The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2015)

Samantha Robinson and Gian Keys in The Love Witch

Laura Waddell and Samantha Robinson in The Love Witch

Cast: Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell, Jeffrey Vincent Parise, Jared Sanford, Robert Seeley, Jennifer Ingrum, Randy Evans, Clive Ashborn, Lily Holliman, Jennifer Couch, Stephen Wozniak. Screenplay: Anna Biller. Cinematography: M. David Mullen. Production design: Anna Biller. Film editing: Anna Biller. Music: Anna Biller. 

Anna Biller's The Love Witch is regarded as a feminist spoof or hommage to horror movies of the 1960s, but it's so uncannily straight-faced and precise in its recapturing of their style and mood that it's hard to tell that you're watching a movie made in the 21st century. It mimics the sources' wooden acting and leaden dialogue -- characters often address one another by name: "What do you think, Steve?" "I don't know, Griff!" It needles their male-gaze attitude toward women and recaptures their often flamboyant Technicolor sets and costumes: There's a scene at a celebration of the summer solstice with luscious primary colors not often seen outside of a candy shop or an MGM musical. It throws in some casual frontal nudity to remind us that the style lingered into the more permissive 1970s. Samantha Robinson plays Elaine, a beautiful, chain-smoking witch who comes to a California town in search of love and makes life first grand and then miserable for college professor Wayne (Jeffrey Vincent Parise), her friend Trish's (Laura Waddell) husband, Richard (Robert Seeley), and local police officer Griff (Gian Keys). Biller wrote, directed, edited, designed the sets and costumes, and even composed some of the music that isn't borrowed from Ennio Morricone's scores for Italian horror movies of the 1970s. The Love Witch probably works best if you're steeped in the source material, but it's undeniably watchable.  

Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)

Ralph Fiennes in Conclave

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini, Lucian Msamati, Sergio Castellito, Carlos Diehz. Screenplay: Peter Straughan, based on a novel by Robert Harris. Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Nick Emerson. Music: Volker Bertelmann. 

Conclave is an intelligently written, superbly acted film that has "Oscar contender" written all over it. Which also means that it has that middlebrow earnestness that dooms many good movies to temporary fame: just good enough to enjoy a period of enthusiasm and then be forgotten. It resorts to a few easy tricks to make the audience think they've seen something worthwhile, chiefly a denouement that happens only in the movies: a conflict settled by a Big Speech. It's a good Big Speech, full of irreproachable ideas, and the actor who gives it does so with admirably quiet conviction. But that it should so easily resolve a heated ideological conflict is scarcely credible. There's also a twist ending that does nothing but drag a contemporary issue into the concerns of an aging institution, and feels like the beginning of a story rather than the end of one. Still, if you want a movie that entertains by making you feel like you've seen something of substance, Conclave will do as well as any.  

The Light That Failed (William A. Wellman, 1939)

Ida Lupino and Ronald Colman in The Light That Failed

Cast: Ronald Colman, Walter Huston, Muriel Angelus, Ida Lupino, Dudley Digges, Ernest Cossart, Ferike Boros, Pedro de Cordoba, Colin Tapley, Ronald Sinclair, Sarita Wooton, Halliwell Hobbes. Screenplay: Robert Carson, based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling. Cinematography: Theodor Sparkuhl. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Odell. Film editing: Thomas Scott. Music: Victor Young. 

Screenwriter Robert Carson and director William A. Wellman do an efficient job of condensing Rudyard Kipling's 1891 novel The Light That Failed, leaving in not only the source's colonialism and resentment at the commercialization of art but also the hints of a queer subtext. For like most writers who choose war and adventure as their subject, Kipling tended to focus more on male bonding than on heterosexual relationships. Dick Heldar (Ronald Colman) is an artist who shares lodgings with a war correspondent named Torpenow (Walter Huston); they met in Sudan, where Heldar was wounded while saving Torpenow's life. His paintings based on his wartime sketches earn Heldar some wealth and celebrity, but he wants to be a "real" artist. He meets a childhood friend, Maisie (Muriel Angelus), who is also an artist, but whose career had not taken off as Heldar's had done. They have a platonic relationship that Heldar is interested in developing into something more, but she goes back to her studies in Paris. One night, Torpenow finds a streetwalker named Bessie Broke (Ida Lupino) who collapsed from hunger on the street and brings her back to the flat. Bessie makes a play for Torpenow, offering to keep house for him, but Heldar nixes it, angering her. Still, she agrees to model for Heldar, who finds her face interesting. He paints a portrait that blends her expression with Maisie's face, and is convinced that it will make his reputation as a serious artist, but just as he completes it, he goes blind, a consequence of the wound he received in Sudan. Despite some strain at stuffing all of this exposition and its fateful consequences, along with somewhat eccentric character relationships, into a 99-minute movie, The Light That Failed is a solid melodrama and an early triumph for Lupino, who makes the most of a role she eagerly sought. Colman wanted Vivien Leigh to play Bessie and didn't get along at all with Wellman, so he reportedly displayed some pique during the filming. 

A Real Young Girl (Catherine Breilliat, 1976)

Charlotte Alexandra and Hiram Keller in A Real Young Girl

Cast: Charlotte Alexandra, Hiram Keller, Rita Maiden, Bruno Balp, Georges Guéret, Shirley Stoler. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on her novel. Cinematography: Pierre Fattori, Patrick Godaert. Production design: Catherine Breillat. Film editing: Annie Charier, Michele Queyroy. Music: Mort Shuman. 

Catherine Breillat's first feature, A Real Young Girl, was made in 1976 but not released until 2000. Like the rest of her oeuvre, it's about female sexuality, in this case the sometimes perverse desires and fantasies of a 14-year-old girl, Alice Bonnard, played by the 20-year-old Charlotte Alexandra. Alice is home from school at her parents' farm and sawmill in the French countryside, and she doesn't have much to do other than indulge those fantasies. Many of them center on a handsome young man known as Jim (Hiram Keller), who works for her father at the sawmill. She hates her icy mother (Rita Maiden) but is a little too playful for comfort (ours) with her father (Bruno Balp). Alice's fantasies spill over into reality as the film goes on, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. It's a raw and unsettling film, just painful and messy enough to pull it this side of pornographic, with some narrative clichés that Breillat would outgrow, like naming her heroine Alice and resorting to a Chekhov's gun for what passes as climax in the slender plot. But it's undeniably the work of a uniquely skilled filmmaker. 

Strange Fascination (Hugo Haas, 1952)

Hugo Haas and Cleo Moore in Strange Fascination

Cast: Hugo Haas, Cleo Moore, Mona Barrie, Rick Vallin, Karen Sharpe, Marc Krah, Michèle Monteau, Pat Holmes, Maura Murphy, Brian O'Hara, Anthony Jochim, Ross Thompson, Maria Bibikov. Screenplay: Hugo Haas. Cinematography: Paul Ivano. Art direction: Rudi Feld. Film editing: Merrill G. White. Music: Václav Divina, Jakob Gimpel. 

Tired and hungry after a concert, touring classical pianist Paul Marvan (Hugo Haas) goes to a night club in his hotel where he's told he can get something to eat. He arrives in the middle of a dance number performed by Margo (Cleo Moore) and her partner Carlo (Rick Vallin), but his clumsy entrance annoys Margo so much that when she learns that Marvan is giving another concert the following night she decides to repay his rudeness. She arrives late, while he's performing, and intentionally makes a small disturbance while getting to her seat. To her surprise, she is captivated by Marvan's performance and goes to ask for his autograph after the concert. He's unaware that he had disturbed her performance but apologizes, and they agree to meet again when both return to New York. You guessed it: They see one another again and fall in love. But can this misalliance of a sophisticated middle-aged European and a bottle blonde showgirl thrive? Especially when Marvan has a wealthy patroness (Mona Barrie) of his own age and class? This familiar setup takes its familiar course, but Strange Fascination almost transcends its low budget and third-string cast by embracing its B-movie status and not camping it up too much. Haas made seven movies with Moore, and they're all watchable in their low-key way.  

Terrestrial Verses (Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami, 2023)

Cast: Bahram Ark, Sadaf Asgari, Ardeshir Kazemi, Gohar Kheirandish, Farzin Mohades, Faehzeh Rad, Majid Salehi, Arghavan Shabani, Hossein Soleimani, Sarvin Sabetian; voices of Ali Asgari, Sara Barami, Behnaz Jafari, Alireza Khatami. Screenplay: Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami. Cinematography: Adib Sobahni. Production design: Hamed Aslani. Film editing: Ehsan Vaseghi.  

The setting of Terrestrial Verses is Tehran, which we see as the sun rises in the film's opening, so we know from the outset that it's about life in the Islamic Republic. Which it is, and really isn't. The film consists of a series of long takes, vignettes of people confronting off-screen bureaucrats, bullies, bosses, and busybodies, whom we hear but don't see. Some of the scenes are specific to life in Iran: a man undergoing an interrogation about his religious faith, a little girl being outfitted with the prescribed garments, a woman accused of uncovering her hair. But some of them could occur anywhere: an elderly woman at a police station looking for her lost dog or a younger woman applying for a job with a boss who finds her attractive. The universality of the experience of dealing with authority gives Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami's film its familiar pain and humor, especially in an age of creeping authoritarianism. Could such a movie be made here featuring segments about a woman with a difficult pregnancy, or a man denied a medical insurance claim, or a student charged with cheating on an examination? And would it be as splendidly acted as this one is, by a cast of unknowns? 

The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)

Arthur Franz in The Sniper

Cast: Arthur Franz, Adolphe Menjou, Gerald Mohr, Marie Windsor, Frank Faylen, Richard Kiley, Mabel Paige, Marlo Dwyer, Geraldine Carr. Screenplay: Harry Brown, Edna Anhalt. Edward Anhalt. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: George Antheil.

Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper is a solid manhunt thriller that maybe gets a little heavy-handed in its promotion of treatment over incarceration for sex offenders, but also contains a few nice surprises. One of them is cinematographer Burnett Guffey's location shooting in San Francisco (except for an amusement park scene filmed in Long Beach), providing a nice record of how the city looked in 1952. Another is an almost unrecognizable Adolphe Menjou, who shaved his mustache to play the police detective in charge of capturing Edward Miller (Arthur Franz), who is gunning down women, driven by some undocumented childhood trauma. Menjou typically played well-groomed upper-middle-class types who looked like they were born wearing three-piece suits -- he was repeatedly voted one of America's best-dressed men -- but in The Sniper he manages to look rumpled for once. Menjou was an outspoken right-wing Republican who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hollywood was full of communists, making his appearance in The Sniper surprising, given that Dmytrk was one of the "Hollywood Ten," who had been blacklisted after refusing to testify before HUAC. Dmytryk recanted and in 1951 named names before the committee, which presumably put him back in Menjou's good graces. The film was produced by Stanley Kramer, and the speech written by his co-producers Edna and Edward Anhalt, and delivered by Richard Kiley, about the need for preventive treatment for potential criminals is characteristic of Kramer's fondness for message movies. The Sniper has a low-key ending, another surprise for a film whose genre typically provides an audience-pleasing catharsis.  

Fading Gigolo (John Turturro, 2013)

Woody Allen and John Turturro in Fading Gigolo

Cast: John Turturro, Woody Allen, Vanessa Paradis, Liev Schreiber, Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, Bob Balaban, Michael Badalucco, Tonya Pinkins. Screenplay: John Turturro. Cinematography: Marco Pontecorvo. Production design: Lester Cohen. Film editing: Simona Paggi. 

A lot about John Turturro's Fading Gigolo, from story to casting, doesn't work, but like other films he wrote and directed, it's so sweetly eccentric that I don't mind. The premise is this: When the bookstore he owns goes out of business, Murray (Woody Allen) persuades his friend Fioravante (Turturro) to go to work as a male prostitute, with Murray as his procurer. Of course, if you believe that a man in his mid-50s, as Turturro was when he made the film, is going to become a success as a gigolo, then you're well prepared to accept other improbabilities that the script throws at you. Like, for instance, that the idea was implanted in Murray's mind by his dermatologist, played by Sharon Stone, who mentions to him that she and her girlfriend (Sofia Vegara) would like to find a man for a three-way and would be willing to pay for it. And that Murray is living with a Black woman (Tonya Pinkins) with three small sons, and when one of them comes down with head lice, he takes the boy to a woman living in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn for treatment. She's Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a widow who hasn't allowed a man to touch her since her husband died, though she's caught the attention of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), who works for a neighborhood watch group. And that Murray somehow persuades Avigal that Fioravante is a massage therapist, so when he touches her it releases all her pent-up emotions and they start to fall in love, which attracts the attention of Dovi who has Murray "arrested" by his group and taken before a rabbinic court. And ... you see where this is going. Or not. Although the credited screenwriter is Turturro alone, Fading Gigolo plays almost like a parody of an early Woody Allen film, so much so that it's hard to believe that he didn't have a hand in it. There's even a soundtrack of jazz standards that resembles those of Allen's movies. Turturro pulls off this oddity of a film by never letting it escape into the raunchy territories that the premise threatens to explore. The best reaction to it might be a puzzled smile. 

The Unfortunate Bridegroom (Jiri Krejcik, 1967)

Iva Janzurová in The Unfortunate Bridegroom

Cast: Iva Janzurová, Vladimr Pucholt, Jan Vostrcil, Frantisek Filipovsky, Stella Zazvorková, Jiri Hrzán, Alina Hessová, Pavel Landovsky, Jan Schánilek, Jan Libícek. Screenplay: Jiri Krejcik, Zdenek Mahler. Cinematography: Josef Strecha. Production design: Oldrich Okác. Film editing: Josef Dobrichovsky. Music: Zdenek Liska. 

A farce about a gang rape could never get made today, nor should it. So what does it say about Czechoslovakia in 1967 that Jiri Krejcik's The Unfortunate Bridegroom was a big hit? One thing it may say is that viewers were willing to see the rape as a metaphor for what the government and the police of their country were doing to them. That's the subversive premise underlying this raucous, knockabout comedy in which a young woman's attempt to get a ticket for her commute home leads to the near-undoing of a young man's wedding to his pregnant bride. Comically, it has a more-than-passing resemblance to all sort of madcap comedies from the Marx Brothers to some of the Preston Sturges oeuvre, and it made me laugh more than once (while feeling a little queasy), but I found it a little too frantic for its underlying premise.  

Ken (Kenji Misumi, 1964)

Raizo Ichikawa in Ken

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Yusuke Kawazu, Hisaya Morishigi, Akio Hasegawa, Noriko Sengoku, Keiju Kobayashi, Yuko Konno, Junko Kozakura, Yoshio Inaba, Rieko Sumi, Kuniichi Takami. Screenplay: Kazuo Funahashi, based on a novel by Yukio Mishima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Kanji Sukanuma. Music: Sei Ikeno. 

Kenji Misumi's Ken, also known as The Sword, is based on a novel by Yukio Mishima and shares that author's intense focus on Japanese tradition. It centers on Jiro Kokubun (Raizo Ichikawa), the captain of his university's kendo club, which is preparing for a tournament against a rival university. Kendo is swordplay, performed with bamboo swords, and Kokubun is obsessively devoted to the sport -- so much so, in fact, that he almost loses out on the captaincy because his coach fears he's a little too intense. His chief rival for the position, Kagawa (Yusuke Kawazu), is equally proficient, but not so obsessive. Eventually this leads to a conflict between the two young men, especially after Kokubun punishes Kagawa for a minor infraction, using him to set an example of complete devotion to the sport. Kagawa retaliates by asking a pretty classmate, Kiuchi (Noriko Sengoku), to try to seduce the chaste and ascetic Kokubun. But the real crisis comes when the club goes on a training retreat in which Kokubun tries to instill the same devotion to the sport in the rest of the team. It takes place in a seaside town, but Kokubun prohibits swimming in the ocean even though the trainees suffer from the intense heat of summer. Kagawa seizes another opportunity to undermine Kokubun, with terrible consequences. The film sympathizes with Kokubun, turning him into a tragic figure, while at the same time suggesting that his intense virtue, analogous to the bushido code of the samurai, is out of place in a modern context. Handsomely photographed and superbly acted, Ken is the middle film in Misumi's Sword Trilogy, which includes Kiru (1962) and Kenki (1965).  

Forbidden (Frank Capra, 1932)

Adolphe Menjou and Barbara Stanwyck in Forbidden

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, Myrna Fresholt, Charlotte Henry, Oliver Eckhardt. Screenplay: Frank Capra, Jo Swerling. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Maurice Wright. 

If you can bring yourself to believe that Barbara Stanwyck's character would spend her life devoted to Adolphe Menjou's, you might like Forbidden. Its writer and director, Frank Capra, didn't, almost apologizing for it in his memoirs. Menjou was a fine character actor with a film career that stretched from 1916 to 1960, but he was no leading man. He was the guy you called on for suave but starchy, not for a lifetime of illicit passion. In Forbidden he's a lawyer and aspiring politician who meets Stanwyck's Lulu on a cruise to Havana. She's a librarian longing for romance, so she spends all her savings on that fateful cruise. They meet cute, of course: He's a little drunk and somehow mistakes her room, No. 66, for his, No. 99. Unfortunately, he's married (she doesn't know this till later) and unwilling to divorce his wife because she was seriously injured in an automobile accident he caused. But they keep seeing each other after they return to the States, she gets pregnant, and through a preposterous series of events winds up letting him and his wife adopt the child she gives birth to. Meanwhile, his political career takes off, although he has made an enemy of a newspaper editor (Ralph Bellamy), who just happens to be Lulu's boss and who wants to marry her. This elaborate contraption of a plot creaks and groans its way to a denouement that's as improbable as the rest of ir. If anything redeems the movie, it's Stanwyck's professionalism, her commitment to creating a character that's almost credible while you're watching her, but really doesn't when you think about it afterward. Capra also directs as if his story makes sense, which is no small feat. 

Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra, 1930)

Ralph Graves and Barbara Stanwyck in Ladies of Leisure

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ralph Graves, Lowell Sherman, Marie Prevost, Nance O'Neil, John Fawcett, Juliette Compton, Johnnie Walker. Screenplay: Jo Swerling, based on a play by Milton Herbert Gropper. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Harrison Wiley. Film editing: Maurice Wright. Music: C. Bakaleinikoff. 

Barbara Stanwyck's mastery of timing and inflection and her sheer camera presence made her a star, and Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure was one of the first films to showcase what she could do. It's an engaging film at the start, with Stanwyck as Kay Arnold, tossing off snappy banter with Dot Lamar (Marie Prevost), her roommate and fellow "party girl." Soon there's a meet-cute with Jerry Strong (Ralph Graves), a rich guy who wants to be an artist. He asks Kay to model for him, and even though he's sort of engaged to a woman of his society set and his family disapproves of her indiscreet past, they fall in love. That's when the movie bogs down into sentimentality, Capra's fatal flaw. The only thing that holds it together is Stanwyck's obvious total commitment to making the character work. It's too bad that her leading man isn't capable of making a similar commitment -- Graves just looks a little flummoxed at what happens. Still, there's some breathless and implausible eleventh-hour suspense to liven things up at the end. 

The Linguini Incident (Richard Shepard, 1991)

Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie in The Linguini Incident

Cast: Rosanna Arquette, David Bowie, Eszter Balint, Andre Gregory, Buck Henry, Viveca Lindfors, Marlee Matlin. Screenplay: Richard Shepard. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Sonya Polonsky, David Dean. Music: Thomas Newman.

Richard Shepard's The Linguini Incident is frequently called "off-beat," but to me it just seems off. Its gags never quite land, its narrative is scattered, its design is drab, and its lead characters, played by Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie, have very little chemistry. Still, it has a cult following that rescued it from obscurity after initial box office and critical failure and inspired a "director's cut" that added ten minutes to its run time. I admit that I laughed a few times, as when Arquette, playing a would-be escape artist who idolizes Houdini, tries to make her way out of a bag in which she's been locked, but even that bit goes on just a few seconds beyond the point at which it's funniest. 

Anatomy of Hell (Catherine Breillat, 2004)

Amira Casar and Rocco Siffredi in Anatomy of Hell

Cast: Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi, voice of Catherine Breillat. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on her novel. Cinematography: Giorgos Avanitis, Guillaume Schiffman. Production design: Jean-Marie Millon, Pedro Sá. Film editing: Pascale Chavance. 

I don't quite believe anyone who says they found Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell boring. There's certainly enough that's unforeseen in it to hold the attention of even the most jaded viewer. It may be that we expect better of Breillat, who has made her reputation on candid treatments of sex, especially female sexuality, so that the more novel transgressive elements of the film feel less like the work of a major director than of one who's out just to shock and/or disgust. And it may certainly be that the dialogue in the film feels like talk for talk's sake, a tiresome attempt to stimulate the mind as well as the body. The film also seems not to understand sexual pleasure and desire very well, especially where it comes to gay men. I'm not sure that it demonstrates homophobia on Breillat's part, as some have charged, so much as a wrong-headed feint at inclusivity. Still, so few films today give us much to talk about after viewing, so we ought to credit Breillat with an attempt at that at the very least. 

Kiru (Kenji Misumi, 1962)

Raizo Ichikawa in Kiru

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Shiho Fujimura, Mayumi Nagisa, Masayo Banri, Jun'ichiro Narita, Matasaburo Niwa, Teru Tomota, Eijiro Yanagi, Shigeru Amachi, Yoshio Inaba. Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. Cinematography: Shozo Honda. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

I knew Kenji Misumi's work mostly from the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which is fairly unabashed in its bloodletting, so I was surprised by the almost meditative tone of Kiru, which is also known as Destiny's Son. It's the story of Shingo Takakura (Raizo Ichikawa) and his search for a father figure. When he comes of age, Shingo asks the man he thinks is his father for permission to go on what you might call walkabout: to spend a year wandering in 19th century Japan. He returns home with a secret: He has learned a mastery of an indefensible sword technique. Unfortunately, this mastery inspires an attack on his home, in which his supposed father is killed, but not before revealing to Shingo his true parentage. That sends Shingo on another pilgrimage in which he meets his biological father and eventually a father figure, Matsudaira (Eijiro Yanagi), the head of a powerful clan whom Shingo serves as a samurai. It's a film full of stylized combat and astonishing scenes that proceeds at a contemplative pace which belies its relative brevity (71 minutes): One tense scene, for example, has no background sound other than the intermittent call of a bird. 

The Cry of Granuaile (Dónal Foreman, 2022)

Dale Dickey in The Cry of Granuaile

Cast: Dale Dickey, Judith Roddy, Andrew Bennett, Rebecca Guinnane, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Donald Clarke, Bob Quinn. Screenplay: Dónal Foreman. Cinematography: Diana Vidrascu. Art direction: Nina McGowan. Film editing: Dónal Foreman. Music: Nick Roth, Olesya Zdorovetska. 

Dale Dickey is a familiar face: She has 140 film and TV credits spanning almost 30 years. You've probably seen her most often playing hard-bitten frontier, backwoods, or Southern women, but she's demonstrated skill and versatility in all her performances. So it's good to see her in a leading role, playing Maire, an American filmmaker visiting Ireland to try to launch a film about Grace O'Malley, aka Gráinne O'Malley or Gráinne Mhaol or Granuaile, or often just the Pirate Queen. It's a film of little plot beyond the development of the relationship of Maire and her guide, Cáit (Judith Roddy), as they travel through Ireland to see the places where the legend of Granuaile began in the 16th century. It's a picturesque and poetic film in which the remote past rubs up against the feminist present, and mostly held together by the performances of  Dickey and Roddy.  

Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023)

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker in Last Summer

Cast: Léa Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Oliver Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau, Serena Hu, Angela Chen, Romain Maricau, Romane Violeau, Marie Lucas, Neilia Da Costa, Lila-Rose Gilberti, Jean-Christophe Pilloix. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Pascal Bonitzer, based on a screenplay by Marie-Louis Käehne and May el-Toukhy. Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie. Production design: Sébastien Danos. Film editing: François Quiqueré. 

When we first meet Anne (Léa Drucker), she's using her considerable skills as a lawyer to help a young woman prosecute her rapist, and we learn that she has devoted much of her career to helping women in abusive situations. So why does Anne, all of a sudden, start having sex with her 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher)? Catherine Breillat's Last Summer never quite comes to terms with Anne's hypocrisy, which is compounded by the lies she tells to her husband after his son tells him of the affair. Still, the film works, thanks to skillful performances by Drucker and Oliver Rabourdin as Anne's husband, Pierre, a rather dull businessman who doesn't have the emotional wherewithal to cope with the revelation. Breillat plays down the sensational aspects of the plot in various ways: in the sex scenes, the focus is on faces rather than bodies, and in the confrontation of husband and wife, the violence is emotional rather than physical. Even the revelation that Pierre has been told of the affair is postponed until he and Anne have had dinner with their two young adopted daughters and sent them to bed, although you can sense the tension building. Last Summer is a fine example of directorial restraint, up to the ending. The only question is whether restraint is appropriate to the subject matter.  

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996)

Cast: Voices of Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Cloris Leachman, Robert Stack, Eric Bogosian, John Doman, Tim Guinee, David Letterman, Richard Linklater, Greg Kinnear, David Spade. Screenplay: Mike Judge, Joe Stillman. Cinematography: David J. Miller. Art direction: Jeff Buckland. Film editing: Gunter Glinka, Terry Kelley, Neil Lawrence. Music: John Frizzell. 

Maybe the funniest thing about Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is reading serious film critics trying to defend it. "Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message," intoned Roger Ebert. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden found it provided something like the catharsis Aristotle found in tragedy, saying of its protagonists, "They distill the agony of adolescence, the queasy feeling of being trapped in a body going through monstrous changes, at the same time that they purge it of its terror." For those of us less serious about wasting our time, let's just say it's dumb fun and a flashback to the Clinton era, which seems somehow more innocent than the current one.

Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006)

Paula Patton and Denzel Washington in Deja Vu

Cast: Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel, Adam Goldberg, Elden Henson, Erika Alexander, Bruce Greenwood, Rick Hutchman, Matt Craven, Donna W. Scott, Elle Fanning. Screenplay: Bill Marsilii, Terry Rossio. Cinematography: Paul Cameron. Production design: Chris Seagers. Film editing: Jason Hellmann, Chris Lebenzon. Music: Jared Lee Gosselin, Harry Gregson-Williams. 

Tony Scott's Deja Vu (the screen title doesn't have the accent marks) is a Scott specialty: a hyperactive thriller with a charismatic star. Denzel Washington's casual savoir faire as an uncannily savvy agent for the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms keeps the movie alive as it ventures out from conventional crime-solving into time travel sci-fi. The movie opens with the sinking of a New Orleans ferry by a mad bomber. Washington's Doug Carlin is on the scene to investigate, and immediately starts finding clues that everyone else has missed. (He investigated the Oklahoma City bombing, so he has some expertise to bring to bear.) So he's asked to join a federal team headed by Agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) that's using a top-secret spyware gizmo that allows them to look back in time at the moments surrounding the explosion. Carlin thinks that a woman named Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), who actually died before the explosion, is somehow linked to it. It's convenient that Claire was also quite pretty, so Carlin gets somewhat more fascinated with her case. So when he learns that the technology can potentially be used not only to look at the past but also travel to it, you can see where this is headed. There's the usual sci-fi talk about time lines and altering history, but Scott keeps things moving along through it, so although what happens probably doesn't make sense, it's hard to care. Washington gets good support from a lively cast.    

Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)

Linda Manz and Dennis Hopper in Out of the Blue

Cast: Linda Manz, Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farrell, Don Gordon, Raymond Burr, Leon Eriksen, Fiona Brody, David L. Crowley, Joan Hoffman, Carl Nelson. Screenplay: Leonard Yakir, Brenda Nelson. Cinematography: Marc Champion. Production design: Leon Eriksen. Film editing: Doris Dyck. Music: Tom Lavin. 

You'd think that a film that begins with a truck barreling into a school bus full of kids couldn't get any worse. Out of the Blue does. The unpleasantness has only begun for the driver of the truck, Don (Dennis Hopper); his wife, Kathy (Sharon Farrell); and their daughter, Cindy (Linda Manz), known as Cebe -- short for "citizens' band," as in radio. Don goes to prison, Kathy is a heroin addict, and Cebe, in her early teens, does whatever she wants, which includes idolizing Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious, running away from home, and loving her father until she confronts the truth about him. The truth is not pretty. Despite the efforts of a child psychologist, Dr. Brean (Raymond Burr), to rescue Cebe from her dysfunctional parents and aimless life, the outcome is bleak. In the original script, Dr. Brean played a more positive role in Cebe's life, but when Hopper took over as director he was of a different mind. Let's just say that this is a painful, harrowing movie with some gritty performances and a grim determination to face the unpleasant fact that some lives are doomed. Is it a good film? Well, some films transcend such questions, and Out of the Blue is one of them. 

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian in Identification of a Woman

Cast: Tomas Milian, Daniel Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel, Veronica Lazar, Enrica Antonioni, Sandra Monteleoni, Marcel Bozzufi, Giampaolo Saccarola, Dado Ruspoli, Arianna De Rosa. Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra. Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma. Production design: Andrea Crisanti. Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni. Music: John Foxx. 

In the middle of Identification of a Woman, the protagonist, Niccolò (Tomas Milian), and his girlfriend, Mavi (Daniela Silverio), get lost in a fog. They emerge from it eventually, but they leave some of the audience behind, to judge from the rather chilly critical reception. Niccolò is a film director trying to focus his ideas for a new film, and you can see from his experiences how much of Antonioni's own frustration in trying to make his ideas cohere is reflected in the film. The difficulty may lie in the milieu, the 1980s, the Reagan-Thatcher era, with its triumphant resurgence of conservatism and capitalism -- so different from the angst-ridden, activist, youth-oriented 1960s in which Antonioni made his name. The political, social, and sexual concerns that seethed underneath the films of the '60s were exploded by Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970), leaving him lost for a subject. Even the sex in Identification of a Woman, though more explicit than his earlier films, has no heat, no risk, no daring. 

In the Folds of the Flesh (Sergio Bergonzelli, 1970)

Eleanora Rossi Drago and Pier Angeli in In the Folds of the Flesh

Cast: Eleanora Rossi Drago, Pier Angeli, Fernando Sancho, Alfredo Mayo, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, María Rosa Sclauzero, Victor Barrera, Gaetano Imbró, Luciano Catenacci, Bruno Ciangola. Screenplay: Fabio De Agostini, Sergio Bergonzelli, Mario Caiano. Cinematography: Mario Pacheco. Art direction: Eduardo Torre de la Fuente. Film editing: Donatella Baglivo. Music: Jesús Villa Rojo. 

Death by cuckoo clock. That's one of the less outrageous moments in the violent vulgarity that is In the Folds of the Flesh, a film that goes so far over the top that you realize there isn't a top. Murder, incest, rape, Nazi extermination camps, gratuitous nudity, orgasmic bathing -- there's almost nothing that Sergio Bergonzelli's exercise in the worst possible taste won't exploit. Throw in a couple of pet vultures and some Etruscan skeletons along with multiple mistaken identities and some truly awful performances, and you've got a trash heap of a movie that even some lovers of horror films and giallo are inclined to admit goes too far. If you still really want to see it, don't say I didn't warn you.  

 

Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

Megumi Okina in Ju-on: The Grudge

Cast: Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara, Yui Ichikawa, Kanji Tsuda, Kayoko Shibata, Yukako Kukuri, Suri Matsuda, Yoji Tanaka, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Hideo Sakaki, Takashi Matsuyama. Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu. Cinematography: Tokusho Kikumura. Production design: Toshiharu Tokiwa. Film editing: Nobuyuki Takahashi. Music: Shiro Sato. 

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Grudge didn't scare me much, partly because I go to horror movies to watch the techniques used to scare people, but also because its major effect is simple creepiness. Some of that comes from the nonlinear narrative technique: We spend so much of our attention on sorting out when things happened and to whom that the story doesn't build the suspense it might. This is a feature, not a bug in Shimizu's scheme of things. The essential point is that a murder took place in a house, which then became haunted by the victims, and that the evil infecting the house is spread by anyone who visits it. In fact, it's spread so widely that there's a hint -- shots of empty streets -- that it has begun to infect the entire city. While the movie is undoubtedly unsettling, I think it needs better character development to have its best effect. 

Twelve Angry Men (William Friedkin, 1997)

Cast: Courtney B. Vance, Ossie Davis, George C. Scott, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Dorian Harewood, James Gandolfini, Tony Danza, Jack Lemmon, Hume Cronyn, Mykelti Williamson, Edward James Olmos, William Petersen, Mary McDonnell. Screenplay: Reginald Rose. Cinematography: Fred Schuler. Production design: Bill Malley. Film editing: Augie Hess. 

William Friedkin's Twelve Angry Men is not so easily dismissed as an unnecessary remake of Sidney Lumet's classic 1957 film, itself a remake of Reginald Rose's 1954 television drama. Forty years of change have taken place, and although such a jury today would almost certainly have women on it, at least Friedkin's version includes four Black men. One of them, strikingly, is the most virulent racist on the panel: a former Nation of Islam follower played by Mykelti Williamson, who delivers a vicious diatribe against Latinos. Which incidentally brings up another anomaly: There are no Latinos on this jury, even though it is impaneled in New York City, which certainly has a significant Latino population. Oddly, one of the actors, Edward James Olmos, is Latino, but he plays an Eastern European immigrant. The rant of the juror played by Williamson has perhaps even more significance today than it did in 1997, after an election campaign tainted by racist taunts against immigrants: The speech sounds like it might have been delivered at Donald Trump's infamous Madison Square Garden rally. As for the film itself, it retains the 1954 movie's power to entertain, if only the pleasure of watching 12 good actors at peak performance (and in George C. Scott's case, a bit over the peak). It also retains the tendency to preachiness, like a dramatized civics lesson, though maybe we need that more than ever.  

The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961)

Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf

Cast: Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed, Yvonne Romain, Catherine Feller, Anthony Dawson, Josephine Llewellyn, Richard Wordsworth, Hira Talfrey, Justin Walters, John Gabriel, Warren Mitchell, Anne Blake. Screenplay: Anthony Hinds, based on a novel by Guy Endore. Cinematography: Arthur Grant. Production design: Bernard Robinson. Film editing: Alfred Cox. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

Hammer Films thoroughly exploited the public taste for monster movies by borrowing story ideas from the classic black-and-white horror films of the 1930s and '40s that originated at Universal Studios. It gave Dracula and Frankenstein's creature multiple outings, but surprisingly only once made a film about a werewolf. It was a success, and launched the career of Oliver Reed, who played Leon Corledo, a young man afflicted by lycanthropic tendencies. Reed actually doesn't appear in The Curse of the Werewolf until well into the film, after an extensive backstory that explains how he became a monster under the spell of the full moon. That's the chief flaw of this otherwise solid, if not terribly scary film, which is handsomely photographed by Arthur Grant and moodily scored by Benjamin Frankel. The bulk of the narrative is handled by Clifford Evans as Don Alfredo Corledo, Leon's adopted father. Reed doesn't get a chance to wolf out until the very end of the movie, but he does so effectively.  

Early David Cronenberg

Clara Mayer in Stereo

Stereo (David Cronenberg, 1969)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jack Messinger, Paul Mulholland, Iain Ewing, Arlene Mlodzik, Clara Mayer, Glenn McCauley. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg. 

Ronald Mlodzik in Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 1970)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Ronald Mlodzik, John Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Paul Mulholland, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, William Haslam, Raymond Woodley, Stefan Czernecki, Rafe Macpherson, Willem Poolman. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg.  

I can't imagine there's much of an audience for David Cronenberg's Stereo and Crimes of the Future (a title he reused in the 2022 feature, which borrows an element of the 1970 film but otherwise has no resemblance to the first one) except among film scholars and passionate devotees of his work. They look like the work of a film school student, although Cronenberg was teaching himself how to make movies at the time. Both are silent except for voiceovers that do what they can to give the images a narrative shape. In the case of Stereo, there's very little of that: The voiceovers sound like excerpts of lectures given by social science professors about a research project concentrated on telepathy and sexuality. Crimes of the Future has a more complex narrative line, as Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik), a dermatologist who heads a clinic called the House of Skin, tells about the attempts to halt a plague caused by cosmetics. It's a creepier film than Stereo, more in the line with Cronenberg's later work, with a nice performance by Mlodzik, who appeared in several of his films before entering the clergy.    

An Egyptian Story (Youssef Chahine, 1982)

Nour El-Sherif and Mohamed Mounir in An Egyptian Story

Cast: Nour El-Sherif, Oussama Nadir, Mohsen Mohieddin, Yousra, Ahmed Mehrez, Mohamed Mounir, Ragaa Hussein, Seif Abdelrahman, Hanan, Layla Hamadah, Magda El-Khatib, Ragaa Al-Gidawy. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine. Cinematograpby: Mohsen Nasr. Art direction: Gabriel Karraze. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Gamal Salamah. 

An Egyptian Story is the middle film of Youssef Chahine's autobiographical "Alexandria trilogy," and it may be the most accessible to people not familiar with his work. Perhaps inspired by Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), it centers on the memories and fantasies of a film director, Yehia Choukry Mourad (Nour El-Sherif), who is Chahine's alter ego, as he undergoes open heart surgery. Some of the action takes place in a set designed to resemble Yehia's chest cavity, where a trial takes place. The defendant is Yehia's "inner child," played by young Oussama Nadir, who is on trial for killing the mature Yehia -- though he isn't really dead yet. Key events of Yehia's life take place in flashbacks that are sometimes realistic, sometimes surreal. In the first film of the trilogy, Alexandria ... Why? (1979), Yehia was played by Mohsen Mohieddin, who appears in this film as Yehia as a young man. In the third film, Alexandria Again and Forever (1990), Chahine himself takes the role as the aging Yehia. Because of the trial setting, the narrative of An Egyptian Story is more linear than the first and third stories in the trilogy, and might be the one to watch if you're just getting started with Chahine's work or if, like me, you're not well versed in the history of Egypt in the 20th century that serves as the backdrop of Yehia's story. Chahine doesn't spare himself in any of the films, revealing much about his ego and ambition, his neglect of his family, and even hinting rather broadly at his bisexuality. Those more familiar with his work may find An Egyptian Story a little less colorful and creative than the others, but it's still a remarkable movie.  

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?