Joyland (Saim Sadiq, 2022)

Ali Junejo in Joyland

Cast: Ali Junejo, Rasti Farooq, Alina Khan, Sarwat Gilani, Salmaan Peerzada, Sohail Sameer, Sania Saeed, Ramiz Law. Screenplay: Saim Sadiq, Maggie Briggs. Cinematography: Joe Saade. Film editing: Saim Sadiq, Jasmin Tenucci. Music: Abdullah Siddiqui. 

Haider (Ali Junejo) is a milquetoast, serving as factotum to everyone in the large household in Lahore, including his father (Salmaan Peerzada), his older brother, Saleem (Sohail Sameer), his sister-in-law, Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani), and their daughters. While his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), works, he stays home, unable to find a job. When we first see Haider he is being pressed into service to take Nucchi to the hospital on his motorbike because she is about to give birth to another daughter. And then things change: Haider finds a job, and it's Mumtaz's turn to stay home -- though she really doesn't want to -- and cater to the family's needs. And so begins Saim Sadiq's prize-winning debut feature, a comic story that turns tragic in its course. Haider's chief problem is with the job he has found: backup dancer to a performer in a musical revue. Her name is Biba (Alina Khan), and she's transgender. At first, Haider tells the family that he's a stage manager, but the truth emerges. Everyone realizes that there's not much they can do about it as long as he's bringing in money, so he's allowed to continue. Haider is no dancer, but under Biba's tutelage he gets by, and soon he becomes a favorite of hers. There the complications really begin. Joyland reminded me of the Italian comedies of the 1960s by directors like Pietro Germi and Mario Monicelli that centered on a traditional society's conflict with contemporary ways of looking at the world. Sadiq's Pakistan is like their Sicily, but Joyland turns serious in ways that those films don't. It's a film that maybe doesn't quite set up its turn from comic to serious well enough, but the splendid performances make up for its flaws. 

Plan 75 (Chie Hayakawa, 2022)

Chieko Baisho in Plan 75

Cast: Chieko Baisho, Hayato Isamuro, Stefanie Arianne, Taka Takao, Yumi Kawai, Hideko Okata, Kazuyoshi Kushida. Screenplay: Chie Hayakawa, Jason Gray. Cinematography: Hideho Urata. Production design: Setsuko Shiokawa. Film editing: Anne Klotz. Music: Rémi Boubai. 

Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa's debut feature, is a fable about a future in which the problem of an aging population in Japan produces legislation that encourages people over 75 to take the option of government-funded euthanasia. It's a very near future: The clothes, architecture, cars and trucks, and even the advertising design all look contemporary. Hayakawa takes a somber, thoughtful, low-key approach to material that could very easily be turned into a horror movie or a biting satire. In fact, the film is perhaps a little too somber and low-key, for the strongest note in the film is pathos, which tends to blunt its edge. The central character is Michi Kakutani (Chieko Baisho), who has reached the age of eligibility for Plan 75, as it's called, with no job, no family, and the threat of having no place to live. She gets much encouragement to sign up from the media, from advertising, and even from those in her age cohort, so she takes the step. At the same time, some of the young people who have been hired to administer the program begin to ask questions about it. Hiromu Okabe, who works in recruiting people for the plan, discovers that his uncle Yukio (Taka Takao) has signed up for it. When Hiromu looks into how the plan is funded, he discovers evidence of corruption. Maria (Stefanie Arianne), a Filipina who works in Japan so she can send money back home to pay for her daughter's operation, takes a job with the plan that involves removing the clothes of the deceased and sorting through their belongs. There are echoes of the Holocaust in what she does, and she finds corruption, too. And Yoko (Yumi Kawai), who works as a counselor for those who sign up, spending 15 minutes a week on the phone with them, begins to have doubts about her job when she violates protocol and meets Michi in person, finding a woman still full of life and spirit. Still, the program is such a success that by the end of the film the government is thinking of lowering the eligibility age to 65. Almost all of the conflict in the film is internal: The only sign of opposition to the program comes when something is flung at a poster Hiromu is putting up. Hayakawa deserves praise for not yielding to conventional movie sensationalism, but as haunting as the film is, it would have benefited from a slightly sharper edge. 

Amanda (Carolina Cavalli, 2022)

Benedetta Porcaroli in Amanda

Cast: Benedetta Porcaroli, Galatéa Bellugi, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Michele Bravi, Monica Nappo, Margherita Missoni. Screenplay: Carolina Cavalli. Cinematography: Lorenzo Levrini. Production design: Martino Bonanomi. Film editing: Babak Jalali. Music: Nicolò Contessa. 

If comedy has to have a point other than to make you laugh, Carolina Cavalli's droll Amanda seems to assert that only a misfit can help another misfit fit. Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli) is certainly a misfit, a twentysomething who clomps around in clodhoppers, usually wearing a vest made of crocheted granny squares, sullenly looking for a friend. She has some awkward encounters with awkward men, but finally she finds something of a soulmate in the similarly alienated Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi), who has closeted herself in her bedroom, seeing only her somewhat sinister therapist. Eventually, Amanda makes her way through the door and both of them blossom oddly. Amanda is like one of Wes Anderson's less twee movies, not so encumbered with style for style's sake and capable of making you laugh out loud if you just go with it.   

Unrest (Cyril Schäublin, 2022)

Clara Gostynski in Unrest

Cast: Clara Gostynski, Alexei Evstratov, Valentin Merz, Laurent Ferrero, Mayo Irion, Monika Stalder, Hélio Thiémard, Li Tavor, Laurence Bretignier, Nikolai Bosshardt. Screenplay: Cyril Schäublin. Cinematography: Silvan Hillmann. Production design: Sara B. Weingart. Film editing: Cyril Schäublin. Music: Li Tavor. 

The portmanteau "docudrama" was coined to denote an attempt to depict an actual event in a medium for fiction. It's kind of an oxymoron, and as a genre it usually works only if the historical element and the artistic element balance each other. Cyril Schäublin's Unrest fails to do so. It dramatizes the visit of the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) to a watchmaking factory in Switzerland in 1877, seven years before the adoption of the Universal Time standard. So we learn that in Berne, where the film takes place, the railroad, the municipality, and the telegraph office each ran on a different clock. You might call this anarchy, but it's a different kind of anarchy than the movement espoused by Kropotkin is concerned with, which centers on the rights of workers, including the ability to govern their work. The watchmakers of Berne, of which Josephine Gräbl (Clara Gostynski) is one, are suffering from the abitrariness and micromanaging of the company, which is determined to improve the efficiency and productivity of the workers, who do labor that demands patience and concentration. So the film has a lot to chew on, from the process of watchmaking to the political struggles of the day to the nature of time itself. Unfortunately, Schäublin also wants to experiment with cinematic technique and likes to savor moments at the expense of forward narrative drive. He seems to expect us to do the work of putting together the historical background while savoring the beauty of his images. He likes, for example, to frame scenes with the characters at the bottom of the screen and sometimes at its corners. Josephine and Kropotkin serve as the central characters to help lead us through the maze of history and ideas with which the film deals, but we often lose sight of them. In short, it's a tantalizing but chilly movie that only a dedicated cinéaste could really love. 

Our Father, the Devil (Ellie Foumbi, 2021)

Babetida Sadjo in Our Father, the Devil

Cast: Babetida Sadjo, Souléyman Sy Savané, Jennifer Tchiakpe, Franck Saurel, Martine Amisse, Maëlle Genet, Hiba el Aflahi. Screenplay: Ellie Foumbi. Cinematography: Tinx Chan. Production design: Philippe Lacomblez. Film editing: Roy Clovis. Music: Gavin Brivik. 

Ellie Foumbi's debut feature, Our Father, the Devil, is a thriller in which all the violent action occurs off-camera. When Marie (Babetida Sadjo) recognizes the new priest, Father Patrick (Souléyman Sy Savané), at the upscale French retirement home where she's the chef, she faints. She thinks he's the man she knew back in Guinea as Sogo, the warlord who raped her and forced her into his cadre of child soldiers. So one night when he comes to her kitchen after hours to ask for a snack, she knocks him out with a cooking utensil, hauls him into her car, and imprisons him in an isolated cabin. When he comes to, he denies that he was the man she once knew until she tortures the truth out of him. It's the setup for a moral fable that Foumbi tells quite well, and the absence of on-screen violence only heightens the tension and reinforces the film's treatment of the ethics of revenge. When Marie is torturing Father Patrick we see instead shots of her chopping vegetables and pounding a cutlet, which sounds comic in description but is really quite effective in the tense atmosphere Foumbi creates. Unfortunately, the tropes of thriller movies sometimes intrude. The scene when Marie and the hot bartender (Franck Saurel) she's been seeing consummate their relationship is gratuitous, and the sequence in which the roles of captive and captor switch back and forth is awkwardly handled. But it's superbly acted, especially by Sadjo and Sy Savané, and gives great promise of Foumbi's future as a director.    

Tótem (Lila Avilés, 2023)

Naíma Sentíes in Tótem

Cast: Naíma Sentíes, Montserrat Narañon, Marisol Gasé, Saori Gurza, Mateo García, Teresa Sánchez, Iazua Larios, Alberto Amador, Juan Francisco Maldonado, Marisela Villarruel, Galia Mayer, Lukas Urquijo López. Screenplay: Lila Avilés. Cinematography: Diego Tenorio. Production design: Nohemi Gonzalez. Film editing: Omar Guzmán. Music: Thomas Becka. 

I don't cry at movies, but sometimes I hold my breath in awe. I did so at the ending of Lila Avilés's extraordinarily beautiful and accomplished Tótem. I've never seen a film about a dying man so endowed with life. Everyone in Tótem knows that Tonatiuh (Mateo García) is dying, even his small daughter Sol (the enthralling Naíma Sentíes), and that the birthday party they're throwing for him will be his last. But they soldier on, filling this climactic day with brightness and love, along with some tears and some fights. Tona himself is a reluctant participant in the occasion, battling as he is with weakness and incontinence, but he's drawn into it anyway. The film could have been mawkish, but Avilés takes a documentary approach, concentrating on the noise and bustle of a house full of children and animals. The latter include a cat, several dogs, a parrot, a goldfish, some snails, and a few insects, which add the continuity of life to the tale about dying. There are funny scenes, too, one of them involving the charlatan one of Tona's sisters hires to rid the house of evil spirits, making an nuisance of herself and getting the film's biggest laugh with her curtain line. Avilés choreographs the crowd of actors of all ages well, getting fine performances from even the youngest. The cast was unknown to me, although afterward I discovered that I had recently seen Teresa Sánchez, who plays Cruz, the nurse hired to tend to Tona, in quite a different role, as the tough, determined owner of an agave plantation in Dos Estaciones (Juan Pablo González, 2022). I suspect there was quite a bit of improvisation beyond the script and a few happy accidents that got included, because it's a film that feels lived in.   

The Breaking Ice (Anthony Chen, 2023)

Chiuxio Qu, Haoran Liu, and Dongyu Zhou in The Breaking Ice

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu, Chiuxio Qu, Ruguang Wei, Baisha Liu. Screenplay: Anthony Chen. Cinematography: Jing-Pin Yu. Production design: Luxi Du. Film editing: Hoping Chen, Mun Thye Soo. Music: Kin Leonn. 

Anthony Chen's The Breaking Ice is a post-pandemic fable centered on three members of Generation Z, the cohort that perhaps suffered the greatest cultural dislocation when Covid emerged: At a time when they should have been exploring life's options, setting out on careers, discovering themselves, they were severely restricted. The film also features a relationship that has been oddly prevalent in movies recently, the two-guys-and-a-girl triangle popularized by French New Wave directors in films like François Truffaunt's Jules and Jim (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964). (It was also central to this year's film by Luca Guadagnino, Challengers.) The "girl" in this case is Nana (Dongyu Zhou), who works as a tour guide, a job she certainly doesn't want to turn into a career. Leading a group of tourists, she meets Haofeng (Haoran Liu), who works in finance in Shanghai and has come north for a friend's wedding. He takes the tour to fill time before his flight leaves, but being much younger than the rest of the tour group, he strikes up a conversation with Nana. When they return to the hotel, they continue to see each other, and eventually she introduces him to Xiao (Chiuxio Qu), who has come north to work for his aunt in a restaurant, a job he also doesn't intend to keep. The rest of the film is about the discoveries the somewhat misfit trio make about each other and themselves. Chen is a little too heavy-handed in creating epiphanic moments for his protagonists and with the trope announced in his title, from an opening sequence showing ice being cut into blocks to a scene near the end of the film in which the three protagonists pass an ice cube from mouth to mouth. Still, it's a film with engaging performances and the beautiful scenery of an unfamiliar setting: northeastern China right at the border with North Korea.

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023)

Deniz Celiloglu in About Dry Grasses

Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Merve Dizdar, Muzab Ekici, Ece Bagci, Erdem Senocak, Yüksei Aksu, Münir Can Cindoruk, Onur Berk Arslanoglu, Yildrim Gücük, Cengiz Bozkurt, Emrah Özdemir, Elif Ürse, Elt Andaç Çam. Screenplay: Akin Aksu, Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Cinematography: Cevahir Sahin, Kürsat Üresin. Production design: Meral Aktan. Film editing: Oguz Atabas, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Music: Philip Timofeyev. 

Midway in the third hour of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses, he breaks the third wall. Actually, he breaks all of them: The camera follows the protagonist down a hall and through a door that opens onto the studio where the set has been constructed. We see the crew moving about in the studio and the actor going to what may be his dressing room, where he takes a pill and then returns to the set. We then follow him back onto the set and the film proceeds with no further such interruptions. It's an audacious moment that breaks the tension but not the mood. We have just witnessed a long scene that's the intellectual and moral heart of the film, and we're anticipating something physical and emotional to happen. The effect is to add another layer to an already complex narrative that centers on the film's anti-hero, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), a schoolteacher in a remote Turkish village. Samet hates it. He hates the climate, which he says has only two seasons, winter and summer. In the former it's covered with snow and in the latter with dry grass. He hates the school administration and some of his fellow teachers. He hates the social and political unrest that plagues the region. He hates its poverty and ignorance. And as you can guess, he hates himself for not being able to escape. He also hates his students, except for one pretty young girl, Sevim (Ece Bagci), in whom he takes an interest that will get him into a lot of trouble. His only release is in griping to his roommate, Kenan (Muzab Ekici) and to a woman they meet, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), who teaches at another school in the area. Nuray lost a leg in a terrorist attack, but she copes with the loss and with the less than ideal circumstances in her life. Eventually, the plot will center on the relationship of Samet, Nuray, and Kenan, which Ceylan uses to explore topics like survival, commitment, endurance, and more. Celiloglu is superb at playing a character we come to loathe even as we maintain a certain sympathy for him, but the triumphant performance in the film is by Dizdar, who won the best actress award at Cannes for the film. About Dry Grasses is overlong but it's filled with moments of beauty in which we come to see the landscape that so plagues Samet with other eyes than his.   

A Prince (Pierre Creton, 2023)

Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton in A Prince

Cast: Antoine Pirotte, Pierre Creton, Grégory Gadebois (voice), Vincent Barré, Mathieu Amalric (voice), Manon Schaap, Françoise Lebrun, Chiman Dangi, Pierre Barray, Yves Edouard, Maxime Savouray, Olivier Chaval, Evelyne Didi, Bruno Martin, Marie-Odile Daubeuf. Screenplay: Vincent Barré, Pierre Creton, Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat. Cinematography: PIerre Creton, Léo Gil Mela, Antoine Pirotte. Film editing: Félix Rehm. Music: Jozef van Wissem. 

At a key moment in Pierre Creton's A Prince, Antoine Pirotte, the actor playing Pierre-Joseph, gets out of the bed he's sharing with two other men and is replaced by the much-older director himself, who then assumes the role. The voiceover narrator simply notes that Pierre-Joseph had gotten older. It's clear at that point, if it hasn't been earlier, that the film is deeply rooted in Creton's own experiences, dreams, desires, and vision. So much so, in fact, that it almost becomes a barrier between the viewer and the film, disarming even critical responses to something so personal and idiosyncratic. Some critics, for example, took Creton to task for the "orientalism" of the character Kutta (Chiman Dangi), an Indian, the titular prince, who is viewed as an exotic creature, culminating in a startling nude scene near the end of the film. But it's clear that the Kutta of the film is a reflection of Pierre-Joseph's -- and by extension Creton's -- own imaginings. Similarly, critics objected to the heavy use of voiceover narration, whereas I think Creton resorts to it as a way of suggesting that we all turn the past into stories in our head. This is all to say that I found A Prince fascinating but often opaque, a tantalizing but inaccessible attempt at autobiographical fiction.

Chicken for Linda! (Sébastien Laudenbach, Chiara Malta, 2023)

Cast: Voices of Mélinée Leclerc, Clotilde Hesme, Laetitia Dosch, Estéban, Patrick Pineau, Claudine Acs, Jean-Marie Fonbonne, Antoine Momey, Pietro Sermonti, Scarlett Choleton, Alenza Dus, Anaïs Weller, Milan Cerisier, Anna Parent. Screenplay: Chiara Malta, Sébastien Laudenbach. Film editing: Catherine Aladenise. Music: Clément Ducol. 

Chicken for Linda! is a candy-colored animated feature about a mother's attempt to prepare a chicken dinner for her little girl. It's a film about children and maybe for children, but I wouldn't show it to an averagely inquisitive child unless I was prepared to answer questions about the death of a parent, the stress of a single parent, corporal punishment, family quarrels, organized labor strikes, chicken theft, police enforcement of the law, and the killing of animals for food. (I've probably missed a few. It's been a while since I was a child or had one.) Much of the often frenetic, if colorful, action centers on the attempts to kill the stolen chicken, which is not going to sit well in some households. The whole plot is initiated when the mother, Paulette, slaps Linda for something she didn't do. (The fat purple cat did it.) To make it up to her, the guilt-ridden Paulette promises to make Linda a dinner of chicken with peppers, which Linda recalls as the favorite dish of her father, who died when she was very little. Paulette's efforts to find a chicken are thwarted by a strike that has closed all the markets, so she drives out to the country to find one there. Finding only a sulky teenager at the farm, in desperation Paulette steals one, only to have the cops called on her. And matters get worse when the chicken escapes. Each character has their own bright color, so it's easy to keep track of them once the action gets complex. There are also some interpolated song sequences with the flavor of French pop music. It's an enjoyably lively film unless you really want to examine its subtext, so maybe try not to.
 

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

George MacKay and Léa Seydoux in The Beast

Cast: Léa Seydoux, George MacKay, Guslagie Malanda, Dasha Nekrasova, Martin Scali, Elina Löwensohn, Marta Hoskins, Jula Faure, Kester Lovelace, Felicien Pinot, Laurent Lacotte. Screenplay: Bertrand Bonello, Guillaume Bréaud, Benjamin Charbit, based on a story by Henry James. Cinematography: Josée Deshaies. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Anita Roth. Music: Anna Bonello, Bertrand Bonello.

Bertrand Bonello's The Beast is a jigsaw puzzle of a movie, asking the viewer to assemble the scattered pieces of three distinct stories -- a doomed romance set in early 20th-century Paris, a contemporary suspense thriller about stalker and prey, and a futuristic sci-fi tale about artificial intelligence -- into a single frame. The risk of such non-linear narratives is that the viewer may think that the finished product doesn't reward the effort of putting it all together. Each individual story in The Beast is enough to base an entire movie on. They share a common theme: the intersection of fear and desire. Is anything gained by jumbling them into one another? I think that Bonello knows the central fact about jigsaw puzzles: that the end result, the finished picture, is less important than the pleasure of putting the pieces together. He demonstrates this knowledge by opening his film with a distancing device: Léa Seydoux playing an actress in front of a green screen, being rehearsed through the movements -- a woman taking up a knife to defend herself from an unseen beast -- that will recur in some fashion throughout The Beast. It's a little like the picture on the cover of the puzzle box that helps you know what pieces are likely to go together. It's well-acted, with Seydoux and George MacKay deftly handling the switches between French and English, including the American accent called for in the thriller section, and Bonello achieves some creepy and suspenseful moments throughout. But in the end, I think its success depends mostly on the viewer's willingness to play his game.  

Here (Bas Devos, 2023)

Liyo Gong and Stefan Gota in Here

Cast: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Cédric Luvuezo, Teodor Corban, Saadia Bentaïeb, Alida Constantin, ShuHuan Wang, Victor Claudio Zichil, Jovial Mbenga, Sanae Kamlichi. Screenplay: Bas Devos. Cinematography: Grimm Vandekerckhove. Production design: Spela Tusar. Film editing: Dieter Diependaele. Music: Brecht Ameel.

Bas Devos's Here is about soup and moss and names. It's also about fireflies and construction work and family and lab work and evolution and climate change and cities and nature and shorts and rain and long walks and diversity and kindness and whatever sticks in your mind after you watch it and start thinking about it. It must have been an incredibly difficult film to edit: Just how long can and should you hold a shot of men sitting on a bus or branches waving in the breeze before a viewer begins thinking they should watch something else or go get something to eat? I kind of hated it while I was watching and kind of loved it afterward.  

Adieu Bonaparte (Youssef Chahine, 1985)

Patrice Chéreau in Adieu Bonaparte

Cast: Michel Piccoli, Mohsen Mohieddin, Salah Zulfikar, Patrice Chéreau, Mohamad Atef, Ahmed Abdelaziz, Abla Kamel, Hassan Husseiny, Huda Sultan, Dahlia Younès, Christian Patey, Gamil Ratib. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Onsi Abou Seif. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Youssef Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte is about a clash of empires: the nascent one that will be led by Napoleon Bonaparte and the crumbling one that saw Islamic culture spread across much of what was Eurocentrically called "the known world." But its point of view is primarily that of the people caught between these two powerful forces, the people of Egypt, when French forces under the command of Bonaparte, not yet emperor, clash with the Ottoman Turks who then ruled Egypt. Mostly it's about the relationship between a fictional character, the young poet and interpreter, Aly (Mohsen Mohieddin), and the French general Maximilian Caffarelli (Michel Piccoli), an intellectual who had lost a leg in an earlier conflict when the French annexed a territory belonging to Belgium. (The movie repeats a witticism that Caffarelli doesn't care what happens because he'll always have one foot in France.) Caffarelli befriends Aly and his brother Yehia (Mohamad Atef) partly because he's sexually attracted to the young men, but also because he has a curiosity about Egyptians and their culture. Meanwhile, Bonaparte (Patrice Chéreau) suffers a defeat when Admiral Nelson destroys his fleet and forces him to stay in Egypt. Chéreau gives a wonderful performance as the preening but determined man who would be emperor, and Piccoli is equally fine as Caffarelli. Mohieddin holds his own with the French stars, as Aly struggles with his admiration for Caffarelli and his loyalty to his brother Bakr (Ahmed Abdelaziz), a leader in the struggle for Egyptian self-determination. It's a handsomely filmed production, with fine work by cinematographer Mohsen Nasr and an epic score by Gabriel Yared. But it's also often hard to follow, with its swarm of characters, many of them members of Aly's family, and its historical backstory. Chahine has a tendency to overload his narratives with incidents that distract from or seem only tangential to the main story.    

Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)

Michael Ironside in Scanners

Cast: Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O'Neill, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Robert A. Silverman, Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

David Cronenberg's Scanners is remembered today for its exploding head and the literal face-off of its conclusion, and probably for making splatter into a genre. But so many heads have been exploded and so much gore has been spilled since then that today it looks a little tired and slow. It's not helped by the woodenness of much of its acting. A lot of the criticism has been leveled at its leading man, Stephen Lack, but nobody is up to par. In contrast to Lack, Michael Ironside goes full ham as the film's villain. It also has a dialogue track that lacks ambience -- I don't know if it was post-synched, but it has the deadness characteristic of films that were. Cronenberg's script was reportedly being written while the shooting proceeded, which may explain some of the flatness of the performances, the confusion about where the movie's headed between its action sequences, and why the ending seems so perfunctory. Still, it's worth a watch for its pioneer bloodletting and for being the film that launched an important director's career.   

Finishing School (Wanda Tuchock, George Nicholls Jr., 1934)

Frances Dee and Bruce Cabot in Finishing School

Cast: Frances Dee, Bruce Cabot, Ginger Rogers, Billie Burker, Beulah Bondi, John Halliday, Sara Haden, Helen Freeman, Marjorie Lytell, Adalyn Doyle, Anne Shirley, Irene Franklin, Jane Darwell. Screenplay: Wanda Tuchock, Laird Doyle. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Arthur P. Schmidt. 

Finishing School is a reverse Cinderella story in which poor little rich girl Virginia Radcliff (Frances Dee) finds her prince in Ralph "Mac" McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an unpaid intern at a children's hospital who supports himself by working as a waiter in a Manhattan hotel. Virginia has two wicked stepmothers: her real mother, the snobbish socialite Helen Radcliff (Billie Burke), and the headmistress of the finishing school Helen sends her off to, Miss Van Alstyne (Beulah Bondi). If there's a fairy godmother in the film, it's Virginia's wisecracking roommate, known as Pony (Ginger Rogers), who helps turn the shy and proper Virginia into something of a rebel. The movie is one of those Depression-era fables in which the tables are turned on the wealthy, and also one of the last movies to be released before the Production Code clamped down on the depiction of premarital sex. It earned a condemnation from the Catholic Legend of Decency for just that. Virginia and Mac do it in one of those pan-to-the-window scenes in which we see the snow outside filling up their footprints. And from what follows, including Virginia's refusal to see the school physician, we know the consequences even though nobody ever says "pregnant" out loud. The denouement is precipitated by a literature teacher who tells Virginia and her class that Anna Karenina's suicide was the only possible response to her breach of proper behavior, which is all that the school really teaches. It's a not-unwatchable little film that gets a nice boost occasionally from Rogers's snappy delivery of her lines, but otherwise is mainly a document of the era in which it was made.   

The GoodTimesKid (Azazel Jacobs, 2005)

Sara Diaz in The GoodTimesKid

Cast: Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo, Sara Diaz, Lucy Dodd, Pat Reynolds, Gill Dennis, Melissa Paul. Screenplay: Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo. Cinematography: Eric Curtis, Azazel Jacobs, Gerardo Naranjo. Film editing: Azazel Jacobs, Diaz Jacobs. Music: Mandy Hoffman. 

In The GoodTimesKid Azazel Jacobs gives a millennial spin on the two-guys-and-a-girl trope popularized by French New Wave directors in films like Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959), Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), and Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964). The girl in this case is Diaz (Sara Diaz), who lives with one of the guys, Rodolfo Cano (Jacobs). But when the antsy Rodolfo gets fed up with their relationship, he decides to join the army. Somehow the letter telling him to report for duty gets sent to another Rodolfo Cano (Gerardo Naranjo), who goes to set the record straight, and winds up following the other Ricardo home. Diaz is there, preparing a birthday party for her Ricardo, who doesn't want one and storms off. So the other Ricardo decides to hang around with her. If none of this makes much sense so far, you have a choice: either stick around to watch this low-key wackiness develop, or find another film to watch. In its defense, the film has some lovely moments, as when Diaz does a loosey-goosey dance to "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." But if you have no affection for grungy slackers or existential ennui, not to mention low-budget independent filmmaking, this isn't for you. I liked Diaz, who reminded me of Shelley Duvall, and Naranjo gives his Rodolfo a sweetly lost melancholy that contrasts nicely with Jacobs's self-destructive ferocity, but as a movie it's really kind of trifling. 

Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)

Kirsten Dunst in Civil War

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Nelson Lee, Evan Lai, Jesse Plemons. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Rob Hardy. Production design: Caty Maxey. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Geoff Barrow, Ben Salisbury. 

Alex Garland's Civil War grows out of our current political tensions, which means that it's either too timely or not timely enough to be entirely successful. At least Garland has the wisdom not to give his his fable too much direct correspondence to political actuality: There's no way, of course, that Texas and California would be allied secessionist states. What it does have is a kind of physical actuality, meaning a lot of bloody conflict. It also has some terrific performances, starting with Kirsten Dunst's tough photojournalist, Lee, a long way from Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) or the title role in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006). She's matched well by Wagner Moura as her reporter partner, Joel. I knew I had seen Moura before but I couldn't quite place him until I was reminded that, 40 pounds heavier, he was Pablo Escobar in the series Narcos. Aside from unlikely alliances, the story stretches credulity that the intensely focused Joel would choose to bring along on a perilous journey an aging, overweight reporter like Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a callow young photographer like Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). But as I said, it's a fable, a story meant to make a point -- or rather several points. One of them is that journalism depends on a sometimes cold-hearted pursuit of the truth. Another is that political stability is a fragile thing. And that both are in perpetual danger. If Civil War fails in making those points effectively, and I think it does, it's because the medium, an action movie, is inadequate to deliver the message. 

French Wedding, Caribbean Style (Julius-Amédée Laou, 2002)

Nicole Dogué in French Wedding, Caribbean Style

Cast: Dieudonné, Loulou Boislaville, Nicole Dogué, Daniel Njo Lobé, Lucien Thérésin, Emile Abossolo M'bo, Ériq Ebouaney, Emilie Benoît. Screenplay: Julius-Amédée Laou. 

You can't count on much help from the internet if you want to know more after watching Julius-Amédée Laou's French Wedding, Caribbean Style. There's precious little about the film on the usual sources like IMDb and Letterboxd. But it's a refreshing, noisy, chaotic treat that takes on all sorts of subjects: racism, colonialism, sexism, and any number of cultural conflicts in an amusing but bittersweet, insightful, provocative way. The setup is simple: a young white Frenchman and a young woman whose grandparents immigrated to France from Martinique in the 1930s arrive at the reception after their wedding, which is being held at the home of her parents. The event is being recorded by her younger brother on a video camera, and we see everything through that lens. There are the usual family tensions on display -- get any large family, no matter the ethnicity, together and you'll witness them. The groom's parents, an uptight couple, are not terribly happy with the marriage, but even among the bride's relatives there's some conflict. Still, everything proceeds noisily as the young videographer pokes his camera's nose into what's going on. But midway through the film, an uninvited guest arrives: the bride's old boyfriend, who throws a bombshell into the occasion. His "wedding gift" is another videotape, and a shocking one. At this point, as the reception turns into an uproar, the camera falls into the hands of the bride's younger sister, who has an entirely different attitude toward what's going on. That shift in point of view opens up a new perspective on the proceedings. I have to say that I found the ending of the movie a little more didactic and conventional than I'm entirely happy with, but I still admire the huge ensemble cast and the energy and artistry with which Laou has put together this boisterous film. If you subscribe to the Criterion Channel (and you should), you owe it to yourself to check it out.  

We All Loved Each Other So Much (Ettore Scola, 1974)

Stefano Satta Flores, Vittorio Gassman, and Nino Manfredi in We All Loved Each Other So Much

Cast: Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, Stefania Sandrinelli, Stefano Satta Flores, Giovanna Ralli, Aldo Fabrizi. Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Ettore Scola. Cinematography: Claudio Cirillo. Production design: Luciano Ricceri. Film editing: Raimondo Crociani. Music: Armando Trovajoli. 

Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)

Cast: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril, Eros Pagni, Giuliana Calandri, Piero Mazzinghi, Glauco Mauri, Clara Calamai. Screenplay: Dario Argenti, Bernardino Zapponi. Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller. Production design: Giuseppe Bassan. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Giorgio Gaslini, Goblin. 

Dario Argenti likes his protagonists to keep sticking their noses in places where they shouldn't. In The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, for example, it's an American writer who witnesses something that he should have left to the Italian police to investigate, but he persists in trying to solve the crime, putting himself and his girlfriend in peril. And in Deep Red it's a British jazz pianist, Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), who witnesses something that he should have left to the Italian police to investigate, but he persists in trying to solve the crime, putting himself and his girlfriend, journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), in peril. Well, if a formula works, use it. And it does work, though largely because Argenti has such delight in flinging the most improbable situations and the most colorful (not to say bloody) images at the viewer. He also likes to load his films with a variety of eccentric characters, some of whom are red herrings, but most of which are just there to keep the protagonist on his toes. (There's a touch of homophobia in Argenti's treatment of some of them, like the antiques dealer in The Bird who keeps hitting on the writer, and the androgynous lover of Marcus's friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) who elicits a puzzled response from Marcus.) It's best not to try to solve the mysteries along with Argento's amateur detectives, mainly because nothing in his elaborate plots makes sense, like the mechanical doll that spooks one of the victims, or even the identity of the killer. Hemmings, who was usually cast as somewhat creepy, is instead a likable and intrepid protagonist, and Nicolodi is more the entertainingly spunky sidekick than the romantic interest.   

The Lovers (Azazel Jacobs, 2017)

Debra Winger and Tracy Letts in The Lovers

Cast: Debra Winger, Tracy Letts, Aidan Gillen, Melora Walters, Tyler Ross, Jessica Sula. Screenplay: Azazel Jacobs. Cinematography: Tobias Datum. Production design: Sue Tebbutt. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Mandy Hoffman. 

Azazel Jacobs's The Lovers has a premise that sounds very French: A middle-aged married couple, each of whom has a lover, has decided to separate. But all of a sudden they discover that their old passion for each other has flared up again. As a result, they begin lying to their lovers to cover up their reheated marriage. But these are not Parisian sophisticates, they're American suburbanites. The couple, Mary (Debra Winger) and Michael (Tracy Letts), are cubicle-dwellers in tedious office jobs; their respective lovers, Robert (Aidan Gillen) and Lucy (Melora Walters), bring a little artsy glamour to their lives -- Robert is a writer and Lucy a dancer. Mary and Michael have promised their lovers that they will separate after their  college-age son, Joel (Tyler Ross), comes for a visit with his girlfriend, Erin (Jessica Sula). Joel has been witness to the tension in his parents' marriage, which he blames on his father, and he warns Erin that it will not be a pleasant visit. But Erin finds them to be warmly affectionate, which in its turn causes tension between her and Joel. Meanwhile, Robert and Lucy, both frustrated by the delay in the separation of Mary and Michael, begin to act out: Robert confronts Michael in a supermarket, and the volatile Lucy actually hisses at Mary when she sees her -- an event witnessed by Erin. Unfortunately, Jacobs can't find an easy way to resolve this crisis and the very promising film begins to fall apart. From the outset, in fact, the film feels a little off in tone, as if it's not quite sure when or whether we're supposed to laugh at the situations the characters fall into. For one thing, it's overlaid with and sometimes smothered by a lush, romantic, symphonic score by Mandy Hoffman that often seems at odds with what's happening on screen. Defenders of the film say that these are directorial choices designed to be unsettling, but I have to wonder why Jacobs chose this particular story to unsettle us with. 

The Old Sorceress and the Valet (Julius-Amédée Laou, 1987)

Robert Liensol and Jenny Alpha in The Old Sorceress and the Valet

Cast: Jenny Alpha, Robert Liensol, Christine Amat, Jean-François Perrier, Jean-Claude Fal, Sophie Pal, Jacques Martial, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Roger Lemus, Jean-Marie Retby. Screenplay: Julius-Amédée Laou. Cinematography: Jean-Paul Miotto. Film editing: Sophie Chailley, Tamara Pappe. Music: Leona Gabrielle, Ernest Léardée, Jean-Claude Mejstelman, Stellio. 

Julius-Amédée Laou's The Old Sorceress and the Valet is not a particularly obscure film: Enough people have seen it for it to have a page on Letterboxd, though not on Wikipedia. But it deserves to be better-known, if only for the performances of Jenny Alpha and Robert Liensol, who play the title couple, an elderly husband and wife reflecting on their life together. We first see Armand at the breakfast table waiting for his wife, Eugénie, to join him. When she rises from the bed, she calls out for him to bring her robe, but he doesn't respond, even when she joins him, grumbling and scolding. And then he disappears from the apartment and we see Eugénie in her nightgown at a window, calling out for him, a moment that recurs throughout the movie. We then concentrate on Eugénie herself, as she deals with a variety of clients who have come to her for her aid as a sorceress: One woman wants help in murdering her husband, a man wants another man to fall in love with him, and so on. In addition to potions, Eugénie offers advice, much of it sensible. Then the major thread of the film begins: Eugénie and Armand take a walk through Paris, reflecting -- usually bitterly and angrily, but sometimes with tenderness -- on their life together. As the film proceeds, we notice some discontinuities: Eugénie, for example, sometimes walks with a cane or carries a purse, but not always. We see them trapped on a traffic island as they try to cross a busy thoroughfare, and then we see Eugénie alone, being rescued from the island by two policemen. We gather that there has been discord throughout their life in Paris ever since they came there, many decades ago, from Martinique. Alpha, the actress who plays her, was a celebrated performer in nightclubs and on stage, and Eugénie was a showgirl until age reduced her to her current job, dealing with a mostly white clientele. Armand was a valet to a man they refer to as "Master," with whom Eugénie had an affair. The film builds to a revelation that probably doesn't surprise many who see it, and in fact feels a little clumsily handled. But what matters are the haunting insights into the lives of the characters, superbly embodied by their performers. 

Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)

Terence Stamp in Teorema

Cast: Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, Laura Betti, Andréa José Cruz Soublette, Ninetto Davoli, Carlo De Mejo, Adele Cambria, Luigi Barbini, Giovanni Ivan Scratuglia, Alfonso Gatto. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolino. Cinematography: Giuseppe Ruzzolini. Production design: Luciano Puccini. Film editing: Nino Baragli. Music: Ennio Morricone. 

Is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema artsy fiddle-faddle or a trenchant satire of the bourgeoisie? Yes. It's both. It's a heavy-footed Marxist diatribe and a beautiful display of cinematic technique. If ever a film was caviar to the general, it's Teorema. At this point, I want to recommend that anyone who subscribes to the Criterion Channel go watch Rachel Kushner's commentary on Teorema in her "Adventures in Moviegoing" collection. And if you don't (and even if you do), then read James Quant's essay on the film at the Criterion Collection site. Both of them suggest why Pasolini's film continues to awe and/or annoy viewers. There's a fine line between the pretentious and the provocative, and Teorema has continued to straddle it more than 60 years. For myself, I find it an immensely amusing film, which may be enough for me to recommend it to anyone who has a taste for caviar.  

La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)

Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Valeria Ciangottini, Riccardo Garroni, Alain Dijon, Lex Barker, Jacques Sernas, Nadia Gray. Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Production design: Piero Gherardi. Film editing: Leo Catozzo. Music: Nino Rota. 

La Dolce Vita was among the celebrated international films that challenged Hollywood's hegemony in 1960, including René Clément's Purple Noon, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, and Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn. It established Federico Fellini as one of the world's most important filmmakers. I was very young when I first saw it, and it dazzled me with its nose-thumbing satire of a shallow, hedonistic culture. I remember being impressed particularly by the scene at the home of Steiner (Alain Cuny), the ill-fated intellectual whose life and ideas also made their mark on Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), Fellini's protagonist, a journalist with ambitions to become a "serious" writer. What I missed at that time was that Steiner was as much a target of satire as the movie stars, aristocrats, and hucksters that swarm around Marcello's Rome. Steiner's soiree is as empty and sterile, as decadent in its own way as the scenes of boozing and party-hopping and religious mania. But at least there's an energy to those scenes that keeps the film alive. Even though Steiner's story is tragic, La Dolce Vita is a profoundly anti-intellectual movie. And of all the films I just named, despite its technical prowess, it seems to me the least impressive, the one most touched by the passage of time.  

Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner, 1931)

Judith Wood and Paul Lukas in Working Girls

Cast: Judith Wood, Dorothy Hall, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Paul Lukas, Stuart Erwin, Frances Dee, Mary Forbes, Frances Moffett, Claire Dodd, Dorothy Stickney. Screenplay: Zoe Akins, based on a play by Vera Caspary and Winfred Lenihan. Cinematography: Harry Fishbeck. Film editing: Jane Loring. Music: Ralph Rainger.

Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, Mamadou Athie, Yorgos Stefanos, Hunter Schafer. Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Anthony Gasparro. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix.  

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970)

Cast: Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Enrico Maria Salerno, Eva Renzi, Umberto Raho, Renato Romano, Giuseppe Castellano, Mario Adorf, Pino Patti. Screenplay: Dario Argento, based on a novel by Fredric Brown. Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro. Production design: Dario Micheli, Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Ennio Morricone. 

The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996)

Woody Harrelson in The People vs. Larry Flynt

Cast: Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward Norton, Brett Harrelson, Donna Hanover, James Cromwell, Crispin Glover, Vincent Schiavelli, Miles Chapin, James Carville, Richard Paul, Larry Flynt. Screenplay: Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski. Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot. Production design: Patrizia von Brandenstein. Film editing: Christopher Tellefsen. Music: Thomas Newman. 

The People vs. Larry Flynt succeeds as a message movie, demonstrating that even the most obnoxious among us -- and Larry Flynt was certainly that -- deserves the protection of the First Amendment. Of course, the movie didn't have to do that for us; the Rehnquist Supreme Court did it, unanimously. (I have to wonder if today's court, with so many justices appointed by a president who railed against the news media as "fake" and referred to the press as enemies of the people, would do likewise.) Where the film falls down is in its efforts to be a biopic as well as a message movie. We get a glimpse of Flynt's backwoods Kentucky boyhood as a bootlegger who tries to keep his father from drinking up the profits, and we see how Flynt moved from strip club owner to magazine publisher, but none of this sheds enough light on how the flamboyantly defiant personality came together. Too much time is spent on Flynt's short-lived conversion to religion under the guidance of Jimmy Carter's sister, Ruth Stapleton (Donna Hanover), without tying it either to his past or to his emergence as a champion of free speech. But the portrayal of Flynt's relationship with Althea Leasure (entertainingly played by Courtney Love) does give us an insight into his mixture of rebellion and convention, as the two decidedly promiscuous people decide to get married. Nothing but love, it seems, can tame the beast. Certainly not the law. Woody Harrelson gets a chance to go over the top in the courtroom scenes, and he takes it wonderfully. Edward Norton is good, too, as Alan Isaacman, the Harvard-trained lawyer who has to put up with this yahoo. The People vs. Larry Flynt might have held together better if Flynt's story had been told from Isaacman's point of view instead of the somewhat glossy, somewhat reticent, somewhat too admiring account the screenplay gives us.  

Bell' Antonio (Mauro Bolognini, 1960)

Claudia Cardinale and Marcello Mastroianni in Bell' Antonio

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Pierre Brasseur, Rina Morelli, Tomas Milian, Fulvia Mammi, Patrizia Bini, Ugo Torrente. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gino Visentini, based on a novel by Vialiano Brancati. Cinematography: Armando Nannuzzi. Production design: Carlo Egidi. Film editing: Nino Baragli. Music: Piero Piccioni. 

There's no surer target for satire than hypocrisy, particularly when it's rooted in antiquated social mores and religious bigotry. And for Italian filmmakers, there was no more frequent locus for satirizing hypocrisy than Sicily, which was regarded by Northern Italians much the way the American South is seen by the "coastal elites": set in its ways and in the grip of religious intolerance. Usually, Italian films set in Sicily and lampooning hypocrisy are raucous and farcical: Think of Pietro Germi's films Seduced and Abandoned (1964), about the hubbub that ensues when an unmarried woman is discovered to be pregnant, and Divorce, Italian Style (1961), in which Marcello Mastroianni's character comes up against the fact that divorce is illegal, so he plots to catch the wife he doesn't love in an affair and get rid of her by means of an "honor killing." Both films were preceded by Mauro Bolognini's Bell' Antonio, which is just as deeply satiric, but takes a more sober tone in dealing with its subject: a concept of masculinity reinforced by society and supported by the church. There's no better way to appreciate Mastroianni's skill as an actor than to watch Bolognini's film back to back with Divorce, Italian Style. Cocksure and preening in Germi's film, he's lovestruck and tormented in Bolognini's, in which he plays the handsome Antonio of the title, a man with a reputation as a lover of many women, who has slept around but turns impotent when he's with a woman he truly loves. Wedded to the woman of his dreams, Barbara (Claudia Cardinale), he's unable to consummate the marriage and for a while takes advantage of his wife's sexual ignorance. But she discovers that she's been missing something, and takes advantage of the situation to have the marriage annulled so she can marry a much richer man than Antonio. When word of his impotence gets out, not only Antonio but also his bragging, macho father, Alfio (Pierre Brasseur), are ruined in the eyes of the society in which they live. Bell' Antonio is often funny, but not in the broadly comic way of Germi's. Bolognini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's screenplay, view Antonio's plight with sympathy, casting the blame on the reinforcement of machismo by society and church.