The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

Cast: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Evelyn Varden, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper, Henry Jones, Paul Fix, Joan Croydon, Gage Clarke, Jesse White, Frank Cady. Screenplay: John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson and a novel by William March. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Alex North. 

The Bad Seed stands out today as one of the more muddle-headed products of Production Code censorship. In the play and novel on which the movie was based, Christine Penmark, the unwitting carrier of the gene that turns her daughter, Rhoda, into a serial killer, commits suicide after giving the child an overdose of sleeping pills. One of the shocks of the novel and play is that Rhoda survives to kill again. But suicide as a positive plot resolution and crimes that go unpunished were taboo under the Code, so John Lee Mahin's adaptation blunts the ending for both characters. And then, to add farce to bathos, someone thought it a good idea to add a "curtain call" sequence in which the actress playing Christine, Nancy Kelly, gives the actress playing Rhoda, Patty McCormack, a spanking. Since spanking is hardly a punishment for murder, you have to wonder if Kelly is punishing McCormack for upstaging her. (In any case, McCormack seems to be enjoying it a little too much.) Still, if you take the movie on its own terms, it has its creepy moments, most of them involving McCormack, whom we spot as a bad kid from the moment she shows up with her braids so tight it looks like they hurt and wearing a starchy, spotless outfit that no decent child would have tolerated for a moment. There's some entertaining overplaying by Evelyn Varden as the psychologizing landlady and Henry Jones as the nosy hired man. The production is stagy and the performances often overblown, with the exception of Kelly, who strives to make her character -- and the ridiculous premise that evil is inherited -- credible. It's a role that could easily have tipped over into camp -- as the rest of the film often does -- but Kelly balances right on the edge. 

Spiritual Kung Fu (Lo Wei, 1978)

Cast: Jackie Chan, Kao Kuang, Dean Shek, James Tien, Yee Fat, Wang Yao, Jane Kwong, Hsu Hong, Chui Yuen, Peng Kang, Li Hai Lung, Li Chun Tung, Yuen Biao. Screenplay: Pan Lei. Cinematography: Chen Jung-Shu. Art direction: Chou Chih-Liang. Film editing: Liang Yung-Charn. Music: Frankie Chan. 

Ghosts in red fright wigs help Yi-Lang (Jackie Chan) develop the skills necessary to thwart a plot against the Shaolin temple where he's a martial arts student. The movie makes about as much sense as that sentence, but it's giddy fun. 

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, Shirley Douglas, Stephen Lack. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider, based on a  book by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

Jeremy Irons's performance as the twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle is spectacular in its subtle differentiation between the two men. It's one of David Cronenberg's body-horror films, and is said to have given many viewers, especially women, nightmares. 

The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921)

Jackie Coogan and Charles Chaplin in The Kid

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance, Carl Miller, Henry Bergman, Lita Grey, Jules Hanft, Raymond Lee, Walter Lynch, John McKinnon, Granville Redmond, Charles Reiser, Edgar Sherrod, Minnie Stearns, S.D. Wilcox, Tom Wilson. Screenplay: Charles Chaplin. Cinematography: Roland Totheroh. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Charles Chaplin. Music: Charles Chaplin. 

Charles Chaplin's first feature film is not as mawkish as a story about the Little Tramp's raising a foundling might have been. It includes one of Chaplin's wackier fantasy sequences, in which he dreams that he and his fellow slum denizens have become angels and must fight it out with devils. 

The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)

Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man

Cast: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland, Ingrid Pitt, Lindsay Kemp, Russell Waters, Aubrey Morris, Irene Sunters. Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer, based on a novel by David Pinner. Cinematography: Harry Waxman. Art direction: Seamus Flannery. Film editing: Eric Boyd-Perkins. Music: Paul Giovanni. 

Edward Woodward plays a police officer from the mainland who goes to investigate the disappearance of a young girl on a remote Scottish island and falls into a terrible trap. This celebrated horror film benefits from some intelligent writing, particularly in the conflict of the bigoted Christian policeman and the carnally pagan islanders. Christopher Lee, who plays the island's sophisticated laird, called it one of his favorite roles, and he brings his usual suavely sinister presence to it.  

Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989)

Charles Lane and Nicole Alysia in Sidewalk Stories

Cast: Charles Lane, Nicole Alysia, Sandye Wilson, Trula Hoosier, Darnell Williams. Screenplay: Charles Lane. Cinematography: Bill Dill. Production design: Ina Mayhew. Film editing: Charles Lane, Ann Stein. Music: Marc Marder.  

A low-budget independent classic, with writer-director-producer-editor as a homeless man who, like Charles Chaplin's Tramp in The Kid (1921), gets encumbered with a small child. It's a smart blend of neorealism and sentiment that gets its impetus not only from Chaplin's movie but also from Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). The movie is silent until the very end, when its message about homelessness is verbalized. 

Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932)

Charles Laughton in Island of Lost Souls

Cast: Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi, Kathleen Burke, Arthur Hohl, Stanley Fields, Paul Hurst, Hans Steinke, Tetsu Komai, George Irving. Screenplay: Waldemar Young, Philip Wylie, based on a novel by H.G. Wells. Cinematography: Karl Struss.  Art direction: Hans Dreier. 

Lost in Yonkers (Martha Coolidge, 1993)

Mercedes Ruehl and Richard Dreyfuss in Lost in Yonkers

Cast: Mercedes Ruehl, Richard Dreyfuss, Irene Worth, Brad Stoll, Mark Damus, David Strathairn, Robert Miranda, Jack Laufer, Susan Merson, Illya Haase. Screenplay: Neil Simon, based on his play. Cinematography: Johnny E. Jensen. Production design: David Chapman. Film editing: Steven Cohen. Music: Elmer Bernstein. 

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

Dominique Labourier and Juliet Berto in Céline and Julie Go Boating

Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder, Nathalie Asnar, Marie-Thérèse Saussure, Philippe Clévenot. Screenplay: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, based in part on stories by Henry James. Cinematography: Jacques Renard. Film editing: Nicole Lubtchansky. Music: Jean-Marie Sénia. 

Dos Monjes (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1934)

Victor Urruchúa in Dos Monjes

Cast: Victor Urruchúa, Carlos Villatoro, Magda Haller, Beltrán de Heredia, Emma Roldán. Screenplay: Juan Bustillo Oro, José Manuel Cordero. Cinematography: Agustín Jiménez. Production design: Mariano Rodríguez Granada, Carlos Toussaint. Film editing: Juan Bustillo Oro. Music: Max Urban. 

The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960)

Supriya Choudhury in The Cloud-Capped Star

Cast: Supriya Choudhury, Anil Chatterjee, Bijon Bhattacharya, Gita Dey, Gita Ghatak, Dwiju Bhawal, Niranjan Ray. Screenplay: Ritwik Ghatak, Samiran Dutta, Shaktipada Rajguru. Cinematography: Dinen Gupta. Production design: Ravi Chatterjee. Film editing: Ramesh Joshi. Music: Jyotirindra Moitra. 

Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950)

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Where the Sidewalk Ends

Cast: Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Bert Freed, Tom Tully, Karl Malden, Ruth Donnelly, Craig Stevens, Neville Brand, Grayce Mills, Robert F. Simon, Harry von Zell. Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Victor Trivas, Frank P. Rosenberg, Robert E. Kent, based on a novel by William L. Stuart. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler. Music: Cyril J. Mockridge. 

In Where the Sidewalk Ends, Dana Andrews plays Mark Dixon, a tough cop who's just a little too eager to rough up the suspects, and he starts the film by getting demoted for it That barely fazes him, however: When he's called on to interview Ken Paine (Craig Stevens), a suspect in a murder that's just been committed, Paine fights back and Dixon punches him out. Unfortunately, Paine had a severe head injury in the war, and he dies. Dixon's attempts to cover up only make things worse, leading to a snarl of consequences that form the plot of this darkly entertaining crime drama. What elevates Where the Sidewalk Ends into more than routine is mostly Ben Hecht's richly slangy, cynical dialogue and Otto Preminger's smooth direction. It helps, too, that Preminger is working with people who made his Laura (1944) one of the classics of Hollywood film: Andrews, of course, who even shares the name Mark with his cop counterpart in Laura, Gene Tierney as another leading lady with a lousy taste in men, and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who won an Oscar for the earlier movie. Laura was, however, almost baroque in contrast with the tight, spare Where the Sidewalk Ends, which depends on Hecht's skill at crafting tough talk to overcome some of the story's reliance on pop psychology: Dixon, it seems, developed his sadistic approach to police work because he hated his father, who was a hoodlum gunned down by the cops. The film ends on a nicely unresolved note after Dixon admits to killing Paine and trying to cover it up at the same time that he's being honored for bringing mobster Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) to justice. 

Blind Alley (Charles Vidor, 1939)

Cast: Chester Morris, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Dvorak, Joan Perry, Melville Cooper, Rose Stradner, John Eldredge, Ann Doran, Marc Lawrence, Stanley Brown, Scotty Beckett, Milburn Stone, Marie Blake. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald, Michael Blankfort, Albert Duffy, based on a play by James Warwick. Cinematography: Lucien Ballard. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: George Parrish. 

Blind Alley has a familiar setup: a killer on the run from the cops takes a family hostage in their own home. Chester Morris plays the killer, Hal Wilson, who moves in on the Shelby household, whose head is a college professor and psychiatrist played by Ralph Bellamy. Wilson, it turns out, is a psychopath, plagued by a recurrent dream, and Dr. Shelby sees the opportunity to disarm him by using the tools of psychotherapy. It works, sort of, in a rather too simplistic fashion, as the shrink decodes the symbolism of Wilson's dream as a traumatic event from his childhood that the killer has been repressing. The movie is a little stagy, as any adaptation of a play to screen is likely to be, but it's tidy enough in its storytelling that I didn't mind the obvious curtain lines and creaky attempts to "open out" the action -- for example, by visualizing the contents of Wilson's nightmare. It's nice to see Bellamy playing something other than a stooge for Cary Grant, as he did so memorably in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941). Morris is given to chewing the scenery but Ann Dvorak is good as his moll, Mary, who knows how to handle him well enough that Shelby can work his cure. The movie is sometimes cited as one of the first films noir, which only shows how flexible any definition of that genre has to be. 

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cast: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Richard Courcet, Nicolas Devauchelle, Adiatou Massudi, Mickael Ravovski, Dan Herzberg, Giuseppe Molino, Gianfranco Poddighe, Marc Veh, Thong Duy Nguyen, Jean-Yves Vivet, Bernardo Montet, Dimitri Tsiapkinis, Djanel Zemali, Abdelkader Bouti. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, based on a novella by Herman Melville. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Charles-Henri de Pierrefeu, Eran Zur. 

Claire Denis's Beau Travail doesn't really have much in common with Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991). Bigelow's film is pure pulp movie action thriller material, whereas Denis's is thoughtfully derived from a literary classic, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. But both films are directed by women with a keenly objective eye toward male display, the acting-out of testosterone-driven urges, a vision that gives these movies a special erotic charge. It might be worth bringing in a third film for consideration here: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982), a film made by a gay man that, like Denis's, also contains overtones of Billy Budd. But where Fassbinder's movie feels overheated, even campy, Denis's film, for all its intensity, has a coolness to it. I think that sometimes Denis, for all the scenes of barechested Legionnaires working out intensely, even intimately in the desert sun, is more restrained than she might be. The central conflict of her film, between Galoup (Denis Lavant), the movie's Claggart equivalent, and Sentain (Grégoire Colin), the Billy Budd of the movie, is fragmented in Denis's telling. All of the film's Legionnaires are handsome, so that Sentain doesn't stand out immediately from the group the way Melville's Billy does. The development of Galoup's jealous antipathy is subtly handled, mostly by casting the story as a flashback by Galoup after being court-martialed and expelled from the Legion -- this Claggart doesn't die. Neither, for that matter, does this Billy Budd, although he comes closer to it. But Beau Travail is still something like a great movie, maybe because Denis's avoidance of melodramatic excess and narrative hand-holding leaves it up to the viewer to draw inferences about motives and behavior. The film gets a great boost from Agnès Godard's hungry cinematography, a score that includes excerpts from another version of Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten's opera, and most especially from the Legionnaires' training routines, choreographed by Bernardo Montet.    

The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981)

Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Hilton McRae, Emily Morgan, Charlotte Mitchell, Lynsey Baxter, Peter Vaughan, Colin Jeavons, Liz Smith, Patience Collier, Leo McKern. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by John Fowles. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Carl Davis. 

When I used to teach a course on Victorian literature, I would assign, in addition to Dickens and George Eliot and the Brontës, John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman because, more than any other critical work I know of, it illuminated what those 19th-century novelists were up to: what they were telling us that their contemporary readers knew firsthand about the manners and morals and sexuality of their times. And about the intellectual controversies, such as Darwinism and societal change, that raged in the times. And crucially, about the conventions and evasions of fiction itself. Not much of this is readily translatable into cinematic terms, so when Karel Reisz came to film the novel and Harold Pinter to write the screenplay for it, much of that, especially the metafictional aspect of Fowles's book, had to be jettisoned. Instead, Reisz and Pinter chose to tell the main story of the novel -- the love affair of Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) and Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) -- within the framework of a story about the actors, Anna (Streep) and Mike (Irons), also having a affair while performing in a movie about Sarah and Charles. The result, for anyone who relished the novel, was bound to be disappointing, even with actors as skilled as the film's stars. The movie is splendidly mounted and photographed, the music score is ravishing, and the performances are subtle and witty. But the frame seems gratuitous. Fowles's novel famously had alternate endings for its story about Sarah and Charles: one conventionally tidy in the manner of Victorian fiction, the other enigmatic in the manner of modern novels. The film instead assigns the Victorian ending to Sarah and Charles, the modern one to Anna and Mike, which only approximates the point Fowles was trying to make about fictional conventions. Streep got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and it's her usual carefully detailed work. To some it's a little too detailed and self conscious, and it doesn't quite match with Irons's performance: He admitted that, as a stage-trained actor making his first major film, he was puzzled by what Streep was doing until he realized that she knew much more about acting for the camera than he did. It's possible that if you haven't read the book, you're at an advantage, but as one who admires the original, I find this version pretty but flat. 

Our Modern Maidens (Jack Conway, 1929)

Joan Crawford and Anita Page in Our Modern Maidens

Cast: Joan Crawford, Rod La Rocque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Anita Page, Edward J. Nugent, Josephine Dunn, Albert Gran. Screenplay: Josephine Lovett, titles by Marian Ainslee, Ruth Cummings. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist. Music: Arthur Lange. 

Cedric Gibbons got a lot of credit for designs he didn't do: His name was listed as art director on almost all of MGM's movies from 1925, when he joined the studio, through 1956, when he retired, but largely because he was head of the art department; the actual hands-on design work on any given film was probably that of the person listed along with Gibbons, usually as assistant art director. That said, I think it's almost a sure thing that the set designs for Our Modern Maidens were done by Gibbons himself: The giveaway is that they're a splendidly, almost over-the-top art deco, a style associated with Gibbons, which influenced even his most famous design: the Oscar statuette. The décor of B. Bickering Brown's mansion is a fabulous assemblage of deco staircases, columns, cornices, and whatnots, an almost cubist setting for Billie Brown (Joan Crawford) to sashay about in, wearing designs by Adrian. The truth is, the movie needs the boost it gets from the design, given that the story is a fairly banal account of modern maidens Billie and Kentucky (Anita Page) in dangerous liaisons designed to point the moral: Don't get too modern when it comes to sex. Billie, who has her fling at several wild parties, gets secretly engaged to Gil (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who has a little thing going with Kentucky, but when Billie meets Glenn Abbott (Rod La Rocque), things get complicated. She flirts with Abbott, who has connections in the state department, to get Gil posted to the embassy in Paris, but breaks off with Abbott when he gets a little too hot and bothered. Then, on her wedding day, she learns that Kentucky is pregnant with Gil's child, and she realizes that she really loves Abbott. Not to worry, he'll forgive her. This was Crawford's last silent film, and it's not entirely silent: Leo roars over the MGM logo, there's a music soundtrack, some sound effects and crowd noises, and once we hear a public announcement over a loudspeaker. It's not quite as entertaining as the movie to which it's a sequel, Harry Beaumont's 1928 Our Dancing Daughters, which also starred Crawford and Page, but it holds the eye if not the mind. 

Pressure Point (Hubert Cornfield, 1962)

Bobby Darin and Sidney Poitier in Pressure Point

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Bobby Darin, Peter Falk, Carl Benton Reid, Mary Munday, Howard Caine, Gilbert Green, Barry Gordon, Richard Bakalayan, Lynn Loring, Anne Barton. Screenplay: Hubert Cornfield, S. Lee Pogostin, based on a story by Robert M. Lindner. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Ernest Gold. 

Stanley Kramer was a producer best known for "message movies," films aimed at the soft heart of the liberal consensus. Though in his heyday, Kramer's movies were often labeled "controversial," their point of view was rarely more than demonstrations that tolerance was good, prejudice bad. He also directed some of his most famous films, like The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). And although he handed over the task of directing Pressure Point to a little-known second-stringer, Hubert Cornfield, it's widely assumed that Kramer also directed much of the film. It was not a box office success. Seen today, it feels more like a TV drama of the era, despite excellent cinematography by Ernest Haller, a nervous score by Ernest Gold, a commanding performance by Sidney Poitier and an incisive one by Bobby Darin. But it also feels like it's taking place in a world that never was: one in which, in 1942, a Black man could be a prison psychiatrist, treating a patient who was arrested on a charge of sedition, for being a member of the pro-Nazi organization the German-American Bund. Poitier's character, known only as "Doctor," is trying to help Darin's "Patient" with the problems he has sleeping. Naturally, this leads to the Nazi Patient taunting the Doctor with his racist beliefs. But when he cures the Patient of insomnia by having him face up to childhood trauma involving his abusive father and clinging mother, the Doctor wants to go further: to treat the Patient's racism as a mental disease. Even Sidney Poitier, at the peak of his "Magical Negro" persona, can't make that turn credible. Still, Pressure Point almost overcomes the artificiality of its story, the simplistic look at psychoanalysis, and the falsification of race relations in the 1940s, thanks to some intense acting. There's a completely gratuitous frame story set in the period when the movie was made, in which the older Doctor (Poitier with artfully grayed hair) counsels a young psychiatrist played by Peter Falk not to give up on his treatment of an especially frustrating patient by telling the story of his experience with the Nazi Patient. Unnecessary at it is, the frame -- like the rest of the movie -- is made watchable by the rapport of the actors.  

The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)

Manjinder Virk in The Arbor

Cast: Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Natalie Gavin, Parvani Lingiah, Danny Webb, Kate Rutter, Jimi Mistry, Robert Emms, Kathryn Pogson, George Costigan, Monica Dolan, Neil Dudgeon, Matthew McNulty, Lizzie Roper. Screenplay: Clio Barnard. Cinematography: Ole Bratt Birkeland. Production design: Matthew Button. Film editing: Nick Fenton, Daniel Goddard. Music: Harry Escott, Molly Nyman. 

The Arbor is a heartfelt, scathing docudrama about promise without fulfillment, centered on the playwright Andrea Dunbar and her children, particularly the eldest, Lorraine, who is played on screen by the actress Manjinder Virk, lip-synching the actual Lorraine's voice from recorded interviews. Director Clio Barnard uses this technique throughout the film, with the voices of Lorraine's siblings, her foster parents, and other members of the Dunbar family dubbed in place of the voices of the on-screen actors. It's an arresting device that runs the risk of having a film full of monologues, which Barnard avoids by staging the scenes in the actual locations, particularly the drab, run-down council estate (i.e. "public housing"), where the Dunbars lived. She also includes scenes from Dunbar's plays, and the film, Rita, Sue and Bob Too (Alan Clarke, 1987), that was made from one of them. The Arbor culminates in the story of Lorraine's descent into drug addiction and the consequent death of her small son. It's not a film designed to lift your spirits, but the effectiveness of Barnard's way of telling the story makes it well worth seeing. 

A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda

Cast: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, Maria Aitken, Tom Georgeson, Patricia Hayes, Geoffrey Palmer, Cynthia Cleese. Screenplay: John Cleese, Charles Crichton. Cinematography: Alan Hume. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: John Jympson. Music: John Du Prez. 

By all rights, A Fish Called Wanda shouldn't have worked: It's a blend of comic acting styles, from Monty Python to Hollywood to Broadway, under the direction of a septuagenarian best known for his work on that comparatively restrained classic of British postwar comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). It's vulgar and silly and hardly sensitive to social concerns -- it was denounced by disability rights advocates for the laughs derived from the Michael Palin character's stutter. And yet it remains one of the most successful screen comedies in history. It won Kevin Kline an Oscar for his performance as the dopey Übermensch Otto, and covered John Cleese, Palin, and Jamie Lee Curtis with glory -- especially Cleese, who not only wrote the screenplay (from a story he concocted with director Charles Crichton) but also reportedly did much of the directing for which Crichton got the Oscar nomination. The secret to its success is that it takes nothing seriously, especially the British and American national identity, but is so light-hearted in its offenses that they amuse rather than offend. It's full of little in-jokes, like calling the character played by Tom Georgeson "George Thomason," and naming Cleese's character Archie Leach without nodding to the fact that it was Cary Grant's real name. (That one may even be a double in-joke, since Grant himself ad-libbed a line about Archie Leach in Howard Hawks's 1941 screwball classic His Girl Friday.) Maybe it falls a little flat at the end, with the frantic business at Heathrow, but it would be hard to top what has gone before. 

In a Year With 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

Volker Spengler in In a Year With 13 Moons

Cast: Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Eva Mattes, Günther Kaufmann, Lilo Pempeit, Isolde Barth, Karl Scheydt, Walter Bockmayer, Peter Kollek, Bob Dorsay, Gerhard Zwerenz. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Production design: Franz Vacek. Film editing: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz. Music: Peer Raben. 

You might need to be better versed in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than I am to give a full account of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons, but two things are immediately apparent: It's a fable about identity and desire, and it's a very personal film for its maker. Fassbinder wrote, directed, photographed, and edited the movie as a response to the death of his lover Armin Meier. The story gradually tells us about the life of Elvira Weisshaupt (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman who began as Erwin Weisshaupt, married and fathered a daughter, but after falling in love with a man decided to undergo surgery and become Elvira. Some ambivalence about her transition seems to remain: At the beginning of the film, she has dressed as a man in order to solicit sex from male prostitutes, but that ends with her being severely beaten. When she returns to the apartment she shares with her lover, Christoph (Karl Scheydt), he angrily packs a suitcase and storms out. Over the next few days, with the help of a prostitute named Zora (Ingrid Caven), Elvira seeks out a nun (Lilo Pempeit), whom she knew from her childhood in an orphanage and who tells her the truth about her parentage. She also visits with her ex-wife and her daughter, and makes her way in to see the man who inspired her transition, the powerful Anton Saitz (Gottfried John), a reunion that cannot end well. Despite the tragic drift of Elvira's story, there are ludicrous moments, as when she joins with the employees in Saitz's office in recreating a routine from a movie starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that is playing on the office television. There's also a gruesome sequence in a slaughterhouse as well as a brief interlude in which Elvira watches a man commit suicide after expounding his Schopenhaueresque philosophy of the will. This is Fassbinder at both his most enigmatic and his most heartfelt. 

10 to 11 (Pelin Esmer, 2009)

Mithat Esmer in 10 to 11

Cast: Nejat Isler, Mithat Esmer, Laçin Ceylan, Tayanç Ayaydin, Savas Akova. Screenplay: Pelin Esmer. Cinematography: Özgür Eken. Art direction: Naz Erayda. Film editing: Ayhan Ergürsel, Pelin Esmer, Cem Yildirim. 

Pelin Esmer's 10 to 11 gets its title from one of the items in Mithat's collection: a clock that he has carefully watched to determine precisely how much behind the time it runs. When he calculates that figure, he writes it on a label and attaches it to the clock, which is only one of the numerous clocks he has collected. We would call Mithat a hoarder: He lives in an Istanbul apartment with stacks and stacks of newspapers, which are only part of the various things he collects. Unfortunately, the building in which he lives is in the process of being condemned, and the elderly Mithat is the only holdout among the tenants willing to sign the building over to the authorities and relocate to a new building. He stubbornly resists the pleas of the head of the tenants association to do so, and finally is the only remaining resident, along with the caretaker, Ali. As the film ends even Ali has forsaken him, though he leaves behind an item that Mithat has long sought for his collection. Mithat's story is more droll and exasperating than melancholy, partly because Mithat is played by writer-director Esmer's uncle, Mithat Esmer, himself a real-life collector. The interplay between Mithat and Ali (Nejat Isler) becomes a delicately handled character study, with the naïve, provincial Ali gradually being educated in the ways of the big city by Mithat's cranky, precise demands. At one point, Mithat is visited by a nephew who, seeing a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka on a shelf, opens it to pour a drink, only to be scolded by Mithat because the unopened bottle was part of his collection. Even recapping the bottle isn't sufficient to restore it to the pristine state Mithat demands for that part of his collection. The story becomes a resonant commentary on the nature of time and memory, with Mithat determinedly attempting to hold onto the past in tangible form, as the changing city tries to sweep the past away. 

The Children of the Century (Diane Kurys, 1999)

Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche in The Children of the Century

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel, Stefano Dionisi, Robin Renucci, Karin Viard, Isabelle Carré, Patrick Chesnais, Arnaud Giovaninetti, Denis Podalydès, Olivier Foubert, Marie-France Mignal, Michel Robin, Ludivine Sagnier. Screenplay: Murray Head, Diane Kurys, François-Olivier Rousseau. Cinematography: Vilko Filac. Production design: Bernard Vézat. Film editing: Joëlle Van Effenterre. Music: Luis Bacalov. 

Handsomely mounted and splendidly acted, Diane Kurys's The Children of the Century ultimately goes the way of all biopic costume dramas: history and fact bumping up against dramatic and narrative imperatives, and opulence overwhelming story. It's fun to watch Juliette Binoche throw herself into the role of George Sand, but it's more fun to watch her in films in which she has to create a character from scratch rather than from what books have already us about the character. Benoît Magimel goes grandly over the top in giving us the mood-swinging Alfred de Musset, but at the cost of making us wonder why Sand would have put up with his excesses as much as she did. Still, there's magnificent chemistry between the actors in the best scenes and even if the film doesn't do much to illuminate the works of Sand and de Musset, it's easy on the eyes.  

Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)

Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey in Carmen Jones

Cast: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Olga James, Joe Adams, Brock Peters, Roy Glenn, Nick Stewart, Diahann Carroll. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, based on a book for a musical by Oscar Hammerstein II, an opera by Georges Bizet, Henri Meilhac, and Ludovic Halévy, and a novella by Prosper Mérimée. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Art direction: Edward L. Ilou. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Georges Bizet. 

Turning Georges Bizet's opera Carmen into a stage musical with an all-Black cast set in the American South was not the coolest idea to start with, especially when it resulted in such silliness as turning the bullfighter Escamillo into the prizefighter Husky Miller and the tavern run by Lillas Pastia into a roadhouse run by Billy Pastor. Still, Otto Preminger's film version of Carmen Jones has a lot to recommend it, particularly Dorothy Dandridge's Carmen, a fiery, committed performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress -- the first ever for a Black performer of either sex in a leading role. The theatrical version that premiered in 1943 was designed to be sung by musical theater performers, not opera singers, but when Otto Preminger agreed to direct the film version, he insisted on operatic voices, meaning that even though Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, the film's Joe, were well-known as singers, their roles and others had to be dubbed in the musical numbers. Marilyn Horne, then only 20, hadn't yet developed the vocal depth and flexibility that would make her an operatic superstar, but her voice matched well with Dandridge's speaking voice, so the illusion works. LeVerne Hutcherson was less successful in dubbing for Belafonte, whose own singing voice was so familiar that the disparity with Hutcherson's becomes obvious. But the best vocal performance in the film is probably that of Pearl Bailey, who belts out the Gypsy Song, "Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum," in her own voice and provides one of the movie's high points. The lyrics provided by Oscar Hammerstein II are sometimes banal -- the Toreador Song turns into "Stand Up and Fight Until You Hear the Bell" -- but usually serviceable. Unfortunately, the film falls apart at the end, with a clumsy staging of the final tragic confrontation of Carmen and Joe.   

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2013)

Cast: Lee Kang-sheng, Yang Kuei-Mei, Lu Yi-Ching, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lee Yi Cheng, Lee Yi Chieh, Wu Jin-kai. Screenplay: Song Peng Fei, Tsai Ming-liang, Tung Cheng-Yu. Cinematography: Liao Pen-Jung, Lu Ching-Hsin, Shong Woon-Chong. Art direction: Liu Masa, Tsai Ming-liang. Film editing: Lei Chen-Ching. 

To go from yesterday's post on Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break to today's on Tsai Ming-liang's Stray Dogs is to go from one cinematic polarity, the hyperkinetic, to the opposite, the almost intolerably static. We mostly expect some version of the former from movies: Motion pictures are by definition supposed to move. But Tsai stubbornly resists that impulse, even to the point of almost eliminating what makes cinema its own distinct art form: montage. Instead we have long, long takes, beginning at the start of the film with a woman lethargically brushing her hair while she sits on the edge of a bed where two children are sleeping. One of the key sequences of Stray Dogs is a shot of two men in plastic raincoats standing on a traffic island while holding up advertising placards; the sequence lasts so long that we welcome the moments when the traffic light apparently changes and the eye is relieved by the movement of cross-traffic. And the film concludes with a man and a woman standing absolutely still, looking at something (the mural in the picture above) off-screen. Minutes pass in which nothing happens except for the tear that rolls down the woman's face. This kind of stasis can be enormously effective when there's a narrative direction to it, as in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), in which the fixed camera makes us watch as the banality of Jeanne's daily chores is established with long takes of her washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and so on, only to be disturbed when things go slightly wrong with those chores on a second visit to her apartment, giving Jeanne's story a forward movement. Stray Dogs accumulates such moments in the lives of the man with the advertising sign and his two children, along with three women -- including the one brushing her hair and the woman looking at the mural -- who interact with them. But in this film we seem to be looking for looking's sake. We may react to the social context of their lives -- the man and the children are homeless, and one of the women lives in a crumbling, water-streaked dwelling -- as the import of the film, but Tsai seems to feel no urgency about letting us know more about them than he shows us. There are moments of enigmatic drama unlike any we've seen in a film before, as when the man finds a cabbage in the bed he shares with the children. They have drawn a face on it, and the man first tries to smother it with a pillow, then attacks it with his teeth and nails and devours much of it. Any significance we may impose on this scene comes from us -- is he, for example, attacking the hopelessness of his existence, taking it out on the cabbage doll? -- but Tsai isn't going to tip his hand in that or any other direction. The film won numerous awards, and had several critics hauling out the word "masterpiece," but it also earned a dismissal from the New York Times critic Stephen Holden as a "glum, humorless exercise in Asian miserablism." I can't dismiss it that glibly, but I also can't endorse it with great enthusiasm. It's not a movie I would urge on anyone who isn't prepared to undergo a good deal of ennui -- my own finger hovered over the fast forward button several times -- in order to reflect the nature of the cinematic experience.  

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, James Le Gros, John Philbin, Bojesse Christopher, Julian Reyes, Daniel Beer, Chris Pedersen, Vincent Klyn, Anthony Kiedis, Dave Olson, Lee Tergesen. Screenplay: Rich King, W. Peter Iliff. Cinematography: Donald Peterman. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Mark Isham. 

Point Break is so kinetic a movie, so crammed with stunts and fights and chases, that it almost seems like a parody of an action flick. Just when you wonder how the movie can top its surfing sequences, it throws in a skydiving episode. When you're expecting another car chase, you get an exhilarating, not to say exhausting, foot chase. I have to wonder if what makes Kathryn Bigelow such a successful action director is that, as a woman, she has a special point of view on what testosterone-driven action looks like. The dialogue is loaded with machismo: "Young, dumb, and full of cum." "It's basic dog psychology: If you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit." Skydiving is "Sex with gods. You can't beat that!... One hundred percent pure adrenaline." "Why be a servant to the law when you can be its master?" "You gonna jump or jerk off?" After a fight: "This is stimulating, but we're out of here." It's the one female character of any consequence in the movie, Lori Petty's Tyler, who sardonically quits a scene by commenting, "Okay, too much testosterone around here for me." Bigelow's objectification of male display is what gives the movie its subversive quality.   

 

History Is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)

Leo Carrillo, Charles Boyer, and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night

Cast: Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur, Leo Carrillo, Colin Clive, Ivan Lebedeff, George Meeker, Lucien Prival, George Davis. Screenplay: Gene Towne, C. Graham Baker, Vincent Lawrence, David Hertz. Cinematography: David Abel. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Margaret Clancey. Music: Alfred Newman.

It starts as a domestic drama about a failing marriage, then becomes a suspense thriller, then a romance, then a rom-com with screwball touches, and winds up as a disaster movie. Objectively viewed, History Is Made at Night is a mess. But somehow it holds together, partly because of the chemistry of its leads, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, as well as some good comic acting by Leo Carrillo and the creepiness of Colin Clive, outdoing even his Dr. Frankenstein. And most of all, I think, by the direction of Frank Borzage, an under-recognized helmsman who seems willing to take anything the screenwriters and producer Walter Wanger throw at him. I've always been a fan of Arthur, and I think she's at her best here. She's not the sort of leading lady that makes you think men readily fall deeply in love with her, but here her character, Irene Vail, causes both the sinister steamship magnate Bruce Vail (Clive) and the suave Parisian headwaiter Paul Dumond (Boyer) to become obsessed with her, to the point that Dumond pursues her from France to America and Vail is willing not only to murder his chauffeur but even to sink an ocean liner with 3,000 passengers for her sake. Somehow, Arthur imbues the character with a quirky charm that makes all this credible. No, it's not a great movie by anyone's standards, but as a sample of Hollywood hokum it's at least great fun.  

À Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

Sandrine Bonnaire and Maurice Pialat in À Nos Amours

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Christophe Odent, Dominique Bresnehard, Cyril Collard, Cyr Boitard, Jacques Fischi, Valérie Schlumberger, Evelyne Ker, Pierre Novion, Tsilka Theodoru. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Jacques Loiseleux. Production design: Jean-Paul Camail, Arlette Langmann. Film editing: Valérie Condroyer, Sophie Coussin, Yann Dedet. 

Maurice Pialat is one of those directors who don't make it easy for viewers. He likes jump cuts from time to place that keep you slightly off-balance, and he seems to be obsessed with dysfunction. Not that À Nos Amours is hard to follow or hard to watch. It's graced with a skillful performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, making her screen debut in the key role of Suzanne, the teenage daughter in a family so volatile that it sometimes erupts into blows. Pialat himself plays the father, who finally gets so fed up with his wife (Evelyne Ker) and his dilettantish son (Dominique Bresnehard) that he abandons them -- not before knocking them around a few times. In response to this family craziness, Suzanne turns promiscuous, ignoring the attentions of Luc (Cyr Boitard), who loves her, and sleeping around until she finally decides to marry Jean-Pierre (Cyril Collard), though at the end of the film she has left him and is off to America. There's a raw immediacy to the film, created in part by Pialat's indifference to conventional exposition and transitions, so that we often feel as if we've been thrust into rooms to which we haven't been invited. 

All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

Jessica Lange and Roy Scheider in All That Jazz

Cast: Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, Cliff Gorman, Ben Vereen, Erzsebet Foldi, Michael Tolan, Max Wright, William LeMessena, Irene Kane, Deborah Geffner, John Lithgow, Sandahl Bergman. Screenplay: Robert Alan Aurthur, Bob Fosse. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Philip Rosenberg, Tony Walton. Film editing: Alan Heim. Music: Ralph Burns. 

Bob Fosse's All That Jazz has a valedictory feeling to it, and not just because it's about a man foreseeing his own death, which strikingly foreshadows that of Fosse himself. It also feels like one of the last films of the 1970s, a decade associated with young hotshot American filmmakers who were determined to go their own way and to craft movies filled with personal vision that didn't sugarcoat the material or pander and talk down to the audience. After them, the myth goes, came the deluge of movies made with a view to spawning sequels and franchises. That summary is oversimple, of course, but perhaps it does illuminate why a film like All That Jazz continues to fascinate viewers, despite its inherent messiness and occasional excessive self-indulgence. It's held together by Fosse's abundant mad energy and by a cunning, committed performance by Roy Scheider as the driven, workaholic, self-destructive Joe Gideon, whom only the most obtuse would deny is a warts-and-all self-portrait by Fosse. All That Jazz is usually classified as a musical, because of its elaborate production numbers, but it fits the genre only loosely. It's a bit like 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) in that it's a "backstage musical" with a serious undercurrent, although the undercurrent becomes a torrent in All That Jazz, and the music becomes an ironic counterpoint to the sardonic drama of the life and death of Joe Gideon.   

L'Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)

Michel Terrazon and Marie Marc in L'Enfance Nue

Cast: Michel Terrazon, Linda Gutenberg, Raoul Billerey, Pierrette Deplanque, Marie-Louise Thierry, René Thierry, Henri Puff, Marie Marc, Maurice Coussonneau. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil. No credited production designer or film editor. 

L'Enfance Nue is as straightforward and unadorned a portrait of a dysfunctional childhood as you're likely to see, with no special pleading, no excuses or indictments. Young François (Michel Terrazon) does some bad things: He kills a cat (though he first tries to nurse the wounded animal), he steals compulsively, and he helps cause a serious automobile accident. But we also see that he's capable of affection, especially to the aged Meme (Marie Marc) in the second foster family to which he's posted. (Even then, he swipes money from the coin purse under her pillow.) Yet there's no attempt on the part of director Maurice Pialat to sentimentalize him, or even to manipulate our sympathies toward him as openly as François Truffaut does with the boy Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959). (Truffaut was one of the producers of L'Enfance Nue.) The title means, of course, "naked childhood," which is also the title under which it was sometimes released in English-speaking countries, and the nakedness consists of a steady realism, a documentary approach to telling François's story. There are moments of warmth in Pialat's film, such as a wedding party scene, but the general effect of L'Enfance Nue is a clear-eyed directness, as unsparing to the audience as it is to the characters. 

Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)

Dorothea Wieck and Hertha Thiele in Mädchen in Uniform

Cast: Hertha Theile, Dorothea Wieck, Emilia Unda, Hedy Krila, Ellen Schwanneke, Erika Mann, Else Ehser, Gertrud de Lalsky, Lene Berdolt, Margory Bodker, Charlotte Witthauer, Ethel Reschke, Doris Thalmer. Screenplay: Christa Winsloe, Friedrich Dammann, based on a play by Winsloe. Cinematography: Reimar Kuntze, Franz Weihmayr. Art direction: Fritz Maurischat, Friedrich Winckler-Tannenberg. Film editing: Oswald Hafenrichter. Music: Hanson Milde-Meissner. 

An aura of naughtiness still clings to the title of Mädchen in Uniform, which is unfortunate, as if this drama set in a German girls' school were some sort of exploitation flick. What we have instead is a sensible, sensitive account of the emotional confusion of adolescence, done with a finesse in acting and camerawork that mostly seemed to escape Hollywood filmmakers in 1931. The premise is this: Manuela (Hertha Theile) is the new girl at a school run by a grim-faced martinet (Emilia Unda) who believes that education should be a matter of Prussian discipline. Naturally, the students rebel as much as they can, as do some of the teachers, especially Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck), who believes in kindness and love as a way to inspire the girls. Naturally, all of the girls love Fräulein von Bernburg, who is quite good-looking, but Manuela, whose mother died when she was a baby, is especially drawn to her -- so much so that she freezes with embarrassment whenever the teacher calls on her in class. Eventually, this leads to a declaration of love before the whole school, and a consequent scandal that pits the head of the school against not only Manuela but also Fräulein von Bernburg. Director Leontine Sagan effectively stages both the boisterous scenes with the girls and the quiet ones between the principal characters. The film serves as an indictment of the harshness of the school system, which may have been as much a reason for its being banned when the Nazis came to power as its understanding and approving of the schoolgirl infatuation, which led to its being banned and heavily cut in the United States. It's often called a "lesbian classic," which it may well be, but it tells a universal story irrespective of sexual orientation. 

Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

David Niven, Deborah Kerr, and Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse

Cast: Jean Seberg, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Juliette Gréco, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, David Oxley, Elga Anderson, Jeremy Burnham, Eveline Eyfel. Screenplay: Arthur Laurents, based on a novel by Françoise Sagan. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Roger K. Furse. Film editing: Helga Cranston. Music: Georges Auric. 

Only a couple of years after Otto Preminger's adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel Bonjour Tristesse was released to critical and box office indifference, filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni would make their international reputations with films about moneyed Europeans fighting vainly the old ennui. In fact, Bonjour Tristesse is not so very much different in content from movies like Antonioni's L'Avventura and Fellini's La Dolce Vita, both of which rocketed to success in 1960. They're all about what today we might call "Eurotrash" -- people with too much money and not enough to occupy their souls. Preminger's film was hindered a bit by the censors, who forbade any explicit descriptions of what was going on between Raymond (David Niven) and his several mistresses, much less any extrapolation about his exceptionally close relationship with his daughter, Cecile (Jean Seberg). And the casting of the British Niven and Deborah Kerr and the American Jean Seberg as characters meant to be très French, feels more than a little off-base. There's also some heavy-handed telegraphing of the film's message, summed up in a title song by composer Georges Auric with lyrics by screenwriter Arthur Laurents that's sung by Juliette Gréco in a Paris boîte. But Bonjour Tristesse has gained in favor over the years, no longer dismissed as a complete misfire. Mylène Demongeot adds some much needed comic relief in the form of Elsa, Raymond's sunburned mistress, a necessary counterpoint to Cecile's existential angst. Auric's score provides a continental flavor to the film, and Georges Périnal's cinematography makes the most of locations, especially the Paris that's viewed in monochrome as contrasted with the Technicolor vividness of the Riviera. Since the film is told from the point of view of Seberg's Cecile, the place where she feels depressed and regretful is necessarily more drab than the place where she had a brief encounter with something like freedom and power. It's Paris as Kansas and the Riviera as Oz, but without the "no place like home" nostalgia. 

Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Vernon Dobtcheff, Louise Lemoine Torrès, Rodolphe Pauly, Mariane Plasteig, Diabolo, Denis Evrard, Albert Delpy, Marie Pillet. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Baptiste Glaymann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. 

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) together again, nine years later. They meet in a Parisian bookstore where Jesse, now a successful novelist, is signing copies of his book, whose story is based on their brief encounter in Vienna nine years earlier. It might have remained that, just a brief encounter with echoes of the great 1945 David Lean film of that name, except that Céline's curiosity tinged with guilt brings her to the book signing, where she hovers on the fringes until she catches Jesse's eye. Like Richard Linklater's 1995 film, Before Sunrise, Jesse's novel ends on an uncertain note: He doesn't say whether the characters he has based on himself and Céline made their appointed rendezvous in Vienna. The people at the book signing urge him to express an opinion on whether they did, but Jesse hedges. And so it remains for Céline herself, who invites him to join her for coffee after the signing, to elicit the truth. She knows she didn't make the planned reunion: Her grandmother, she tells him, died and she was at the funeral when they were supposed to meet. But did he show up? He says no at first, but then confesses the truth: He was there, but with no way for either to contact the other, he only had to assume that she decided it was over. He has married and has a son; she has remained single. And so begins the delicate verbal dance that Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke have scripted for them to perform. They start almost as they did in Before Sunrise: he the brash, open American with the nervous laugh; she the reserved but intrigued Frenchwoman, only faintly condescending to his cultural and linguistic disorientation in a foreign land. And as in the first film, they walk and talk and prod each other into more and more revelations. Like the first film, Before Sunset also has a terminus ad quem that gives their encounter a sense of urgency: He has a plane to catch and a driver to get him to the airport on time. And like the first film, this one ends on an ambiguity: They have gone to her room, where they exchange a bit of dialogue before the credits roll. "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane," she says. "I know," he says. And so we have another sequel to wait for. I know of no other English-language film that so deftly uses dialogue and the chemistry of two actors (who also wrote much of the dialogue) to accomplish its romantic aims while at the same time scoring so many points about the passage of time, the limits of communication, and the significance of sex.  

Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1981)

Jorge Julião and Fernando Ramos da Silva in Pixote

Cast: Fernando Ramos da Silva, Jorge Julião, Marilia Pêra, Gilberto Moura, Edilson Lino, Zenildo Oliveira Santos, Claudio Bernardo, Israel Feres David, Jose Nilson Martin Dos Santos, Elke Maravilha, Tony Tornado, Jardel Filho, Rubens de Falco. Screenplay: Hector Babenco, Jorge Durán, based on a novel by José Louzeiro. Cinematography: Rodolfo Sánchez. Art direction: Clovis Bueno. Film editing: Luiz Elias. Music: John Neschling. 

At the risk of sounding flippant, I have to call Hector Babenco's Pixote an almost perfect feel-bad movie. Not only is what appears on screen unrelentingly harrowing and sordid, but the fate of the young non-professional actor who plays the title character -- he was shot dead by police at the age of 19 -- carries its own burden of sorrow. Yet as a work of art Pixote has a kind of tragic nobility, an unflinching look at the life of the wretched of the Earth, accomplished with the kind of realism that only film can provide. I can't help feeling that Dostoevsky and Zola would have envied Babenco the availability of the camera to show the world what they could only display in words. Pixote (Fernando Ramos da Silva) is a street kid, rounded up and sent to a brutal reformatory, from which he escapes with a group of friends, who hustle their way into the underworld of Brazil's cities, involving themselves in everything from purse-snatching to drug-running to prostitution to murder. It works because of a stunning ensemble of performances with a few standouts, especially Jorge Julão as the transgender Lilica and Marilia Pêra as the ailing prostitute Sueli. If Pixote has a major failing, it's that its tragic vision results in no catharsis, only a numb feeling of hopelessness as Pixote and his kind face an unaccommodating society. But it's also a work of well-shaped art, of subtly shifting tones, that needs to be judged chiefly for its clarity and honesty. 

The Divorce of Lady X (Tim Whelan, 1938)

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X

Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes, Ralph Richardson, Morton Selten, J.H. Roberts, Gertrude Musgrove, Gus McNaughton, H.B. Hallam, Eileen Peel. Screenplay: Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, Arthur Wimperis, based on a play by Gilbert Wakefield. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Film editing: Walter Stovkis. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Screwball comedy movies, in which an otherwise sober and respectable male, usually a lawyer, a professor, or a businessman, is prodded into absurd behavior and outlandish situations by a giddy, beautiful, and usually rich female, seem to be a particularly American genre. They may have their antecedents in the French farces of Feydeau and Labiche, but they need that American sense, particularly common in the Great Depression, that the rich are idle triflers, not to be trusted by everyday hard-working folk. Which may be why the British attempt at screwball seen in The Divorce of Lady X is a bit of a misfire. Merle Oberon plays the madcap lady in the film, who delights in deceiving and annoying the barrister played by Laurence Olivier until he inevitably falls in love with her. One problem with the film lies in the casting: Olivier's vulpine mien is not one that easily expresses naïveté, which the barrister Everard Logan must possess in order to fall for Leslie Steele's wiles, when she allows him to believe that she's really the scandalous Lady Mere. The real Lady Mere is played by Binnie Barnes, and the subplot revolves around the desire of her husband, played by Ralph Richardson, to divorce her, with the aid of Logan in the dual role of both barrister and corespondent -- how he got into that predicament is the rather clumsy setup for the film. Barnes and Richardson are far better suited to this kind of comedy than Oberon and Olivier, and they contribute some of the more amusing moments in the movie. It's filmed in the rather wan hues of early Technicolor, which only contribute to the general sense of underachievement.

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Thomas E. Sanders. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Fernando Velázquez. 

In Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro takes all the elements of the Gothic romance and turns them up to 11, which is the best thing he could have done with such familiar, not to say cheesy, material. There's the dewy heroine who makes a dubious marriage, the sinister rival female, the doughty but dull spurned suitor, and of course the Old Dark House. This one makes Thornfield Hall, Manderley, and even the Castle of Otranto look like a suburban tract house: It's a great malevolent beetle of a mansion, squatting on a bleak landscape, decaying steadily and grossly while sinking into the mine above which it sits. It's inhabited by the cash-poor aristocrats Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), along with a sizable contingent of ghosts. To it, Thomas brings his bride, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), whose father has recently died (rather violently, as we have seen), leaving her the family fortune. Edith is spunky and imaginative, an aspiring writer of ghost fiction, having had her own encounters with ghosts who warned her to "beware Crimson Peak." What she doesn't know, of course, is that the place to which her husband has brought her is called Crimson Peak, for its blood-red clay, by the locals. Anyway, the truth will out, and in a variety of gruesome ways. What makes the movie work is that del Toro is willing to go over the top entertainingly, stretching credibility to (and sometimes beyond) the breaking point, without smirking about it and camping it up. So we have, for example, a duel between Edith and Lucille, with both wearing flimsy, flowing nightwear. (Kate Hawley's costume designs are splendidly excessive.) We have apparitions in various states of decay and a plethora of insect life. The ghost of Edith's mother appears in a form that looks something like a cross between a tarantula and a woman with dreadlocks. There are vats of disgusting red murk in the cellar in which things are submerged. It's all a bit much, but the actors know how to take it in their stride. Having played Loki in the Marvel movies and the vampire Adam in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Hiddleston in particular knows how to make a character both attractive and disquieting at the same time. Del Toro isn't up to anything of great moment in this movie, but it's good to see the material handled with a distinct sensibility and an avoidance of the tried and true. 

Snow Trail (Senkichi Taniguchi, 1947)

Setsuko Wakayama and Toshiro Mifune in Snow Trail

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Akitake Kono, Yoshio Kosugi, Setsuko Wakayama, Kokuten Kodo. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa. Cinematography: Junichi Segawa. Art direction: Taizo Kawashima. Film editing: Senkichi Taniguchi. Music: Akira Ifukube. 

Snow Trail is the start of a famous collaboration, that of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. It was Mifune's first film, and he goes headlong into his handsome, brooding mode, playing a tough, ruthless bank robber on the run in the Japanese Alps. Kurosawa didn't direct the film, but wrote the screenplay and had a strong hand in working with director Senkichi Taniguchi. Though Mifune gets top billing and has probably the showiest role, the best performance in the film comes, as it often did, from Takashi Shimura, who would collaborate with Mifune and Kurosawa often over the next couple of decades. They would reunite almost immediately for Drunken Angel the next year. Mifune and Shimura have joined with a third robber, played by Yoshio Kusugi, in their flight into the mountains, which hasn't gone unnoticed by the police. After a brief stay at a popular spa, the trio head deeper into the snowy wilderness, where their plight becomes more desperate after Kusugi's character is killed by an avalanche. But they come across a small lodge run by an elderly man (Kokuten Kodo) and his granddaughter, Haruko (Setsuko Wakayama) for the benefit of mountain climbers. Only one climber, Honda (Akitake Kono), is currently staying there. It's the perfect hideout: The only contact with the outside world is by carrier pigeon (which Mifune's character swiftly kills). But when the barking of dogs alerts the robbers that their pursuers are drawing nearer, they decide to move on with the aid of Honda, the experienced climber, whom Mifune's character forces to be their guide by threatening to kill Haruko. The robber played by Shimura is beginning to have regrets, but he goes along with the plan until calamity puts the climbers in peril. It's a solid action drama, with some fine cinematography in the mountain wilderness. It gets a little sentimental in the scenes with Haruko and her grandfather -- there's a heavy-handed use of a record of, no kidding, "My Old Kentucky Home" -- but good performances keep it going.