A Chinese Ghost Story II (Ching Siu-tung, 1990)

Joey Wong and Leslie Cheung in A Chinese Ghost Story II

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Joey Wong, Michelle Reis, Jacky Cheung, Wu Ma, Lau Siu-Ming, Waise Lee, Ku Feng, Lau Shun, To Siu-chun. Screenplay: Edward Leung Yiu-ming, Lam Kei-to, Lau Tai-muk. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Special effects: Nick Allder, David H. Watkins. Film editing: Marco Mak. 

A non-stop, no-holds-barred extravaganza of ghosts, demons, monsters, swordsmen, priests, princesses, and whatever else can be dredged up from Chinese myth and legend, Ching Siu-tung's followup to the 1987 original, A Chinese Ghost Story II does what the first film didn't: It makes the characters secondary to the special effects. Which is not to say it isn't entertaining, but the gifts of its attractive performers are almost incidental. The head-spinning plot follows Leslie Cheung's naive young tax collector Ning Choi San in the aftermath of his romance with a beautiful ghost (Joey Wong). Wrongfully imprisoned, he escapes with the aid of his fellow prisoner, the scholar Elder Chu (Ku Feng), on a horse he unwittingly -- Ning does most things by accident -- steals from a magician, Chi Chau (Jacky Cheung), and winds up in the company of two beautiful sisters, Ching Fung (Wong) and Yuet Chi (Michelle Reis), who mistake him for the real Elder Chu. They and their retinue are trying to free their father, Lord Fu (Lau Siu-Ming), who has also been wrongly charged with a crime and now faces execution. And as if all this weren't confusing enough, Ching Fung is an exact double for Ning's ghostly love -- a fact that astonishes Ning but the film doesn't bother to account for. Ning's old accomplice, the Taoist priest played by Wu Ma, returns too. Everything winds up in a welter of supernatural phenomena that features, among other things, a centipede the size of a subway train and much swooping and swirling of mysterious forces. It's a lot of noisy fun if you don't insist on logic and coherence.   

Heroes Shed No Tears (John Woo, 1984)

Eddy Ko in Heroes Shed No Tears

Cast: Eddy Ko, Lam Ching-ying, Philippe Loffredo, Cécile Le Bailly, Chau Sang Lau, Yuet Sang Chin, Ma Ying-chun, Doo Hee Jang, Lee Hye-sook. Screenplay: Peter Ho-Sun Chan, Chiu Leung-chun, John Woo. Cinematography: Kenichi Nakagawa. Art direction: Fung Yuen-chi. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Tang Siu-lam. 

Aside from some of John Woo's characteristically volatile action scenes, his early film Heroes Shed No Tears is a fairly forgettable movie about an incursion of some mercenaries led by soldier of fortune Chan Chung (Eddy Ko) into the drug-running area called the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge. The mission is complicated when Chan is reunited with his young son (Ma Ying-chun) and the team is encumbered not only with the boy but also his pretty aunt (Lee Hye-sook) and a French reporter (Cécile Le Bailly). Along the way, they also join up with Louis (Philippe Loffredo), an American expat, and are menaced by a vicious Vietnamese colonel (Lam Ching-ying), who captures Chan and tortures him. The action is interrupted by some sex scenes at Louis's residence that are uncharacteristic of Yoo's work and which he claims he didn't direct, as well as some pointless comic episodes involving some of Chan's fellow mercenaries. In short, it's sort of a mess, and Woo has expressed regret that it's part of his filmography.

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)

Idris Elba in A House of Dynamite

Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Malachi Beasley. Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim. Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd. Production design: Jeremy Hindle. Film editing: Kirk Baxter. Music: Volker Bertelmann. 

Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite is a very smart movie that evidently went over some people's heads. A chorus of complaints about its ending followed its theatrical release and multiplied when it began streaming on Netflix. The complainers seem to have been expecting a conventional thriller like, for example, Crimson Tide, Tony Scott's 1995 movie about a nuclear threat that is averted at the last moment. Instead, what they got is a depiction of the potential for annihilation that comes from living in a world that is quite literally what the title of the film implies. I don't know what sort of conclusion the dissatisfied viewers might give to the situation depicted, which comes down to "surrender or suicide," as the adviser (Gabriel Basso) tells the president (Idris Elba). The film makes it seem possible that the fate of the world might depend on what it depicts as flimsy contingency plans, a few frightened government and military officials, and what the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) in the film calls "a coin toss." I watched A House of Dynamite on the day that our president announced that he was resuming tests of nuclear weapons, so I may have been more receptive to the movie's message than otherwise, but it still seems to me a well-made and terrifying film. 

Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990)

Waise Lee, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and Jacky Cheung in Bullet in the Head

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Jacky Cheung, Waise Lee, Simon Yam, Yolinda Yam, Cheung Lam, Fennie Yuen. Screenplay: John Woo, Patrick Leung, Janet Chun. Cinematography: Wilson Chan, Ardy Lam, Chai Kittikum Som, Wong Wing-hang. Production design: James Leung. Film editing: John Woo, David Wu. Music: Sherman Chow. 

A harrowing story that begins in a larky mood, John Woo's Bullet in the Head features the usual copious amounts of bloody gunfire, but it lacks the cheeky over-the-top quality of some of his more popular movies. It centers on the adventures of three friends from the wrong side of the tracks in Hong Kong, who think they're going to make big money smuggling stuff into wartime Vietnam, but misjudge the chaotic situation in the country. In Saigon, Ben (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), Fai Jai (Jacky Cheung), and Ming (Waise Lee) connect with the Eurasian Lok (Simon Yam), who works for the gangster Leong (Chung Lam), but wants to escape his control. The four of them make plans to return to Hong Kong, taking with them the nightclub singer Sally (Yolinda Yam), who has been forced into prostitution by Leong. Needless to say, that doesn't turn out to be easy. After a big shootout at Leong's nightclub, in which Sally is wounded. their escape is thwarted by, among other things, the Vietcong, who capture and torture Ben, Fai Jai, and Ming. The friendship of the three is also tested by Ming's greedy insistence on clinging to a box of gold he found in the shootout at Leong's club. Nothing ends well for them. The darkness and seriousness of the story is sometimes at odds with the elaborate action sequences, and Woo was exhausted by the effort to make the film work. It was not a commercial success, but it has moments of real feeling provided by the fine performances of its actors.  

A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon (Tsui Hark, 1989)

Chow Yun-fat in A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Anita Mui, Shih Kien, Saburo Tokito, Maggie Cheung Ho-yee, Chen Wai-lun, Andrew Kam, Foo Wang-tat, Nam Yin. Screenplay: Edward Leung, Tai Foo-ho, Tsui Hark. Cinematography: Horace Wong, Yung Chun-wa, Chik Kim-kiy. Art direction: Lu Zifeng. Film editing: Marco Mak, Tsui Hark, David Wu. Music: Lowell Lo, David Wu.

A stand-alone film posing as a prequel, Tsui Hark's A Better Tomorrow III has only the presence of the most charismatic actor in the first two films, Chow Yun-fat, in the role of Mark Lee, to link it with the first two. And the only significant things it adds to the character are explanations of how he learned to shoot and how he got the black duster that he swaggers about in. The plot is summed up in the subtitle, Love and Death in Saigon. It's 1974 and the Vietnam War is coming to its end when Mark goes there to help his uncle (Shih Kien) and cousin, Michael Cheung Chi-mun (Tony Leung Ka-fai), close up shop in Saigon and return to Hong Kong. But he gets in trouble at the airport and has to be helped out by Chow Ying-kit (Anita Mui), a woman with whom he has been flirting. Though Mark finds Kit attractive, it's his cousin Michael who falls hard for her. She, on the other hand, prefers Mark. She also turns out to be involved in a variety of shady businesses, including gun smuggling. So not only do we have a romantic triangle to spin the plot on, we also have various underworld conflicts as well as the chaos of the fall of Saigon to provide the usual bloodshed. It's not a bad movie: There's plenty of action, Mui and Chow are in good form, and there's some poignancy in the fate of the characters. But it lacks the exhilaration of style that John Woo brought to the first two installments.

A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987)

Ti Lung, Dean Shek, and Chow Yun-fat in A Better Tomorrow II

Cast: Ti Lung, Chow Yun-fat, Leslie Cheung, Dean Shek, Kwan Shan, Emily Chu, Kenneth Tsang, Shing Fui-On, Lam Chung, Ng Man-tat, Peter Wang, Lung Ming-yan, Louis Roth, Regina Kent, Ken Boyle. Screenplay: Chan Hing-ka, Leung Suk-wah, John Woo, Tsui Hark. Cinematography: Wong Wing-hung. Production design: Andy Lee, Luk Tze-fung. Film editing: David Wu. Music: Joseph Koo, Lowell Lo. 

When you have a big action movie hit like A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986), you naturally want to make a sequel. But what do you do when the most popular character was killed off in the first film? You give him a previously unknown identical twin, of course. And not just a look-alike, but a twin with the same mannerisms, like chewing on an unlit matchstick. and equal proficiency at gunplay. And so Chow Yun-fat's Mark Lee is reincarnated in A Better Tomorrow II as Ken Lee. The sequel is bloodier and noisier and more improbable than the original, and it adds a fourth protagonist to the original trio of Ho (Ti Lung), Kit (Leslie Cheung), and Mark, now Ken (Chow): Dean Shek as Lung Sei, the target of a police investigation who turns out to be a good guy being framed. The somewhat too twisty plot takes Lung to New York, fleeing arrest for murder, where he meets up with Ken, a restaurant owner who is in trouble with the mob in America. It also introduces a novel kind of psychotherapy: Lung has a mental breakdown when he learns that the mob back in Hong Kong has killed his daughter and he witnesses the murder of a friend and a little girl. Ken takes it upon himself to heal the catatonic Lung by subjecting him to gunfire: They're attacked by both the Hong Kong and American mobsters. Lung recovers in time to help, and somehow the two of them make their way back home, where they join forces with Ho and Kit. Woo, who was reluctant to make the sequel, agreed in order to give Shek, a friend of his in financial difficulties, a job. Tension between Woo and producer Tsui Hark almost derailed the film, which spends too much time in the New York scenes, but the action sequences are the usual spectacular and inventive overkill. 

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

Chow Yun-fat and Ti Lung in A Better Tomorrow

Cast: Ti Lung, Leslie Cheung, Chow Yun-fat, Emily Chu, Waise Lee, Tien Feng, Kenneth Tsang, Shing Fui-on, Sek Yin-si, Wang Hsieh, Leung Ming, John Woo, Tsui Hark. Screenplay: Chan Hing-ka, Leung Suk-wah, John Woo. Cinematography: Wong Wing-hang. Production design: Lui Chi Leung. Film editing: Ma Kam, David Woo. Music: Joseph Koo. 

John Woo's terrific action thriller A Better Tomorrow is less stylized and more conventionally plotted than his later films, but it provides a satisfactory amount of bullets and blood squibs. It's based on an old trope of melodrama: estranged brothers. Sung Tse-ho (Ti Lung) is a gangster involved in a counterfeit operation, and Sung Tse-kit (Leslie Cheung) is a rookie cop. Ho is trying to go straight, however, and he goes to prison partly to sever his ties with the mob in order to make a fresh start after his release. But Kit finds that his older brother's record is an impediment to his advancement in the police force, and he rejects Ho's attempts to reconcile, blaming him for their father's death. The plot centers on their rapprochement, which is ultimately aided by Ho's best friend and fellow mobster, Mark Lee (Chow Yun-fat). Though billed third, Chow steals the movie as the blithe hit man who gets wounded in a shootout, loses favor with the mob, and eventually turns against them. A Better Tomorrow was such a big hit that sequels became inevitable, but as usual the original is the best. 

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

Shauna Macdonald in The Descent

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone, Oliver Milburn, Molly Kayl, Craig Conway. Screenplay: Neil Marshall. Cinematography: Sam McCurdy. Production design: Simon Bowles. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: David Julyan.

Neil Marshall's The Descent is notorious for having two endings, one for American audiences and a darker, more ambiguous one for the rest of the world. Neither ending, it seems to me, is satisfactory, but the choice itself points out the difficulty with genre films: What sort of conclusion do you put on a movie that has potential spinoffs lurking in its plot? Structurally, The Descent reflects the influence of sequelitis. As a claustrophobe, I was suitably terrified by the film when it looked like it was going to be an exciting and scary survival adventure. But then, midway, The Descent turns into a monster movie, and at that point it became "just a movie" to me: actors in makeup on obvious sound stage sets. I also preferred the movie when it seemed that there were going to be real characters in it, but then Marshall fails to provide distinct personalities for each of the six women who brave the adventure. Four of them fall by the way as the hero (Shauna Macdonald as Sarah) and the villain (Natalie Mendoza as Juno) battle each other along with the threatening creepers. We know Sarah is the hero because she has previously suffered a terrible loss, just as we know Juno is the villain because she's an adrenaline junkie likely to put them in danger. Skillfully made, and undeniably involving, The Descent sadly falls into genre clichés. 

REC (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007)

Manuela Velasco in REC

Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Teraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Pablo Rosso, David Vert, Vicente Gil, Martha Carbonell, Carlos Vicente, Maria Teresa Ortega, Manuel Bronchud, Akemi Goto, Kao Chenmin, Maria Lanau, Claudia Silva, Carlos Lasarte. Screenplay: Jaume Balagueró, Luiso Berdejo, Paco Plaza. Cinematography: Pablo Rosso. Production design: Gemma Fauria. Film editing: David Gallart. 

Messy and unsettling, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's REC takes the camera's viewpoint as a vapid young TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman (cinematographer Pablo Rosso, voiced by Javier Coromina) tape an episode for a TV series. They ride along with a small crew of firefighters on what sounds like a routine call: The screams of a woman in a locked apartment have disturbed her neighbors. Once there, however, they and the cops who join them not only encounter the unexpected, but they're also forced to stay in the building after it's quarantined by the authorities for a suspected biohazard. I wish that Velasco's character had not been allowed to grow so screechy and hysterical as the events they encounter escalate -- they're nerve-wracking enough on their own -- but REC does the "found footage" approach to horror as well as I've ever seen it done. Though it winds up as pretty much a routine "zombie virus" movie, it has a bloody actuality that's quite disturbing.
 

The Glass Shield (Charles Burnett, 1994)

Michael Boatman and Lori Petty in The Glass Shield

Cast: Michael Boatman, Lori Petty, Erich Anderson, Richard Anderson, Bernie Casey, Linden Chiles, Wanda De Jesus, Victoria Dillard, Elliott Gould, Don Harvey, Tommy Hicks, Ice Cube, Michael Ironside, Natalija Nogulich, Drew Snyder, M. Emmet Walsh. Screenplay: Charles Burnett, based on a screenplay by John Eddie Johnson and Ned Welsh. Cinematography: Elliot Davis. Production design: Penny Barrett. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton. Music: Stephen James Taylor. 

Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield starts as a movie about racism and sexism, but then wanders into whodunit territory, becomes a trial drama, and winds up as an indictment of the corruption-breeding cronyism of police departments. Michael Boatman and Lori Petty play rookies in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department who, because they're the first Black and first woman in the department, immediately become outsiders, regarded as "diversity hires." Petty's Deborah Fields, trained as a lawyer, remains on the defensive, while Boatman's J.J. Johnson decides to go along and get along. They find themselves, however, investigating a murder that has been pinned on a young Black man (Ice Cube), whose arrest Johnson had a part in bringing about. Boatman and Petty are too lightweight for the roles they've been asked to play, especially since the cast is loaded with such heavyweight character actors as M. Emmet Walsh, Michael Ironside, and Elliott Gould. This miscasting causes the film to lose what focus its rather complicated screenplay possesses. To its credit, The Glass Shield, which was made after the Rodney King trial but before the O.J. Simpson trial, feels prescient, and it doesn't come up with pat answers to the problems it exposes. 

Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973)

Marlene Clark in Ganja & Hess

Cast: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn, Sam L. Waymon, Leonard Jackson, Candece Tarpley, Richard Harrow, John Hoffmeister, Betty Barney, Mabel King. Betsy Thurman, Tommy Lane, Tara Fields. Screenplay: Bill Gunn. Cinematography: James E. Hinton. Production design: Tom H. John. Film editing: Victor Kanefsky. Music: Sam L. Waymon. 

Bill Gunn's astonishing Ganja & Hess is a deconstruction of both the vampire legend and Christian mythography posing as a horror movie. It focuses on the common element of both: blood. And it does it so effectively that perhaps its most chilling scene comes at the end of the film: children singing the hymn "There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood." Made on a small budget, Gunn's film premiered at Cannes to an enthusiastic reception, but failed at the American box office and was pulled from distribution except for a radically recut version called Blood Couple that Gunn had his name removed from. Spike Lee attempted a remake in 2014 called Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, but it lacks the rawness and authenticity of the original. I can think of no other "vampire movie" that has a comparable effect except perhaps Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025).  

Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986)

Brigitte Lin, Cherie Chung, and Sally Yeh in Peking Opera Blues

Cast: Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh, Cherie Chung, Mark Ho-nam Cheng, Cheung Kwok Keung, Kenneth Tsang, Wu Ma, Ku Feng, Lee Hoi-sang, Leong Po-Chih, Huang Ha, Sandra Ng. Screenplay: Raymond To. Cinematography: Hang-Sang Poon. Production design: Kim-Sing Ho, Chi-Heng Leung, Vincent Wai. Film editing: David Wu. Music: James Wong. 

All flash and dazzle and most of all color, Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues is a nonstop action comedy that uses the elaborate costumes of Chinese opera to kaleidoscopic effect. The plot is a tangle of nonsense about stealing some documents that support a revolutionary movement in China in 1914, but mostly it's designed to provide excuses for gunfights and hair's-breadth escapes. The protagonists are three young women who wind up as collaborators, aided by two young men. They don't escape harm: One of the men is seriously wounded by gunfire and one of the women is captured and mercilessly tortured, but both bounce back with a resilience that tests credulity but keeps the action going. There's also a good deal of queerness: One of the women dresses as a man, and the fact that women in Peking Opera were played by men provides some not exactly tasteful humor. Fortunately, Hark keeps things going so fast and furiously that it takes an effort of will to be offended by the movie. 

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later

Cast: Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Edvin Ryding, Chi Lewis-Parry, Christopher Fulford, Stella Gonet. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle. Production design: Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: Young Fathers. 

Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later is an installment posing as a sequel, so no wonder it frustrated many who were expecting a self-contained film. The next installment, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is due in January 2026. But although this installment begins and ends with a character who gets very little screen time, there's a nice coherence to what Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have put together, centered on young Spike (Alfie Williams). It's a coming-of-age fable about living up to society's idea of manhood, in which Spike is initiated by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a hunt for the infected, the zombiefied humans introduced by Boyle and Garland in 28 Days Later (2002). Spike's disillusionment and loss constitute the plot of the film, which is also a satire on post-Brexit Britain posing as a monster movie. Good performances, especially by Williams and by Jodie Comer as his mother, suffering from an illness that the post-apocalyptic community in which they live is unable to diagnose, carry the installment as far as it was designed to go. On the other hand, it's not a movie that left me hungry for more.  

Lips of Blood (Jean Rollin, 1975)

Catherine Castel and Marie-Pierre Castel in Lips of Blood

Cast: Jean-Loup Philippe, Annie Bell, Natalie Perrey, Martine Grimaud, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel, Hélène Maguin, Anita Berglund, Claudine Beccarie, Béatrice Harnois. Screenplay: Jean-Loup Philippe, Jean Rollin. Cinematography: Jean-François Robin. Production design: Alain Pitrel. Film editing: Olivier Grégoire. Music: Didier William Lepauw. 

Would Jean Rollin's Lips of Blood be as creepy if it had been made on a generous budget with capable actors? Or is it the very cheesiness -- the fake fangs, the clumsy continuity, the gratuitous nudity, the patchy editing -- that makes it more interesting and memorable than slicker Hollywood horror movies? Because even when I'm laughing at some of Rollin's dodges and exploitative moments or wondering why he paces the action so slowly, I find myself drawn into the movie. Rollin is a master at finding and using real settings, from the crumbling Château Gaillard in Normandy to the Métro, the Trocadero gardens, and the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, which provide the right atmosphere and give the preposterous vampire love story an actuality that it doesn't deserve.   

The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova, 1971)

Oleg Vladimirsky and Zinaida Sharko in The Long Farewell

Cast: Zinaida Sharko, Oleg Vladimirsky, Yuriy Kayurov, Svetlana Kabanova. Screenplay: Natalya Ryazantseva. Cinematography: Gennady Karyuk. Production design: Enrique Rodriguez. Film editing: Valentina Oleynik. Music: Oleg Karavaychuk. 

Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) has just returned home to his mother, Yevgeniya (Zinaida Sharko), from a visit to his father in Novosibirsk, a long way away from their home in Ukraine. His parents separated when he was very small, but now that he's a teenager, about to set out on his own, Sasha thinks he might just go live with his father. Yevgeniya, naturally, isn't very happy about this. That situation gives Kira Muratova's The Long Farewell its substance; there is no plot. It's a film that depends greatly on our empathy with the characters, and empathy was not valued very much by the Soviet ideologues who got Muratova into a bit of trouble. (The same attitude seems to be true of the right-wingers currently in charge in the U.S.) But Muratova and her two lead performers know exactly how to generate it in the audience, which makes the film such a quietly memorable one. Most of it deals with the fraying relationship between mother and son, as they get on each other's nerves, but there's a key scene that brings the movie's themes into focus. Yevgeniya is in the post office where she's asked by a man to write a letter to his family for her -- he has forgotten his glasses. As he dictates it to her, the things he says about being separated from them clearly resonate with her. Sharko, who was a celebrated stage actress in the Soviet Union, is marvelous. Vladimirsky, an actor whose career is otherwise undocumented on the internet, is equally good, with a presence reminiscent of the young Anthony Perkins. The Long Farewell is a slender but poignant film much enlivened by Muratova's sly finesse with the camera and in the editing room.  

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Demi Moore in The Substance

Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Edward Hamilton-Clark, Gore Abrams, Oscar Lesage, Christian Erickson, Robin Greer, Tom Morton, Yann Bean (voice). Screenplay: Coralie Fargeat. Cinematography: Benjamin Kracun. Production design: Stanislas Reydellet. Film editing: Jerome Eltabet, Coralie Fargeat, Valentin Féron. Music: Raffertie. 

The fluids and textures of body horror have seldom been used for a satirically intense purpose as in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance. But the film wouldn't work without the courageous performance of Demi Moore, who brings her own image as a fading superstar to the movie. She provides a core of actuality to what is often an absurdly tongue-in-cheek film, in which people (including the character she plays) blithely do stupid things and in which plot holes and improbably over-the-top doings are abundant. The scene in which she prepares for a date in front of a mirror, applying and wiping away her makeup and then applying and removing it again, is more effective in its way than any of the scenes in which she is smothered in slimy and oozing prosthetics. As a fable about Hollywood's exploitation of women by men, embodied by Dennis Quaid as the producer named (with obvious aptness) Harvey, The Substance is sometimes blatant and a bit shrill, but the deeper target is our own body-consciousness, and in this area the film leaves us queasily examining our private obsession with age and decay.  

A Confucian Confusion (Edward Yang, 1994)

Chen Shiang-chyi and Suk Kwan Ni in A Confucian Confusion

Cast: Chen Shiang-chyi, Yiwan Chen, Danny Dun, Hung Hung, Elaine Jin, Chen Limei, Richie Li, Suk Kwan Ni, Bosen Wang, Weiming Wang, Yeming Wang. Screenplay: Edward Yang. Cinematography: Chang Chan, Hung Wu-hsiu, Li Lung-yu, Arthur Wong. Production design: Ernest Guan, Tsai Chen, Edward Yang, Yao Jui-chung. Film editing: Chen Po-wen. Music: Antonio Lee. 

Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion is a satiric but ultimately benign look at yuppies in a boom town, Taipei in the '90s. Nothing is fixed and stable about their lives, as they rise and fall, couple and uncouple in their pursuit of fortune. It's animated by the lively performances of its ensemble and the typically novelistic detail of Yang's narrative. The film itself had deteriorated somewhat since it was released, and has been restored, but I still found some of its scenes less clearly lit than they could have been. 

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999)

James Earl Jones in The Annihilation of Fish

Cast: James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder. Screenplay: Anthony C. Winkler. Cinematography: John L. Dempsey Jr., Rick Robinson. Production design: Nina Ruscio. Film editing: Nancy Richardson. Music: Laura Karpman. 

I was surprised that The Annihilation of Fish was written for the screen and not adapted from a play. Anthony C. Winkler's script is mostly talk, the action is largely confined to one setting, and it makes use of only three characters. James Earl Jones plays Fish, a man who believes he is being harassed by a demon; Lynn Redgrave is Poinsettia, who believes that her lover is Giacomo Puccini; and Margot Kidder is their landlady, Mrs. Mudroone, and God forbid if you ever spell her name without the final E. The plot, such as it is, comes from bringing the three together in Mrs. Muldroone's Los Angeles rooming house, where the two misfits, Fish and Poinsettia, fall in love (and into bed) while dealing with Fish's invisible demon, whom he literally wrestles and she finally kills, precipitating a crisis that threatens to end their affair. All three performers are wonderful, and some people find the film charming and funny, but I began to be more annoyed than intrigued by their eccentricities. 

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

Masaki Suda in Cloud

Cast: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masaaki Akahori, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Yugo Mikawa, Maho Yamada, Toshihiro Yashiba. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Yasayuki Sasaki. Production design: Kyoko Matsui. Film editing: Koichi Takahashi. Music: Takuma Watanabe. 

A cloud is just a fog that keeps its distance. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, it's that place in cyberspace where we do and store things, but it descends upon Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) as a miasma filled with people who wish to do him harm. He has been raking in the yen as a reseller of dubious goods, buying them from distressed sellers and putting them online at marked-up prices. He has made enough money to quit his factory job and move with his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), to a place in the country, where he continues his work with the aid of a young man called Sano (Daiken Okudaira), whom he hires as an assistant. But then he starts getting mysteriously harassed and threatened, and before long he discovers that a group has formed online of people who would do him real harm. They include his former boss, a rival reseller, retailers whose goods he has bought and resold, and dissatisfied customers -- some of the products he sold were fakes. Things escalate until he is fighting for his life, aided to his surprise by Sano, whom he has fired. Cloud is a bit of a mashup: It's a satire on capitalism, an old-fashioned revenge thriller, and a moral fable, and its ending suggests that there's more going on in the background of the story than has met the eye. The film disappointed some of Kurosawa's fans, who expected more of the psychological horror for which he has become known, but I found it skillfully made and provocative. 

Judgment Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993)

Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven, Emilio Estevez, Stephen Dorff, and Michael DeLorenzo in Judgment Night

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Denis Leary, Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven, Peter Greene, Erik Schrody, Michael Wiseman, Michael DeLorenzo, Relioues Webb, Will Zahrn, Eugene Williams. Screenplay: Lewis Colick, Jere Cunningham. Cinematography: Peter Levy. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Tim Wellburn. Music: Alan Silvestri. 

Judgment Night is a routine thriller about four suburban knuckleheads who head into the big bad city and wind up in a preposterous amount of trouble. They're the usual types: the Good Guy (Emilio Estevez), the Kid Brother (Stephen Dorff), the Adrenaline Junkie (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and the Jerk (Jeremy Piven). In the Dark City -- the Chicago of Donald Trump's imaginings -- they face off against the Sneering Gang Boss (Denis Leary), his Menacing Sidekick (Peter Greene), and a host of undifferentiated Thugs. They're chased through a Bleak Railyard, into a Decaying Housing Project, and everything winds up in a place where there's a lot of Stuff to Break. Director Stephen Hopkins, working from a much-rewritten script, treats it all as if it were new and interesting, but this is a case where if you've ever seen an action thriller you know what to expect. 

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, 1976)

Joel Grey, Geraldine Chaplin, and Paul Newman in Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Cast: Paul Newman, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster, Allan F. Nicholls, Geraldine Chaplin, John Considine, Will Sampson, Frank Kaquitts, Robert DoQui, Mike Kaplan, Burt Remsen, Bonnie Leaders, Noelle Rogers, Evelyn Lear, Denver Pyle, Pat McCormick, Shelley Duvall. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph, Robert Altman, suggested by a play by Arthur Kopit. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Production design: Anthony Masters. Film editing: Peter Appleton, Dennis M. Hill. Music: Richard Baskin. 

"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be," says Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) in Robert Altman's deconstruction of the Wild West myth that Bill Cody, with the help of the novelist Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster), had created. Buffalo Bill and the Indians premiered in the bicentennial year of 1976 and was poorly received by both critics and audiences, though probably not because of any offenses to patriotism. It's overlong and unfocused, relying more on Newman's charisma than on any attempt at giving the character depth and substance. It's no revelation that the man who made the myth of the Wild West was a racist and an egomaniac. There are amusing moments: Joel Grey delivers the malapropisms of Nate Salisbury, the producer of Bill's show, with sly finesse, and Geraldine Chaplin and John Considine spar nicely as Annie Oakley and Frank Butler. Bill's supposed infatuation with opera singers lets Evelyn Lear, as a soprano called Nina Cavallini, beautifully sing "The Last Rose of Summer" in Italian. But the movie has nowhere to go. If Sitting Bull does teach Buffalo Bill a history lesson, as the subtitle suggests, it doesn't seem to have any effect.  

Alucarda (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)

Tina Romero and Susana Kamini in Alucarda

Cast: Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, Claudio Brook, David Silva, Tina French, Brigitta Segerskog, Lili Garza, Adriana Roel, Martin LaSalle. Screenplay: Alexis Arroyo, Juan López Moctezuma, Tita Arroyo, Yolanda López Moctezuma, based on a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. Cinematography: Xavier Cruz. Art direction: Kleomenes Stamatiades. Film editing: Maximo Sánchez Molina. Music: Anthony Guefen.

Juan López Moctezuma's lurid, loony Alucarda takes place mostly in the environs of an orphanage run by nuns, who seem to belong to no usual order: Instead of black, their habits and wimples are a dingy white -- the better to get soiled and bloodied, as we'll see. The plot, such as it is, centers on Justine (Susana Kamini), a teenager who comes to the orphanage on the death of her parents, and is immediately taken under the wing of another teenage orphan, Alucarda (Tina Romero), who seems not to have given the nuns much trouble until Justine arrives, and then ... well, for once the cliché "all hell breaks loose" seems appropriate. Both girls go nuts, but it's Justine in particular who causes the attending priest, Father Lázaro (David Silva), to intone "we must do [portentous pause] an exorcism!" [Gasp from the assembled nuns.] In this case expelling the demon appears to involve stripping Justine naked, chaining her to a forked cross, and poking holes into her. This goes on until the attending doctor (Claudio Brook, who also doubles as an avatar of Satan) arrives to put a stop to it, whereupon Father Lázaro and the nuns go into a frenzy of penitential flagellation. But the doctor's efforts to use reason don't work either. Alucarda has some of the clunkiest dialogue and most wooden delivery of it that I've encountered in many a month of movie-watching. But it's also compulsively, perversely watchable, and not just in a condescending way because of its campiness or its exploitative nudity and blasphemy. In this tale of God vs. Satan, Satan seems to get the upper hand, despite the efforts of both religion and science to thwart him.  

Hard-Boiled (John Woo, 1992)

ChowYun-fat in Hard-Boiled

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan, Phillip Kwok, Anthony Wong, Kwan Hoi-san, Stephen Tung, Bowie Lam, Lo Meng, Bobby Au-yeung. Screenplay: John Woo, Barry Wong, Gordon Chan. Cinematography: Wang Wing-heng. Production design: James Leung. Film editing: John Woo, David Wu, Kai Kit-wai, Jack Ah. Music: Michael Gibbs.

About as much fun as you can have watching people die by the dozens. Don't get me wrong: I laughed out loud several times during John Woo's action masterpiece Hard-Boiled, as when Tequila's pants caught fire and the baby he was carrying peed and doused the flames. It's a rush of kinetic effects, and Chow Yun-fat as Yuen (aka Tequila) and Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Alan (or perhaps Ah Long, as the subtitles put it) have chemistry and charisma to spare. But once the dizzying, exhilarating action is over, you're not left with much beyond a pleasant buzz and in my case a nagging feeling that maybe you shouldn't really enjoy mindless violence so much. It's an "it's only a movie" movie that depends on your assurance that those are stuntmen firing fake guns and flinging themselves about and the blood is red stuff packed into squibs. Yet maybe, living as we Americans do in a gun culture, we ought to have an occasional afterthought about what we enjoy so much.

Brief Encounters (Kira Muratova, 1967)

Vladimir Vysotskiy and Kira Muratova in Brief Encounters

Cast: Kira Muratova, Nina Ruslanova, Vladimir Vysotskiy, Lidiya Bazilskaya, Olga Viklandt, Aleksey Glazyrin, Valeri Isakov, Tatyana Midnaya, Kirill Marinchenko, Svetlana Nimolyaeva, Grigoriy Kogan. Screenplay: Kira Muratova, Leonid Zhukovitsky. Cinematography: Gennady Karyuk. Production design: Aleksandra Konardova, Oleg Perederiy. Film editing: O. Kharakova. Music: Oleg Karavaychuk. 

Kira Muratov's first feature, Brief Encounters, is a deftly handled romantic drama about a middle-aged woman, Valentina (Muratova), her not-so-faithful husband, Maksim (Vladimir Vysotskiy), and a pretty young woman, Nadya (Nina Ruslanova), whom Valentina hires as a housekeeper. What neither Valentina nor Nadya realizes when the hiring takes place is that Nadya and Maksim have already met. The process of discovering that fact and dealing with it constitutes the plot. In the meantime, we see the satire-tinged portrait of Valentina's life as a bureaucrat in the city of Odesa, dealing with contractors who cut corners and people anxious to occupy the apartment houses they're building. Muratova wittily fragments the narrative, with flashbacks to the on-the-road encounter of Nadya and Maksim, who is a geologist exploring the rural Ukraine that Nadya is eager to leave. It's the kind of movie whose narrative technique demands attention, but it's also engaging enough that you want to go back and watch it again once you've sorted out the relationships of the characters. 

A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu-tung, 1987)

Leslie Cheung and Joey Wong in A Chinese Ghost Story

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Joey Wong, Wu Ma, Lau Siu-ming, Lam Wai, Xue Zhilun, Wong Jing, David Wu. Screenplay: Yuen Kai-chi, based on stories by Pu Songling. Cinematography: Poon Hang-sang, Sander Lee Kar-ko, Tom Lau Moon-tong, Wong Wing-hang. Production design: Yee Chung-man. Film editing: David Wu. Music: Romeo Diaz, James Wong.

I hadn't expected a Chinese ghost story, or rather a film with that title (the original Chinese title translates as The Ethereal Spirit of a Beauty), to be so funny. But Chiung Siu-tung's frenetic melange of horror tropes, legend, slapstick, martial arts, and satire is just that, thanks to a charming comic performance by Leslie Cheung. He plays a novice tax collector trying to do his job in a village and meeting more than the usual resistance. Forced to spend the night in an abandoned temple, he encounters a beautiful young woman (Joey Wong) and a Taoist priest (Wu Ma). The latter informs him that the young woman is a ghost, but his infatuation persists. It turns out that she's under the control of a tree demon from whom her soul can only be freed if he disinters her remains and takes them to safety. He and the priest set out to do that, but the tree demon, who possesses, among other powers, a threatening tongue, puts up a fight. There are other spirits to be dealt with, too, including a horde of the undead. The barrage of special effects fortunately never overwhelms the performers.  

Requiem for a Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1972)

Mireille Dargent and Marie-Pierre Castel in Requiem for a Vampire

Cast: Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille Dargent, Philippe Gasté, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle, Antoine Mosin, Olivier François, Dominique Toussaint, Angès Petit, Agnes Jacquet, Anne-Rose Kurat, Paul Bisciglia, Jean-Noël Delamarre. Screenplay: Jean Rollin. Cinematography: Renan Pollès. Film editing: Michel Patient. Music: Pierre Raph. 

We never find out why the two young women dressed as clowns are fleeing a pursuing car at the start of Jean Rollin's Requiem for a Vampire or how they got the guns or why they never seem to run out of ammunition. It's clear that Rollin will do anything within his budget (which includes torching the car they're escaping in) for an effect. It's part horror movie, part skin flick, cobbled together from whatever's available, which includes a picturesque setting, the Château de la Roche-Guyon and environs in Normandy. There are vampires, of course, cheesily outfitted with fake fangs. For Rollin, vampirism is a form of rape, of which there are several exploitative scenes involving naked women in chains. Our heroines get naked, too, cuddling in bed until they're interrupted by creepy noises. It comes as no surprise that, in order to make his "serious"  films, of which this is considered to be one, Rollin also directed porn. The effect of this film on me was mostly "what the hell?" 

Shanghai Blues (Tsui Hark, 1984)

Sylvia Chang and Kenny Bee in Shanghai Blues

Cast: Kenny Bee, Sylvia Chang, Sally Yeh, Ching Tien, Loletta Lee, Fu-On Shing, Manfred Wong, Ging-Man Fung, Woo Fung, Lung Kong. Screenplay: Chan Koon-Chung, Szeto Cheuk-Hon, Raymond To. Production design: Ah-Yeung Hing-Yee. Film editing: Chew Siu Sum. Music: James Wong. 

Tsui Hark's zany slapstick rom-com Shanghai Blues begins with the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937. Two young people, Tung Kwok-Man (Kenny Bee) and Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang) take shelter under a bridge and hit it off immediately. As he runs off to join the army and she goes in search of her family, they vow to meet again in the same place in ten years. The setup made me try to imagine an American version, set perhaps during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but the cognitive dissonance was too great. But their reunion in Shanghai after the war is a more familiar situation: The city was undergoing economic upheaval not unlike that of the Great Depression, a setting more like that of many screwball comedies of the 1930s. It was dark under that bridge, so neither of them has a clear image of the person they vowed to meet again, so true to romantic comedy they don't recognize each other when they happen to wind up in the same rundown apartment building. He's a struggling musician, and she's a dancer in a nightclub. She also has a comic sidekick who takes on the nickname translated as "Stool" (it probably makes more sense in Chinese), who is played with fine goofiness by Sally Yeh. She falls in love with Tung, of course. The rest is a melange of mistaken identities, mixed signals, chases, farcical near-encounters, some smutty jokes, and almost any gag and sitcom trope Hark and his screenwriters can wedge into the movie. Shanghai Blues is undeniably funny, but it's also a little exhausting.

To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990)

Paul Butler and Danny Glover in To Sleep With Anger

Cast: Danny Glover, Paul Butler, Mary Alice, Richard Brooks, Carl Lumbly, DeVaughn Nixon, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Vonetta McGee, Ethel Ayler, Reina King, Cory Curtis, Paula Bellamy, Wonderful Smith, Sy Richardson, Davis Roberts, John Hawker, Julius Harris. Screenplay: Charles Burnett. Cinematography: Walt Lloyd. Production design: Penny Barrett. Film editing: Nancy Richardson. Music: Stephen James Taylor. 

The conventional interpretation  of Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger is that the character of Harry, played by Danny Glover, is the devil. But remember Rilke's assertion that "every angel is terrible." The film begins with an image of endurance, a man being enveloped but not consumed by flames. It ends with an instance of persistence, an amateur trumpet player whose discordant notes segue into a triumphant harmony. Remember, too, that it's Harry who points out that however much the young trumpeter's practice may annoy the neighbors, if he continues with it he may become a real musician. Harry brings mischief and misfortune to the South Central LA family and their friends, but he leaves them wiser and more harmonious. He brings the refining fire, the resolution to discord. He stirs memories of the Southern past -- the discrimination and abuse, but also the pleasure-seeking and lawlessness -- that spurred the Black diaspora, but by reminding them of it he enables them to move on with their lives more assuredly. Burnett's morality tale is never so didactic: Its strength lies in its ambiguities. It falters occasionally in narrative ellipses and by being a bit overcrowded with characters, but it fully earns the praise it has gained over the years since its somewhat inept release and marketing. 

Bug (William Friedkin, 2006)

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in Bug

Cast: Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr., Lynn Collins, Brian F. O'Byrne. Screenplay: Tracy Letts, based on his play. Cinematography: Michael Grady. Production design: Franco-Giacomo Carbone. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Brian Tyler. 

If Bug feels sometimes overburdened with subtext, it's probably not the fault of William Friedkin, never the most subtle or cerebral of directors. The sense that it can't be allowed to be just a psychological body horror movie probably comes from Tracy Letts, whose screenplay, based on his off-Broadway play, is rife with American malaise. Name-checking everything from the Tuskegee Experiment to Timothy McVeigh to Ted Kaczynski, it touches on sexual dysfunction and discrimination, the drug culture of the underclass, regional antagonisms, the military-industrial complex, the prison industry, political conspiracy theories, and ecoterrorism, among others. That it succeeds at all is due to the commitment of its lead actors, Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, who make the lost souls of Agnes and Peter visible to us. I suspect that on stage Bug was more of a dark comedy than it becomes on screen, though some of that still comes through despite Friedkin's tendency toward overkill and an apocalyptic ending that doesn't make a lot of sense. 

The Killer (John Woo, 1989)

Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee in The Killer

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Kenneth Tsang, Chu Kong, Shing Fui-on, Ricky Yi Fan-wai, Barry Wong. Screenplay: John Woo. Cinematography: Peter Pau, Wong Wing-Hang. Art direction: Luk Man-Wah. Film editing: Fan Kung-Ming. Music: Lowell Lo. 

The rhythmic violence of John Woo's The Killer obliterates thought, turning what could be a study of motives and morals into a ballet of blood-letting that exhilarates with its inherent absurdity. It's a film of overkill, in which dispatching an adversary is never accomplished with one shot but with four or six or eight. No one falls dead, they recoil and squirm. Opponents come in waves, never stepping into the fray but rushing and swooping. If you closed your eyes (not that that's possible), the gunshots could be a drum solo punctuated by grunts and squeals. It is, in short, action movie making at its purest and best. It helps that the actors playing the film's antagonistic protagonists, Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat) and Li Ying (Danny Lee), possess an innate charisma, so that we're fooled into thinking of them as human beings when in fact they're just plot devices to provoke action. Woo wants us to reflect on their motives and morals, and he gives them speeches to explore those, but then the action starts again and it's just a movie. But what a movie, a torrent of bullets and doves, of religion and gore, of mayhem and honor.  

Ghosts of Mars (John Carpenter, 2001)

Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge in Ghosts of Mars

Cast: Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Clea DuVall, Pam Grier, Joanna Cassidy, Richard Cetrone, Rosemary Forsyth, Liam Waite, Duane Davis, Lobo Sebastian, Rodney A. Grant. Screenplay: Larry Sulkis, John Carpenter. Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe. Production design: William A. Elliott. Film editing: Paul C. Warshilka. Music: Anthrax, John Carpenter. 

It's a space zombie Western, how good could it be? There are those who are willing to overlook the bad acting, the lame dialogue, the lack of plausibility, and the overall cheesiness of design in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, and I understand them. There's a place for this kind of B-movie throwback to sci-fi tropes of the 1950s, and it's in the hearts of many cineastes, especially those who admire the chutzpah of its writer-director-composer. I don't belong to the Carpenter cult myself, but I respect their enthusiasm. Still, if you came across this movie on TV and didn't know anything about its auteur, how long would you keep watching before you looked for something better? 

Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985)

Hou Hsiao-hsien in Taipei Story

Cast: Tsai Chin, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen, Lin Hsiu-ling, Ko I-chen, Ke Su-yun, Wu Ping-nan, Mei Fang, Chen Shu-fang, Yang Li-yin, Lai Te-nan. Screenplay: Chu T'ien-wen, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang. Cinematography: Yang Wei-han. Film editing: Sung Fan-chen, Wang Qi-yang. Music: Edward Yang. 

Edward Yang's Taipei Story thrusts us into the midst of the lives of two people in the city of Taipei in the mid-1980s, and then lets us sort out the personal, social, and economic tensions between them. Chin (Tsai Chin) and Lung (Hou Hsiao-hsien) grew up together in the city and at some point decided to live together, despite pressure from their parents to get married. Lung has a small fabric shop and Chin is the executive assistant to a manager of a large construction company. As the film opens, Chin is about to lose her job because the company is about to be taken over by a larger corporation, and the woman she works for has resigned. Lung has just returned from the States, where his sister is married to a man who runs an import business. The possibility of immigrating intrigues both of them, especially since Chin's future is uncertain. But their lives are complicated by their families, old and new lovers, and the city that's changing around them. It's a film with the flavor of a good novel, whose subtlety and the intricacy of its relationships suggest that it probably improves with more than one viewing. 

Kalpana (Uday Shankar, 1948)

Uday Shankar in Kalpana

Cast: Uday Shankar, Amala Shankar, Lakshmi Kanta, G.V. Subbarao, Birendri Banerji, Swaraj Mitter Gupta, Anil Kumar Chopra, Brijo Behari Banerji, Chiranjilal Shah, Devilal Samar, K. Mukerjee. Screenplay: Uday Shankar. Cinematography: K. Ranoth. Production design: A.K. Sekar. Film editing: N.K. Gopal. Music: Vishnudas Shirali.

Uday Shankar's phantasmagoric, angry, joyous, often baffling Kalpana is the ultimate dance musical, recalling everything from Busby Berkeley's pattern-making choreography to the expressionist visions of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). It was Shankar's only film, and it's easy to see why: It's exhaustive and exhausting. The flood of dance sequences occurs in a flashback within a frame story about Udayan, played by Shankar, trying to persuade a box office minded producer to make a film based on his life work. He's doomed to failure because the producer thinks only of money, which Udayan has learned to be an evil, though a necessary one. He has a vision of India as a cultural force, an independent leader of nations, emerging from its colonial past, though thwarted by capitalist greed. There's also a love story along with some intrigue and villainy in Kalpana, resulting in a narrative muddle, which may be why it was not a great success when it was initially released. However, its energy and imagination (which is one meaning of the Sanskrit word that gives the film its title) overcome its flaws.   
 

Two Girls on the Street (André De Toth, 1939)

Mária Tasnádi Fekete and Bella Bordy in Two Girls on the Street

Cast: Mária Tasnádi Fekete, Bella Bordy, Andor Ajtay, Piroska Vaszary, Gyula Csortos. Screenplay: André De Toth, based on a play by Tamás Emöd and Reszö Török. Cinematography: Károly Vass. Production design: Márton Vincze. Film editing: Zoltán Kerényi. Music: Szabolcs Fényes. 

In 1939, the Production Code was so rigidly enforced in Hollywood that David O. Seznick had to beg for an exemption that would allow Clark Gable to speak the word "damn" in Gone With the Wind. So for an example of what Hollywood movies might have been like if they hadn't been saddled with the Code's strictures, take a look at a film from Hungary that year, André De Toth's Two Girls on the Street. It begins with a young woman revealing, at a dinner party that celebrates an engagement, that the potential groom, who is marrying someone else, made her pregnant. Out of wedlock pregnancy would have been severely punished under the Code, but after the uproar, she moves to Budapest and gets an abortion -- one of the Code's severest taboos -- and goes to work in a night club as a violinist in an all-female orchestra. By the end of the film, she has become a celebrated concert violinist, hardly a punishment. Two Girls on the Street is a romantic melodrama whose plot feels familiar in many respects: The violinist befriends a waiflike young woman, and as they prosper they fall in love with the same man. But many of the details of the film feel like they come from another place and another time: The man they fall for was accused of sexually harassing the second woman, who also attempts suicide (another Code taboo) when she thinks she's lost him, but she's perfectly happy to wind up with him at the end of the movie. None of this is to suggest that Hungary was a better place to make movies at that time, of course. De Toth left it for Hollywood, where he became a second-tier director specializing in Westerns like The Gunfighter (1950) and films noir like Pitfall (1948) before moving into television; his best-known movie is House of Wax (1953), one of the first of the run of 3-D features in the 1950s. 

Muna Moto (Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, 1975)

Arlette Din Bell in Muna Moto

Cast: Philippe Abia, Arlette Din Bell, Samuel Baongla, Catherine Biboum, David Endene, Gisèle Dikongué-Pipa. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa. Cinematography: J.P. Delazay, J.L. Leon. Film editing: Andrée Davanture, Dominque Saint-Cyr, Jules Takam. Music: A.G.A.'Styl, Georges Anderson. 

Muna Moto, also known as The Child of Another, takes place in a village in Cameroon, where young Ngando (Philippe Abia) and Ndomé (Arlette Din Bell) have fallen in love. Ngando, however, can't afford the dowry Ndomé's father demands, so his rich uncle decides to take her as his fifth wife -- none of his other four wives have produced the child he wants. To forestall the uncle's plans, Ngando gets Ndomé pregnant, but the uncle is undeterred and takes her for his wife anyway and raises the child as his own. Ngando's struggle to claim his daughter and to reunite with Ndomé is the driving force of a film about the heavy hand of tradition, a universal theme in a setting unfamiliar to most of us. Director Jean-Pierre Dikongué makes the most of that setting, a place where nature and human beings tenuously co-exist. 

Chess on the Wind (Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976)

Shohreh Aghdashloo, Fakhri Khorvash, and Aghajan Rafii in Chess of the Wind

Cast: Fakhri Khorvash, Mohama Ali Keshavarz, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Akbar Zanjanpour, Shahram Golchin, Hamid Taati, Aghajan Rafii, Annik Shefrazian. Screenplay: Mohammad Reza Aslani. Cinematography: Houshang Baharlou. Art direction: Houri Etesam. Film editing: Abbas Ganjavi. Music: Sheyda Gharachedaghi. 

Made, released, and almost immediately suppressed in a country in the throes of revolutionary change, Mohammad Reza Aslani's Chess on the Wind is one of those films that are almost more interesting for the history of their survival than for their content. Which is not to say that the film isn't impressive in itself: It's visually and aurally exceptional, in the opulence of its setting, an old mansion in Tehran, and the score using antique instruments by Sheyda Gharachedaghi. It also makes some strong points about the oppression of women, even including some queer content that was one of the reasons for its suppression. After its initial showing, the film completely disappeared for 38 years -- even its director had no prints of it -- until a complete negative was discovered by the director's son in an old shop in a suburb of Tehran. Viewers may find it a little slowly paced and sometimes enigmatic in motives and relationships, but Aslani's mastery of filmmaking is evident. It's worth watching the documentary The Majnoun and the Wind (Gita Aslani Shahrestani, 2022), made by the director's daughter and available with it on the Criterion Channel, for the film's full story.

Prisioneros de la Tierra (Mario Soffici, 1939)

Elisa Galvé and Ángel Galvaña in Prisioneros de la Tierra

Cast: Francisco Petrone, Ángel Galvaña, Elisa Galvé, Raúl De Lange, Roberto Fugazot, Homero Cárpeno. Screenplay: Ulises Petit de Murat, Dario Quiroga, based on stories by Horacio Quiroga. Cinematography: Pablo Tabernero. Production design: Ralph Pappier. Film editing: Gerardo Rinaldi. Music: Lucio Demare. 

In Hollywood, 1939 is often cited as a peak year, but the Argentine film Prisioneros de la Tierra, released the same year, holds its own in comparison with the American studio output. It's a story of abused workers in the Argentine jungles, with a grim conclusion that contrasts with the timid, feel-good resolutions of Hollywood. Granted, it too is sometimes a little more glossy than the subject warrants, with the casting of a pretty but limited actress, Elisa Galvé, in the key role of Andrea. who accompanies her alcoholic father (Raúl De Lange), a physician, on the trip to a labor camp. She falls in love with one of the workers, the dashing Estéban Podeley (Ángel Galvaña), while being pursued by the villain, Köhner (Francisco Petrone), the ruthless boss of the camp. Director Mario Soffici manages to overcome the by-the-numbers romance with a genuine feeling for the exploitation of indentured workers, aided greatly by Pablo Tabernero's use of light and shadow to create an oppressive mood in key scenes. Prisioneros de la Tierra is regarded as one of Argentina's greatest films, and at its best it justifies the acclaim.