Your Name. (Makoto Shinkai, 2016)

Cast: Voices of Ryunosuke Kamiki, Mone Kamishiraishi, Ryo Narita, Aoi Yuki, Nobunaga Shimazaki, Kaito Ishikawa, Masami Nagasawa, Etsuko Ichihara, Kanon Tani, Masaki Terasoma, Sayaka Ohara, Kana Hanazawa. Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Cinematography: Makoto Shinkai. Art direction: Akiko Majima, Takumi Tanji, Tasuku Watanabe. Film editing: Makoto Shinkai. Music: Radwimps. 

Makoto Shinkai's most commercially successful and most critically acclaimed anime is an engaging variation on the body-switch trope usually used for comedy or satire. Here it's the basis for a romantic fantasy about growing up, with its attendant problems of love and loss. A boy in Tokyo wakes up one morning to find that he's inhabiting the body of a girl in a village, and she wakes up with his consciousness inside her body. The usual comic mishaps occur as each goes through the other's daily routine. They wake up the next day with no memory of the switch, but the reactions of their family and friends make them realize that something strange happened. When it happens again and again, they begin to figure out what's going on and to keep a record of it. Eventually each discovers the other's identity and tries to communicate with them, but then the switches suddenly stop. It falls to the boy to recognize that the cessation of the switches has something to do with a disaster that struck the girl's village three years earlier. His determination to get to the source of the mystery forms the main plot of the film. Your Name is overloaded with perhaps more cosmic and mystical stuff than some viewers can tolerate, and it sidesteps some real issues about gender identity, but the astonishing visuals, cliff-hanging action and suspense, and heartfelt emotion help keep the film from bogging down into sheer hooey.  

The File on Thelma Jordon (Robert Siodmak, 1950)

Wendell Corey and Barbara Stanwyck in The File on Thelma Jordon

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Paul Kelly, Joan Tetzel, Stanley Willis, Richard Rober, Minor Watson, Barry Kelley, Gertrude Hoffman. Screenplay: Ketti Frings, Marty Holland. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Hans Dreier, A. Earl Hedrick. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Victor Young.

The chief problem with The File on Thelma Jordon is casting. Barbara Stanwyck's performance is terrific, of course, Robert Siodmak keeps a complex plot from snarling, and George Barnes's lights and shadows are eloquent. But Stanwyck is paired once again with Wendell Corey, who was her ineffective leading man in Anthony Mann's otherwise splendid The Furies, also made in 1950. Corey has no charisma and no depth. The screenplay may be at fault in not letting us see why Cleve Marshall's antagonism to his father-in-law is driving him to drink -- and into the arms of Stanwyck's scheming Thelma Jordon -- but Corey's hangdog manner doesn't help. Nor does he bring much visible intelligence to Marshall's scheming to undermine his own defense of Thelma when she's brought to trial for killing her aunt -- a murder he helped her cover up. The ending is also a bit of a muddle, largely because the Production Code meant that Thelma's crime had to be punished. What could have been a classic film noir ends up only a passable one.

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

Griffin Dunne and Teri Garr in After Hours

Cast: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Tommy Chong, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, Cheech Marin, Catherine O'Hara, Dick Miller, Will Patton, Robert Plunket, Bronson Pinchot. Screenplay: Joseph Minion. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus. Production design: Jeffrey Townsend. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker. Music: Howard Shore. 

Martin Scorsese's dark farce After Hours puts protagonist Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) through all the wringers that 1980s New York City could provide. It's often described as "Kafkaesque" with reason: Scorsese borrowed from a Kafka story in the scene in which Paul tries to persuade a doorman to let him into a night club. But it also reflects the director's feelings about being given the runaround by the bureaucracy of the movie business as he tried to get The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) under way. There are those who think After Hours has a misogynistic edge, given that most of Paul's troubles stem from his interactions with women, starting with Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), who flirts with him and sets the whole fantastic plot in motion. But Paul's frantic inability to seize control of events -- some of which, like the loss of his money, are pure accident -- is also to blame. He's an Odysseus blown off course by fate, with the occasional Circe or siren to make things worse. 

An Autumn's Tale (Mabel Cheung, 1987)

Chow Yun-fat and Cherie Chung in An Autumn's Tale

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Cherie Chung, Danny Chan, Arthur Fulbright, Gigi Wong, Joyce Houseknecht. Screenplay: Alex Law, Low Chi-Yeuh. Cinematography: David Chung, James Hayman. Production design: Christy Addis. Film editing: Chu Sun-Kit. Music: Lowell Lo. 

The chemistry between Chow Yun-fat and Cherie Chung animates the somewhat rough-edged romance of Samuel Pang (Chow) , a thirtysomething slacker, and Jennifer Lee (Chung), a twentysomething woman who arrives in New York expecting to meet her boyfriend, Vincent (Danny Chan), only to find he has a new girlfriend and is moving to Boston. Samuel, known as Figgy (short for Figurehead, a reference to his years as a sailor), takes her under his wing, though she's put off by his slacker ways -- he survives mainly by gambling and carousing with his pals. As in any good romance, she loosens up and he straightens up, though not without the usual backsliding. The film gives some fresh twists to the usual romcom tropes.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices (Makoto Shinkai, 2011)

Cast: Voices of Hisako Kanemoto, Miyu Irino, Kazuhiko Inoue, Junko Takeuchi, Fumiko Orikasa, Sumi Shimamoto. Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Cinematography: Makoto Shinkai. Art direction: Takumi Tanji. Film editing: Aya Hida, Makoto Shinkai. Music: Tenmon. 

Myth-making anime fantasy, crafted with Makoto Shinkai's usual opulence, Children Who Chase Lost Voices draws on a variety of legends about the underworld, including Orpheus's journey to Hades to reclaim Eurydice. The protagonist is a young girl, Asuna, who finds herself in a subterranean land called Agartha, accompanied by her teacher, Mr. Morisaki, who knows a good deal, though not enough, about Agartha. He wants to go there to see if he can bring his dead wife back to life. Asuna is driven by curiosity about a strange boy named Shun, whom she met on her wanderings in the hills near her village. They discover that they have to deal with the animosity of the residents of Agartha toward people from the upper world. (The subtitles call them "Topsiders," which for me has a distracting footwear overtone.) It's too creepy and violent for younger kids, and some of its plot points, such as the suggestion that Agartha has been exploited by malign upper-world forces like the Nazis, need better context. But it's never boring and always a treat for the eye. 

Deal of the Century (William Friedkin, 1983)

Chevy Chase in Deal of the Century

Cast: Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, Gregory Hines, Vince Edwards, Wallace Shawn, Richard Libertini, William Marquez, Eduardo Ricard, Richard Herd, Graham Jarvis. Screenplay: Paul Brickman. Cinematography: Richard H. Kline. Production design: Bill Malley. Film editing: Jere Huggins, Ned Humphreys, Bud S. Smith. Music: Arthur B. Rubinstein.

Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, and Gregory Hines stumble through the chaotic screenplay of Deal of the Century, not trying very hard to help it tell a coherent story or even be funny. Ostensibly a satire of the Reagan-era arms race, it was a critical bomb and a box office dud, and unlike many such double failures hasn't even made it to cult-movie status. Too much of it fails to make sense, like the marriage of the characters played by Weaver and Wallace Shawn, the religious conversion of Hines's character, or Chase's character getting repeatedly shot in the foot. Cheesy special effects don't help, either. 

Try and Get Me! (aka The Sound of Fury) (Cy Endfield, 1950)

Lloyd Bridges and Frank Lovejoy in Try and Get Me! 

Cast: Frank Lovejoy, Kathleen Ryan, Lloyd Bridges, Richard Carlson, Katherine Locke, Adele Jergens, Art Smith, Renzo Cesano, Irene Vernon, Cliff Clark, Harry Shannon, Donald Doss, Joe E. Ross. Screenplay: Jo Pagano, based on his novel. Cinematography: Guy Roe. Production design: Perry Ferguson. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Hugo Friedhofer. 

Climaxing in a vividly filmed and edited scene of a mob storming a city jail, Try and Get Me! is the second film based on a lynching that took place in San Jose in 1933. The first, Fritz Lang's Fury (1936), starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney, is better-known and better acted, but Cy Enfield's version of the story, scripted by Jo Pagano from his fictionalized account of the incident, is equally gripping. What it lacks in its cast, it makes up for in sheer momentum. Frank Lovejoy plays Howard Tyler, an out-of-work man with a wife and child, whose desperation at providing for his family causes him to fall for the blandishments of Jerry Slocum, a sleazy thief played (not to say overplayed) by Lloyd Bridges. When Jerry murders a rich man's son during a kidnapping plot, Howard is trapped in a situation beyond his control. Public opinion is stirred up by newspaper columnist Gil Stanton (the bland and miscast Richard Carlson), who succumbs to his editor's sensationalism. The movie is mostly uncompromising in its hard-nosed treatment of the story, with only a few lapses into sentimentality in its portrayal of Howard's wife and son. Under the original title, The Sound of Fury (a probably intentional echo of Lang's film as well as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury), it was a box office failure, leading producer Robert Stillman to re-release it under the title Try and Get Me! But it failed to find an audience until it was restored by the Film Noir Foundation in 2020.

Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, 2016)

Cast: Finnegan Oldfield, Vincent Rottiers, Hamza Meziani, Manai Issa, Martin Petit-Guyot, Jamil McCraven, Raban Nait Oufella, Laure Valentinelli, Ilias le Dore, Robin Goldbronn, Luis Rego, Hermine Karagheuz, Adèle Haenel. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello. Cinematography: Léo Hinstin. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Fabrice Rouaud. Music: Bertrand Bonello.

Nocturama is a kind of existential thriller in which a group of young people bomb and burn various Parisian landmarks. I use the word "existential" because their terrorism appears to be unmotivated; it's an acte gratuit that seems to stem from no political or social dissatisfaction. The narrative is elliptical: We watch the members of the group as they cross Paris to assemble at their various assigned targets before we even know where they're going and why. Eventually, there's a flashback that shows their preparatory meeting, but even that supplies only the most rudimentary information: that the explosive is semtex, which has been procured for them an older man named Greg (Vincent Rottiers). Their several missions accomplished, they regroup in a department store that's closed for the night, where they raid the food and wine department, try on the clothes, listen to music, and watch the news, which eventually reveals that their hideout has been discovered. Two of them are missing: One is killed in a showdown with a security guard, while Greg suffers a fate that we learn about in a curious way. The outcome is presented with a cold-blooded detachment. Bertrand Bonello breaks no new ground for the thriller genre, but skillfully plays with the viewer's reactions to the young protagonists, an alternation of censure and sympathy.   

Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)

Austin Stoker, Laurie Zimmer, and Darwin Joston in Assault on Precinct 13

Cast: Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Martin West, Tony Burton, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, Peter Bruni, John J. Fox, Marc Ross, Alan Koss, Henry Brandon, Kim Richards. Screenplay: John Carpenter. Cinematography: Douglas Knapp. Art direction: Tommy Lee Wallace. Film editing: John Carpenter. Music: John Carpenter. 

Jean-François Richet's 2005 remake of Assault on Precinct 13 makes a lot more narrative sense and has a much better cast (Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, etc.), but it feels routine in comparison with the laconic, low budget original, which John Carpenter admitted was a kind of mashup of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Which only goes to show that when it comes to thrillers, coherence and slick production values are not the top priorities. Setting the hook is what matters, and Carpenter's movie does that early with a shocker of a scene that almost earned the film an X rating -- one of the rare instances when the ratings board was upset by violence rather than sex. In this case, the film's rough edges and unknown actors somehow add a neo-realist touch to a movie in which the bad guys might as well be zombies or space aliens for all we get to know about them. 

Farewell China (Clara Law, 1990)

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Ka-fai in Farewell China

Cast: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Hayley Man, Lester Chit-Man Chan, Hung Chun, Jun Liao. Screenplay: Eddie Ling-Ching Fong. Cinematography: Jingle Ma. Art direction: Lee Lok-Si. Film editing: Ma Kam. Music: Jim Shum.

Despite a narrative clotted with flashbacks, some scenes that don't seem to fit, and an unsteadiness of tone, Clara Law's Farewell China remains a vivid, sometimes harrowing look at Chinese immigrants in New York City. Maggie Cheung gives a dazzling performance as Li Hung, who leaves her husband, Zhao Nansan (Tony Leung Ka-fai) and their infant son in China to seek work in New York. When Nansan stops hearing from Hung, he finds his way to the city to search for her. Hayley Man gives a lively performance as a 15-year-old Chinese-American runaway from her family in Detroit, who steals and turns tricks as she aids Nansan in his search through the city's lower depths.  

5 Centimeters per Second (Makoto Shinkai, 2007)

Cast: Voices of Kenji Mizuhashi, Yoshimi Kondou, Satomi Hanamura, Ayaka Onoue. Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Cinematography: Makoto Shinkai. Art direction: Makoto Shinkai, Film editing: Makoto Shinkai. Music: Tenmon. 

Makoto Shinkai's eye-dazzling, tearjerking anime has many admirers, but I tend to side with the detractors that think the spectacular images overwhelm an insubstantial story of young love frustrated by time and space. Shinkai crafts magnificent settings, creating vivid skies while also paying meticulous attention to mundane details like railway cars and shop interiors, but his human characters are sketchy, even at times kitschy: his little girls have huge eyes like the children in Margaret Keane's paintings. 

My Little Loves (Jean Eustache, 1974)

Martin Loeb in My Little Loves

Cast: Martin Loeb, Jacqueline Dufranne, Ingrid Caven, Henri Martinez, Dionys Mascolo, Maurice Pialat, Pierre Edelman, Marie-Paule Fernandez. Screenplay: Jean Eustache. Cinematography: Nestor Almendros. Film editing: Françoise Belleville, Vincent Cottrell, Alberto Yaccelini. 

A deadpan film about coming of age, which as usual means learning about sex, set first in a French village where such learning is discouraged and then in a French city, where such learning is haphazard. Regarded by many as a masterpiece, though I have my reservations about its lack of narrative drive. Beautifully filmed by Nestor Almendros. 

Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)

Al Pacino in Cruising

Cast: Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Karen Allen, Richard Cox, Don Scardino, Joe Spinell, Jay Acovone. Screenplay: William Friedkin, based on a novel by Gerald Walker. Cinematography: James A. Contner. Production design: Bruce Weintraub. Editing: Bud S. Smith. Music: Jack Nitzsche. 

Is Cruising deliberately or only accidentally inchoate? It could hardly be anything else, having been attacked before, during, and after its production by the queer community. Its star, Al Pacino, has never been comfortable discussing it, while its creator, William Friedkin, remained on the defensive. At its best, it overturns any expectations we may have about detective thriller movies. When we see cops harassing gay men in the opening of the film, we probably expect those cops to get their comeuppance in the end. When we learn that it's about a serial killer preying on the leather community, we expect the killer to be found and disposed of, probably violently, at the end. When we see a straight cop (Pacino) chosen to go undercover in that community, we expect him to solve the case but stay straight. That would be the course of the conventional movie. But none of that quite happens. Instead, we are left with ambiguities, inspiring a small industry of commentary that persists today. It's probably best to regard Cruising as a period piece: a document of attitudes, from outrage to ambivalence to acceptance, toward gay men in America just before the outbreak of AIDS. 

Born to Be Bad (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

Joan Fontaine and Robert Ryan in Born to Be Bad

Cast: Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Zachary Scott, Joan Leslie, Mel Ferrer, Harold Vermilyea, Virginia Farmer. Screenplay: Edith Sommer, Charles Schnee, based on a novel by Anne Parrish. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender. 
 

Mambar Pierrette (Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam, 2023)

Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat in Mambar Pierrette

Cast: Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat, Marguerite Mbakop, Duval Franklin Nwodu Chinedu, Léonce Sonia Bangoub, Chamard Yotchou, Chimène Aboheu, Claire Hiencheu, Marie Noël Nimendeu, Emmanuel Keutagna. Screenplay: Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam. Cinematography: Finoa Braillon. Film editing: Geoffroy Cernaix. 

House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

 

Cast: Noémie Lvovsky, Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Jasmine Trinca, Adèle Haenel, Alice Barnole, Iliana Zabeth, Xavier Beauvois, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Jacques Nolot. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello. Cinematography: Josée Deshais. Production design: Alain Guffroy. Music: Bertrand Bonello. 

Phase IV (Saul Bass, 1974)

Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, and Lynne Frederick in Phase IV

Cast: Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, Lynne Frederick, Alan Gifford, Robert Henderson, Helen Horton. Screenplay: Mayo Simon. Cinematography: Dick Bush. Art direction: John Barry. Film editing: Willy Kemplen. Music: Brian Gascoigne. 

Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Peter Ho-Sun Chan, 1996)

Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai in Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Cast: Maggie Cheung, Leon Lai, Eric Tsang, Kristy Yeung, Christopher Doyle, Tung Cho "Joe" Cheung, Irene Tsu, Yu Ting, Michelle Gabriel. Screenplay: Ivy Ho. Cinematography: Jingle Ma. Production design: Chung-Man Yee. Film editing: Ki-Hop Chan, Chi-Leung Kwong. Music: Tsang-Hei Chiu. 

The Place Promised in Our Early Days (Makoto Shinkai, Yoshio Suzuki, 2004)

Cast: Voices of Hidetaka Yoshioka, Masatao Hagiwara, Yuka Nanri, Unsho Ishizuka, Kazuhiko Inoue, Risa Mizuno, Hidenobu Kiuchi. Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Cinematography: Makoto Shinkai. Art direction: Takumi Tanji. Film editing: Makoto Shinkai. Music: Tenmon. 

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Johann Karthaus, Luis Noah Witte, Nele Ahrenmeier, Lili Falk, Medusa Knopf, Maximilian Beck, Andrey Isaev, Stephanie Petrowitz, Imogen Kogga. Screenplay: Jonathan Glazer, based on a novel by Martin Amis. Cinematography: Lukasz Zal. Production design: Chris Oddy. Film editing: Paul Watts. Music: Mica Levi. 

The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)

Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Françoise Lebrun in The Mother and the Whore

Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, Françoise Lebrun, Isabelle Weingarten, Jacques Renard, Jean-Noël Picq, Jessa Darrieux, Berthe Granval, Geneviève Mnich. Screenplay: Jean Eustache. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Film editing: Denis de Casabianca, Jean Eustache.

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988)

Cast: Voices of Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama, Taro Ishida, Tessho Genda, Mizuho Susuki, Tatsuhiko Nakamura, Fukue Ito, Kazuhiro Shindo, Yuriko Fuchizaki, Masaaki Okura, Takeshi Kusao, Hiroshi Otake. Screenplay: Katsuhiro Otomo, Izo Hashimoto, based on a manga by Otomo. Cinematography: Katsuji Misawa. Production design: Kazuo Ebisawa, Yuji Ikehata, Hiroshi Ono. Film editing: Takeshi Seyama. Music: Shoji Yamashiro. 

Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977)

Cast: Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Amidou, Ramon Bieri, Karl John. Screenplay: Walon Green, based on a novel by Georges Arnaud. Cinematography: Dick Bush, John M. Stephens. Production design: John Box. Film editing: Robert K. Lambert, Bud S. Smith. Music: Tangerine Dream.  

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Cast: Cillian Muphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Dylan Arnold, Tom Conti, James D'Arcy, David Dastmalchian, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich, Tony Goldwyn, Jefferson Hall, David Krumholtz, Matthew Modine. Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, based on a book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Ruth de Jong. Film editing: Jennifer Lame. Music: Ludwig Göransson. 

Caged (John Cromwell, 1950)

Eleanor Parker in Caged

Caged: Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead, Hope Emerson, Ellen Corby, Betty Garde, Jan Sterling, Lee Patrick, Oliver Deering, Jane Darwell, Gertrude Michael, Sheila MacRae. Screenplay: Virginia Kellogg, Bernard C. Schoenfeld, based on a book by Kellogg. Cinematography: Carl E. Guthrie. Art direction: Charles H. Clarke. Film editing: Owen Marks. Music: Max Steiner. 

The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1972)

Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come

Cast: Jimmy Cliff, Janet Bartley, Carl Bradshaw, Ras Daniel Hartman, Basil Keane, Bob Charlton, Winston Stone, Lucia White. Screenplay: Perry Henzell, Trevor D. Rhone. Cinematography: Peter Jessop, David McDonald, Franklyn St. Juste. Art direction: Sally Henzell. Film editing: Reicland Anderson, John Victor Smith, Richard White. Music: Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, The Slickers. 

Gothic (Ken Russell, 1986)

Myriam Cyr, Julian Sands, Gabriel Byrne, and Natasha Richardson in Gothic

Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardon, Myriam Cyr, Timothy Spall. Screenplay: Stephen Volk. Cinematography: Mike Southon. Production design: Christopher Hobbs. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. Music: Thomas Dolby. 

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai, 1990)

Leslie Cheung and Maggie Cheung in Days of Being Wild

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Rebecca Pan, Jacky Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Screenplay: Jeffrey Lau, Wong Kar-Wai. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: William Chang. Film editing: Kai Kit-Wai, Patrick Tam. Music: Terry Chan. 

The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013)

Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant

Cast: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner, Yelena Solovey, Dagmara Dominczyk, Magda Wampuszyc, Angela Sarafyan, Ilia Volok, Antoni Corone, Kevin Cannon. Screenplay: James Gray, Ric Menello. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Happy Massee. Film editing: John Axelrad, Kayla Emter. Music: Christopher Spelman.  

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Paul Giamatti, and Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Brady Hepner, Ian Dolley, Jim Kaplan, Michael Provost, Andrew Garman, Naheem Garcia, Gillian Vigman, Tate Donovan. Screenplay: David Hemingson. Cinematography: Eigil Bryld. Production design: Ryan Warren Smith. Film editing: Kevin Tent. Music: Mark Orton. 

The Eagle Shooting Heroes (Jeffrey Lau, 1993)

 

Tony Leung Chiu-wai in The Eagle Shooting Heroes

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Jacky Cheung, Kenny Bee, Brigitte Lin, Joey Wang, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Veronica Lip. Screenplay: Jeffrey Lau, based on a novel by Louis Cha. Cinematography: Peter Pau. Production design: Peter Chang. Film editing: Kai Kit-wai. Music: James Wong, Mark Lui. 

Undercurrent (Vincente Minnelli, 1946)

Robert Mitchum and Katharine Hepburn in Undercurrent

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Robert Taylor, Robert Mitchum, Edmund Gwenn, Marjorie Main, Jayne Meadows, Clinton Sundberg, Dan Tobin, Kathryn Card, Leigh Whipper, Charles Trowbridge, James Westerfield, Billy McClain. Screenplay: Edward Chodorov, based on a story by Thelma Strabel. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Randall Duell, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ferris Webster. Music: Herbert Stothart. 

Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)

Danny Huston and Nicole Kidman in Birth

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall, Alison Elliott, Arliss Howard, Michael Desautels, Anne Heche, Peter Stormare, Ted Levine, Cara Seymour, Zoe Caldwell. Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Sam Sneade, Claus Wehlisch. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023)

Sandra Hüller and Swann Arlaud in Anatomy of a Fall

Cast: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth, Saadia Benthaïb, Camille Rutherford, Anne Rotger, Sophie Fillières, Messi. Screenplay: Justine Triet, Arthur Harari. Cinematography: Simon Beaufils. Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay. Film editing: Laurent Sénéchal. 

Cute Girl (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1980)

Fong Fei-fei and Kenny Be in Cute Girl

Cast: Kenny Be, Fong Fei-fei, Anthony Chan, Chang Ping-yu, Chi Kai-ching, Chien Lu, Chou Wan-sheng, Chang Hui-fen. Screenplay: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Cinematography: Chen Kun-hou. Film editing: Liao Cheng-sung. Music: Huang Mou-shan. 

A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Nelly Frijda, Edda Barends, and Henriëtte Toll in A Question of Silence

Cast: Edda Barends, Nelly Frijda, Henriëtte Toll, Cox Habbema, Eddie Brugman, Hans Croiset, Erik Plooyer. Screenplay: Marleen Gorris. Cinematography: Frans Bromet. Art direction: Harry Ammerlaan. Film editing: Hans van Dongen. Music: Lodewijk de Boer, Martijn Hasebos.

Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)

Masayuki Mori in Love Letter

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Juzo Dosan, Yoshiko Kuga, Jukichi Uno, Kyoko Kagawa, Shizue Natsukawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Chieko Seki, Ranko Hanai, Chieko Nakakita, Keisuke Kinoshita. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Fumio Niwa. Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki. Art direction: Seigo Shindo. Film editing: Toshio Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Marcus Carl Franklin, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere in I'm Not There

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson (voice), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Bob Dylan. 

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Emma Stone in Poor Things

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Suzy Bemba, Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, Vicki Pepperdine, Margaret Qualley, Hanna Schygulla. Screenplay: Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Alasdair Gray. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Shona Heath, James Price. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix. 

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover 

Cast: Jane Russell, Richard Egan, Joan Leslie, Agnes Moorehead, Jorja Curtright, Michael Pate, Richard Coogan, Alan Reed. Screenplay: Sydney Boehm, based on a novel by William Bradford Huie. Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Mark-Lee Kirk, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Hugo Friedhofer. 

A Sunday in the Country (Bertrand Tavernier, 1984)

Sabine Azéma and Louis Ducreux in A Sunday in the Country

Cast: Louis Ducreux, Michel Aumont, Sabine Azéma, Geneviève Mnich, Monique Chaumette, Thomas Duval, Quentin Ogier, Katia Wostrikoff, Claude Winter. Screenplay: Bertrand Tavernier, Colo Tavernier, based on a novel by Pierre Bost. Cinematography: Bruno de Keyzer. Production design: Patrice Mercier. Film editing: Armand Psenny. 

Bertrand Tavernier's autumnal A Sunday in the Country appropriately evokes several famous paintings, including Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party and Seurat's La Grande Jatte. The film's central character is a painter, M. Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux), an elderly survivor of the era in which those masterpieces were created, and some of the film's wistful tone is set by his acknowledgement that he never rose to their heights. It is a Sunday in the late summer of 1912 at his country home near Paris, and he welcomes the arrival by train of his son, Gonzague (Michel Aumont), and daughter-in-law (Geneviève Mnich) and their three children, the boisterous Emile (Thomas Duval) and Lucien (Quentin Ogier) and the somewhat petted Mireille (Katia Wostrikoff). But his daughter, Irène (Sabine Azéma), also shows up, driving her own car, and her free-spirited manner contrasts with the stuffiness of Gonzague and his wife. There are a couple of crises: Mireille somehow gets stuck up a tree, and Irène receives an upsetting phone call from her lover, whom she has been trying to reach throughout the afternoon. But mostly the film is a study of family dynamics in an era that's about to be blown away by World War I. Tavernier and his cast give the otherwise uneventful narrative a lovely, delicate tension.  

The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978)

Christopher Plummer and Elliott Gould in The Silent Partner

Cast: Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Céline Lomez, Michael Kirby, Sean Sullivan, Ken Pogue, John Candy. Screenplay: Curtis Hanson, based on a novel by Anders Bodelsen. Cinematography: Billy Williams. Production design: Trevor Williams. Film editing: George Appleby. Music: Oscar Peterson. 

Solid, entertaining thriller with a good turn by Christopher Plummer as the heavy. Your enjoyment of it may depend on how much you can accept Elliott Gould's transformation from nerdy bank teller to romantic lead. I'm still struggling with it. Director Daryl Duke's conflicts with the producers led to screenwriter Curtis Hanson being called in to finish the film, which he had wanted to direct all along.

La Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000)

Stanislas Merhar and Sylvie Testud in La Captive

Cast: Stanislas Merhar, Sylvie Testud, Olivia Bonamy, Liliane Rovère, Françoise Bertin, Aurore Clément, Vanessa Larré, Samuel Tasinaje, Jean Borodine, Anna Mouglalis, Bérénice Bejo. Screenplay: Chantal Akerman, Eric De Kuyper, based on a novel by Marcel Proust. Cinematography: Sabine Lancelin. Production design: Christian Marti. Film editing: Claire Atherton. 

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is notoriously unfilmable, but that doesn't stop filmmakers from attempting their own versions of at least parts of it. Chantal Akerman is honest in the credits to La Captive in saying that it was "inspired by" the fifth volume of Proust's work, La Prisonnière. What apparently inspired her about the book is the stalemated relationship between the narrator of the book, called Simon (Stanislas Merhar) in the film, and the woman who obsesses him, Albertine, renamed Ariane (Sylvie Testud) in the film. As Simon's desire to possess Ariane deepens, she grows ever more passive, responding to his every proposition with "If you like." As fascinating as Proust makes the narrator's obsession in the novel, it doesn't translate well to film. The intricate backstory of the narrator and Albertine provided by the novel in its preceding volumes is untranslated to the story of Simon and Ariane, leaving us to surmise what brings these two enigmatic people together -- and keeps them apart. Much has been made of the queerness that pervades the film, a lesbian filmmaker's vision of a gay writer's work, but for most viewers that's a subtext that doesn't fully inform the narrative. Akerman's choice to end the film with the possible death of Ariane -- in the novel Albertine escapes her curious imprisonment and lives to continue to tantalize the narrator -- feels melodramatic rather than thematically integral.

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers

Cast: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy. Screenplay: Andrew Haigh, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada. Cinematography: Jamie Ramsay. Production design: Sarah Finlay. Film editing: Jonathan Alberts. Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. 

Movies are not poems. Cinema is based on externalities, on the documentary impulse to record and preserve that which is happening outside of ourselves. Poetry is interior, a response to the impulse to record and preserve the emotional and intellectual experiences produced within us by the outside world. Making movies tends to be communal, writing poems to be private. And yet the two are always superimposing themselves on each other -- on the one hand we have poetry readings, and on the other the viewing of movies in our living rooms and bedrooms. And from the beginning, moviemakers have striven for the poetic, just as poets have always tried to record the seen and heard as pathways to the emotion and the idea. Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers is the product of the attempt to find something like an objective correlative for a variety of emotions -- loneliness, desire, regret -- and ideas -- the centrality of family relationships, the nature of sexuality, the persistence of the past. Haigh finds it in a ghost story, a well-worn trope for literature and film, and tantalizes us into questioning how much of the experience depicted in the film is external and how much is interior -- whether Adam (Andrew Scott) actually encounters the ghosts or is projecting his psychological disorder onto the world. One critic wrote that she approached the ending of the film hoping that we would find out that what we have been watching is actually a story Adam has written. But that would have been on the order of the banal "it was all a dream" conclusion that has been foisted on us too often. Haigh wisely leaves us with questions -- maybe too many for the film's own good. His aim is to unsettle us, in the way the loose ends of a poem, the lines and images that don't quite settle into explicit statements, linger with us. It helps that the movie is perfectly cast, with actors who can translate longing and loss into visible experience. If you've ever been cautioned about a movie to not take it too literally, this is one of those times.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1932)

Nils Asther and Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Walter Connolly, Toshia Mori, Gavin Gordon, Lucien Littlefield, Richard Loo, Helen Jerome Eddy, Emmett Corrigan. Screenplay: Edward E. Paramore Jr., based on a novel by Grace Zaring Stone. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Edward Curtiss. Music: E. Franke Harling. 

Maybe the best way to approach a movie like The Bitter Tea of General Yen today is to think of it as science fiction: a story taking place on a distant planet called t'Chaï-nah. Think of the heroine, Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck) as coming from Earth to a planet torn by civil war, seeking out her fiancé, an astronaut tasked with bringing a message of peace. Captured by the forces supporting General Yen (Nils Asther), she discovers all manner of intrigue involving the beautiful Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), one of the general's servants, and Mah-Li's lover, Captain Li (Richard Loo), as well as some exploitative dealing by her fellow Earthling, a man named Jones (Walter Connolly), the general's financial adviser. Megan finds herself strangely drawn to the alien general, despite the prohibition against interplanetary sexual relations. That way we might be able to set aside our objections to the ethnic stereotypes, the yellowface makeup of the Swedish actor playing the title role, the chop suey chinoiserie of its design and costumes, and the nonsensical taboo against "miscegenation." Because Frank Capra's film has a core of good sense and solid drama to it that almost, but not quite, overcomes the routinely racist attitudes of the time when it was made. It has good performances by its leads, some lively action scenes, and a leavening of sardonic humor provided by Connolly's Jones, who admits that he's "what's known in the dime novels as a renegade. And a darn good one at that." It also demonstrates that Capra was a pretty good director when he wasn't indulging in the sentimental populism that his most famous movies bog down in.  

Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in Me and My Gal

Cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Marion Burns, George Walsh, J. Farrell MacDonald, Noel Madison, Henry B. Walthall, Bert Hanlon, Adrian Morris, George Chandler. Screenplay: Arthur Kober, Philip Klein, Barry Conners. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Gordon Wiles. Film editing: Jack Murray.

Why have I never seen Me and My Gal before? Is it because it's not an easy movie to pigeonhole, being not quite romantic comedy, not quite screwball, and not quite crime drama? Or because it's one of those pre-Code movies that teeter on the edge of seriousness and back off from it in sometimes uncomfortable ways? It starts with an old man about to drown his dog and ends with the police detective protagonist fudging the truth to protect the not entirely innocent. And in between it's wall-to-wall wisecracks, most of them delivered by a never-better Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, who does the gum-chewing dame as well as anyone, even Joan Blondell. Tracy plays Danny Dolan, a cop whose attitude toward those he's supposed to protect and serve is summed up in his response to someone telling him there's been another bank robbery: "Oh, who'd the bank rob now?" And when told that it was the bank that got robbed, retorts, "Ah, turned the tables on 'em, eh? Smart!" There's also a slapstick drunk, a well-staged bank break-in, and even a parody of the Clark Gable and Norma Shearer movie based on Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which Dolan remembers as Strange Inner Tube. Much of the credit for turning potential chaos into a thoroughly entertaining movie has to go to Raoul Walsh, one those Hollywood tough-guy directors who seem not to get the recognition they deserve today. 

Le Million (René Clair, 1931)

René Lefèvre and Annabella in Le Million

Cast: Annabella, René Lefèvre, Jean-Louis Allibert, Paul Ollivier, Constantin Siroesco, Vanda Gréville, Odette Talazac, Pedro Elviro, Jane Pierson, André Michaud, Eugène Stuber, Pierre Alcover, Armand Bernard. Screenplay: René Clair, based on a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Music: Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès, Georges Van Parys. 

The French do wonderful things with air. They invented the soufflé and Champagne, and the Montgolfier brothers mastered the art of ballooning. And no French director had a greater gift for buoyancy than René Clair, whose mastery of pacing keeps even the most cockamamie of stories from collapsing, going flat, or crashing to Earth. Le Million is the quintessential Clair film, a musical farce that inspired countless movies, some of which don't always stay aloft. You can see the lineaments of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) in it as well as Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). The story is much ado about a lottery ticket left in an old jacket owned by a young artist (René Lefèvre) with a mountain of debts, and it carries us from his studio to the jail to backstage at the opera and back again, sometimes journeying over the rooftops of Paris, all of which are embodied not by the real things but by Lazare Meerson's evocative sets. The music is pretty but forgettable, which is really all you need it to be. 

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F.W. Murnau, 1931)

Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu. Screenplay: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty. Cinematography: Floyd Crosby. Film editing: Arthur A. Brooks. 

Humankind is its own serpent in the garden. If you expect F.W. Murnau's Tabu: A Story of the South Seas to be yet another fable about innocence spoiled by civilization, you're wrong. For Murnau, the fault lies in humans themselves, in their insistence on proscribing natural and instinctive behavior. The taboo that precipitates the crisis in the filn is not imposed by the colonizing Europeans, although we see the consequences of the clash between their value system and that of the islanders well enough, but in the tribal imperative that prevents Matahi and Reri from consummating their love. Reri is chosen to become the tribe's sacred virgin, an honor she doesn't want, so she flees with Matahi and is pursued by the tribal elder, Hitu, who is tasked with putting the lovers to death. On the French-colonized island where they land, they encounter a culture they don't understand, particularly its attitude toward money, a foreign concept that will be their undoing. But the valorizing of virginity produces the central taboo of the film. Much has been made of the "gay gaze" in the film: the camera's lingering on beautiful male bodies, which is attributed to Murnau's own gayness. But if Tabu is in any way a product of Murnau's sexual orientation, it's in the emphasis on the central theme: the proscription of desire. In Murnau's case it was the desire for others of his own sex, so the virginity taboo is a metaphor for the rejection of queerness that Murnau encountered in his own life. 

Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)

Cast: Stepan Shkurat, Semen Svashenko, Yuliya Solintseva, Yelena Maksimova, Mykola Nademsky, Petro Masokha, Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Mikhajlov, Pavlo Petrik. Screenplay: Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danill Demutsky. Art direction: Vasyl Vasylovych Krychevsky. Film editing: Alexsandr Dovzhenko. 

At once lyrical, tragic, and enigmatic, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth might be viewed today as an example of how Ukraine has always been a temptation and a thorn in the side of Russia -- or at least those in Russia who would try to rule it. As a film about the collectivization of agriculture in the young Soviet Union it bears comparison to Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929), which attempted that subject with a much heavier hand: Its celebration of the tractor, in comparison with Dovzhenko's somewhat problematic introduction of a tractor whose radiator has to be pissed in before it will function, concludes with a tractor ballet. And Eisenstein's treatment of the reactionary clergy involves an all too obvious montage in which the followers of the church are juxtaposed with a herd of sheep; Dovzhenko is content with just showing his priest's frenzied proclamations of anathema on the collectivists. But Eisenstein's film, like Dovzhenko's, met with official disapproval: Collectivization was just too important to Stalin not to undergo intense ideological scrutiny. Artistically, Dovzhenko's Earth has to be judged the greater film, one in which the relationship of beauty and terror informs almost every frame.