Hold Your Man (Sam Wood, 1933)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess, Muriel Kirkland, Garry Owen, Barbara Barondess, Elizabeth Patterson, Blanche Friderici, Theresa Harris, George Reed. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Howard Emmett Rogers. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. 

Part sexy pre-Code romp and part weepie melodrama, Hold Your Man succeeds on both counts. Clark Gable plays small-time con man Eddie Hall, who while fleeing from the cops winds up in the apartment of Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), while she's taking a bath. He winds up there for good until he slugs an intruder into her apartment, accidentally killing him. He takes it on the lam and she takes the rap, going to a women's prison where she learns that she's carrying his child. The denouement, in which Ruby's fellow inmates help unite her with Eddie, is full of suspense. In a surprisingly almost enlightened twist, the heroine of this section of the movie is a Black prisoner, Lily Mae (Theresa Harris), whose father, a minister (George Reed), just happens to be at the prison for visitors' day, and thus available with a little maneuvering to marry Ruby and Eddie. (I say "almost enlightened" because neither Harris nor Reed gets a screen credit, and an alternate ending was filmed for Southern release, in which the minister was played by Henry B. Walthall.) The switch from hijinks among lowlifes to redemptive love story is a little jarring, but Harlow was never more in her element, and Gable's smirky charm is engaging.  

Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015)

Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, and Jesuthasan Antonythasan in Dheepan

Cast: Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, Vincent Rottier, Faouzi Bensaïdi, Marc Zinga, Bass Dhem, Franck Falise, Joséphine de Meaux, Jean-Baptiste Pouilloux. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré. Cinematography: Éponine Momenceau. Production design: Marcel Barthélémy. Music: Nicolas Jaar. 

Writer-director Jacques Audiard has a recurring theme in his films: the search for redemption thwarted by past transgressions. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), for example, an enforcer for a corrupt real estate firm decides to turn away from the gangster life of his father and instead follow in the footsteps of his mother, a classical pianist, but doesn't succeed. And in his current film, Emilia Pérez, a drug lord transitions from male to female, but old relationships undo the attempt to become a better person. Much of Dheepan is a stirring, fascinating story about a makeshift family: three unrelated refugees from the civil war in Sri Lanka, who take on new names and pose as husband, wife, and daughter to escape the country and find safety in a suburb of Paris. How they manage to endure cultural, social, and linguistic changes and form a new family is the heart of the film. Unfortunately, they find themselves in a housing development that is the locus of a turf war between various drug cartels, and Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) discovers that his old identity as a fighter for the Tamils in Sri Lanka hasn't been hidden. Memories of that old conflict possess him, and Audiard climaxes his story by having Dheepan pull off a single-handed rescue of Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and Ilayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), resorting to old combat techniques. Although this part of the film is exciting, it's a reversion to conventional movie-making, turning Dheepan into Rambo, and it upends the neo-realistic style of the rest of the film. 

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)

Zoe Saldaña in Emilia Pérez

Cast: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir, Eduardo Aladro, Emilio Hasan. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, based on a novel by Boris Razon. Cinematography: Paul Guilhaume. Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay. Film editing: Juliette Welfling. Music: Camille, Clément Ducol. 

While I was watching Emilia Pérez I was caught up in the audacity of its neat intermeshing of drama with song and dance, but when it ended I felt let down. Jacques Audiard accomplishes what he set out to do: tell a story about a drug lord who transitions from male to female in search of authenticity and redemption. And he does it with the help of superb performances by Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, and Selena Gomez, and witty choreography by Damien Jalet. But the film is all surface: It doesn't treat its characters as real people but rather as figures in a neo-noir melodrama laden with contemporary attitudes about sexuality and identity. The ending is far more conventional than I expected from such an interesting premise, turning the premise into a gimmick.

The Killer That Stalked New York (Earl McEvoy, 1950)

Evelyn Keyes in The Killer That Stalked New York

Cast: Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, William Bishop, Dorothy Malone, Lola Albright, Barry Kelley, Carl Benton Reid, Ludwig Donath, Art Smith, Whit Bissell, Roy Roberts, Connie Gilchrist, Dan Riss, Harry Shannon, Jim Backus, Reed Hadley (voice). Screenplay: Harry Essex, based on a magazine article by Milton Lehman. Cinematography: Joseph F.  Biroc. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Hans J. Salter. 

I wonder what RFK Jr. would have to say about The Killer That Stalked New York, now that he threatens to put his anti-vax quackery into effect. It's a taut little thriller about a smallpox epidemic, in which the heroes are the governmental and medical officials who race against time to vaccinate 8 million people against the disease while its carrier moves among them. The carrier is Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes), who has been to Cuba to retrieve some diamonds that her boyfriend, Matt Krane (Charles Korvin), wants to fence. Somewhere in her journey, she started to get sick, and by the time she arrives in New York City, she's really not feeling so well. Trying to dodge the Treasury agent (Barry Kelley) who's on her tail, she plays hide-and-seek around the city, and when she discovers her boyfriend is double-crossing her, she gets even more furtive. Several people will die from direct contact with her, and others will become carriers before her pursuers, including the doctor (William Bishop) who treated her without knowing the real nature of her disease, finally track her down. A voiceover (Reed Hadley) keeps hyping the urgency of the situation, but it's really not necessary -- Earl McEvoy's crisp pacing and the effective location shooting by Joseph F. Biroc supply enough intensity and reality. There are some nice surprises among the cast, including Dorothy Malone as a nurse and Jim Backus as a club owner, both of them pre-stardom.  

 

Illuminata (John Turturro, 1998)

Katherine Borowitz and John Turturro in Illuminata

Cast: John Turturro, Katherine Borowitz, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Ben Gazzara, Bill Irwin, Donal McCann, Aida Turturro, Leo Bassi. Screenplay: Brandon Cole, John Turturro, based on a play by Cole. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Robin Standefer. Film editing: Michael Berenbaum. Music: Arnold Black, William Bolcom.

Illuminata is poetic, witty, and beautifully filmed, designed, and acted. But it's also a little twee, which means it misses the mark for a lot of viewers. It's a tale of the theater, which means it comes with one strike against it already: Movies about the stage inevitably fail to capture what's most important about theater, the quality of being live. The theater in question is a small New York repertory company in 1905, a time and place when the stage and actors were most alive, before they became canned by radio, movies, and television. Almost all of the characters have Europeanish names, not because they're immigrants but because the film has a commedia dell'arte quality to it and a sense of playing to the rafters. John Turturro is the playwright Tuccio, married to the actress Rachel (Katherine Borowitz), but tempted by the diva Celimene (Susan Sarandon). His nemesis is the theater critic Bevalaqua (Christopher Walken), and the company includes a Beppo (Leo Bassi), a Dominique (Rufus Sewell), a Marta (Aida Turturro), a Flavio  (Ben Gazzara), and a Marco (Bill Irwin). The theater is owned by the Astergourds (Beverly D'Angelo and Donal McCann). Everyone in the cast seems to be sleeping with everyone else, or at least trying to. Bevalaqua, for example, tries to seduce Marco, the occasion for much clowning by Walken and Irwin. As noted, it's not for all tastes: It has a 46% rating on the Tomatometer. But I found it sweet and amusing, and I don't get much sweetness and amusement from movies these days.  

Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022)

Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Vic Carmen Sonne, Jacob Lohmann, Hilmar Guðjónsson, Waage Sandø, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir. Screenplay: Hlynur Pálmason. Cinematography: Maria Von Hausswolff. Production design: Frosti Fridrikkson. Film editing: Julius Krebs Damsbo. Music: Alex Zhang Hungtai. 

Godland is the age-old tale of man against the elements, as a Danish preacher, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), makes his way across the unforgiving landscape of Iceland to a place where he plans to build a church for the settlers. He is working with a guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), who doesn't (or won't) speak Danish, so he relies on an interpreter played by Hilmar Guðjónsson until the interpreter is drowned in a river crossing that Lucas stubbornly insists on. From then on, he's in Ragnar's hands, and he will be until the fated ending of the film. When they reach the settlement he finds shelter with Carl (Jacob Lohmann) and his two daughters, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir. director Hlynur Pálmason's actual daughter). Since the settlement is near the coast, Carl wonders why Lucas has taken such a long overland route. Lucas explains that he wanted to get a feeling for the land and to photograph it: The crew has hauled his bulky photographic equipment all the way. From then on, it's a story of Lucas against Ragnar and to some extent Carl, who wants to protect his daughters, especially the marriageable Anna, against the priest. Cinematographer Maria Von Hausswolff provides spectacular images, viewed not in the widescreen panoramas usually called on for such photogenic landscapes, but in the old, narrow Academy ratio that was standard in movies until the 1950s, when the film industry decided to compete with television with techniques like CinemaScope. The images in Godland even have rounded corners, an evocation of the wet-plate photography used by Lucas. The film is technically dazzling, a visual tour de force, but I just wish it moved me more. Too often it feels like the creation of a gifted and imaginative director out to display his gifts rather than one who wants to tell a story and evoke human emotions.

The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu, 2023)

Huang Yao and Xin Baiqing in The Shadowless Tower

Cast: Xin Baiqing, Huang Yao, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Li Qinqin, Siqin Gaowa, Wang Honwei, Wang Yiwen. Screenplay: Zhang Lu. Cinematography: Piao Songri. Production design: Zhang Yican. Film editing: Liu Xinzhu. Music: He Xiao. 

The Shadowless Tower is a fable about dislocation and the attempt to reconnect. It opens with a family visit to the grave of the mother of Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing) and his sister Wenhui (Li Qinqin). Wentong and Wenhui are surprised to see that there are flowers already on the grave, but Wenhui's husband explains that they were brought there by Gu Yuntai (Tian Zhuangzhuang), the estranged father of the siblings. It's a dislocated family in many ways: Wentong is divorced, and his daughter, Xiao Xiao (Wang Yiwen), whose name the subtitles translate as "Smiley," lives with Wenhui and her husband. Yuntai, the father, separated from the family many years earlier, when he was convicted and jailed (perhaps wrongly) for sexual misconduct on a bus; he now lives in Beidaihe, a seaside town many miles from Beijing, where his children live. Even the titular tower, the 13th century White Pagoda, a Buddhist temple, is a symbol of dislocation: Because of its unusual shape, it's said not to cast a shadow locally but instead 3,000 miles away in Tibet. The film concentrates mostly on Wentong, a restaurant reviewer who is accompanied on his visits to dining spots by a photographer, Ouyang Wenhui (Huang Yao), a much younger woman with a sardonic manner. What plot the film has concerns Wentong's attempts to reconnect with his father, who coincidentally lives in the same town where Ouyang was born. There's also some sexual tension between Wentong and Ouyang. It's a leisurely film, beautifully shot by Piao Songri, that could use some trimming to heighten its witty, wistful atmosphere.

Deadpool and Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024)

Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool & Wolverine

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen, Dafne Keen, Jon Favreau, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, Chris Evans, Henry Cavill, Wunmi Mosaku, Aaron Stanford, Tyler Mane, Karan Sonni, Brianna Hildebrand. Screenplay: Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, Shawn Levy. Cinematography: George Richmond. Production design: Ray Chan. Film editing: Shane Reid, Dean Zimmerman. Music: Rob Simonsen. 

Raucous, rude, and raunchy, Deadpool & Wolverine holds nothing sacred, even the production companies that made it, as the irrepressible Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) teams up with the grouchy Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to take on the Time Variance Authority, represented by Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), and Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) in the Void and elsewhere. You might wonder how Deadpool could team with Wolverine since the latter died in James Mangold's 2017 film Logan. It involves traveling through the multiverse and encountering all the various Wolverines that exist in other timelines, including one known as The Cavillrine, a cameo by Henry Cavill. The Wolverine Deadpool chooses turns out to be the worst Wolverine, someone reviled in his own universe for bringing about the deaths of all the other X-Men. The arc of Wolverine's story in the movie turns out to be a quest for redemption. The multiverse trope itself gets lampooned by treating its actors as moving through their roles as if through other universes than the one they inhabit, the Marvel Universe. So there are allusions to Jackman's career as a performer in musicals and to Reynolds's older films like The Proposal (Anne Fletcher, 2009) and Van Wilder (Walt Becker, 2002). Chris Evans's appearance in the film is also a bit of role-switching. Deadpool at first thinks he's Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, until he reveals himself as Johnny Storm, aka Human Torch, the earlier Marvel role Evans played in Fantastic Four (Tim Story, 2005). Evans's brief performance in Deadpool & Wolverine includes one of the funniest speeches in the film, a foul-mouthed diatribe about Cassandra that's so good it gets repeated in the end credits. Thoroughly mindless and thoroughly entertaining, Deadpool & Wolverine is the superhero movie to end all superhero movies. Well, we can dream, can't we?

Alexandria: Again and Forever (Youssef Chahine, 1989)

Youssef Chahine and Zaky Fateen Abdel Wahab in Alexandria: Again and Forever

Cast: Youssef Chahine, Youssra, Hussein Fahmy, Amr Abdulgalil, Hesham Selim, Tahiyya Karyuka, Huda Sultan, Seif Abdelrahman, Abla Kamel, Manha Batraoul, Zaky Fateen Abdel Wahab. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Youry Nasrallah. Cinematography: Ramses Marzouk. Art direction: Mahmoud Mabrouk. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Mohamad Nouh. 

As with so many of Youssef Chahine's films, I find myself sorely lacking in a background in Egyptian history and politics. In this case, my ignorance of the film industry strike in 1987 made my comprehension of a central section of the narrative difficult to follow. What I can grasp is that Alexandria: Again and Forever is a very personal film about the writer-director's life, including his relationship with a favorite actor named Amr (Amr Abdulgalil). The film opens with the director Yehia Eskendarany (Chahine) trying to coax a performance out of a recalcitrant Arm in Yehia's film version of Hamlet. We gather that the relationship between Yehia and Amr is more than just that of director and actor: Chahine's bisexuality was widely known. As the film goes on, Yehia either tries to or imagines (things aren't really clear) casting Amr as Alexander the Great, and he also turns his attention to the actress Nadia (Youssra), who becomes his imagined Cleopatra. Meanwhile, everyone in the Egyptian film industry is involved in a strike against government interference. And throughout the film, there are musical interludes. It's all very watchable, and as a self-portrait of the director, it has been likened to Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), a potent comparison. But it's one of those movies I'll have to reserve judgment on simply because of ignorance.  

Blondie of the Follies (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

Billie Dove and Marion Davies in Blondie of the Follies

Cast: Marion Davies, Robert Montgomery, Billie Dove, Jimmy Durante, James Gleason, Zasu Pitts, Sidney Toler, Douglass Dumbrille, Sarah Padden, Louise Carter, Clyde Cook. Screenplay: Frances Marion, Anita Loos. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George Hively. Music: William Axt. 

Marion Davies is always a delight to watch, but Blondie of the Follies is a mess. A sort of backstage, rags-to-riches, romantic comedy with music, it was tailor-made for Davies, who had once been a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl. In fact, it was where she caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst, But why Hearst would have okayed a story so reflective of his liaison with Davies is something of a mystery, especially since he meddled in the production to make sure it wasn't too close to real life. Not that he was a reluctant meddler: He set up his own production company with MGM for her and made sure that she was photographed and clothed in the most flattering ways possible. Davies is such an adroit comedian, the forerunner of such glamorous funny women as Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball, that she didn't need Hearst's help, especially his desire to see her in serious dramatic roles. There's some drama in Blondie of the Follies, but it's much less entertaining than Davies's clowning, as when she mimics Greta Garbo in a sendup of Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) with Jimmy Durante as John Barrymore. The story isn't much: Blondie McClune (Davies) and Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove) are on-and-off friends and neighbors in a tenement before Lottie runs off to become a Follies girl. Visiting Lottie (now known as Lurline Cavanaugh), Blondie meets Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery), who has set Lottie/Lurline up in a swank apartment. Blondie decides that the life of a chorus girl isn't so bad after all, and sure enough she follows in Lottie's footsteps, becoming a star and getting set up in her own swell digs by an oilman (Douglass Dumbrille). Moreover, Larry decides that Blondie is more his type than the pretentious Lurline, who is outraged when she finds out. Even though this is a pre-Code movie, there needs to be some indication that the filmmakers don't fully endorse all of this gold-digging and living-in-sin, so Blondie's dad (James Gleason) shows up to disapprove. Finally, he gives in and decides to let Blondie live how she wants to, but not without touching her conscience a bit. Blondie's ambivalence about her lifestyle and her attraction to Larry will be tested, forming what amounts to the plot. There's an interpolated party scene to let Durante do his comic shtick, which hasn't aged well, and a couple of rather clunky production numbers, but they only add to the generally unfocused character of the movie.  

Terri (Azazel Jacobs, 2011)

Jacob Wysocki in Terri

Cast: Jacob Wysocki, John C. Reilly, Creed Bratton, Bridger Zadina, Olivia Crocicchia, Tim Heidecker, Justin Prentice, Mary Anne McGarry, Curtiss Frisle, Tara Karsian, Diane Salinger, Jenna Gavigan. Screenplay: Patrick DeWitt, Azazel Jacobs. Cinematography: Tobias Datum. Production design: Matt Luem. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Mandy Hoffman. 

Terri sounds like another teen movie, but it isn't. It has all the elements of the genre: misfit kids, mean girls, horny guys, uncomprehending teachers, absent parents, and so on. Terri (Jacob Wysocki) is an overweight high school student whose misfit status is signified by the spelling of his name, which is usually that of a girl. He lives with his Uncle James (Creed Bratton), who is some kind of an invalid -- we never learn what the illness is, whether mental or physical, other than that he sometimes takes too many pills and blacks out. We also never learn what happened to Terri's parents, only that he doesn't know where they are. He wears pajamas to school and is usually late, which gets him sent to the office of the vice principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who is something of an eccentric himself and specializes in trying to connect with the school misfits. What director Azazel Jacobs and screenwriter Patrick DeWitt do with this setup is to keep the audience off balance as Terri learns to embrace his misfit status. Terri is a wholehearted embrace of eccentricity, with good performances, engaging twists and turns, and a welcome lack of preachiness, but it left me feeling that there was too much quirk for quirk's sake. It's a bit like someone watched The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985), Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989), and Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997) and smoked too much weed.

The Man I Love (Raoul Walsh, 1947)

Ida Lupino and Robert Alda in The Man I Love

Cast: Ida Lupino, Robert Alda, Andrea King, Martha Vickers, Bruce Bennett, Alan Hale, Dolores Moran, John Ridgely, Don McGuire, Warren Douglas, Craig Stevens, Tony Romano. Screenplay: Catherine Turney, Joe Pagano, based on a novel by Maritta M. Wolff. Cinematography: Sidney Hickox. Art direction: Stanley Fleischer. Film editing: Owen Marks. 

The Man I Love is a rather scattered and melodramatic film noir laced with music. It gives Ida Lupino one of her best roles, and she takes charge of it with such authority and intensity that it's not surprising that she collapsed during the filming. She plays Petey Brown, a lounge singer who decides to come home for Christmas, only to find her family embroiled in a number of crises. Her brother, Joe (Warren Douglas), is involved in some shady business and her sister Sally (Andrea King) is dealing with the hospitalization of her husband, Roy (John Ridgely), a shell-shocked veteran. Sally and her other sister, Ginny (Martha Vickers), spend a lot of time looking after the infant twins of their neighbors, Gloria (Dolores Moran) and Johnny O'Connor (Don McGuire), partly because Gloria is a boozy tramp to whom Johnny is devoted. Joe works for nightclub owner Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda), so Petey goes to work as a singer at his club, partly to keep her eye on her brother. When Joe gets involved in some kind of scuffle, Petey goes to bail him out of jail and discovers that the other guy arrested in the dust-up was San Thomas (Bruce Bennett), a pianist well-known in the jazz circles in which Petey travels. While the womanizing Nicky is making a play for her, Petey is falling for San, giving her another problem: managing two men. Raoul Walsh manages to keep all these plot threads from getting too tangled, but not without some loss of credibility. Fortunately, there's some good music to listen to, including the Gershwin song that gives the movie its title. (Lupino's singing was dubbed by Peg La Centra.) But mostly the movie is a showcase for Lupino, whippet-thin and sharp of tongue.  

Read My Lips (Jacques Audiard, 2001)

Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos in Read My Lips

Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Vincent Cassel, Olivier Gourmet, Olivier Perrier, Olivia Bonamy, Bernard Alane, Céline Samie, Pierre Diot, François Loriquet, Serge Onteniente, David Saracino, Christophe Vandevelde. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista. Cinematography: Mathieu Vadepied. Production design: Michel Barthélémy. Film editing: Juliette Welfling. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

It's so easy to imagine an American remake of Jacques Audard's Read My Lips that it's surprising it hasn't been done with, say, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in the roles played by Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel. At its core it's a romantic thriller about a mousy office worker who blossoms when she teams up with a scruffy ex-con for a heist that depends in large part on her ability to read lips. But this is the French version, so it's also violent and murky, with some complicated backstories and sidebar episodes. Devos plays Carla, an overworked secretary/office manager with a hearing impairment, who collapses one day after being harassed once too often by other members of the staff. Her boss takes notice, however, and lets her hire an assistant to do some of the grunt work like photocopying. The hire is Paul (Cassel), who has just got out of prison, and Carla is so grateful for what he does -- and so obviously turned on by his rough masculinity -- that she goes out of her way to help him find a place to live and even gives him money. Paul repays her by helping her get even with one of the office harassers, but he still owes money to Marchand (OIivier Gourmet), one of his old criminal associates. That's where Carla's ability to lip-read comes in. So Carla and Paul team up to rob a large amount of money that Marchand is holding for some fellow criminals. Read My Lips was well received, winning César awards for Devos and for the screenplay, and nominations for Cassel, Audiard's direction, and for best film. But it also has some detractors, who criticize it as overlong and needlessly complicated, including a subplot involving Paul's parole office (Olivier Perrier) that seems to have nothing to do with the main plot. The treatment of Carla's hearing impairment is vague, and some have questioned whether even the most skilled lip-readers could do what the film has her do. But Devos and Cassel are terrific, generating real sexual tension, and Audiard skillfully provides suspense and surprises. 

Romance & Cigarettes (John Turturro, 2005)

James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet in Romance & Cigarettes

Cast: James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Bobby Cannavale, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Aida Turturro, Christopher Walken, Barbara Sukowa, Elaine Stritch, Eddie Izzard, Amy Sedaris. Screenplay: John Turturro. Cinematography: Tom Stern. Production design: Donna Zakowska. Film editing: Ray Hubley. 

Romance & Cigarettes is ... well, certainly unique. It's a marital/family drama with songs and dances, a sort of dramusical with an all-star cast of mostly non-singers. It has passionate advocates and a good number who dislike it. It was spottily released, first at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, then in the UK and Europe, but not in the United States until 2007, partly owing to disagreements among the various production companies, but also to the difficulty of marketing such an oddball movie. I happen to like it a lot, mostly because of the enthusiastic professionalism of its actors, who were called on to do things they don't usually do. James Gandolfini plays a construction worker named (no kidding) Nick Murder, married to Kitty (Susan Sarandon) but with a mistress named Tula (Kate Winslet). Nick and Kitty have three daughters: Baby (Mandy Moore), Constance (Mary-Louise Parker), and Rosebud (Aida Turturro), who serve as a kind of Greek chorus to the breakup that occurs when Kitty discovers a seriously raunchy love note (there's a lot of raunch in the movie) Nick has written to Tula. Things get heated, kicked off by a production number set to Engelbert Humperdinck's "A Man Without Love," that features garbage men dancing in the streets of Queens. And it doesn't let up from there, as actors lipsynch or sing along with singers like Bruce Springsteen, James Brown, Ute Lemper, Elvis Presley, and more. They also smoke a lot of cigarettes, and this half of the film's title precipitates the film's conclusion, which is probably its weakest part, as if writer-director John Turturro couldn't find another way to resolve the plot he has begun. Still, I welcome any movie that gathers a company as variously talented as Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Elaine Stritch, and Eddie Izzard to support its superb leads. I have to single out Winslet in particular for giving another performance that demonstrates what a chameleon she is. 

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005)

Linh-Dam Pham and Romain Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Cast: Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Jonathan Zaccaï, Gilles Cohen, Linh-Dan Pham, Aure Atika. Emmanuelle Devos, Anton Yakoviev, Mélanie Laurent. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Tonino Benacquista, based on a screenplay by James Toback. Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine. Production design: François Emmanuelli. Film editing: Juliette Welfling. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

Cry of the Hunted (Joseph H. Lewis, 1953)

Vittorio Gassman and Barry Sullivan in Cry of the Hunted

Cast: Barry Sullivan, Vittorio Gassman, Polly Bergen, William Conrad, Mary Zavian, Robert Burton, Harry Shannon, Jonathan Cott. Screenplay: Jack Leonard, Marion Wolf. Cinematography: Harold Lipstein. Art direction: Malcolm Brown, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. 

Mac (John Turturro, 1992)

John Turturro, Carl Capotorto, and Michael Badalucco in Mac

Cast: John Turturro, Michael Badalucco, Katerine Borowitz, Paul Capotorto, Matthew Sussman, Ellen Barkin, Dennis Farina, Olek Krupa, John Amos. Screenplay: John Turturro, Brandon Cole. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Production design: Robin Standefer. Film editing: Michael Berenbaum. Music: Richard Termini, Vin Tese. 

The Hard Way (Vincent Sherman, 1943)

Ida Lupino, Jack Carson, and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way

Cast: Ida Lupino, Dennis Morgan, Joan Leslie, Jack Carson, Gladys George, Faye Emerson, Paul Cavanaugh. Screenplay: Daniel Fuchs, Peter Viertel. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Tomas Pratt. Music: Heinz Roemheld. 

Pickup Alley (John Gilling, 1957)

Bonar Colleano and Victor Mature in Pickup Alley

Cast: Victor Mature, Anita Ekberg, Trevor Howard, Bonar Colleano, Dorothy Allison, André Morell, Martin Benson, Eric Pohlmann, Alec Mango. Screenplay: John Paxton, A.J. Forrest. Cinematography: Ted Moore. Art direction: Paul Sheriff. Film editing: Richard Best. Music: Richard Rodney Bennett. 

36 Fillette (Catherine Breillat, 1988)

Delphine Zentout in 36 Fillette

Cast: Delphine Zentout, Etienne Chicot, Olivier Parnière, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Berta Dominguez D., Jean-François Stévenin, Diane Bellego, Adrienne Bonnet. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Roger Salloch, based on a novel by Breillat. Cinematography: Laurent Dailland. Production design: Olivier Paultre. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Maxime Schmitt. 

Catherine Breillat's explorations of adolescent female sexuality continue in 36 Fillette. (The title refers to a French dress size in the "Junior" range.) The protagonist, Lili (Delphine Zentout), is 14 years old and precocious both mentally and physically, but perhaps not emotionally. She's visiting Biarritz with her mother (Adrienne Bonnet) and father (Jean-François Stévenin) and her 17-year-old brother, Bertrand, (Olivier Parnière). One evening, she wheedles her self-absorbed parents into letting her accompany her brother on a nighttime excursion into the clubs at Biarritz, and they hitch a ride with a 40-something businessman named Maurice (Etienne Chicot), who has a couple of Bertrand's acquaintances in his car. Eventually, Lili and Bertrand go their separate ways, and in the course of her explorations Lili encounters a local celebrity, Boris Golovine -- an extended cameo by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got his start in movies playing a disaffected adolescent in The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959). They strike up a conversation which provides the bulk of exposition for Lili's character. Then she re-connects with Bertrand and Etienne, and goes off with the latter for an evening of sexual and emotional exploration in which it becomes apparent that Lili is in many ways the more mature person of the two -- though perhaps not enough to justify such an exploitative relationship. In the French manner, the film is too talkative to be shocking, but Breillat is really not out to shock audiences so much as make them question their own reactions to such a pairing. Zentout, who was 16 at the time, gives an astonishing performance, though I find myself queasy at the thought of so young an actress playing such a role.  

The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941)

Evelyn Keyes and Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask

Cast: Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, John Tyrrell, Cy Shindell, Stanley Brown, James Seay, Warren Ashe, Charles C. Wilson, George McKay. Screenplay: Allen Vincent, Paul Jarrico, Arthur Levinson, based on a radio play by Thomas Edward O'Connell. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Sidney Cutner. 

A real sleeper, Robert Florey's The Face Behind the Mask performed poorly at the box office and was critically dismissed on its release, but over time it has gained admirers. Florey and cinematographer Franz Planer do what they can with the movie's scrawny budget, achieving some haunting expressionistic images and telling the story with great economy: The film runs only 69 minutes. It's a showcase for Peter Lorre, who plays Janos Szabo, a Hungarian immigrant to the United States whose naïve enthusiasm is smothered when he's horribly scarred in a fire. (We get only a brief glimpse of his scarred face, but it's enough to make what follows plausible.) Trained as a watchmaker and skilled with his hands, Janos is unable to find work. Then a chance encounter with a small-time thief (George E. Stone) sets him on the road to crime. Trying to earn money for plastic surgery, he becomes the head of a small ring of jewel thieves, using his expertise to break into safes and circumvent burglar alarms. (It's a sign of the small budget, and of Florey's narrative economy, that we never see him and his gang at work.) They make enough for Janos to have a rather creepy mask made to cover his disfigurement, but on learning that surgery can never fully repair his face he becomes despondent. Then he meets a blind woman (Evelyn Keyes) who doesn't care what he looks like, and they fall in love. It's a rather soppy twist to the story, and Keyes is never able to make her character other than a saccharine cliché, but the film takes a darker turn that undercuts the sentimentality. Lorre is terrific throughout, as Janos ranges from meek to menacing to heroic. 

Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)

James Duval in Nowhere

Cast: James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Chiara Mastroianni, Debi Mazar, Kathleen Robertson, Joshua Gibran Mayweather, Jordan Ladd, Christina Applegate, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, Jeremy Jordan, Alan Boyce, Jaason Simmons, Ryan Philippe, Heather Graham, Scott Caan, Thyme Lewis, Mena Suvari, Beverly D'Angelo, Charlotte Rae, Denise Richards, Teresa Hill, Kevin Light, Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan, John Ritter, Christopher Knight, Eve Plumb, Lauren Tewes, David Leisure. Screenplay: Gregg Araki. Cinematography: Arturo Smith. Production design: Patti Podesta. Film editing: Gregg Araki. 

I have taken the liberty of listing more cast members than usual just because Nowhere is a crowded movie, a throng of newcomers, future stars, familiar faces, and a few one-shots. It's a mess, but an intentional one, the chaotic culminating film of Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse trilogy that began with Totally F***ed Up in 1993 and continued with The Doom Generation in 1995. Araki called it "Beverly Hills 90210 on acid," and that serves as well as anything to describe this freewheeling farrago of sex and drugs, as Araki puts a lot of Gen Xers and Millennials through hell. It's eye-bombing and ear-assaulting, and it contains a rape scene as well as a murder committed with a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup. In short, don't watch it unprepared.   

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

Gina Carano in Haywire

Cast: Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Michael Angarano, Mathieu Kassovitz. Screenplay: Lem Dobbs. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Howard Cummings. Film editing: Steven Soderbergh. Music: David Holmes. 

Haywire could have been a solid entry in the male-dominated action genre when Steven Soderbergh cast MMA champion Gina Carano as a sexy undercover agent named Mallory Kane. But Soderbergh may have had his doubts, because he surrounded her with a solid and experienced supporting cast, letting her beat up characters played by Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender and outwit the ones played by Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor. And even before the film was released it was clear that Carano's weakness as an actress might be a problem, so some of her dialogue was dubbed by Laura San Giacomo and some of it was digitally altered to lower it in tone. And when the film was released the critics were not impressed with her debut: In the New Yorker, David Denby said she was "strong, fast, relentless [but] not much of an actress," while Time's Richard Corliss called her "all kick and no charisma." Still, the film got mostly good reviews for what it is: a solid action film. Carano seemed on track to success, winning a role in Fast and Furios 6 (Justin Lin, 2013) and in the first two seasons of Lucasfilm's Star Wars spinoff series The Mandalorian. But then she got political, criticizing the use of face masks during the Covid crisis and supporting Donald Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, thus finding her mainstream career blocked. So a star wasn't born and a genre wasn't revitalized.

Alphabet City (Amos Poe, 1984)

Michael Winslow in Alphabet City

Cast: Vincent Spano, Michael Winslow, Kate Vernon, Jami Gertz, Zohra Lampert, Raymond Serra, Kenny Marino, Danny Jordano, Tom Mardirosian. Screenplay: Gregory K. Heller, Amos Poe. Cinematography: Oliver Wood. Production design: M. Nord Haggerty. Film editing: Graham Weinbren. Music: Nile Rodgers. 

In 1984, a cop show called Miami Vice revolutionized its genre with hip music and lots of style, transforming the city where it was set into a place where even wickedness looked good. In the same year, director Amos Poe tried to do something similar for the gangster movie in New York's Lower East Side with a movie called Alphabet City. He cast a 20-something actor, Vincent Spano, as Johnny, a 19-year-old sharp-dressing factotum for the mob, and sent him cruising the city streets in a limited edition Pontiac Trans Am to the music of Nile Rodgers. The movie's streets are hosed-down and shiny and the city lights are haloed by a fog filter. Johnny has a wife/partner/companion named Angie (Kate Vernon), who does abstract expressionist paintings and tends to their infant daughter in the loft where they live. He cruises about, collecting from drug dealers like Lippy (Michael Winslow) and club owners who pay the mob protection. But then the mob boss wants Johnny to torch an apartment building, which is a problem because Johnny's sister, Sophia (Jami Gertz), and his mother (Zohra Lampert) live there. We learn that Sophia is a party girl and Mama spends her time ironing while her latest boyfriend snoozes on the sofa before the TV, and Johnny has some trouble persuading them to vacate. So he decides to quit the mob and tries to persuade Angie that they should take the baby and run. Naturally, the mob sends out hit men and Johnny has to deal with them. And that's pretty much it. Spano has real presence, and Winslow creates an amusingly quirky character for Lippy, but the clichés are as pervasive as the lens-created fog that blurs the streetlights. Alphabet City is worth watching only as an example of the high '80s style that MTV made ubiquitous, but if you want to see that the reruns of Miami Vice are more worth watching.

Fear City (Abel Ferrara, 1984)

Tom Berenger in Fear City

Cast: Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia, Melanie Griffith, Rossano Brazzi, Rae Dawn Chong, Joe Santos, Michael V. Gazzo, Jan Murray, Janet Julian, Daniel Faraldo, Maria Conchita Alonso, Ola Ray, John Foster. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: James Lemmo. Production design: Vincent Joseph Cresciman. Film editing: Jack W. Holmes, Anthony Redman. Music: Dick Halligan. 

Abel Ferrara's style and ability to create an atmosphere almost manage to redeem the tawdry Fear City, but there's really no getting over the leaden familiarity of the story. Someone is mutilating and killing the dancers who work in New York City's strip clubs and the police, club owners, and managers of the women are unable to stop the carnage. Eventually, it falls to Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger), the co-owner of a talent agency that supplies the dancers, to search out the killer and deal with him. Rossi is a damaged man: an ex-boxer who killed a man in the ring and is tormented with guilt, but when the target becomes his ex-girlfriend Loretta (Melanie Griffith), he feels compelled to act. You can see from the start where the plot is going -- toward a showdown in a dark alley. It doesn't help that Rossi is at odds with the police officer in charge of the investigation, Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), who hates Italians: "There's nothing I hate more than guineas in Cadillacs," Wheeler says, watching Rossi get in his car. Ferrara can sometimes be thuddingly obvious in exposition: We know from flashbacks what the cause of Rossi's guilt and depression is, but just in case we don't get it Ferrara needlessly inserts a scene in which we see newspaper clippings about the opponent's coma and death. More time might have been spent developing the character of the killer, who is just a figure out of a nightmare. The acting in Fear City is mediocre and there's more exploitative nudity than necessary in the dance club scenes, but the movie undeniably holds your attention. 

Blaze (Ethan Hawke, 2018)

Ben Dickey and Alia Shawkat in Blaze

Cast: Ben Dickey, Alia Shawkat, Charlie Sexton, Josh Hamilton, Lloyd Teddy Johnson Jr., Wyatt Russell, Jenn Lyon, Ritchie Montgomery, David Kallaway, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Jean Carlot, Alynda Segarra, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn, Sam Rockwell, Martin Bats Bradford. Screenplay: Ethan Hawke, Sybil Rosen, based on a book by Rosen. Cinematography: Steve Cosens. Production design: Thomas Hayek. Film editing: Jason Gourson.  

You probably have to be deeper into outlaw country music than I am to fully appreciate Blaze. It's a familiar story: a promising musician whose life comes undone because of substance abuse and failure to manage their career wisely. This one is informed by the woman in the musician's life: The film is based on the memoir of Blaze Foley's sometime companion, Sybil Rosen, who co-wrote the screenplay with the director, Ethan Hawke. It's a solid biopic that stars an unknown actor, Ben Dickey, in the title role, with Alia Shawkat as Sybil. Foley was the kind of intensely personal songwriter whose music lends itself to a biopic -- almost shapes it, in fact -- and Hawke takes full advantage of it by presenting most of Foley's songs in performance scenes that blend into dramatic sequences. Dickey and Shawkat get good support from Charlie Sexton as Townes Van Zandt. There are also some cameo performances, including Kris Kristofferson in his final screen appearance as Foley's father, and an amusing turn by director Richard Linklater and actors Steve Zahn and Sam Rockwell as some oil millionaires who decide to get into the record business -- not really to Foley's benefit. Blaze is slowly paced and the narrative sometimes gets oblique, and the 129 minute run time betrays the slackness that often afflicts independent film, but on the whole it's a success and another landmark in Hawke's increasingly impressive career. 

Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015)

Elisabeth Moss in Queen of Earth

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit, Kentucker Audley, Keith Poulson, Kate Lynn Sheil, Craig Butta. Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Anna Bak-Kvapil. Film editor: Robert Greene. Music: Keegan DeWitt. 

Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth is about a breakdown. And just by virtue of being about a breakdown, it's going to be a showcase for an actor, in this case Elisabeth Moss, who has made her career by playing young women on the brink. Moss is Catherine, an artist whom we see at the beginning of the film with her eye makeup smeared, so that it looks like she has two black eyes. She has just learned that her marriage is over, her husband (Kentucker Audley) having confessed to an affair with another woman. This blow is added to another, her father's suicide, so that she retreats to a house in the country with her best friend, Virginia (Katherine Waterston), to recover. But companionship and isolation don't help soothe Catherine's troubled psyche, especially when it's violated (from her point of view) by the presence of Rich (Patrick Fugit), a young man who's staying at a neighboring house and feels happy just wandering into theirs occasionally. It gets worse when Rich and Virginia start seeing more of each other. You can guess the rest. The problem with Queen of Earth is that it's not much more than a showcase for Moss, even though Waterston gets some good scenes too. Perry steadfastly refuses to give us much more about Catherine's background than what we can glean from conversations with Rich and Virginia: There are no revelatory scenes from her married life, and only hints at her relationship with her father, a celebrated artist and her mentor, and what drove him to suicide. The ending of the film, too, hints at more than it tells. So what we are left with is a chronicle of disintegration, some artful use of Keegan DeWitt's eerie minimalist score, and a demonstration that Moss is a fearlessly inventive performer. That may be enough for some viewers, but I wanted more. 

Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995)

Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger in Empire Records

Cast: Anthony LaPaglia, Maxwell Caulfield, Debi Mazar, Rory Cochrane, Johnny Whitworth, Robin Tunney, Renée Zellweger, Ethan Embry, Coyote Shivers, Brendan Sexton III, Liv Tyler. Screenplay: Carol Heikkinen. Cinematography: Walt Lloyd. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Michael Chandler. 

It's not much of a compliment to call a movie "harmless," but that's the only word I can think of to describe Empire Records, which was a flop when released but has an enthusiastic following today among Gen-Xers. The best I can say, as a member of a generation not even contiguous with Generation X, except that my daughter was a member, is that it provided a nice diversion from pre-election anxiety. And that it has some performers -- Rory Cochrane and Renée Zellweger in particular -- that it's fun to watch. The story is negligible and predictable: a small record store is threatened with being taken over r by a large corporation, and the madcap young employees, who never seem to do any work, manage to save it. That's just enough to hang a lot of songs from the '90s on. There is a place for movies that disarm criticism like this one, so I respect it for being just that. 

Eva (Joseph Losey, 1962)

Jeanne Moreau in Eva

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, James Villiers, Ricardo Garrone, Lisa Gastoni, Checco Rissone, Enzo Fiermonte, Nona Medici, Alexis Revidis, Peggy Guggenheim, Giorgio Albertazzi. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Evan Jones, based on a novel by James Hadley Chase. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Henri Decaë. Production design: Richard Macdonald, Luigi Scaccianoce. Film editing: Reginald Beck, Franca Silvi. Music: Michel Legrand. 

Jeanne Moreau, as was so often the case when she was cast in a movie, is the best thing about Joseph Losey's Eva. She plays a high-class prostitute who makes the messy life of Welsh novelist Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) even messier. He has hit the jackpot with his best-selling novel, now made into a movie, and is living it up in Venice when he meets Moreau's Eve Olivier. The rest is the old familiar story of the undoing of a man who has already started to come undone, so there's not much plot to follow in Eva. There are some glimpses of Venice and Rome in winter, denuded of tourists, and some interest to be had in watching how the inevitable occurs, but apart from capable performances, Eva doesn't have much else to recommend itself. 

Don't Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)

Barbara Bouchet in Don't Torture a Duckling

Cast: Florinda Bolkan, Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas, Marc Porel, Georges Wilson, Antonello Campodifiori, Ugo D'Alessio, Virgilio Gazzolo, Vito Passeri, Rosalia Maggio, Andrea Aureli, Linda Sini, Franco Balducci, Marcello Tamborra. Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, Gianfrancoi Clerici. Cinematography: Sergio Offizi. Production design: Pier Luigi Basile. Film editing: Ornella Micheli. Music: Riz Ortolani. 

From its offbeat title to its gruesomely overdone climax, Don't Torture a Duckling is an unsettling movie. At heart it's a whodunit, with amateur sleuths outdoing the police in solving a mystery -- typical of the giallo. But writer-director Lucio Fulci can't resist perverse twists throughout the film. It takes place in a picturesque town in Apulia, the boot heel of Italy, where the mysterious murders of several young boys attract the attention of the police and the press. The place is isolated enough to be rife with superstition and suspicion of outsiders, providing a variety of suspects that include the village simpleton and a woman thought to be a witch. There's also an outsider, a rich young woman sent to live there by her father after a drug bust. And there are the prostitutes brought in from elsewhere to sate not only the lusts of the local men but also the curiosity of the boys of the town, who spy on what's going on in the isolated shack where the women ply their trade. Fulci serves up this mixture of sex and blood with skill, scattering false leads throughout, but also with some gratuitous scenes that display a serious lack of taste.  

Alexandria ... Why? (Youssef Chahine, 1979)

Mohsen Mohieddin in Alexandria ... Why?

Cast: Mohsen Mohieddin, Farid Shawqi, Ezzat El Allaili, Gerry Sundquist, Naglaa Fathi, Yehia Chahine, Ahmed Mehrez, Youssef Wahbi, Leila Fawzy, Seif Abdel Rahman, Ahmed Zaki, Mahmoud Al Meledji. Screenplay: Yussef Chahine, Mohsen Zayed. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Abdel Fattah Madbouly. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 
 

Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932)

Chester Morris and Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman

Cast: Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Leila Hyams, Una Merkel, Henry Stephenson, May Robson, Charles Boyer, Harvey Clark. Screenplay: Anita Loos, based on a novel by Katharine Brush. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. 

Momma's Man (Azazel Jacobs, 2008)

Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs, and Ken Jacobs in Momma's Man

Cast: Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, Dana Varon, Piero Arcilesi, Richard Edson, Eleanor Hutchins. Screenplay: Azazel Jacobs. Cinematography: Tobias Datum. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Mandy Hoffman. 

A canceled flight leaves Mikey (Matt Boren), on a business trip to New York, spending a night with his parents in the apartment where he grew up. The stay extends into weeks as Mikey is drawn back into his childhood by the memorabilia crammed into the apartment. His mother (Flo Jacobs) is solicitous, constantly offering him food, while his taciturn father (Ken Jacobs) remains preoccupied with his own interests. Mikey sinks into his old collection of notebooks and comic books, and develops a kind of agoraphobia, becoming frozen at the top of the stairs that lead to the world below. Meanwhile, his wife, Laura (Dana Varon), is back in Los Angeles with their infant daughter, wondering why Mikey doesn't return her calls. Azazel Jacobs's movie is not only a story of a midlife crisis, but also a loving but slightly critical portrait of his own parents, who play Mikey's mother and father, filmed in their actual cluttered apartment where the director grew up. It's not like any other movie you've seen, being not a documentary and not quite fiction, but somehow real and touching and wistfully funny.   

 

Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958)

Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, unidentified baby, Marcello Mastroianni, and Renato Salvatori in Big Deal on Madonna Street

Cast: Vittorio Gassman, Renato Salvatori, Memmo Carotenuto, Rossana Rory, Carla Gravina, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, Totò. Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Mario Monicelli. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo. Production design: Piero Gherardi. Film editing: Adriana Novelli. Music: Piero Umiliani. 

According to director Mario Monicelli, Big Deal on Madonna Street was intended not just as a parody of heist thrillers like Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) but also of neorealism as a genre. We may get a glimpse of that when Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni) hears that the target of the heist is a pawn shop: "My sheets are there," he says, perhaps reminding the audience of the scene in Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) when the couple pawn their sheets so the husband can buy a bicycle. Whatever the target, Big Deal stands on its own as an Italian comedy classic, revealing the comic gifts of actors like Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman, and providing a small but important role in the budding career of Claudia Cardinale. It's a tale of screw-ups, as everything possible goes wrong in the attempts of a crew of ne'er-do-wells to pull off a burglary that involves extensive planning, surveillance, and other feats that are just beyond their abilities. The comedy ranges from small ironies to broad slapstick, all set to a lively jazz score by Piero Umiliani. 

Come Back, Africa (Lionel Rogosin, 1959)

Zachariah Mgabe in Come Back, Africa

Cast: Zachariah Mgabe, Vinah Bendile, Miriam Makebe, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisani, Can Themba, Myrtle Berman, George Malabye, Morris Hugh, Hazel Futa. Screenplay: Bloke Modisani, Lewis Nkosi, Lionel Rogosin. Cinematography: Ernest Artaria, Emil Knebel. Film editing: Carl Lerner, Hugh A. Robertson. Music: Chatur Lal. 

Filmed surreptitiously and edited with skill, Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa is everything a docufiction film should be, with the chief weakness being the fiction part. It's a revelatory exploration of apartheid in South Africa, concentrated on Johannesburg, that gets its focus by following the misadventures of Zachariah Mgabe, which is also the name of the actor who plays him. Zachariah comes to Johannesburg in search of work, leaving his wife and children in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal province. He finds work in the gold mines, but when the agreed-upon term of employment is over, he wants something that pays more. He negotiates the "pass laws," a notorious system of internal passports devised by the white South African government to enforce segregation, and finds work as the "house boy" for a white couple. But the mistress of the household, played by anti-apartheid activist Myrtle Berman, constantly scolds, berates, and finally fires him, so Zachariah moves from job to job, encountering suspicion and contempt from the white employers. Things become more desperate when his wife, Vinah (Vinah Bendile), and their children join him in Johannesburg. The film vividly explores the street life of the city, and climaxes in a scene set in a shebeen where Black intellectuals discuss their situation and Miriam Makeba, already a celebrity in the country, sings two songs -- a  superb performance that helped launch her international career. But the narrative thread of the film isn't sustained as well as the documentary scenes and after an act of brutality that isn't set up properly, the film ends on a harsh but inconclusive note.   

One From the Heart: Reprise (Francis Ford Coppola, 1981, 2024)

Teri Garr in One From the Heart

Cast: Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, Lainie Kazan, Harry Dean Stanton, Allen Garfield. Screenplay: Armyan Bernstein, Francis Ford Coppola. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García, Vittorio Storaro. Production design: Dean Tavoularis. Film editing: Rudi Fehr, Anne Goursaud, Randy Roberts. Music: Tom Waits. 

Was it the success of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Damien Chazelle's La La Land (2016) that inspired Francis Ford Coppola to try revamping One From the Heart, the 1981 musical that destroyed his hopes of creating a film studio? One From the Heart had often been called "ahead of its time," for its attempt to revive the movie musical with stylized sets and performers that weren't known for singing and dancing. The knock against One From the Heart was chiefly that the elaborate production overwhelmed the rather thin story: a couple who quarrel, split up, have flings with others, but return to each other at the end of the film. Unfortunately, that defect remains in the re-edited version, with previously unseen footage, that Coppola called One From the Heart: Reprise. And both Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr feel miscast: Forrest was a fine character actor, not a leading man, and Garr was a wonderful comic actress in movies like Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) and Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), but they have no chemistry together as the sparring lovers. Tom Waits's songs, beautifully sung by Waits and Crystal Gayle, work nicely as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the action, but some who admire the original version of Coppola's film object that in the Reprise they've been smothered by dialogue. Mostly it's a treat for the eye and sometimes for the ear, but it never reaches the heart.    

The Spell (Lee Phillips, 1977)

Susan Myers in The Spell

Cast: Lee Grant, Susan Myers, Lelia Goldoni, Helen Hunt, Jack Colvin, James Olson, James Greene, Wright King, Barbara Bostock, Doney Oatman, Richard Carlyle, Kathleen Hughes, Robert Gibbons, Arthur Peterson. Screenplay: Brian Taggart. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Art direction: Robert MacKichan. Film editing: David Newhouse. Music: Gerald Fried. 

The Spell was planned as a theatrical feature, but when Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) became a big hit, the producers decided that another film about a telekinetic teenager would be dismissed as a copycat, so it was reworked into a TV movie. In the process, as its writer and director responded to tighter censorship, time constraints, and the need to accommodate commercial breaks, it lost a lot of suspense as well as some essential characterization and backgrounding. The Matchetts, Marion (Lee Grant) and Glenn (James Olson), are an affluent couple with two daughters, 15-year-old Rita (Susan Myers) and 13-year-old Kristina (Helen Hunt). Rita is overweight, and her father criticizes her at the dinner table for eating too much. She's a misfit at school, taunted by the mean girls, and when she's asked to do a rope-climbing exercise, she's unable to do it. The girl she was paired with in the exercise succeeds and starts showing off, but when Rita glares menacingly at her, the girl falls from the rope and breaks her neck. It's not an accident: Others who cross Rita, including her father and her sister, find themselves in danger, too. Marion  is closer to Rita and more defensive of her than the others in the family, but when a friend of hers dies in a freakishly inexplicable manner, she too becomes concerned. The story builds to a surprise twist, but the ending fizzles into anticlimax. The cast, especially Grant and Hunt, does the best they can with a clumsily mishandled narrative.