Breakfast of Champions (Alan Rudolph, 1999)

Bruce Willis in Breakfast of Champions

Cast: Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly, Lukas Haas, Omar Epps, Vicki Lewis, Buck Henry, Ken Hudson Campbell, Jake Johanssen, Will Patton, Chip Zien, Owen Wilson. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph, based on a novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Cinematography: Elliot Davis. Production design: Nina Ruscio. Film editing: Suzy Ruscio. Music: Mark Isham. 

When a film starts with a man with a gun in his mouth, you expect it to explain why he's doing that. Alan Rudolph's Breakfast of Champions never really does. You can only accept as explanation a desire to escape the hurly-burly of events that follows. There are those who love this movie and those who would need to be strapped to a chair with their eyes taped open to watch it again. I found it exhausting and pointless, with gags that went on too long and characters who serve no function in whatever plot it possesses.  

Mapplethorpe (Ondi Timoner, 2018)

Matt Smith in Mapplethorpe

Cast: Matt Smith, Marianne Rendón, John Benjamin Hickey, Brandon Sklenar, Tina Benko, Mark Moses, Carolyn McCormick, Thomas Philip O'Neill, Mickey O'Hagan, Anthony Michael Lopez, McKinley Belcher III, Brian Stokes Mitchell. Screenplay: Ondi Timoner, Mikko Alanne, based on a screenplay by Bruce Goodrich. Cinematography: Nancy Schreiber. Production design: Jonah Markowitz. Film editing: John David Allen, Lee Percy, Ondi Timoner. Music: Marcelo Zarvas. 

An unconventional artist like Robert Mapplethorpe deserves an unconventional biopic. Ondi Timoner's Mapplethorpe isn't. It's full of clichés like the meet-cute: Mapplethorpe (Matt Smith) meets Patti Smith (Marianne Rendón) on a park bench when she latches on to him as a pretend boyfriend to evade a pursuing creep. There are the usual clashes with the parents, a bullying father (Mark Moses) and an ineffectual mother (Carolyn McCormick). There's the chance meeting that launches him to success: The wealthy art collector Sam Wagstaff (John Benjamin Hickey) becomes both mentor and lover. And the faint funk of disapproval hangs over the film, as if Mapplethorpe's life were something of a warning to aspiring artists, especially queer ones. I think it wants to celebrate Mapplethorpe as an artist, but is afraid to do so, stepping gingerly around gay sexuality as if afraid of rousing the "ick factor" in a straight audience. The lives of artists are notoriously hard to dramatize, and everyone connected with Mapplethorpe deserves respect for trying, but they didn't succeed.

Richard III (Laurence Olivier, 1955)

Laurence Olivier in Richard III

Cast: Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Cedric Hardwicke, Claire Bloom, Alec Clunes, Mary Kerridge, Andrew Cruikshank, Clive Morton, Norman Wooland, Helen Haye, George Woodbridge, Pamela Brown, Stanley Baker. Screenplay: Laurence Olivier, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Otto Heller. Production design: Roger K. Furse. Film editing: Helga Cranston. Music: William Walton. 

Laurence Olivier clearly relished Shakespeare's cunning Machiavel Richard III, and with good reason: It's a role that put him front and center at all times. Of the roles he filmed, even Hamlet has to share the stage with others as colorful as Polonius, Claudius, and Ophelia, and Othello stands on equal footing with Iago in getting attention. But Richard is buzzed around by characters he can swat off like flies, which lets Olivier cast his two rivals for greatest English actor of the 20th century, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, alongside him. For good measure, he even adds that hammy knight Cedric Hardwicke, who chews the scenery in his big moment. I happen to think that Gielgud gives the best performance in the film, but Clarence leaves the play early. Richardson for some reason underplays the role of Buckingham, and Olivier said that he wished he had been able to cast Orson Welles instead. Outfitted with a prosthetic nose and a page-boy wig of stygian blackness, Olivier lurks and limps around the stage, scowling and plotting. In adapting the play, he cuts and rearranges: The scene in which Richard woos the Lady Anne (Claire Bloom) is cut into two pieces, but it helps increase the credibility of a widow succumbing to the man who killed her husband. The ranting of Queen Margaret is one of the play's more entertaining moments, but it interrupts the flow, so Olivier cuts the role entirely. He brings Mistress Shore onto the stage and casts her generously with Pamela Brown, even though she has only one interpolated line. He borrows bits from 18th century adaptations of the play by David Garrick and Colley Cibber. The result is a reasonably swift and tight account of the play, less confusing to audiences that have trouble with the tangled genealogy of the Yorks and Lancasters. Unfortunately, Roger Furse's design is a little drab, and in some scenes Olivier's blocking and camera direction are cluttered. Still, on the whole, Richard III deserves its current reputation as Olivier's best adaptation of Shakespeare to the screen.

Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar, 2023)

Cast: Colman Domingo, Clarence Maclin, Sean San Jose, Paul Raci, David Giraudy, Mosi Eagle, James "Big E" Williams, Sean Dino Johnson. Screenplay: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence Maclin, John Divine G Whitfield. Cinematography: Pat Scola. Production design: Ruta Kiskyte. Film editing: Parker Laramie. Music: Bryce Dessner. 

Greg Kwedar's docudrama Sing Sing is an object lesson on how solid characterization combined with skillful acting can carry a film beyond the limitations of genre and plot. Not much really happens in the movie: A group of convicts put on a play. There is one death, but it happens non-violently off-screen and the film is concerned with how it affects the characters and their relationships to one another. There is an explosion of temper but it's resolved peacefully. There are revelations of backstory, but the chief concern is immediacy. There is a bit of advocacy for more humane treatment of prisoners, but it's not preached at us. There is some tension about whether the play will actually take place and whether some of the prisoners will receive clemency or parole, but it's more in service of character than of plot. In short, it's a movie that lets you do the thinking and feeling without undue manipulation, which is rare these days. 

Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023)

Teo Yoo, Greta Lee, and John Magaro in Past Lives

Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro, Moon Seung-ah, Leem Seung-min, Jun Ji-hye, Choi Won-young, Ahn Min-yeung, Seo Yeon-Woo. Screenplay: Celine Song. Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner. Production design: Grace Yun. Film editing: Keith Fraase. Music: Christopher Bear, Daniel Rossen. 

Celine Song's Past Lives is full of silences, some of them lasting for 12 years, some merely the moments in which communication between the characters is suspended out of embarrassment or awkwardness or uncertainty. But the silences are productive: They allow both the characters and the viewer to reflect on the meaning of the moment. When we first meet Nora (aka Na Young) and Hae Sung, they are 12-year-old schoolmates and close friends in Korea. We sense something blossoming between them, but it's nipped in the bud by the immigration of Nora and her family to Canada. Then the first silence begins: They lose contact as Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) finishes school, does his military service, and begins his studies to become an engineer, and Nora (Greta Lee) moves from Toronto to New York where she begins a career as a playwright. Then, after 12 years, Hae Sung searches out Nora on the internet, and they begin to catch up with each other in cyberspace. But Nora abruptly breaks off the connection, for reasons that she never fully articulates. She meets a fellow writer, Arthur (John Magaro), and they get married. Hae Sung finds a girlfriend but it's not a solid relationship. Finally, after another 12-year-silence, Hae Sung lets Nora know that he's coming to New York on a vacation. And thus begins a fable about the limits of human connection, the burdens of ethnic difference, and the barriers to desire. Hae Sung is plainly in love with Nora, and Arthur senses it with some trepidation about how she will respond. This dance to the music of the past would be nothing without actors as skilled at manifesting the interior as Lee, Yoo, and Magaro are, or without a director like Song, who keeps the pace as stately as a pavane.   

Gypsy 83 (Todd Stephens, 2001)

Birkett Turton and Sara Rue in Gypsy 83

Cast: Sara Rue, Birkett Turton, Karen Black, John Doe, Anson Scoville, Paulo Costanzo, Carolyn Baeumler, Stephanie McVay, Amanda Talbot, Vera Beren, Eileen Letchworth. Screenplay: Todd Stephens, Tim Kaltenecker. Cinematography: Gina Degirolamo, Mai Iskander. Production design: Nancy Arons. Film editing: Annette Davey. Music: Marty Beller.

Misfits searching for a way to escape, Gypsy (Sara Rue) and Clive (Birkett Turton) hit the road from Sandusky, Ohio, to New York City, where misfits always think they can find a way to fit. Todd Stephens's Gypsy 83 is filled with more misfits than those two, a 25-year-old woman and a gay teenager. They also include a hitchhiking young Amish man (Anson Scoville), a disaffected fraternity boy (Paulo Costanzo), and a middle-aged has-been singer (Karen Black). Stephens follows these characters through an entertainingly scruffy road movie that ends, as many road movies do, where it probably should just be beginning.   

Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier, 2024)

Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge

Cast: Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, David Denman, Emory Cohen, Steve Zissis, Zsané Jhé, Dana Lee, James Cromwell, CJ LeBlanc. Screenplay: Jeremy Saulnier. Cinematography: David Gallego. Production design: John P. Goldsmith, Ryan Warren Smith. Film editing: Jeremy Saulnier. Music: Brooke Blair, Will Blair. 

Rebel Ridge begins painfully, with the too-familiar image of a Black man being forced to the ground and handcuffed by two white cops. But it recovers from that to become one of the better action thrillers of recent years, thanks to writer-director-editor Jeremy Saulnier's ability to surprise, a charismatic performance by Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond, the protagonist, and a reliably watchable one by Don Johnson as Terry's antagonist, Chief Sandy Burnne. Granted, the plot of Rebel Ridge is familiar: stranger comes to a small town and tangles with corrupt law enforcement, a trope we've seen in Reacher and the Lee Child novels it's based on, for example. But Saulnier gives his characters depth and he avoids the expected conclusion in which the bad guys get blown away in a spectacularly messy fashion. There are witty moments, too. Terry gets help from several people, including Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a court house clerk, and Liu (Dana Lee), the elderly owner of a Chinese restaurant. When Terry introduces them to each other, he tells Summer that Liu is a veteran of the Korean War. Summer chirps the familiar "Thank you for your service," whereupon Terry explains that Liu was on the other side. Rebel Ridge is no ground-breaker, but it deservedly won the Critics Choice Award for best TV movie, and we should be seeing a lot more of Aaron Pierre. 

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

Michael Fassbender, Tom Burke, and Pierce Brosnan in Black Bag

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Kae Alexander, Ambika Mod, Gustaf Skarsgard, Pierce Brosnan. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Philip Messina. Film editing: Steven Soderbergh. Music: David Holmes. 

Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag is a solid, satisfying spy thriller that breaks no new ground for the genre, which may be why it was not a success at the box office: There are no spectacular moments, no stunts, no especially gory deaths -- in short, nothing to spark a word of mouth publicity campaign. Its characters are all handsome and sexy but also not very likable. In fact, they delight in getting on each other's nerves. In fact, it feels more like a pilot for a series on a streaming channel like Netflix or Hulu than a stand-alone movie. 

Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart, 2020)

Cast (voices): Honor Kneafsey, Eva Whittaker, Sean Bean, Simon McBurney, Tommy Tiernan, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Jon Kenny, John Morton, Nora Twomey, Oliver McGrath. Screenplay: Will Collins, Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart. Production design: Tomm Moore, Maria Pareja, Ross Stewart. Film editing: Darragh Byrne, Richie Cody, Darren T. Holmes. Music: Bruno Coulais. 

The images and animation of Wolfwalkers are so dazzling, so beautiful, so witty that it feels almost churlish to wish that they were in service to a less conventional story. It's the familiar tale of the spunky, underestimated kid who overcomes obstacles to save the day. The time is the 17th century and the place is the village of Kilkenny in Ireland, governed by a lord protector who is determined to exterminate a pack of wolves in a nearby forest. He hires Bill Goodfellowe, an English hunter, to do the job. His small daughter, Robyn, wants to help him, and ventures into the forest on her own. There she encounters a girl, Mebh, who turns out to be a wolfwalker, a human who can take the form of a wolf and who has mysterious healing powers. When Robyn is accidentally bitten by Mebh, she too becomes a wolfwalker, and gets involved in a plan to free Mebh's mother, Moll, who has been captured by the lord protector, and to save the wolf pack led by Moll from his campaign against them. The mythology gets a bit confusing and the denouement has the usual crises before a somewhat ambivalent resolution. But why complain about story when the visuals are so ravishing? The design contrasts the rigid, sharp-angled human world with the fluid, sinuous natural world, and even the characters are delineated by angles or curves -- the more angular, the more villainous, and the lord protector is virtually boxlike. Wolfwalkers is the third in a trilogy of films by Tomm Moore about Irish legends, after The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014). It was deservedly nominated for a best animated feature Oscar, but lost to Pete Docter's Pixar film Soul. 

I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Justice Smith and Jack Haven in I Saw the TV Glow

Cast: Justice Smith, Jack Haven, Ian Foreman, Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan, Danielle Deadwyler, Fred Durst, Conner O'Malley, Emma Portner, Madeline Riley, Amber Benson. Screenplay: Jane Schoenbrun. Cinematography: Eric Yue. Production design: Brandon Tonner-Connelly. Film editing: Sofi Marshall. Music: Alex G. 

Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow uses the horror movie genre as a springboard into a fascinating and enigmatic fable of identity, gender and otherwise. Teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Jack Haven) form a bond over a TV series called The Pink Opaque, finding in it an alternative reality to that of their suburban home town. In time, Maddy comes to take that alternative as the true reality and tries to escape into it, while Owen remains grounded but troubled as he grows older. Hallucinatory visuals provided by Eric Yue's cinematography and Brandon Tonner-Connelly's set designs immerse the audience in what could be just a story of the effects of pop culture on impressionable minds, but in a larger interpretation is a parable about the problems of feeling different in a conformist culture. 

The Ghost Goes West (René Clair, 1935)

Robert Donat in The Ghost Goes West

Cast: Robert Donat, Jean Parker, Eugene Pallette, Elsa Lanchester, Ralph Bunker, Patricia Hilliard, Everley Gregg, Morton Selten, Chili Bouchier, Mark Daly, Herbert Lomas, Elliott Mason, Hay Petrie. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on a story by Eric Keown. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Leila Rubin. Film editing: Harold Earle. Music: Mischa Spoliansky.

The premise of The Ghost Goes West, René Clair's first English language feature, is sound: An American businessman buys a castle in Scotland and ships it to Florida along with its resident ghost. Robert Donat is the handsome leading man in the double role of the ghost and his present-day descendant. Eugene Pallette, who plays the businessman, is one of the best character actors in a golden age for character actors. And Jean Parker is attractive as his daughter, who is romanced by both the ghost and his descendant. Yet somehow the movie keeps falling flat. It may have something to do with the screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood, a writer not known for the light touch needed for the blend of screwball and romantic comedy that the premise deserves. There were also some tensions between Clair and the producer, Alexander Korda, who originally planned the film as a vehicle for Charles Laughton, which may explain why Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester, is billed fourth for a role that has only a few minutes of screen time. When Korda decided he needed more romance in the film, the part was offered to Laurence Olivier, who was unavailable, so Donat stepped in. Tipping the film in the direction of romance also resulted in the loss of some of its satiric edge, aimed at American millionaires like William Randolph Hearst looting Europe and creating their own castles in the United States. Still, The Ghost Goes West has dryly clever moments that make it watchable and often amusing.

Afterglow (Alan Rudolph, 1997)

Nick Nolte and Julie Christie in Afterglow

Cast: Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Jay Underwood, Domini Blythe, Yves Corbeil, Alan Fawcett, Michèle-Barbara Pelletier, France Castel, Genevieve Bissonnette. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Production design: François Séguin. Film editing: Suzy Elmiger. Music: Mark Isham.

Elliptical to the very end, Alan Rudolph's Afterglow makes the audience do a lot of work sorting out the messy backstories of the two attractive married couples whose lives and problems intersect. Lucky (Nick Nolte) and Phyllis (Julie Christie) are an odd couple to start with: He's a rough-edged handyman, she's a former movie actress. Jeffrey (Jonny Lee Miller) and Marianne (Lara Flynn Boyle) are younger and wealthier: He's an executive in a corporation, she's a lady who lunches. In both cases, the marriages are at a sexual standstill: Phyllis tolerates Lucky's sleeping around with other women, who are often clients for his handyman services, and Jeffrey seems to find all sorts of work-related reasons not to sleep with Marianne, who has decided that she wants to have a baby. We come to find out that Lucky and Phyllis stopped having sex when he discovered that their daughter wasn't fathered by him but by her co-star. In the uproar that followed, their daughter left home, and now they have come to Montreal in search of her. The reason for Jeffrey's lack of interest in Marianne is less explicit, though he may be having doubts about his sexual orientation: His friend Donald (Jay Underwood) seems to be coded as gay, and Jeffrey likes to compliment his secretary, Helene (Domini Blythe), on what she's wearing. The worlds of the two couples collide when Marianne hires Lucky to remodel their apartment. The Montreal setting gives Rudolph an excuse to make a French movie on New World soil, for Afterglow has the kind of sophistication about relationships that we associate with the French but also the sexual mores of this side of the Atlantic. The film's chief virtue is a radiant performance by Julie Christie, which earned her an Oscar nomination, and Nolte is often fun to watch. Unfortunately, Boyle and Miller aren't quite up their standard, so Afterglow often feels unbalanced.

D.E.B.S. (Angela Robinson, 2004)

Devon Aoki, Meagan Good, Michael Clarke Duncan, Sara Foster, and Jill Ritchie in D.E.B.S.

Cast: Sara Foster, Jordana Brewster, Meagan Good, Devon Aoki, Jill Ritchie, Geoff Stults, Jimmi Simpson, Michael Clarke Duncan, Holland Taylor, Jessica Caulfield. Screenplay: Angela Robinson. Cinematography: M. David Mullen. Production design: Chris Anthony Miller. Film editing: Angela Robinson. Music: Steven M. Stern.

When is a silly movie not just a silly movie? When it's a cult film that some consider a landmark in the representation of queer people on screen, like Angela Robinson's D.E.B.S. Or are we past that now?  Is it possible that there have been enough movies about queer people that don't treat them as victims or objects of scorn, and we can just start judging films about them by the criteria we use on all movies? Could we say that it was a mistake to turn Robinson's 11-minute short film, a spoof on the spy movie subgenre epitomized by the Charlie's Angels TV series and movies, into a 91-minute feature, stretching its gags out to the point of tedium? Could we say that some of the acting is sub-par and that there's no chemistry between the two actresses, Sara Foster and Jordana Brewster, who play the superspy and supervillain who fall for each other? Or is being a landmark enough? Just asking. 

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024)

Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay in Misericordia

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

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

Bullshot (Dick Clement, 1983)

Billy Connolly, Alan Shearman, and Christopher Good

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

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

The Black Vampire (Román Viñoly Barreto, 1953)

Nathán Pinzón and Gogó in The Black Vampire

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

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

Bye Bye Braverman (Sidney Lumet, 1968)

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

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

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

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

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

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

O (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)

Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett in O

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

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

The Beach (Danny Boyle, 2000)

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

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

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

Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1948)

Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Young in Crossfire

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

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

It Happened Tomorrow (René Clair, 1944)

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

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

Liz and the Blue Bird (Naoko Yamada, 2018)

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

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

Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978)

Anthony Perkins and Geraldine Chaplin in Remember My Name

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

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

Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973)

Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow

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

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

Love Letters (Amy Holden Jones, 1983

James Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis in Love Letters

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

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

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall in 3 Women

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

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

Ripley's Game (Liliana Cavani, 2002)

Dougray Scott and John Malkovich in Ripley's Game

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

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

Election (Johnnie To, 2005)

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

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

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

Giovanna Ralli in What Have They Done to Your Daughters?

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

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

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Patsy Ferran, Cameron Britton, Daniel Henshall, Steve Park, Anamaria Vartolomei, Holliday Grainger. Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Fiona Crombie. Film editing: Jinmo Yang. Music: Jung Jae-il. 

Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 is carpet-bomb satire, spread out over so many social, political, scientific, and theological targets that it's bound to hit all of them but inflict no lasting damage on any of them. What it has going for it is a watchable cast, starting with Robert Pattinson, who adds to his reputation as one of our most versatile young actors. Pattison is Mickey Barnes, whom technology allows to essentially live forever as a succession of Mickeys who die and get reborn. By the time the film starts, he's Mickey 17, an "Expendable" on a voyage to settle a new planet. He's essentially a guinea pig, sent out to test whether humans can survive the new environment. Each time something on the planet, such as a virus, kills him, he's re-created out of something like a 3-D printer and his previously stored memories are replaced so he can go out again, after the scientists on-board have discovered a cure or preventative for what killed him. That's the principal set-up, but Bong has more twists to Mickey's story in line. The captain of the spaceship, for example, Kenneth Marshall, is a wealthy politician out for glory. He's played well over the top by Mark Ruffalo in a performance that evokes several contemporary egomaniacs with more money and power than scruples and common sense. And the planet is inhabited by creatures that look like large pill bugs; they turn out to be intelligent beings, setting the plot up for a showdown with the blustering Marshall. It's a darkly funny movie that reflects Bong's somewhat jaundiced view of humankind. 

The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)

Allan Corduner and Kamelia Grigorova in The Grey Zone

Cast: David Arquette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Daniel Benzali, Allan Corduner, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Kamelia Grigorova, Mira Sorvino, Natasha Lyonne, Jessica Hecht, Brian F. O'Byrne. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson, based on his play and a book by Miklos Nyiszli. Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine. Production design: Maria Djukovic. Film editing: Michelle Botticelli, Tim Blake Nelson. 

In basing his film (originally a play) on the memoirs of Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish physician who aided Josef Mengele in his hideous experiments at Auschwitz, Tim Blake Nelson makes one grave mistake. Instead of making Nyiszli the focus of the film, he chooses to scatter the narrative among others imprisoned at the death camp. One of the strengths of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) was its use of Oskar Schindler as a pivotal figure, and Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015), a much better film about the Sonderkommandos, the Jews who did the dirty work for the Nazis at the camps, is centered on the dilemma of one man. The Grey Zone remains a harrowing film, but it's easy to get lost as it shifts from the discovery of a girl found alive in one of the gas chambers to the plotting that results in the destruction of one of the crematoria. 

  

Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang-ke, 2002)

Zhao Tao and Wu Qiong in Unknown Pleasures

Cast: Zhao Wei Wei, Zhao Tao, Wu Qiong, Li Zhubin, Wang Hongwei, Zhou Qingfeng, Bai Ru, Liu Xi An, Xu Shou Lin, Xiao Dao, Ying Zi. Screenplay: Jia Zhangke. Cinematography: Nelson Yu Lik-wai. Production design: Jingdong Liang. Film editing: Keung Chow. 

At one point in Jia Zhangke's Unknown Pleasures, a character tells another about a movie he saw that sounds a lot like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), and it's followed by a cut to a shabby discotheque where people are dancing to music that sounds like a bad imitation of "Misirlou," the number that opens Tarantino's film. The homage is ironic, because the young idlers of Jia's film are a world away from the stylish gangsters and lowlifes of the American film. They're wannabes and would-bes, trapped in a decaying backwater and trying to get as much pleasure as they can out of life, which isn't much. China has never looked more drab than in Unknown Pleasures, which is usually taken to be a portrait of the generation produced under China's "one child" policy that was initiated in 1979. They long for what they see as the glamour of Beijing, but have to settle for what little glamour they can milk out of popular culture. Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) has a frustrating relationship with his more ambitious girlfriend, Yuan Yuan (Zhou Qingfeng), and decides to rob a bank. Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) aimlessly rides his unreliable motorbike as he tries to get the attention of Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), who works as a singer and dancer promoting the wares of a liquor company.  It's sometimes a confusing film, taking sidetracks into the stories ancillary to those of the principal characters, but what it lacks in narrative structure it makes up for in atmosphere.

The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath, 1969)

Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan in The Magic Christian

Cast: Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Isobel Jeans, Caroline Blakiston, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Richard Attenborough, Leonard Frey, Laurence Harvey, Christopher Lee, Spike Milligan, Roman Polanski, Raquel Welch, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Yul Brynner. Screenplay: Terry Southern, Joseph McGrath, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Peter Sellers, based on a novel by Southern. Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: Kevin Connor. Music: Ken Thorne. 

There are some funny people doing funny things in The Magic Christian: John Cleese as a Sotheby's employee aghast when the billionaire played by Peter Sellers mutilates a painting thought to be a Rembrandt; Spike Milligan as a traffic warden bribed into eating the ticket he's given the billionaire for parking in a loading zone; and Sellers himself trying out an unpredictable variety of accents. There are also some inspired moments: Laurence Harvey playing Hamlet and doing a striptease during the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and an unbilled Yul Brynner in drag, singing "Mad About the Boy." But this scattershot, anything-for-a-gag movie has too many gags that don't land, including some dodgy gay jokes like a swishy character named Laurence Faggot -- pronounced fa-GOH. It's a sledgehammer satire on the familiar premise that people will do anything for money, and it often lands flat on its own banality.