Countdown (Robert Altman, 1967)

James Caan in Countdown

Cast: James Caan, Joanna Moore, Robert Duvall, Barbara Baxley, Charles Aidman, Steven Ihnat, Michael Murphy, Ted Knight, Stephen Coit, John Rayner, Charles Irving, Bobby Riha. Screenplay: Loring Mandel, based on a novel by Hank Searls. Cinematography: William W. Spencer. Art direction: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: Leonard Rosenman. 

Reality intervened to make Countdown obsolete within a few months after it was released, so that the scenes of the astronaut played by James Caan plodding across the lunar surface -- instead of bouncing on it as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would soon be seen doing -- look ridiculous. Countdown is watchable today mainly for the people involved with it who went on to better things. Caan and Robert Duvall were just a few years away from stardom thanks to The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and even Ted Knight, who plays a NASA press relations man, would find a better journalistic role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. But it was almost the undoing of its director, Robert Altman, who was fired by Warner Bros. for what became one of his signature techniques: overlapping dialogue. What energy and interest Countdown generates comes from Altman's ability to keep things moving, but he's saddled with a tired story about the space race with the usual cliches, including the astronaut's anxious wife, played woodenly by Joanna Moore. 

Undercurrent (Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1956)

Fujiko Yamamoto in Undercurrent

Cast: Fujiko Yamamoto, Ken Uehara, Eitaro Ozawa, Michiko Ai, Eijiro Tono, Kazuko Ichikawa, Michiko Ono, Kimiko Tachibana, Mineko Yorozuyo, Keiko Kawasaki. Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Hisao Sawano. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Shigeo Nishida. Music: Sei Ikeno. 

Kozaburo Yoshimura's Undercurrent (aka Night River) is a romantic melodrama somewhat in the manner of Douglas Sirk, in which a strong woman is troubled by the expectations of the men in her life, including her father, her colleagues, her suitors, and her lover. Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto) has built a career as a textile designer when she meets a university professor, Takemura (Ken Uehara), whose wife is an invalid. Their relationship causes a mild scandal, and his wife's death awakens qualms of conscience in Kiwa, just as her career is reaching new levels of success. In an American "woman's picture" of the 1950s, which Undercurrent strongly resembles, the choice between love and career might have easily been resolved in favor of love, but the changes in the role of women in postwar Japan produce a distinctly different effect. Handsomely filmed by Kazuo Miyagawa in a muted palette in which splashes of primary color stand out vividly, Undercurrent benefits from Yamamoto's thoughtful, sensitive performance. 

Loving Couples (Mai Zetterling, 1964)

Harriet Andersson, Gio Petré, and Gunnel Lindblom in Loving Couples

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gio Petré, Anita Björk, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Jan Malmsjö, Lissi Alandh, Bengt Brunskog, Anja Boman, Åke Grönberg. Heinz Hopf. Screenplay: Mai Zetterling, David Hughes, based on a novel by Agnes von Krusentjerna. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: Jan Boleslaw. Film editing: Paul Davies. Music: Roger Wallis. 

Mail Zetterling's first film as director, Loving Couples, almost collapses under the weight of exposition and subtext. It centers on three women about to give birth in a gloomy Swedish hospital in the first year of World War I. One of the women, Angela (Gio Petré), is unwed but doesn't care; another, Agda (Harriet Andersson), is married to a gay man who isn't the father, and is perfectly happy about it; the third, Adele (Gunnel Lindblom), is told that the child she's carrying, fathered by her husband, whom she doesn't love, is dead. All of them wound up in this condition on or about Midsummer's Eve on an opulent estate. The film first wanders back through their several girlhoods and then spends a good deal of time bringing us up to the day they were impregnated. The tone of the film ranges from giddy to gloomy as it explores religious bigotry, sexual freedom, societal hypocrisy, mindless militarism, and predatory behavior, among other topics. It almost flies apart at several of its narrative turns, but somehow Zetterling manages to hold it together. 

Bugsy Malone (Alan Parker, 1976)

Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone

Cast: Scott Baio, Florence Garland, Jodie Foster, John Cassisi, Martin Lev, Paul Murphy, Sheridan Earl Russell, Albin "Humpty" Jenkins. Screenplay: Alan Parker. Cinematography: Peter Biziou, Michael Seresin. Production design: Geoffrey Kirkland. Film editing: Gerry Hambling. Music: Paul Williams.

It could almost be a scene from the Apple+ series The Studio: 

"I got an idea: a spoof of Warner Bros. gangster movies."

"Nah, I think it's been done." 

"So what if we make it a musical?"

"Hmm. Tell me more."

"We could have it performed by kids!"

"Not bad. But what about the violence? You can't have kids gunning down kids." 

"Yeah ... oh, wait! We could have the machine guns fire whipped cream!"

"Huh. You mean like those old movies with the custard pie fights?"

"Yeah. We could have a big pie fight at the end!" 

"Great! Let's greenlight it!"

It didn't happen that way, of course. It was all Alan Parker's idea -- or bad idea, depending on how you respond to Bugsy Malone. I for one find it a bit creepy, with all those prepubescent chorus girls like something out of Jeffrey Epstein's fever dreams. But there are those who love it and find it perfectly innocent in execution. And it does have Jodie Foster's performance in what would have been the Joan Blondell role: the hard-bitten chorus girl with a heart. The 13-year-old Foster gives it all the sass Blondell would have given it. The songs, by Paul Williams, are clever enough, and fortunately they're dubbed, so we don't have to listen to them sung in childish treble. Most critics, with Pauline Kael a decided exception, liked it, and it was a hit in Britain, where it was filmed. Maybe the best thing about it is that it started no trend toward kiddie spoof movies.  

Streetwise (Na Jiazuo, 2021)

Li Jiuxiao and Huang Miyi in Streetwise

Cast: Li Jiuxiao, Huang Miyi, Yu Ailei, Yao Lu, Sha Baoliang. Screenplay: Na Jiazuo. Cinematography: Li Jia Neng. Film editing: Jinlei Kong. 

Bleak in concept but often lush in execution, Na Jiazuo's debut feature, Streetwise, centers on the lives of three young people in a city in Sichuan in 2004. Dong Zi (Li Jiuxiao) works with his friend Xi Jun (Yu Ailei) as a debt collector for a man known as Mr. Four (Sha Baoliang), getting beat up as often as not by the people they try to collect money from. Dong Zi takes on this unpleasant job to pay the hospital bills for his father (Yao Lu), who is a handful of his own, constantly in trouble for gambling. Unfortunately, Dong Zi also has a bent for trouble, getting involved with Mr. Four's ex-wife, Jiu'er (Huang Miyi), who runs a tattoo parlor. Streetwise is narratively somewhat choppy, and it takes patience and attention to sort out the connections among the characters, but it repays that attention with some vivid characterization and a real feeling for the atmosphere of a dead-end city.   

Chongqing Hot Pot (Yang Qing, 2016)

Cast: Chen Kun, Bai Baihe, Qin Hao, Yu Entai. Screenplay: Yang Qing, Zhang Enming, Zhang Shimao. Cinematography: Liao Ni. Art direction: Lin Mu. Film editing: Li Nanyi. Music: Peng Fei, Zhao Yingjun. 

Liu Bo (Chen Kun) and his buddies Xu Dong (Qin Hao) and Four Eyes (Yu Entai) get caught in the middle of a bank heist in the hyperviolent comedy Chongqing Hot Pot. The guys, who run a hot pot restaurant in a former bomb shelter, discover that they share an easily penetrated wall with a bank, and the passage leads straight to the vault. Liu Bo is having difficulties with the gambling debt he owes a mobster, so the temptation to take the cash lying out on a table in the vault is intense. But that cash has coincidentally become the target of some robbers who, wearing masks, try to pull off a daylight heist. Also coincidentally, a pretty young woman (Bai Baihe) whom the guys knew in middle school works in the bank, adding a romantic subplot to the movie. Yang Qing doesn't quite tie up all the loose ends of this complicated story, and Chongqing Hot Pot is a little darker than it needs to be, but there are some amusing moments. 

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 2006)

Garrison Keillor in A Prairie Home Companion

Cast: Woody Harrelson, L.Q. Jones, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Tim Russell, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin. Screenplay: Garrison Keillor, Ken LaZebnik. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Dina Goldman. Film editing: Jacob Craycroft. Music: Garrison Keillor. 

Garrison Keillor used to be celebrated as a humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and James Thurber, crafting stories out of the regional American experience with his best-selling tales of Lake Wobegon, Minn. and hosting a public radio show with a devoted following. His descent into obscurity came, like many others, with charges of inappropriate sexual behavior, but it's a mark of how famous he once was that a feature film with a starry cast was built around his radio show. A Prairie Home Companion was Robert Altman's last feature, and it demonstrates his ability to direct an ensemble of vivid characters. The thread of story concerns the final broadcast of the show, brought about by the purchase of the theater by a large Texas corporation. Somehow, a mysterious figure in a white trench coat, played by Virginia Madsen and billed in the credits as "Dangerous Woman," is inserted into the plot, as is the character of Guy Noir, the private eye played on the radio by Keillor but in the film by Kevin Kline. But the point of the movie is really to have the stars show off. Keillor's owlish presence is what holds the movie together, and the cast seems to be having fun. Whether the audience does too seems to be a matter of taste. I admit that I never appreciated Keillor's humor. It always seemed to contain a whiff of condescension to the residents of Lake Wobegon and the old-fashioned down-home music on his show, a kind of smirky folksiness, and that mars the film for me. 

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill in Possession

Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent, Johanna Hofer, Carl Duering, Shaun Lawton, Michael Hogben, Maximilien Rüthlein. Screenplay: Andrzej Zulawski, Frederic Tuten. Cinematography: Bruno Nuytten. Art direction: Holger Gross. Film editing: Marie-Sophie Dubus, Suzanne Lang-Willar. Music: Andrzej Korzynski. 

As if the story of a woman possessed by ... something weren't enough, Andrzej Zulawski tells it with such feverish restlessness that Possession exhausts the audience well before its frenzied climax. Two men can't have a conversation without at least one of them bobbing and weaving or swiveling in a desk chair. Yet somehow this most hyperactive of horror movies makes its impact, putting its leads, Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, through hell. To what point other than touching a viewer's every nerve? The Berlin setting, smack up against the Wall, suggests a political subtext reflected in the apocalyptic ending, and the dialogue is riddled with references to God and Faith and Chance, but I tend to think that in this case the mannerism is the message.  
 

Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, Ko Matsuo, 2001)

Cast (voices): Miyoko Shoji, Mami Koyama, Fumiko Orikasa, Shozo Izuka, Shoko Tsuda, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Hisaka Kyoda, Kan Tokumaru, Tomie Kataoka, Takko Ishimori, Masamichi Sato, Masaya Onosaka, Masane Tsukayama, Koichi Yamadera. Screenplay: Satoshi Kon, Sadayuki Murai. Cinematography: Hisao Shira. Art direction: Nobutaka Ike. Film editing: Satoshi Terauchi. Music: Susumu Hirasawa. 

I enjoyed Millennium Actress more than I do most anime because I love Japanese film and its history, and the movie is full of references to it, from wartime propaganda to postwar readjustment dramas, from ghost stories to samurai films, from geisha dramas to monster movies and beyond. The central figure is a retired actress, whose story echoes that of many famous Japanese actresses, including Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine. When the studio where she spent her career is closed, a documentarian and a cameraman go in search of her, hoping to tell the story of the studio through her own. They get more than they expect, finding not only that her life is intertwined with the movies she made, but also that they themselves become part of the story. The complex narrative is deftly handled and the hand-drawn animation is quite beautiful. 

Towheads (Shannon Plumb, 2013)

Walker Cianfrance, Shannon Plumb, and Cody Cianfrance in Towheads 

Cast: Shannon Plumb, Derek Cianfarnce, Walker Cianfrance, Cody Cianfrance. Screenplay: Shannon Plumb. Cinematography: Brett Jutkiewicz. Production design: Katie Hickman. Film editing: Joseph Krings. Music: Dave Wilder. 

A mother, struggling to raise two boys while also trying to recapture something of who she was before motherhood, has a nervous breakdown. She begins to recover by making a home video with the boys. That's the somewhat autobiographical premise of Shannon Plumb's Towheads, which stars writer-director Plumb, her husband, Derek Cianfrance, and their two boys, Walker and Cody. The myth of motherhood embodied by June Cleaver vacuuming in pearls while nurturing Wally and the Beav is long dead. Towheads simply amounts to dancing on its grave. It's lively, amusing, sometimes incoherent, but it hits the mark more often than it misses it. 

Ms .45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)

Zoë Lund in Ms .45

Cast: Zoē Lund, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto, Helen McGara, Nike Zachmanoglou, Abel Ferrara, Peter Yellen, Editta Sherman, Vincent Gruppi, S. Edward Singer, James Albanese. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: James Lemmo. Art directions: Veronika Rocket. Film editing: Christopher Andrews. Music: Joe Delia. 

The microbudgeted Ms .45 stars Zoë Lund (aka Zoë Tamerlis) as Thana, whose name suggests the Greek word for death, a mute seamstress who, after being raped twice on the same day, goes on a killing spree targeting unsavory men. But a nutshell description like that doesn't do justice to the odd mixture of exploitation flick, satire, black comedy, and social commentary that Abel Ferrara makes of it. It's the kind of movie that sticks with you even when you wish it wouldn't. 

Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980)

Paul Dooley, Shelley Duvall, and Robin Williams in Popeye

Cast: Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall, Ray Walston, Paul Dooley, Paul L. Smith, Richard Libertini, Donald Moffat, MacIntyre Dixon, Roberta Maxwell, Donovan Scott, Allan F. Nichols, Wesley Ivan Hurt, Bill Irwin. Screenplay: Jules Feiffer, based on characters created by E.C. Segar. Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design: Wolf Kroeger. Film editing: John W. Holmes, David A. Simmons. Music: Morton Stevens, songs by Harry Nilsson. 

The busy, noisy adaptation of the Popeye cartoon was not particularly well-received by either critics or audiences when it was released, and it was something of a commercial disaster because of cost overruns during its filming in Malta. Much of the blame fell on its director, Robert Altman, but a lot of it had to do with its flamboyantly indulgent producer, Robert Evans, and some also cited the widespread use of cocaine on the set. The casting can't be faulted: Robin Williams in the title role and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl couldn't be bettered. (Evans originally wanted Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin to play the roles.) But the songs by Harry Nilsson lack melodic hooks and the decision to record them live on the set was a mistake, considering that none of the actors was a real singer. Popeye has its moments, many of them contributed by the appealing Wesley Ivan Hurt, Altman's grandson, as the infant Swee'pea, but it's really something of a mess. 

Drug War (Johnnie To, 2012)

Louis Koo in Drug War

Cast: Louis Koo, Sun Honglei, Huang Yi, Wallace Chung, Gao Yunxiang, Li Guangjie, Guo Tao, Li Jing, Lo Hoi-pang, Eddie Cheung, Gordon Lam, Michelle Ye, Lam Suet. Screenplay: Wai Ka-Fai, Yau Nai-Hoi, 
Ryker Chan, Yu Xi. Cinematography: Cheng Siu-Keung. Production design: Horace Ma. Film editing: Allen Leung, David M. Richardson. Music: Xavier Jamaux. 

Even though we first see him frothing at the mouth and driving his car into a restaurant, and at the end of the film he's bargaining desperately for his life, Louis Koo makes an attractive if duplicitous figure at the center of Johnnie To's Drug War. The title says it all: Like our own war on drugs, the one in the film is a never-ending conflict full of compromises and fatal missteps. The first misstep the cops make in the movie is trusting Koo's Timmy Choi, whose meth lab has just exploded, and who desperately wants to avoid the death penalty China has imposed on fabricators of the drug. Choi promises to lead them into the heart of the country's drug world, and they go along with his plan. Initial success at gaining access to the workings of the drug business gives them hope, but Choi has only his survival in mind, and that precipitates a series of spectacular, if sometimes confusing, confrontations between cops and criminals, culminating in a spectacular shootout. Don't expect subtlety or sentiment from Drug War, and you'll be fine. 

The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Wim Wenders, 1972)

Arthur Brauss in The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Cast: Arthur Brauss, Kai Fischer, Erika Pluhar, Libgart Schwarz, Marie Bardischewski, Michael Toost, Bert Fortell, Edda Köchl, Mario Kranz, Ernst Meister, Rosl Dorena. Screenplay: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke, based on Handke's novel. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Burghard Schlicht, Rudolf Schneider-Manns Au. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Jürgen Knieper. 

As everyone knows, a murder involves motive, means, and opportunity. For Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss), the opportunity was present, the means handed to him by the victim, but what of the motive? That's the part of the murder that goes unsolved in Wim Wenders's adaptation of the novel by Peter Handke, and failing that, we're left to our own speculations. Which is pretty much the point of the film: Everything we know about another person is speculative, and the speculation goes beyond the character created by Wenders and Handke into the nature of narrative itself. Why are we being told about Bloch's crime and his apparently blithe escape from punishment? When we're told a story we want it to have a meaning, a moral, a special significance. And when the storytellers leave us hanging without resolving our desires for closure we feel dissatisfied, even cheated. Perhaps even, to use an obvious word: anxious. Get it? 

Dark Habits (Pedro Almodóvar, 1983)

Julieta Serrano and Cristina Sánchez Pascual in Dark Habits

Cast: Cristina Sánchez Pascual, Julieta Serrano, Chus Lampreave, Marisa Paredes, Carmen Maura, Lina Canalejas, Mary Carillo, Berta Riaza, Manuel Zarzo, Cecilia Roth. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar. Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández. Film editing: José Salcedo.

What is it that makes nuns funny? Is it just their anachronistic appearance, their ostensible modesty and piety in a culture that is anything but modest and pious? The nuns in Pedro Almodóvar's Dark Habits are certainly modest in dress, though one of them creates outré fashion designs (with the help of the parish priest). And they're pious enough to adopt self-mortifying names like Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave), Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), and Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas). But they also shoot heroin, drop LSD, and write salacious popular fiction. They run a retreat for wayward women like Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual), who brought about the death of a friend when she sold him some poisoned heroin and is on the run from the police. It's to Almodóvar's credit that he keeps the film going once the shock humor of these characters' secret lives is delivered, although there's not much more to Dark Habits than a comic take on transgressive behavior. At best, the movie is a sketch for the later, more involving Almodóvar films to come.  

Sound of the Sea (Bigas Luna, 2001)

Jordi Mollà and Leonor Watling in Sound of the Sea

Cast: Jordi Mollà, Leonor Watling, Eduard Fernández, Neus Agolló, Pep Cortés, Ricky Colomer. Screenplay: Rafael Azcona, based on a novel by Manuel Vicent. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Art direction: Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Film editing: Ernest Blasi. Music: Piano Magic. 

A stranger comes to town and wins the hand of a young woman, but when he's lost at sea and ruled dead, she marries a rich man. Then after several years the stranger returns and meets secretly with the young woman, but they're discovered and the rich man takes his revenge. There's not much more to the plot of Bigas Luna's Sound of the Sea than that, although it's dressed up with some trappings of myth: The stranger is named Ulises (Jordi Mollà), evoking the Odyssey, and he woos Martina (Leonor Watling) with quotations from the Aeneid. But the characterization is sketchy: What drives Ulises to abandon Martina and their child and fake his death? What, other than a romantic urge, causes him to return? The film posits no retribution for the revenge by the rich man (Eduard Fernández). And it all concludes with a clumsy coda that seems to signify that love (or at least sex) survives death. It's often beautiful to look at, but not much more than that. 

The Bodyguard (Sammo Hung, 2016)

Jacqueline Chan and Sammo Hung in The Bodyguard

Cast: Sammo Hung, Jacqueline Chan, Li Qinqin, Andy Lau, James Lee Guy, Tomer Oz, Zhu Yuchen, Feng Yaiyi. Screenplay: Kong Kwan. Cinematography: Ardy Lam. Production design: Pater Wong. Film editing: Kwong Chi-Leung, Lo Wai-Lun. Music: Alan Wong, Janet Yung. 

Sammo Hung's The Bodyguard is a mashup of sentimental drama, crime thriller, and martial arts film, with the sentiment dominating. Hung plays Ding, an aging man with a fading memory, who lives alone after a breakup with his daughter precipitated by his failure to look after his granddaughter, who went missing. Ding's landlady, Mrs. Park (Li Qinqin), has romantic designs on him, and he's befriended by a little neighbor girl, Cherry Li (Jacqueline Chan), whose father (Andy Lau), is mixed up with some mobsters. Although he looks like an ordinary, overweight elderly citizen, Ding is retired from the Central Security Bureau, a highly trained cadre of bodyguards for the elite of the Chinese Communist Party. Eventually, this training becomes apparent when Cherry's father steals from the mob and goes on the run, the mobsters retaliate by trying to kidnap the girl, and Ding, haunted by his failure with his granddaughter, successfully fends them off. More complications ensue before the plot culminates in a big fight scene in which Ding single-handedly takes on a flood of gangsters. The scene is fairly preposterous in comparison with those in Hung's earlier movies: It's filmed mostly in closeup with rapid editing, an obvious cheat. Eventually, of course, Ding and Cherry are reunited and she becomes a caretaker for the man who protected her. Despite the mushiness, there's a warmth and generosity in Hung's characterization of the aging man, and he has a genuine rapport with his young co-star. For martial arts movie devotees, there are cameos of other aging stars of the genre like Tsui Hark, Karl Maka, and Dean Shek, who play elderly men who kibitz on the passing scene.    

La Marge (Walerian Borowczyk, 1976)

Sylvia Kristel and Joe Dallesandro in La Marge

Cast: Sylvia Kristel, Joe Dallesandro, André Falcon, Mireille Audibert, Denis Manuel, Dominique Marcas, Norma Picadilly, Camille Larivière, Luz Laurent, Louise Chevalier, Karin Albin. Screenplay: Walerian Borowczyk, based on a novel by André Piyere de Mandriargues. Cinematography: Bernard Daillencourt. Production design: Jacques D'Ovidio. Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur. 

Positing a connection between grief and sex, Walerian Borowczyk's La Marge tries to be more than just soft-core porn filtered through an exquisite sensibility. It fails, but honorably. What it needs is a more nuanced actor than Joe Dallesandro in the lead, greater narrative clarity, and an avoidance of symbolic clichés like the dwarf who marks the fringes of a fragmented reality. It overreaches just enough to be memorable but not to avoid ridicule. 

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

Ronee Blakley in Nashville

Cast: David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Keenan Wynn, Elliott Gould, Julie Christie. Screenplay: Joan Tewkesbury. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Film editing: Dennis M. Hill, Sidney Levin. Music: Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Juan Grizzle, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Joe Raposo. 

Nashville hated Nashville. That's because it wasn't about them, but like most major movies of the '70s, from Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), it was about American angst. I hadn't seen it since its release and as I did then, I found it deserved the critical hosannas for sheer audacity but was also exasperatingly inconsistent in achievement. The satire remains pungent, especially when it involves Geraldine Chaplin's clueless BBC reporter, constantly missing the point, stumbling over her own preconceptions, or desperately searching for metaphors as she tours a junkyard or a school bus lot. Some of the performances are great, especially Ronee Blakley's fragile diva, Michael Murphy's oily political advance man, Gwen Welles's clueless would-be singer, and Lily Tomlin's unappreciated wife. But although the great Barbara Harris gets her moment to shine late in the film, her character is poorly integrated, and Shelley Duvall is wasted in a role that has no point. The decision to have the actors write and perform their own songs was a mistake, especially in the case of Karen Black, who never comes across as a credible rival to Blakley's Barbara Jean. Still, the film serves its major purpose, to portray an America wrenched by post-Watergate anxiety as it prepares to celebrate its bicentennial. Nashville is bracketed by two songs, one asserting that "we must be doing something right to last 200 years," the other anxiously repeating "you may say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me." What comes in between is apt demonstration of both premises. 

To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976)

Nastassja Kinski in To the Devil a Daughter

Cast: Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Nastassja Kinski, Honor Blackman, Denholm Elliott, Anthony Valentine, Michael Goodliffe, Eva Maria Meineke. Screenplay: Christopher Wicking, John Peacock, based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley. Cinematography: David Watkin. Art direction: Don Picking. Film editing: John Trumper. Music: Paul Glass. 

Peter Sykes's To the Devil a Daughter was disowned by both its credited screenwriter, Christopher Wicking, and the author of the book on which it was based, Dennis Wheatley. It's easy to see why: It's muddled and uninvolving, a routine horror thriller that borrows its best ideas from The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), throws in a nude scene for Nastassja Kinski, who was only 14 at the time, and wastes the talents of Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, and Denholm Elliott. 
 

Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979)

Jeff Bridges in Winter Kills

Cast: Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Tomas Milian, Belinda Bauer, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune, Richard Boone, David Spielberg, Joe Spinell, Elizabeth Taylor. Screenplay: William Richert, based on a novel by Richard Condon. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Production design: Robert F. Boyle. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Maurice Jarre. 

Every conspiracy thriller has to be judged by the standard set by John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and that includes Jonathan Demme's ill-advised 2004 remake. What makes William Richert's Winter Kills such an obvious target for comparison is that it's based on a novel by Richard Condon, who also wrote the novel on which Frankenheimer's film was based. The difference between Frankenheimer's film and Richert's is that although both deal with a political assassination, The Manchurian Candidate appeared a year before the killing of John F. Kennedy and Winter Kills a decade and a half later. Frankenheimer's movie felt somehow so prophetic that it actually disappeared from circulation for years. Richert's is obviously modeled on the conspiracy and cover-up theories that have always surrounded the Kennedy assassination. Winter Kills is stuffed with stars, some of them, like the brief cameos by Sterling Hayden, Toshiro Mifune, and an unbilled Elizabeth Taylor, amounting to stunt casting. Its chief virtue is a reliably solid and attractive performance by Jeff Bridges as the half-brother of an assassinated president, who stumbles across a clue that seems to implicate their father, a billionaire played with sinister charm by John Huston. Even though everyone that Bridges's character comes in contact with seems to get killed, there's no real urgency driving the film, and the result is a puzzle with no payoff. 

The Beaver (Jodie Foster, 2011)

Mel Gibson in The Beaver

Cast: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Riley Thomas Stewart, Cherry Jones. Screenplay: Kyle Killen. Cinematography: Hagen Bogdanski. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Lynzee Klingman. Music: Marcelo Zarvos. 

The Beaver was a notorious box office flop, and no wonder. It starts as a serious drama about a man in the throes of a deep depression, morphs into a comic fantasy with a teen romance subplot, and then becomes a horror movie before a bloody denouement leads to a tentative resolution. How do you market a movie like that, especially when its star is getting the wrong kind of press? You can't blame it all on Mel Gibson, who demonstrates throughout the movie that he's a skilled and resourceful actor when his demons of bigotry and violence aren't being released by alcohol. It's tempting to blame Jodie Foster for taking the helm of the movie, though she manages to give it some coherence. The producers must have seen some promise in Kyle Killen's screenplay, so we might question their wisdom and taste. But mark it down to systemic failure, a reminder that making movies is a collaborative project and that collective judgment is fraught with peril. 

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)

Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel in The Dreamers

Cast: Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Anna Chancellor, Robin Renucci. Screenplay: Gilbert Adair, based on his novel. Cinematography: Fabio Cianchetti. Production design: Jean Rabasse. Film editing: Jacopo Quadri. 

Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American in Paris in 1968, meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother, Théo (Louis Garrel), at the protest over the firing of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque Française, and is invited home to dinner with them. There he meets their parents, a prominent French poet (Robin Renucci) and his English wife (Anna Chancellor), and is invited to stay over for the night. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, he is surprised to see, through a partly opened door, Isabelle and Théo sharing a bed, naked. The next day, the parents depart on a month's vacation, leaving a check for the twins to cover their expenses. Matthew accepts an invitation from them to move into a spare room. And so begins a month in which Matthew's view of life is altered. Matthew, Isabelle, and Théo form a ménage familiar to them from the movies they have watched, like Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964), whose familiar run through the Louvre they re-create. The sex and nudity in The Dreamers earned it an NC-17 rating, but when I learned that in the novel on which the film is based Matthew has sex not only with Isabelle but also with Théo, I wondered if Bertolucci regarded homosexuality as more transgressive than incest. Though The Dreamers intends to shock, it pales in comparison to the work of filmmakers like Michael Haneke and Catherine Breillat. A handsome and well-acted film, it feels inert, and an insertion of a scene from Robert Bresson's unsparing Mouchette (1967) in the film reveals how conventional and glossy it really is.