Backfire (Vincent Sherman, 1950)

Edmond O'Brien, Gordon MacRae, and Virginia Mayo in Backfire

Cast: Gordon MacRae, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O'Brien, Viveca Lindfors, Dane Clark, Ed Begley, Sheila MacRae, Mack Williams, Leonard Strong, Frances Robinson, Richard Rober, David Hoffman, Ida Moore. Screenplay: Lawrence B. Marcus, Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts. Cinematography: Carl E. Guthrie. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Thomas Reilly. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof. 

Backfire is a hyperplotted whodunit that aspires to some of the narrative complexity of Raymond Chandler but doesn't quite have what it takes. Gordon MacRae plays Bob Corey, recovering from war wounds in an Army hospital, who receives a visit one night from a mysterious woman (Viveca Lindfors) who tells him that his friend Steve Connolly (Edmond O'Brien) has been in a serious accident and is threatening to commit suicide; she asks for his help, but Corey has just been given a shot to help him sleep and passes out as the woman is talking. The next morning, he's not certain whether the woman was really there or if he dreamed about her visit. When he gets out of the hospital, the police contact him: Connolly is wanted for the murder of a notorious gambler and has disappeared. While in the hospital, Corey has fallen in love with a nurse, Julie Benson (Virginia Mayo), and with her help he begins the search for his friend. The rest of the story is told mostly in a series of flashbacks, some of them provided by people who get killed for telling Corey their stories, which all point to a high-roller with a mistress who is none other than the mysterious woman who visited Corey in the hospital. Some suspenseful moments and some entertaining performances keep the movie going, but the outcome is just a little too predictable. It's like one of those TV detective shows where the bad guy turns out to be that character actor you've seen before but can't quite place. This time, it's the actor whose name recognition is a little larger than their role in the movie seems to justify. 

Ceddo (Ousmane Sembene, 1977)

Tabata Ndiaye in Ceddo

 Cast: Tabata Ndiaye, Alioune Fall, Moustapha Yade, Mamadou N’diaye Diagne, Ousmane Camara, Nar Sene, Makhouredia Gueye, Mamadou Dioum, Oumar Guèye, Pierre Orma, Eloi Coly, Marek Tollik, Ismaila Diagne. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Bara Diokhane, Orlando Lopez, Seydina D. Saye. Art direction: Alpha W. Diallo. Film editing: Dominique Blain, Florence Eymon. Music: Manu Dibango. 

In Wolof, ceddo means something like "outsiders" or "others," but the subtitles for Ousmane Sembene's film translate it as "pagan." Which is appropriate in that Sembene's film is about that essential precursor to colonialism: the obliteration of an indigenous religion by a proselytizing religious authority. Ceddo is set in a village in Sub-Saharan Africa in precolonial times -- Sembene said that he imagined it to be the 17th or 18th century. The colony of French West Africa was established in 1895, but the colonizing vanguard was there much earlier in the form of Islamic and Christian missionaries. In Ceddo the village has been mostly converted to Islam, which the village king has accepted. But the ceddo resist the new religion, and kidnap the king's daughter, Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye), who is supposed to marry a Muslim, in conflict with suitors upholding tribal tradition. The struggle to return the princess is bloody. Two white men, a slaver and a Catholic priest, observe the action like eager scavengers. Sembene tells the story with a mixture of straightforward narrative and touches that evoke the future under colonialism. The music track, for example, at one point contains a gospel song sung in English, suggesting the diaspora of slavery. And we see the Catholic priest with what appears to be his sole parishioner in his makeshift chapel, but Sembene cuts to a vision of what the priest longs for: a large congregation with nuns dressed in white and an image of black men rising into heaven. At one point, when the Islamic villagers have won a victory over the ceddo, the imam gives the forced converts their new names. The first one is called Ibrahim, but the second is tellingly given the name Ousmane. Ceddo is an ambitious film, made under difficult circumstances -- the dailies, for example, had to be sent to France to be processed, resulting in a lag of some weeks before Sembene and his crew could know if what they had shot was acceptable. But Sembene's achievement is a remarkable portrait of a continent in transition.   

A Mother Should Be Loved (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934)

Mitsuko Yoshikawa in A Mother Should Be Loved

Cast: Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Den Ohinata, Koji Mitsui, Seiichi Kato, Shusei Nomura, Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryu, Yumeko Aizome, Shinobu Aoki, Choko Iida. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Tadao Ikeda, Masao Arata, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Isamu Aoki. 

Ordinarily, I would regard watching a silent movie about mother love as a chore, not a pleasure. Especially if the movie is missing its first and last reels and doesn't have a music soundtrack to sweeten it. But A Mother Should Be Loved is an exception, mostly because it's directed by Yasujiro Ozu, who can be trusted not to slip into mawkishness and also to provide visuals that compensate for what's lacking in audibles. The story is emotionally complex: After the death of their father -- a role, played by Yukichi Iwata, that was lost with the movie's first reel -- Sadao (Seiichi Kato) and Kosaku (Shusei Nomura) are raised by Chieko (Mitsuko Yoshikawa). But when Sadao comes of age (now played by Den Ohinata) and applies to the university, he sees his birth certificate and realizes that Chieko is not really his mother -- he's the son of his father's first wife. He's upset at the deception but is quickly assured by Chieko that she loves him equally with Kosaku (now played by Koji Mitsui) and has tried to raise him as her own son. Eventually, however, Sadao suspects Chieko of overcompensating: treating him more generously than Kosaku. They argue, and when Kosaku learns that Sadao has upset their mother, he strikes him. Unwilling to fight back, Sadao leaves home and takes up residence in a brothel. When Chieko comes to plead with him to return home, Sadao refuses at first, but a maid in the brothel overhears their conversation and tells him her own story, which moves him so much that he relents. The reconciliation scene has been lost with the last reel, but is narratively inessential -- if the loss of any of Ozu's work can be deemed inessential. The delicacy of the performances and the lovely framing of each scene in the film overcome sentimentality. Ozu also slips in one of his allusions to other movies by decorating the brothel with a poster of Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson in Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932).  

The House of Yes (Mark Waters, 1997

Tori Spelling, Josh Hamilton, and Parker Posey in The House of Yes

Cast: Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Freddie Prinze Jr., Geneviève Bujold, Rachael Leigh Cook. Screenplay: Mark Waters, based on a play by Wendy MacLeod. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Patrick Sherman. Film editing: Pamela Martin. Music: Rolfe Kent. 

Meeting the in-laws is such a familiar rite of passage that it's no wonder it has become a common movie plot device, as in Meet the Parents (Jay Roach, 2000) and its sequels in 2004 and 2010. Wendy MacLeod's play and Mark Waters's film The House of Yes turn the device into a black comedy influenced by another genre: the wacky family comedy -- think You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938) and Auntie Mame (Morton DaCosta, 1958), in which a prospective spouse is introduced to a household of eccentrics. In The House of Yes Marty Pascal (Josh Hamilton) brings his fiancée, Lesly (Tori Spelling), to meet his family in a D.C. suburb. Lesly, who works as a waitress in a doughnut shop, finds herself out of her element: For one thing, the Pascals are clearly more affluent and better educated than she is. Moreover, Marty's twin sister (Parker Posey), known as Jackie-O because of her fixation on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, has recently been institutionalized, his mother (Geneviève Bujold) is hardly the most stable of parents, and his younger brother, Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.), only appears normal. Marty's no-nonsense manner also turns out to be a façade as Lesly becomes the vehicle for the revelation of various family secrets, including incest and possibly even the real reason for the death of Marty's father. In fact, Lesly's obvious out-of-placeness suggests that Marty's invitation to spend Thanksgiving with his family may even have been a kind of sadistic prank. There's some smart dialogue and some wincingly funny moments, but the film is stage-bound. It never touches base with reality, suggests an idea behind its conception, or reveals a satiric target. 

The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in The Pirate

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Walter Slezak, Gladys Cooper, Reginald Owen, George Zucco, Fayard Nicholas, Harold Nicholas, Lester Allen, Lola Albright, Ellen Ross. Screenplay: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich, based on a play by S.N. Behrman. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Lennie Hayton, Conrad Salinger, Cole Porter (songs). 

Props to Walter Slezak, who is the only person in the cast of The Pirate who knows how to pronounce the name of the heroine. Everyone else refers to Manuela (Judy Garland) as "Man-you-ella." Manuela is a young woman in the Caribbean village of Calvados who is engaged to the town's portly, middle-aged mayor, Don Pedro Vargas (Slezak). Her head is full of tales of the dashing pirate Macocco, aka "Mack the Black," and she fantasizes about him taking her away from the village for a life of adventure. Don Pedro, however, likes the village perfectly well and never wants to leave. Visiting the city of Port Sebastian to have her wedding gown fitted, Manuela encounters a traveling player named Serafin (Gene Kelly), who falls for her, and during his act he hypnotizes her, hoping she'll fall in love with him. Instead, she reveals her passion for Mack the Black. Serafin follows her with his troupe to Calvados, where he recognizes Manuela's fiancé as the real Macocco, retired from piracy and hiding his secret past. From there, the plot thickens into a series of complications as Serafin decides to win Manuela away from Don Pedro by pretending that he's the real Macocco. It's not a bad premise to hang a series of songs and production numbers on, and there's some spectacularly athletic dancing by Kelly and Garland is in fine voice. The songs by Cole Porter are not his best work, however. The lyrics are sometimes silly: "Niña," for example, rhymes the name Niña with "neurasthenia" and "schizophrenia." Only "Be a Clown," which Kelly dances to first with the Nicholas Brothers and then with Garland, has had any life outside the film, and that mostly because producer and songwriter Arthur Freed notoriously copied it for Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" number in Singin' in the Rain (Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952). Garland's increasing emotional problems, which worsened after she experienced postpartum depression following the birth of Liza Minnelli in 1946, also affected the production. The film feels a little disjointed and the ending is perfunctory, a reflection of some script problems and cost overruns. It wasn't a box office success. Still, it has moments that are as good as any of the more successful Freed Unit productions. 

Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

Barry Keoghan in Saltburn

Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Ewan Mitchell. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis. 

With its fine cinematography and production design and skilled performances, Emerald Fennell's Saltburn is an exquisite container that's so hollow it echoes. The echoes are those of sharper literary and cinematic satires on the English class system. Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a first-year student at Oxford from an affluent and apparently loving middle class family who pretends to be a poor young man from a dysfunctional family and winds up conning his way into a decadent aristocratic family. Oliver's skill at lying and his lethal ways of covering up his lies recalls Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, whose adventures began in The Talented Mr. Ripley, memorably filmed by René Clément (as Purple Noon) in 1960 and by Anthony Minghella in 1999. Like Ripley, Oliver is sexually fluid, and makes his way into the Catton family through his infatuation with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a handsome and popular fellow student who invites Oliver to spend the summer at the family estate, Saltburn. The Cattons, who include Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and Felix's sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), are a collection of quirks and vices, including the other guests that summer: Felix's cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), an American who sees Oliver as a rival, and Elspeth's neurotic friend, Pamela (Carey Mulligan). If the gathering at Saltburn reminds you of Brideshead Revisited, Fennell name-checks its author when Oliver says Felix's description of his family reminds him of Evelyn Waugh; Felix replies that Waugh based his characters on the Cattons. Another analogue might be found in Alan Hollinghurst's novel, a satire on Thatcherite Britain. The Line of Beauty, whose protagonist becomes a part of the wealthy household of an Oxford classmate on whom he has a crush. And Oliver's sexual attraction to Felix, which has him slurping the bathwater in which Felix has masturbated, is an inevitable reminder of the cum-filled peach in André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name and Luca Guadagnino's 2017 film version. Now, I don't have anything against borrowing, but it has to be done with some originality. The time is ripe for a satire on post-Brexit Britain, for example, but Fennell doesn't even give us that: Saltburn is set in 2007. The film lacks sharpness and clear intent, so it winds up being a well-mounted, very well acted but wholly derivative collection of mildly shocking incidents.  

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (William Nigh, 1948)

Elyse Knox in I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes

Cast: Don Castle, Elyse Knox, Regis Toomey, Charles D. Brown, Rory Mallinson, Robert Lowell, Bill Kennedy. Screenplay: Steve Fisher, based on a story by Cornell Wooolrich. Cinematography: Mack Stengler. Art direction: Dave Milton. Film editing: Roy V. Livingston, Otho Lovering. 

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes is a tidy, by-the-numbers Wrong Man thriller with an eleventh-hour climax -- in short, the kind of drama that would become standard on television a few years after it was released. Tom (Don Castle) and Ann (Elyse Knox) are a young dance team getting by between bookings on Ann's pay (and tips) as an instructor in a dance hall. One night, Tom flings his shoes out the window at a yowling cat. That same night, an elderly miser in their neighborhood is murdered and robbed. Tom's shoes become an important clue in the search for the killer, leading to his conviction for murder and imprisonment on Death Row. His only hope lies in Ann's attempt to persuade the police detective, Clint Judd (Regis Toomey), with whom she has flirted at the dance hall, to find the real killer. The movie was made by Poverty Row studio Monogram, so there's nothing fancy about it. The stars are low-wattage: Castle had been a bit player at Paramount before World War II, and had trouble restarting his career after being drafted and serving in the Army Air Force. Knox was a former model whose career never quite took off before she was signed by Monogram to play the girlfriend of Joe Palooka in a series of movies based on the comic strip hero; she married football player Tom Harmon and became the mother of Mark Harmon. Regis Toomey was probably the best-known member of the cast, with an IMDb list of 273 credits, stretching from 1929 to 1985, mostly in character roles. Director William Nigh started as an actor, but turned director in 1914, working steadily for B-movie factories like Monogram. I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes was his next-to-last feature. Mostly a straightforward movie, it does try a little too hard in a montage in which Tom, counting the hours until he goes to the chair, is haunted by echoes of the word "shoes." It comes off, unfortunately, as a little silly. Otherwise, it's solid, unpretentious and modestly entertaining. 

Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in Maestro

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Gideon Glick, Maya Hawke, Sarah Silverman, Vincenzo Amato, Michael Urie, Greg Hildreth, Brian Klugman, Nick Blaemire, Mallory Portnoy, Yasen Peyakov, Zachary Booth, Miriam Shor, Alexa Swinton. Screenplay: Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Michelle Tesoro. Music: Leonard Bernstein. 

The Aussies call it "tall poppy syndrome." It's that tendency to try to undermine or underestimate the achievement of anyone who excels. And I think we saw it directed at Bradley Cooper when the first big wave of negative publicity came out from a critic from the Hollywood Reporter who saw the trailer for Maestro and called the prosthetic nose Cooper wore to play Leonard Bernstein "ethnic cosplay." The word "Jewface," analogous to blackface and "yellowface," labels for white performers pretending to be Black or Asian, was tossed about, as if Cooper were somehow guilty of antisemitism, or even depriving a Jewish actor of the role. Defenders came to the fray, including Bernstein's family, who indicated their approval of Cooper's choice, and others who pointed out that Cooper wasn't playing a negative stereotype, or even a character like Shylock or Fagin, but an authentic musical genius. But the damage was done, and the controversy continues to be a kind of scrim through which we watch and assess the film. I think much of it stems from the fact that Cooper is one of the most exceptional talents of our time, recognized for excellence as an actor, director, and screenwriter  -- a tall poppy indeed. He has a total of nine Academy Award nominations in all three of those fields plus producing -- for Todd Phillips's Joker (2019) and Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley (2022). He won a BAFTA for the music of A Star Is Born (2018), for which he wrote and sang several songs, and for which he also won two Grammys. He was nominated for a Tony in 2015 for his performance on Broadway in The Elephant Man. (One of the critics of the prosthetic nose observed that he wore no disfiguring makeup for the role of John Merrick, suggesting that if he's that good an actor, he should have played the role of Bernstein without the help of makeup.) All of this is preface to saying that Maestro is an exceptional film that only adds luster to an already distinguished career. It has been labeled a biopic, which is inadequate. Biographical films are usually distanced from their subjects, dramatizations of events in a career. Maestro is more intimate than that, a portrait of a man and a marriage. Cooper goes beyond mimicry of Bernstein in a serious effort to suggest the social and sexual and artistic tensions seething within the man. If I have to voice a criticism it's that he doesn't quite bring it off -- it's a little too much for any actor or screenwriter to achieve. But Cooper shows us the depths even if he doesn't plumb them. He wisely lets us have our own thoughts about something even Bernstein probably couldn't define about his sexuality: whether he was gay or bisexual, or whether that question is stupid and irrelevant. Carey Mulligan's performance as his wife, Felicia, brittle and burning, is a perfect match for Cooper's. If they don't have the chemistry that Cooper had with Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) or Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born, that's partly the point: The marriage of Lenny and Felicia was one of unresolved tension. Hence the epigraph for the film: "A work of art does not answer questions, if provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers." I have the feeling that Maestro will be remembered and studied for years to come.

Emitaï (Ousmane Sembene, 1971)

Cast: Andongo Diabon, Robert Fontaine, Michel Renaudeau, Osmane Camara, Ibou Camara, Alphonse Diatta, Pierre Blanchard. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Michel Renaudeau. Film editing: Gilbert Kikouïne. 

I grew up on Hollywood films, which were all that were available in the small town where I lived. (This was before cable TV, not to mention streaming.) They made me love movies, but they also gave me a limited awareness of what film could do. So when foreign films finally became part of my movie-watching life, I was astonished at how little I knew about what cinema could be, but also about how limited my experience of human behavior was. The people in the French and Italian and Swedish films I saw didn't behave the way people in American movies did and the way the filmmakers told their stories was somehow different from the way Hollywood did. There were fewer happy endings and predictable plot turns. And when I moved beyond European films into the work of Asian directors, there was still more culture shock coming. But as my cinematic horizons widened, and I came to embrace Satyajit Ray along with Nicholas Ray, to rank Ozu and Renoir among my favorite directors alongside Hitchcock and Hawks, there still remained (and remains) an ignorance of what's called "world cinema," the work of filmmakers outside the developed countries of Europe and Asia. I still approach these movies with a bit of trepidation, uncertain whether the differences between the cultures they show and my own will stymie my understanding and appreciation of their work. So I'm working my way through the Criterion Channel's collection of the films of Ousmane Sembene with a kind of divided awareness. I have to remind myself that these movies weren't made for me, but for an African audience. There's a kind of urgency about his films that's more vital for the intended audience than it is for me. Emitaï is set in Senegal during World War II, when the French drafted the native people of their colonies into the fight. It takes place in a village that resents having its young men taken away and its rice crop collected as taxation. But there's no resisting the superior arms of the French authorities, and the film evokes the impotence and frustration of the villagers. The elders decide to call on their gods, which we actually see in a fantasy sequence, but they get no help. Sembene depicts the latent strength of the tribe, especially its women, but this conflict of cultures can only end tragically. Sometimes, Sembene's storytelling relies on blatantly expository dialogue and didactic speeches that verge on propaganda, but this is anything but naïve filmmaking. Emitaï is a subtle and poignant depiction of the destructive absurdity of colonialism.  

Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)

Margot Robbie in Barbie

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, Rhea Perlman, Helen Mirren (voice), Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, Connor Swindells, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, John Cena, Dua Lipa. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt.

For all the snarky cleverness of its screenplay, the brightness of its performances, and the liveliness of its direction, what is Barbie if not a 114-minute image ad for Mattel, Inc.? The movie allows the toymaker to look like a good sport by acknowledging its oft-criticized influence on young girls and its marketing mistakes, and by letting its management be portrayed as clueless males, with its CEO played by the master of cluelessness, Will Ferrell, while still raking in more money than ever. It's a masterpiece of corporate self-justification. The points the movie makes about the Barbie phenomenon (which became an even bigger phenomenon when its release date coincided with another blockbuster, resulting in the "Barbenheimer" meme), couldn't have been made without the participation of Mattel. Sure, you could make a movie satirizing the toy business, focusing on a girl doll laden with separately purchased accessory toys. You could call the doll something like Mitzi and give her a boyfriend called Bob, and you could call the company Rattel or Battel, and you could score all the same points with almost the same script and the same cast. But it wouldn't have the same sharply real edge. This is a movie that future analysts of American society in the 21st century are going to come back to when they examine childhood and capitalism and the role of the sexes in the year 2023. The story the movie tells is essentially the same as that of another toy that comes to life, Pinocchio. Except that when Pinocchio became a real boy, I'm pretty sure that he ran out to play. If Ken had been the one to become real, he probably would go out to shoot hoops or see his mates at the bar. When Barbie becomes a real woman, the first thing she does is visit a gynecologist. It's an ending that sums up the film's view of what it means to be a woman today.  

Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Yoshiko Okada and Ureo Egawa in Woman of Tokyo

Cast: Yoshiko Okada, Ureo Egawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryo. Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara. Art direction: Takashi Kanasu. Film editing: Kazuo Ishikawa. 

Woman of Tokyo, which runs only 45 minutes and was shot in nine days, shows Yasujiro Ozu moving toward the economy of narrative that marks his mature style. In it, Ozu also pays homage to one of the master directors who influenced him: Ernst Lubitsch. In the middle of the film, Harue (Kinuyo Tanaka) goes to the movies with her boyfriend Ryoichi (Ureo Egawa), and we see a bit of the movie they're watching: the 1932 anthology film If I Had a Million. It's the segment directed by Lubitsch featuring Charles Laughton as an office worker who, upon being given a million dollars, celebrates the windfall by razzing his boss. The Lubitsch segment has nothing to do with the plot of Woman of Tokyo, other than that the central character, Chikako (Yoshiko Okada), works in an office, which doesn't pay her enough to support herself and her brother, Ryoichi, a university student. Chikako resorts to prostitution as a result, and the plot turns on the revealing of her secret occupation. If I Had a Million was a talkie, but Lubitsch's segment is virtually silent, and I think Ozu alluded to it in Woman of Tokyo, which is one of his late silent films, as a kind of homage to visual narrative, at which Ozu would continue to excel. 

Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones, 2015)

François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock/Truffaut

Cast: Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Bob Balaban (voice), Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Peter Bogdanovich, Arnaud Desplechin, David Fincher, James Gray, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese. Screenplay: Kent Jones, Serge Toubiana. Cinematography: Nick Bentgen, Daniel Cowen, Eric Gautier, Mihai Malaimare Jr., Lisa Rinzler, Genta Tamaki. Film editing: Rachel Reichman. Music: Jeremiah Bornfield. 

I urge anyone who's interested in movies, and not just interested in Alfred Hitchcock or François Truffaut, to see the terrific documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, beautifully put together by Kent Jones and Serge Toubiana. Although the focus is on Hitchcock, and to a lesser extent on Truffaut, the film constitutes an invaluable lesson on how to make a movie, particularly what a director does to grab hold of viewers and manipulate their thoughts and emotions. Hitchcock's techniques were unique, of course, derived from his own interests and obsessions as well as from his experience as someone who began his career directing silent movies, which taught him how to tell a story through images. But the comments in the film by contemporary filmmakers like Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and Richard Linklater on Hitchcock's techniques, particularly Martin Scorsese's analysis of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), open a new perspective on their own works. 

Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999)

Guy Pearce in Ravenous

Cast: Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, David Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, John Spencer, Stephen Spinella, Neal McDonough, Joseph Runningfox, Sheila Tousey, Bill Brochtrup. Screenplay: Ted Griffin. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Production design: Bryce Perrin. Film editing: Neil Farrell. Music: Michael Nyman, Damon Albarn. 

When the only thing critics can agree on is that your movie has a distinguished music score, you kind of have to admit that the film's a botch. Ravenous is an interesting botch, however: a horror Western about cannibalism, a topic that tantalizes anyone who has ever heard the story of the Donner Party. It has a strong cast, filled with actors who are gifted at playing baddies and weirdos, like Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Davies, and Neal McDonough. The cannibalism in the film is based on the Algonquian legend of the wendigo, an evil spirit that possesses humans and turns them into killers with a desire for human flesh. Yet the movie comes off scattered and sometimes clunky, with the grisly violence arriving without the buildup of suspense. The central character, Capt. Boyd (Guy Pearce), is given a confusing backstory. During the Mexican-American war, he tasted flesh, sort of, when he was wounded, heaped in a pile of corpses, and, unable to move, swallowed the blood of one of the men stacked above him. It gave him a brief surge of strength, during which he struggled out of the pile and performed the act of heroism for which he was honored. But when the commanding officer realizes Boyd is really a coward, he punishes him with a post in an isolated fort located in the Sierra Nevada. The fort is staffed with misfits, and soon falls prey to a mysterious stranger named Colqhoun (Carlyle), who claims to be the survivor of a wagon train that got lost in the mountains and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Colqhoun is not what he seems, of course, and the rest of the business is bloody. Some of the movie's disjointedness stems from the disagreement between the original director, Milcho Manchevski, and the producers and a subsequent conflict between his replacement, Raja Gosnell, and the cast. Finally, Antonia Bird was hired to complete the film, but even she had problems with the producers and was critical of the cut that was released. Critics generally disliked the movie, but everyone seems to have been pleased with the innovative score by Michael Nyman and Damon Alborn, which relies on instruments from the historic period in which the action takes place and echoes of hymns and patriotic anthems.   

Clockwatchers (Jill Sprecher, 1997)

Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach in Clockwatchers

Cast: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Helen FitzGerald, Stanley DeSantis, Jamie Kennedy, David James Elliott, Debra Jo Rupp, Kevin Cooney, Bob Balaban, Paul Dooley. Screenplay: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Pamela Marcotte. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Mader. 

Blessed are the meek, they say. Certainly Iris (Toni Collette) qualifies as meek when, on her first day as a temp at a credit company, she does as she's told and sits patiently for a very long time until Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp), the human resources manager, sees her and scolds her for not letting anyone know she was there. Self-effacing to a fault, Iris soon finds herself with a group of new friends, all temps who have been "temporary" for quite a while (a dodge companies use to keep from paying benefits). Each of them is more outgoing than Iris: Margaret (Parker Posey) is sassy and subversive, eager to point out to Iris ways to do as little work as possible. Paula (Lisa Kudrow) claims to be just passing time while waiting for her big break as an actress. Jane (Alanna Ubach) is engaged and can't wait until marriage frees her from office work. Iris's father (Paul Dooley), meanwhile, is urging her to get a good job in sales, something that her shyness makes her unsuitable for. This is the setup for Jill Sprecher's satire on contemporary work in the kind of office, scored to the artificial peppiness of Muzak, that anyone who ever worked for a corporation that values productivity over creativity, routine over initiative, and regimentation over individuality will recognize. In Clockwatchers, meekness wins out: Iris lasts longer in the job than her friends, even after the company makes their work lives more miserable than ever. But she's bested by an employee even meeker than she is, but who adds sneakiness to the meekness. As satire, I happen to think the film is a little too low key, and that the casting of vivid actresses like Posey and Kudrow, wonderful as they are, works against the mood of the film, but it has the ring of truth throughout.  

Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (Ernest R. Dickerson, 1995)

Billy Zane in Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight

Cast: Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Thomas Haden Church, C.C.H. Pounder, Brenda Bakke, Dick Miller, Gary Farmer, John Kassir (voice). Screenplay: Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, Mark Bishop. Cinematography: Rick Bota. Production design: Christiaan Wagener, Gregory S. Melton. Film editing: Stephen Lovejoy. Music: Edward Shearmur. 

I was going to say that failure to access the 10-year-old boy in me kept me from enjoying Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight, but then I remembered that when I was 10 years old I thought the Tales From the Crypt comic books were repulsive trash. So maybe I really enjoyed it more than that 10-year-old would have, which isn't saying much. It's still trash, but I've seen many movies that repulsed me more. There's a tongue-in-cheek element in its slimy rotting horrors (if there's a tongue to put in a cheek or a cheek to put one in) that doesn't exactly redeem it, but at least kept me watching. And it suggests that we have come to a point in the post-Christian era that what would once be regarded as blasphemous is now only a plot device: namely, the use of the blood of Jesus as a horror movie gimmick. Mostly, it made me feel a little sorry for the actors who have to go through their paces, trying to act but knowing that anything they do is going to be chopped up in the editing and stirred into a mess of special effects. Billy Zane as the demonic Collector and William Sadler as his heroic antagonist are the nominal leads, but Jada Pinkett Smith comes off best as the ex-con on work release who labors in the boarding house where most of the action takes place. She manages to create a character we can root for, which is all the otherwise well-worn plot needs. The frame story in which the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) introduces things is unnecessary and mainly serves to promote the HBO series from which it's a theatrical spinoff. 

For Me and My Gal (Busby Berkeley, 1942)

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy, Martha Eggert, Ben Blue, Stephen McNally. Screenplay: Howard Emmett Rogers, Richard Sherman, Fred F. Finkelhoffe, Sid Silvers. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ben Lewis. Music: Roger Edens.

Gene Kelly became a star on Broadway by playing a heel in Pal Joey, so it's fitting that he made his movie debut playing a heel who becomes a hero in For Me and My Gal. Initially, he was too much of a heel for preview audiences, who indicated that they wanted Judy Garland to wind up with George Murphy instead of Kelly. So some additional filming and editing (eliminating a lot of Murphy's role, even though he was billed second below Garland and above Kelly) made Kelly's Harry Palmer more likable. The movie doesn't free up Kelly to do the kind of show-off dancing that he would later become famous for. It's a story about vaudeville, and the songs were nostalgic oldies even when the movie was first released. Harry Palmer is an ambitious hoofer and comedian who will stop at nothing to get to the top: the Palace in Manhattan. He muscles into the spotlight, breaking up with partners and stealing musical arrangements, to wind up teaming with Jo Hayden (Garland), whose ambition is similar to his but restrained by a conscience. When World War I starts, Harry breaks his hand to keep from getting drafted just as they're about to play the Palace and she tells him off, leaving the act. Naturally, the plot hinges on Harry's redemption. Busby Berkeley's direction keeps things lively, though the film doesn't feature the kaleidoscopic production numbers he became famous for at Warner Bros. and in three of MGM's "hey, kids, let's put on a show" musicals with Garland and Mickey Rooney. There's a subplot involving Harry's flirtation with a star called Eve Minard, played by Martha Eggerth, a Hungarian soprano famous for her performance in operettas. She was signed by MGM possibly as a replacement for Jeanette MacDonald, whose career as the studio's house soprano was ending. Eggerth sings splendidly, but she photographed less well, and the house soprano job went to Kathryn Grayson. For Me and My Gal is full of historical interest -- it was also the first movie for which Garland received top billing -- but it feels a little canned and unoriginal in comparison to the Freed Unit classics that followed.  

The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995)

Lili Taylor in The Addiction

Cast: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco, Paul Calderon, Fredro Starr, Kathryn Erbe, Michael Imperioli, Robert W. Castle. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Mayin Lo. Music: Joe Delia. 

Blood looks bloodier in black-and-white. In color it too often looks like ketchup or cranberry juice or corn syrup with red food dye. But under the lens and lights of cinematographer Ken Kelsch in The Addiction it turns black, flat and dry like an aging wound or glossy like the spill of an unsavory substance. And there's a lot of it in the film, which turns vampirism into a metaphor for not only drug addiction but any other self-destructive obsession. When Kathleen Conklin (the terrific Lili Taylor) is turned vampire, her attacker (Annabella Sciorra) tells her to resist, and after Kathleen is addicted, she makes a similar offer to her own victims: They should tell her to go away. Except "victims" is maybe the wrong word here. The film is about something as banal as responsibility or yielding to temptation: It almost devolves into a "just say no" moral treatise, except that it also exposes the inanity of that maxim. Christopher Walken plays a vampire who has managed to get his bloodlust under control, except that we can see the price he has paid doing so. As Macbeth put it, "I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er." Admonitions against self-destructive behavior aside, The Addiction is a fable with rich intellectual content, a meditation on human appetite and attempts to control it. That it's also a pretty damn good horror movie is only part of it. 

The Lady and the Beard (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

Tokihiko Okada in The Lady and the Beard

Cast: Tokihiko Okada. Hiroko Kawasaki, Satoko Date, Choko Iida, Ichiro Tsukida, Toshiko Iizuka, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Tatsuo Saito, Takeshi Sakamoto, Sotaro Okada, Yasuo Nanjo, Ayako Katsuragi. Screenplay: Komatsu Kitamur, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Minoru Kuribayashi, Hideo Shigehara. Film editing: Minoru Kuribayaski, Hideo Shigehara. 

The Lady and the Beard is one of Yasujiro Ozu's silent comedies that, like I Graduated, But... (1929), I Flunked, But ... (1930), and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932), center on college students and their postgraduate life. The protagonist, Kiichi (Tokhiko Okada), affects a full beard and old-fashioned dress, which his fellow students tolerate laughingly, but which opens him to mockery when he goes home with a friend who invites him to his sister's birthday party. The young women at the party shun him. Worse, when he graduates, he discovers that the beard is an obstacle to getting a job. So he shaves it off, and suddenly finds that he's not only employable but also a magnet to marriageable young women. He rescues Hiroko (Hiroko Kawasaki) from being mugged by Furyo (Satoko Date) and her thuggish companions, and winds up attracting the attention of both women. Later, he encounters Furyo again at the hotel where he works: He thwarts her in a con job involving a piece of jewelry, but that doesn't deter her interest in him. It's a likable little comedy with an endearing performance by Okada. I occasionally had trouble following some of the narrative, whether because of cultural differences or missing footage -- the print shows signs of damage. As often with Ozu's early films, he shows his inspiration in the form of movie posters on the characters' walls: Kiichi's room has a poster of a Laurel and Hardy movie. Ozu credits himself, under his pseudonym James Maki, as the film's gag writer. 

In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994)

Julie Carmen and Sam Neill in In the Mouth of Madness

Cast: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, Charlton Heston, Frances Bay. Screenplay: Michael De Luca. Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe. Production design: Jeff Ginn. Film editing: Edward Warschilka. Music: John Carpenter, Jim Lang.

A box office failure in its theatrical debut, John Carpenter's cleverly recursive In the Mouth of Madness has since gathered an enthusiastic following. I'm not one of the enthusiasts -- I find it much too frantic to be very scary, entertaining, or thought-provoking -- but I see what they like about it. It's partly a satiric look at the popularity of horror fiction and its movie spinoffs, centering on an obvious target: Stephen King. In the film, the horror writer is called Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), who lives in New Hampshire (next door to Maine, where King lives). Maybe to avoid any legal problems, the analogy is made explicit in the movie: King is name-checked several times. The other obvious horror writer target is H.P. Lovecraft, who isn't mentioned, but he's dead and can't sue. One reason for my discontent with In the Mouth of Madness is the miscasting of Sam Neill, who plays an insurance investigator who gets caught up in the search for Sutter Cane and his latest manuscript. Neill is one of my favorite underappreciated actors, but he seems all at sea here: Even his well-practiced American accent is sometimes clotted with his native New Zealand vowels. The role, which has a comic undertone, needs a more smart-alecky performer like Jim Carrey or Bill Murray. But then most of the cast -- including a cameo by Charlton Heston and a screen debut by Hayden Christensen as a paperboy -- is just along for the ride as the special effects and the plot kinks mount up. 

 

Mandabi (Ousmane Sembene, 1968)

Ynousse N'Diaye, Makhouredia Gueye, and Isseu Niang

Cast: Makhouredia Gueye, Ynousse N'Diave, Isseu Niang, Mustapha Ture, Farba Sarr, Serigne Diayes, Thérèse Bas, Mouss Diaf, Christof Colomb. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Paul Soulignac. Film editing: Gilbert Kikoïne, Max Saldinger.

When we first see Ibrahim Dieng (Makhouredia Gueye), he is having his head shaved and his nose cleaned. Then he strolls through the streets of Dakar, immaculate head held high, the very image of smug prosperity. He is anything but prosperous, of course: He is stone broke, having been unemployed for a very long time, supporting himself, his two wives, and seven children with a combination of handouts and loans, sustained mainly by his pride and a Micawberish sense that something will turn up. That something turns up in the form of a money order from his nephew, a street sweeper in Paris, and it will be the undoing of Ibrahim. Most of the money his nephew sent is not his: Part of it is to go into the nephew's savings, part to his mother, Ibrahim's sister (Thérèse Bas), who is a formidable force herself. The little left over goes to Ibrahim, and the thought of it elicits a brief period of delight -- one of the wives even makes up a song about the money order. But when word of it gets about, Ibrahim is immediately set upon by creditors and handout seekers. Mandabi (which means "money order") is a tragicomic film about postcolonial Africa, its people strangled by governmental corruption. Ibrahim is caught in a Catch-22: He can't cash the money order without an identity card. He can't get an identity card without a birth certificate. He can't get a birth certificate without some form of identification. The bureaucracy that frustrates him is both Dickensian and Kafkaesque. Ousmane Sembene tells Ibrahim's story with sympathy, but also with a smart distancing from the character, whose faults he makes all too clear. The only problem I had with the film is that it ends with a didactic speech by a character delivering the message: People should work to end the corruption that results in such misery. But Mandabi wasn't made for me, but for people like the ones it portrays. It was the first feature made in Wolof, the indigenous language of Senegal, which Sembene chose over French, the official language imposed by colonialism. "Message movies" may be tiresome to us Westerners, but they were an important tool for filmmakers like Sembene. 

Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams, 2021)

Cast: Cheryl Isheija, Elvis Ngabo, Bertrand Ninteretse, Elane Umuhire, Dorcy Rugamba, Rebecca Uwamahoro, Trésor Niyongabo, Eric Ngangare, Natacha Muziramakenga, Cécile Kayirebwa, Diogène Ntarindwa. Screenplay: Saul Williams. Cinematography: Anisia Uzeyman. Production design: Cedric Mizero, Antoine Nshimiyimana. Film editing: Anisha Achyara. Music: Saul Williams. Costume design: Cedric Mizero.

Neptune Frost is ... well, what is it? An American-Rwandan anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist queer sci-fi musical about the confluence of the autochthonic and technology? If you go looking for more descriptives, you'll encounter concepts like "cyberpunk" and "Afrofuturist" that seem appropriate but also insufficient to characterize the film. And don't expect any spoilers here; I couldn't go into particulars on the plot if you forced me to. It starts in a coltan mine: That's the ore from which the stuff that helps run our computers and cell phones and whatnot is refined. It's a "conflict mineral": Wars, trade and otherwise, are fought over it. And then the story moves, through the peregrinations of our protagonists, Neptune, played by both Cheryl Isheija and Elvis Ngabo (the character is intersex), and Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse, aka Kaya Free), to an e-waste dump that becomes a hacker community that takes over the world's computers. Confused? Just go with it: This is an extraordinary movie, both in the watching and in the backstory of how it was made. There is poetry and wit here that needs more than one viewing to assimilate. For example, the name Matalusa is a Joycean pun: "martyr and loser," and by the end of the film it becomes Matalusa King -- Martin Luther King. It's full of music and color -- a special nod to Cedric Mizero's costume design. Maybe it's not a film for everyone, but I am dazzled and baffled by it.     

Party Girl (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995)

Parker Posey in Party Girl

Cast: Parker Posey, Anthony DeSando, Guillermo Díaz, Donna Mitchell, Liev Schreiber, Omar Townsend, Sasha von Scherler, Becky Mode, Simon Verhoeven. Screenplay: Harry Birckmayer, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Sheila Gaffney. Cinematography: Michael Slovis. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Cara Silverman. Music: Anton Sanko. 

With its larky portrayal of the Manhattan club scene of the 1990s, Party Girl reminded me of those "swinging London" movies of the 1960s, like Richard Lester's The Knack ... and How to Get It (1965). You might even think of Parker Posey as the Rita Tushingham of the '90s. But The Knack now feels tired and dated, while Party Girl remains fresh. Or maybe I feel a special affection for Party Girl because I spent my youth mastering the Dewey Decimal System instead of partying, and it's nice to see a movie that validates my lifestyle, even ironically. Party Girl also is ethnically and sexually more diverse than those '60s movies were, or could have been. The odd thing is that a lot of critics of the time didn't get it. A British reviewer bosleycrowthered, "If bad behaviour and smugness were truly charming, Party Girl might be as much fun as it thinks it is." And even Roger Ebert dismissed it, saying that Posey's character's "life is disorganized, ... but the script could nevertheless organize its approach to her, so the audience wouldn't feel as confused as she is most of the time.... But the movie never pulls itself together." Which I think misses the point: Why ask for an eight-course meal when what you really want is a falafel with hot sauce, a side order of baba ganoush, and a seltzer? 

When a Stranger Calls Back (Fred Walton, 1993)

Cast: Carol Kane, Charles Durning, Jill Schoelen, Gene Lythgow, Kevin McNulty, Cheryl Wilson, Jerry Wasserman. Screenplay: Fred Walton. Cinematography: David Geddes. Production design: Chris August. Film editing: David Byron Lloyd. Music: Dana Kaproff. 

I haven't seen When a Stranger Calls, Fred Walton's 1979 film, but I gather that it helped launch the horror movie trope "the phone call's coming from inside the house!" There are no calls coming from inside or outside the house in Walton's sequel, When a Stranger Calls Back, because the phone line has been cut. (The film was obviously made before the ubiquity of cell phones.) The setup is a standard one for horror movies: A babysitter is terrorized by a mysterious stranger. In this case, Julia (Jill Schoelen) is a high school student called in at the last moment to sit for a couple's two small children, who have already gone to bed by the time she arrives. As she settles in, there's a knock on the door, which she cautiously answers from inside, not unlocking or opening the door. The voice outside explains that his car has broken down and he'd like to use the phone to call for help. She volunteers to make the call herself, and after some back and forth, he reluctantly agrees, giving her the information she needs. But when she goes to the phone, the line is dead. Still wary, she lies to the man outside, claiming that she made the call, but hoping he'll go elsewhere for help. Walton handles this part of the film efficiently and effectively as things gradually escalate until Julia realizes that the man is inside the house. Fortunately, the parents arrive just in time to save her, but they discover that the children are missing from their upstairs bedroom. Then the film falls apart. Five years pass, and Julia is now a college student. Still suffering the effects of the earlier incident, she begins noticing strange things happening in her apartment. The police are dismissive, but they call on a counselor from the college to help. She turns out to be Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), who was the victim in original film. Jill has good reason to trust Julia's instincts and calls in John Clifford (Charles Durning), the detective from her case. But the convergence of the separate experiences of Jill and Julia muddles the narrative, as both women become terrorized by the new bad guy. And then the movie comes to a thuddingly ridiculous end, as Clifford figures out that the guy must be a ventriloquist. As any 10-year-old kid who has ever tried it knows, ventriloquists rely on visual misdirection: moving the dummy's mouth while keeping theirs nearly motionless. They can't really "throw" their voices, as the movie suggests the guy outside Julia's door did. When a Stranger Calls Back was made for television and first appeared on Showtime, then was released on video. Despite some creepy moments, I suspect that it would have been laughed out of theaters. 

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

 

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940

Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Ian Hunter, Florence Rice, Lynne Carver, Ann Morriss, Trixie Firschke. Screenplay: Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, Jack McGowan, Dore Schary. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg, Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: George Bassman, George Stoll; songs by Cole Porter. 

"Glorious Technicolor," as a song in Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957) dubs it, was the hallmark of MGM's musicals, starting with The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). The fourth and final iteration of MGM's series that started with the Oscar-winning (but now laughably antique) The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929) and continued with Broadway Melody of 1936 (Roy Del Ruth, 1935) and Broadway Melody of 1938 (Del Ruth, 1937) was supposed to be in color, but uncertainty about the European market where war was breaking out caused the studio to cut back on the budget. But who needs Technicolor when you have talent like Cole Porter, Fred Astaire, and Eleanor Powell, especially in the big shiny black set for the finale, with Astaire and Powell dancing to "Begin the Beguine"? We probably won't see the likes of that again ever. For that matter, who needs a plot? Most movie musical screenplays were just threads to string the gems on, and the one for Broadway Melody of 1940 is no exception. Astaire and George Murphy play a down-and-out dance team, one of whom gets a chance at the big time, performing with Powell in a new Broadway show. The problem is that there's a mixup about which one is owed the big break. Astaire's character is the one picked by the talent-scouting producer (Frank Morgan), but through the kind of mishap that mis-happens only in the movies, the co-producer (Ian Hunter) thinks that Murphy's character is the one he's chosen. Both guys fall in love with Powell's character, of course, and everything has to be sorted out. Norman Taurog had a good hand with this sort of comedy, thankfully, and Morgan's befuddlement, which also involves an ermine cape that he lends his dates, is moderately amusing. The only flaw is that the movie follows the tradition of its predecessors in inserting vaudeville-style specialty acts between the musical numbers, so we endure extended routines by a juggler and a comic soprano before Astaire, Powell, and Murphy can sing and dance again. This was the only teaming of Astaire and Powell, and each was reportedly intimidated by the other. Powell's dance style was more athletic and acrobatic than Astaire's, and it's demonstrated spectacularly in her solo number "All Ashore," but any fears that their styles might not mesh were put to rest by their duets to "I Concentrate on You" and "Begin the Beguine." Murphy gets shown up by both, and he looks ridiculous dancing on tippy-toes in the "Between You and Me" duet with Powell, which may be why he quit hoofing and went into politics.

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001)

Béatrice Dalle in Trouble Every Day

Cast: Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Decas, Florence Loiret Caille, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Raphaël Neal, José Garcia, Hélène Lapoiwer, Marilu Marini, Aurore Clément. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Tindersticks. 

Claire Denis has steadily resisted linear storytelling and expository dialogue, preferring to trust audiences to pay attention, to assemble the narrative of her films themselves. The result has been films touched with greatness like Beau Travail (1999) and White Material (2009) that invite viewers to experience their stories with greater immediacy than if they were spoon-fed the relationships and motivations of the characters. But sometimes this demand on the viewer backfires, as I think it does in Trouble Every Day. Watching the film can be a visceral experience, a descent into transgressive behavior that's made more disturbing because Denis treats it so coldly. Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and Coré Sémeneau (Béatrice Dalle) are both afflicted with extreme versions of a malady, apparently contracted in Guyana, that causes them to become violent when sexually aroused. Shane has his mostly under control, it seems, except that he's newly married and on his honeymoon. To protect his wife from his impulses, he masturbates, once interrupting their intercourse to jerk off frantically. Coré's case has advanced much further: Her husband, a physician (Alex Descas), keeps her locked up, but she escapes to have sex and then bite vampire-like into the throats of her victims. Shane has come to Paris to see Dr. Sémeneau, who has been researching this disorder. After Trouble Every Day culminates in one of the most brutal rape scenes ever staged in a film, we're left with only the suggestion that sex and violence are intimately related, hardly a novel idea. It's one treated in, for example, the two movies called Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942, and Paul Schrader, 1982). Critics were mostly harsh when it was released, yet some revisionism has occurred, possibly because Denis is unquestionably a filmmaker who must be taken seriously. But unlike her best films, Trouble Every Day lacks the payoff of experiencing something meaningful. It ends up being only an intellectualized horror movie. 

Repeat Performance (Alfred L. Werker, 1947)

Louis Hayward and Joan Leslie in Repeat Performance

Cast: Joan Leslie, Louis Hayward, Virginia Field, Tom Conway, Richard Basehart, Natalie Schafer, Benay Venuta, Ilka Grüning. Screenplay: Walter Bullock, based on a novel by William O'Farrell. Cinematography: L. William O'Connell. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Lewis Sackin. Music: George Antheil. 

When Repeat Performance ended, I thought, "That was different. I wish it were better." The premise is a good one: the time loop, usually the stuff of sci-fi movies and seldom of noirish melodramas. And who hasn't wished to live a year (or day or week or month) over, knowing what you know now. That happens to Broadway star Sheila Page (Joan Leslie), who shoots her husband, a blocked playwright and alcoholic philanderer named Barney Page (Louis Hayward) just before midnight on New Year's Eve in 1946. She flees into the night, wishing that she had the year that had led up to the shooting to live over again, sure that she could prevent what had just happened. Well, sure enough she can. As New Year's Day arrives, she discovers that it's not 1947 but January 1, 1946 again. And that she's not wearing the nightgown that she threw a coat over when she ran from the apartment, but instead the new party dress she bought for New Year's. Of course, she can't convince anyone else what has happened, though she does manage to interest her Gay Best Friend, the poet William Williams (Richard Basehart), with her story that he's going to meet a woman, Eloise Shaw (Natalie Schafer), who will have him committed to a mental institution. She also knows that in the first 1946 she and Barney went to London where they met a playwright, Paula Costello (Virginia Field), who wrote the play she starred in but also started an affair with Barney. So can the past be course-corrected? Would there be a movie if it could be? What Repeat Performance needs is a somewhat better script and much better actors. Leslie doesn't make Sheila into a credible figure: She's too much the suffering wife and not enough the resourceful woman who rose to the top on Broadway. And Hayward gabbles some of the soap operatic dialogue and never shows us what Sheila saw in Barney in the first place. The best performance in the movie is Basehart, who handles the coded role of the gay man well enough to let the audience glimpse his secret life. To its credit, the screenplay handles the coding well, too, although we never find out why he was committed to the asylum: Something happened in a toy store, it seems, so maybe we're supposed to infer that William was a pedophile rather than gay. (Although in 1946, the two were often regarded as synonymous.) But despite these flaws, Repeat Performance is a watchable, if frustrating, movie. 

Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006)

Cast: Voices of Megumi Hayashibara, Tōru Furuya, Tōru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Akio Ōtsuka, Kōichi Yamadera, Hideyuki Tanaka, Satomi Kōrogi, Daisuke Sakaguchi, Mitsuo Iwata, Rikako Aikawa, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Satoshi Kon. Screenplay: Seishi Minakami, Satoishi Kon, based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Cinematography: Michiya Katô. Art direction: Nobutaka Ike. Film editing: Takeshi Seyama. Music: Susumu Hirasawa. 

Almost from the beginning, motion pictures, with their ability to move rapidly through time and space and their frequent embrace of the irrational, have been associated with dreams. The development of animated movies only heightened the identification, and makers of animated films have always been ready to embrace the dreamlike. Satoshi Kon's extraordinary anime Paprika is not only dreamlike, it's also about the dream state and its psychological potential. The word "psychology" etymologically means "the study of the soul," and nothing gets closer to the soul -- whatever that is -- is than dreams, unfettered by reason and mundane actuality. So Kon's film is about an invasion of the dream state, predicated on the idea that technology might eventually allow one to enter other people's dreams -- an invasion of the soul. Kon finds the dreamlike not only in movies or television, but also in other manifestations of the imagination like circuses and parades and toys, and ultimately in the internet, which Paprika herself identifies as one of the "areas where the repressed conscious mind escapes." Paprika is an avatar in the dream world of Atsuko Chiba, a psychiatrist who is using the newly developed DC Mini, technology that allows her, as Paprika, to enter the dreams of her patients. But when one of the developers of the DC Mini begins using it for his own nefarious purposes, the boundary between dreams and waking life is breached, with phantasmagorical consequences. Dr. Chiba and Paprika have to find a way to repair the breach. Any summary of the film is inadequate because there's something recursive about Paprika, a dreamlike movie about movies (and other things) as dreams.            

Champagne (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)

Betty Balfour and Gordon Harker in Champagne

Cast: Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Ferdinand von Alten, Gordon Harker, Jack Trevor, Claude Hulbert, Marcel Vibert, Hannah Jones, Clifford Heatherley. Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Walter C. Mycroft, Eliot Stannard. Cinematography: Jack E. Cox. Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold. 

Champagne is flat. Still, thank you to the Criterion Channel for the opportunity to see one of the Alfred Hitchcock films I hadn't seen before. Hitchcock himself disowned the movie, hating its cobbled-together script and disliking his leading lady, Betty Balfour, whom, according to Stephen Whitty's invaluable The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, he called "a piece of suburban obscenity." Balfour is not that bad, I think, though she resorts to cutesy mannerisms and she's obviously more in love with the camera than with her leading man, the bland Jean Bradin. The movie is a romantic comedy about an heiress whose pursuit of her man involves flying to mid-ocean to meet him on an ocean liner headed for France. When they reach Paris they quarrel and break up, whereupon she decides to live it up until her father (Gordon Harker) arrives to tell her that he's lost his fortune. She looks for work and lands a job as a "flower girl," handing out flowers to male patrons at a rather sketchy restaurant. A slightly sinister man (Ferdinand von Alten) whom she met on the ship takes an interest in her, but her boyfriend arrives, wanting to make up. A surprise twist makes everything all right. Without much to work with either in story or cast, Hitchcock, with the aid of cinematographer Jack E. Cox, turns his attention to some innovative camerawork, at least providing us with something to watch as the plot grinds on. Some of my disaffection for the movie may lie in the fact that it's a silent film without musical accompaniment, perhaps owing to copyright issues. Although the music supplied for silent films today is often sub-par, it at least distracts one a bit from trying to figure out what the actors are saying between intertitles. 

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Gabrielle Anwar and Billy Wirth in Body Snatchers

Cast: Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Billy Wirth, Reilly Murphy, Christine Elise, R. Lee Irmey, Kathleen Doyle, Forest Whitaker, G. Elvis Phillips. Screenplay: Raymond Cistheri, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, Nicholas St. John, based on a novel by Jack Finney. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Abel Ferrara's version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers is nothing if not economical. The economy extends to the title: Don Siegel's 1956 version and Philip Kaufman's 1978 one were called Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Ferrara even drops the definite article. The story, too, has been pared down. Ferrara's version sets the story on a military base in Alabama instead of the urban California of the previous films. It also shifts the focus to a teenage girl, Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), who comes with her family to the base when her father (Terry Kinney) is sent there by the EPA to investigate chemical pollution. The dynamic of a rebellious adolescent in a military culture is perfect for the conflict between individualism and conformity, the theme that unites all of the versions of Finney's story. In addition to her father, Marti's dysfunctional family consists of her stepmother, Carol (Meg Tilly), whom she dislikes, and her young half-brother, Andy (Reilly Muphy), who annoys her. Andy is the first to sense that something is seriously wrong in their new home when, during an art class at day care, all the other kids produce identical finger paintings. As they hold up their paintings, the teacher murmurs approvingly at each one until she comes to a halt at Andy's, which is unique. She clearly disapproves. One by one, the fact that people are being somehow replaced by identical but emotionless beings becomes clear. Ferrara is not particularly interested in the mechanics of invasion and transformation that took up more narrative space in the previous films. We get some nicely disgusting body horror scenes, but the response of Marti to the alien takeover is what drives the plot as she teams up with a handsome young helicopter pilot named Tim (Billy Wirth) to fight off the invaders. Tim's stoic military manner keeps us unsure whether he's not already one of the pod people, an ambiguity that persists until the end of the movie. Body Snatchers is a good rethinking of material whose previous versions are now considered classics. The source material was mined again for a fourth version, The invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007), which starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig but bombed with the critics.