Moving (Shinji Somai, 1993)

Tomoko Tabata in Moving

Cast: Tomoko Tabata, Junko Sakarada, Kiichi Nakai, Mariko Sudo, Taro Tanaka, Ippei Shigeyama, Nagiko Tono. Screenplay: Satoshi Okonogi, Satoko Okudera, based on a novel by Hiko Tanaka. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Art direction: Shigenori Shimoishizaka. Film editing: Yoshiyuki Okuhara. Music: Shigeaki Saegusa. 

The engine that drives Shinji Somai's Moving is the voracious ego of a child. When we first meet Renko (Tomoko Tabata), she is sitting at the appropriately wedge-shaped dining table in the home of her parents, Kenichi (Kiichii Nakai) and Nazuna (Junko Sakarada). Everyone at the table is pretending that it's a perfectly normal meal, except that it is the last one that Kenichi will be having there. He's moving out, having joined with Nazuna in a decision that their marriage is virtually over. Renko is feigning a maturity and understanding that we will soon see is beyond the capacity of her 12-year-old self. Soon, under the pressure from schoolmates and her mother's attempt to impose a new order on their lives, she will begin acting out in a variety of ways. Somai's portrait of the effect of divorce on Renko is an acute and sensitive one, hindered as a drama by the fact that there are only two ways the story can go: reconciliation or acceptance. After the explosion of several attempts at reconciliation, that ceases to be an option. Somai chooses to dramatize Renko's process of acceptance with an extended sequence that's part real, part dream. It takes place at a festival at which Renko has arranged for both of her parents to be present, but when she's unable to effect a reunion, she runs away and spends the night alone, wandering the woods on the fringe of the festival and having a vision that somehow brings her to understand her inability to manipulate her parents' lives. It's a heartfelt movie with superb performances, though it seems to me to cheat a little with its shift into fantasy as a correlative for the psychological healing that takes place in Renko. 

Redline (Takeshi Koike, 2009)

Cast: Voices of Takuya Kimura, Yu Aoi, Takeshi Aono, Kosei Hirota, Unsho Ishizuka, Kente Miyaka, Koji Ishi, Cho, Ken'yu Horiuchi, Shunichiro Miki, Ikki Todoroki, Akane Sakai, Daisuke Gori, Shin'ichiro Ota. Screenplay: Katsuhito Ishi, Yoji Inokido, Yoshiki Sakurai. Cinematography: Ryu Takizawa. Production design: Katsuhito Ishii. Film editing: Naoki Kawanishi, Satoshi Terauchi. Music: James Shimoji. 

Though Redline took seven years to create, even its most ardent admirers admit that it's lacking in originality when it comes to story: It's the old auto-race tale with a romance thrown in. But almost everyone admits that it really doesn't matter: Takeshi Koike's film is a slam-bang, non-stop, eye-challenging demonstration that when it comes to animation, there's life in hand-drawn images that computer-created ones still don't possess. I'm no great fan of anime, but Redline kept me amused even when my attention was divided between the images and the subtitles. (I refuse to watch dubbed movies.) The truth is, you hardly need the subtitles to get what's happening, since it's mostly action anyway, especially when you get the setup of a futuristic auto race taking place illicitly on a planet that doesn't want it to happen and is willing to take any means to prevent it. The central character, JP, is an amalgam of Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando in The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953), and the outlaw bikers of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969). To win the race, he teams up with his chief rival, Sonoshee McLaren, who hates her nickname, Cherry Boy Hunter, but demonstrates her feminine wiles whenever they're useful. (She has a gratuitous topless scene.) In short, it's the ultimate in kinetic cinema, though you may nurse a hangover headache afterward.  

The Hungry Ghosts (Michael Imperioli, 2009)

Steve Schirripa in The Hungry Ghosts

Cast: Steve Schirripa, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Nick Sandow, Sharon Angela, Emory Cohen, Zohra Lampert, Stefan Schaefer, Paul Calderón, Joe Caniano, Jim Hendricks, Sondra James, Jerry Grayson, Bess Rous. Screenplay: Michael Imperioli. Cinematography: Dan Hersey. Art direction: Illya Radysh. Film editing: Erin Greenwell. Music: Elijah Amitin.

The Hungry Ghosts, Michael Imperioli's debut feature, feels a bit like it came out of an assignment in Screenwriting 101: Write a screenplay about a group of seriously flawed people who carom off one another in surprising ways, but don't worry about plot. In short, it has all the earmarks of an independent film, including no stars but a cast of slightly familiar faces. In this case, many of them are former cast members of The Sopranos, in which Imperioli came to prominence. The principal figures in the film are Frank (Steve Schirripa), who hosts a late-night talk show on radio and has a serious alcohol and cocaine problem; Nadia (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who moves out of her apartment because she's behind on her rent but can't seem to find a place to crash; and Gus (Nick Sandow), Nadia's former lover who is just getting out of rehab and can't wait to pick up the habit again. Nick has a teenage son, Matthew (Emory Cohen), with whom he has trouble communicating, and a wife, Angela (Sharon Angela), with whom he is at odds, not least because of his relationship with Matthew. Nadia, who has been going to a yoga and meditation class run by Ruth (Zohra Lampert) while dodging Gus's phone calls, decides it's time to get out of the city, which connects her with Frank, who is on the same train, and eventually, though belatedly, unites them with Gus. Imperioli struggles with making these connections, but the skill of his performers almost succeeds in making sense out of them. The consensus of reviewers was that The Hungry Ghosts was warmed-over Cassavetes (a director Imperioli admires), and for once, the consensus was just.  

Psycho Beach Party (Robert Lee King, 2000)

Lauren Ambrose, Charles Busch, and Thomas Gibson in Psycho Beach Party

Cast: Lauren Ambrose, Thomas Gibson, Nicholas Brendon, Kimberley Davies, Matt Keeslar, Charles Busch, Beth Broderick, Dani Wheeler, Nick Cornish, Andrew Levitas, Amy Adams, Kathleen Robertson, Nathan Bexton, Buddy Quaid. Screenplay: Charles Busch, based on his play. Cinematography: Arturo Smith. Production design: Franco-Giacomo Carbone. Film editing: Suzanne Hines. Music: Ben Vaughn. 

Psycho Beach Party, Charles Busch's theatrical mashup of surfer movies and slasher flicks, should have been a natural for turning into a movie, since that was the original target of the parody. Busch especially spoofs Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959), whose title character, played by Sandra Dee, becomes Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose). Others are similarly lampooned: Cliff Robertson's Kahuna becomes Thomas Gibson's Kanaka, James Darren's Moondoggie becomes Nicholas Brendon's Starcat, and so on. Like Gidget and other surfer-teen movies, Psycho Beach Party is full of process shots of the stars riding surfboards against a projected background, and the homoerotic subtext of the horseplay of the surfer dudes in the original is revealed for what it really is. But Busch adds murder to the mix, when characters with physical disabilities start getting bumped off -- as if they don't fit into the tanned and fit world of surf culture. Unfortunately, Psycho Beach Party falls apart on the screen because its director, Robert Lee King, fails to get his ensemble working on the same level. On the stage, Busch played Chicklet, but he knew his performance wouldn't work on the pseudo-realistic screen, so he created a role of a detective investigating the murders for himself, and the lead role went to Ambrose, who is quite good at switching from the wide-eyed teenager to the possibly schizophrenic serial killer. Brendon, who learned how to play with tongue in cheek on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, strikes the right note as Starcat, but Gibson wipes out as Kanaka, looking like he doesn't get the joke. At best, Psycho Beach Party gets a few laughs, but time has made the targets of its humor ridiculous enough that today they don't need parodying.

Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, 1970)

Robert Liensol in Soleil Ô

Cast: Robert Liensol, Théo Légitimus, Gabriel Glissand, Bernard Fresson, Yane Barry, Greg Germain, Armand Meffre, Med Hondo (voice). Screenplay: Med Hondo. Cinematography: François Catonné, Jean-Claude Rahaga. Production design: Med Hondo. Film editing: Michèle Catonné, Clément Menuet. Music: George Anderson. 

Because it caused our civil war and continues to blight our public discourse and public policy, we Americans tend to think of racism as a problem somehow peculiar to us. Of course it isn't, and Med Hondo's Soleil Ô is a scathing, satiric demonstration of that painful fact. It depicts the experiences of a young African man (Robert Liensol) as he immigrates to France, where he encounters racism in a variety of forms, from discrimination in employment to sexual humiliation when he fails to live up to the myth of Black male potency. Creating a collage with various techniques, including animation, sometimes taking a neorealist approach and sometimes resorting to surrealism, Hondo indicts colonialism as well as racism almost to the point of exhausting the viewer. But then sometimes we viewers need to be exhausted for our own good.   

Cain and Abel (Lino Brocka, 1982)

Carmi Martin and Christopher De Leon in Cain and Abel

Cast: Christopher De Leon, Phillip Salvador, Carmi Martin, Camille Castillo, Baby Delgado, Mona Lisa, Ruel Vernal, Michael Sandico, Venchito Galvez. Screenplay: Ricky Lee. Cinematography: Conrado Baltazar. Production design: Joey Luna. Film editing: Efren Jarlego. Music: Max Jocson. 

Lino Brocka's Cain and Abel doesn't really take much from the archetypal family feud story in Genesis other than the conflict between brothers and the fact that it takes place in an agricultural setting. Like the Cain of Genesis, Lorenzo (Phillip Salvador) is a farmer, tending the fields owned by his mother, Señora Pina (Mona Lisa). But his brother, Ellis (Christopher De Leon), is no shepherd like the biblical Abel. Instead, he's a mama's boy, favored by his imperious mother because she blames Lorenzo for the death of his father. (It seems that the two boys had a fight, and in trying to break it up, the father suffered a fatal heart attack.) So while Lorenzo sweats out a living in the fields, Ellis has been sent off to university in Manila. And while Lorenzo has married and has two sons, Ellis has always been a playboy, impregnating several local girls, including Rina (Cecille Castillo). The Señora paid for the other girls to have abortions, but she was fond of Rina and allowed her to carry the child to term and to remain as her servant. Then Ellis comes home from university, announcing that he's dropping out and plans to marry Zita (Carmi Martin), who comes with him. Though the Señora is none too pleased with Zita, she nevertheless announces that Ellis will take over the management of the estate and that Lorenzo will work for him. Angered, Lorenzo takes his family and moves out. And so begins a lurid melodrama that ends well for no one. Cain and Abel never achieves the symbolic dimensions promised by the title, and there are some overstated performances, but it's as watchable as a bloodier version of a prime-time soap opera like Dynasty or Dallas.

Maine-Océan Express (Jacques Rozier, 1986)

Luis Rego, Lydia Feld, and Rosa-Maria Gomes in Maine-Océan Express

Cast: Rosa-Maria Gomes, Luis Rego, Bernard Menez, Lydia Feld, Yves Afonso, Pedro Armendáriz Jr. Screenplay: Lydia Feld, Jacques Rozier. Cinematography: Acácio de Almeida. Film editing: Marine Brun, Jacques Rozier. Music: Hubert Degex, Anne Frédérick, Francis Hime. 

If I had to say what Jacques Rozier's Maine-Océan Express is about, which as a movie blogger I kind of have to do, I'd say it's about 130 minutes long. Forced to do better, I'd have to call it a screwball odyssey in which, although it begins and ends with two different travelers, the viewer is the Odysseus, forced to come to terms with a variety of wacky incidents. It starts with a Brazilian samba dancer (Rosa-Maria Gomes) boarding a train, on which, because she has failed to have her ticket stamped at the station, she is confronted by a ticket inspector (Luis Rego) who, because she speaks only a little French and English and he speaks no Portuguese, has trouble explaining what the problem is. He calls in his supervisor (Bernard Menez), who insists that rules must be followed and she must pay a fine, but has just as much trouble explaining the problem, until a lawyer (Lydia Feld), accompanied by her large black dog, tries to act as interpreter since she speaks a little Portuguese. Things get sorted out a little, and when they reach the town where the lawyer is scheduled to act in defense of a fisherman (Yves Afonso) who is being sued for an act of road rage, the samba dancer accompanies the lawyer -- for some reason I'm not quite clear about. Eventually, the samba dancer, the lawyer, the dog, the fisherman, the two ticket inspectors, and the dancer's manager (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) all wind up on the Île d'Yeu -- please don't ask me why or how -- where things are sort of sorted out. It's goofy French nonsense in Rozier's style, which amounts to dreaming up an assortment of characters and a situation to put them in, and seeing what comes of it. I have a bit of resistance to this approach to filmmaking but I have to admit that I found myself laughing out loud once or twice.    

PTU (Johnnie To, 2003)

Lam Suet in PTU

Cast: Simon Yam, Maggie Siu, Lam Suet, Ruby Wong, Raymond Ho-Yin Wong, Eddy Ko, Lo Hoi-Pang, Jerome Fung, Frank Zong-Ji Liu, Chiu Chi-Shing. Screenplay: Yau Nai-Hoi, Au Kin-Yee. Cinematography: Chen Siu-Keung. Production design: Ringo Cheung, Jerome Fung. Film editing: Law Wing-Cheung. Music: Chung Chi Wing. 

One of Akira Kurosawa's best early films was Stray Dog (1949), in which a cop's gun is stolen, necessitating a frantic search for the weapon. Johnnie To must surely have had that film in mind when he made PTU, although he takes a very different approach to the search, laying bare the inner workings of the Hong Kong police force and its relationship with the gangs it battles. Unlike the anxious rookie played by Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's film, the cop with the missing gun is a slovenly veteran, Sgt. Lo (Lam Suet), who loses the gun when he slips and falls and is knocked out while giving chase to some young gangsters. The Police Tactical Unit, headed by Sgt. Mike Ho (Simon Yam), comes to his aid, hoping to recover the weapon before they have to report its loss to the authorities. The rest is a series of colorful and sometimes deadly encounters, made vivid by cinematographer Chen Siu-Keung's visions of the city at night, its shadowy streets sometimes garishly lighted by signs. It's a twisty, ironic, and decidedly antiheroic thriller.  

Mallrats (Kevin Smith, 1995)

Art James, Jeremy London, Jason Lee, and Brian O'Halloran in Mallrats

Cast: Jeremy London, Jason Lee, Shannen Doherty, Claire Forlani, Ben Affleck, Michael Rooker, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Priscilla Barnes, Joey Lauren Adams, Ethan Suplee, Brian O'Halloran, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Art James, Stan Lee. Screenplay: Kevin Smith. Cinematography: David Klein. Production design: Dina Lipton. Film editing: Paul Dixon. Music: Ira Newborn. 

The success of his microbudget indie Clerks (1994) gave Kevin Smith the clout and the cash to make a more ambitious feature, but some think Smith was undone by his own success, overloading Mallrats with too much plot and too many extraneous characters and incidents. This comedy about the misadventures of two motormouth slackers is a bit too frantic and uninvolving, and some of its slapstick stunts centered on Smith's duo of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are poorly conceived. There's a gross-out joke that's more gross than funny, a bludgeoning of an Easter Bunny that comes out of nowhere, and an encounter with a topless fortune teller (Priscilla Barnes) that belongs in some other movie. You kind of have to be a fan of Smith's better films, especially Clerks, Chasing Amy (1997), and Dogma (1999), to be in the frame of mind to put up with the misfires in Mallrats.   

Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992)

Jeff Goldblum and Laurence Fishburne in Deep Cover

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Jeff Goldblum, Charles Martin Smith, Victoria Dillard, Gregory Sierra, Sydney Lassick, Roger Guenveur Smith, Clarence Williams III. Screenplay: Michael Tolkin, Henry Bean. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Pamela B. Warner. Film editing: John Carter. Music: Michael Colombier. 

If nothing else, Bill Duke's Deep Cover is notable for casting actors against type. Some of it works: Jeff Goldblum's lawyer turned would-be drug lord is full of humorous self-assurance tinged with menace. But Charles Martin Smith never overcomes the actor's nerdy image to establish him as a DEA agent confident enough to ask a series of Black federal agents a shockingly racist question and to manage the perilous situation he thrusts the agent played by Laurence Fishburne into. As for Fishburne himself, the role came early enough in his career that he was still being billed as Larry, which he insisted on changing once his career took off. He holds the film together even when it sometimes threatens to get derailed by too many plot twists. Although the movie asks the right questions about the compromised motives and veiled racism behind the so-called War on Drugs, it's undermined by generic thriller conventions and some preachy moments. 

Stowaway in the Sky (Albert Lamorisse, 1960)

André Gille and Pascal Lamorisse in Stowaway in the Sky

Cast: André Gille, Pascal Lamorisse, Maurice Baquet. Screenplay: Albert Lamorisse. Cinematography: Maurice Fellous, Guy Tabary. Production design: Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Film editing: Pierre Gillette. Music: Jean Prodromidès. 

After the success of his short film The Red Balloon (1956), Albert Lamorisse conceived another aerial adventure on a larger scale. It became his first feature, Stowaway in the Sky, and also starred his son, Pascal. It's a fanciful tale of an inventor (André Gille) who develops what he thinks is a revolutionary ballooning technique. On the maiden flight, his young grandson (Pascal) manages to scramble aboard after clinging to the gondola at liftoff. The inventor reluctantly allows the boy to accompany him on the flight, and they set off on a series of adventures that take them over spectacular French landscapes from Brittany to the Camargue and into close encounters with the Strasbourg Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, and Mont Blanc. They're tracked on the ground by an assistant (Maurice Baquet), who gets into comic scrapes of his own. To get the effects he needed for the film, Lamorisse helped develop a shock-absorbing mechanism called Helivision, which eliminated the vibrations of a camera mounted on a helicopter. All of the aerial sequences were shot this way, including those that appear to be taking place inside the gondola of the balloon: A half-basket was attached to the side of the helicopter and the actors rode in it while filming took place. Although there is some dialogue in setting up the premise and advancing what plot there is, it's essentially a silent film. Jack Lemmon, who liked the film so much that he bought the rights to it,  added his own voiceover narration scripted by S.N. Behrman for the American release. I haven't seen it, but some who have think it detracts from the charm of the film, which is often breathtakingly beautiful. 

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1993)

Colm Feore in Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

 Cast: Colm Feore, Derek Keurvorst, Katya Ladan, Kate Henning, Sharon Bernbaum, Don McKellar, David Hughes, Gale Garnett. Screenplay: François Girard, Don McKellar. Cinematography: Alain Dostie. Art direction: John Rubino. Film editing: Gaétan Huot. 

The conventional biopic uses narrative devices that subject it to distortions and falsifications, so in an attempt to avoid those in his portrait of the life of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, François Girard resorts to something like a mosaic or collage -- a bit like those portraits that are made up of dozens of smaller photographs. Gould was, above all, an eccentric and a master of technique, so the story of his life demands the eccentric technique of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Certainly what we get from Girard's approach and actor Colm Feore's performance as Gould is eccentricity -- a man who even in a crowd is as solitary as we see him at the beginning of the series of short films, walking toward the camera across an icy vastness. What we don't get, I think, is much of a sense of Gould as musician -- the images and the talk overwhelm the music except on occasion, as in the one segment in which a string quartet plays one of Gould's compositions or in the Norman McLaren animation of Fugue No. 14 from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. Gould loved talk, so some of the sequences are all talk. The chief criticism of Gould as pianist is that he was a master of technique, which suited the intricacies of Bach, but that he was so limited emotionally -- today, he might be diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum of autism -- that he played everything as if it were Bach. For example, in the excerpt from Beethoven's Sonata No. 17 in D minor played in one segment, the cascading notes fail to evoke the emotions that give the sonata its nickname, "Tempest." Sometimes, the film seems more preoccupied with what other people thought about Gould, especially in the scenes in which he's hounded by interviewers, than in examining the man himself. 

Eastern Condors (Sammo Hung, 1987)

Cast: Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Haing S. Ngor, Joyce Godenzi, Chui Man-yan, Ha Chi-chun, Lam Ching-ying, Melvin Wong, Charlie Chin, Cheung Kwok-keung, Billy Lau, Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen, Peter Chan, Chin Kar-lok, Hsiao Ho, Lau Chau-sang, Yuen Wah. Screenplay: Barry Wong. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Production design: King Man Lee. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Danny Chung. 

Blithely stealing from classics in the genre, Sammo Hung crafts in Eastern Condors the action film to end all action films. (If only.) The premise is that after the fall of Saigon, the retreating Americans left behind a missile installation that they now want to disarm, lest it fall into the wrong hands. So the American military recruits undocumented Chinese immigrants now in prison for a variety of offenses to be air-dropped into Vietnam to destroy the facility. If they succeed, they will be rewarded with American citizenship and a large sum of money. If this sounds familiar, at least there are more than a dozen of them and they're not particularly dirty. Eastern Condors is full of gags ribbing the Americans, as well as a few that wouldn't pass muster in an American movie, such as a volunteer whose stutter is played for laughs until it proves fatal. There's more gunplay than kung fu in Hung's movie, although it ends with a great martial arts standoff that's worth sitting through the rest of the movie for. Hung, slimmed down for the film, plays a more serious role than usual, but the movie is stolen by Yuen Biao as the wily Rat Chien and Yuen Wah as a giggling Viet Cong general modeled on some of James Bond's more epicene villains. 

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke, 2024)

Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides

Cast: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin, Zhou You, Xu Changchu, Lan Zhou, Hu Maotao, Pan Jianlin. Screenplay: Wan JIahuan Wan, Jia Zhang-ke. Cinematography: Eric Gautier, Nelson Lik-wai Yu. Production design: Liu Weixin. Film editing: Yang Chao, Matthieu Laclau, Xudong Lin. Music: Lim Giong. 

I can't imagine watching Caught by the Tides without having seen Jia Zhang-ke's earlier films, particularly Unknown Pleasures (2002), Sill Life (2006), and Ash Is Purest White (2018), which introduced us to his characters, settings, and themes. The docufictional Caught by the Tides is part reprise of and part coda to those films. The first two-thirds of it are actually patched together with outtakes and footage from them, along with personal footage shot by Jia himself during their production, and then blended into a narrative centered on Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) and her sometime lover, the shady Guo Bin (Li Zhubin). The titular tides are those of Chinese history and society in the first quarter of the 21st century, sweeping Qiao and Bin apart and together again. They're also, in the middle part of the film, the tides of the Yangtze, as the immense Three Gorges Dam project transforms the geography of China. It's a film about "progress" and its human consequences, most human at its beginning in the industrial city of Datong, where the declining old city is being redeveloped. By the end of the film, which returns to Datong, the city has been transformed by technology into something glossier but less human. The plot, such as it is, involves Qiao's attempt to reconnect with Bin, who noticeably declines as she seems to grow stronger. If there's a failing in Jia's work, it's that his vision is too personal, too concerned with working out a commentary on the history of modern China, with a consequential loss of connection to international audiences. But the skill with which he works out that vision may also be his greatest strength.      

The Sandpiper (Vincente Minnelli, 1965)

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Sandpiper

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bronson, Robert Webber, James Edwards, Torin Thatcher, Tom Drake, Douglas Henderson, Morgan Mason. Screenplay: Martin Ransohoff, Irene Kamp, Louis Kamp, Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: George W. Davis, Urie McCleary. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Johnny Mandel. 

Cynically concocted by its producer, Martin Ransohoff, as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the peak (or nadir) of their celebrated relationship, The Sandpiper steals its dialectic from the hoary old Somerset Maugham tale of Sadie Thompson and the missionary. Ransohoff set a team of writers, including former blacklistees Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, to work on fleshing out his idea to tell the purloined story of a free-spirited woman and an uptight male. The best the writers could do was to lard the story with glitzy profundities, e.g. "Man is doomed by his myths" or "Man is essential to any concept of the universe" or "Saints tend to be myopic, whereas the atheist is almost always innocent." Burton looks especially uncomfortable mouthing lines like "I cannot dispel you from my thoughts," and Taylor has to say things like "Life always flies back to life if it isn't penned in." We get some relief from the tedious course of the plot, which anyone can see coming almost before the movie starts, with some lovely shots of the scenery at Big Sur. Otherwise, The Sandpiper doesn't even offer the delight of camp, since its stars are so uninterested in the story that they don't even bother overacting. 

Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959)

Sandra Dee and Cliff Robertson in Gidget

Cast: Sandra Dee, James Darren, Cliff Robertson, Arthur O'Connell, The Four Preps, Mary LaRoche, Joby Baker, Tom Laughlin, Sue George, Robert Ellis, Joe Morrow, Yvonne Craig, Patti Kane, Doug McClure, Burt Metcalfe. Screenplay: Gabrielle Upton, based on a novel by Frederick Kohner. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: William A. Lyon. Music: Arthur Morton.

Deconstructing Gidget is an amusing pastime. This is a movie made four years after the publication of Lolita, in which Burt Vail, aka Kahuna (Cliff Robertson), a 36-year-old man, almost seduces Francie Lawrence, aka Gidget (Sandra Dee), a 17-year-old girl. (For another perspective, try to imagine Gidget being screened at the Jeffrey Epstein mansion.) Of course, the unmarried Kahuna also hangs around with a bunch of half-naked college boys. And Gidget has an androgynous friend called B.L. (Sue George) who claims to have a boyfriend we never meet. Eventually, to be sure, tomboy Gidget, who claims to be repulsed by the physical advances of boys, will succeed in the "man hunt" initiated by her other, more nubile girlfriends and land the handsome, hunky Jeffrey Matthews, aka Moondoggie (James Darren), one of Kahuna's male followers. It's a movie that launched sequels, a TV series, and a whole subgenre of beach party movies. But were we ever so naive as to take Gidget as just wholesome entertainment? 

Pilgrim, Farewell (Michael Roemer, 1980)

Elizabeth Huddle and Christopher Lloyd in Pilgrim, Farewell

Cast: Elizabeth Huddle, Christopher Lloyd, Laurie Prange, Leslie Paxton, Shelley Wyant, Elizabeth Franz, Robert Curtis Brown. Screenplay: Michael Roemer. Cinematography: Franz Rath. Film editing: Terry Lewis. 

Life is messy, but dying is messier. That seems to be the point of Michel Roemer's emotionally raw Pilgrim, Farewell. Kate (a compelling Elizabeth Huddle) is not going to let cancer take her without making a fuss about it, which involves lashing back at the well-meaning people, her physicians and family, who would like to make it easier for her. She's especially hard on her sister, Rebecca (Leslie Paxton), and her daughter, Annie (Laurie Prange), both of whom have problems of their own, even if they aren't fatal ones. Annie and Rebecca both collapse under Kate's pain-driven assault, but manage to recover with the aid of Paul (Christopher Lloyd), the man Kate is living with. There are times when I felt that Roemer had crammed too much backstory into the lives of her characters, bringing a whiff of melodrama into what is mostly a serious film. And he makes Paul just a little too sturdy and patient in dealing with the women who are acting out the crisis of Kate's illness. (The film was made before Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) established Lloyd as a comic character player, specializing in eccentrics. I wish we'd seen more of this side of him as an actor.) It's also unfortunate that the story of the effect of a woman's slow death on others brings to mind a greater film, Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972). Pilgrim, Farewell can't hope to match up to that standard, but it's a solid and often profoundly moving work. 

We Won't Grow Old Together (Maurice Pialat, 1972)

Marlène Jobert and Jean Yanne in We Won't Grow Old Together

Cast: Marlène Jobert, Jean Yanne, Christine Fabréga, Patricia Pierangeli, Jacques Galland, Maurice Risch, Harry-Max, Muse Dalbray, Macha Méril. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Film editing: Bernard Dubois, Arlette Langmann. 

Now that all relationships between (and among) consenting adults can no longer be called "perverse," it's hard to find a word for that of Catherine (Marlène Jobert) and Jean (Jean Yanne) in Maurice Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together. "Dysfunctional" comes to mind, although it has apparently been functioning for six years before we encounter them. "Sadomasochistic" is a little too clinical and reductive for their on-again, off-again pairing. Separately, it's easier to categorize Jean as a jerk and Catherine as a doormat, except that there's something larger and deeper about both of them. In the astonishing scene in which Catherine sits blank-faced while Jean spews out a torrent of abuse, denouncing everything about her from her looks to her family to aimlessness in life, we project our own emotions about what it would be like to undergo such a barrage of insults, only to realize that her blankness, her lack of affect, her failure to fight back, is a way of asserting her control over him. When we meet Jean's beautiful, competent, and independent wife, Françoise (Macha Méril), we realize that his urge to dominate and abuse Catherine stems from a sense of his own inadequacy. We Won't Grow Old Together, a title that admits failure from the outset, is a complex psychological portrait, perhaps too complex for the medium of film, which makes it at once fascinating and abhorrent. 

Volavérunt (Bigas Luna, 1999)

Aitana Sánchez-Guión in Volavérunt

La Maja Desnuda, by Francisco de Goya

Volavérunt, by Francisco de Goya

Cast: Aitana Sánchez-Guión, Penélope Cruz, Jordi Mollà, Jorge Perugorría, Stefania Sandrelli, Empar Ferrer, Zoe Berriatúa, Jean-Marie Juan, Olivier Achard, Fermí Reixach. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna, based on a novel by Jean-Louis Benoît. Cinematography: Paco Femenia. Production design: Koldo Vallés. Film editing: Kenout Peltier. Music: Alberto García Demestres. 

Bigas Luna's Volavérunt tries to be several different things before finally settling down as perhaps the least interesting of them. It's an erotic fable, or a historical pageant, or a dramatization of an incident in the life of an artist, or a tale of political intrigue, before it finally becomes a whodunit. The title, which means "they have flown," refers perhaps most directly to one of Francisco de Goya's Caprichos, the artist's series of satirical etchings, which depicts his patron and perhaps mistress the Duchess of Alba, in flight with a group of grotesques at her feet. In the film, he shows his sketch of the scene to the duchess in response to her wish to fly. Which she might well desire, given that the duchess played by Aitana Sánchez-Guión is having an affair not only with Goya (Jorge Perugorría) but also with the Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy (Jordi Mollà), who is also having an affair with Queen Maria Luisa (Stefania Sandrelli). Meanwhile, Goya is painting a pair of portraits of a reclining woman, in one of which she is clothed and in the other nude. He is using as a model Godoy's mistress Pepita Tudó (Penélope Cruz), but the face in the finished portraits is not hers, leading to speculation that the model was actually the duchess. But this famous artistic mystery fades into the background of the movie when the duchess suddenly dies. Luna turns Godoy and Goya into detectives, out to solve the mystery of the duchess's death. Ultimately, the film collapses under the weight of too much historical speculation, both political and artistic, with only the colorful setting and the vivid performances of Sànchez-Guión, Cruz, and Sandrelli to make it memorable. 

Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998)

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Velvet Goldmine

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale, Toni Collette, Eddie Izzard, Emily Woof, Michael Feast, Janet McTeer (voice). Screenplay: Todd Haynes, James Lyons. Cinematography: Maryse Alberti. Production design: Christopher Hobbs. Costume design: Sandy Powell. Film editing: James Lyons. Music: Carter Burwell, Craig Wedren.

I used to think that if Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1952), and 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) could all be made into musicals, why couldn't someone do that to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)? I mean, aside from the fact that the only person who sings in that movie, Susan Alexander Kane, isn't very good at it, there are lots of opportunities for musical numbers. Kane himself has a scene with some dancing girls that could be turned into a production number, and Bernstein's recollection of the girl in a white dress with a white parasol could be turned into a wistful ballad. Of course, you'd probably wind up calling the musical Rosebud!, with a theme song reprised throughout. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Todd Haynes had already made a Kane musical called Velvet Goldmine. Actually, what Haynes does is superimpose the Kane plot on a story about a reporter (Christian Bale) searching for the truth about a glam rocker, Brian Slade, aka Maxwell Demon (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), whose fake death led to a career death. The resulting movie is a bit of a muddle, especially when Haynes adds elements drawn from Oscar Wilde to the mix, but it's probably better than Rosebud! would have been, and it might even have reached greatness if Haynes had been able to secure the cooperation (and the songs) of David Bowie, as he originally wanted. As it is, it's an intriguing picture of a moment in rock history and the continuing change in attitudes about gender identity. Ewan McGregor is particularly good as Curt Wild, a figure modeled on Iggy Pop, especially considering McGregor's retreat from edgy roles like this one and the junkie in Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) into the Star Wars universe.    

The Magnificent Butcher (Yuen Woo-ping, 1979)

Sammo Hung in The Magnificent Butcher

Cast: Sammo Hung, Kwan Tak-hing, Yuen Biao, Wei Pai, Fan Mei-sheng, Chung Fat, Hoi Sang Lee, Fung Hak-on, JoJo Chan, Tong Ching, Chong Kam, Lam Ching-ying, Yuen Miu, Tsang Cho-lam. Screenplay: Edward Tang, Wong Jing. Cinematography: Ma Koon-wah.  Art direction: Wo Mak. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Frankie Chan. 

A kung fu action comedy doesn't really need an elaborate plot, and certainly not one with the rape-murder subplot that sours Yuen Woo-ping's The Magnificent Butcher. What it needs is lots of setups for flips and feints, strikes and sweeps and rapid-fire conflict, and the rival martial arts schools of Yuen's movie set that up adequately. Mostly the movie is a showcase for Sammo Hung, the endearingly pudgy star whose agility belies his girth. I admit that I began to tire of so many choreographed confrontations, skillful as they were, and of the mugging of some of the actors, especially Fan Mei-sheng as Beggar So, but things picked up again when Hung's Butcher Wing took on Chung Fat's Wildcat, who displayed moves I haven't seen since the last time I tried to trim my cat's claws. Devotees of the discipline will relish the movie. Others may just want to sample it. 

Breaking News (Johnnie To, 2004)

Richie Jen and Kelly Chen in Breaking News

Cast: Richie Jen, Kelly Chen, Nick Cheung, Eddie Cheung, Benz Hui, Lam Suet, Yong You, Ding Haifeng, Li Haitao, Simon Yam, Alan Chiu Chung-San, Maggie Shiu, Wong Chi-wai, Wong Wah-wo. Screenplay: Chan Hing-kai, Yip Tin-shing. Cinematography: Cheng Siu-keung. Production design: Bruce Yu. Film editing: David M. Richardson. Music: Ben Cheung, Chung Chi-wing.

Johnnie To's Breaking News treats media manipulation as if it were something new, which it isn't. It's been with us at least since FDR used radio for his "fireside chats" and Adolf Hitler hired Leni Riefensthal to make Triumph of the Will (1935). But propaganda is so much a part of our life that although To's thriller tells us nothing new, it cleverly integrates it into a standard cops-and-crooks plot. When a shootout between the police and the bad guys goes wrong, media-savvy police superintendent Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen) takes over with a double aim: to catch the criminals and to save the department's reputation. The failed shootout takes place in a bravura opening sequence, in which Cheng Siu-keung's camera travels through, around, up, and over the scene with breathtaking, apparently uninterrupted fluidity. The movie barely rests after that's over. There are a few bobbles in the movie's storytelling, and it's sometimes hard to see who's shooting whom, but we're here for the chase, the suspense, and a few laughs, so nobody who really matters will mind.