Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025)

Andrew Scott and Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney, Giles Surridge, Cillian Sullivan, Michael James Ford, John Doran, Anne Brogan. Screenplay: Robert Kaplow. Cinematography: Shane F. Kelly. Production design: Susie Cullen. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Graham Reynolds.

I wish I liked Richard Linklater's Blue Moon more than I do. He's one of my favorite directors, and Ethan Hawke is terrific as Lorenz Hart, whose lyrics I love. But Robert Kaplow's screenplay, "inspired by" the correspondence between Hart and Elizabeth Weiland (played by Margaret Qualley), turns the lyricist into a spiteful, deluded bore, and I can't believe that Hart was so lacking in insight into himself and others. The cast is phenomenal, especially Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers, basking in the success of   Oklahoma! and trying to enjoy the moment while placating the envious Hart, and Bobby Cannavale as the bartender trying to lift Hart out of his bitter funk. Qualley brings to life a fictionalized character based on some letters exchanged with the real Weiland, who seems to be otherwise unknown except through her flirtatious correspondence with Hart. Patrick Kennedy, an actor otherwise unfamiliar to me, has some fine, small moments as E.B. White, though I wish Kaplow hadn't invented the bit about Hart inspiring White to write Stuart Little. There's enough wit and truth in Blue Moon almost to overcome the screenplay's prevarications, but only the performances make it more than a melancholy misfire.

Happyend (Neo Sora, 2024)

Yukito Hadaka and Hayata Kurihara in Happyend

Cast: Hayata Kurihara, Yukito Hadaka, Yuta Hayashi, Shina Peng, Arazi, Kilala Inori, Pushim, Ayumu Nakajima, Makiko Watanabe, Shiro Sano. Screenplay: Neo Sora. Cinematography: Bill Kirstein. Production design: Norifumi Ataka. Film editing: Albert Tholen. Music: Lia Ouyang Rusli. 

Disaffected students at a Tokyo school pull a prank on their principal that gets labeled (as things often do these days) "terrorism" in Neo Sora's debut feature, Happyend. The consequence is that the principal (Shiro Sano) installs a radical new surveillance system that causes still more turmoil at the school. Sora's look into the near future resonates with our anxious present, touching on such issues as authoritarianism, racism, and invasive technology. The touch is light, however, thanks to an engaging young cast and a plot that never turns as grim as it might. 

The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, 2005)

Cast: Brad Dourif, Donald Williams, Ellen Baker, Franklin Chang-Diaz, Shannon Lucid, Michael McCulley, Roger Diehl, Ted Sweetser, Martin Lo. Screenplay: Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Henry Kaiser, Tanja Koop, Klaus Scheurich. Film editing: Joe Bini. Music: Ernst Reijseger. 

Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder is a great director's jeu d'esprit, a deconstruction of science fiction tropes about intergalactic travel, using space shuttle footage provided by NASA and Henry Kaiser's film from below the ice in Antarctica's McMurdo Sound. It's held together by a narrative supplied by Brad Dourif playing an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, and given an eerie underpinning by cellist-composer Ernst Reijseger. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes maddening, sometimes boring, but always provocative.  

Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier, 2015)

Isabelle Huppert and Gabriel Byrne in Louder Than Bombs

Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, Jesse Eisenberg, Devin Druid, Amy Ryan, David Strathairn, Ruby Jenkins, Megan Ketch, Rachel Brosnahan. Screenplay: Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt. Cinematography: Jakob Ihre. Production design: Molly Hughes. Film editing: Olivier Bugge Coutté. Music: Ola Fløttum. 

Joachim Trier's Louder Than Bombs is a portrait of a dysfunctional family, but Trier lays on the dysfunction a little too thickly and the film descends into soap opera territory. Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), a celebrated photojournalist, has died in an automobile crash, and her family is contacted by a gallery for a memorial exhibition of her photography. A reporter (David Strathairn) who had worked with her is also preparing an article for the New York Times celebrating her life and work. Gene (Gabriel Byrne), her husband, asks their older son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), who has just become a father, to come help him sort through the materials remaining in Isabelle's workshop. The younger son, Conrad (Devin Druid), is still in his teens, and Gene has refrained from telling him that his mother's death was probably not an accident but instead a self-destructive consequence of depression. Trier tells their story in fragments and flashbacks, and relies on some rather heavy-handed ironies. Isabelle, for example, had been concerned that her photographs of the victims of war were exploitative and voyeuristic, but Gene becomes a voyeur himself, spying on the sullen, secretive, and taciturn Conrad. He is also having an affair with one of Conrad's teachers (Amy Ryan) to further his spying on his son. In a gratuitous episode that adds nothing to the plot or the theme of the film, Jonah, although initially portrayed as a loving husband and father, has an affair with an old girlfriend (Rachel Brosnahan) he meets in the hospital where his wife has just given birth. The acting is uniformly good, with Druid particularly effective at portraying the torments of adolescence. But the secrets and lies in the film tend to sink it into melodrama.  

Pretty Red Dress (Dionne Edwards, 2022)

Alexandra Burke and Natey Jones in Pretty Red Dress

Cast: Natey Jones, Alexandra Burke, Temilola Olatunbosun, Rolan Bell, Ben Caplan, Nicholas Bishop, Maria Almeida, Edwin De La Renta, Angie Le Mar, Mark Monero, Dexter Flanders. Screenplay: Dionne Edwards. Cinematography: Adam Scarth. Production design: Phoebe Platman. Film editing: Adonis Trattos. Music: Hugo Brijs. 

In her debut feature, Pretty Red Dress, Dionne Edwards grapples with issues of gender but finally loses her grip on them in an effort to resolve the plot. Just out of prison, Travis (Natey Jones) goes home to his partner, Candice (Alexandra Burke), and their teenage daughter, Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun), seeking to start his life again. Candice, a singer who works as a cashier in a supermarket, is trying to make her dreams come true: She's auditioning to play Tina Turner in a new musical, and she and Travis spot the perfect dress in a shop window. It's too expensive for her salary, however, so Travis reluctantly goes to work for his bullying older brother, Clive (Rolan Bell), and buys it for her. The bright red beaded dress seems to help her at the audition, but Travis is fascinated by it too. He yields to an old compulsion and furtively tries the dress on before the mirror, even borrowing Candice's lipstick. It's the beginning of a series of complications in their relationship, especially when Kenisha, who has been confronting her own sexual identity, walks in on him in the dress. Edwards avoids preachiness in her drama, but doesn't find a satisfying outcome for the film, avoiding sentimentality but leaving her characters in suspension. It's well-acted by the entire cast, and Burke's musical performances provide a highlight for the film.  

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010)

Stephen Dorff in Somewhere

Cast: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fannin, Chris Pontius, Michelle Monaghan, Kristina Shannon, Karissa Shannon. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Anne Ross. Film editing: Sarah Flack. Music: Phoenix. 

Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is about a hollow man, a movie star played by Stephen Dorff who has fame and fortune but not much else in his life other than a lively 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) from a failed marriage. When his ex-wife has a breakdown of some sort, he gets to see his daughter more often, and their relationship blossoms. But it's only a temporary alleviation of his deep ennui, a condition verging on anhedonia: He hires blonde twins to do pole dances in his hotel room but displays only polite enthusiasm for their performance. Once he even falls asleep during sex. Somewhere succeeds as a portrait of a man without a purpose in life, but it makes for challenging viewing -- it's hard to maintain interest in a character who isn't interested in anything. Coppola has clearly drawn on her own experience as the daughter of a celebrity, and that gives her film the grounding it needs. 

Nine Months (Chris Columbus, 1995)

Julianne Moore and Hugh Grant in Nine Months

Cast: Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, Robin Williams, Mia Cottet. Screenplay: Chris Columbus, based on a screenplay by Patrick Braoudé. Cinematography: Donald McAlpine. Production design: Donald McAlpine. Film editing: Raja Gosnell, Stephen E. Rivkin. Music: Hans Zimmer.

Chris Columbus's Nine Months is a sometimes painfully unfunny attempt to blend slapstick with romantic comedy, centered on the notion that women in their 30s should get married and have children. So when Rebecca Taylor (Julianne Moore) discovers that her birth control has failed and she's pregnant, she and Sam Faulkner (Hugh Grant), who are living together, face the big decision. She's for it, and he's -- well, he's played by Grant at his most dithery. The rest of the film wobbles between treating the pregnancy as a real-life couple might and treating it as an excuse for knockabout scenes. In one of the latter, for example, Sam and his new friend Marty (Tom Arnold), get into a fight in a toy store with a man in a dinosaur suit (based on a then-popular kid's show about a purple dinosaur called Barrney). The movie climaxes in a fight in the delivery room that's supposed to be funny but is more than a little disturbing thanks to the presence of  Robin Williams as a Russian obstetrician who has unaccountably been allowed to practice in America and spouts a lot of probably ad-libbed gynecological malapropisms. But even when the film takes Rebecca's pregnancy seriously, it's just tedious. Grant did his career no good by mugging his way through the film, and skilled players like Moore, Jeff Goldblum, and Joan Cusack are wasted. 

Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan, 2005)

Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon in Where the Truth Lies

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman, David Hayman, Rachel Blanchard, Maury Chaykin, Sonja Bennett, Kristin Adams, Deborah Grover. Screenplay: Atom Egoyan, based on a novel by Rupert Holmes. Cinematography: Paul Sarossy. Production design: Phillip Barker. Film editing: Susan Shipton. Music: Mychael Danna. 

Confusion worse confounded. Atom Egoyan's whodunit Where the Truth Lies is miscast and muddled. First off, who would ever have cast Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as a 1950s comedy team clearly modeled on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis? Both actors make a go of it, being the professionals that they are, but they're battling the fact that neither of them is particularly known for their work in comedy. In the scenes where they're supposed to be performing, Bacon makes a few attempts at Lewis's spazz shtick, but Firth is simply a stiff. Worse is the casting of Alison Lohman as Karen, a journalist out to get the story of a young woman who was found dead in the hotel suite of the comedy team. Lohman has no weight or depth, and her voice, unfortunately entrusted with the narration, is thin and grating. Egoyan's decision to use flashbacks to unravel the complicated story is worsened by the fact that Lohman resembles Rachel Blanchard, who plays the victim, so that occasionally I was momentarily unsure which was which. There's a suicide and a sentimental aside involving the victim's mother which drag the film down just when we should in suspense about the solution to the crime, which itself lands unconvincingly. In short, a misfire from a usually reliable director. 

Death Is a Caress (Edith Carlmar, 1949)

Claus Wiese and Bjørg Riiser-Larsen in Death Is a Caress

Cast: Claus Wiese, Bjørg Riiser-Larsen, Eva Bergh, Ingolf Rogde, Einar Vaage, Brita Bigum, Sossen Krohg. Screenplay: Otto Carlar, based on a novel by Arne Moen. Cinematography: Kåre Bergstrøm, Ragnar Sørensen. Art direction: H.C. Hansen. Film editing: Olav Engebetsen. Music: Sverre Bergh. 

A cougar on the prowl snares a handsome garage mechanic and takes him back to her lair in the Norwegian noir Death Is a Caress. Edith Carlmar, the first woman to direct a Norwegian film, tells the story of the ill-fated liaison of Sonja Rentoft (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen) and Erik Hauge (Claus Weise) with considerable finesse. The sinners in the movie still get punished -- one with death, the other with imprisonment -- but it's a film that reflects how timid Hollywood's output was under the Production Code, which forbade things like showing a man and a woman in bed together as well as any mention of abortion, both of which Carlmar has no hesitation about including.  

54 (Mark Christopher, 1998)

Ryan Philippe in 54

Cast: Ryan Philippe, Mike Myers, Salma Hayek, Neve Campbell, Breckin Meyer, Sela Ward, Sherry Stringfield, Ellen Albertini Dow, Heather Matarazzo, Skipp Sudduth. Screenplay: Mark Christopher. Cinematography: Alexander Gruszynski. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Lee Percy. Music: Marco Beltrami. 

Mark Christopher's 54 tells the old tale of the moth drawn to the flame who gets his wings singed. It's the story of Shane (Ryan Philippe), a Jersey boy drawn to the bright lights of Manhattan and particularly those of Studio 54, the pleasure palace run by Steve Rubell (Mike Myers). Despite all the sex and drugs, however, it's a tepid, tedious film -- or at least the one that went into release and is now being shown on the Criterion Channel is. It uses the expository crutch of a voice-over narration by Shane to tell how he and his friends Anita (Salma Hayek) and Greg (Brecking Meyer) became victims of Rubell's vices and venality, though it ends improbably with a presumably repentant Rubell returning from prison to be welcomed by them in a cleaned-up Studio 54. The film was a critical disaster, which writer-director Christopher blames on the meddling of producer Harvey Weinstein. But a "director's cut" now exists that is reportedly darker, tougher, and incidentally a lot queerer, one in which Shane is not quite the choirboy gone astray.  

Love (Dag Johan Haugerud, 2024)

Andrea Bræin Hovig and Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen in Love

Cast: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, Marte Engebritsen, Lars Jacob Holm, Tomas Gullestad, Marian Saastad Ottesen, Morten Svartveit. Screenplay: Dag Johan Haugerud. Cinematography: Cecilie Semec. Production design: Tuva Hølmebakk. Film editing: Jens Christian Fodstad. Music: Peder Kjellsby. 

What do we talk about when we talk about love? Sex? Commitment? Fidelity? Selflessness? In Dag Johan Haugerud's engaging Love, part of his "Oslo trilogy," the characters talk about all of those things and sometimes act upon them. The film centers on Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), a urologist, and Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), a nurse, who meet after work on a commuter ferry from Oslo to the Nesodden peninsula. Tor reveals to Marianne that he's on Grindr and often uses it to meet other gay men on the ferry. He's happily unattached and enjoys talking with the men he meets almost as much as he does having sex with them. The conversation sparks something in Marianne: She's middle-aged and unmarried, which doesn't seem to bother her as much as it bothers her friends, who keep trying to set her up. In fact, she's on her way to meet an eligible divorcé her friend Heidi (Marte Engebritsen) thinks is a good match for her. Marianne goes on Tinder, trying out Tor's methods, and has a brief hookup with a passenger she meets that way. It doesn't work out quite as smoothly as Tor suggests it does, but then neither does Tor's encounter with Bjørn (Lars Jacob Holm), a psychologist who becomes a patient in the clinic where Marianne and Tor work. Haugerud's delicate, knowing approach to his characters makes Love work splendidly.   

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)

James Howson in Wuthering Heights

Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Shannon Beer, James Howson, Solomon Glave, Oliver Milburn, Nichola Burley, James Northcote, Lee Shaw, Amy Wren, Steve Evets, Paul Hilton, Simone Jackson, Michael Hughes. Screenplay: Andrea Arnold, Olivia Hetreed, based on a novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Helen Scott. Film editing: Nicholas Chaudeurge. 

Andrea Arnold captures some of the feverishness of Emily Brontë's novel in her version of Wuthering Heights, but it's lost in some fashionable camerawork, and her actors aren't quite up to the demands of the characters. Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave provide some of the feral quality of the young Cathy and Heathcliff, but their adult counterparts, Kaya Scodelario and James Howson, don't have the abandon that the doomed lovers of the novel should have. When not called on to provide literal darkness to evoke the emotional darkness of the book, or punch up moments of conflict with a jiggly hand-held camera, cinematographer Robbie Ryan does capture the bleak environment of the story. The Brontë novel is probably unfilmable without lopping off large parts of the book, and Arnold stops short of the brutal last section about Heathcliff's destructive decline. There are some clumsy intrusions of contemporary language, words that would never have been allowed to appear in print at the time the book was published, and a few outright anachronisms, like "okay" and calling one's belongings "stuff." The film does a few things right, like casting Black actors as Heathcliff, but its chief problem is that it's more than a little dull.

Five Star Final (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)

Edward G. Robinson and Oscar Apfel in Five Star Final

Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Marian Marsh, H.B. Warner, Anthony Bushell, George E. Stone, Frances Starr, Ona Munson, Boris Karloff, Aline MacMahon, Oscar Apfel. Screenplay: Byron Morgan, Robert Loird, based on a play by Louis Weitzenkorn. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Jack Okey. Film editing: Frank Ware. 

Part of Mervyn LeRoy's Five Star Final is brisk and lively, and part of it is stiff and stagy. Edward G. Robinson plays Randall, managing editor of a New York tabloid called The Evening Gazette. Randall is being pressured by the paper's editor, circulation manager, and advertising sales director to increase circulation by printing a series about a murder that took place 20 years ago, in which a woman named Nancy Voorhees (Frances Starr) shot her boss when he reneged on a promise to marry her. She was acquitted of the crime because she was pregnant, but the sensation of the trial lingers in memory. Randall marshals his reporters, including a rather sinister one named Isopod (Boris Karloff), to find out whatever happened to Nancy. They discover that she's alive and happily married to Michael Townsend (H.B. Warner) who knows her story and has been willing to raise her daughter, Jenny (Marian Marsh) as his own. Moreover, Jenny is about to get married to Philip Weeks (Anthony Bushell), from a prominent family. Sensationally flogging the story has dire consequences for all concerned. Unfortunately, the melodramatic scenes that take place in the Townsend household are the ones we are supposed to believe in and take to heart, wrecking the tone of the movie. The entertaining ones in the newspaper office, filled with colorful characters and full of snappy repartee of the kind the Production Code would suppress, are the ones that bring Five Star Final to life. Robinson and Karloff are fine, and Aline MacMahon as Randall's secretary gets to pull off some memorable lines. When a Jewish reporter threatens to change his name to advance his career, she shoots back: "Don't do it, kid. New York's too full of Christians as it is." 

Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, 2008)

Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode in Brideshead Revisited

Cast: Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, Patrick Malahide, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Ed Stoppard, Felicity Jones, Jonathan Cake. Screenplay: Andrew Davies, Jeremy Brock, based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Cinematography: Jess Hall. Production design: Alice Normington. Film editing: Chris Gill. Music: Adrian Johnston. 

Julian Jarrold's version of Brideshead Revisited pales in comparison to the classic 1981 miniseries. Despite a greater emphasis on the queerness of the relationship of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), Jarrold's film comes across as tepid and talky. Goode and Whishaw are well-cast, and they get impressive support from Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, Michael Gambon as her estranged husband, and Patrick Malahide as Charles's remotely vague father. But the film feels rushed as it tries to encompass the events of Evelyn Waugh's novel while trying to illuminate the book's complex manipulations of faith and family that span decades. 

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Zoë Bell in Death Proof

Cast: Kurt Russell, Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Tracie Thoms, Rose McGowan, Jordan Ladd, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Quentin Tarantino, Mary Harriel, Eli Roth. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography: Quentin Tarantino. Production design: Steve Joyner. Film editing: Sally Menke. 

Quentin Tarantino's parody of quick-and-dirty "grindhouse" movies, Death Proof, is sometimes dirty but not always quick enough. It's almost two hours long, when the originals were rarely more than an hour and a half. Kurt Russell plays a psychotic killer, an aging stuntman who uses his "deathproofed" car as a weapon against young women. Eventually, of course, it's young women who get their revenge against him. But we have to wait a long time for that revenge to take place, as it does after a spectacular car chase. It's a movie for Tarantino fans and people who like to see fast cars destroyed. 

Felicia's Journey (Atom Egoyan, 1999)

Bob Hoskins and Elaine Cassidy in Felicia's Journey

Cast: Bob Hoskins, Elaine Cassidy, Arsenée Khanjian, Sheila Reid, Nizwar Karanj, Peter McDonald, Gerard McSorley, Marie Stafford, Brid Brennan, Susan Parry. Screenplay: Atom Egoyan, based on a novel by William Trevor. Cinematography: Paul Sarossy. Production design: Jim Clay. Film editing: Susan Shipton. Music: Mychael Danna. 

A tightly wound performance by Bob Hoskins and a touchingly vulnerable one by Elaine Cassidy make Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey memorable. Cassidy is Felicia, an Irish girl who comes to Birmingham in search of the young man who made her pregnant and receives the sinister aid of Joe Hilditch (Hoskins), who runs a catering business. Egoyan subordinates suspense to character development and mood, which saves Felicia's Journey from being a routine and generic serial killer story. Paul Sarossy's cinematography avoids the clichés of darkness and shadow characteristic of the genre, and Mychael Danna's sometimes off-beat score also sidesteps familiarity. 

School on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1988)

Fennie Yuen in School on Fire

Cast: Fennie Yuen, Sarah Lee, Damian Lau, Lam Ching-ying, Roy Cheung, Terrence Fok Shui-Wah, Joe Chu Kai-Sang, William Ho Ha-Kui, Chan Lap-Ban, Li Kwong-Tim. Screenplay: Nam Yin. Cinematography: Joe Chan. Art direction: Luk Tze-Fung. Film editing: Tony Kwok-Chung Chow. Music: Lowell Lo. 

Ringo Lam's School on Fire is the culmination of a series of "on fire" movies that started with City on Fire (1982) and continued with Prison on Fire (1987). (The 1991 sequel to the latter, Prison on Fire II, was made a response to the popularity of Chow Yun-fat in the first two films.) School on Fire centers on a schoolgirl, Chu Yuen Fong (Fennie Yuen), who is caught up in the infiltration into the schools of a triad headed by Smart (a handsomely sinister Roy Cheung). I think School on Fire is the best of the lot, in part because Lam's concentration on characters as well as action brings in focus his vision of corruption in Hong Kong. Still, nobody does frenzy better than Lam, and he tops himself with the climactic scene of School on Fire in which people and weapons and furniture are whipped into a chaotic conflict that makes you wonder how any of the actors involved in it survived.  

Maniac Cop (William Lustig, 1988)

Robert Z'Dar in Maniac Cop

Cast: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon, Richard Roundtree, William Smith, Robert Z'Dar, Sheree North, Nina Arvesen, Nick Barbaro, Lou Bonacki, Barry Brenner, Victoria Catlin. Screenplay: Larry Cohen. Cinematography: James Lemmo, Vincent J. Rabe. Production design: Jonathan R. Hodges. Film editing: David Kern. Music: Jay Chattaway. 

Whoever did the closed captions for William Lustig's Maniac Cop deserves special credit for recognizing the movie's essence. Instead of the usual description of background noises, like "swooshing sounds" or "loud explosion," they inserted the equivalent of comic book words like "POW!" and "WHAM!" So when a van takes a nose-dive into the waters of the bay, instead of "gurgling sounds" as it sinks, we get "*BLUB* *BLUB*." In short, Maniac Cop is schlock, but knows it, as you might expect that when you see that the cast includes Bruce Campbell, who made his name by teaming up with director Sam Raimi on such campy horror movies as The Evil Dead (1981) and Army of Darkness (1992). (Raimi has a cameo in Maniac Cop as a TV reporter.) Lustig's movie is less outrageously over the top than the Raimi films, and there's a good deal of sub-par dialogue and acting, but it spawned two sequels.  

We Don't Live Here Anymore (John Curran, 2004)

Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts, and Laura Dern in We Don't Live Here Anymore

Cast: Mark Ruffalo. Laura Dern, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts, Sam Charles, Ginger Page, Jennifer Bishop, Amber Rothwell, Meg Roe, Jim Francis, Marc Baur, Patrick Earley. Screenplay: Larry Gross, based on stories by Andre Dubus. Cinematography: Maryse Alberti. Production design: Tony Devenyi. Film editing: Alexandre de Franceschi. Music: Michael Convertino. 

Even a quartet of accomplished actors can't save John Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore from the fact that none of the characters they play is interesting enough to elicit our concern about what happens to  them. The Lindens, Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Terry (Laura Dern), and the Evanses, Hank (Peter Krause) and Edith (Naomi Watts), are thirtysomethings living in a town where Jack and Hank teach at the local college. Jack and Edith are having an affair, and the tensions their sneaking around causes eventually drive Terry into a reciprocal affair with Hank. At some point it occurred to me that these marital disputes were really none of my business, and that I didn't really care if or how they worked things out. The film tries to keep us involved, laying on Michael Convertino's melancholy score to elicit emotions that the screenplay fails to inspire, but in the end I was left with nothing but the pleasure of watching actors act. 

Dead Presidents (Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes, 1995)

Bokeem Woodbine, Freddy Rodriguez, Larenz Tate, and Keith David in Dead Presidents

Cast: Larenz Tate, Keith David, Chris Tucker, Freddy Rodriguez, Rose Jackson, N'Bushe Wright, Alvaleta Guess, James Pickens Jr., Jennifer Lewis, Clifton Powell, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Terrence Howard, Bokeem Woodbine. Screenplay: Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes, Michael Henry Brown. Cinematography: Lisa Rinzler. Production design: David Brisbin. Film editing: Dan Lebental. Music: Danny Elfman. 

The Hughes Brothers' Dead Presidents sags under the weight of its own ambition to portray the urban Black experience in the Vietnam War era, trying to be both a war film and a heist movie. Larenz Tate is too lightweight an actor for the central role of Anthony Curtis, who chooses to join the Marines and returns from the war to find his expectations of fitting into postwar life thwarted. The film succeeds in providing vivid roles for supporting actors, particularly Chris Tucker and Keith David, but the final third of the movie feels rushed to its rather flat conclusion.

Winter Brothers (Hlynur Pálmason, 2017)

Elliott Crosset Hove in Winter Brothers

Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Simon Sears, Vic Carmen Sonne, Lars Mikkelsen, Peter Plaugborg, Michael Brostrup, Anders Hove, Birgit Thøt Jensen, Laurits Honoré Rønne, Frédéric André. Screenplay: Hlynur Pálmason. Cinematography: Maria von Hausswolff. Production design: Gustav Potoppidan. Film editing: Julius Krebs Damsbo. Music: Toke Brorson Odin. 

Hlynur Pálmason's Winter Brothers begins in darkness, with a few lights shuttling around in the blackness that eventually reveal that we are in a mine, part of the limestone quarry and chalk factory that forms the setting for the film. It's a way of setting up the contrast of dark and light that gives the film its peculiar power. This is a bleak setting for wintry lives, particularly those of the brothers, Emil (Elliott Crosset Hove) and Johan (Simon Sears), who work in the factory. There's not much story to be told in the movie beyond delineating the tensions that exist between the brothers, the unsettled Emil and the more stoic Johan, but Pálmason, with the significant aid of Maria von Hasswolff's cinematography, provides a darkly poetic vision of figures in a forbidding landscape. 

Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012)

Gustavo Jahn and Irma Brown in Neighboring Sounds

Cast: Irandhir Santos, Gustavo Jahn, Maeve Jinkings, W.J. Solha, Irma Brown, Lula Terra, Yuri Holanda, Clébia Souza, Albert Tenório, Nivaldo Nascimento, Felipe Bandeira, Clara Pinheiro de Oliveira. Screenplay: Kleber Mendonça Filho. Cinematography: Pedro Sotero, Fabricio Tadeu. Production design: Juliano Dornelles. Film editing: João Maria, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Music: DJ Dolores. 

Oblique, elliptical, subtly unsettling, Kleber Mendonça Filho's debut fictional feature film Neighboring Sounds is a glimpse into the private lives of some middle-class residents of a condominium complex. It gradually exposes their secrets in ways that will frustrate viewers expecting conventionally dramatic revelations. But then, how much do you really know about your neighbors?    

F1 (Joseph Kosinski, 2025)

Cast: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Sarah Niles, Will Merrick, Joseph Balderrama, Abdul Salis, Callie Cooke, Samson Kayo, Simon Kunz. Screenplay: Joseph Kosinski, Ehren Kruger. Cinematography: Claudio Miranda. Production design: Ben Munro, Mark Tildesley. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Hans Zimmer. 

Joseph Kosinski's entertaining but unoriginal F1 was one of this year's surprise nominees for the best picture Oscar. Nobody actually gives it much of a chance of winning, and there was much comment on the fact that it took that place of Jafar Panahi's much-praised It Was Just an Accident. As a racing movie, it has the usual plot clichés: rival drivers, big crashes, behind-the-scenes villainy, an inevitable love affair. You might call it a case of déjà vroom.  

Trade Winds (Tay Garnett, 1938)

Fredric March and Joan Bennett in Trade Winds

Cast: Fredric March, Joan Bennet, Ralph Bellamy, Ann Sothern, Sidney Blackmer, Thomas Mitchell, Robert Elliott. Screenplay: Tay Garnett, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Frank R. Adams. Cinematography: Rudolph Maté. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff, Alexander Golitzen. Film editing: Otho Lovering, Dorothy Spencer. Music: Alfred Newman. 

Tay Garnett's Trade Winds is the product of a trip he took to the Far East, accompanied by  cinematographer James B. Shackelford (credited with "foreign exterior photography" on the film). When he got back to Hollywood, he cobbled together a story that would use the scenic footage Shackelford shot, and then hired a crew of writers that included Dorothy Parker and her husband, Alan Campbell, to come up with a screenplay. What they gave him is a goofy mess about a woman (Joan Bennett) accused of murder who flees to various Asian locales, and a detective (Fredric March) who follows her, trying to collect the $100,000 reward for her capture. Naturally, they fall in love. In addition to March and Bennett, the cast includes Ann Sothern as his (you guessed it) wisecracking secretary and Ralph Bellamy in one of the doofus roles he specialized in during the 1930s. The cast never left the sound stages of Hollywood, where they spent a lot of time posing or walking on treadmills before rear-projection screens that showed Shackelford's footage. It's a rather tiresome adventure comedy with an ending that doesn't make a lot of sense.   

Vigilante (William Lustig, 1982)

Fred Williamson in Vigilante

Cast: Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Richard Bright, Rutanya Alda, Don Blakely, Joseph Carberry, Willie Colón, Joe Spinell, Carol Lynley, Woody Strode, Vincent Beck. Screenplay: Richard Vetere. Cinematography: James Lemmo. Production design: Mischa Petrow. Film editing: Larry Marinelli. Music: Jay Chattaway. 

William Lustig's Vigilante is a raw, hyper, low-budget version of Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974), and there are those who think it's the more effective movie because its rawness and cheapness make it feel more immediate. Robert Forster plays Eddie Marino, whose son is murdered by a marauding gang that also sends his wife (Rutanya Alda) to the hospital. When a judge on the take lets the bad guys go free, and Eddie's protest gets him jailed for contempt of court, he joins a group led by Nick (Fred Williamson) that's determined to take the law in their own hands. The movie turns out to be a solid endorsement of vigilantism, unconscionable and full of ethnic stereotypes, but undeniably watchable.

Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)

Rinaldo Smordoni and Franco Interlenghi in Shoeshine

Cast: Franco Interlenghi, Rinaldo Smordoni, Annielo Melie. Bruno Ortensi, Emilio Cigoli. Screenplay: Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, Cesare Giulio, Cesare Zavattini. Cinematography: Anchise Brizzi. Production design: Ivo Battelli, Giulio Lombardozzi. Film editing: Niccolò Lazzari. Music: Alessandro Cicognini. 

Vittorio De Sica's neorealist classic Shoeshine is not quite as successful as his Bicycle Thieves (1948) in capturing the street life of Rome after the end of World War II, chiefly because its focus on the two boys, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) and Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni), imposes limits. But they never become Dickensian waifs -- Dickens would never have crafted such an unsentimental ending. If Bicycle Thieves is ultimately the greater picture it's because De Sica learned from Shoeshine the importance of ambiance -- present largely in the prison setting for the earlier film. Still, it's one of the great films about childhood, with a searing vision that was unavailable to American filmmakers of the day.  

Queen of the Desert (Werner Herzog, 2015)

Cast: Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, Robert Pattinson, Jay Abdo, Jenny Agutter, David Calder, Christopher Fulford, Nick Waring, Holly Earle, Mark Lewis Jones, Beth Goddard. Screenplay: Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Ulrich Bergfelder. Film editing: Joe Bini. Music: Klaus Bedelt. 

Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert is a tepid and conventional biopic from a director who isn't known for being either tepid or conventional. It's ostensibly the story of the pioneering explorer Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman), but it subsumes her discoveries and adventures in the Middle East in an account of her love life. A miscast James Franco plays British diplomat Henry Cadogan, who supposedly won her heart but was prevented from marrying her by Bell's parents. After his death, she fell in love with a British army officer, Richard Wylie (Damian Lewis), but he was married and died at Gallipoli in 1915. The film also hints at a flirtation with T.E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson), who was probably either asexual or gay. So the film suggests that these failures in love caused Bell to transfer her affections to the desert and its people, embodied in the film by her guide, Fattuh (Jay Abdo). Falsifications abound, as they do in most biopics, and some of them are glaring: A scene set in 1914 is followed by a flashback that a title card says took place 20 years earlier, which would place it in 1902, but it contains references to Queen Victoria, who died in 1901. If the film is redeemed at all, it's by Peter Zeitlinger's cinematography and Kidman's performance. But Bell deserves much better treatment. 

Leaves of Grass (Tim Blake Nelson, 2009)

Edward Norton in Leaves of Grass

Cast: Edward Norton, Tim Blake Nelson, Keri Russell, Melanie Lynskey, Josh Pais, Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, Pruitt Taylor Vince. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson. Cinematography: Roberto Schaefer. Production design: Max Biscoe. Film editing: Michelle Botticelli. Music: Jeff Danna.

With a fine cast headed by Edward Norton in a tour de force performance, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass only needed a somewhat less ramshackle screenplay than the one Nelson wrote for it. The premise is sound: A successful academic returns to his backwater home town and is confronted with his messed-up family. Norton deftly creates the disparate twin brothers, philosophy professor Bill Kincaid and good-ol'-boy marijuana grower Brady Kincaid. Bill soon finds himself embroiled in Brady's illegal affairs. Nelson's screenplay does a lot of things right, using Bill's philosophical approach to life as a foil to Brady's hang-loose lifestyle, and making both characters somewhat plausible twins. It also does a lot of predictable things, like finding a romantic interest for Bill in a poetry-quoting local played nicely by Keri Russell. But he overcomplicates his story with secondary characters like the randy coed who snares Bill into a sexual harassment charge or the orthodontist who meets Bill on a plane and unwittingly precipitates the bloody outcome of the story. He also casts great actors like Susan Sarandon and Melanie Lynskey in roles that have little to do with the mainstream of the plot. Leaves of Grass uneasily straddles the line between screwball and black comedy, but even when it doesn't work, the cast makes it watchable.  

Reprise (Joachim Trier, 2006)

Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Høiner in Reprise

Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Espen Klouman Høiner, Viktoria Winger, Odd-Magnus Williamson, Pål Stokka, Christian Rubeck, Henrik Elvestad, Henrik Mestad, Rebekka Karijord, Sigmund Sæverud. Screenplay: Jochim Trier, Eskil Vogt. Cinematography: Jakob Ihre. Production design: Roger Rosenberg. Film editing: Olivier Bugge Coutté. Music: Olla Fløttum, Knut Schreiner. 

Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young. To make the point, Joachim Trier focuses on two friends, aspiring writers, in their early 20s, and imagines the course their lives might have taken as well as showing the way it did. He uses a voiceover narrator (Eindrida Eidsvold) to set up the potential but also sometimes to elucidate the actual. The result is a sometimes confusing but ultimately touching portrait of Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman Høiner) as they try to manage burgeoning careers, love affairs, and friendships. Reprise was Trier's first feature, made with the keen awareness of a director in his 30s of the choices and the missteps we all encounter in that crucial period of our lives.

Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998)

Vince Vaughn in Psycho

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, Robert Forster, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Haney, Chad Everett, Rance Howard, Rita Wilson, James Remar, James Le Gros. Screenplay: James Sefano, based on a novel by Robert Bloch. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: Tom Foden. Film editing: Amy E. Duddleston. Music: Bernard Herrmann. 

Accepting the role of Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was an act that took chutzpah or hubris or something. There are few performances more definitive than Anthony Perkins in the role in the 1960 film. It's much easier to accept some of the actors who replace the originals: Viggo Mortensen is a far more capable actor than John Gavin, and he gives the role of Sam Loomis personality. Julianne Moore is tougher and feistier than Vera Miles as Lila Crane. And even Anne Heche is acceptable as Marion Crane, though lacking the touch of glamour -- and the shock of her early departure from the movie -- that made Janet Leigh iconic in the role. Which is just to say that Van Sant's version is an experiment that never justifies itself: Can a nearly shot-for-shot re-creation of a classic film succeed as its own movie? It didn't, of course, meeting critical scorn and audience indifference. The incidental departures from the Hitchcock version, the updatings to meet contemporary expectations are glaringly irrelevant: San is naked in the bedroom scene at the beginning; Norman masturbates when he looks at Marion through the peephole; we see the wounds inflicted by Mother and Marion's nude buttocks in the shower scene. Even the rescoring of Bernard Herrmann's music by Danny Elfman feels less effective in the new context. As so often with remakes, we come to see what made the original so brilliant. 

The Fan (Otto Preminger, 1949)

George Sanders, Jeanne Crain, and Richard Greene in The Fan

Cast: Jeanne Crain, George Sanders, Madeleine Carroll, Richard Greene, Martita Hunt, John Sutton, Hugh Dempster, Richard Ney, Virginia McDowall. Screenplay: Ross Evans, Dorothy Parker, Walter Reisch, based on a play by Oscar Wilde. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Leland Fuller, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof. 

Uncharacteristically lackluster direction by Otto Preminger mars The Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan. Like so many movies from stage plays, it hashes things up to meet the demands of motion pictures for action and change of scenery, adding a "frame story" that takes place in London after the end of World War II. An elderly Mrs. Erlynne (Madeleine Carroll) discovers the titular fan at an auction of things retrieved from the rubble left by the bombing of the city and seeks out Lord Darlington (George Sanders) to prove her rightful ownership. Flash back to the action of the play. Wilde's aphorisms are chopped up and scattered in the dialogue of the film, as it becomes less a battle of wits and more a domestic drama. Sanders, Carroll, and Martita Hunt retain some of the play's essence in their performances, but Jeanne Crain and Richard Greene are pallid versions of the Windermeres. 

The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)

Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth in The Hit

Cast: Terence Stamp, John Hurt, Tim Roth, Laura del Sol, Bill Hunter, Fernando Rey, Lennie Peters, Willoughby Gray, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Peter Prince. Cinematography: Mike Molloy. Production design: Andrew Sanders. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: Paco de Lucia. 

The acting trio of Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth make The Hit watchable even though they're playing characters with manifest inconsistencies in a story riddled with plot holes. Stamp plays Willie, who ratted on his fellow mobsters to avoid prison and has spent ten years in exile in Spain. Then  two gangsters, the icy, taciturn Braddock (Hurt) and his itchy, naive partner Myron (Roth), show up to bring him to mob justice. What follows is a peregrination through northern Spain, during which Braddock kills another mobster and abducts his mistress (Laura del Sol). As a road movie, it's not bad, but as a gangster film it falls short, never quite finding a consistent tone, wavering between film noir and black comedy. 

Limonov: The Ballad (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2024)

Ben Whishaw in Limonov: The Ballad

Cast: Ben Whishaw, Viktoria Miroshnichenko, Tomas Aran, Corado Invernizzi, Evgeniy Mironov, Andrey Burkovskiy, Masha Mashkova, Odin Lund Biron, Vladim Stepanov, Vladislav Tsenev, Sandrine Bonnaire. Screenplay: Pawel Pawlikowski, Ben Hopkins, Kirill Serebrennikov. Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov. Production design: Lyubov Korolkova, Vladslav Ogay. Film editing: Yuriy Karik. Music: Massimo Pupillo. 

I admit that I had never heard of Eduard Limonov before venturing into Kirill Serebrennikov's biopic, and even now I'm not sure why I should have. Poet, dissident, and madman, he stirred things up in the Soviet Union, New York, France, and again in the Russia that arose from the fall of the Soviet Union. Limonov: The Ballad puts him in the larger context of the madness of New York City in the 1970s and Russia in the 1990s, and to some extent makes him a representative figure for those troubled places and times. Despite an all-stops-out performance by Ben Whishaw and a vivid re-creation of those eras, the film lacks coherence. But maybe that's the point: Limonov himself lacked coherence.   

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)

Emma Stone in Bugonia

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone. Screenplay: Will Tracy, based on a film by Jang Joon-hwan. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: James Price. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix. 

Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia feels less inventively off-beat than some of his other films, like the macabre fable Dogtooth (2009), the dystopian fantasy The Labster (2015), or the sendup of the costume drama The Favourite (2018). That may be because it's a remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! (2003), whose director, Jang Joon-hwan, was originally supposed to make it, so the material didn't originate in Lanthimos's imagination. Which is not to say it isn't full of his delirious inventiveness, especially since he's working with his favorite actress, Emma Stone, who seems to share his predilection for the absurd (viz. her work with Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie on the 1923 series The Curse). Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceuticals CEO who is kidnapped by Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), who is convinced that she's an alien and that the Andromedan mother ship is about to return to Earth for her. Imprisoned in his basement, with only Teddy's timorous cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), to guard her, Michelle proves resourceful and resistant. But is Teddy really deluded in his beliefs about her? What suspense the film generates comes from that question. Stone and Plemmons, the former indomitable and the latter sometimes explosively brutal, are at peak form. The only reservations I have lie in the rather cobbled-together ending of the film, which seems to me an apocalypse that the movie neither earns nor justifies.  

Girl With Hyacinths (Hasse Ekman, 1950)

Ulf Palme and Anders Ek in Girl With Hyacinths

Cast: Eva Henning, Ulf Palme, Birgit Tengroth, Anders Ek, Gösta Cederlund, Karl-Arne Holmsten, Keve Hjelm, Marianne Löfgren, Björn Berglund, Anne-Marie Brunius. Screenplay: Hasse Ekman. Cinematography: Göran Strindberg. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Lennart Wellèn. Music: Erland von Koch. 

A young woman kills herself, leaving a letter for her neighbors across the hall that names them as her heirs, even though they were only passing acquaintances. That's the setup for Hasse Ekman's Girl With Hyacinths. The neighbors, writer Anders Wikner (Ulf Palme) and his wife, Britt (Birgit Tengroth), are left to solve the mystery of why Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning) chose to take her life. Ingmar Bergman named Girl With Hyacinths as one of the greatest Swedish films, and while it never achieves the distinction of the best of Bergman's own films, it's an absorbing precursor to them. The secrets of Dagmar Brink's life are uncovered by the Wikners in a series of flashbacks, as they encounter a bristly banker (Gösta Cederlund), an alcoholic painter (Anders Ek), a giddy actress (Marianne Löfgren), Dagmar's ex-husband (Keve Hjelm), and a womanizing popular singer (Karl-Arne Holmsten). Although Anders Wikner does most of the sleuthing, it's his clever and more sympathetic wife who really understands what led to Dagmar's death, bringing to mind the collaboration of Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). The film also touches on themes that were taboo in the Hollywood of 1950. Hasse Ekman's skillful direction is aided by Göran Strindberg's cinematography.