Clean, Shaven (Lodge Kerrigan, 1993)

Peter Greene in Clean, Shaven

Cast: Peter Greene, Megan Owen, Jennifer McDonald, Jack McDonald, Molly Casteloe, Jill Chamberlain, Alice Levitt, Roget Jolly, J. Dixon Byrne, Eliot Rockett, Lee Kayman, Rob Benevides, June Kelly. Screenplay: Lodge Kerrigan. Cinematography: Teodoro Maniaci. Production design: Tania Ferrier. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Hahn Rowe. 

Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven is a sensitive, accomplished portrait of a schizophrenic somewhat undermined by the imposition of a detective story on the material. Peter Greene hauntingly plays a deinstitutionalized mental patient, Peter Winter, searching for the daughter, Nicole (Jennifer McDonald), who was put up for adoption after he was hospitalized. When a girl Nicole's age is found bludgeoned to death, a detective (Jack McDonald) in charge of the case begins to suspect that Peter may have been her killer. Eventually the two men come together, but the film never resolves the question of whether Peter actually killed the little girl. This inconclusiveness, and the absence of some of Peter's backstory, including his experiences while institutionalized and his ill-fated marriage, leaves us with more questions than the film needs to be fully satisfactory. Its real strength lies in the ambiance that Kerrigan creates around Peter, a haunting mixture of radio static and voices, along with natural sounds like wind and bird calls, amplified to suggest his perpetual edginess and lack of balance. 

Detention (John Hsu, 2019)

Gingle Wang in Detention

Cast: Gingle Wang, Fu Meng-po, Tseng Ching-hua, Cecilia Choi, Hung Chang Chu, Hsia Chang-ting, Jessie Chang, Moon Lee. Screenplay: John Hsu, Lyra Fu, Chien Shih-keng. Cinematography: Chou Yi-hsien. Production design: Wang Chih-cheng. Film editing: Shih Meng-ju. Music: Luming Lu. 

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," said Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. It's also the nightmare that haunts Wei Chung-ting (Tseng Ching-hua) in John Hsu's debut feature Detention, an atmospheric horror film set the period of political and ideological repression known as the White Terror that persisted in Taiwan for more than 20 years. Wei is one of its victims, whose story is told in flashbacks to 1962, when he was a high school student. Wei and his classmates met secretly with some dissident teachers to read and discuss forbidden books, and when the authorities discovered this, the students and their teachers were arrested and tortured to elicit information about other nonconformists. The story largely centers on Fang Ray-shin (Gingle Wang), who was not a member of the group, but had a crush on an art teacher, Chang Ming-hui (Fu Meng-po), who was a participant. Fang's actions led to the betrayal of the group. The film takes place partly in the real world of the past but also in a dream world, part Fang's and part Wei's, filled with monsters and ghosts -- in short, the fantastic equivalents to the political repression. It's not an easy film to follow because of the temporal switchbacks and the lack of clear delineation between the actual and the imagined, but it succeeds at evoking a pervasive malaise and paranoia.  

Man Bites Dog (Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992)

Benoît Poelvoorde in Man Bites Dog

Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde, Valérie Parent, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Jean-Marc Chenut, Alain Oppezzi, Vincent Tavier, Jacqueline Poelvoorde-Pappaert, Nelly Pappaert, Hector Pappaert, Jenny Drye, Malou Madou. Screenplay: Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, Vincent Tavier. Cinematography: André Bonzel. Film editing: Rémy Belvaux, Eric Dardil. Music: Jean-Marc Chenut, Laurence Dufrene, Philippe Malempré. 

Man Bites Dog dares you to laugh and then punishes you for it. Trigger warnings are inadequate for this mockumentary about a serial killer called Ben, played with sleazy charm by Benoît Poelvoorde, who also co-wrote and -directed, and whose own family members were reportedly tricked into playing the roles of his mother and grandparents. His fellow writer-directors play the reporter (Rémy Belvaux) and cameraman (André Bonzel) who initially plan to document Ben's murder spree and eventually get caught up into it as participants. Their documentary in fact becomes financed by the cash Ben gleans from his murders, including what's found under the mattress of an old woman he literally scares to death. Other murders are not so bloodless as that one, and the film reaches its horrifying climax with the murder of a small boy during a home invasion and a rape and murder in which the victim is disemboweled. The targets of the film as satire are many, including the compromised nature of documentary film itself, as well as the audience's own prurience. Much censored, much censured, and much praised, it pushes the limits of how scabrous a film can be and still retain an audience. You have been advised. 

The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Meg Ryan and Val Kilmer in The Doors

Cast: Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon, Kathleen Quinlan, Michael Wincott, Michael Madsen, Josh Evans, Dennis Burkley, Billy Idol, Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman. Screenplay: Randall Jahnson, Oliver Stone. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: David Brenner, Joe Hutshing. 

Oliver Stone's hyperactive The Doors does exactly what you might expect of a biopic of one of rock's live fast, die young legends. It never gives us a moment to think about what Jim Morrison might really have been like when he wasn't performing. It treats him as what he has become: an emblem of the mad era when the '60s were becoming the '70s, when to be young was to be performative. Stone montages the political and social background with clips of riots and assassinations, but despite a committed and compelling performance by Val Kilmer, Morrison ends up as a figure flailing in a sea of clichés. There's even a mystical shaman figure to represent the pseudo-spiritual side of Morrison's experimentation with psychoactive drugs. If you want music, there's plenty of it. If you want insight into the life and times of Jim Morrison, go elsewhere.

Permanent Vacation (Jim Jarmusch, 1980)

Chris Parker and Leila Gastil in Permanent Vacation

Cast: Chris Parker, Leila Gastil, John Lurie, Richard Boes, Sara Driver, Charlie Spademan, Jane Fire, Ruth Bolton, Evelyn Smith. María Duval, Lisa Rosen, Frankie Faison, Suzanne Fletcher, Felice Rosser, Eric Mitchell, Chris Hameon. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Tom DiCillo, James A. Lebovitz. Film editing: Jim Jarmusch. Music: Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie. 

Jim Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation is the quintessential student film, even if Jarmusch was no longer a student at NYU when he made it. It springs out of an environment, the way New Orleans gave birth to Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Cleveland and Florida spawned Down by Law (1986), and Memphis informed Mystery Train (1989), New York City is what gives Permanent Vacation its soul. It's a "student film" because those of us who are familiar with Jarmusch's later works can see in it how he's learning to use a sense of place as a reflection and an explanation of who his characters are. And it's also the work of a gifted but still uncertain student, learning that quirky and deadpan and offbeat are useful attitudes for a novice filmmaker but they aren't ends in themselves. Good things were yet to come from Jarmusch, but you won't find more than a hint of them in Permanent Vacation. 

Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Madonna and Harvey Keitel in Dangerous Game

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Madonna, James Russo, Nancy Ferrara, Reilly Murphy, Victor Argo, Leonard L. Thomas, Christina Fulton, Heather Bracken. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Alex Tavoularis. Film editing: Anthony Redman, Shivo Andrew Stewart. Music: Joe Delia. 

Oscar Wilde's dictum that life imitates art gets a workout in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game. At the beginning we see movie director Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) taking leave of his wife (Nancy Ferrara) and child (Reilly Murphy) to fly from New York to LA, where he is making a film. There's a little tension at the departure, but nothing extreme. The extremity begins when he starts shooting about a marriage violently on the rocks with method actor Francis Burns (Joe Russo) and rising star Sarah Jennings (Madonna), who seem to dislike each other as much as the characters they're playing do. And it intensifies when Eddie's wife and child suddenly arrive just as Sarah has left his bed. From then on, what Eddie is trying to put on film begins to echo what is happening off-screen, not only with Eddie and his wife but also between his two stars. Even though it contains one of her best performances in a movie, Madonna bad-mouthed Dangerous Game when it was released. Not without reason. Though the performances are solid, it's heavy-handed and one-note, with a narrative so poorly constructed that there's no satisfactory way to end either the film being made or the one about its making. 

Maidstone (Norman Mailer, 1970)

Rip Torn and Norman Mailer in Maidstone

Cast: Norman Mailer, Rip Torn, Ultra Violet, Buzz Farbar, Leo Garen, Joy Bang, Lee Cook, Beverly Bentley, Jean Campbell, Robert Gardiner. Screenplay: Norman Mailer. Cinematography: Nick Doob, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker. Nicholas J. Proferes, Sheldon Rocklin, Diane Rocklin, Flame Schon, Jan Welt. Film editing: Lana Jokel, Norman Mailer, Jan Welt.

Why has no one done a biopic of Norman Mailer yet? Or would it be redundant? He put so much of himself on paper and on film that maybe there's not much left to say about him. But he's a key figure in that pivotal era in American cultural and political history, roughly the span of time from the Kennedy assassination to the Nixon resignation. The stressors of that period are on full display in his movie Maidstone: the psychic wounds of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X;  the rise of Black power; the emergence of feminism and the reaction against it. It's a mad, almost unwatchable film, that fortuitously contained its own climax: the fight between the brothers played by Mailer and Rip Torn, which was a real fight between director and actor, the culmination of a five-day shoot at estates in East Hampton, New York. Much of Maidstone was improvised, with a resulting 45 hours of footage, that Mailer and others eventually edited into an 119-minute movie. It's ostensibly about a film director who wants to be a presidential candidate, launching his campaign while casting and beginning to film a movie. But really it's about the obsessions of Norman Mailer, and you really have to be interested in that to justify the time spent watching it. 

The Little Sister (Hafsia Herzi, 2025)

Rita Benmannana, Melissa Guers, and Nadia Melliti in The Little Sister

Cast: Nadia Melliti, Park Ji-min, Amina Ben Mohamed, Melissa Guers, Rita Benmannana, Rizzak Ridha, Louis Memmi, Waniss Chaouki, Anouar Kardellas, Joven Etienne, Madi Dembele, Mahamadou Sacko. Screenplay: Hafsia Herzi, based on a novel by Fatima Daas. Cinematography: Jérémie Attard. Production design: Dièné Béreté. Film editing: Géraldine Mangenot. Music: Amine Bouhafa. 

In The Little Sister Hafsia Herzi succeeds in taking an almost too familiar coming-of-age story and giving it freshness and universality. Seventeen-year-old Fatima (Nadia Melliiti) is athletic and likes to hang out with the boys more than the girls, but she has a boyfriend who wants to get married as soon as she finishes school. She's afraid of breaking with her traditional French-Algerian family if she acknowledges that she's sexually more attracted to women than to men. She explores lesbianism furtively by hiring a prostitute to educate her on what women do sexually with other women. She's also asthmatic, and during a treatment she strikes sparks with a nurse, Ji-Na (Park Ji-min), and they begin an affair. When she starts university, she finds a thriving gay community and joins it, a little warily, still fearing that she'll be exposed to her family. A breakup with Ji-Na sends her into a tailspin, and she seeks help from an imam at a mosque, but he gives her the conservative religious line about her sexuality that a rabbi might give a Jew, a priest might give a Catholic, or a minister might give a Protestant. In the end, she is left to find a way of being herself rather than what her family, her society, or her religion say she should be. The film gets much of its strength from its cast, some of whom are non-professional actors, and from an insightful screenplay based on the autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas. The Little Sister tells us nothing new, but like the best old stories, it's anchored deeply in the truth about humanity and sexuality.    

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)

Marcia McBroom, Dolly Read, and Cynthia Myers in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Cast: Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, John Lazar, Michael Blodgett, David Gurian, Edy Williams, Erica Gavin, Phyllis Davis, Harrison Page, Duncan McLeod, James Iglehart, Charles Napier. Screenplay: Roger Ebert, Russ Meyer. Cinematography: Fred J. Koenekamp. Art direction: Arthur Lonergan, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Dann Cahn, Dick Wormell. Music: Stu Phillips. 

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a spoof of racy melodramas like Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls, which made a lot of money for 20th Century Fox in 1967. And of the T&A-filled sexploitation movies in which Meyer specialized. And of the kind of movies that Roger Ebert used to give a thumbs-down to at the Chicago Sun-Times and on the TV show he shared with Gene Siskel. The movie was Ebert's one venture into screenwriting, and he and Meyer concoct a lot of perilous situations for the trio of girl rockers who are at the center of the movie. Kelly (Dolly Read), Casey (Cynthia Myers), and Pet (Marcia McBroom) hit LA with high hopes, and are immediately swept up into a whirlwind of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. There's a nefarious financial advisor (Duncan McLeod) who wants to cheat Kelly out of an inheritance, and a sleazy producer (John Lazar) who wants to make his fortune off of them. The group's manager (David Gurian), loves Kelly but gets involved with a porn star (Edy Williams). A fashion designer (Erica Gavin) seduces Cynthia into a lesbian affair. A young law student (Harrison Page) takes up with Pet but is edged out by a heavyweight champion boxer (James Iglehart). And there are some deaths and an abortion and a surprise gender reveal.... The movie is busy, noisy, and packed with outrageous incidents, but the one thing it isn't is funny. The dialogue and  jokes are leaden, like the "moral lessons" attached to each of its principal characters at the end of the film. Can it be that Ebert, earnest in all of his film criticism, didn't have much of a sense of humor? The movie is one of John Waters's favorites, as you might expect from that connoisseur of trash, but I wonder if it isn't because he secretly knows that he did this sort of thing a lot better.

Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994)

Elina Löwensohn in Nadja

Cast: Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan, Peter Fonda, Galaxy Craze, Suzy Amis, Jared Harris, Karl Geary, David Lynch. Screenplay: Michael Almereyda. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Kurt Ossenfort. Film editing: David Leonard. Music: Simon Fisher-Turner. 

The title character of Nadja, Michael Almereyda's languid, somewhat campy take on the Dracula story, is Dracula's daughter, prowling Manhattan at night accompanied by Renfield (Karl Geary). When she learns that her father has been killed, Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) claims the body by putting a spell on a morgue attendant (the film's producer, David Lynch) and has it cremated, then stops at a bar where she meets a woman named Lucy (Galaxy Craze), who just happens to be married to Jim (Martin Donovan), who is the nephew of the man who has killed Dracula, Van Helsing (Peter Fonda). Jim is occupied with bailing out Van Helsing, who has been arrested for the murder, so Nadja accompanies Lucy back to her apartment, where they have sex. Then Nadja goes to Brooklyn to take the ashes to her twin brother, Edgar (Jared Harris), who is under the care of a nurse, Cassandra (Suzy Amis). Eventually, this collection of the living and the undead will collide, of course, with more or less predictable results. It's all played with straight faces -- a skill that Löwensohn and Donovan mastered in films directed by Hal Hartley -- and a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek humor: At one point, for example, Edgar receives a telepathic message from Nadja that he calls a "psychic fax." The film blends crisp black-and-white images with grainy, blurry ones shot on a toy camcorder, though to no great effect.

Distant Journey (Alfréd Radok,1949)

Blanka Waleská in Distant Journey

Cast: Blanka Waleská, Otomar Krejca, Viktor Okásec, Zdenka Baldová, Eduard Kohout, J.O. Martin, Josef Chvalina, Anna Vanková, Jirí Plachy, Sasa Rasilov, Jirí Spirit, Rudolf Deyl, Zdenek Hodr. Screenplay: Erik Kolár, Mojmir Drvota, Alfréd Radok. Cinematography: Josef Strecha. Art direction: Jan Pacák, Frantisek Troster. Film editing: Jirina Lukesová. Music: Jirí Sternwald. 

Films about the Holocaust are so much a part of cinematic history now that it's surprising to see how well one of the earliest, Afréd Radok's Distant Journey, has maintained its power to disturb and move us. The film centers on a Jewish doctor, Hana Kaufmannová (Blanka Waleská), whose marriage to a gentile, Antonin Bures, initially spares her from being sent to the camps along with the rest of her family. Radok intercuts their stories with scenes of the Nazi rise to power, many of which come from Leni Riefensthal's infamous propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). It also includes scenes shot at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which was planned by the Nazis as an intermediate stop before internees were sent to the extermination camps. The word "transport" becomes a recurring motif in the film. By today's standards, Distant Journey is mild in its depiction of the horrors of the camps, but the psychological tension is unabated and the moral impact remains intense. The story is all too familiar: a family uprooted, separated, and sent to detention and possible death. How, we wonder, could people let such things happen? Wouldn't we be outraged if such injustice were taking place in the United States today? But no, that's all in the past, right? 

The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979)

Abel Ferrara in The Driller Killer

Cast: Abel Ferrara, Carolyn Marz, Baybi Day, Harry Schultz, Alan Wynroth, Maria Helhoski, James O'Hara, Richard Howorth, Louis Mascolo, Tommy Santora. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Film editing: Bonnie Constant, Michael Constant, Abel Ferrara, Orlando Gallini, Veronika Rocket. Music: Joe Delia. 

Abel Ferrara isn't much of an actor, but he doesn't have to be in The Driller Killer, his grindhouse classic. He's not surrounded by people who can act, or even need to: All they have to do is show how intolerable life is in 1970s New York City. Ferrara (under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine) plays Reno Miller, an artist who lives in a rundown apartment with two women, Carol (Carolyn Marz) and Pamela (Baybi Day), who are more interested in each other than they are in him. When a punk band called the Roosters moves in next door and starts practicing at all hours, Reno flips out. He begins prowling the streets with an electric drill, using it to off any poor derelict who manages to come into his sights. Apart from one gruesome scene in which Reno drills into the forehead of a victim, it's less bloody than the slasher films it inspired, which may be why the producers chose to reproduce that scene in a notorious poster that got the movie banned, especially in the United Kingdom. Ferrara went on to hire better actors and find better scripts to create more convincing urban nightmares in King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992), so The Driller Killer is probably of interest mainly to students of his work and devotees of the genre. The minimal budget for the movie is evident throughout, but the coherence of its director's vision of an urban hellscape helps it transcend schlock.

Brick and Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)

Taji Ahmadi and Zackaria Hashemi in Brick and Mirror

Cast: Zackaria Hashemi, Taji Ahmadi, Jamshid Mashayekhi, Mehri Mehrnia, Forugh Farrokhzad, Parviz Fanizadeh, Munuchehr Farid, Akbar Meshkin, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Ebrahim Golestan  (voice). Screenplay: Ebrahim Golestan. Cinematography: Amir Karari, Soleiman Minasian. Film editing: Ebrahim Golestan. 

Taxicabs are irresistible tools for filmmakers, providing intimacy and mobility, both the close contact of driver and passenger and exploration of the variety of the city. The classic of the taxicab drama is, of course, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), but it has also inspired filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, whose Night on Earth (1991) consists of minidramas set in taxis in five different cities. In Ebrahim Golestan's Brick and Mirror the taxi both provokes the drama and allows for a satiric exploration of life in the city of Tehran as it was before the Islamic revolution. One night, cabbie Hashem (Zackaria Hashemi) picks up a fare, a woman in a black chador, and drives her to a remote site where construction has been abandoned. After she leaves, he hears a noise in the back seat: the cry of a baby. He searches for the woman but finds only a few derelicts at the site who claim not to know of any such woman. At this point, most of us would go straight to the police or the nearest hospital, but this is not a film in which people do the expected things. Instead, he takes the baby with him to a cafe: He's late turning over the keys to the cab to the next driver. He seeks advice from some friends there, but they respond only with ponderous philosophizing and caveats about going to the authorities. When he finally goes to the police, he is thrust into a Kafkaesque scene of bureaucratic indifference. He meets with his girlfriend, Taji (Taji Ahmadi), who helps him feed and change the infant, sleeps with him, and sees the opportunity to marry Hashem and start a family. Hashem is more worried about what the neighbors will think about her spending the night with him, and in the morning he takes the baby to an orphanage, which is unwilling to take in an undocumented foundling and sends him to the courthouse to provide the documentation he will need. As expected, he encounters still more bureaucracy. Brick and Mirror begins as film noir, shifts into urban parable, and ends poignantly and painfully. In short, it's an astonishing and exasperating work that should be more widely known and celebrated. 

The Story of a Three Day Pass (Melvin Van Peebles, 1967)

Harry Baird and Nicole Berger in The Story of a Three Day Pass

Cast: Harry Baird, Nicole Berger, Hal Brav, Tria French, Pierre Doris, Christian Marin. Screenplay: Melvin Van Peebles, based on his novel. Cinematography: Michel Kelber. Film editing: Liliane Korb. Music: Melvin Van Peebles, Mickey Baker. 

The Story of a Three Day Pass is a tale of expatriation made by an expatriate, Melvin Van Peebles. Turner (Harry Baird), a Black American soldier stationed in France, is granted a three day pass by his captain (Hal Brav), which he plans to spend in Paris. There he meets Miriam (Nicole Berger), a young French woman, and goes with her to the coastal town of Étretat. In the midst of a romantic weekend, in which they declare their love for each other, they are spotted by a trio of his fellow servicemen. Turner fears the worst: They will tell the captain that he was seen there with a white woman, and he will suffer for it. The film that Van Peebles develops from this situation is highly influenced by French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard, using surprise cuts and unusual camera angles -- in one scene, for example, when the couple enters the hotel room they've rented, they're seen from overhead, like participants in an experiment. Van Peebles emphasizes Turner's isolation and loneliness, as in a scene when he goes to a sidewalk café and sees three Black men at another table. Although they acknowledge one another with a wave, they don't make contact, suggesting that African expatriates in France have little in common with an American expatriate. Van Peebles maintains a steady tension born of Turner's displacement throughout the film, sometimes with a sly humor. When Turner and Miriam have sex, we enter their fantasies: He imagines himself as a prince arriving at a castle; she sees herself as the captive of African tribesmen. A low-key, bittersweet film, The Story of a Three Day Pass touches and amuses while also seething with a repressed anger.  

Cactus Pears (Rohan Kanawade, 2025)

Suraaj Suman and Bhushaan Manoj in Cactus Pears

Cast: Bhushaan Manoj, Suraaj Suman, Jayshri Jagrap. Screenplay: Rohan Kanawade. Cinematography: Vikas Urs. Production design: Tejashree Kapadne. Film editing: Anadi Athaley. 

Tradition inevitably gives way to change, but it's the fight between them that animates our fictions. It falls to Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) to carry the burden of change in Rohan Kanadade's Cactus Pears, his debut feature. Anand is comfortably employed in Mumbai when his father dies, which necessitates a trip into the past, to the village where he grew up, for the ten-day funeral observances. Anand is reluctant to spend the whole ten days there. At 30, he knows that he'll be under constant pressure to explain why he's not married. At one point in the ceremonies, there's even discussion about whether, as an unmarried man, he's eligible to light his father's funeral pyre. But Anand is gay, a fact he feels compelled to hide from the villagers, if only to spare the embarrassment to his mother (Jayshri Jagtap), who already knows. During their stay, Anand meets Balya (Suraaj Suman), a friend from boyhood who knows Anand's secret because he's also gay. The film surveys the multiple tensions that arise as a new intimacy develops between Anand and Balya amid the funereal solemnity and the complex rituals and taboos of community and religion. Cactus Pears is a finely observed, refreshingly new take on a familiar story.   

The Hours and Times (Christopher Munch, 1991)

Ian Hart and David Angus in The Hours and Times

Cast: David Angus, Ian Hart, Stephanie Pack, Robin McDonald, Sergio Moreno, Unity Grimwood. Screenplay: Christopher Munch. Cinematography: Christopher Munch. Film editing: Christopher Munch.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times is that it feels right. Nothing we know about what happened to John Lennon and Brian Epstein afterward feels inconsistent with what's shown in the film: a brief visit to Barcelona by the self-assured Beatle and his repressed manager in which they test the limits of their intimacy with each other. Munch at one point considered making the film's two central characters "just two guys," but it gains immeasurably from our awareness of the sad history that followed in the two men's lives and deaths. The film is just under 60 minutes of sexual tension, as Lennon (Ian Hart) teases and taunts Epstein (David Angus) about his experiences as a gay man. They share a bathtub and a bed in the film, but without apparent consummation, and the ending leaves us to ponder the nature of sexual attraction. Is Lennon sadistically inflicting cruelty on Epstein? Why does Epstein want to go on a trip with a man he knows he can't have? The Hours and Times is a film that ramifies in the mind the more you ponder it, each incident shown -- Lennon's flirtation with the flight attendant and Epstein's with a hotel worker, the meeting with the man in the bar, the phone conversations of Lennon with Cynthia and Epstein with his mother -- casting light on another.  

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, 2025)

Eylul Guven in Blue Heron

Cast: Eylul Guven, Edik Beddoes, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Liam Serg, Preston Drabble, Amy Zimmer. Screenplay: Sophy Romvari. Cinematography: Maya Bankovic. Production design: Victoria Furuya. Film editing: Kurt Walker. 

"Mental illness," "neurodivergence," "social dysfunction," there are many phrases and labels that can be applied to the case of Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the central character in Sophy Romvari's debut feature Blue Heron. And perhaps the problem is that Jeremy is a "case," a subject for study and analysis, which his desperate parents resort to when their oldest child threatens the peace and stability of the family. Unfortunately, the parents and their three younger children have to live with Jeremy's disruption while the psychologists and social workers can only maintain a clinical distance. Romvari tells the story largely through the eyes of the youngest member of the family, Sasha, first as a child (Eylul Guven) and then as an adult (Amy Zimmer), trying to reconstruct their experience twenty years later. Romvari intelligently and artfully bends time, sending the adult Sasha back to scenes from her childhood, putting her in the place of a social worker trying to help the family cope. It's a film full of insights, but not of answers to the plight of families like the one it depicts, well-meaning and loving but driven to the frustrating limits in their attempt to cope. It's a well-written, well-staged, well-acted cry for help. 

The Girl in the Window (Luciano Emmer, 1961)

Bernard Fresson and Marina Vlady in The Girl in the Window

Cast: Lino Ventura, Bernard Fresson, Magali Noël, Marina Vlady. Screenplay: Rodolfo Sonego, Luciano Emmer, Vinicio Marinucci, Luciano Martino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Emanuele Cassuto. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Production design: Alexandre Hinkis. Film editing: Jolanda Benvenuti, Emma Le Chanois. Music: Roman Vlad. 

Luciano Emmer's The Girl in the Window begins as a harrowing account of a cave-in in a coal mine and turns into a romantic weekend spree. This very odd mashup of genres centers on two Italian miners, the seasoned Federico (Lino Ventura) and the novice Vincenzo (Bernard Fresson). After being rescued from the mine disaster, they head for the red-light district in Amsterdam, where they meet two women, Chanel (Magali Noël) and Else (Marina Vlady), who make their living as sex workers, attracting clients by posing in windows. Vincenzo has decided that working in the mine is not for him, and plans to take the train back to Italy. But when he meets Else, who takes a fancy to him, he misses his train and they join Federico and Chanel at the seaside. An on-again, off-again relationship forms among the two couples. Emmer tries to jam a lot of character exposition into the film, and doesn't always succeed. Fortunately, the four actors are more than capable, particularly Vlady, who makes the stereotyped role of the good-hearted prostitute fairly convincing. Ventura also has a comic drunk scene in which he wanders by mistake into a gay bar and is slow to realize it. Tonally, The Girl in the Window is a mess, never quite overcoming the realistic opening scenes in the mine, but it's a watchable mess.  

Full Alert (Ringo Lam, 1997)

Lau Ching-wan in Full Alert

Cast: Lau Ching-wan, Francis Ng, Amanda Lee, Jack Kao, Monica Chan, Chin Ka Lok, Yung Kam-cheong, Raymond Cho, Emily Kwan Po-wai. Screenplay: Ringo Lam, Lau Wing-kin, Poon Yuen-leung. Cinematography: Ardy Lam. Art direction: S.P. Choo, C.C. Wong. Film editing: Angie Lam, Marco Mak. Music: Peter Kam.

There are the usual thriller set pieces, car chases and gun battles, in Ringo Lam's Full Alert, but the film really hinges on the psychological twinning of cop and criminal. Everything in the film builds toward a final showdown between Pao (Lau Ching-wan), the cop in charge of the pursuit of Mak Kwan (Francis Ng), an explosives expert who escapes from prison after Pao arrests him. Both Pao and Mak are obsessive types, and an early confrontation establishes that both are haunted by guilt. Mak has a partner, Chung (Amanda Lee), whom he loves, and Pao has a wife (Monica Chan) and child. Lam deftly plays on these parallels throughout the film, and Lau and Ng give their characters full intensity. The result is a high-powered movie that feels more realistic than it actually is.  

Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951)

Brunella Bovo and Francesco Golisano in Miracle in Milan

Cast: Emma Gramatica, Francesco Golisano, Brunella Bovo, Paolo Stoppa, Guglielmo Bernabò, Anna Carena, Alba Arnova, Flora Cambi, Virgilio Riento, Arturo Bragaglia, Erminio Spala. Screenplay: Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Mario Chiarai, Adolfo Franci, based on a book by Zavattini. Cinematography: G.R. Aldo. Production design: Guido Fiorini. Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma. Music: Alessandro Cicognini. 

The great neorealist Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan begins with an old woman finding a baby in a cabbage patch and ends with people on broomsticks taking flight over the Milan cathedral. It's a long way from the film that preceded it in his directing career, Bicycle Thieves (1948). What unites the two films is their focus on the struggling and dispossessed of Italy in the years after World War II. The foundling is Totò (Francesco Golisano), who emerges with an indomitably sunny disposition from the orphanage to which he was sent after the death of the old woman (Emma Gramatica). Totò greets strangers on the street with "good morning," sometimes to their annoyance, and manages to make friends with a man who filches the handbag containing his worldly possessions. He winds up sharing a trash-can hovel with the man in a homeless encampment, which somehow he transforms into a community. And from then on it's all fantasy, as the shantytown is threatened by greedy developers and rescued by Totò with the aid of the angelic visitation of the old woman who gives him a wish-granting magic dove. As a satire, the film's portrayal of capitalist greed is tempered by the fact that the poor people display a similar greed when the dove's powers grant their wishes, which also leaves De Sica with a bit of a problem when it comes to ending his film. His only resort is a literal flight of fantasy. Miracle in Milan is a much-loved movie that has been compared to the films of Charles Chaplin, though it never achieves either the comic highs or the maudlin lows of Chaplin's movies. The best way to approach it is with a childlike disposition, taking it for the fairy tale that it is. 

Victim (Ringo Lam, 1999)

Lau Ching-wan in Victim

Cast: Lau Ching-wan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Amy Kwok, Wayne Lai, Collin Chou, Hui Shiu-hung, Emily Kwan. Screenplay: Ho Man-lung, Ringo Lam, Joe Ma. Cinematography: Ross W. Clarkson. Art direction: Jason Mok. Film editing: Chan Chi-wai. Music: Raymond Wong. 

Ringo Lam's victim begins and ends like a horror movie, in a haunted hotel and a graveyard, but in between it's mostly an action film. This not entirely successful mashup of genres benefits from two high-powered performances, by Lau Ching-wan as Manson Ma, the titular victim, and Tony Leung Ka-fai as Pit Kwan, the detective in charge of the case. Ma, who is in financial trouble, is kidnapped at the film's beginning but rescued by Pit, who tracks him down to an old hotel where Ma is hanging upside down, apparently having been tortured. Under questioning, Ma is so eccentric in his responses that the police can make nothing of the case, so Pit takes over surveiling him when he's released. Car chases and gunfights ensue before we discover what Ma is really involved in, a counterfeiting scheme. The question of whether Ma has actually been possessed by the ghosts that are said to haunt the hotel lingers over the film, and Lam actually filmed two endings for Victim: In one, the question remains unanswered, while the other provides a manifestation of the spirits. Fortunately, Lam provides enough solid, even occasionally gruesome, action to satisfy any audience member who resists this rather pointless narrative gimmick.

Throw Down (Johnnie To, 2004)

Aaron Kwok in Throw Down

Cast: Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok, Cherrie Ying, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Eddie Cheun Siu-fai, Lo Hoi-pang, Calvin Choi, Jordan Chan, Jack Kao. Screenplay: Yau Nai-hoi, Yip Tin-shing, Au Kin-yee. Cinematography: Cheng Siu-keung. Art direction: Tony Yu Hing-wah. Film editing: David Richardson. Music: Peter Kam. 

The narrative and the backstories of Johnnie To's Throw Down are to say the least, oblique. It's a film that almost demands a second viewing to make you understand why some of the things in it happen. Yet largely because of the engaging performances of the three principal actors it all makes sense in the end, even on one viewing. It's a story of three people who meet in a Hong Kong dive: the club owner, Szeto Bo (Louis Koo); a would-be singer, Mona (Cherrie Ying); and a young man who wants to make it big as a judo champion, Tony (Aaron Kwok). Over the course of a few nights and a few fights and mishaps, the three become fast friends. Their friendship culminates in a lovely lyrical moment that has nothing to do with the plot, when they team up to "liberate" a balloon caught in a tree. Throw Down is an homage to Akira Kurosawa via references to his first film, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and it may help a little to have seen that movie, but To gives us moments of humor and pathos that are very much his own. 

Wild Search (Ringo Lam, 1989)

Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung in Wild Search

Cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Cherie Chung, Roy Cheung, Paul Chun, Chang Cheuk-yan, Ku Feng, Tommy Wong, Lau Kong, Frankie Ng, Elaine Jin, Wan Yeung-min. Screenplay: Nam Yin. Cinematography: Andrew Lau. Art direction: Luk Tze-Fung. Film editing: Chow Tung-Nei. Music: Lowell Lo. 

The chemistry of the romantic pairing of Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung gives Ringo Lam's Wild Search enough heart to lift it above the routine Hong Kong action movie. Not that Lam is ever routine in his staging of action, but the likability of the actors and their characters make the film feel like it's more than just gunplay and cars and bodies in motion. Chow plays a cop named Lau but nicknamed Mew-Mew (we never find out why), who gets involved with Chung's character, Cher, when her sister, Elaine, is killed by gangsters muscling in on the gun-smuggling business Elaine's antique shopt is fronting for. A witness survives the gunfire, Elaine's small daughter known as Ka-ka (Chan Cheuk-yan).  Mew-Mew meets Cher while interviewing Ka-ka, and things escalate from there in both attraction and action. There's a vicious hit man called Bullet (Roy Cheung) to contend with, along with Ka-ka's grumpy old grandfather (Ku Feng) and a rival suitor for Cher's hand, her ex-husband (Lau Kong). Mew-Mew is more vulnerable than many of Chow's characters: He winds up in the hospital after one encounter, but he's very much on hand for the final blazing shootout. Much has been made of Wild Search's resemblance to Peter Weir's 1985 hit Witness, but the movie is more homage than plagiarism. 

This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019)

Mary Twala Mhlongo in This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection

Cast: Mary Twala Mhlongo, Jerry Mofokeng Wa, Makhaola Ndebele, Tseko Monaheng, Siphiwe Nzima-Ntskhe, Thabiso Makoto, Thab Letsie, Silas Monyatse, Aleandro Florio, Sarah Weber. Screenplay: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. Cinematography: Pierre de Villiers. Art direction: Leila Walter. Film editing: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. Music: Yu Miyashita. 

Deeply touching and sometimes astonishingly beautiful. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection is a fable about the tensions of the modern world, most centrally about tradition and change. Mantoa (the compelling Mary Twala Mhlongo) is a woman who has suffered the loss of her family, and now patiently -- perhaps a little impatiently -- awaits her death. Her main hope is to be buried with her family in the valley where they lived. But that hope is thwarted when surveyors and engineers arrive in the valley bringing news that it's to be flooded by the construction of a new dam. Soon she is confronting not only the government of Lesotho but also some powerful local authorities. Her resistance gains support from other villagers, but not enough to stem the tide of what some call progress. (The village chief says, "Every time I say the word progress, my tongue rolls backward.") It's a simple story of people imbued with faith, maintained by the village priest, but also tinged with skepticism. Part of the film is narrated by a man (Jerry Mofokeng Wa) who plays a lesiba, a musical instrument native to Lesotho and South Africa. At one point Mantoa recounts the history of the valley, which was settled by people fleeing a plague, and with the arrival of Christianity the village was named Nazaretha. A new god had arrived, and as the lesiba player comments, "the new god prays to the old god." Now perhaps another new god is appearing. The cinematography of Pierre de Villiers provides a rich color palette for Mosese's thoughtful story.

High Art (Lisa Cholodenko, 1998)

Radha Mitchell and Ally Sheedy in High Art

Cast: Radha Mitchell, Ally Sheedy, Gabriel Mann, Patricia Clarkson, Tammy Grimes, Charis Michelson, David Thornton, Anh Duong. Bill Sage, Helen Mendes, Cindra Feuer, Anthony Ruivivar. Screenplay: Lisa Cholodenko. Cinematography: Tami Reiker. Production design: Bernhard Blythe. Film editing: Amy E. Duddleston. Music: Stuart Hill, Nathan Larson, Craig Wedren. 

Lisa Cholodenko's High Art is a keen-edged portrait of life on the fringes of the art and publishing worlds of New York in the waning years of the 20th century. Syd (Radha Mitchell) is a 24-year-old working for a magazine that specializes in art photography. She has just received a promotion to assistant editor, though it still includes gofer work like picking up the lunch order for her boss. One day the ceiling in the bathroom of the run-down apartment she shares with her boyfriend begins to leak, so she goes upstairs to complain to the tenant, who turns out to be a once-famous photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy). In the course of trying to fix the leak, Syd gets acquainted with Lucy and her lover, Greta (Patricia Clarkson), and their assortment of heroin-using friends. The walls of their apartment are hung with Lucy's photographs, and Syd soon gets a chance not only to mount a comeback for the reclusive Lucy but also to prove herself as an editor. Working with Lucy on the feature draws them closer, precipitating a breakup of Syd and her boyfriend as well as a crisis in Lucy's relationship with Greta. Mitchell and Sheedy give fine performances, but they're overshadowed by Clarkson as the fragile, addicted, and self-deluded Greta, a once-famous German actress who was part of the circle around Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There are also some fascinating scenes with Lucy and her mother (Tammy Grimes), a wealthy woman who escaped Germany just before the Nazis came to power. The backstories of High Art are almost more interesting than the central one, and the painful ending feels contrived, but it's a sensitive and provocative film.

Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956)

Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, and Eli Wallach in Baby Doll

Cast: Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman, Eades Hogue, Noah Williamson, Madeleine Sherwood, Rip Torn. Screenplay: Tennessee Williams, based on his play. Cinematography: Boris Kaufman. Art direction: Richard Sylbert. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: Kenyon Hopkins. 

Elia Kazan's famous "dirty movie" Baby Doll raises no eyebrows today, except possibly in its opening scene, when Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), in his pajamas, pokes a hole in the wall to spy on his wife, known as Baby Doll (Carroll Baker), as she lies in a crib sucking her thumb. Millions spied on her too, in a famous poster image that fueled the ire of New York's Cardinal Francis Spellman. The image is perhaps perverse, but so was the reaction to it. The film is less about sex than it is about greed and ambition. Archie Lee's ambition, to possess not only Baby Doll but also the cotton ginning business, has been thwarted: The marriage has not been consummated because of an arrangement that they wouldn't sleep together until she was ready, and she promised that she would be ready on her 20th birthday, which happens to be the next day. As for the business, Archie Lee has been thwarted by a rival, the ambitious Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), who has managed to contract with the majority of the cotton growers in the Mississippi Delta county where they live. A desperate Archie Lee resorts to desperate measures, but he has met his match in the cunning Sicilian. The result is a raucous dark comedy, one of Kazan's best films, set mostly in the decaying plantation house Archie Lee acquired in his ambitious plans. The atmosphere of the film, created in large part by Boris Kaufman's Oscar-nominated black-and-white cinematography and Richard Sylbert's art direction, is superb, and the three lead actors never gave better performances. The screenplay is credited to Tennessee Williams, although Kazan claimed that he wrote the script and Williams polished the dialogue. 

The Guitar Mongoloid (Ruben Östlund, 2004)

Erik Rutström in The Guitar Mongoloid

Cast: Erik Rutström, Ola Sandstig, Britt-Marie Andersson, Julia Persdotter, P.A. Emanuelsson, Anna Johansson, Mikael Allu, Bjarne Gunnarsson, Pär Berg, David Olandersson. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund. Cinematography: Tibor Gent. Film editing: Ebbe Rutström. Music: Bjön Olsson. 

Ruben Östlund's first feature, The Guitar Mongoloid, is a plotless collage of life on the societal fringes of a Swedish city very much like Göthenberg. The key figure is a 12-year-old boy (Erik Ruström) who has aspirations to be a punk rock guitarist and plays his guitar on the streets. The scenes in which he features intersect with those of a variety of other characters, all played by non-actors, involved in things like smashing bicycles or dropping them off bridges, playing with a gun, getting into fights, and rigging a car to drive backward in circles. As a portrait of urban absurdity, it's sometimes amusing, sometimes disturbing, and often unsettlingly familiar. Made with the visual distancing that became key to Östlund's style, it's a useful introduction to his more involving work. 

Two Friends (Jane Campion, 1986)

Kris Bidenko and Emma Coles in Two Friends

Cast: Kris Bidenko, Emma Coles, Kris McQuade, Peter Hehir, Kerry Dwyer, Stephen Leeder, Debra May, John Sheerin, Sean Travers, Emily Stocker. Screenplay: Helen Garner. Cinematography: Julian Penney. Production design: Janet Patterson. Film editing: Bill Russo. Music: Martin Armiger. 

Jane Campion's debut feature Two Friends, made for television, is a simple story about Louise (Emma Coles) and Kelly (Kris Bidenko), teenagers who have found themselves going separate ways. Louise continues on the "normal" course of adolescence, attending a somewhat exclusive girls' school, while Kelly has dropped out, crashing with friends at the beach and adopting punk style and mannerisms. The film begins, strikingly, at a wake for another girl their age, suggesting the pervasive vulnerability of the young. After introducing us to the estranged Kelly and Louise, the story of how they drifted apart is told backward by increments of a year or two. The parents of both girls are divorced, but Kelly's mother has remarried and Kelly is very much at odds with her stepfather. She tries to live with her father, but his fecklessness makes it difficult. Louise remains attached to her mother, though with the usual tensions of the mother-daughter relationship. Two Friends is a psychologically acute film, with fine performances, made with a keen-eyed documentary style, though its inverted storytelling deprives it of momentum.  

Songs From the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)

Lars Nordh in Songs From the Second Floor

Cast: Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson, Bengt C.W. Carlsson, Torbjörn Fahlström, Sten Andersson, Rolando Núñez, Lucio Vucina, Per Jörnelius, Peter Roth, Klas-Gösta Olsson, Nils-Åke Eriksson, Hanna Eriksson. Screenplay: Roy Andersson. Cinematography: István Borbás, Jasper Klevenås. Film editing: Roy Andersson. Music: Benny Andersson.

As the date of its release suggests, Roy Andersson's Songs From the Second Floor is a millennial movie. It ends with crucifixes being heaped on a trash pile, and scene after scene suggests that capitalism is on its last legs. A conference room filled with executive types panics when one of them notices that a building across the street is moving, and the streets are filled with self-flagellating stockbrokers. Traffic is gridlocked, and ghosts from the past are stalking people. At one point, even human sacrifice seems to be attempted to free the world from its malaise. All of this angst is presented to us with straight-faced detachment as a series of incidents viewed through a murky atmosphere. It's a darkly comic apocalypse for a world in which everything, even a magician's attempt to saw a man in half, is going wrong. Songs From the Second Floor can leave you puzzled or depressed or even angry that the real world is too much like what it fantastically depicts, but it's not likely to leave you easily. 

Play (Ruben Östlund, 2011)

Anas Abdirahman and Sebastian Blyckert in Play

Cast: Anas Abdirahman, Sebastian Blyckert, Yannick Diakité, Sebastian Hegmar, Abdiaziz Hilowle, Nana Manu, John Ortiz, Kevin Vaz. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund, Erik Hemmendorff. Cinematography: Marius Dybwad Brandrud. Production design: Pia Aleborg. Film editing: Ruben Östlund, Jacob Secher Schulsinger. Music: Danny Bensi, Saunder Juriaans. 

So much of contemporary life is touched on in Ruben Östlund's Play that it's difficult to isolate a single dominant theme. It's about racism, of course, but it's also about bullying and vigilantism, about cultural appropriation, immigration, and alienation, about adolescence and parenting and the sterility of the urban environment and law enforcement and bureaucracy. The film stirred controversy in Sweden perhaps because no one could agree that it's about any one of these things and that it was making a specific point about them. It begins with a group of Black kids in a shopping mall, trying to con some white kids out of a cell phone by claiming it was stolen, and develops from there, interrupted occasionally by seemingly unrelated scenes set on a train, where a baby's cradle has been left in a passageway, to the consternation of the conductors. Everything is viewed with detachment, the camera in a fixed position, so it's almost like looking through a window at what's happening. Play takes two hours to tell a story without a resolution, but because of its skillfully maintained distancing it ironically involves the viewer more than a more dramatic or didactic account of the same incident might have.  

Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)

Ursula Strauss and Johannes Krisch in Revanche

Cast: Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Andreas Lust, Ursula Strauss, Johannes Thanheiser, Hanno Pöschl. Screenplay: Götz Spielmann. Cinematography: Martin Gschlacht. Production design: Maria Gruber. Film editing: Karina Ressler. 

Götz Spielmann's Revanche is a moral tale about getting even. On the face of it, Alex (Johannes Krisch) is an unredeemable man: An ex-con who works in a brothel, he tries to help one of the prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), escape from it by robbing a bank. When she is shot and killed by a cop as they are trying to flee, he hides out with his grandfather (Johannes Thanheiser), an elderly widower who lives alone on his farm. When it turns out that Robert (Andreas Lust), the cop who killed Tamara, lives nearby, Alex plots to avenge her death. Several means of revenge immediately present themselves: He could kill Robert on his daily run, or he could take advantage of his grandfather's friendship with Robert's wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss), who visits the old man and takes him to church on Sundays. Susanne is lonely and frustrated: She wants to have a child but has miscarried. She's easy prey for Alex, since Robert is frequently away from home on police duty in the city. Spielmann handles the development of these characters deftly, and keeps the viewer guessing on how they may interact. He also finely crafts the contrasting worlds of the film: the seamy side of the city of Vienna and the pastoral Austrian countryside. Revanche is not easily pigeonholed as a thriller, although it certainly has the lineaments of the genre, since it doesn't have the payoff you might expect from the situation it establishes. Instead, it ends in a kind of stalemate that points up the difficulty of getting even in an unbalanced world.

After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)

Cast: Arata Iura, Erika Oda, Susumi Terajima, Takashi Naito, Kyoko Kagawa, Kei Tani, Takatoshi Naito, Toro Yuri, Yusuke Iseya, Sayaka Yoshino, Kazuko Shirakawa, Kotaro Shiga, Hisako Hara. Screenplay: Hirokazu Koreeda. Cinematography: Masayoshi Sukita, Yutaka Yamazaki. Production design: Hideo Guni, Toshihiro Isomi. Film editing: Hirokazu Koreeda. Music: Yasuhiro Kasamatsu.

Hirokazu Koreeda's unique take on the afterlife is that each person's experience will be boiled down to one precious memory that they will ponder for eternity. In After Life the dead first arrive at a building where the staff interviews them to discover what single memory they more want to take with them forever. Then a movie is made of that moment, and after the screening of it, the dead person moves on to a place we don't get to see. Koreeda developed the film after witnessing his grandfather's dementia and memory loss, interviewing hundreds of people, and working with the cast and their own memories. The narrative of After Life doesn't just focus on the attempts of the dead to find that key memory, which is often linked to sex or romance, but also includes such ephemeral moments as the feel of a cool breeze on the face or the sight of cherry trees in flower. The staff of interviewers, it turns out, is composed of people who were unable or unwilling to choose a particular moment. Their eternity consists of examining other people's memories and re-creating them on film -- in short, becoming Koreeda. The poignant twist in the film comes when one of the interviewers realizes that he was personally involved in the moment chosen by a man he is interviewing. The realistic setting of After Life in a rather run-down building (someone using a hair dryer in it blows a fuse) makes its fantasy more credible and immediate. It's a film that can't help but stir the viewer's own memories, but it also suggests that we inevitably edit and distort our remembrances of things past.

Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz, 2009)

Dylan Riley Snyder in Life During Wartime

Cast: Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Michael Lerner, Dylan Riley Snyder, Chris Marquette, Rich Pecci, Charlotte Rampling, Paul Reubens, Ally Sheedy, Michael K. Williams, Renée Taylor, Gaby Hoffman. Screenplay: Todd Solondz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Roshelle Berliner. Film editing: Kevin Messman. 

Todd Solondz's itchy, dark Life During Wartime draws more winces than laughs from its look at middle-class American lives. Pedophilia and suicide are among the topics it deals with in its depiction of the veneer of civilized behavior maintained by its characters, whom Solondz has introduced in earlier films. It centers on the three Jordan sisters, Trish (Allison Janney), Joy (Shirley Henderson), and Helen (Ally Sheedy), whom Solondz introduced in Happiness (1998) and Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), where they were played by other actresses. The film begins with Joy's breakup with her husband, Allen (Michael K. Williams), then moves to the Florida home that Trish shares with her children, the college-age Billy (Chris Marquette), 13-year-old Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder), and the younger Chloe (Emma Hinz). Trish has divorced her husband, Bill (Ciarán Hinds), who has just been released from prison after serving a sentence for molesting a child, and she is now dating Harvey (Michael Lerner). All of them are teetering on the brink. Trish self-medicates, Chloe is on Klonopin for panic attacks, and Timmy is being bullied at school because of his father's crimes. Joy sees the ghost of her former lover, Andy (Paul Reubens), who killed himself after their breakup. Bill leads a furtive life trying to re-enter society, picking up (or being picked up by) a woman (Charlotte Rampling) in a bar. In short, everyone's a mess. Solondz's straight-faced but twisty account of these lives on the edge depends on skillful performances that bring a measure of credibility to characters that are really just puppets in his hands. You may find yourself laughing when you feel you shouldn't. 

Bad Influence (Curtis Hanson, 1990)

Rob Lowe and James Spader in Bad Influence

Cast: James Spader, Rob Lowe, Lisa Zane, Christian Clemenson, Marcia Cross, Kathleen Wilhoite, Grand L. Bush, Tony Maggio, Perri Lister, John De Lancie, David Duchovny. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: Robert Elswit. Production design: Ron Foreman. Film editing: Bonnie Koehler. Music: Trevor Jones. 

Curtis Hanson's Bad Influence is a nasty little thriller that's sometimes compared to Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) but really owes more to the Faust legend. Rob Lowe plays Alex, a Mephistophelean psychopath who inserts himself into the life of Michael Boll (James Spader) when Michael is on the verge of being beaten to a pulp by a thug in a bar. Michael is trying to climb the corporate ladder where he works, but is a little too shy and self-effacing to outwit a slimier contender for the job he wants. He also has a girlfriend who's hot to get married, even though Michael isn't all that enthusiastic about the prospect. So when Alex rescues him from the thug, Michael is so impressed that he's an easy mark for the slick, handsome manipulator, who takes over his life with surprising ease, engineering Michael's business success, putting an end to his engagement, and taking him on a dangers spree of sex and drugs and criminal behavior. It's more than a little difficult to credit both Alex's motiveless malignancy and Michael's submission to it, but this is a morality fable rather than a psychologically realistic story. It works because both actors are good at what they do, but there's a formulaic quality to the project that keeps it from being a fully satisfactory movie.

Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012)

Cast: Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Tapalaga, Catalina Harabagiu, Gina Tandura, Vica Agache, Nora Covali, Dionisie Vitcu, Ionut Ghinea, Liliana Mocanu, Doru Ana, Costache Babii. Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu, based on novels by Tatiana Niculescu-Bran. Cinematography: Oleg Mutu. Production design: Calin Papura, Mihaela Poenaru. Film editing: Mircea Olteanu. 

Faith and science both get a workout in Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills, and both are found wanting. The setting is an Orthodox Christian retreat in rural Romania, where a young nun, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), is visited by Alina (Cristina Flutur), who was her close friend when they were both in an orphanage. Alina has come to persuade Voichita to leave the monastery and come with her to Germany, where Alina has been living. But Voichita has found peace and contentment in the ascetic world of the monastery, with a kind of family that includes her sister nuns under the strict guidance of a priest (Valeriu Andriuta) whom she calls "Papa." Alina and Voichita may have been more than just friends when they were in the orphanage, but when Alina suggests that the two women resume their relationship, Voichita rejects her. Alina's reaction is extreme: She threatens to drown herself in the monastery's well. After more extreme behavior, the nuns manage to get Alina to a clinic, but all the doctors can do is medicate her; they have no facilities for longer treatment. Alina is stable for a while, but eventually her destructive behavior returns and a calamitous decision is made to bind her and force her to undergo an exorcism. Mungiu's screenplay was inspired by the fictionalization of an actual case, but the remote monastic setting, in which the contemporary world is regarded as under the spell of the devil, gives the film the flavor of a fable from the middle ages. Stratan and Flutur jointly received the best actress award at Cannes, where Mungiu also won for best screenplay. The two-and-a-half-hour run time somewhat dilutes the intensity of the story, but this is immersive filmmaking of a high order. 

A Master Builder (Jonathan Demme, 2013)

Wallace Shawn and Lisa Joyce in A Master Builder

Cast: Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagerty, Lisa Joyce, Larry Pine, Andre Gregory, Jeff Biehl, Emily Cass McDonnell. Screenplay: Wallace Shawn, based on a play by Henrik Ibsen. Cinematography: Declan Quinn. Production design: Eugene Lee. Film editing: Tim Squyres. 

The symbolic realism of Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder gets a shrewd cinematic twist in the version scripted by Wallace Shawn and directed by Jonathan Demme called A Master Builder. I think the shift from the definite article in the title of the play to the indefinite one is probably a deliberately subtle one, indicating that the film is as much an interpretation of the play as it is a translation from one medium to another. Demme and Shawn don't "open up" the play in the usual manner of adapting play to movie, by shifting scenes from the confines of a set. Instead they use surprise cuts: We initially see Halvard Solness (Shawn), the title character, lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors, but suddenly and without explanation, Solness is up and about, wearing a dressing gown, and the bed and monitors disappear. By the end of the film, Solness is bedridden again, and we are left to assume that much of what has taken place in the film has perhaps been only in Solness's imagination. It's still very much a play, however, and a talky one with lines that need the kind of emphatic delivery by the actors that's more appropriate on a stage than in a film. Shawn is not the first actor who comes to mind when you read Ibsen's play, but he's splendid in the role of Solness, managing to efface our memories of his performances as a comic character actor in movies like Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) and The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), just as Julie Hagerty overcomes memories of the ditzy characters of Airplane! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, 1980) and Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985) as the haunted Aline Solness. Lisa Joyce finds a solid center in the enigmatic and unhinged role of Hilde Wangel.