Macao (Josef von Sternberg, 1952)

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in Macao

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Thomas Gomez, Gloria Grahame, Brad Dexter, Edward Ashley, Philip Ahn, Vladimir Sokoloff, Don Zelaya. Screenplay: Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Stanley Rubin, Robert Creighton Williams. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Samuel E. Beetley, Robert Golden. Music: Anthony Collins.

Macao has the makings of a much better movie: two enormously potent and well-matched stars, a solid supporting cast, a legendary director, an exotic setting, and a twisty, noirish plot. What it doesn't have is dialogue worthy of speaking. The actors give the right twists to their lines, but too often they fall flat. "You don't want that junk," Brad Dexter's Halloran says to his mistress, Margie (Gloria Grahame), about the jewel she's flashing. "Diamonds would only cheapen you." "Yeah," she replies, "but what a way to be cheapened." At another point, Robert Mitchum's Nick Cochran tells Margie, "You know, you remind me of an old Egyptian girlfriend of mine: the Sphinx." She retorts, "Are you partial to females made of stone?" This is tin-eared repartee at best, delivered by the actors as if they were the witty work of better screenwriters like Jules Furthman or Ben Hecht. Still, the opportunity to see Mitchum paired with Jane Russell, one of the few actresses capable of putting him in his place, is irresistible. She plays Julie Benson, an itinerant night club singer who meets Cochran on board the ship on which they're making their way from Hong Kong to Macao. He's a soldier of fortune, on the lam from some sort of misdeed in New York. She picks his pocket, keeps the dough, and tosses his wallet, which contains his passport, overboard. They cross paths again in Macao, where she goes to work for club owner Halloran, who has his own problems with the police. He knows that a detective is coming to Macao to try to nab him, and when Cochran shows up to try to get his money back from Julie, Halloran mistakes him for the detective. In fact, the detective turns out to be in disguise as a traveling salesman called Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), whom Julie and Cochran met earlier on the ship. What follows is much ado about a diamond necklace that Halloran left in a safe deposit box in Hong Kong which Trumble is using to try to lure Halloran across the three-mile limit outside Macao so the police can arrest him. Some double-crosses and chase scenes and a few murders ensue before Cochran and Julie can embrace in the final scene. There's enough good stuff to overcome the misfired dialogue, despite the film's reputation as a troubled shoot in which the actors fought constantly with Sternberg, then at the end of his career. Nicholas Ray completed the film after Sternberg left the shoot, which started in 1950 -- RKO owner Howard Hughes held it from release as he tried to build Russell's  career, which he had launched with hype and controversy over The Outlaw (1943). The delay also explains why Gloria Grahame feels miscast in such a small role in Macao: Her career had taken off while the film was on the shelf.

The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, 1927)

Olin Francis, Leo Willis, and Harold Lloyd in The Kid Brother

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Walter James, Leo Willis, Olin Francis, Constantine Romanoff, Eddie Boland, Frank Lanning, Ralph Yearsley. Screenplay: John Grey, Ted Wilde, Thomas J. Criser, Lex Neal, Howard J. Green. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Allen McNeil.

Underdog saves the day, gets the girl. It's a familiar comic formula, but that's no reason to criticize Harold Lloyd for reworking it constantly. In The Kid Brother he's Harold Hickory, the unappreciated youngest of the family, who as the title card tells us, "was born on April Fool's Day. The stork that brought him could hardly fly for laughing." His two brawny older brothers and their brawny father, the local sheriff, mock him for his weakness and never include him in their manly business, leaving him at home to do the washing and cooking. The plot has something to do with Sheriff Hickory (Walter James) raising money to build a dam. But the money gets stolen by the unscrupulous manager (Eddie Boland) and the strongman (Constantine Romanoff) in a traveling medicine show. Also with the show is "the girl," Mary (Jobyna Ralston), whose late father owned the show and who tries in vain to deal with the crooks in the company. Eventually, the sheriff gets charged with absconding with the funds and is almost lynched before Harold, who has tracked down the thieves and captured them, arrives to set things right. There's an extended battle between Harold and the strongman that takes all of the ingenuity of which the former is capable -- it's almost as much an action film as it is a comedy. It's also a romance, with the scene in which Harold and Mary meet as one of the film's sweeter highlights, almost Chaplinesque in its conception. Harold has just rescued Mary from the attentions of the lecherous strongman, scaring him off by picking up a stick that he doesn't realize has a snake twined around it. Then the snake scares Mary into jumping into Harold's arms, sparking their romance. They must part, however, and as she walks downhill out of sight, he climbs a tree to get a look at her; he calls out to ask her name and she replies, then goes farther downhill out of sight; so he climbs still higher and asks where she lives; she tells him and walks out of sight again, so he climbs higher and waves goodbye. When she is finally out of sight, he sits on a branch and sighs, and then of course falls down past his earlier perches. It's a beautifully constructed sequence -- literally, as a tower was built next to the tree for the camera to ascend. I think The Kid Brother is less well-known than other Lloyd features like Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925), but for inventiveness and variety of tone it may be the best of the three.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril (Buichi Saito, 1972)

Tomisaburo Wakayama and Akihiro Tomikawa in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Yoichi Hayashi, Michi Azuma, Akihiro Tomikawa, Asao Koike, Hiroshi Tanaka, Tatsuo Endo, Shin Kishida, So Yamamura. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Art direction: Shigenori Shimoishizaka. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hideaki Sakurai.

Like any movie-lover in these days of streaming venues, I am encumbered with choices. So I resort to a kind of enforced choice, namely, making lists. So I have queues of available films on my DVR as well as on the Criterion Channel, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and potentially others in the expanding streaming universe. I try to rotate steadily among them, usually on a first-in, first out basis -- meaning the one that has been on the list the longest gets watched next. (Yes, the rotation is occasionally broken, especially when a film I've been wanting to watch suddenly pops up.) And so I wind up watching some oddities that I probably wouldn't have chosen other than because their time on the queue had come. Like four of the six Lone Wolf and Cub films. It's not that I have any special love for Japanese samurai warrior films; I can take them or leave them. It's the result of my devotion to Turner Classic Movies and its somewhat fitful programming of foreign and silent films. Whenever one of those turns up on the schedule I put it on my queue. Hence, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril, a movie that sorely tests my tolerance of its genre. I enjoyed the first three films in the series, but Baby Cart in Peril feels a little tired. (I note here that the first three in the series were directed by Kenji Misumi, but this one by Buichi Saito, about whom I know nothing.) Once again, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is wheeling little Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) along the Demon Way in Hell -- his vision of the chaotic world of feudal Japan. Once again, there is a beautiful female assassin to be dealt with, along with various representatives of his enemy, the Yagyu clan. Once again, blood is shed and spurted and sprayed. Once again, there is a rape scene. And once again, Ogami single-handedly vanquishes an entire army. The film plays a bit with the formulas: Ogami and Daigoro are separated for a while in the film, during which time the cub Daigoro proves to be a worthy successor to his lone wolf father. And the film ends on an inconclusive note, as an exhausted, wounded Ogami pushes the baby cart along its way. Will he survive into a fifth film? Of course. Will I be there to watch it if TCM programs it? Let me think about that.

The Insult (Ziad Doueiri, 2017)

Adel Karam in The Insult

Kamel El Basha in The Insult

Cast: Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha, Camille Salameh, Diamand Bou Abboud, Rita Hayek, Talal Jurdi, Christine Choueiri, Julia Kassar, Rifaat Torbey, Carlos Chahine, Walid Abboud, Georges Daoud. Screenplay: Ziad Doueiri, Joelle Touma. Cinematography: Tommaso Fiorilli. Production design: Hussein Baydoun. Film editing: Dominique Marcombe. Music: Éric Neveux.

The pictures at the top of the post give away much of what The Insult is about: the twinned lives of the film's Lebanese and Palestinian antagonists. There's not one insult in the film, there are many, and they are flung back and forth across the gulf between Tony Hanna (Adel Karam) and Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha) throughout the film. It's a courtroom drama that seems intended to bring the entire Middle East into judgment, if only to show how intractable the tensions are, how difficult if not impossible to bring to justice. A small dispute over a drainage pipe explodes into a cause célèbre, spilling out of the courtroom into the streets. Ziad Doueiri and his co-scenarist Joelle Trouma have made a well-crafted film that won't solve the world's problems as readily as it might like to, but at least will remind us how petty at base some of them are -- and how much alike sworn enemies tend to be. There's a small moment in the film that brought this home to me the way those two photographs at the top do. In his testimony in court, Yasser, who is a construction foreman, is asked why he chose to use a more expensive crane than his contractor specified -- something the contractor earlier mentioned as a reason for taking Yasser off the project. The specified crane, Yasser explains, was made in China and was much less reliable than the one he chose, which was made in Germany. The camera at this point picks up the listening Tony, a garage mechanic who earlier in the film had complained about using shoddy Chinese auto parts instead of the superior German ones. It's moment that flickers across the screen but one that, if you've been paying attention to details, reinforces the men's similarities without hammering on them. The Insult was nominated as best foreign language feature by the Academy, and it's the kind of solid humanist filmmaking that the award frequently honors.  

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Go Kato, Yuko Hama, Isao Yamagata, Michitaro Mizushima, Ichiro Nakatana, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Yoshinobu Nishioka. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hiroshi Kamayatsu, Hideaki Sakurai.

There's no let-up to the bloodshed in the third installment of the Lone Wolf and Cub series: At the end, Ogami Itto (Tomisabuo Wakayama) stands alone in the middle of a corpse-strewn field, having vanquished an army of a couple of hundred men single-handedly -- or rather, with the help of little Daigoro and the baby cart, which is revealed to be a formidable fighting vehicle. But the most disturbing violence in the film is the rape of two women near the beginning of the film -- disturbing because it is treated realistically, rather than with the tricks of style that characterize the film's swordplay. The women are set upon by a gang of idlers, men waiting to be hired as fighters by whoever needs them. One member of the gang, however, holds himself aloof from the raping and pillaging that the others typically indulge in. He's Kanbei (Go Kato), a former samurai turned ronin, who is conscience-stricken, we learn, having been dishonored for an earlier failure to follow the orders of his lord to the letter, even though his actions saved the lord's life. This time, Kanbei remains loyal to the gang he has taken up with, and having come late to the scene of the rape, kills the two women and their servant, then has the three rapists draw straws to choose the one among them who will be killed as punishment for the rape. But just as Kanbei is killing the one who drew the short straw, Ogami comes upon the scene and kills the other two men. Kanbei challenges Ogami to a duel, but Ogami sheathes his sword and calls it a draw. What's going on here is a complex working out of the samurai code, which will resolve itself poignantly if bloodily at the end of the film when Ogami and Kanbei meet again. Which is to say that beneath the flash and dazzle of the multifarious violence of Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades, which includes an extended sequence in which Ogami is tortured to save a woman being sold into prostitution, lies a moral vision that's both alien and comprehensible. 

Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923)

Noah Young and Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott Clarke. Screenplay: Hal Roach, Sam Taylor, Tim Whelan; titles: H.M. Walker. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Film editing: Thomas J. Criser.

I was sure I had seen Safety Last! but as the film progressed I began to suspect that I had seen only excerpts, including the scene in which Harold Lloyd, aka The Boy, dangles from the clock, reprised countless times in compilations of great movie moments. But this great film is more than that moment, or even the extended sequence in which The Boy climbs the façade and encounters that treacherous timepiece. Getting to that moment involves byzantine, almost Rube Goldberg plotting. Because The Boy is not even supposed to be climbing the building: It's a task meant for The Pal (Bill Strother), who instead is fleeing from The Law (Noah Young), racing through the building from floor to floor inside, intending to swap places with The Boy at some perpetually receding moment. And The Pal is in trouble with The Law because of a run-in that resulted from The Boy mistaking The Law for an old buddy of his, a different cop, and involving The Pal in a prank played by mistake on The Law. And the reason The Boy is involved in climbing the building is that he wants to win The Girl (Mildred Davis), who thinks he's actually the general manager of the department store where he's actually a lowly clerk in danger of getting fired. And the reason The Girl thinks that is ... oh, hell, watch the movie yourself. The point is that Safety Last! is an intricately worked piece of art. By contrast, even the best film of Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, let's say The Gold Rush (1925) or The General (1926), is a comparatively simple affair, with a story line that doesn't tax the summarizer. Which may be a clue to why Lloyd is not as highly regarded or as fondly remembered as Chaplin or Keaton. He doesn't have the former's balletic gracefulness or the latter's athletic control. The delight of Lloyd's films doesn't come from watching Lloyd himself so much as from watching the situations he gets himself into, from watching him fail upward, so to speak, in Safety Last! Chaplin or Keaton would devise clever ways to climb that façade, whereas Lloyd bumbles and flounders, beset by clocks and pigeons and badminton nets, only to recover by luck and pluck. We don't think "What will he do next?" so much as "What will happen to him next?" This, mind you, is comic genius in itself, a shrewd devising of hilarious situations, but it's comedy imposed on the character, not emerging from within. Which doesn't make it less comic or less genius, of course.

Man Wanted (William Dieterle, 1932)

David Manners and Kay Francis in Man Wanted

Cast: Kay Francis, David Manners, Una Merkel, Andy Devine, Kenneth Thomson, Claire Dodd, Elizabeth Patterson, Edward Van Sloan. Screenplay: Robert Lord, Charles Kenyon. Cinematography: Gregg Toland. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: James Gibbon. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Man Wanted is an arch, sophisticated romantic comedy that needed an Ernst Lubitsch to handle its racy moments and a Howard Hawks to handle its snappy dialogue. William Dieterle was a good director, but he was neither of those men, so the movie feels slow when it should be lively, choppy when it should be speedy. The premise is this: Lois (Kay Francis) is a high-powered career woman, the editor of a magazine, married to a wealthy playboy (Kenneth Thomson) who cares more about playing polo and chasing other women than he does about their marriage. So when Tom (David Manners), a salesman for exercise equipment, pays a sales call on Lois and reveals that he knows shorthand -- from taking notes in his classes at Harvard -- he gets hired to replace the secretary she has just fired. You can fill in the rest. Francis carries a lot of the film on charm, even when the situations feel over-familiar and the dialogue doesn't sparkle the way it should. Check out her work for Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise, made the same year as this film, to see what might have been. Manners, best known today for his work in the horror movies Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932), and The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934), is a pleasantly forgettable leading man, and Andy Devine and Una Merkel are miscast as Tom's buddy and girlfriend, providing comic relief that doesn't quite relieve. 

The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)

Aleksey Batalov and Tatyana Samoylova in The Cranes Are Flying

Cast: Tatyana Samoylova, Aleksey Batalov, Vasiliy Merkurev, Aleksandr Shvorin, Svetlana Kharitonova, Konstantin Kadochnikov, Valentin Zubkov, Antonina Bogdanova, Boris Kokovkin, Ekaterina Kupriyanova. Screenplay: Viktor Rozov, based on his play. Cinematography: Sergey Urusevskiy. Production design: Evgeniy Svidetelev. Film editing: Mariya Timofeevna. Music: Moisey Vaynberg.

The Cranes Are Flying was received enthusiastically on its international release in 1957, partly as a sign of a thaw between the Soviet Union and the West. Among other things, it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Today, I think it's more likely to be judged for its visuals and its almost formalist construction than for the well-worn theme of its narrative, a romantic drama set against the backdrop of war. From the beginning I was struck by the compositions of cinematographer Sergey Urusefskiy, an evocative use of diagonals, framing the lovers Veronika (the extraordinary Tatyana Samoylova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) within the angles made by bridges and causeways, roads and ramps and staircases, all of which echo the image evoked in the title: the V-shaped flight of migrating cranes. Director Mikhail Kalatozov uses the image of flying cranes at the beginning of the film, almost as a harbinger of the coming war, and again at the end of the film, this time precisely as an image of returning peace. The V of the flying cranes at the beginning is soon mocked by the X of anti-tank barriers set up in the wartime street. But his entire film is structured of such echoes, including the crowds that weep at the departure of soldiers and at the end weep at their return -- or failure to do so. The film is full of beautifully staged moments, such as the return of Veronika to her home after a bombing raid. She has taken shelter in the subway but her family hasn't, and she rushes into the bombed-out building, climbs the burning stairs, and opens a door to nothingness, with only a dangling lampshade to recall the scene that had taken place in the apartment before. There are striking cuts, such as the one of feet walking across broken glass in a bombed apartment that's followed immediately by a soldier's feet slogging through mud. This particular cut also serves to link two key moments in the film: Veronika's rape by Boris's cousin Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) and Boris's death from a sniper's bullet. The Cranes Are Flying can be faulted for melodramatic excesses: Veronika's decision to marry her rapist doesn't come out any perceptible necessity, and the failure to report Boris as dead rather than missing seems there only to heighten her futile hope that he will return to her. But if you're going to be melodramatic, you should embrace it as whole-heartedly as Kalatazov does.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Kayo Matsuo, Akiji Kobayashi, Minoru Oki, Shin Kishida, Shogen Nitta, Takashi Ebata, Kappei Matsumoto, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hideaki Sakurai.

Among the cinematic innovations that Akira Kurosawa is credited with is the use of a pressurized hose to spew fake blood in his 1962 film Sanjuro. The story has it that the amount of pressure needed was miscalculated, and the explosion of gore nearly knocked Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet when he received the fatal blow from Toshiro Mifune's Sanjuro. But the effect was so startling -- and so in keeping with the comic tone that pervades the movie -- that Kurosawa decided to keep it in rather than go to the trouble of reshooting. And so a continuing motif of excessive bloodletting was introduced to the samurai movie. The pressure hoses get quite a workout in Kenji Misumi's second film (of six) in his Lone Wolf and Cub series, as his hero, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) continues to trundle little Daigoro (Akihiro Kobyashi) across the landscape of 17th-century Japan. Wide-eyed Daigoro is witness to all sorts of bloody encounters, and even at one point participates in them: Under attack by a small army, Ogami gives the pram containing the boy a shove into the melee, signaling him to release a mechanism that shoots blades out of the cart's wheels, cutting off a couple of the attackers below the knees. The story doesn't matter much: It's about Ogami's being commissioned to assassinate a man who threatens to reveal a clan's secret process for making indigo dye. This secret is so important that the people who plan to steal it commission ninjas to guard the man who plans to leak it, including a small army of female assassins and a trio of brothers who wear what look like large straw lampshades. Ogami bests them all in various ways, while continuing to defend Daigoro, who at one point is kidnapped and threatened with being dropped into a deep well. The film is full of ingenious ways of putting people to death, including a scene in which the guardians of the thief are crossing a desert when one of the brothers stops and plunges his iron-clawed hand into the sand, out of which bubbles a geyser of blood -- their opponents have buried themselves in the desert, planning an ambush that gets thwarted by the keen-eared brother. But eventually he too, gets what he deserves from Ogami, who cuts his throat, resulting in an almost touching moment in which the dying man listens to his final breath whistling through the wound -- a sound, he says, he always wanted to hear, but not from his own throat. It's this kind of distancing from the dismemberments and blood fountains that makes Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx tolerable, and sometimes even poetic.

Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas, 2018)

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Christa Théret, Nora Hamzawi, Pascal Greggory, Laurent Poitrenaux, Sigrid Bouaziz, Lionel Drey, Nicolas Bouchaud. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Simon Jacquet.

If we learn anything about the French from watching their movies, it's that they love to talk. So many French films are made up of scenes at a table, in a bed, on a train, where the people are less interested in food or sex or travel than in batting ideas back and forth. In Non-Fiction the ideas are about literature and its relationship to life, to commerce, to truth. And yes, the phrase "post-truth era" makes its sullen appearance in the discourse. We begin with the meeting of the poised, groomed publisher Alain Danielson (Guillaume Canet) with the shaggy, bearded writer Léonard Spiegel (Vincent Macaigne), and we can tell from Leónard's slightly anxious manner and Alain's smooth control that things will not end the way Léonard wants: Alain, who has published his other books, is not going to publish his latest. Underlying the situation is something Alain may or may not know (Léonard isn't sure): that Léonard has been having an affair with Alain's wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche), and moreover that the affair is the subject of Léonard's novel. (Léonard has always written romans à clef, although this time he thinks he has thrown Alain off the track by having slept with a popular TV anchorwoman as well as with Selena.) Of course, Alain has been having his own affair with a young woman, Laure (Christa Théret), who works for the publishing company as a sort of "new media" adviser -- leading the talk into conversations about the death of print, the power of the Internet, and so on. Léonard has a wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), who is a consultant to a leftist politician and is so busy that she barely has time for Léonard -- at one point, when she is leaving for an appointment, he goes in for a goodbye kiss and gets the door shut in his face. As for Selena, she's an actress trying to decide whether to commit to another season of the TV cop show she's currently appearing in, or to take an offer to appear in a stage production of Racine's Phèdre, a role she fears may be a sign that she's getting old. There's also a sly "meta" moment in the film when someone suggests that the publisher should hire Juliette Binoche to read the audiobook version of Léonard's novel and asks Selena if she knows her. Some may question whether the film is a satire that doesn't quite have the courage of its bite, or a commentary on the decline of the arts in an era of self-absorption. All of the relationships in the film eventually resolve themselves a little anti-climactically, but Olivier Assayas has such a light touch with the film that it's best to just relax and listen to the talk.

The Scar of Shame (Frank Peregini, 1927)

Norman Johnstone, Harry Henderson, Ann Kennedy, Lucia Lynn Moses in The Scar of Shame

Cast: Harry Henderson, Lucia Lynn Moses, Norman Johnstone, Ann Kennedy, William E. Pettus, Lawrence Chenault, Pearl McCormack. Screenplay: David Starkman. Cinematography: Al Liguori.

The Scar of Shame is usually categorized as a "race" movie -- one made for exclusively African-American audiences -- but it's really more about caste than about race. As sociologists point out, any group of people set aside for some overriding characteristic -- age, skin color, language, religion, sexual orientation, you name it -- tends to subdivide, to establish its own hierarchies, cliques, clans, privileged or subjugated groups. In its melodramatic way, The Scar of Shame is a keen-edged portrayal of black Americans under segregation, and the more remarkable because it was produced, written, and directed by white men. But the acceptance of the film by the audiences for which it was made suggests that it may have embodied some home truths. It's mostly a well-made film, though one in need of a stronger editor -- none is credited -- and eventually it has a misfire of an ending. The story centers on the fortunes of Alvin Hillyard (Harry Henderson), a young musician with ambitions to prove himself a serious (i.e., not jazz) composer, or as another character puts it in an intertitle, to become "the leading composer of our race." He rescues a young woman, Louise Howard (Lucia Lynn Moses), from being abused by her alcoholic stepfather, Spike (William E. Pettus), and marries her, mainly because she's pretty and he feels sorry for her. Unfortunately, he can't bring himself to tell his mother that he's wed someone not of their social class, and whenever he goes to visit her he leaves Louise at home. Meanwhile, the crooked Eddie Blake (Norman Johnstone) wants Louise to become a star attraction in the club he plans to open, and engineers a showdown with Alvin in which shots are fired and Louise is wounded. Having discovered that Alvin is ashamed of her lack of social status, Louise blames him and goes to work for Eddie. Alvin goes to prison, escapes, starts a new life under an assumed name, and falls in love with the pretty and socially prominent Alice Hathaway (Pearl McCormack). Meanwhile, Eddie has made a success of his club and Louise has a new admirer -- none other than Ralph Hathaway (Lawrence Chenault), Alice's father. It all ends with Louise first trying to blackmail Alvin but having a change of heart. She kills herself and exonerates Alvin in her suicide note, leaving Hathaway to moralize in a wordy intertitle, opining that if Louise had "had the proper training, if she had been taught the finer things in life, the higher aims, the higher hopes, she would not be lying cold in death! -- Oh! our people have much to learn!" Which is, of course, not the point at all: If Alvin hadn't been such a snob, such a "dicty sap," as Eddie calls him (the touches of African-American slang in the intertitles are delicious), Louise wouldn't have had to suffer. It would have been nice if the makers of The Scar of Shame had been more attentive to the ironies of their story and not so quick to slap on a wrong-headed moral about the need of the black community to pull itself up by its bootstraps. Still, it's a useful window onto the mindset of an era.

Hopscotch (Ronald Neame, 1980)

Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau in Hopscotch

Cast: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom, David Matthau, George Baker, Ivor Roberts, Lucy Saroyan, Severn Darden. Screenplay: Brian Garfield, Bryan Forbes, based on a novel by Garfield. Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson, Brian W. Roy. Production design: William J. Creber. Film editing: Carl Kress. Music: Ian Fraser.

Hopscotch is an engaging trifle with just enough bite into the hindquarters of international espionage bureaus to make it seem more substantial. It also has the improbable teaming of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, who have a kind of chemistry that recalls Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn at their best (which was mostly when George Cukor was directing them). It was their third film together, and Jackson reportedly accepted the part because she liked working with Matthau so much. With good reason: Their first film together, Melvin Frank's 1973 A Touch of Class, won her an Oscar, and their second, House Calls (Howard Zieff, 1978), was a solid box office success. Hopscotch actually doesn't give Jackson much to do: Her character, Isobel, is an old flame of Matthau's Miles Kendig, a CIA agent who decides to write a tell-all memoir to even the score with his blustering boss, Myerson (Ned Beatty), a far more committed Cold Warrior than Kendig, who sees the spy games for what they are. Isobel's role is mainly to help out occasionally when Kendig needs it, which he mostly doesn't; he's almost always ahead of the game. They have a few good scenes together, including their first encounter in the film, when they pretend not to know each other -- a scene that was actually written by Matthau. There are also some breezy moments between Kendig and his opposite number from the KGB, played with weary good humor by Herbert Lom. There's a special buoyancy to the film contributed by abundant borrowings from the music of Mozart, along with some Rossini and Puccini -- Matthau was an opera lover, so these bits of filigree are probably his contribution to the film, too.

The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Bill Murray and Adam Driver in The Dead Don't Die

Cast: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Larry Fessenden, Maya Delmont, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, RZA. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: Alex DiGerlando. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Sqürl.

I suppose that having made a vampire movie, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Jim Jarmusch may have felt he had to make a zombie movie, but I wish he hadn't. The Dead Don't Die might have become a cult film if there weren't so many good Jarmusch films to choose from: It has all the earmarks of a guilty pleasure movie, like cheeky dialogue and a trendy horror movie trope, the zombie apocalypse. And I have to admit that it's not as bad as most of the zombie fare, and that it's not even Jarmusch's worst film -- I'd have to rank it above The Limits of Control (2009) for that dubious distinction. But there's something dispirited about it, a feeling that having latched onto the idea for the movie, Jarmusch grew bored with it. That reflects itself in the gimmick that gradually creeps into the film: that the cops Cliff (Bill Murray) and Ronnie (Adam Driver) know they're in a movie. It first surfaces when the song "The Dead Don't Die" keeps reappearing on the radio and Ronnie refers to it as "the theme song." Then, in the middle of some byplay between the two of them, Cliff asks, "What, are we improvising here?" And eventually, after Ronnie says, "Oh man, this isn't gonna end well" one time too many, Cliff objects, and Ronnie admits that he's read the script. Cliff is incredulous: "Jim only gave me the scenes I appear in," he fumes. These "meta" moments are amusing, but they counter any involvement a viewer might have in the fates of the characters, predictable as the genre makes them. Still, I liked some things in the film, especially Tilda Swinton's eerie undertaker, who speaks with a Scottish accent and wields a mean samurai sword. I still think Jarmusch is a wonderful writer-director -- Paterson (2016) was clear evidence that he hasn't lost his touch -- when he's got the right subject in mind, but I think he needs to edit himself more, and not just make movies when an idea strikes his fancy.

Golden Eyes (Jun Fukuda, 1968)

Akira Takarada in Golden Eyes

Cast: Akira Takarada, Beverly Maeda, Tomomi Sawa, Makoto Sato, Andrew Hughes, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Nadao Kirino, Sachio Sakai, Toru Ibuku, Seishiro Kuno, Mari Sakurai. Screenplay: Jun Fukuda, Ei Ogawa, Michio Tsuzuki. Cinematography: Kazuo Yamada. Production design: Shigekazu Ikuno. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Masaru Sato.

Golden Eyes -- not to be confused with the real James Bond pic GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995) -- is a followup to Jun Fukada's 1965 Bond spoof Ironfinger. It's just as goofy but a little more slickly made than the first film. It also stars Akira Takarada as the Franco-Japanese spy Andrew Hoshino, who may or may not be an Interpol agent, and who seems to be devoted to his mother -- although this time he gets called on that when someone suggests that "Mom" is a code word or even an acronym for some mysterious agency. The action moves from Beirut to Japan and involves some jaw-droppingly improbable setups like a man impaled on a hook dangling from a helicopter, a group of assassins dressed like nannies pushing perambulators along a desert cliff, and a crate of Champagne used as an assault weapon. There are two pseudo-Bond Babes in this one, a knife-throwing hit-woman (Beverly Maeda) who turns out to be the heroine and a ditzy singer (Tomomi Sawa) who gets an extended take in which she sings a nonsense pop song. There's also a climactic shootout between Hoshino and a blind millionaire called Stonefeller (Andrew Hughes), who "sees" his target by means of a rifle fitted out with a directional microphone. No, really. Someone else made all of this up. It wasn't me.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019)

Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Far From Home

Cast: Tom Holland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Zendaya, Samuel L. Jackson, Jon Favreau, Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, Tony Revolori, Angourie Rice, Remy Hii, Martin Starr, J.B. Smoove, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Cobie Smulders, Numan Acar. Screenplay: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers. Cinematography: Matthew J. Lloyd. Production design: Claude Paré. Film editing: Leigh Folsom Boyd, Dan Lebental. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire are fine actors, but neither of them made the role of Spider-Man their own the way Tom Holland has done. His training as a dancer helped him get the moves right for the stunts as Spider-Man, and he's the right height (five-eight) and age (early 20s) to keep him credible as the adolescent Peter Parker. Beyond that, he's a gifted actor, more than holding his own in scenes with veterans like Samuel L. Jackson and Jake Gyllenhaal. It's hard to know what Marvel Studios will do when Holland eventually ages out of the role. He's the main reason I liked Spider-Man: Far From Home much more than the usual superhero movie. He makes the slam-bang special effects tolerable. It helps, too, that he's up against one of the more engaging villains in the genre, Gyllenhaal's Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio. Gyllenhaal -- who was once considered for the role of the webslinger in Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004) when Maguire was sidelined -- makes the seduction of Peter Parker into handing over the gizmo that gives him power credible, and then does a fine job of unveiling Beck's bad side. But mostly it's Holland's ability to sustain Peter's boyish gullibility, and his reluctance to give up his teenage life (and his pursuit of Zendaya's MJ) to become one of the Avengers, that brings the implausible superhero to life. The screenplay is efficient and sometimes witty, often at the expense of Peter, who gushes "Oh, I love Led Zeppelin!" when Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) plays a track by AC/DC and who gets zinged by Nick Fury (Jackson) with "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Stark said you wouldn't get that because it's not a Star Wars reference."

Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017)

Garrett Hedlund and Jason Mitchell in Mudbound

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, Jonathan Banks, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Dylan Arnold, Kerry Cahill, Lucy Faust, Jason Kirkpatrick. Screenplay: Virgil Williams, Dee Rees, based on a novel by Hillary Jordan. Cinematography: Rachel Morrison. Production design: David J. Bomba. Film editing: Mako Kamitsuna. Music: Tamar-kali.

Mudbound is a solid, hard-edged, sometimes raw look at Mississippi in the post-World War II period, one I know well, having been born into that time and place. It only occasionally slips into the "Magical Negro" and "White Savior" tropes that afflict so many films about race relations. For example, it has Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) in his crippled bomber saluted by one of the Tuskegee Airmen, who have just rescued him from an attack by German fighter planes. This serves as a predicate for Jamie's friendship with Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) and his attempt to save him from a lynch mob headed by Jamie's own father, known as "Pappy" (Jonathan Banks). The screenplay also subverts some of the film's earlier harshness by tacking on a somewhat happy ending for Ronsel, who reunites with his German girlfriend and their son. It feels gratuitously sentimental in comparison with what has gone before. Nevertheless, Mudbound is a well-acted film, sometimes beautifully acted, as in the case of the Oscar-nominated Mary J. Blige as Florence Jackson, the tower of strength for both the Jackson and the McAllan families. Rachel Morrison also deserved her Oscar nomination -- the first ever for a woman -- for cinematography. She provides images of both the stark beauty of the Mississippi Delta landscape and the oppressiveness of the mud that clings to and clots the lives of its inhabitants.

Satansbraten (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976)

Kurt Raab and Margit Carstensen in Satansbraten

Cast: Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Helen Vita, Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Y Sa Lo, Ulli Lommel, Armin Meier, Katherina Buchhammer, Vitus Zeplichal, Brigitte Mira, Hannes Kaetner, Heli Finkenzeller, Marquard Bohm, Christiane Maybach, Nino Korda, Adrian Hoven. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus, Jürgen Jürges. Production design: Ulrike Bode, Kurt Raab. Film editing: Thea Eymèsz. Music: Peer Raben.

Although it was written for the screen, Rainer Maria Fassbinder's Satansbraten (aka Satan's Brew) feels stagy. Its absurdist comedy evokes Beckett and Ionesco, and especially Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, which Fassbinder more or less acknowledges by appending a quotation from Artaud as a kind of epigraph for the film. But it also harks back to Fassbinder's earliest films, the ones like Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) and Gods of the Plague (1970) that followed his involvement with the Anti-Theater in Munich. In a way it merges the often eccentric performance in those films with the florid style of Fassbinder's Douglas Sirk-inflected melodramas like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Veronika Voss (1982). The central character of Satansbraten, Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), is a poet with writer's block who, while trying to work his way out of inertia, unconsciously (or not?) plagiarizes a poem by Stefan George, and when his theft is brought to his attention decides that he is the reincarnation of George. Among other things, this leads him to explorations of his sexuality -- George was gay. But mostly the film tracks Kranz's various involvements with women, including his wife, Luise (Helen Vita), who claims that he hasn't slept with her for 17 days, as well as Lisa (Ingrid Caven), the wife of his friend Rolf (Marquard Bohm); a prostitute (Y Sa Lo) whom he interviews; a wealthy patron, Irmgart von Witzleben (Katherina Buchhamer), who has an orgasm while signing a check for him and whom he then murders; and an adoring fan, Andrée (Margit Carstensen). Meanwhile, he is also dodging a detective (Ulli Lommel) investigating the murder of Irmgart while contending with his brother, Ernst (Volker Spengler), a mentally disordered man who is fascinated with the sex lives of houseflies. It's all very silly but watchable in a "what next?" way. Efforts have been made to explicate the film as a commentary on fascism -- George was enthusiastically courted by the Nazis for his visions of an emergent Germanic national culture, though he shrugged off their approaches -- but such exegeses are kind of wobbly.

Ironfinger (Jun Fukuda, 1965)

Mie Hama and Akira Takarada in Ironfinger

Cast: Akira Takarada, Mie Hama, Ichiro Arishima, Jun Tatara, Akihiko Hirata, Sachio Sakai, Susumo Kurobe, Toru Ibuki, Chotaro Togin, Naoya Kusakawa, Koji Iwamoto, Mike Daneen. Screenplay: Michio Tsuzuki, Kihachi Okamoto. Cinematography: Shinsaku Uno. Production design: Kazuo Ogawa. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii, Yoshitami Kuroiwa. Music: Masaru Sato.

Ironfinger is a wacky and somewhat cheesy Japanese entry into the subgenre of James Bond spoofs that swept through movies internationally in the 1960s, attracting not only American and British filmmakers but also Frenchmen like Philippe de Broca (That Man From Rio, 1964) and even Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, 1965). Which may be why the pseudo-Bond of Ironfinger is part French. He calls himself Andrew Hoshino -- though it's not exactly clear that that's his name -- and is played a little more broadly than is necessary by Akira Takarada, a veteran not only of films by Yasujiro Ozu (The End of Summer, 1961) and Mikio Naruse (A Woman's Life, 1963) but also of numerous Godzilla movies, starting with Ishiro Honda's original Gojira in 1954. His leading lady, Mie Hama, made her own appearance in the real James Bond series in You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967), playing Kissy Suzuki to Sean Connery's Bond. Ironfinger isn't unwatchable: There are some good gags, but also some bad ones. The climactic action sequence, in which the good guys foil the bad guys by tossing lighted matches into oil drums, which then explode into an impossible cascade of drums coming from every corner, is flat-out ridiculous. Still, if you can put up with some tacky pop songs and a needlessly complicated plot, Ironfinger is a tolerably amusing period artifact and only 93 minutes long.

Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)

Allakariallak in Nanook of the North

Cast: Allakariallak, Alice Nevalinga, Cunayoo, Allegoo. Screenplay: Frances H. Flaherty, Robert J. Flaherty. Cinematography: Robert J. Flaherty. Film editing: Robert J. Flaherty, Charles Gelb.

Today, Nanook of the North would have to be called a "docudrama," or a re-creation of a faded actuality. The real Inuit of 1922 were a lot more conscious of technological advances than Nanook's biting of the phonograph record would suggest. In fact, they regularly viewed the footage that Robert J. Flaherty was filming of them. They had already begun to integrate modern clothing with their traditional garb of skins and furs, and they carried rifles along with knives and harpoons. A cutaway igloo was constructed because Flaherty couldn't film inside a traditionally closed structure, ice window notwithstanding. The tug-of-war with the seal under the ice was faked: The seal was already dead and Nanook's struggle with it was staged by men off-camera pulling on the rope. Nanook himself is a fiction: An actual Inuit hunter named Allakariallak played him, and the wife and family who accompanied him were not really his own. And despite the title card announcing that Nanook starved to death, Allakariallak seems to have died of tuberculosis. Still, is there a more fascinating portrait of a vanishing culture than Flaherty's film? Not only does it give a credible account of what life must have been at one time for the Inuit, it also gives us insight into the nature of documentary filmmaking in its formative years. Its great popularity at the time of its initial release tells us something about the hunger of audiences for knowledge of a world they had never been able to see before except through lantern slides and the narratives of intrepid travelers -- most of whom had their own imperialist designs. Flaherty had the taste and sense not to see the Inuit as exploitable resources -- something he would be guilty of later in his career when he made Louisiana Story (1948), a paean to the petroleum industry funded by Standard Oil -- but rather as a culture to be valued for its own strengths.

Samurai Spy (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965)

Koji Takahashi and Jitsuko Yoshimura in Samurai Spy

Cast: Koji Takahashi, Shintaro Ishihara, Eitaro Ozawa, Kei Sato, Mutsuhiro Toda, Tetsuro Tanba, Eiji Okada, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Hodaka, Misako Watanabe, Yasunori Irikawa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Jun Hamamura. Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Fukuda, based on a novel by Koji Nakada. Cinematography: Masao Kusugi. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Samurai Spy begins with a history lesson: a voiceover telling us about the chaos that set in after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and the rivalry between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Toyotomi Clan. Ordinarily, this kind of information would be helpful to the Western viewer in sorting out what takes place in the film, but such a welter of names and allegiances follows that it left me in a muddle -- one admirer of the film even suggests taking notes. But the point being made by director Masahiro Shinoda seems to be that even the participants in the conflicts of the time weren't sure who was on whose side at any given point. It came down to a spy vs. spy situation, with double crosses at every turn. Let it suffice to say that the central figure in the film is Sasuke Sarutobi, played with steely authority by Koji Takahashi, a spy for his clan who has wearied of unending war, but nevertheless gets caught up in its intrigues. At this point, I simply let myself go with the flow of the film, which is often extraordinarily beautiful. Shinoda intentionally underplays the action usually associated with samurai movies: One fight takes place in a field swept by fog, a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't tease that adds to the film's essential point that in warfare it's not always clear who are the winners and who the losers. Another sequence, beautifully filmed by Masao Kusugi, involves a duel between two men that's viewed from a distance: We see them as small almost antlike figures on a hillside, warily circling each other to the point that we don't know who is who. The nature that surrounds them is blithely indifferent to what seems so important to the combatants. Shinoda uses sound eloquently to reinforce this theme, sometimes introducing the call of a bird in the background to emphasize the beauty that's being violated by mere human concerns. And the movie is certainly flavored by Toru Takemitsu's score. Shinoda is often a difficult filmmaker to comprehend, and I wouldn't recommend his films -- with the possible exception of Pale Flower (1964), which seems to me the most American-inflected of the movies of his that I've seen -- to someone just starting out with Japanese films, but Samurai Spy has incidental pleasures even when you don't quite follow what's going on. Just don't expect the clarity of a Kurosawa-style samurai film.

Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)

Clark Gable and William Powell in Manhattan Meldodrama

Cast: Clark Gable, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Leo Carrillo, Nat Pendleton, George Sidney, Isabel Jewell, Muriel Evans, Thomas E. Jackson, Isabelle Keith, Frank Conroy, Noel Madison, Jimmy Butler, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Ross. Screenplay: Oliver H.P. Garrett, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Arthur Caesar. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ben Lewis. Music: William Axt.

This is the movie that John Dillinger saw before he was shot down outside the theater. It's the one in which Mickey Rooney grows up to be Clark Gable. It's the first film to team William Powell and Myrna Loy, months before they became Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (with the same director, W.S. Van Dyke). It's the one in which Shirley Ross sings Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon" with Hart's original lyrics, "The Bad in Every Man." It was made before the Production Code took effect, so there's no dodging the implication that Eleanor (Loy) is Blackie Gallagher's (Gable) mistress before she marries Jim Wade (Powell), leading to a crucial plot point. Manhattan Melodrama is, to say the least, of historical interest even if it's not really a very good movie. It can pass for one, however, because of Gable and Powell and Loy, James Wong Howe's cinematography, and some clever lines. It won an Oscar for Arthur Caesar's story, though what it really deserved was some kind of award for truth in labeling: In melodrama, characters do things in service of the plot, and not in the way real human beings behave. We are asked to believe that two very different boys, one a hedonistic rascal, the other studious and virtuous, would become close friends and remain so even after the former grows up to be a gangster and the latter a district attorney with high political ambitions. And that they would remain close friends after the gangster's mistress leaves him and marries the D.A. And that the gangster would sacrifice himself, going blithely to the electric chair after his old friend has convicted him of murder. Life may not be like that, but Manhattan Melodrama certainly is. 

Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019)

Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver in Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Anthony Daniels, Joonas Suotamo, Billy Dee Williams, Domhnall Gleeson, Richard E. Grant, Ian McDiarmid, Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell, Lupita Nyong'o, Kelly Marie Tran, Greg Grunberg, Shirley Henderson, Dominic Monaghan, Billie Lourd. Screenplay: Chris Terrio, J.J. Abrams, Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow. Cinematography: Dan Mindel. Production design: Rick Carter, Kevin Jenkins. Film editing: Maryann Brandon, Stefan Grube. Music: John Williams.

The saga began unwittingly in medias res in 1977, expanded in 1980 and 1983, then doubled back on itself in 1999, 2002, and 2005, then picked up where it left off earlier for episodes in 2015 and 2017. And with the cumbersome title of Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker, it comes to a stuttering halt. This, of course, disregards all the ancillary film and TV projects, not to mention books, that George Lucas's brainchild has added to the corpus over the years and seems intent on adding. It may be our greatest film epic, or at least the most influential: Would we have had, for example, the various excursions into the Marvel universe without Star Wars as a prototype? But the salient fact here is that no one is quite happy with the way the triple trilogy finally resolves itself in the latest (and supposedly final) episode -- not even those who profit financially from it, since the movie was a disappointment at the box office. The hardcore Star Wars fans point to inconsistencies, omissions, and downright contradictions to the core mythology. Those who just like action movies, or sci-fi movies, or just plain storytelling movies seem to feel a little let down by The Rise of Skywalker, whose very title doesn't even seem to follow through, since Rey assumes the family name after all of the rest of the Skywalkers have died off. I found myself a little creeped out by the postmortem use of Carrie Fisher in the film, and annoyed at the introduction of some new characters, like Naomi Ackie's Jannah and Keri Russell's Zorii, that don't seem to serve any real function in the plot. There are some suspense gimmicks, like the apparent death of Chewbacca and the memory-wipe of C3PO, that don't pay off in real narrative tension. The appearances of the "Force ghosts" of Han and Luke are a little cheesy, and the Force itself becomes a kind of narrative crutch, one that Rey can lean on when it helps advance the plot but which seems unavailable to her when she needs it. And the psychic link between Rey and Kylo Ren is a similar narratively flimsy gimmick. Still, I found myself occasionally able to let all of these real and nagging flaws go by and relax into watching some old familiar actors and characters go through their paces. John Williams's familiar music certainly helps, even if it's only to cue up memories of better Star Wars movies.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Samantha Robinson, Rafal Zawierucha, Lorenza Izzo, Costa Ronin, Kurt Russell. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Fred Raskin.

With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino proves himself to be perhaps the most superficial of our major filmmakers. I mean that as a compliment, recalling Oscar Wilde's remark, "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril." Tarantino exerts a lot of effort getting things right so he can get them wrong. He meticulously re-creates the Hollywood of the late 1960s just so he can change history. And so, Sharon Tate is not murdered by the Manson family. Instead, Tex and Squeaky and Sadie are done in by the fictional Cliff Booth, Francesca Capucci, and Rick Dalton, the last incinerating Squeaky with a flamethrower -- perhaps the only "Chekhov's flamethrower" in the history of movies, its existence and Dalton's prowess with it having been established earlier in the film. Tarantino did this kind of rewriting history before, in Inglourious Basterds (2009), but without the kind of luxuriating in upending our knowledge of things the way he does here. Like almost all of his other films, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a revenge fantasy, though here the revenge is the audience's: We get our gratification from revenge upon actuality, from seeing Sharon Tate spared a horrible death. But despite the violent outcome, this is also one of Tarantino's least violent films as well as one of his least flamboyant (perhaps owing to the absence of his signature actor, Samuel L. Jackson). It comes off eventually as a kind of homage to one of the film and TV industry's least honored periods: that late-'60s era, before the emergence of film brats like Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese gave a new direction to movies, a macho time filled with spaghetti Westerns, James Bond ripoffs like the "Matt Helm" series, and private eye shows like "Mannix," when fading stars like Rick Dalton were scrounging for whatever work they could land. Tarantino himself was a small child then, so his re-creation of the period is, like most of his oeuvre, drawn more from movies than from memory. Still, he knows how to create characters and write dialogue, and how to cast actors who can play and speak both. It won a well-deserved supporting actor Oscar for Brad Pitt, whose role seems to me at least as large as that of Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated as best actor but didn't win. 

Following (Christopher Nolan, 1998)

Jeremy Theobald in Following

Cast: Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, Lucy Russell, John Nolan, Dick Bradsell, Gillian El-Kadi, Jennifer Angel, Nicolas Carlotti, Darren Ormandy. Screenplay: Christopher Nolan. Cinematography: Christopher Nolan. Production design: Tristan Martin. Film editing: Gareth Heal, Christopher Nolan. Music: David Julyan.

Following, Christopher Nolan's first feature, is a clever thriller done in the hashed-up-narrative manner of his breakthrough film, Memento (2000). In that later film, however, the narrative scrambling seems to be done in service of the film's premise, the nature of memory and what might happened to someone deprived of it. If told linearly, Following is a mildly complex story about how an idle would-be writer starts following strangers on the street, only to be accosted by one of the people he's following and roped into a scheme that culminates in theft and murder. The narrative's skips back and forth in time aren't essential to telling the story, the way they are in Memento. Still, as a foreshadowing of Nolan's success as a filmmaker, Following is fascinating stuff, especially since it was made on a shoestring budget, the largest line item of which was the 16mm film stock on which it was shot. The actors are unknowns or amateurs (and sometimes show it). Some, like Jeremy Theobald, who plays the protagonist, and Lucy Russell, who has the leading female role, have gone on to careers in film and television. Both have bit parts in Nolan's Batman Begins (2005). Others, like Alex Haw, who plays Cobb, the man who lures the protagonist into his plot, gave up acting entirely; he earned a degree in architecture and now works for a New York architectural firm. 

The Crimson Pirate (Robert Siodmak, 1952)

Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat in The Crimson Pirate

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Nick Cravat, Eva Bartok, Torin Thatcher, James Hayter, Leslie Bradley, Margot Grahame, Noel Purcell, Frederick Lester, Eliot Makeham, Frank Pettingell, Dana Wynter, Christopher Lee. Screenplay: Roland Kibbee. Cinematography: Otto Heller. Art direction: Paul Sheriff. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: William Alwyn.

All flashing blue eyes and white teeth, Burt Lancaster swashbuckles in The Crimson Pirate like no one since the elder Douglas Fairbanks -- some of whose acrobatic gags were borrowed by the movie. It's one of those kids'  movies for all ages, with only just enough mushy stuff between Lancaster and Eva Bartok to hold adult interests. Actually, the real romance here is between Lancaster's Captain Vallo and Nick Cravat's Ojo, the latter a mute lieutenant to the dashing pirate captain. Some of the funniest sequences involve the movements in sync of the six-foot-one Lancaster and the five-foot-four Cravat -- the two once had a circus act together. There's perhaps more plot than the movie absolutely needs, involving the pirates coming to the aid of the anti-monarchical rebels on the mythical Caribbean island of Cobra. There Vallo, aka The Crimson Pirate, meets Consuelo (Bartok), the daughter of the rebel leader El Libre (Frederick Lester). Meanwhile, mutiny brews aboard Vallo's ship, fueled by his first mate, Humble Bellows (Torin Tatcher), disgruntled by the fact that Vallo's involvement in politics has got in the way of their routine piratical pursuits of treasure. Eventually, with the aid of a scientist, Prof. Elihu Prudence (James Hayter, Vallo and Ojo vanquish both the mutineers and the forces of the king, led by Baron Gruda (Leslie Bradley), by using the professor's scientific innovations, such as a hot-air balloon and nitroglycerin, as well as the theory that a capsized boat might hold enough air to be used as a kind of submarine. (That last gag was borrowed for the 2003 movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. It was later proved unfeasible on the Mythbusters TV show.) The Crimson Pirate was the kind of hit it deserved to be.

The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015)

Michalina Olszanska and Marta Mazurek in The Lure

Cast: Marta Mazurek, Michalina Olszanska, Kinga Preis, Andrzej Konopka, Jakub Gierszal, Zygmunt Malanowicz, Magdalena Cielecka, Katarzyna Herman, Marcin Kowalczyk. Screenplay: Robert Bolesto. Cinematography: Jakub Kijowski. Production design: Joanna Macha. Film editing: Jaroslaw Kaminski. Music: Ballady i Romanse.

I'm pretty sure this is the only "Polish horror musical" I've ever seen, to put The Lure into the category Wikipedia assigns to it. It's not a genre I'm inclined to follow with any great enthusiasm if any others exist. It's the story of two mermaids who pop out of the water and join a group of musicians who play in a nightclub. The two, named Silver and Golden, begin as strippers with the group but eventually get their own act. When they're dry, the mermaids have what look like human legs but no sex or excretory organs (like a Barbie doll, as one musician observes); their tails appear only when they're wet. Tension between the mermaids arises when Silver falls in love with the bass player Mietek and Golden picks up a stranger and eats him. Silver still wants to be human and to marry Mietek, so she arranges for a sort of lower-body transplant: Her tail is cut off and replaced with human nether regions. (We don't learn anything about the human donor.) But Mietek decides to marry someone else, and when that happens, Silver is told by the god Triton, who has become a heavy-metal musician, that she must eat Mietek or else she'll turn into sea foam. Because Silver can't go through with it and, as the sun rises, dissolves into what look like soap suds, Golden tears Mietek's throat out. So if you thought this was going to be The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989) or even Splash (Ron Howard, 1984), too bad. There's a lot of pop music and some moments of grossly silly fun in the movie, but its main attraction is that you've probably never seen anything quite like it.

China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in China Seas

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, Dudley Digges, Robert Benchley, William Henry, Hattie McDaniel, Liev De Maigret, Lilian Bond, Edward Brophy, Soo Yong, Akim Tamiroff, Ivan Lebedeff. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, James Kevin McGuinness, based on a novel by Crosbie Garstin. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William LeVanway. Music: Herbert Stothart.

China Seas is a pretty good romantic adventure that seems to have been pieced together from better movies. Its romantic triangle of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Rosalind Russell mimics that of Gable, Harlow, and Mary Astor in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932). Harlow and Wallace Beery have a relationship that echoes the one their characters had in Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933). And the byplay between Harlow's character and her maid (Hattie McDaniel, of course) is a lot like the banter between Mae West and her maids in She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) and I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933). China Seas has a few standout moments of its own: There's a terrific typhoon sequence involving a runaway steamroller on the deck of the tramp steamer captained by Gable's Alan Gaskell, and Robert Benchley has some funny bits as an alcoholic writer who's usually too drunk to know where he is or to respond to other people with anything more than non sequiturs. There's a kind of uptightness to the movie that reminds us that the Production Code censors were breathing down people's necks, whereas all of those better movies mentioned above were pre-Code. But Gable and Harlow are in fine form. She's Dolly Portland, aka "China Doll," the shady lady (sometimes introduced as "an entertainer") who used to be involved with Capt. Gaskell and has now booked passage on his steamer from Hong Kong to Singapore in an effort to win him back. Russell plays Sybil Barclay, a high-class English lady who also has a past with the captain and nearly does succeed in recapturing him. Russell seems to be trying too hard at the role, slipping into stiff-upper-lip mannerisms and becoming rather arch, so there's no real heat between her character and Gable's. Another old flame of Dolly's, Jamesy McArdle (Beery), is also on board, and he's in cahoots with Malaysian pirates to board the ship and steal the gold it's carrying. Rejected by the captain, who decides to marry Sybil, Dolly joins forces with McArdle, though she doesn't really mean to. You've seen this sort of thing before, so there are no surprises, but relax and be entertained.

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, Valeriia Karaman, Logan Hawkes, Kyla Nicolle, Shaun Clarke, Pierre Richard, Preston Hudson, Jeffrey Cruts. Screenplay: Robert Eggers, Max Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blasche. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Korven.

Two men arrive on a lonely, deserted, rocky island where they take over the maintenance of a lighthouse. They proceed to drive each other into madness and death. That pretty much sums up The Lighthouse, a psychological drama with horror movie tinges. Clearly, to make such a simple story work, you need topnotch actors and good dialogue, camerawork, design, music, and editing. The Lighthouse succeeds in all these areas. Willem Dafoe is already established as one of our best actors, and Robert Pattinson has been building an exceptional career since coming out of the shadow of the Twilight movies. Jarin Blasche's cinematography, which works with an almost square frame, even tighter than so-called "Academy ratio," won him an Oscar nomination, and all the other elements work to build a sense of loneliness, isolation, and claustrophobia, of things closing in on the two men. So why do I feel it doesn't quite add up to the sum of its excellent parts? Perhaps because the course of the narrative is so obvious from the outset. Its opening scenes, the arrival at the lighthouse and the establishment of the characters, reminded me of those Ingmar Bergman films set on Fårö island. But where Bergman can turn weirdness resulting from isolation into a statement about humanity, Robert Eggers doesn't give us much beyond the spectacle of two only roughly civilized men disintegrating into savagery as they unmask each other's secrets and suffer from dreams and hallucinations. Still, if that's the kind of thing you want -- or feel you need -- to watch, there's not a much better portrayal of it than The Lighthouse. It might make for provocative viewing, come to think of it, in a time of quarantine and social distancing.

Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976)

Mona Lisa and Hilda Koronel in Insiang

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Mona Lisa, Ruel Vernal, Rez Cortez, Nina Lorenzo, Marlon Ramirez, Mely Mallari, Carpi Asturias. Screenplay: Mario O'Hara, Lamberto E. Antonio. Cinematography: Conrado Baltazar. Art direction: Fiel Zabat. Film editing: Augusto Salvador. Music: Minda D. Azarcon.

Lino Brocka's Insiang begins with a scene of pigs in an abattoir that's likely to put most carnivores off their feed for a while. It sets the tone for a story whose neo-realist approach is tinged with overtones of Greek myth: a tale of revenge that centers on a young woman betrayed by her lover as well as by her mother and her mother's lover. Think of Medea or Elektra brought up in the slums of Manila. The title character, played beautifully by Hilda Koronel, lives with her tense, quarrelsome mother, Tonya (Mona Lisa), who takes out her fury on Insiang at having been left by her husband. Then Tonya takes a much younger lover, Dado (Ruel Vernal), who furtively lusts after the pretty daughter. Insiang has a suitor her own age, Bebot (Rez Cortez), who wants her to sleep with him, but she insists on waiting until they have good jobs -- unemployment is rife in the slums -- and get married. But when Dado, who has moved in with the two women, rapes Insiang and then lies to Tonya that the young woman provoked him by bathing and sleeping naked, Insiang agrees to spend the night with Bebot and to begin a life with him. She wakes up in the sleazy hotel to find that Bebot has already gone, and when she finally finds him he gives her a cold shoulder. At this point, Insiang, once mild-mannered and long-suffering, turns into a woman bent on revenge, and finds ways to inflict it on Bebot, Dado, and her mother. Lino Brocka's direction and the performances by actors drawn from his theatrical company elevate the film into something of a small tour de force: It was shot in only seven days in places where it must have been difficult to film. There are no overt political messages being delivered by the film, but it's hard to avoid the consciousness that people have been forced into lives like these and shouldn't be. Is it enough to note that Imelda Marcos hated the film?