Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024)

Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay in Misericordia

Cast: Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Duran, Jacques Develay, David Ayala, Tatiana Spivakova, Serge Richard, Sébastien Faglain, Salomé Lopes, Elio Lunetta. Screenplay: Alain Guiraudie. Cinematography: Claire Mathon. Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay. Film editing: Jean-Christophe Hym. Music: Marc Verdaguer. 

Alain Guiraudie's deadpan Dostoevskyan farce Misericordia plays out in the picturesque Aveyron region of southern France. The protagonist, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), returns to the village where he grew up for the funeral of the town's baker, from whom he learned the trade. There he learns that you can go home again, but you'd better be prepared to pay the price, which in Jérémie's case is murder. A young man of free-floating sexuality, Jérémie is soon involved in various ways with the baker's widow, Martine (Catherine Frot); her son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand); a boyhood friend, Walter (David Ayala); and even the village priest, Philippe (Jacques Develay). The effect of the film, however, is anything but erotic, given that all the characters, Jérémie included, are homely, ordinary people who wouldn't catch your eye if you passed them on the street. Instead, it's a nicely accomplished exercise in playing with the audience's expectations of what will happen next, a game of small surprises. 

Bullshot (Dick Clement, 1983)

Billy Connolly, Alan Shearman, and Christopher Good

Cast: Alan Shearman, Diz White, Ronald E. House, Frances Tomelty, Ron Pember, Mel Smith, Michael Aldridge, Christopher Good, Billy Connolly, Geoffrey Bayldon, Christopher Godwin, Bryan Pringle. Screenplay: Ronald E. House, Diz White, Alan Shearman, based on their play. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: Norman Greenwood. Film editing: Alan Jones. Music: John Du Prez. 

The character Bulldog Drummond, created in 1920 by H.C. McNeile and portrayed in a string of mostly forgettable movies from 1922 to 1969, was a World War I veteran in search of postwar adventures, and a precursor of James Bond filtered through Sherlock Holmes. Bullshot is a silly spoof of that mostly forgotten character, cooked up by the British actors Alan Shearman and Diz White and the American Ronald E. House for a stage play that was performed in London and San Francisco. The film version is laden with sight gags, goofy accents, faintly smutty jokes, and improbable cliffhanger situations. It emulates the humor of Monty Python and Peter Sellers's Pink Panther movies but just misses. If pretty good wacky spoofs are enough for you, have at it.  

The Black Vampire (Román Viñoly Barreto, 1953)

Nathán Pinzón and Gogó in The Black Vampire

Cast: Olga Zubarry, Roberto Escalada, Nathán Pinzón, Nelly Panizza, Georges Rivière, Pascual Pelliciota, Gloria Castilla, Mariano Vidal Molina. Screenplay: Román Viñoly Barreto, Alberto Etchebeherre, based on a screenplay by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. Cinematography: Anibal González Paz. Production design: Jorge Beghé. Film editing: Jorge Gárate, Higinio Vecchione. Music: Juan Ehlert. 

Román Viñoly Barreto's The Black Vampire is not so much a remake of Fritz Lang's 1931 M as a reworking of it. It builds a new story, that of a reluctant witness, on the original film's narrative of the manhunt for a serial killer of little girls. Rita (Olga Zubarry) is a singer in a rather louche cabaret who from the window of her dressing room sees the killer dispose of the body of one of his victims down a sewer opening. She's reluctant to tell the police what she saw because she doesn't want the publicity that might let the school her daughter attends find out that she works in such a disreputable place. But an investigator (Roberto Escalada) senses that she knows more than she's telling. So in addition to the story of the manhunt and of the killer's attempt to evade it, The Black Vampire adds another layer: that of the relationship that develops between Rita and the investigator, who is sexually frustrated in his marriage to an invalid and finds Rita attractive. Somehow this narrative overlay doesn't detract from the primary story of the killer, played by Nathán Pinzón in a way that evokes Peter Lorre's performance in the original film without copying it. Eventually, of course, the killer and Rita's daughter come together in an ingenious if improbable trick of plotting. Anibal Gonzálex Paz's shadowy cinematography gives the film a richness of atmosphere that helps make up for its narrative convolutions. The Black Vampire is at its best a suspenseful homage to Lang's classic. 

Bye Bye Braverman (Sidney Lumet, 1968)

Sorrell Booke, Jack Warden, Godfrey Cambridge, and George Segal in Bye Bye Braverman

Cast: George Segal, Jack Warden, Joseph Wiseman, Sorrell Booke, Jessica Walter, Phyllis Newman, Zohra Lampert, Godfrey Cambridge, Alan King, Anthony Holland. Screenplay: Herbert Sargent, based on a novel by Wallace Markfield. Cinematography: Boris Kaufman. Art direction: Ben Kasazkow. Film editing: Gerald B. Greenberg. Music: Peter Matz. 

Sidney Lumet's Bye Bye Braverman is a shaggy dog of a movie about four middle-aged Jewish intellectuals who go on a kind of road trip to the funeral of their friend Braverman, who has just died of a heart attack at 41. It's a road movie, except that all of the roads are in New York City. It's also rife with the kind of ethnic stereotypes that only people who belong to that ethnicity can pull off. Instead of plot, there are incidents: a fender-bender with a cab driven by a Black Jew (Godfrey Cambridge) and a sermon by a rabbi (Alan King) at a funeral that turns out not to be Braverman's. And mostly it's a showcase for the talents of the actors playing the four friends, Morroe Rieff (George Segal), Barnet Weinstein (Jack Warden), Felix Ottensteen (Joseph Wiseman), and Holly Levine (Sorrell Booke). Segal gets the key scene in which Morroe wanders among the tombstones in one of New York's vast necropolises and informs the residents of what has happened in the world since they died, but every actor (and the ones who play the women in their lives, Jessica Walter, Phyllis Newman, and Zohra Lampert) gets a moment to shine. It's not a movie for everyone: The only person I know who ever listed it among their favorites was a middle-aged Jewish intellectual from New York City. But if you're in the mood for something droll, it will do.  

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

Cast: Richard Conte, Valentina Cortese, Lee J. Cobb, Millard Mitchell, Jack Oakie, Barbara Lawrence, Joseph Pevney, Morris Carnovsky, Tamara Shane, Kasia Orzazewski, Norbert Schiller, Hope Emerson. Screenplay: A.J. Bezzerides, based on his novel. Cinematography: Norbert Brodine. Art direction: Chester Gore, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Nick DeMaggio. Music: Alfred Newman. 

Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway is a fascinating, little-known noir, set in multiethnic working-class postwar California. Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, who returns to Fresno after the war to find his father (Morris Carnovsky) has lost his legs in a trucking accident after being cheated by Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), a boss in the produce trade in San Francisco. Determined to take revenge on Figlia, Nick takes up with Ed Kinney (Millard Mitchell), who has salvaged Nick's father's truck and wants to buy up a farmer's apple crop and resell it in the city. There are some exciting scenes on the road, as trucks roar by on the narrow highway after Nick's truck blows a tire and he gets pinned under the truck trying to change it. Rescued by Ed, who is following in the salvaged truck which is held together, as Ed says, by spit. a sleep-deprived Nick makes it to Frisco (don't cavil, that's what it's called). There he encounters Figlia, who does what he can to cheat Nick, including hiring a streetwalker (Valentina Cortese) to seduce him. The film gets a great sense of actuality from the scenes set in the old San Francisco produce market, and the performances have a satisfying grittiness to them. Dassin and Bezzerides are forced into some narrative compromises by Hollywood studio conventions and censorship, but at its best, Thieves' Highway often evokes Italian neorealism in its depiction of ordinary people caught up in anything-goes capitalism.    

O (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)

Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett in O

Cast: Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Martin Sheen, Andrew Keegan, Rain Phoenix, Elden Henson, John Heard. Screenplay: Brad Kaaya, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine. Production design: Dina Goldman. Film editing: Kate Sanford. Music: Jeff Danna. 

Tim Blake Nelson's O begins with Desdemona's prayer from Verdi's Otello on the soundtrack, which seems to me like a misstep, reminding anyone who knows either Shakespeare's play or Verdi's operatic adaptation of it that they won't be hearing either the former's verse or the latter's music. That probably doesn't matter to anyone unfamiliar with those masterworks, which includes much of the teenage audience for which the movie seems designed, but it puts a heavy burden on it for those who do know them. Brad Kaaya is quite deft at sticking to the plot and characters of the play, however, and many of the actors are up to its demands. As Hugo, the movie's Iago, Josh Hartnett is a plausible schemer, and Kaaya probably didn't need to supplement the "motiveless malignancy" of the original character with a suggestion of 'roid rage, showing Hugo shooting up a performance enhancer. Julia Stiles's Desi is spunkier than the play's Desdemona, which presents a problem only at the end, when her character doesn't fight back as much as she might be expected to. But the casting to Mekhi Phifer as Odin (a curiously Nordic name) is the major mistake: He doesn't evoke the charisma and power that Othello needs, both in wooing Desi and becoming the tragic subject of Hugo's. Phifer is also a good deal shorter than Hartnett, which unbalances their confrontation. Still, if you're going to rip off Shakespeare, O does a better job of it than might be expected.  

The Beach (Danny Boyle, 2000)

Leonardo DiCaprio, Virginie Ledoyen, and Guillaume Canet in The Beach

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Canet, Robert Carlyle, Patterson Joseph, Lars Arentz-Hansen, Daniel Caltagirone, Staffan Kihlborn, Jakka Hiltunen, Magnus Lindgren. Screenplay: John Hodge, based on a novel by Alex Garland. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: Masahiro Hirakubo. Music: Angelo Badalamenti.

Danny Boyle's The Beach turned a novel by Alex Garland into a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio, coming off the success of Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). The protagonist, Richard, who was British in the novel, becomes a disaffected young American (DiCaprio) searching for adventure in Thailand, who manages to get hold of a map to a secluded island with a white sand beach and all the marijuana one could wish. But his arrival on the island disturbs the detente between the native cannabis farmers and the hippie-style communards who have found their way there. Violence (and a little sex) ensues. The movie can't seem to decide whether it wants to be an adventure tale, a satire on tourism, a commentary on human nature, or a fable about utopianism, and an intrusive narrative voiceover by Richard doesn't clarify much.

Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1948)

Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Young in Crossfire

Cast: Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, Robert Young, Gloria Grahame, Paul Kelly, Sam Levene, Jacqueline White, Steve Brodie, George Cooper, Richard Benedict, Tom Keene, William Phipps, Lex Barker, Marlo Dwyer. Screenplay: John Paxton, based on a novel by Richard Brooks. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Alfred Herman. Film editing: Harry Gerstad. Music: Roy Webb. 

As long as Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire stays twisty and not preachy, this tale about antisemitism is a lot better than the other picture on the same topic that beat it for the year's best picture Oscar, Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement, in which the sermon was built in. A Jewish businessman (Sam Levene) is found beaten to death in his apartment, and the suspicion falls on some demobilized servicemen with whom he had been drinking in a bar. One of them, Mitchell (George Cooper), has disappeared, and the detective in charge of the case, Finlay (Robert Young), initiates a manhunt, aided by one of Mitchell's fellow servicemen, Keeley (Robert Mitchum). When he's located, Mitchell is not quite sure where he has been that evening, but he has a hazy memory of going to the victim's apartment with Montgomery (Robert Ryan), a fellow soldier, and then picking up a woman named Ginny (Gloria Graham) in another bar. Crossfire is sometimes a little askew when it comes to psychology, as in Mitchell's brain fog and the murderous antisemitism of the killer, but it's full of enough sharp dialogue and colorful performances to keep your attention. Grahame and Robert Ryan got Oscar nominations, Paul Kelly is good as the enigmatic guy who may be Ginny's husband (probably a bit of hedging about their relationship to placate the Production Code enforcers), and even the usually bland Robert Young, on the verge of becoming America's father who knows best, shows a little toughness. In the source novel by Richard Brooks, the victim was gay and the motive was homophobia, and a hint of that remains in the scene between Mitchell and the victim in the bar. 

It Happened Tomorrow (René Clair, 1944)

Cast: Dick Powell, Linda Darnell, Jack Oakie, Edgar Kennedy, John Philliber, George Cleveland, Sig Ruman, George Chandler, Eddie Acuff, Edward Brophy, Paul Guilfoyle. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, René Clair, based on a story by Hugh Wedlock Jr. and Howard Snyder, and a play by Lord Dunsany. Cinematography: Archie Stout. Art direction: Ernö Metzner. Film editing: Fred Pressburger. Music: Robert Stoltz. 

It Happened Tomorrow is a screwball romantic comedy fantasy about a newspaperman (Dick Powell) who magically receives a copy of the next day's edition of the paper. This enables him to land some scoops that advance his career, make a small fortune at the race track, and win the hand of the assistant (Linda Darnell) to a vaudeville fortune teller (Jack Oakie). But then he gets a copy of the paper that predicts his death. The feathery direction of René Clair keeps this nonsense aloft, despite the tendency of some of the supporting players like Oakie and Edgar Kennedy to try to steal every scene they're in. It also has a slightly clumsy frame that turns the movie into a flashback from the 50th wedding anniversary of Powell's and Darnell's characters, cuing us into the fact that he doesn't die. Setting the film in the 1890s was probably a way to avoid any mention of the war going on when It Happened Tomorrow was made.  

Liz and the Blue Bird (Naoko Yamada, 2018)

Cast: voices of Atsumi Tanezaki, Nao Toyama, Miyu Honda, Konomi Fujimura, Yuri Yamaoka, Shiori Sugiura, Tomoyo Kurosawa, Ayaka Asai, Moe Toyota, Chica Anzai, Houko Kawashima, Yuichi Nakamura, Takahiro Sakarai. Screenplay: Reiko Yoshida. Cinematography: Kazuya Takao. Art direction: Mutsuo Shinohara. Film editing: Kengo Shigemura. Music: Akito Matsuda, Kensuke Ushio. 

A beautiful synchronization of image and music gives Naoko Yamada's Liz and the Blue Bird its special quality. It's a simple tale of two girls, a flutist and an oboist in their school orchestra, on the brink of one of life's early crises: the separation caused by graduation from the school where they had grown close. Their story is blended with the one in a book that bears the film's title, a fable about a girl who lives alone but one day is joined by a mysterious girl who is really a blue bird transformed into a human. Though they grow close, the lonely girl knows that the bird needs to fly free. Yes, the point of both the storybook version and that of the real girls is as banal as "If you love someone, set them free." But execution is everything in this case, and Yamada and her animators and composers rise to the task superbly.  

Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978)

Anthony Perkins and Geraldine Chaplin in Remember My Name

Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Berry Berenson, Moses Gunn, Jeff Goldblum, Timothy Thonerson, Alfre Woodard, Marilyn Coleman, Jeffrey S. Perry, Alan Autry, Dennis Franz. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph. Cinematography: Tak Fujimoto. Film editing: William A. Sawyer, Tom Walls. Music: Kenneth Wannberg, Alberta Hunter (songs). 

Casting Anthony Perkins as a construction worker sets up the kind of cognitive dissonance that permeates Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name, which has to be classified as a kind of screwball film noir. It was intended by Rudolph as an homage to the "women's pictures" of the '30s and '40s that starred Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck and that peaked in the 1950s in the oeuvre of Douglas Sirk. Geraldine Chaplin plays Emily, who has just been released from prison where she served a term for killing her ex-husband's lover. Perkins plays the ex, now married to Barbara (Berry Berenson), and Emily is intent on stalking them and getting retribution. She manages to make their lives not exactly miserable, but certainly unsettled. It's a film full of offbeat characters, including Mr. Nudd, the young manager of the store where Emily gets a job. He's played by a very young and very skinny Jeff Goldblum. There are also memorable bits by Alfre Woodard as Emily's superior at the store and Moses Gunn as the security officer of the apartment complex where Emily lives. Both the store and the apartment house seem to be transition zones for ex-cons re-entering the world. Remember My Name teeters between the comic and the serious, with the balance tipped slightly toward the latter by the fact that it's set to a song score by the blues/jazz singer Alberta Hunter, whose contribution is one of the chief reasons, along with a great performance by Chaplin, for seeing the film. 

Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973)

Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow

Cast: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Richard Lynch, Eileen Brennan, Penelope Allen, Richard Hackman, Al Cingolani, Rutanya Alda. Screenplay: Gerry Michael White. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Production design: Albert Brenner. Film editing: Evan A. Lottman. Music: Fred Myrow.

Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow is the quintessential '70s film: a road movie featuring two actors on the verge of becoming legendary. It's long on character development and short on plot. Essentially, the narrative is there to provide reciprocal character arcs: The tough guy (Gene Hackman) softens and the soft guy (Al Pacino) toughens. Hackman and Pacino play drifters with unlikely dreams: Hackman's Max wants to open a car wash and enlists Pacino's Lion in his scheme, though Lion wants to make a stop along the way to reconnect with his ex, whom he left pregnant, and meet the child he has never seen. We know that they'll never fulfill these dreams, so the only suspense in the film is over how badly it will end for them. So mostly it's about performance, which Scarecrow adequately supplies. Scarecrow is something of a forgotten film, overshadowed by more celebrated ones in the two actors' oeuvre, and even a historian of the era in which it was made, Peter Biskind, dismissed it as a "secondary" work. But it deserves to be rediscovered, not just for the performances but also as a reminder of how significant the decade in which it was made is to film history.

Love Letters (Amy Holden Jones, 1983

James Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis in Love Letters

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, James Keach, Bonnie Bartlett, Matt Clark, Amy Madigan, Bud Cort, Rance Howard. Screenplay: Amy Holden Jones. Cinematography: Alec Hirschfeld. Art direction: Jeannine Oppewall. Film editing: Wendy Greene Bricmont. Music: Ralph Jones. 

In Amy Holden Jones's Love Letters Jamie Lee Curtis plays Anna Winter, a woman who discovers a cache of love letters from a man not her father among her dead mother's things and is somehow inspired by them to have an affair with a married man. Curtis does her considerable best with a role that's more concept than character, but Jones's screenplay makes her do a lot of stupid and impulsive things, made more implausible  because the man, played by James Keach, doesn't have the charisma that might inspire her to do them. The film is a throwback to the old weepies like Back Street (John M. Stahl, 1932, Robert Stevenson, 1941, and David Miller, 1961), though Curtis's character is given more agency than the women played by Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, and Susan Hayward in those earlier versions, and she doesn't have to die at the end. What psychological depth Jones's film has is enhanced by Anna's relationship with her alcoholic creep of a father (Matt Clark), who seems to have a more than paternal affection for her. The movie also adds some gratuitous nudity, insisted on by its producer, Roger Corman, who backed the filming of Jones's script as a reward for her successful direction of The Slumber Party Massacre (1982).  

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in 3 Women

Cast: Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule, Robert Fortier, Ruth Nelson, John Cromwell, Sierra Pecheur, Craig Richard Nelson, Maysie Hoy, Belita Moreno, Leslie Ann Hudson, Patricia Ann Hudson. Screenplay: Robert Altman, Patricia Resnick. Cinematography: Charles Rosher Jr. Art direction: James Dowell Vance. Film editing: Dennis M. Hill. Music: Gerald Busby. 

Coleridge claimed that he wrote the poem "Kubla Khan" after he had an opium-induced dream. Robert Altman said that he made the film 3 Women after a dream in which he was making a movie with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, but he didn't specify what might have induced the dream. There's no stately pleasure dome in 3 Women, which takes place in a bleak little town in the California desert that, as several people comment, looks like Texas. Duvall plays Millie, who works in a rundown spa helping elderly people and invalids in and out of the therapy pool and the hot tubs. She's asked to train a newcomer named Pinky (Spacek), a naive young woman who, like her, is from Texas and is also named Mildred. Pinky is awed by the more worldly Millie, and soon becomes her roommate in a small apartment complex owned by Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier) and his pregnant wife, Willie (Janice Rule), who also run a shabby bar called Dodge City. Eventually, tensions develop between the meek Pinky and the pretentious Millie, whom everyone else laughs at behind her back, and when Millie suggests she move out, Pinky attempts suicide by jumping off the apartment balcony into the swimming pool. She survives, spends some time in a coma, and awakes with a distinct personality change. Although the film largely focuses on Millie and Pinky, the third woman, Willie, who is an artist, plays a major role in their story and its somewhat eerie denouement. Critics praised 3 Women, and many think it's one of Altman's best films. It veers off onto the fringes of the surreal, enhanced by Gerald Busby's spiky score. Spacek and Duvall improvised much of their dialogue, including Millie's very funny "dinner party" menu made up of recipes from magazine ads for processed foods, with "pigs in a blanket" serving as entree. 

Ripley's Game (Liliana Cavani, 2002)

Dougray Scott and John Malkovich in Ripley's Game

Cast: John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Heady, Chiara Caselli, Sam Blitz, Paolo Paoloni, Evelina Meghnagi, Lutz Winde, Wilfred Xander. Screenplay: Charles McKeown, Liliana Cavani, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Production design: Francesco Frigeri. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: Ennio Morricone. 

Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game was filmed before, by Wim Wenders, as The American Friend (1977), a movie that's more Wenders than Highsmith. When I saw that version, as witty and accomplished as it is, I commented that it made me want to see the story done more slickly and conventionally, which is exactly what Liliana Cavani does in her version. The novel was Patricia Highsmith's third about the chameleonic and psychotic Tom Ripley. Most of us have seen one or more of the versions of her first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, whether in the versions filmed by René Clément (as Plein Soleil or Purple Noon) in 1960, by Anthony Minghella (under the original title) in 1999, or by Steven Zaillian (as Ripley) in the TV series in 2023. But few of us have seen the film version of the intermediate novel, Ripley Under Ground, a critical and commercial failure directed by Roger Spottiswoode in 2005, in which we learn that Ripley has flourished on his ill-gotten gains and is further enriching himself as a dealer in art forgeries. So Cavani's Ripley's Game begins rather abruptly, with Ripley (John Malkovich) engaged in a shady transaction and yet another murder. But more important, the character of Ripley has changed: Malkovich's Ripley doesn't have the specious charm of the ones played by Alain Delon, Matt Damon, or Andrew Scott -- maybe because he doesn't need it, being already on top of the world. This lack of charm and vulnerability is a problem for the film to overcome, especially when it invests some of those traits in the film's chief victim, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott). Trevanny should elicit our sympathy: He's dying of leukemia and has an attractive wife (Lena Heady) and small son (Sam Blitz), and he desperately wants to leave them well off after his death. Unfortunately, Ripley overhears Trevanny scoffing at Ripley's wealth and taste at a dinner party, and immediately sets out to get even. What follows is the familiar Ripleyan snarl of schemes and murders. And in the end, it demonstrates what was wrong with my reaction to Wenders's version: Slickness and convention aren't enough to make a really good film, sometimes what you need is an auteur.

Election (Johnnie To, 2005)

Cast: Simon Yam, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Louis Koo, Nick Cheung, Gordon Lam, Cheung Siu-fai, Lam Suet, Wong Tin-lam, Tam Ping-man, Maggie Shiu, David Chiang, You Yong, Berg Ng, Raymond Wong. Screenplay: Yau Nai-Hoi, Yip Tin-shing. Cinematography: Cheng Siu-Keung. Art direction: Tony Yu. Film editing: Patrick Tam. Music: Lo Ta-Yu. 

If nothing else, Johnnie To's Election shows that you don't need guns to take out your enemies: A large rock, a log, a tree branch, or even a passing car will do the job. And you can soften up a guy by nailing him in a crate and rolling him down a steep hill a couple of times. This is a gangster film without much glamour beyond the swagger provided by Tony Leung Ka-fai as Big D, whose opponent in the election to head up their Hong Kong triad is the more reserved Lok (Simon Yam). Mostly these gangsters are older guys, many of them referred to as "uncle," and with nicknames like Big Head, Whistle, Fish Ball, and Four Eye. When Lok defeats Big D in the first round of the election, complications ensue, much of them centered on finding and possessing the film's MacGuffin, a carved dragon head that's a symbol of authority from the days of the formation of the triad -- which we see re-created in a flashback. Election is often hard to follow, partly because allegiances to Lok and Big D are somewhat fluid, but it repays attention as a vivid portrait of a subculture.  

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (Massimo Dallamano, 1974)

Giovanna Ralli in What Have They Done to Your Daughters?

Cast: Giovanna Ralli, Claudio Cassinelli, Mario Adorf, Franco Fabrizi, Farley Granger, Marina Berti, Paolo Turco, Corrado Galpa, Michaela Pignatelli, Ferdinando Murolo. Salvatore Puntillo, Eleonora Morana. Screenplay: Ettore Sanzò, Massimo Dallamano. Cinematography: Franco Delli Colli. Art direction: Franco Bottari. Film editing: Antonio Siciliano. Music: Stelvio Cipriani.

When a pregnant 14-year-old girl is found hanging naked from the rafters of a garret apartment, the first thought from the police is suicide, but that quickly turns to murder. And so begins the lurid, exploitative What Have They Done to Your Daughters? Naturally, the filmmakers try to take the edge off of the charges of exploitation by suggesting in the opening credits that the nudity and violence in their film serves a larger purpose of exposing an important social problem: the sexual trafficking of adolescent females. Still, the movie has all the thrills of its hybrid genre: a fusion of giallo and poliziottesco. There's a masked killer wielding a butcher's cleaver, an exciting car chase, a grisly dismembered body, some good-looking leads in Giovanna Ralli as the DA in charge of the case and Claudio Cassinelli as the chief investigator, and even a cameo by Farley Granger as the victim's father. But there's also an eerie prescience about the film's conclusion: For although the immediate case is solved, the investigators learn that the trafficking problem stems from sources they can't approach for investigation. So we find ourselves reminded by a 50-year-old movie of the Jeffrey Epstein case, with its own lesson about the invulnerability of the very rich and very powerful.