamoto, Bontaro Miake, Keiji Sada, Yuko Mochizuki. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Production design: Motoji Kojima. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Two giddy Tokyo showgirls descend upon a Japanese village, the birthplace of one of them, Kin Aoyama, whose stage name is Lily Carmen. She's played by the emerging Japanese superstar Hideko Takamine, and her friend, Maya Akemi, by Toshiko Kobayashi. Naturally, their big-city style turns the village upside down, especially when they decide to put on a show and the town learns that they're not just "dancers" but strippers. This first Japanese feature in color was a huge hit, spawning a sequel, Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952), firmly establishing Takamine's stardom, and accelerating writer-director Kinoshita's extraordinarily prolific career.

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)

Cast: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, Sully Boyar, Carol Kane, James Broderick, Lance Henriksen, Susan Peretz, Judith Malina. Screenplay: Frank Pierson. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Production design: Charles Bailey. Film editing: Dede Allen.

Dog Day Afternoon is a tragicomic docudrama about an ill-advised, ill-planned bank robbery that went wrong in almost all ways imaginable. It gave Al Pacino one of his most entertainingly flamboyant roles as Sonny Wortzik, who wants the money to pay for his lover's sex reassignment surgery. In its day, this motive might have been played more for laughs than it would be today, but Chris Sarandon's performance as Leon, who wants to transition to female, brought a measure of sympathy to the character that it might otherwise have lacked. The film is, like so many of director Sidney Lumet's, notable not only for standout performances like Pacino's and Sarandon's, but also for its exceptional ensemble work among the hostages in the bank and the cops outside, a result of Lumet's going beyond the screenplay (which won an Oscar for Frank Pierson) to workshop dialogue and business among the groups, playing up the emerging Stockholm Syndrome of the hostages and the itchiness of the impatient cops. 

Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl, 2012)

Cast: Margarete Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux, Dunja Sowinetz, Helen Brugat, Gabriel Mwarua, Josphat Hamisi, Carlos Mkutano, Melanie Lenz, Maria Hofstätter. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

Sexually explicit but not pornographic, Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love, the first in his Paradise trilogy, tells the story of a middle-aged Austrian woman, a sex tourist, who goes to Kenya for thrills and mistakenly tries to find love instead. Margarete Tiesel plays the woman, Teresa, and in scenes that take place in Austria we get introduced to her sister (Maria Hofstätter) and her daughter (Melanie Lenz), whose own stories are told in Paradise: Faith (2012) and Paradise: Hope (2013). The film was shot on location in Kenya, using a mixture of non-professional and professional actors. It's an unsettling, sometimes even shocking film, and a little longer than it needs to be, but also revelatory of post-colonial attitudes. 

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)

Thelma Ritter and Richard Widmark in Pickup on South Street

Cast: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis Bouchey, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, based on a story by Dwight Taylor. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: George Patrick, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Nick DeMaggio. Music: Leigh Harline.

What better thing can you say about Pickup on South Street than that J. Edgar Hoover hated it? Even though the bad guy in the film is a commie spy, he's really not much less a sleaze than the good guys: The film's protagonist is a pickpocket, after all, who sneers at patriotism and flag-waving. Samuel Fuller's peculiar mastery of the pulp genre was never more effective than in this film, which is distinguished by its performers: Richard Widmark as the pickpocket, teetering between vice and a grudging kind of virtue; Jean Peters as a bad girl with a good streak that only gets her beat up; and best of all, Thelma Ritter as the aging snitch who only wants enough money to have a good funeral. Ritter got an Oscar nomination out of the film, too. One of the darkest, and one of the best, film noirs.

Violence at Noon (Nagisa Oshima, 1966)

Cast: Kei Sato, Saeda Kawaguchi, Akiko Koyama, Rokko Toura, Fumio Watanabe. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, based on a novel by Taijun Takeda. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Production design: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoda. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Violence at Noon is an edgy, jumpy film about a serial rapist and killer of women, played with his characteristic intensity by Kei Sato. It's a notable departure in technique by director Nagisa Oshima, usually given to long takes, in that it's constructed of thousands of individual shots. Akiko Koyama and Saeda Kawaguchi play the two women, both victims of the rapist, who try to piece together the truth about his life.

Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)

Robert Forster in Medium Cool

Cast: Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill, Harold Blankenship, Charles Geary. Screenplay: Haskell Wexler. Cinematography: Haskell Wexler. Art direction: Leon Ericksen. Film editing: Verna Fields. Music: Mike Bloomfield.

The first time I saw Medium Cool was the year of its release, in a theater in downtown Dallas. I remember walking from the theater to the parking lot, still stunned by the movie's blend of fiction and actuality, past a high-end restaurant whose plate glass windows gave passersby a good view of wealthy Dallasites enjoying themselves. It felt like a continuation of the film, an ironic coda to the political passions it had documented. Seeing Medium Cool many years later, I can realize how cooked-up Haskell Wexler's movie really is, with its heavy-handed ending, so obviously recapitulating what now seems like a similarly contrived opening. I can watch Verna Bloom striding through the mobs of Chicago protesters, easily spotted in her bright yellow dress, and recognize how blatant a bit of staging that is. I have learned that the film's most celebrated line, "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," was dubbed into the soundtrack later: It may have been spoken by the cameraman to the director in the heat of the moment, when he was being teargassed along with the protesters, but Wexler wasn't recording sound at the time, so it's a bit of a con. And yet, Medium Cool remains for me a potent demonstration of art imitating life, and doing it so well that I hesitate to call it fakery. Wexler shrewdly knew this: Just look at the picture of Robert Forster above, cigarette dangling like Jean-Paul Belmondo's in the poster, and remember that truth is rarely pure and never simple.

The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941)

Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster

Cast: Walter Huston, Edward Arnold, James Craig, Anne Shirley, Jane Darwell, Simone Simon, Gene Lockhart, John Qualen, H.B. Warner, Frank Conland, Lindy Wade, George Cleveland. Screenplay: Dan Totheroh, based on a story by Stephen Vincent Benet. Cinematography: Joseph H. August. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Alfred Herman. Film editing: Robert Wise. Music: Bernard Herrmann.

With its historical figures and rural setting The Devil and Daniel Webster could have sunk into sentimental Americana, but it stays just shy of that with the help of a good screenplay, solid direction, and most of all some fine performances, particularly Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch and Edward Arnold as Webster, a turn away from Arnold's usual fat-cat persona. (Arnold was a replacement for Thomas Mitchell, injured in an on-set accident just after filming started.) Bernard Herrmann's Oscar-winning score, giving a sophisticated twist to old folk tunes like "Pop Goes the Weasel," and Joseph H. August's moody cinematography also help. James Craig gives a solid performance as Jabez Stone, the victim of Scratch's soul-buying, especially in his scenes with Simone Simon as the little devil Belle sent to tempt him. 

The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950)

John Garfield and Patricia Neal in The Breaking Point

Cast: John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernandez, Wallace Ford, Edmon Ryan, Ralph Dumke, Guy Thomajan, William Campbell, Sherry Jackson, Donna Jo Boyce, Victor Sen Young. Screenplay: Ranald MacDougall, based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Ted D. McCord. Art direction: Edward Carrere. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Max Steiner.

If the setup, an honest fishing-boat captain forced into some intrigue he really doesn't want to get mixed up in, sounds familiar, that's because The Breaking Point was based on Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. And that had been the basis for a much looser adaptation (it mostly just kept the title) by Howard Hawks, with the aid of screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, in 1944. But here, instead of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, we get John Garfield and Patricia Neal -- considerable actors both, but striking no sparks and teaching no one how to whistle. The New York Times's ineffable film critic Bosley Crowther much preferred The Breaking Point, calling the Hawks version a "feeble swing and a cut at Ernest Hemingway's memorable story of a tough guy" whereas director Michael Curtiz and screenwriter Ranald MacDougall "got hold of that fable and socked it into a four-base hit." Crowther's baseball metaphors aside, it's possible to admire the professionalism of Curtiz's direction and the adherence to a downer ending for Garfield's Harry Morgan, while still feeling that in their film Hawks, Furthman, Faulkner, Bogart, Bacall, et al. knew and displayed a lot more about the Hemingway virtue of grace under pressure.

The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima, 1970)

Cast: Kazuo Goto, Emiko Iwasaki, Sukio Fukuoka, Kenichi Fukuda, Hiroshi Isogai, Kazuo Hashimoto, Kazuya Horikoshi, Tomoyo Oshima. Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima, Tsutomu Tamura, Masato Hara, Mamoru Sasaki. Cinematography: Toichiro Narushima. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Nagisa Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will on Film owes something to Michelangelo Antonio's Blow-Up (1966) in that both involve photography that tantalizes and hints at an unsolved (unsolvable?) mystery. But Oshima's film has political overtones, a kind of goodbye-to-all-that movie about the waning of student protests in Japan. The story it tells is about the quest of Motoki (Kazuo Goto) to find out why a young activist, Endo (Kazuya Horikoshi), committed suicide when he was being chased by police across a rooftop. Motoki tries to puzzle out Endo's motives by retracing the footage he left in the camera he was holding when he leaped (fell? was pushed?). But the film resists interpretation almost as much as the one Oshima made about it. Oshima is always surprising and enigmatic, and this is one of his more challenging works.

The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969)

Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in The Bed Sitting Room

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Richard Warwick, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Frank Thornton, Dandy Nichols. Screenplay: John Antrobus, Charles Wood, based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Ken Thorne.

Seemingly every comic actor in 1960s Britain turns up somewhere in Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, but they don't generate many laughs. The problem with most absurdist comedies is the absence of a grounding normality, and in the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, in which Britain has been turned into a vast trash dump by a nuclear war, there's not much to serve as a norm against which its silliness can play out. The point is to satirize our pre-apocalyptic complacency, and once you get that point the film mostly asks you to sit around and wait for your particular favorite actor to make his or her appearance. Oh, there's Ralph Richardson. Ah, that's Mona Washbourne. Good, that's Marty Feldman. And so on for 90 minutes. It only seems longer.

True Stories (David Byrne, 1986)

David Byrne in True Stories

Cast: David Byrne, John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Spalding Gray, Swoosie Kurtz, Jo Harvey Allen, Alix Elias, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Tito Larriva, John Ingle, Matthew Posey. Screenplay: Stephen Tobolowsky, Beth Henley, David Byrne. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Caroline Biggerstaff. Music: David Byrne.

Does David Byrne's film about Texans celebrating the state's sesquicentennial reflect the condescending view of a hipster or is it a good-hearted tribute to human eccentricity? It's probably a bit of both, I suspect, having done time in Texas, where a non-native can find a good deal to smirk about but can also be worn over by something warm and genuine. There's a good deal of the ludicrous in the "Celebration of Specialness" mounted by Byrne's Texans, but allow yourself to rise above ironic distancing and get swept up in the variety of human individuality in True Stories and I think you can sense that Byrne isn't really there just to poke fun at his characters, that he kind of loves them. Some of the film falls flat, but it's usually picked up again by performers like John Goodman and Swoosie Kurtz, and of course by the music of Byrne, Talking Heads, and others.

The Better 'Ole (Charles Reisner, 1926)

Syd Chaplin in The Better 'Ole

Cast: Syd Chaplin, Harold Goodwin, Jack Ackroyd, Edgar Kennedy, Charles K. Gerrard, Theodore Lorch, Doris Hill, Arthur Clayton. Screenplay: Darryl F. Zanuck, Charles Reisner, intertitles by Robert E. Hopkins, based on a play by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Eliot. Cinematography: Edwin B. DuPar. Art direction: Ben Carré. Film editing: Ray Enright. Music: Maurice Baron.

Slapstick comedy starring Charles Chaplin's older brother Syd Chaplin as "Old Bill," a British soldier in World War I. Based on a 1917 stage musical that had been filmed once before, The Better 'Ole was released in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process with a synchronized music track and sound effects but no dialogue. The character of Old Bill was created by Bruce Bairnsfather in a newspaper cartoon published as a morale builder during the war. The film, which centers on Bill's involvement in exposing a German spy ring, tends to drag a bit as it works out some plot switches, and most of the physical comedy is old hat.

Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Cast: Fumio Watanabe, Miyuki Kuwano, Takao Yoshizawa, Akiko Koyama, Masahiko Tsugawa, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Kei Sato, Rokko Toura, Shinko Ujiie, Ichiro Hayami. Screenplay: Toshiro Ishido, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata. Art direction: Koji Uno. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Riichiro Manabe.

The wedding of Nozawa (Fumio Watanabe) and Reiko (Miyuki Kuwano) is interrupted by protesters who denounce the couple for betraying the ideals of the Japanese student movement of the 1950s. Nagisa Oshima's Night and Fog in Japan is a heady portrait of ideological conflict filled with flashbacks as a variety of witnesses open old political wounds, but it's hard to follow especially for Westerners not well versed in the history of the period.

Bad Times at the El Royale (Drew Goddard, 2018)

Chris Hemsworth in Bad Times at the El Royale

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Chris Hemsworth, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman. Screenplay: Drew Goddard. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Martin Whist. Film editing: Lisa Lassek. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Giddy, bloody thriller that has been called "Tarantinoesque" for its blend of violence and humor, Bad Times at the El Royale runs too long at 141 minutes, but it has good performances, particularly from Jeff Bridges and Cynthia Erivo, and Chris Hemsworth (shirtless of course) as a sadistic villain. It feels like a cult film that hasn't yet found its cult the way, say, writer-director Drew Goddard's The Cabin in the Woods (2011) did. 

The Witnesses (André Téchiné, 2007)

Johan Libéreau and Sami Bouajila in The Witnesses

Cast: Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Béart, Sami Bouajila, Johan Libéreau, Julie Depardieu, Constance Dollé, Lorenzo Balducci, Alain Cauchi. Screenplay: André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Viviane Zingg. Cinematography: Julien Hirsch. Production design: Michèle Abbé-Vannier. Film editing: Martine Giordano. Music: Philippe Sarde.

The time is 1984, and AIDS has just begun to make its menace completely known in the small circle of friends who constitute André Téchiné's "witnesses." They include Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) and Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a married couple with a baby; Adrien (Michel Blanc), their middle-aged doctor friend; and Manu (Johan Libéreau), a gay man who is Adrien's protégé (i.e., he loves the young man but they don't have sex). Eventually, Manu will contract AIDS, complicating things because he and Mehdi have begun having sex. Téchiné works out all of these complications with a beautiful deftness that avoids sugarcoating the fatal epidemic but still manages to leave viewers with a satisfactory resolution.

Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

Mariko Kaga and Ryo Ikebe in Pale Flower

Cast: Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga, Takashi Fujiki, Naoki Sugiura, Shin'ichiro Mikami, Isao Sasaki, Koji Nakahara, Chisako Hara, Saiji Miyaguchi, Eijiro Tono, Mikizo Hirata. Screenplay: Masaru Baba, Masahiro Shinoda, based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara. Cinematography: Masao Kosugi. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu.

Masahiro Shinoda does noir better than almost anybody in Pale Flower, a lush, brooding film about a middle-aged, burning-out yakuza and a beautiful but damned young woman, both played to perfection by, respectively, Ryo Ikebe and Mariko Kaga. Also near perfection: Masao Kosugi's chiaroscuro cinematography and Toru Takemitsu's nervous score. 

Sing a Song of Sex (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)

Cast: Ichiro Araki, Kazuko Tajima, Juzo Itami, Akiko Koyama, Koji Iwabuchi, Kazuyoshi Kushida, Hiroshi Sato, Nobuko Miyamoto, Hiroko Masuda, Hideko Yoshida. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Toshio Tajima, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Set decoration: Jusho Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Politics and pornography intersect in Sing a Song of Sex, a film which, though it has four credited screenwriters, was largely improvised by its young cast. It's set at a time of political demonstrations, during which the teacher (Juzo Itami) of a group of young men preparing for their examinations tells them that bawdy songs -- the film's Japanese title has also been translated as A Treatise on Bawdy Songs -- are themselves a political statement, a way for the poorer classes to find release from oppression. And so the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred in the film as the young men act, if only in their imaginations, upon their desires, many of which focus on the pretty Mayuko (Kazuko Tajima), whom they depersonalize by referring to her by her seat number in class, 469. Often enigmatic, Sing a Song of Sex is the kind of film for which it's best that many of us just go along for the ride rather than to try to unravel its social and political implications, which are very much of a particular time and place.

Old Acquaintance (Vincent Sherman, 1943)

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, John Loder, Gig Young, Dolores Moran, Phillip Reed, Roscoe Karnes, Anne Revere, Esther Dale. Screenplay: John Van Druten, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a play by John Van Druten. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Terry O. Morse. Music: Franz Waxman.

One of those actress pairings that you can't help being drawn to, no matter the quality of the movie: Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Fortunately, the movie, Old Acquaintance, is pretty good. (So was their earlier teaming in 1939, in William Goulding's The Old Maid, during which they are said to have had off-screen battles.) It's a story of two childhood friends who both grow up to be successful novelists, though Davis's Kit Marlowe is a critical darling while Hopkins's Millie Drake is a commercial success. They also grow up orbiting the same man, Preston Drake (John Loder), though Millie is the one who marries him and has a daughter with him. Eventually, Millie and Preston split, and the daughter, Dede, grows up to be played by Dolores Moran, and wouldn't you know it, to take Kit's much younger lover, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young), away from her. The central fact of the relationship between Kit and Millie, however, is that they represent opposite temperaments: Kit is solid and cynical, while Millie is high-strung and manic. All of this makes for some entertaining scenes, which is all that's needed in a Bette Davis movie, or a Miriam Hopkins one, for that matter.