Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Busby Berkeley, 1949)

Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Garrett in Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Esther Williams, Betty Garrett, Edward Arnold, Jules Munshin, Richard Lane, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Harry Tugend, George Wells, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Roger Edens, Conrad Salinger, songs by Edens, Betty Comden, Adolph Green.

Energetic almost to the point of frenzy, Take Me Out to the Ball Game had a legendarily troubled production. Although the credited director is Busby Berkeley, he reportedly had some sort of breakdown early in the filming and the direction was taken over by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, who are also credited with coming up with the rather thin story, as well as the choreography. Esther Williams, who later confessed her unhappiness with the shoot, was not the first choice for female lead, but Ginger Rogers turned it down and Judy Garland was deemed too unwell to take on the role of K.C. Higgins, the woman who inherits a baseball team on which Kelly's and Frank Sinatra's characters are star players. Williams doesn't even get her usual water ballet extravaganza, but just a turn in a swimming pool that sets the ogling Kelly and Sinatra characters in pursuit of her. Though Sinatra was in the midst of his early fame as an idol of the bobby-soxers, he wasn't considered handsome or strong enough to be a romantic lead, so he lost Kathryn Grayson to Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945). This time, Kelly's Eddie O'Brien wins K.C., and Sinatra's Dennis Ryan is left with Betty Garrett's character, as the Sinatra character would be in On the Town (Kelly and Donen, 1949). Take Me Out to the Ball Game belongs to the peak MGM Technicolor musical era, and it was produced by the head of the musicals unit, Arthur Freed, but it's a decidedly second-rank movie. Although billed third, after Sinatra and Williams, Kelly takes over, including a long solo number, "The Hat My Dear Old Father Wore Upon St. Patrick's Day," in which he dances jigs and shows off Irish step-dancing moves, as well as borrowing a few of James Cagney's familiar struts and stiff-legged movements. The best Freed Unit musicals can leave you exhilarated, but the clumsy plot, the flat romance (Kelly and Williams have no chemistry), and the mediocre songs of this one are more likely to induce exhaustion.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Jack Conway, 1987)

Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Cast: Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins, Wendy Hiller, Marie Kean, Ian McNeice, Alan Devlin, Rudi Davies, Prunella Scales, Áine Ní Mhuiri, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Peter Nelson, based on a book by Brian Moore. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Michael Pickwoad. Film editing: Terry Rawlings. Music: Georges Delerue.

The Dublin of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a nest of vipers, full of people with stunted lives, blinkered vision, and downright meanness. The effect of this is to make Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) look good by comparison, even though her life has been stunted and her vision is none too wide either. Perhaps she has had enough of the meanness exhibited by her late Aunt D'Arcy (Wendy Hiller) and by her spiky landlady (Marie Kean) and the other denizens of the boarding house into which she has recently moved, that she seems almost sunny and pleasant as if to defy them. She carries with her two icons of her past: a dour portrait of her aunt and a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These images represent her efforts to control her alcoholism through self-discipline and religion, but the truth is that both only serve to make the problem worse, exacerbating her guilt when she fails at the task. In late middle age, with a small annuity and a clump of savings, she has little to look forward to, so she grasps at anything that represents hope -- or at least a surcease from loneliness -- which manifests itself as her landlady's brother, James Madden (Bob Hoskins), a stubby middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed mustache who has recently returned from the United States. He's a phony, of course, a man full of schemes like opening a hamburger restaurant in Dublin that will never turn out, and whose American career in the New York hotel business amounted to being a doorman. He latches on to Judith because he thinks she has money stashed away. She gravitates to him because he represents a wider world than she has known in her years taking care of her aunt and earning a little money by giving piano lessons. It's a bleak and unforgiving tale, spiked with a little unsavory sex -- the rivalry between Madden and his nephew (Ian McNeice), a corpulent would-be poet who sponges off of his mother, for the attentions of the housemaid Mary (Rudi Davies), whom Madden rapes when she spurns him. No one comes off well in this movie, but I couldn't help being drawn in by the performances of Smith, Hoskins, Hiller, and the others, even when their characters were at their most unlikable.

The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)

Paul Newman in The Hustler

Cast: Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Murray Hamilton, Michael Constantine, Stefan Gierasch, Clifford A. Pellow, Jake LaMotta, Gordon B. Clarke, Alexander Rose, Carolyn Coates, Carl York, Vincent Gardenia. Screenplay: Sidney Carroll, Robert Rossen, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Kenyon Hopkins.

You can't say The Hustler isn't educational: It made me Google the difference between pool and billiards. Otherwise, it stands as a direction the American film might have gone in the 1960s, after the breakup of the studios, the waning of anticommunist hysteria, and the weakening of Production Code enforcement. Instead, the movies went in the direction signaled by the Oscars for that year, in which Academy voters chose West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins) over The Hustler as best picture, indicating a trend toward big, bright entertainment rather than gritty, intense films of the sort that were being turned out in Europe and Japan during the 1950s and '60s. The Hustler seems more like a film from the 1970s than one of the better films of the 1960s. It did land Oscars for Harry Horner's production design and Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography, as well it should have. CinemaScope could be an unwieldy format, especially in black-and-white, but Schüfftan mastered it beautifully, working with director Robert Rossen to make the most of Horner's unglamorous and sometimes cramped settings. The camera sometimes gives us the full spread of a set and lets us search for the key figures in it: The introduction of Piper Laurie's Sarah is not a grand entrance or a tell-all closeup but an at first insignificant figure in a train station diner, gaining prominence only through the eyeline of Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson. Later, when Sarah returns to that diner, Eddie is seated at the far right of the frame, not front and center as you'd expect the protagonist of a movie to be. Pool, being a horizontal game, is more in line with the demands of CinemaScope, and it's here that Dede Allen's editing works particularly well. As for the actors, Newman, Laurie, George C. Scott, and Jackie Gleason all covered themselves with glory -- and Oscar nominations, which of course Scott declined. If I have reservations about The Hustler it's that the bluesy score by Kenyon Hopkins is laid on a little too thickly and that its story, hinging on a suicide and a redemption, strays to the edge of being contrived and melodramatic, but at least doesn't fall completely into happily ever after mode.

Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941)

Robert Newton, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley, Rex Harrison, and Emlyn Williams in Major Barbara

Cast: Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Sybil Thorndike, Emlyn Williams, Marie Lohr, Penelope Dudley-Ward, Walter Hudd, David Tree, Deborah Kerr, Donald Calthrop, Marie Ault, Cathleen Cordell, Torin Thatcher, Miles Malleson, Felix Aylmer, Stanley Holloway. Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, based on his play. Cinematography: Ronald Neame. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: Charles Frend, David Lean. Music: William Walton.

George Bernard Shaw's plays often seem to me as if they're about to collapse underneath their own cleverness: so many paradoxes, so much witty dialogue, such tantalizingly heretical ideas. Major Barbara is a prime example of this, a duel between faith and realism, between rich and poor, between capitalism and Fabian socialism, between men and women, all treated with the would-be drawing-room-comedy lightness of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, down to the climactic revelation that the play's ostensible hero is a "foundling" (a euphemism for "bastard"). But the film version slumps down into tedium because Shaw can't resist trying to make his characters, especially Barbara (wonderfully played by Wendy Hiller), into something like real people whenever he wants the audience to feel something instead of just laughing at the bright repartee. The film remains a three-act play, despite attempts to provide some scenes -- the initial meeting of Barbara and Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison being archly ardent), the fight between Bill Walker (Robert Newton) and Todger Fairmile (Torin Thatcher), Barbara's tossing her Salvation Army bonnet (and almost herself) into the Thames, and the tour of the hellish munitions factory and its heavenly benevolent-capitalist planned community -- in between the ones we would ordinarily see on stage. We are supposed to continue the dialogue of ideas among ourselves after the movie's over, but the effect of the two-hour-plus barrage of wit is to make me want to be stupid again. The film was rightly celebrated for the skill of its performers and for the tenacity with which it was filmed during the Blitz, but as a whole it's an achievement that hasn't stood the test of time.

On the Town (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1949)

Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, and Gene Kelly in On the Town

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen, Florence Bates, Alice Pearce, George Meader. Screenplay: Adolph Green, Betty Comden, based on their book for a musical play. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters. Music: orchestrations by Conrad Salinger, songs by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Edens, Adolph Green, Betty Comden.

A funny thing happened after I watched On the Town: I found myself humming "Lucky to Be Me" and "Some Other Time," songs by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden that aren't in the movie. They were in the original Broadway production, but were cut by producer Roger Edens, along with several others, and replaced by his own songs, almost all of which are forgettable. Bernstein was pissed off, as he should have been: "Lucky to Be Me" was perfect for one of Gene Kelly's numbers, and "Some Other Time" almost begged to be sung by Frank Sinatra and the rest of the company. Those excisions, and the Breen Office's insistence that the song "New York, New York" had to describe the city as "a wonderful town," instead of the original "helluva town," weigh down this much-loved but overrated MGM musical, which at least managed to do some location filming in the city after Kelly and co-director Stanley Donen rebelled against shooting the entire musical in the New York sets of the studio's back lot. The location shots give some life to the movie, but it still looks cheap and stagy in comparison with later, more lavish productions like An American in Paris (1951). Kelly and Donen, along with Comden, Green, and cinematographer Harold Rosson, would redeem themselves with Singin' in the Rain (1952), which has the wit and buoyancy On the Town sadly lacks.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, Anne Jackson. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson. Cinematography: John Alcott. Production design: Roy Walker. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind.

There are those of us who don't love The Shining. There used to be a lot more of us: When it first opened, Stanley Kubrick's movie met with lukewarm reviews and a general feeling that it was a well-made but not particularly interesting horror movie. Today, the word tossed about often is "masterpiece," and the ranking on IMDb is a whopping 8.4 out of a possible 10. But for me the film is all tricks and no payoff, and the central problem is Jack Nicholson. I know, it's an intensely committed performance, like all of his. But it's one-note crazy almost from the start, partly because the demonic eyebrows and sharklike grin are in full play. Jack Torrance should go mad, nut just be mad, and Kubrick hasn't allowed Nicholson to make the transition of which the actor is fully capable. But Kubrick is less interested in creating characters than in playing with shock effects. Shelley Duvall is forced to turn from a loving and resourceful mother to a blithering nutcase before reverting to the former by the end of the film. Then, too, there are the clichés on which the story is based: the isolated hotel built on the old Indian burying ground, the hedge maze, the kindly but obviously doomed Black man, and so on. Even the supernatural elements are muddled: What does the extrasensory communication, the "shining" of Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Halloran (Scatman Crothers), have to do with the presence of ghosts in the hotel beyond being a way to provide a rescue at the end? The film works for me only if I let myself take on some of its director's notorious cold detachment, and I want movies to let me do more than just admire technique.

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)

John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in Mikey and Nicky

Cast: Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, Rose Arrick, Carol Grace, William Hickey, Sanford Meisner, Joyce Van Patten, M. Emmet Walsh. Screenplay: Elaine May. Cinematography: Bernie Abramson, Lucien Ballard, Jack Cooperman. Production design: Paul Sylbert. Film editing: John Carter, Sheldon Kahn. Music: John Strauss.

"I came as soon as I got your towel." That line, spoken by Mikey (Peter Falk) to Nicky (John Cassavetes) after the latter has thrown a bottle and a towel out of his hotel room window to get the former's attention, has an Elaine May ring to it. It's followed by a sardonic in-joke when Mikey chides Nicky for throwing the bottle because the broken glass could have put his eye out. (Falk lost an eye to cancer when he was 3.) The scene feels like a set-up for a comedy of rude manners, which Mikey and Nicky could well have become. But because May famously let the two great improvisatory actors have their head -- resulting in a shoot notorious for going way over budget and consuming reels upon reels of film -- the movie is a raucous, bittersweet tragicomedy about two old friends who have found themselves mobbed up beyond their control. Nicky, when we meet him, is a gibbering nervous wreck, so paranoid about being the target of a mob hit that he can't trust Mikey, even though he has called him to his aid. This time, the paranoia is justified: Mikey, it turns out, is in touch with the hit man, Kinney (Ned Beatty). But even the hit man is paranoid, fearful that he'll be the target next if he botches the hit on Nicky. And so goes this jittery one-of-a-kind movie, which is a kind of tribute to the movies Cassavetes directed himself. (Stories have it that he did direct some scenes.) I'm generally on the fence about Cassavetes's work, feeling that improvisation is a hit-or-miss way to make a serious movie: The misses seriously undermine the hits. Still, the energy generated by Falk and Cassavetes in Mikey and Nicky is potent and irresistible. The film is almost a two-hander, with the supporting cast, even Beatty, good as he is, serving as objects for the two leads to bounce off of. I can wish that May had exerted more control over her film -- she almost lost complete control of it to an uncomprehending studio -- but I also admit that I couldn't stop watching it.

An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

Georges Guétary, Oscar Levant, and Gene Kelly in An American in Paris

Cast: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guétary, Nina Foch. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner. Cinematography: Alfred Gilks, John Alton. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, songs; Conrad Salinger, orchestrator. 

Sure, there are things wrong with An American in Paris. The Oscar-winning screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner relies on clichés like the infatuation at first sight by Jerry (Gene Kelly) with Lise (Leslie Caron) and the threat of the predatory wealthy divorcee played by Nina Foch, and it serves too often as a mechanical way of setting up the musical numbers. Some of the numbers, like Oscar Levant's performance of the third movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F and Georges Guétary's "Stairway to Paradise," are simply shoehorned into the story. And the once-celebrated concluding 17-minute ballet now seems a little overblown and pretentious. Yet I cherish the film for serving up as many Gershwin songs as it does, including some comparative rarities like "By Strauss" and "Tra-la-la (This Time It's Really Love)." I like, too, that Kelly's sometimes overbearing charm offensive is checked by Levant's acerbity and by Guétary's less strenuous effort at being charming. It's not the greatest of MGM musicals, lacking the wit that Betty Comden and Adolph Green infused into their screenplays and the style that Stanley Donen brought to his directing. I sometimes think that Vincente Minnelli was a better director of melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Some Came Running (1958), and Home From the Hill (1960) than he was of musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris and Gigi (1958), in which he could let the songs do the work for him. Still, if you've got Gershwin to do the work for you, why not just lean back and let go?

Lions Love (...and Lies) (Agnès Varda, 1969)

James Rado, Viva, and Gerome Ragni in Lions Love (...and Lies)

Cast: Viva, James Rado, Gerome Ragni, Shirley Clarke, Carlos Clarens, Eddie Constantine, Max Laemmle, Steve Kenis, Hal Landers, Peter Bogdanovich, Billie Dixon, Richard Bright. Screenplay: Agnès Varda. Cinematography: Stevan Larner. Art direction: Jack Wright III. Film editing: Robert Dalva, Carolyn Hicks. Music: Joseph Byrd.

Things have been bad before. Maybe Agnès Varda's pseudo-documentary Lions Love (...and Lies) is just what we need to watch in this time of a rampaging pandemic and collapsing economy presided over by a corrupt and malignant narcissist, if only to remind us that things looked pretty grim in the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War seemingly unstoppable and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy casting a pall. We survived that, and we'll survive this. We can hope. Not that Lions Love starts out on a grim note. Instead, we find ourselves at a performance of Michael McClure's play The Beard, about an encounter between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, and then hanging out in a Hollywood mansion with one of Andy Warhol's entourage, Viva, and the creators of the musical Hair, James Rado and Gerome Ragni. Frivolity with an edge, you might say. But things darken with the arrival of filmmaker Shirley Clarke, playing herself as a New Yorker in La La Land, where she hopes to get studio backing for a film. She's not at all at home there, not in the hedonistic way of the aforementioned trio, who revel in the glitz of the setting. And then the calendar begins to remind us that this is 1968, the windup of Bobby Kennedy's campaign for the Democratic nomination in California, and the darkness deepens -- at least for the moment. To add to the chaos of Kennedy's assassination, Viva receives word that Warhol himself has been shot. Yet before long, the trio are back in their old hedonistic mode. Varda handles this tonally complex subject (I hesitate to call it a story) with all the irony it deserves, and even makes an on-screen appearance when Clarke rebels against the demands of Varda's script that she attempt suicide. It's a movie that only looks like a mess, because once it was over, I found myself sorting through my own memories of the period to try to bring order out of the chaos it portrays. Lions Love is history as tragicomedy.

The Reckoning (Paul McGuigan, 2002)

Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany in The Reckoning

Cast: Paul Bettany, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Gina McKee, Simon McBurney, Tom Hardy, Stuart Wells, Vincent Cassel, Ewen Bremner, Matthew Macfadyen, Hamish McColl, Simon Pegg, Marián Aguilera, Trevor Steedman, Elvira Minguez. Screenplay: Mark Mills, based on a novel by Barry Unsworth. Cinematography: Peter Sova. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: Andrew Hulme. Music: Adrian Lee, Mark Mancina.

Nobody, I think, sets out to make a mediocre movie; they just happen to turn out that way. Certainly, the makers of The Reckoning must have had hopes of excellence when they hired such fine actors as Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Vincent Cassel, Matthew Macfadyen, and a 20-something up-and-comer named Tom Hardy. The story they wanted to film came from Morality Play, Barry Unsworth's novel, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, about the theater in medieval England as it edged away from dramatized Bible stories into secular material, mixed with a murder mystery solved by a renegade priest. Unfortunately, The Reckoning is something of a mess, starting with the priest, Nicholas (Paul Bettany), cutting off his hair and escaping through the woods after being discovered in flagrante with a married woman, whose husband he killed in the ensuing melee. On the road, he encounters a troupe of traveling players headed by Martin (Dafoe) and persuades them that he would be an asset to their company. They go to a village by the castle of Lord De Guise (Cassel) where the trial of a woman accused of killing a teenage boy has just concluded with her conviction and sentence to be hanged. One thing leads to another as Nicholas becomes involved with proving the woman's innocence and exposing De Guise as a murderous pedophile, dragging not only the acting troupe but also the villagers into his exposé. The narrative is muddled by too many unnecessary flashbacks into Nicholas's past, by the intervention of a character known only as "the King's Justice" (Macfadyen), and by a half-hearted attempt to strike up a romance between Nicholas and the woman accompanying the acting troupe, Martin's sister, Sarah (Gina McKee). The brightest moment in the movie comes when the players perform their version of the story of Adam and Eve, with Hardy's Straw, the actor tasked with playing women, as Eve in a sort of bare-breasted body suit and a ropy blond wig. He looks a little like Botticelli's Venus in the get-up. If The Reckoning had more moments like that, and less of the mystery-solving plot, it might have been a better movie, but as it is, the mise-en-scène is cluttered and gloomy and the action unconvincing.

Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

Evelyn Preer and Jack Chenault in Within Our Gates

Cast: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith, Charles D. Lucas, Bernice Ladd, Mrs. Evelyn, William Starks, Mattie Edwards, Ralph Johnson, E.G. Tatum, Grant Edwards, Grant Gorman. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No credited cinematographer, production designer, or film editor.

Famous as the oldest surviving feature film made by a Black director -- Oscar Micheaux's first movie, The Homesteader (1919), is lost -- Within Our Gates is not only a powerful response to the kind of racism represented by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) but it's also a clear demonstration of Micheaux's skill as a director. It spares no one in its portrayal of the poison of racism: Its Black sycophants, toadying to the dominant white power, are as odious as its white bigots. The story centers on Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), an educated Black woman who has moved north to try to work on behalf of the people she left behind in the South. She carries with her a secret about her parentage that is finally revealed only when she returns to the South to aid a Black minister who is trying to run a school. Micheaux lays several subplots, and perhaps a few too many melodramatic coincidences, onto this central one, but he keeps the drive of the film moving steadily through the climactic lynching scene and the revelation of Sylvia's secret. Within Our Gates was reconstructed from a print found in a Spanish archive, and although there are some visible gaps -- the largest one explained by a title card -- the restored version is remarkably coherent.

Girl With Green Eyes (Desmond Davis, 1964)

Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in Girl With Green Eyes

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Peter Finch, Lynn Redgrave, Marie Keen, Arthur O'Sullivan, Julian Glover, T.P. McKenna, Liselotte Goettinger, Pat Laffan, Eileen Crowe, May Craig, Joe Lynch, Yolande Turner, Harry Brogan, Michael C. Hennessy, Joseph O'Donnell, Michael O'Brien, David Kelly. Screenplay: Edna O'Brien, based on her novel. Cinematography: Manny Wynn. Art direction: Edward Marshall. Film editing: Brian Smedley-Aston, Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

Rita Tushingham had a brief period as a movie star after a striking debut in Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey in 1961. For a time she was the embodiment of British young womanhood, with an appeal that suggested a more homely, down-to-earth Audrey Hepburn. Girl With Green Eyes, her fourth feature, captures her at her best. She plays Kate Brady, a bright young Dublin shop-girl, raised on an Irish farm and educated in a convent school, who finds herself out of her depth when she gets involved with Eugene Gaillard, a much older intellectual, married but on the brink of divorce, played by Peter Finch. He's taken with her girlish frankness, she with his maturity and wealth of the kind of experience she has only read about in books. Yet a clash of cultures is inevitable: She's still clinging to her Roman Catholic upbringing, attending Mass every week, and although he prides himself on being a kind of lone wolf, a writer and translator who lives alone in his large house on the outskirts of Dublin, he's still tied to a coterie of cynical sophisticates. It can't work, and it doesn't, especially when her family learns that she's sleeping with an older man who is about to commit the mortal sin of divorce. At the end, she sets sail for London with her boisterous friend Baba (Lynn Redgrave) and a life more in keeping with her age and experience. It's a coming-of-age movie, and a pretty good one, with fine performances all round, solidly directed by Desmond Davis -- it was his first film as a director after working as camera operator for many years. It was Tony Richardson, for whom he had worked on A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), who gave him the Edna O'Brien novel on which the film is based and suggested he direct it.

Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2010)

Mimi Branescu, Maria Popistasu, Sasa Paul-Szel, and Mirela Oprisor in Tuesday, After Christmas

Cast: Mimi Branescu, Mirela Oprisor, Maria Popistasu, Sasa Paul-Szel, Victor Rebengiuc, Dragos Bucur, Dana Dembinski Medeleanu, Silvia Nastase, Adrian Vancica, Carmen Lopazan, Ioana Blaj. Screenplay: Alexandru Baciu, Radu Muntean, Razvan Radulescu. Cinematography: Tudor Lucaciu. Production design: Sorin Dima. Film editing: Alma Cazacu, Cristina Hincu, Matei Ovejan, Andu Radu, Andrei Scutaru.

Tuesday, After Christmas has virtually no plot. It's more of a series of tableaus, scenes composed of long takes, as the marriage of Paul (Mimi Branescu) and Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) disintegrates under the pressure of Paul's affair with Raluca (Maria Popistasu). It takes place over the Christmas weekend, starting with the naked Paul and Raluca in bed, followed by scenes of Christmas shopping by Paul and Adriana, a visit by Paul and Adriana and their daughter to the girl's dentist, who is none other than Raluca, Paul's visit to Raluca in another city where she's gone to see her mother, climaxing in a scene in which Paul confesses the affair to Adriana, followed by their separation, and concluding with a terrifically uncomfortable Christmas dinner with Paul's parents, who are, like the daughter, still unaware of the impending divorce. It ends on a quiet note, a simple gesture in which Adriana hands a present to Paul behind her back. The film gets its forward drive from the performances, from the things the characters say -- and don't say -- to each other. It's a fly-on-the-wall movie, with the viewer stuck there uncomfortably watching things work out, tempted to flee but hypnotized by our own voyeuristic interest in the way things will go next. There's a theatricality to the film in Radu Muntean's use of long takes, each of which lasts several minutes, making us aware of the skill of performers who can't rely on multiple retakes to get a scene right, but it never feels stagy. Instead, it feels observed, which may be the film's strength for those who like to savor the moment as well as its greatest weakness for those who want an imposed significance.

The Merchant of Venice (Michael Radford, 2004)

Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins, Al Pacino, Zuleikha Robinson, Kris Marshall, Charlie Cox, Heather Goldenhersh, Mackenzie Crook, John Sessions, Gregor Fisher, Ron Cook, Allan Corduner, Anton Rodgers, David Harewood, Antonio Gil. Screenplay: Michael Radford, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Bruno Rubeo. Film editing: Lucia Zucchetti. Music: Jocelyn Pook.

Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice is a respectable, almost satisfying version of an unsatisfying play. To put it mildly, The Merchant of Venice has not worn well over time, especially in the post-Holocaust world, and not just because of the potential for anti-Semitic caricature in the presentation of the Jewish moneylender, Shylock. Taken as a whole, it's one of Shakespeare's most cynical plays, a portrait of mistrust, not only between Christians and Jews, but also between men and women, husbands and wives, old and young, rich and poor, and perhaps, if we adhere to the contemporary reading that seems to inflect Radford's version, between gay and straight. It's a play full of "othering." In that context, the play's two most familiar speeches, Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes" and Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strained" stand out, not as the homiletic antidotes to the prevalent mistrust in the play that they have often been taken to be, but as an ironic response to the omnipresent reality of avarice and prejudice that informs the play. Radford has done a good job of emphasizing the unsavory side of the mercantile life presented in the play. For all that Bassanio and Portia are embodiments of the traditional romantic hero and heroine of Shakespeare comedy, it also becomes clear that they enter into their relationship with less than noble sentiments: Bassanio needs money, which is why he goes to wive it wealthily in Belmont. Portia needs to be relieved of the absurd burden imposed by her late father's will, which leaves to blind chance the identity of her future husband. Radford also underscores the fact that the real love match of the play is between two men, Antonio and Bassanio, with the former willing to risk his fortune and eventually his life for the latter, whereas Bassanio can't even be bound not to part with the ring Portia has given him. It's a queer play indeed. The film is full of good performances, starting with Al Pacino's as Shylock, perhaps the raison d'être of the film. The part could have brought out Pacino's worst scenery chewing, but he reins himself in to emphasize the long-suffering Shylock, not the bloodthirsty Shylock, and in the end makes the character less stereotypically avaricious. Jeremy Irons is most effective when he shows Antonio's increasing awareness that he has been trapped, partly at least by his love for Bassanio. Joseph Fiennes is less effective as the wooer of Portia than he is as the stalwart friend of Antonio, but that's partly because Lynn Collins maintains Portia as the upper hand in their relationship -- so much so, that we might wonder what she sees in him. Radford has trimmed and rearranged some of the play, downgrading its great purple passage, Lorenzo's speech to Jessica that opens the somewhat anticlimactic Act V, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank." In fact, he gives the opening lines of the speech to an off-screen singer, and lets Lorenzo pick up with "Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold." It's a sacrifice of poetry for the sake of drama, and I won't complain. There's poetry enough in the handsome production design and cinematography, full of echoes of Renaissance art. 

Ten Nights in a Barroom (Roy Calnek, 1926)

Lawrence Chenault and Charles Gilpin in Ten Nights in a Barroom

Cast: Charles Gilpin, Myra Burwell, Lawrence Chenault, Harry Henderson, William A. Clayton Jr., Ethel Smith, Arline Mickey, Edgar Moore, Reginald Hoffer, William J. Milton. Based on a novel by Timothy Shay Arthur. No credited screenwriter, cinematographer, production designer, or film editor.

Timothy Shay Arthur's 1854 novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There is sometimes called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Temperance movement, especially after it was turned into a play in 1858 by William W. Pratt and began touring the country. Not surprisingly, it was made into a movie as early as 1901, and at least four remakes preceded this all-Black film, credited to director Roy Calnek and the Colored Players of Philadelphia. The failure of Prohibition tarnished the property a bit, and the last known version, the only talkie, was made by William A. O'Connor in 1931. The 1926 film holds up well for many reasons, including the performance of Charles Gilpin as Joe Morgan, who turns to drink after he's cheated out of the mill he owns by Simon Slade (Lawrence Chenault, a character actor mainstay of Black film in the era). Gilpin, who founded his own theatrical company in Harlem, was the creator of the title role of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, but was fired from the play for too many conflicts with O'Neill over the racial epithets the play forced him to utter. (He was replaced by Paul Robeson, who became famous for the part.) Gilpin gives a natural, untheatrical performance as Morgan, whose downfall leads to the death of his young daughter -- a very effective young performer who is unidentified in the credits and in any other source I've found. There's also some skillfully directed and edited action at the climax of the film, when a mob burns down Slade's barroom, with the evil gambler Harvey Green (William A. Clayton Jr.) trapped inside, and Morgan pursues Slade in a rowboat chase on the river. Though the didacticism and melodrama, along with some unfortunate attempts at humor featuring Arline Mickey as the dime-novel addict Mehitable Carwright and Edgar Moore as a drunk called Sample Swichel, slow things down a bit, Ten Nights in a Barroom stays watchable today.

This Means War (McG, 2012)

Tom Hardy, Reese Witherspoon, and Chris Pine in This Means War

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, Til Schweiger, Chelsea Handler, John Paul Ruttan, Abigail Spencer, Angela Bassett, Rosemary Harris, George Touliatos. Screenplay: Timothy Dowling, Simon Kinberg, Marcus Gautesen. Cinematography: Russell Carpenter. Production design: Martin Laing. Film editing: Nicolas De Toth. Music: Christoph Beck.

Professionalism consists of doing your best even when the task assigned to you isn't worthy of your talents. This Means War certifies the professionalism of Tom Hardy, Chris Pine, and Reese Witherspoon, who do every absurd thing and speak every inane line that they're given as if the project warranted their full commitment. The experience of making the film caused Hardy to vow that he'll never do another rom-com, and it's likely that Pine and Witherspoon don't highlight the movie on their résumés. The film is, in short, a terrible mess, a mashup of action movie and sex farce, almost unwatchable except for the sheer charisma of its three principles. Its chief virtue, aside from the handsome performers, is that it's short: only 97 minutes, after being reduced from a director's cut of 107 minutes. This reduction seems to have jettisoned the backstory about the bad guys who put the three leads in jeopardy, making the film less coherent but probably more tolerable. Once upon a time, the presence of Hardy, Pine, and Witherspoon -- as well as such skilled performers as Angela Bassett and Rosemary Harris in barely there supporting roles -- would have been easy to explain: Under the studio system, stars were obligated by their contracts to do what they were handed. But that system vanished half a century ago, and nothing can justify wasting the time and talent of actors like these on This Means War.

The Official Story (Luis Puenzo, 1985)

Héctor Alterio and Norma Aleandro in The Official Story

Cast: Norma Aleandro, Héctor Alterio, Chunchuna Villafañe, Hugo Arana, Guillermo Battaglia, Chela Ruíz, Patricio Contreras, Maria Luisa Robledo, Anibal Morixe, Jorge Petraglia, Analia Castro. Screenplay: Luis Puenzo, Aída Bortnik. Cinematography: Félix Monti. Production design: Abel Facello. Film editing: Juan Carlos Macías. Music: Atilio Stampone.

The Official Story is a gripping film about guilt that might have more resonance in this politically charged year than in any other since it was made. Norma Aleandro plays Alicia, a woman whose suspicions about the parentage of her adopted daughter, Gaby (Analia Castro), lead her to investigate her way into the sufferings of others and thereby to share in that suffering. The film might be criticized for coming at the sordid history which underlies it, the "disappeared" citizens who opposed the Argentine junta that took power in 1976, from the wrong point of view, for turning the complacent bourgeois into victims. But the victimization game is all too easy to play, and I think it's better to see The Official Story as a film about the consequences of evil. Luis Puenzo controls the many ironies of Alicia's story, such as the fact that she's a history teacher who doesn't understand the history of own times, without letting his film become too heavy-handed and didactic. For me the climax of the film comes not when Alicia makes her shattering discovery, but in what spurs her to set out on her quest for the truth: a reunion with an old friend, Ana (Chunchuna Villafañe), who fled the country after being arrested and tortured by the junta. It begins as a light-hearted moment, with the two women getting snockered on egg nog, laughing together until the laughter turns hysterical, and Ana delivers the full story of her torture and abuse. It's a moment that brilliantly evokes the fragility of friendship and the consequences of moral and political choice.

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas. Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker.

Shutter Island is two hours and 18 minutes long, and it feels like it. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) is almost as long (two minutes shorter) and it doesn't. Yet Martin Scorsese, who made Shutter Island, is one of the few contemporary directors who are spoken of with much the same reverence as Hitchcock. Granted, comparing the two films is unfair: North by Northwest is meant to be giddy fun, constantly on the move, while Shutter Island is a psychological thriller with horror movie overtones and a claustrophobic setting. So perhaps the more appropriate comparison would be one of Hitchcock's explorations of disordered psychology, Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958). The former comes in at 109 minutes, the latter at just a few minutes over two hours. The point here is that Hitchcock knew how to tighten things up. Scorsese may know how, but he doesn't seem to care. He lets Shutter Island slop around, losing tension and focus in the process, when all he really has to do is guide us to a surprise twist and shocking climax. I seem to be one of the few who feel that the film is a tedious indulgence in material of no great matter: Its psychology is unconvincing, its characters are toys, and its payoff is rather pat and formulaic. Still, it gets a whopping 8.2 rating from viewers on IMdB, so I seem to be among the few who feel that too much acting and directing talent has been expended on too little.

Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

Cast: Günes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu, Elit Iscan, Ilayda Akdogan, Nihal G. Koldas, Ayberk Pekcan, Bahar Kerimoglu, Burak Yigit, Erol Afsin, Suzanne Marrot, Serife Kara, Aynur Komecoglu, Sevval Aydin. Screenplay: Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Alice Winocour. Cinematography: David Chizallet, Ersin Gok. Production design: Turker Isci. Film editing: Mathilde Van de Moortel. Music: Warren Ellis.

The sheer energy that bursts from the screen as the five girls in Mustang play and rebel is the film's greatest strength. It's a story about five Turkish girls in a small village, orphaned sisters raised by their grandmother and an uncle, whose joie de vivre gets them into trouble when a busybody neighbor sees them playing with some male schoolmates, celebrating the arrival of the end of term, and interprets their horseplay as shamefully erotic. The girls are swiftly imprisoned in their home, which becomes a "school for wives," as the youngest girl, Lale (Günes Sensoy), puts it in her occasional voiceover commentary. Eventually, two of the girls are married off, one commits suicide, and two escape to Istanbul, which evokes for them what Moscow did for the sisters in Chekhov's play. The casting is the chief marvel of the film -- none of the girls is a professional actress and they aren't really siblings -- and director and co-writer Deniz Gamze Ergüven makes the most of it. She's less successful at handling the more sensational elements of the plot, the molestation of some of the girls and the suicide, which are treated a little too obliquely. The film was not received well in the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but since it was co-produced by France, Germany, and Turkey, it was eligible to be submitted as the French contender for the Oscar, and earned a nomination.    

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch, Marion Bessay. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Marco Bittner Rosser. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Josef van Wissem.

With its focus on vital fluids, the vampire genre has always been about sex, especially since at the end of the sexually repressed Victorian era, Bram Stoker gave it one of its definitive expressions in Dracula, where the fear of sexuality gets turned into a fear of a living death. But with the fall of so many sexual taboos in the 20th and 21st century, vampirism itself no longer holds the same kind of terrors. It takes an imagination like Jim Jarmusch's to turn things around, to make the vampires afraid of the living. Only Lovers Left Alive is only partly a post-AIDS fable, in which the substance that sustains a vampire can itself prove deadly. Jarmusch's Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are age-old predators reduced in this century to procuring only carefully screened blood, uncontaminated by the misadventures of human beings. He gets his from a hospital researcher who calls himself "Dr. Watson" (Jeffrey Wright), she from an old friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), whose source we never discover. Jarmusch is casual about providing the backstories of his characters; we have to take them for who and what they are, with only tantalizing hints about their long past and even much of their present lives. We gather that this Marlowe is the historical one, who didn't really die in a tavern brawl in 1593, but lived on in exile where he ghost-wrote the plays of Shakespeare and at one point, presumably late in his life, since he is quite elderly when we see him, became a vampire and moved to Tangier. We never learn, either, why Adam and Eve have gone their separate ways after having been married at least three times in their so-called lives. She, too, lives in Morocco, but he has settled in a desolate, abandoned section of Detroit, where he spends his nights composing music and tinkering with electronics. The plot begins when she comes to visit and they are soon joined by her younger sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), an incorrigible troublemaker. But plot isn't much to the point in Jarmusch's film, which is a character study of two sophisticated people who have lived long enough to see the world and human beings (whom he calls "zombies") change around them. It can be said that some of the humor in the movie is a little obvious, sometimes more like a spoof of vampire pictures than the elegant setup of the film deserves. But this is, I think, one of Jarmusch's best films, simply because he has gathered a wonderful company of actors and given them a finely wrought atmosphere to perform in.

Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, 2018)

Tang Wei and Huang Jue in Long Day's Journey Into Night

Cast: Huang Jue, Tang Wei, Sylvia Chang, Lee Hong-Chi, Chen Yongzhong, Luo Feiyang, Chloe Maayan, Tuan Chun-hao, Bi Yanmin, Xie Lixun, Qi Xi, Ming-Dao, Long Zezhi. Screenplay: Bi Gan. Cinematography: David Chizallet, Wang Dong Li, Wu Changhua. Production design: Liu Qiang. Film editing: Qin Yanan. Music: Hsu Chin-Yuan, Lim Giong.

Bi Gan's second feature feels to me like the work of a young director whose debut feature, Kaili Blues (2015), may have gotten more praise than was good for him. It has the first film's relative indifference to conventional narrative and tendency to dazzle with cinematic technique, namely impossibly long traveling takes. In Kaili Blues, there was a breathtaking one-shot sequence that lasted 41 minutes, so almost inevitably Long Day's Journey Into Night has to extend its climactic take to almost an hour. I'm not saying that the second film is a failure -- it may one day be certified as a masterpiece -- but that Bi is in danger of becoming a mannerist filmmaker, one who lets his infatuation with the possibilities of his medium betray him into excess, to a preoccupation with form and style that fails to serve the imaginative potential of film. Long Day's Journey had the critics counting allusions, from the film noir setup to the apparent hommages to any number of other directors, not to mention his tribute to his literary heroes, evoking Eugene O'Neill in the English title of his film, and Roberto Bolaño in the Chinese title, which translates to an equivalent of Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth. More than one critic has added Kafka and Borges to the source list, and I will add another: Bi's exploration through memories and dreams of Kaili, in southwestern China, reminds me of Faulkner's treatment of the North Mississippi past. And yet, Bi is his own auteur, one whose next film is bound to be met with eager anticipation by many. He just bears the burden of doing something new next time. 

The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

Cheryl Dunye and Valarie Walker in The Watermelon Woman

Cast: Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner, Valarie Walker, Lisa Marie Bronson, Cheryl Clarke, Irene Dunye, Brian Freeman, Ira Jeffries, Alexandra Juhasz, Camille Paglia, Sarah Schulman, V.S. Brodie, Shelley Olivier, David Rakoff, Toshi Reagon, Christopher Ridenhour, Kat Robertson, Jocelyn Taylor. Screenplay: Cheryl Dunye, Doug McKeown. Cinematography: Michelle Crenshaw. Production design: Robert Holtzman. Film editing: Annie Taylor. Music: Paul Shapiro.

Fiction is often a surer way of getting to the truth than fact. Or as Cheryl Dunye puts it in a title card at the end: "Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction." So by inventing a Black lesbian film actress of the 1930s, Fae Richards, known as "The Watermelon Woman," Dunye is able to capture some of the unwritten history of Black women who also happened to be lesbians in the era when to be Black, female, and lesbian was a kind of triple whammy. What sustains the film is the skill with which Dunye crafts her Watermelon Woman, an analog to the actresses like Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, and Butterfly McQueen who found themselves stuck playing maids and mammies, upholders of the straight white norm, in motion pictures. Dunye manages to almost make us believe in the existence of Fae Richards, helped by photographer Zoe Leonard, who shot the stills and archival photographs that give the actress a reality she never really had. The Watermelon Woman could be too easily pigeonholed as a "niche film," one aimed at a Black audience or a lesbian audience or even an audience of film scholars who get the allusions to real actors (and directors such as Dorothy Arzner) in the movie. But it manages to transcend such reductive labeling. It's a film about marginalizing, misrepresentation, stereotyping, and all the common forms of willful ignorance of lives other than the ones we consider normative. That it's also often a very funny film doesn't hurt. I happen to think Dunye's movie falls apart toward the end, when it doesn't reach a logical or emotional climax, but that's not a fatal flaw for a movie of such penetrating intelligence.

Hollywood Shuffle (Robert Townsend, 1987)

Jimmy Woodard and Robert Townsend in Hollywood Shuffle

Cast: Robert Townsend, Anne-Marie Johnson, Craigus R. Johnson, Helen Martin, Starletta DuPois, David McKnight, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Lou B. Washington, Brad Sanders, John Witherspoon, Eugene Robert Glazer, Lisa Mende, Dom Irrera. Screenplay: Robert Townsend, Keenen Ivory Wayans. Cinematography: Peter Deming. Production design: Melba Katzman Farquhar. Film editing: W.O. Garrett. Music: Udi Harpaz, Patrice Rushen.

Thirteen years ago, Vanity Fair ran an article about how Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle hadn't aged in its then-30 years of existence. But in their essentials, neither the article nor the movie has aged since then. Granted, some of the movie's satiric targets, like the TV reviews of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert or the search for Eddie Murphy clones, are no longer fresh, and movie and TV stereotypes are somewhat more self-consciously maintained today. Now, Townsend would probably be lampooning the Magical Negro stereotype instead of the pimps and hoods that his comedy centers on. And Hollywood Shuffle is a little more brash and raw than might win critical favor today. Still, as a wakeup call for Black artists and for white audiences, the movie still rings true and cuts deep.

Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold, 2019)

Matt Damon and Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari

Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal, Catriona Balfe, Josh Lucas, Noah Jupe, Tracy Letts, Remo Girone, Ray McKinnon, JJ Feild. Screenplay: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: François Audouy. Film editing: Andrew Buckland, Michael McCusker, Dick Westervelt. Music: Marco Beltrami, Buck Sanders.

They don't make 'em like they used to do, except when they do, and with Ford v Ferrari they did. This story about spunky underdogs taking on the big boys of the racing world could have been made in the 1930s by Raoul Walsh or Henry Hathaway or any capable action movie director. The difference then would have been that the bad guys would just have been crooks and cheats, whereas in Ford v Ferrari they are bureaucrats, corporate suits stifling innovation and initiative. Even though the title suggests an international rivalry, the key conflict pits "real" racers like Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale) against the bean-counters and marketing M.B.A.s like Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), sucking up to the boss, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). Granted, there is an international rivalry at work, with the Ford Motor Co. trying to recapture some of its old eminence by taking on Ferrari, the Italian auto manufacturer that has for years dominated the prestigious 24-hour road race at Le Mans. What spurs this rivalry is a loss of face by Ford after being finessed out of the acquisition of Ferrari and then being insulted by Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) himself. Shelby and Miles have not always been on the best of terms -- Miles once threw a wrench at Shelby, and the two have a fistfight in mid-film -- but they get sucked into the Ford vs. Ferrari competition because they both love auto racing and are tempted by the opportunity to build the world's greatest race car. Naturally, it all ends in triumph, but not in the way an old-fashioned movie would: The bureaucrats manage to tarnish their victory. The movie doesn't quite avoid the old clichés: Miles has the usual cute kid and loving wife, with Catriona Balfe taking on the latter role, an updated version of June Allyson dutifully supporting James Stewart in all those 1950s movies. Still, Balfe plays it well, particularly in the scene in which she drives the family station wagon the way her husband drives his race cars, scaring some sense into him. The leads, too, are fine. Damon gives Shelby substance, a taciturn cunning, when he's dealing with the volatile Miles or with the stodgy suits. Bale's Miles has a lean and hungry look that suggests his unpredictability, but he manages to make the character human in his scenes with Balfe and Noah Jupe as their son, Peter. One other difference from the old movies: A director like Walsh or Hathaway would have brought the film in at a tidy 90 minutes or so. James Mangold lets Ford v Ferrari sprawl over 152 minutes, with some inevitable sagging in between the snazzily edited racing scenes.

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)

Alva Rogers, Trula Hoosier, and Barbarao in Daughters of the Dust

Cast: Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbarao, Trula Hoosier, Umar Abdurrahamn, Adisa Anderson, Kaycee Moore, Bahni Turpin, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Tommy Redmond Hicks, Tony King, Cornell Royal, Vertamae Grosvenor. Screenplay: Julie Dash. Cinematography: Arthur Jafa. Production design: Kerry Marshall. Film editing: Joseph Burton, Amy Carey. Music: John Barnes.

The Great Migration, the movement northward of Black Americans in the 20th century, was one of the most unreported major stories of its day, and it's only in hindsight that authors and filmmakers have been able to re-create the immense cultural upheaval that it represents. Julie Dash does it in the most intimate and delicate way possible, by letting us meet the Peazant family on the eve of their departure from the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for an unknown future in the North. It's one of those films that need a solid grounding in American history, and particularly in the history of Black people in America, to be fully appreciated, for Dash throws us into the lives of the Peazant family and the centuries of tradition, religion, and oppression that they embody, not to teach us about these things, but to spur us to learn. The film was originally released without subtitles to aid the viewer's comprehension of the dialogue, spoken in the Gullah dialect, and though I'm happy to have that help now, the beauty of the setting and the faces in it communicate nearly as much as the words. It's a film about the ability to endure and prevail, as Faulkner might have put it. 

D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949)

Neville Brand and Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, Neville Brand, Laurette Luez, Jess Kirkpatrick, Cay Forester, Frank Jaquet, Lawrence Dobkin, Frank Gerstle, Carol Hughes, Michael Ross, Donna Sanborn. Screenplay: Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene. Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Arthur H. Nadel. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Who knew that being a notary public could be so dangerous? D.O.A. is a frenetic, mostly implausible thriller that somehow works, even though no one in it acts like a human being. I mean, if you found that you'd been poisoned and had only a short time to live, you'd get in touch with the police, check into a hospital, and call your loved ones, right? Not Frank Bigelow, a tax accountant on a rather odd vacation to San Francisco, who visits a jazz bar where he's given a drink containing a "luminous toxin." The next morning, feeling a little unwell, he goes to a doctor who gives him the bad news, so he rushes to a hospital for a second opinion, and then, following a slim lead, rushes to Los Angeles to try to find out why he's being done in. All this rushing, which includes a famous tracking shot of Bigelow running down Market Street, elbowing aside the crowds, can't have been good for him, perhaps only speeding up the effects of the poison. But by this time we have been so caught up in his plight that we don't really care. One of the reasons is that Edmond O'Brien, an actor who was typically a kind of movie Everyman, is perfectly cast as Bigelow. The other is that Rudolph Maté, abetted by a pounding score by Dimitri Tiomkin, never gives us time for anything so mundane as thought. It's a film full of absurdities, starting with Bigelow's curiously distant relationship with his secretary and lover, Paula (Pamela Britton), and continuing through his arrival at a hotel in San Francisco during "Market Week," where hordes of salesmen, clients, and (presumably) hookers are partying. (I don't know who thought it was a great idea to add a slide-whistle wolf whistle on the soundtrack every time a pretty woman appears on screen. Surely it isn't indicated on Tiomkin's score.) Anyway, Bigelow gets swept away to a bar where a lot of hipsters are grooving to some hyped-up jazz, and it's there that he gets slipped the mickey. The film takes off and never lets up from there, with some fisticuffs and gunplay and a toothy psychopath named Chester (Neville Brand), as the plot thickens so much that by the end I really couldn't tell you why Bigelow's notarizing a bill of sale put him in such final jeopardy. Nor do I care: By the end, I was so exhausted by its audacious silliness that I was content to accept it as the classic good bad movie.

The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)

Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers

Cast: Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson, Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Manfredi Aliquo, David Ford, Daniel Franco, Rossana Canghiari, Fabrizio Sergenti Castellani, Mario Cotone, Giancarlo Previati, Antonio Serrano. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Dante Spinotti. Production design: Gianni Quaranta. Film editing: Bill Pankow. Music: Angelo Badalamenti. 

Like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers exploits the enclosed and labyrinthine character of Venice for sinister potential, but unlike Roeg, Schrader and screenwriter Harold Pinter, following Ian McEwan's book, make the city into a place where psychosis and not the supernatural seems to flourish. It was probably the wrong place for a handsome young couple like Colin (Rupert Everett) and Mary (Natasha Richardson) to come to, as they say, "work on their relationship." She is the divorced mother of two small children, an actress who does voiceover work for commercials; he's apparently some kind of editor, for he sometimes fiddles around with a manuscript that he proclaims "unreadable." But what matters more than what they do is how they look: They're quite beautiful. And that attracts the notice of Robert (Christopher Walken), a bar owner who surreptitiously photographs them and, we later learn, takes the pictures back to his opulent flat to show his disabled wife, Caroline (Helen Mirren). Eventually, Robert lures Colin and Mary to his bar, where he tells them stories of his past, of his cruel, overbearing father. Colin and Mary get lost on the way back to their hotel, and an exhausted (and perhaps drugged) Mary collapses, so they spend the night huddled in an alley. The next day, they agree that Robert is not someone they want to spend a lot of time with, but nevertheless he manages to find them and invite them to his apartment to meet his wife. The spider has lured them to his web. Eventually, we will learn that Robert is a psychopath and that his relationship with Caroline is sadomasochistic. That fact makes the emotional and sexual vulnerability of Colin and Mary more acute. This is one of those instances where the casting of an actor, namely Everett, inevitably adds a layer of significance to the character he's playing. Everett had come out as gay only the year before The Comfort of Strangers was made, and it's almost too easy to read this aspect of the actor's real life into his art. When we first meet Colin and Mary there's an element of sexual tension between them: They are sleeping in separate beds in their hotel room, and at one point she says that what he really needs is more sex. Later, after their encounter with Robert and Caroline has released something in them, Colin and Mary have passionate sex, but at one point he admits that he has always wondered what it's like to be the woman during sex. Robert, meanwhile, accuses Colin of being a "communist poof," and later tells him that he has told the men in the bar that Colin is his lover. I can't help feeling that Schrader has exploited Everett's real-life sexuality in the film, and Everett himself has notoriously advised gay actors not to come out of the closet if they want major careers -- his own hit the skids not long after the release of The Comfort of Strangers. Setting that aside, the film is opulently staged and filmed, well acted, and Schrader sets up the revelations of its plot and characters skillfully. But there's also something airless and perfunctory about it. I don't know enough about Colin and Mary to feel a sense of violation at what happens to them, to regard it as more than just formulaic psychological thriller stuff.  

The Cat and the Fiddle (William K. Howard, 1934)

Ramon Novarro and Jeanette MacDonald in The Cat and the Fiddle

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Jeanette MacDonald, Frank Morgan, Charles Butterworth, Jean Hersholt, Vivienne Segal, Frank Conroy, Henry Armetta, Adrienne D'Ambicourt, Joseph Cawthorn. Screenplay: Bella Spewack, Sam Spewack, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and Jerome Kern. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Frank E. Hull. Music: Herbert Stothart, songs by Jerome Kern and Otto A. Harbach.

The Cat and the Fiddle marks a change in Jeanette MacDonald's career: It was her first film for MGM after the classic series of witty, racy movies co-starring Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, and it neatly bridges her way into the more famous but less interesting operetta films she made with Nelson Eddy at MGM. Here her co-star is Ramon Novarro, a charming actor with great comic skills and a nice singing voice, but they don't mesh the way she did with either Chevalier or Eddy; she seems a little too stiff, he a little too boyish. Made before the full introduction of the Production Code, the movie tries for some of the sexiness of the Paramount films made under the aegis of the master of the sly wink, Ernst Lubitsch. The lovers, Novarro's Victor and MacDonald's Shirley, live together without benefit of clergy, a thing impossible under the code. There is fun to be had watching the film: The dialogue -- among the uncredited contributors to the screenplay are Anita Loos and James Kevin McGuinness -- is often smart and funny, the songs are pleasant, and the giddy nonsense of the plot skips along merrily. And at the end there's a nice surprise: The final reel is in Technicolor, giving audiences a first glimpse of MacDonald's red hair. But this is minor MGM musical stuff, even in comparison with the later MacDonald/Eddy movies.

Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925)

Paul Robeson, Julia Theresa Russell, and Mercedes Gilbert in Body and Soul

Cast: Paul Robeson, Mercedes Gilbert, Julia Theresa Russell, Marshall Rogers, Lawrence Chenault, Lillian Johnson, Madame Robinson, Chester A. Alexander, Walter Cornick. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No other credited crew. 

The melodramatic imagination that crafts stories out of feelings and emotions is a precious thing, giving us an insight into the hidden lives of human beings uninflected by ideology. But the manners and behavior that grow out of these emotions change with the times, so what stirs the emotions of one generation seems ludicrous to the next, leading to an undervaluing and neglect of melodrama as an art form. Add to this a general intellectual mistrust of and contempt for appeals to the emotions, and it's easy to see why so much of the cinematic past that stemmed from this imagination has vanished, the victim of a kind of sanctioned neglect. And a special victim of this neglect would have to be the so-called "race movie," aimed almost exclusively at Black audiences. All of which makes the survival of even a deeply flawed film like Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul so remarkable. Even in its carefully restored form, it has narrative gaps and character inconsistencies that suggest still-missing pieces. But it also preserves the essence of what Black audiences of the time thought and felt about themselves, along with portrayals of the desperation of poverty, the intense and sometimes blinding religiosity, and the indomitable hope. We can fault Body and Soul for its too-facile "it was all a dream" resolution, but we should also value it for endorsing the necessity of dream as an antidote for crushing despair. Watching it 95 years later, it's easy to be distracted by its antiquity, by the title cards written in a dialect that offends us, by the florid acting -- Paul Robeson apparently later tried to hide the fact that this was his first film, even though his is certainly the most impressive performance in it. Call the film naïve if you will, but see it as its first audiences saw it, as a validation of their hopes and fears, and it can be an intensely moving experience. 

Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, and Clelia Matania in Don't Look Now

Cast: Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, Leopoldo Trieste, Giorgio Trestini, David Tree, Ann Rye, Nicholas Salter, Sharon Williams, Bruno Cattaneo, Adalina Poerio. Screenplay: Allan Scott, Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Art direction: Giovanni Socol. Film editing: Graeme Clifford. Music: Pino Donaggio.

A beautifully textured film, Don't Look Now fills every frame with portents, making it one of the most influential "horror films" of all time. And like the best horror films, like Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) or Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), it doesn't rest content with simply scaring people. It's unsettling mostly because it preys not on our nerves but on our conscience, needling our sense of guilt, our self-consciousness about grief, our denial in the face of the inevitability of death. Its supernatural element is preposterous, but we accept it because each of us has our preposterous superstitions, our wishful fantasies, our falling away from logic and reason. Nicolas Roeg accomplishes a near-perfect integration of story and setting in his use of Venice, a beautiful, historic city, riddled with decay and threatened by time and tide. In his hands, it becomes a correlative for the dance between acceptance and despair that the Baxters, Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland), are treading as they try to survive the death of their daughter. I think the film falls apart a little at the end, with too much flashbackery to summarize what has happened to the Baxters, and it could have been leavened with the kind of wit that Hitchcock and Polanski resorted to in their films, but I'd call it a near-miss classic.