The Sealed Soil (Marva Nabili, 1977)

Flora Shabaviz in The Sealed Soil

Cast: Flora Shabaviz. Screenplay: Marva Nabili. Cinematography: Barbod Taheri. Music: Hooreh. 

With its static camera, long takes, and lack of a conventional plot, Marva Nabili's The Sealed Soil has earned comparisons to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975). It has the same unrelenting focus on a central figure, in this case Rooy-Bekhir (Flora Shabaviz), an 18-year-old woman in an Iranian village, who resists pressures from her family and her society to enter an arranged marriage. She is told at one point that her mother was engaged to be married at the age of 7. Eventually, the pressure to conform breaks her down. Much of the film focuses on her daily life in a place that seems suspended in time -- it's a film in which ambience rather than incident dominates. Made on the sly, with Shabaviz the only professional actor in its cast, the film was smuggled out of Iran (where it has never been exhibited) and edited back at the City University of New York, where Nabili was a film student. For those willing to endure its lack of narrative urgency, The Sealed Soil has a quiet power.  

Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971)

Bobby Kendall in Pink Narcissus

Cast: Bobby Kendall, Don Brooks, Charles Ludlam. Screenplay: James Bidgood. Cinematography: James Bidgood. Art direction: James Bidgood. Film editing: Martin Jay Sadoff. Music: Gary Goch, Martin Jay Sadoff. 

James Bidgood's shoestring fantasy is a reminder of the fine line between the erotic and the comic. Filmed in his apartment with a cast of friends, it's a lush evocation of the daydreams of a man (Bobby Kendall) waiting for the client for his sexual favors, in which the man, credited as Pan, imagines himself in various guises: a bullfighter, a harem boy, a Roman slave, and so on. In short, the familiar setups for gay porn. Though there is plenty of male nudity and at least one sexually explicit moment, Pink Narcissus never quite crosses over into pornography -- at least in the eye of this beholder. The score is made up of snippets of Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and a Haydn horn concerto, designed to set up a languorous mood. There's no plot, but none is needed. The usual word for this sort of film is camp, and the presence of Charles Ludlam in a variety of roles reinforces that adjective. Certainly it's all a little too much, and the blazes of color, soft-focus photography, and busy editing are sometimes eye-straining, but it's still an intriguing glimpse into one man's imagination.   

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)

Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Amy Madigan, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Whitmer Thomas, Callie Schuttera, Scarlett Sher (voice). Screenplay: Zach Cregger. Cinematography: Larkin Seiple. Production design: Tom Hammock. Film editing: Joe Murphy. Music: Zach Cregger, Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay.

In Weapons, Zach Cregger takes a gut-level nightmare, the abduction of children, and turns it into a horror movie centered on social scapegoating. When all of the children except for one in the third-grade class taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) disappear one night, she becomes the target of suspicion. The details of their disappearance is uncanny: Seventeen children all left their homes at the same time of night and completely vanished, with only a few videos made by home surveillance cameras to record their departure. The police are baffled even after grilling Justine and the boy (Cary Christopher) who was left behind. Justine is harassed: The word WITCH is painted on her car, and she begins to drink heavily. One of her chief accusers is Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew was one of the disappeared. Cregger tells the story in overlapping segments, each from a different point of view, a device that’s a little too repetitive but eventually pays off, revealing a villain with supernatural powers – ordinarily a cop-out device in a mystery story, but made effective by a wonderfully creepy performance by Amy Madigan. There are some plot holes that irritate those who look too closely, but Weapons is the kind of film you watch without expecting actuality to intrude.

Dr. T and the Women (Robert Altman, 2000)

Shelley Long and Richard Gere in Dr. T and the Women

Cast: Richard Gere, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Shelley Long, Laura Dern, Tara Reid, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler, Robert Hays, Matt Malloy, Andy Richter, Lee Grant, Janine Turner. Screenplay: Anne Rapp. Cinematography: Jan Kiesser. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Geraldine Peroni. Music: Lyle Lovett. 

More noisy than funny, Robert Altman's Dr. T and the Women has his characteristic generous casting and overlapping dialogue, but it also displays the limitations of both. We want to see more of some of the performers, like Lee Grant and Laura Dern, than we do, and we want them to say cleverer things than they do. Richard Gere plays a Dallas gynecologist whose office is crowded with eager patients and whose family is full of women demanding his attention. Though Altman's movie was scripted by a woman, Altman portrays women as so foolishly self-obsessed that when he delivers a baby at the end of the film, his proclamation, "It's a boy," is made to sound like a cry of relief. 

Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974)

Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas

Cast: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Marian Waldman, Andrea Martin, James Edmond, Doug McGrath, Art Hindle, Lynne Griffin. Screenplay: Roy Moore. Cinematography: Reginald H. Morris. Art direction: Karen Bromley. Film editing: Stan Cole. Music: Carl Zittrer. 

One of the progenitors of the "the call is coming from inside the house" trope, Bob Clark's Black Christmas generates a lot of suspense once you get through the first hour, which is full of cheesy jokes and naughty talk, much of it given to Margot Kidder as Barb, one of the doomed coeds in a sorority house being stalked by a psychopath. Bob Clark's pacing is off in this first part of the movie, but it doesn't much matter once the victims keep dropping. The Christmas setting is gratuitous and the father of the first victim is played oddly for laughs, so the film also takes its time finding a consistent tone. Still, there are those who think it's a classic of the genre. 

Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman, 1946)

Bill Williams and Susan Hayward in Deadline at Dawn

Cast: Bill Williams, Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas, Joseph Calleia, Osa Massen, Lola Lane, Jerome Cowan, Marvin Miller, Roman Bohnen, Steven Geray, Joe Sawyer, Constance Worth, Joseph Crehan. Screenplay: Clifford Odets, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Roland Gross. Music: Hanns Eisler. 

In Harold Clurman's Deadline at Dawn, screenwriter Clifford Odets takes a familiar thriller premise -- a guy wakes up after a blackout bender with a dead woman and can't prove that he didn't kill her -- and almost talks it to death. The guy is a sailor on shore leave, Alex Winkler (Bill Williams), and in his effort to determine whether he killed Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), he gains the help of a taxi dancer, June Goffe (Susan Hayward), and a taxi driver, Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas). The result is a head-spinning series of encounters with various unsavory types leading to a conclusion that will be surprising only if you haven't learned to suspect everyone in a whodunit. This was celebrated stage director Clurman's only film and he makes it more theatrical than it should be, largely with the help of Odets, who was also a playwright in love with florid dialogue. So we get lines like "If you hear a peculiar noise, it's my skin creeping" and "People with wax heads should keep out of the sun." Fortunately, Odets doesn't give any of these screwy lines to his protagonist, Alex, so we like him all the more for his simplicity. None of Deadline at Dawn makes very much sense, but that's what's entertaining about it. 

Guilty Bystander (Joseph Lerner, 1950)

Zachary Scott and Mary Boland in Guilty Bystander

Cast: Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Mary Boland, Sam Levene, J. Edward Bromberg, Kay Medford, Jed Prouty, Harry Landers, Elliott Sullivan, Ray Julian, Dennis Patrick. Screenplay: Don Ettinger, based on a novel by Whit Masterson and H. William Miller. Cinematography: Gerald Hirschfeld, Russell Harlan. Production design: Leo Kerz. Film editing: Geraldine Lerner. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin. 

Mary Boland made her name as a character actress playing dotty matrons like the Countess De Lave in The Women (George Cukor, 1939) and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940), so it's fun to see her play against type as Smitty, the tough old bird who is the proprietor of a run-down residence hotel in Joseph Lerner's Guilty Bystander. She's entertaining to watch but it's more a collection of mannerisms and speech patterns borrowed from Marie Dressler, Mae West, and Jean Harlow than a credible character. But then the movie, a whodunit with an alcoholic ex-cop for protagonist, feels borrowed from a lot of sources, including the snarled plots and seedy milieus of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Zachary Scott is Max Thursday, Smitty's booze-sodden house detective. His ex-wife, Georgia (Faye Emerson), comes to him for help when their small son goes missing, along with her brother, Fred (Dennis Patrick). Rousing himself from his stupor, Thursday goes on a hunt that takes him into several hives of sleaze, gets him shot in the arm, and even leads him on a chase through the subway tunnels of New York City. The kidnapping turns out to have something to do with diamond smuggling, but atmosphere is more important to the film than plot. Good location shooting lifts Guilty Bystander above the routine, but not by much.  

Blackout (Terence Fisher, 1954)

Belinda Lee and Dane Clark in Blackout

Cast: Dane Clark, Belinda Lee, Betty Ann Davies, Eleanor Summerfield, Andrew Osborn, Harold Lang, Jill Melford, Alvis Maben, Michael Golden, Nora Gordon, Alfie Bass. Screenplay: Richard H. Landau, based on a novel by Helen Nielsen. Cinematography: Walter J. Harvey. Art direction: J. Elder Wills. Film editing: Maurice Rootes. Music: Ivor Slaney. 

Any movie that starts with Cleo Laine singing "St. Louis Blues" even before the credits run has my attention. Unfortunately, Terence Fisher's Blackout (aka Murder by Proxy) doesn't repay it. It's a welter of plot twists and red herrings and withheld information that begins with a drunken American (Dane Clark) being propositioned in an unusual way by a beautiful woman (Belinda Lee). Naturally he wakes up the next morning in a place he's never been before, with a furious hangover and a blood-spotted topcoat. From then on, he keeps sticking his nose in places he shouldn't and getting mixed up with people he should avoid. It's standard whodunit stuff, but without much punch in either performances or direction. The chief reward of the film for me is that it added to my collection of Mondegreens and closed-caption goofs: When Laine sings the line in "St. Louis Blues" about the St. Louie woman's "store-bought hair," the captioner turns it into "stubbled hair." 
 

Pieces of April (Peter Hedges, 2003)

Katie Holmes in Pieces of April

Cast: Katie Holmes, Derek Luke, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Alison Pill, John Gallagher Jr., Alice Drummond, Sean Hayes, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Lillias White, Leila Danette, Sisqó, Adrian Martinez, Armando Riesco. Screenplay: Peter Hedges. Cinematography: Tami Reiker. Production design: Rick Butler. Film editing: Mark Livolsi. Music: Stephin Merritt. 

April (Katie Holmes) is the black sheep of the Burns family, so when she decides to make amends with them, she invites them for Thanksgiving dinner in the grungy apartment that she shares with her boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke), in a dicey New York neighborhood. It's a formulaic setup for all sorts of formulaic mishaps, starting with April's discovery that her oven doesn't work, yet somehow Peter Hedges manages to transcend formulas and a collection of characters just shy of caricature to create a warm-hearted feel-good movie. Much of the burden of transcendence falls on the shoulders of the actors, particularly Patricia Clarkson as April's mother, Joy, who is dying of breast cancer. Clarkson earned an Oscar nomination for the role. It's part road movie, as the Burnses journey from the suburbs to the inner city, and part sitcom farce, but it has considerable charm. I couldn't help comparing Pieces of April, however, to a better suburbanites-in-the-city comedy, The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996).  

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers

Cast: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield, Edie McClurg, Russell Means, Balthazar Getty, Stephen Wright, Sean Stone, Jeremiah Bitsui, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Joe Grifasi, Everett Quinton. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, David Veloiz, Richard Rutowski, Oliver Stone. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Victor Kempster. Film editing: Brian Berdan, Hank Corwin. Music: Brent Lewis. 

Oliver Stone's sledgehammer satire Natural Born Killers began with a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino in which the central character was the filmmaker Wayne Gale, played in Stone's version by Robert Downey Jr. In the rewrite, Stone and co-writers David Veloz and Richard Rutowski shifted the focus to the killers, Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis). Tarantino has since regretted the loss of control over his story, and it's easy to see why. A Tarantino version might be at least as violent and bloody, but it would have had some wit to it. Mickey and Mallory might have been more like Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, the couple played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction (1994) -- lethal but oddly lovable. Stone makes all of his characters loathsome -- if we have sympathy for Mickey and Mallory, it's because everyone around them is worse, from Mallory's parents, played by Rodney Dangerfield and Edie McClurg, to the gas station attendant played by Balthazar Getty, to the detective played by Tom Sizemore and the warden played by Tommy Lee Jones. Jones in particular is directed to play against his usual type, a slow-burning character like the marshal in The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993), and go wildly over the top. Stone is less interested in characters or even in making a point about media exploitation than in showing off film technique, from Dutch angles to the mixing of various film stocks and switches from color to black and white. In short, Natural Born Killers is a headache-inducing mess.  

Shadow Kill (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 2002)

Director Adoor Gopalakrishnan

Cast: Oduvil Unnikrishnan, Sukumari, Mallika, Thara Kalyan, Murali, Sivakumar, Narain, Nedumudi Venu, Vijayaragavan, Jagathy Sreekumar, Indrans, Kukku Parameshruwaram. Screenplay: Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Cinematography: Sunny Joseph, Mankada Ravi Varma. Production design: Raheesh Babu, Adoor Gopalakrishan. Film editing: B. Ajithkumar. Music: Ilaiyaraaja. 

Shadow Kill, which is also known as Nizhalkkuthu, is my introduction to the films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan and a reminder of how much I am at sea in films from other cultures. I don't know, for example, how much of the story is based on actual criminal justice practices in pre-independence India and how much is fictional. Taken in itself, the film is a fable about guilt and justice, centered in the practice of capital punishment. It takes place in the kingdom of Travancore, where Kaliyappan (Oduvil Unnikrishnan) is the official executioner. He's a man wracked with guilt for what he has done in his professional capacity, particularly the fear that he has put innocent people to death. As the hangman, he is presented the rope used after each execution, which he burns and consecrates to the goddess Kali to be used as holy ash in the treatment of the sick. His guilt has driven him to drink, but he's not the only one who feels cursed by the administration of capital punishment: The authorities, fearing divine retribution, have made it a practice to pardon all those condemned to death, but for the pardon to arrive only after the execution has taken place. Much of the film consists of a story told by the jailer as a drunken Kaliyappan struggles to stay awake before an execution: It deal with the rape and murder of a girl that has been wrongly pinned on her lover. When the jailer reveals that it's the man he's about to execute, Kaliyappan collapses, but his son, a follower of Gandhi in the struggle for India's freedom, dutifully takes his place as executioner. Gopalakrishnan provides no explanation for the son's act, leaving viewers to explicate the story's more on their own. It's beautifully filmed and Unnikrishnan's performance is excellent, but I wonder how much of my puzzled reaction to the movie comes from my own ignorance of Indian culture and history. 

Materialists (Celine Song, 2025)

Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in Materialists 

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Winters, Marin Ireland, Dasha Nekrasova, Emmy Wheeler, Louisa Jacobson, Eddie Cahill, Sawyer Spielberg, Joseph Lee, John Magaro. Screenplay: Celine Song. Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner. Production design: Anthony Gasparro. Film editing: Keith Fraase. Music: Daniel Pemberton. 

Celine Song's Materialists is a rom-com with a satiric edge, though not a terribly sharp one. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, who works for a high-end matchmaking service that celebrates its workers when their clients end up getting married. Lucy is very good at her job, with nine weddings to her credit, but she hasn't been very successful in finding her own soulmate. She split with her old boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), largely because they're too poor -- he's a struggling actor -- to think about an upwardly mobile life together. Then, in the course of her job, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), handsome and rich. They hit it off, but something's not right just yet. When one of her clients is raped by a man Lucy matched with her, she begins to question what she does for a living, and to realize that the potential for love can't be measured by algorithms, the "checked-off boxes" she uses to match her clients. The premise of Materialists -- a bright young woman overcoming her own delusions -- is pure Jane Austen, but the movie feels weighed down by its stars. Johnson doesn't have enough chemistry with either Evans or Pascal to give her choice between the two any real urgency or credibility, and the hits at yuppie materialism are more didactic than funny. 

Household Saints (Nancy Savoca, 1993)

Lili Taylor in Household Saints

Cast: Tracey Ullman, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lili Taylor, Judith Malina, Michael Rispoli, Victor Argo, Michael Imperioli, Rachel Bella, Ileana Douglas, Joe Grifasi. Screenplay: Richard Guay, Nancy Savoca, based on a novel by Savoca. Cinematography: Bobby Bukowski. Production design: Kalina Ivanova. Film editing: Elizabeth King. Music: Stephen Endelman. 

As a portrayal of a certain kind of religious obsession peculiar to immigrant families, Nancy Savoca's adaptation of Francine Prose's novel Household Saints has warmth and charm balanced with a touch of skepticism. Judith Malina and Tracey Ullman overcome the caricature inherent in their roles as Old World mama and New World daughter-in-law, and Lili Taylor is wonderful as Teresa, who inherits her grandmother's piety with a new intensity. Vincent D'Onofrio is a touch too contemporary in style for the role of the butcher Joseph Santangelo, who tries unsuccessfully to impose his will on the women in his life. The film runs about half an hour too long. It could have jettisoned the subplot dealing with the obsession of Nicky Falconetti (Michael Rispoli) with Asian women, which has something to do with Madame Butterfly, and the framing scenes that set up the veneration of Teresa aren't really necessary. Household Saints sometimes overstates the comedy, but that's a risk inherent in the story, and Savoca manages to avoid the temptation to milk the material for tears.

Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric, 2021)

Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight

Cast: Vicky Krieps, Arieh Worthalter, Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet, Sacha Ardilly, Juliette Benveniste, Aurèle Grzesik, Aurélia Petit, Erwan Ribard, Cuca Bañeras Flos, Samuel Mathieu, Jean-Philippe Petit. Screenplay: Mathieu Amalric, based on a play by Claudine Galea. Cinematography: Christophe Beaucarne. Production design: Laurent Baude. Film editing: François Gédigier. 

"I don't like movies that make me think," said a woman on a social media site recently in an argument about Kathryn Bigelow's latest  film, A House of Dynamite. "I have enough to think about already." I wouldn't recommend Mathieu Amalric's Hold Me Tight to her, then. It makes the viewer work to sort out what is going on in actuality or in the mind of the protagonist, Clarisse (Vicky Krieps). When we first see her, she is laying out a bunch of Polaroid photographs on the table, turning them over as if they were tarot cards that might provide a revelation of some sorts. Then we see her sneak out of the house, careful not to wake her husband and children, and set out on what will become a solitary road trip. We then see her family, her husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), her daughter, Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet), and her son, Paul (Sacha Ardilly), as they start the day without her. But gradually we realize that what we have just seen may not have happened at all, at least not in the way it's presented to us, and we have to assemble what is being shown to us into a coherent and ultimately painful reality. The question may arise whether the way Amalric chooses to tell Clarisse's story justifies itself: Does it reveal something about her experience that a straightforward narrative would lack? Or is it just like a jigsaw puzzle in which putting it together is the point, rather than the picture itself? After waffling back and forth between those questions, I find myself coming down mushily in the middle: I think the complications of the narrative verge on self-conscious filmmaking, but that the ultimate effect is to make Hold Me Tight an unusually compelling story of memory and desire, heightened by Krieps's performance and a soundtrack full of evocative music.    

Love Under the Crucifix (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1962)

Ineko Arima in Love Under the Crucifix

Cast: Ineko Arima, Tatsuya Nakadai, Ganjiro Nakamura, Mieko Takamine, Osamu Takizawa, Koji Nanbara, Manami Fuji, Yumeji Tsukioka, Hisaya Ito. Screenplay: Masahige Narusawa, based on a novel  by Toko Kon. Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima. Art direction: Junpei Oosumi. Film editing: Hisashi Sagara. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.  

As deliberate and slow as the tea ceremony that it features, Kinuyo Tanaka's Love Under the Crucifix is a story of love thwarted by conflicting codes: Christian moral doctrine vs. the laws and traditions of 16th century Japan. Ineko Arima plays Ogin, daughter of Rikyu (Ganjiro Nakamura), a master of the tea ceremony. When a wealthy merchant seeks her hand in marriage, Ogin is forced to accept, even though she has loved Takayama Ukon (Tatsuya Nakadai) since they were children together. Ukon, however, is not only already married, but also a Christian and opposed to divorce. When Christianity is banned in Japan, he is forced into exile. Eventually Ogin and Ukon will meet again under perilous circumstances and their enduring love will be tested. Beautifully designed and filmed, Love Under the Crucifix is weighed down by exposition-heavy dialogue and its somewhat over-familiar story line. Arima is superb as Ogin, but Nakadai is wasted in a role that gives him little to do.  

Compensation (Zeinabu Irene Davis, 1999)

John Earl Jelks and Michelle A. Banks in Compensation

Cast: Michelle A. Banks, John Earl Jelks, Nirvana Cobb, Kevin L. Davis, Christopher Smith, K. Lynn Stephens. Screenplay: Marc Arthur Chéry. Cinematography: Pierre H.L. Davis Jr. Production design: Katharine Watford Cook. Film editing: Dana Briscoe, Zeinabu Irene Davis. Music: Atiba Y. Jali, Reginald R. Robinson. 

Zeinabu Irene Davis's Compensation was partly inspired by a poem with that title by Paul Laurence Dunbar: 

Because I had loved so deeply, 

Because I had loved so long, 

God in His great compassion 

Gave me the gift of song.

Because I have loved so vainly,

And sung with such faltering breath,

The Master in infinite mercy

Offers the boon of Death. 

The film tells parallel love stories, one set in the beginning of the 20th century and the other at its end, with the same two actors playing both pairs of lovers. Michelle A. Banks plays Malindy Brown in the earlier story, and Malaika Brown in the other. Both young women are deaf, as is the actress -- Marc Arthur Chéry rewrote his screenplay to accommodate that fact when Davis discovered Banks in a play and recognized her rightness for the role. The change added another layer to a film about the changes in Black lives over the course of the century. Malindy falls in love with Arthur Jones (John Earl Jelks), who has just arrived in Chicago from Mississippi -- part of the great migration from the South that changed America in the century. Jelks also plays Nico Jones, who falls for Malaika at the end of the century. The intermingled stories focus on communication problems -- Malindy not only has to teach Arthur sign language but also to read -- and the impact of serious illness on the lovers. Davis beautifully integrates archival footage of life in Chicago, and uses silent movie-style intertitles and captions to tell the story, an illuminating approach to depicting both the transformations and the continuities in the Black experience.  

The Living Skeleton (Hiroki Matsuno, 1968)

Kikko Matsuoka in The Living Skeleton

Cast: Kikko Matsuoka, Yasunori Irikawa, Masumi Okada, Asao Uchida, Asao Koike, Keijiro Kikiyo, Kaori Taniguchi, Kaiko Yanagawa, Nobuo Kaneko, Ko Nishimura. Screenplay: Kikuma Shimoiizaka, Kuzo Kobayashi. Cinematography: Masayuki Kato. Production design: Kyohei Morita. Film editing: Kazuo Ota. Music: Naboru Nishiyama. 

Hiroki Matsuno's The Living Skeleton is a potpourri of horror movie tropes. In addition to skeletons, there are bats, thunderstorms, a ghost ship, an elaborate disguise, an ill-fated romance, a mad doctor, a quest for revenge, and even a body hidden in a suit of armor. It begins with the gunning down of the shackled crew of a ship being raided by modern-day pirates, and continues three years later as the events on that ship begin to resurface, largely because of the interest of Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka) in what happened to her twin, Yoriko (also Matsuoka), on board the ship. She's aided by her boyfriend, Mochizuki (Yasunori Irikawa), and to some extent by a Catholic priest (Masumi Okada), for whom she works. The print shown on the Criterion Channel hasn't aged well: the gray tones have faded into black so much that in some scenes the action amounts to little blobs of light moving around in the darkness. Following the plot sometimes feels like that too, but the creep factor of the story remains high. We've seen it all before, of course, but never quite in this configuration.

Killer Nun (Giulio Berruti, 1979)

Anita Ekberg in Killer Nun

Cast: Anita Ekberg, Alida Valli, Massimo Serato, Paola Morra, Joe Dallesandro, Lou Castel, Daniele Dublino, Laura Nucci, Alice Gherardi, Nerina Montagnani. Screenplay: Giulio Berruti, Alberto Tarallo. Cinematography: Antonio Maccoppi. Production design: Franco Vanorio. Film editing: Mario Giacco. Music: Alessandro Alessandroni. 

In Giulio Berruti's Killer Nun Anita Ekberg plays Sister Gertrude, a hospital nurse recovering from an operation to remove a brain tumor whose erratic behavior outrages the patients -- in a fit of rage she even stomps on an elderly woman's false teeth. Gertrude is addicted to morphine, and when that gets in short supply, she slips away to the city, doffs her habit, sells her mother's ring to buy more, and has sex with a stranger she picks up in a bar. Back at the hospital, patients start dying in unusual circumstances, and Gertrude manages to put the blame on the head physician and get him fired. But among her manifest sins, is she guilty of murder?  Berruti tries to integrate nudity and lurid violence into a story, based on an actual case, divided between two impulses: to shock. or to make the characters into actual people. The latter impulse is partly thwarted by the casting: Ekberg, never much of an actress. can't handle Gertrude's mood swings. In the end, the chief problem with Killer Nun is that its title promises a sleaze that it doesn't deliver in a story it doesn't know how to tell. 

Fool for Love (Robert Altman, 1985)

Sam Shepard and Kim Basinger in Fool for Love

Cast: Sam Shepard, Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid. Screenplay: Sam Shepard, based on his play. Cinematography: Pierre Mignot. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Stephen P. Dunn, Luce Grunenwaldt. Music: George Burdt. 

Even though Sam Shepard wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman's film version of his play Fool for Love, it remains an example of why things written for the stage so rarely work as well on screen. It lacks the immediacy of theater, where we're in the same room with the characters and, although we know they're actors, can more readily imagine them as real people. Altman's Fool for Love is a very well-acted character drama that loses something when it thrusts the characters into a real setting, a rundown motel in the desert, distracting us from the loopiness and individuality of people who live in their own world of self-justification. Altman does more than just give it a setting, he also dramatizes some of the key speeches in the play in flashback re-creations of the incidents the characters are describing. And he does it, puzzlingly, by not showing precisely what the character is saying. When Harry Dean Stanton's Old Man tells of how he and his wife tried to calm a hysterical child, we see a child who is not at all hysterical. And when Kim Basinger's May tells of her mother's search for her father, she speaks of being held tightly by her mother's hand, but what we see is May following several steps behind her mother. The rationale for the discrepancy, I suppose, is that nothing these characters say can be taken for the truth. But that only leaves us to wonder why we should care about them at all. 

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)

Oscar Isaac in Frankenstein

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Christian Convery. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, based on a novel by Mary Shelley. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Tamara Deverell. Film editing: Evan Schiff. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

Handsomely designed and filmed, compellingly acted, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein strives to bridge the gap between literature, Mary Shelley's gothic novel, and film. Del Toro's version has some plot elements that don't quite work: How, for example, does a blind man teach someone to read? His major mistake, though, was giving the Creature superhuman strength and invulnerability; they turn him into a comic book superhero instead of the suffering being that Jacob Elordi's fine performance manifests. Oscar Isaac is one of our finest actors, but he seems to me a little too old for the role: Victor's obsession is a manifestation of youth, when all things seem possible. When Frankenstein fails, it's because the questions it raises, like what it means to be human, are too large for the medium that's trying to deal with them: They get lost in the cinematic spectacle.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (Gareth Edwards, 2025)

Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in Jurassic World: Rebirth

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, Ed Skrein. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: James Clyne. Film editing: Jabez Olssen. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

Director Gareth Edwards and writer David Koepp try nothing new in Jurassic World: Rebirth, delivering what we expect from the franchise: an intrepid heroine, a nerdy but resourceful scientist, a villain, a cute kid, scary critters, hair's-breadth escapes, and a few deaths that aren't so bloody that they'll tip the rating from PG-13 to R. Suffice it to say that the formula is getting stale. Its chief virtue is that you know what you're in for, and the movie provides it even if you won't remember a thing about it the next day. 

City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987)

Chow Yun-fat in City on Fire

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Sun Yueh, Danny Lee, Carrie Ng, Roy Cheung, Maria Cordero, Fong Yau, Victor Hon, Lau Kong, Elvis Tsui, Tommy Wong Kwong-leung, Cheng Mang-ha, Parkman Wong. Screenplay: Tommy Sham, Ringo Lam. Cinematography: Andrew Lau. Production design: Chi Fung Lok. Film editing: Wong Ming-lam. Music: Teddy Robin Kwan. 

In Ringo Lam's City on Fire, Chow Yun-fat plays Ko Chow, an undercover cop who wants to leave the force for a less perilous life. An easygoing, antic guy, Chow knows his days are probably numbered in the job and he wants to spend more time with his girlfriend, Hung (Carrie Ng), who keeps threatening to leave him. But his superior officer, Inspector Lau (Sun Yueh), chafing because he's being passed over on the force by a younger inspector (Roy Cheung), persuades Chow to go along with the gang of robbers he's infiltrated for one more heist. City on Fire is a solid cops-and-robbers movie with more characterization and less stylized action than many Hong Kong thrillers, and it helped establish Chow Yun-fat as a star in the genre. 

Northern Lights (John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, 1978)

Joe Spano, Helen Ness, and Robert Behling in Northern Lights

Cast: Robert Behling, Susan Lynch, Joe Spano, Marianna Åström-De Fina, Ray Ness, Helen Ness, Thorbjörn Rue, Nick Eldredge, Jon Ness, Gary Hanisch, Melvin Rodvold, Adelaide Thorntveidt. Screenplay: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Cinematography: Judy Irola. Film editing: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Music: David Ozzie Ahlers. 

Northern Lights is a tribute to endurance and persistence, not only that of the North Dakota immigrant farmers whose story it tells, but also to writer-director-editors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, and cinematographer Judy Irola, who endured the hardships of the northern plains in winter to tell it. The story is not a commercial one, dealing as it does with a populist movement seeking solidarity of farmers against capitalists in the early years of the 20th century, but Hanson and Nilsson were determined to make it. It works, too, a moving portrait of unsung lives. 

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

Jess Weixler in Teeth

Cast: Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman, Lenny von Dohlen, Vivienne Benesch, Ashley Springer, Laila Liliana Garro. Screenplay: Mitchell Lichtenstein. Cinematography: Wolfgang Held. Production design: Paul Avery. Film editing: Joe Landauer. Music: Robert Miller. 

Poised in the gap between exploitation and satire, Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth doesn't quite make the grade as either. The title refers to legend of the vagina dentata, a physiological anomaly somehow possessed by Dawn (Jess Weixler). a teenage advocate for the save-it-for-marriage movement. When she lets herself and her boyfriend, Tobey (Hale Appleman), give into their urges, he gets a little too aggressive in satisfying them and suffers the bloody consequences. Teeth never really overcomes its sensational premise, an obvious one for a body horror movie with feminist overtones. Lichtenstein, making his feature debut as writer and director, hasn't yet mastered some of the skills he needs to make it work. The pacing feels off and some of the exposition is muddled. When the film succeeds, it does so because of a sly performance by Weixler, who makes Dawn's confusion and eventual determination more plausible than the script does. 

Black Angel (Roy William Neill, 1946)

June Vincent and Dan Duryea in Black Angel

Cast: Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre, Broderick Crawford, Constance Dowling, Wallace Ford, Hobart Cavanaugh, Freddie Steele, John Phillips, Ben Bard, Junius Matthews, Marion Martin. Screenplay: Ray Chanslor, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Cinematography: Paul Ivano. Art direction: Martin Obzina, Jack Otterson. Film editing: Saul A. Goodkind. Music: Frank Skinner.

What Black Angel has going for it is Dan Duryea in a role that departs from his usual villainy, and a setup derived from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, a writer given to nasty surprises. It takes place in a noir milieu that largely consists of bars and nightclubs, the main one presided over by a sinister Peter Lorre with a cigarette constantly dangling from his lip. The result is a solid B-picture that could have been better than that with a more capable leading lady than June Vincent and more imaginative direction than Roy William Neill gives it.

Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell in Bones and All

Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, André Holland, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper, Chloë Sevigny, Anna Cobb, David Gordon Green. Screenplay: David Kajganich, based on a novel by Camille DeAngelis. Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan. Production design: Elliott Hostetter. Film editing: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. 

A horror movie from the point of view of the monsters, Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All features three remarkable performances. Taylor Russell is revelatory as Maren, the young woman who discovers that her compulsion to eat human flesh is not just an idiosyncrasy; Timothée Chalamet once again proves that he's not just a pretty face as Lee, a fellow "eater"; and Mark Rylance skillfully disappears into another role as Sully, Maren's mentor and nemesis. There's enough gore to satisfy sanguinary horror devotees, but the film focuses mainly on the psychology of people whose desires put them on the fringes of society, doing so without becoming heavily allegorical. Released during the ravages of the covid pandemic, Bones and All underperformed at the box office, but although it transcends the horror genre, its subject matter meant was probably never going to achieve a higher status than cult film.    
 

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon, and Chloë Sevigny in My Son, My Son, What Ye Done

Cast: Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Peña, Grace Zabriskie, Brad Dourif, Irma P. Hall, Loretta Devine. Screenplay: Herbert Golder, Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Danny Caldwell. Film editing: Joe Bini, Omar Daher. Music: Ernst Reijseger. 

It took Werner Herzog a long time to get the backing for this odd duck of a film before the exactly right producer, David Lynch, took it on. It's a "true crime" story filtered through Greek myth and the Herzogian imagination with a touch of the Lynchian sensibility, so that it becomes a darkly comic mock tragedy, with Michael Shannon as Orestes and Grace Zabriskie as Electra. There are pet flamingos in the mix, with Brad Dourif in a cameo as a racist and homophobic ostrich farmer and a deadpan performance by Willem Dafoe as the detective trying to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, though fascinating in concept, it gets a little slow in delivery and might easily be dismissed as quirk for quirk's sake. 

Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Bruce Dern and Will Forte in Nebraska

Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacey Keach, Bob Odenkirk, Mary Louise Wilson, Rance Howard, Tim Driscoll, Kevin Ratray, Angela McEwan, Glendora Stitt, Elizabeth Moore, Kevin Kunkel. Screenplay: Bob Nelson. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: J. Dennis Washington. Film editing: Kevin Tent. Music: Mark Orton. 

Like Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo (1996) and Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Alexander Payne's Nebraska takes place in the hollowed-out heartland of the United States. But where those movies went for satire and dark comedy, Payne is going for something tonally more subtle. Pathos nudges up against humor in Nebraska's story of cantankerous old Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), whose emerging dementia persuades him that he has won a million dollars from one of those dodgy but legal magazine subscription promotions like Publishers Clearing House, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Despite the protests of his long-suffering wife, Kate (June Squibb), and his sons, David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk), he continues to insist on going from his home in Billings, Montana, to collect his winnings in Lincoln, Nebraska, even if he has to walk there -- he has lost his drivers license for DUI. After the highway patrol finds him walking along the freeway and brings him back, David finally gives up and agrees to take him to Lincoln, knowing that the trip won't end well but hoping it will put an end to the delusion. The film is longer than it should be -- the side trip to Mount Rushmore is unnecessary -- and there's a whiff of condescension in its portrayal of the residents of the decaying small towns of middle America, but it raked in Oscar nominations for picture, cinematography, and direction, and well-deserved ones for Dern and Squibb. 

The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931)

Phillips Holmes, DeWitt Jennings, and Walter Huston in The Criminal Code

Cast: Walter Huston, Phillips Holmes, Constance Cummings, Boris Karloff, DeWitt Jennings, Mary Doran, Ethel Wales, Clark Marshall, Arthur Hoyt, John St. Polis, Paul Porcasi, Otto Hoffman, John Sheehan. Screenplay: Fred Niblo Jr., Seton I. Miller, based on a play by Martin Flavin. Cinematography: James Wong Howe, Ted Tetzlaff. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Edward Curtiss. Music: Sam Perry. 

Howard Hawks's The Criminal Code is based on a stage play, and it shows. Although it begins with some Hawksian verve -- two guys arguing about 42 cents won in a pinochle game -- it eventually devolves into some rather inert and talky scenes in the office of prison warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston). Brady is a former district attorney who lost a bid for governor and wound up running a prison that houses a lot of the men he convicted. One of them is young Robert Graham (Phillips Holmes), who was persuaded to plead guilty of an accidental crime for which, as even Brady concedes, any good lawyer could have helped him beat the rap. Brady also has a pretty daughter, Mary (Constance Cummings), and when he turns Graham into a trusty responsible for chauffeuring her, you can guess the consequences. But just when it looks like Graham is going to get paroled, he becomes a witness to the murder of an inmate thought to be a stool pigeon. Graham fears that if he fingers the killer (Boris Karloff), he too will suffer the fate of a rat. There are some good scenes in the prison, and Hawks directs the camera more fluidly than is typical of early talkies, but he hasn't yet developed the facility with dialogue that became his hallmark. Huston, for example, keeps interjecting "yeah" into his lines, I think because directors of early talkies -- The Criminal Code was only Hawks's second -- liked to slow down scenes that had a lot of talk because they were afraid audiences used to title cards wouldn't be able to follow what was being said. The film is of interest mostly to Hawks completists, then, but it's good to see Karloff before Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) stereotyped him forever. Look for Andy Devine in a small role -- a convict slicing bread -- before he developed his raspy whine. 

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

Joey Wong and Leslie Cheung in A Chinese Ghost Story II

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

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