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.   

Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014)

Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld in Phoenix

Cast: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, Michael Maertens, Imogen Kogge, Felix Römer. Screenplay: Christian Petzold, Harun Farocki, based on a novel by Hubert Monteilhet. Cinematography: Hans Fromm. Production design: Hans-Dieter Gruber. Film editing: Bettina Böhler. Music: Stefan Will. 

The premise of Christian Petzold's Phoenix is sheer melodrama: A woman, disfigured in the war that separated her from her husband, undergoes plastic surgery that slightly alters her face. She seeks out the husband, but doesn't immediately identify herself as his missing wife. Recognizing the resemblance, the husband decides to have her pretend to be what she really is, his lost wife, in a plan to get hold of her inheritance. In Phoenix the wife, Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss), was sent to a concentration camp during World War II, possibly having been betrayed as Jewish by her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). Hoss makes Nelly's decision not to reveal her identity to Johnny and to go along with his scheme plausible, even though she has an alternative: Her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) has arranged for them to emigrate to Palestine. The subtlety and intensity of Hoss's performance and the setting among the ruins of Berlin in the aftermath of the war give the film a historical and psychological substance that outweighs the contrivances of the story. Petzold skillfully builds tension toward the film's remarkable conclusion. Phoenix is a reminder that superb acting, good writing, and solid direction can transform even the most formulaic of plots.  

The Shooting (Monte Hellman, 1966)

Millie Perkins in The Shooting

Cast: Warren Oates, Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins, Jack Nicholson, Charles Eastman, Guy El Tsosie, Brandon Carroll, B.J. Merholz. Screenplay: Carole Eastman. Cinematography: Gregory Sandor. Art direction: Wally K. Burns. Film editing: Monte Hellman. Music: Richard Markowitz. 

Part of the very odd effect that Monte Hellman's The Shooting makes on the viewer is caused by Hellman's distaste for exposition. He reportedly tossed the first ten pages of Carole Eastman's screenplay and began filming with only elliptical references to the events that set up the film's trek through the Utah desert. Two gold miners, Coley (Will Hutchins) and Willett Gashade (Warren Oates), are approached by a woman (Millie Perkins) who shows up at their camp and hires them to guide her to a place called Kingsley. Along the way, they are joined by a gunslinger called Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson), who has a prior relationship with the woman. Nothing ends well for anybody, including members of the audience, who are left to piece together the backstory after an enigmatic ending. The Shooting is such an unconventional movie that theatrical distributors wouldn't touch it until after it was well received in France (of course), and even then it was released to television before it was ever shown in U.S. theaters. It has been called an "acid Western," meaning it's a harder trip than "stoner Westerns" like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973). The performances are solid, though Nicholson, a few years before his breakthrough into stardom, hasn't yet developed full presence on screen. Gregory Sandor's camera makes the most of the desert setting, and Richard Markowitz's score is appropriately unsettling. 

The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017)

Sherwan Haji, Nuppu Koivu, Janne Hyytiäinen, Sakari Kuosmanen, and Ilkka Koivula in The Other Side of Hope

Cast: Sherwan Haji, Sakari Kuosmanen, Ilkka Koivula, Nuppu Koivu, Janne Hyytiäinen, Kaija Pakarinen, Niroz Haji, Simon Hussein Al-Bazoon. Screenplay: Aki Kaurismäki. Cinematography: Timo Salminen. Art direction: Markku Pätilä. Film editing: Samu Heikkilä. 

Maybe only Aki Kaurismäki could take a story about a serious problem like the refugee crisis with occasional moments of violence and turn it into a droll, heart-warming comedy like The Other Side of Hope. Khaled (Sherwan Haji) has escaped from the civil war in Syria and found his way across Europe to Finland, where after his application for asylum is denied, he takes to the streets of Helsinki. He is found hiding behind the garbage cans of the restaurant owned by Waldemar Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) and taken in, given a job and a fake ID. Then all that's left for Khaled to do is find his sister, Miriam (Niroz Haji), from whom he was separated during their escape from Syria. The straight-faced performances of the cast, including Waldemar's three employees, give this perhaps improbable, melodramatic, even sentimental (there's also a cute dog) tale its special piquant charm. It's probably best to be familiar already with Kaurismäki's other movies about deadpan Finns in challenging situations to appreciate this one's unique character. But who else could give you a movie in which a Finnish restaurant decides to serve sushi, and when it runs out of the right fish substitutes salted herring? (They figure if they use enough wasabi no one will notice.)  

Gloria Mundi (Nikos Papatakis, 1976)

Olga Karlatos in Gloria Mundi

Cast: Olga Karlatos, Armand Abplanalp, Philippe Adrien, Roland Bertin, Jean-Louis Broust, Alain Halle-Halle, Christiane Tissot, Mehmet Ulusoy. Screenplay: Nikos Papatakis. Cinematography: Yves Lafaye, Yorick Le Saux, Jean-Paul Pradier, Benoît Rizzotti, Frédéric Variot. Production design: Robert Voisin. Film editing: Thomas Bertray, Jean-Claude Bonfanti. Music: Barbaud Brown Klein, Tasos Chalkias, Bernard Parmegiani. 

Sometimes a performance is so uninhibited that you can't quite decide whether it's effective or excessive. That's the way I feel about Olga Karlatos in Nikos Papatakis's Gloria Mundi. She bares everything, emotionally and physically, as Galaï, the actress playing an Arab terrorist in a film directed by her lover, a never-seen man called Hamdias (the voice she hears on the tapes she plays is that of Papatakis). On tape, he expresses dissatisfaction with the scream in a scene she is playing, so while sitting in her bath she gives herself an electric shock that she hopes will elicit the right sound for a woman being tortured. And so begins a film that's a satire on filmmaking, as well as a commentary on political radicalism, and also just a little bit of an exploitation flick on its own. Gloria Mundi takes Galaï, and the audience, through a series of outrageous moments, some of them in the film-within-the-film that is screened for an audience of jaded sophisticates, to an appropriately explosive conclusion. In the end, however, its satire and political comment are undermined by a too-obvious determination to give the audience a kick in the head. 

The Photograph (Nikos Papatakis, 1986)

Aris Retsos in The Photograph

Cast: Aris Retsos, Hristos Tsagas, Zozo Zarpa, Despina Tomazani, Christos Valavanidas, Marina Delivoria, Yannis Totsikas, Stratos Pahis. Screenplay: Nikos Papatakis. Cinematography: Arnaud Desplechin, Aris Stavrou. Production design: Nikos Meletopoulos. Film editing: Delphine Desfons. Music: Hristodoulos Halaris. 

Lying has become so entrenched in the highest levels of our government that Nikos Papatkis's The Photograph feels a bit like a parable for our times. It's set in the past, however, during the period when Greece was ruled by a right wing junta that, among other things, cracked down on people suspected of being communists. That includes young Ilias (Aris Retsos), whose father was a communist -- a stain that lingers on  Ilias even though he was a boy when his father died. So Ilias leaves for France, where he seeks out a relative, Gerasimos (Hristos Tsagas), who makes a comfortable living as a furrier. After some failed attempts at finding employment, Ilias decides to get on Gerasimos's good side and learn that trade. He has with him a photograph of a pop star that he picked up by accident in Greece, and he passes that off as a photo of the sister he doesn't really have. Gerasimos is smitten with the young woman's portrait, so Ilias cooks up a complex system of correspondence with the imaginary sister, whom he calls Joy, using his mother back in Greece as an intermediary. Gerasimos can't read, so he's an easy mark as Ilias preys on the other man's fascination with Joy as a potential bride. Eventually, Ilias's ambition causes the scheme to mushroom out of control. Papatakis's fable is first comic and then tragic, culminating in a harrowing road trip on the hairpin turns of the Greek mountains. The performances of Retsos and Tsagas give this somewhat fantastic tale the reality it needs. 

Buzzard (Joel Potrykus, 2014)

Joshua Burge in Buzzard

Cast: Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Teri Ann Nelson, Jason Roth, Joe Anderson, Alan Longstreet. Screenplay: Joel Potrykus. Cinematography: Adam J. Minnick. Film editing: Joel Potrykus. 

Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), the hangdog protagonist of Joel Potrykus's Buzzard, is the consummate slacker, a temp worker fueled by junk food, energized by video games and horror movies, and sustained by petty scams. He's not the typical loner who lives in his parents' basement: He lives in his friend Derek's parent's basement -- or at least he does after pulling a scam that's likely to get him jail time. Eventually, even that hideout becomes too perilous, and he hits the streets of Detroit where, in one possible interpretation of the film's trick ending, he vanishes from sight after taking his scam a step too far. Potrykus, who wrote, directed, edited, and acted in the film (as Derek), gives us a pungent sketch of contemporary life that blends itchy black comedy with  keen satire of the fringes of finance that include mortgage companies and payday loan operations, along with a touch of actuality where the comedy and satire sour into something more disturbing. If it occasionally gives way to independent film self-indulgence -- an overlong scene of Marty eating spaghetti and meatballs in bed -- it succeeds largely on the strength of Burge's performance and Potrykus's keen eye and ear. 

Les Abysses (Nikos Papatakis, 1963)

Francine Bergé and Colette Bergé in Les Abysses

Cast: Francine Bergé, Colette Bergé, Pascale de Boysson, Colette Régis, Paul Bonifas, Jean-Louis Le Goff, Lise Daubigny, Robert Benoit, Marcel Roche. Screenplay: Jean Vauthier, Louis Jouvet. Cinematography: Jean-Michel Boussaguet. Film editing: Edwidge Bernard, Denise de Casabianca, Pascale Laverrière. Music: Pierre Barbaud. 

Nikos Papatakis's raw, unsparing Les Abysses is one of the many films, plays, and even operas inspired by the case of the Papin sisters, Christine and Léa, who in 1933 murdered their employer's wife and daughter. The most distinguished of the artistic treatments of the case are probably Jean Genet's 1947 play The Maids and Claude Chabrol's 1995 film La Cérémonie, but Papatakis's version stands up well against them. It opens with the mad antics of the two maids, called Michelle (Francine Bergé) and Marie-Louise (Colette Bergé) in this version of the story. They have been left alone in the country house of their employers and have spent the time wreaking havoc in the property. The employers, the Lapeyres, have been taking advantage of the two women, withholding their wages for three years but promising them that they will be given part of the property as recompense. Now the Lapeyres return unexpectedly to discover the house, which they are planning to sell, in chaos. When Michelle and Marie-Louise discover they're about to be cheated out of their expectations, things escalate. The film was widely interpreted as a fable about capitalism and the class system as well as a kind of allegory of the exploitation of colonial Algeria by France. It's a mad, brutal work with uninhibited performances by the Bergé sisters, and a nerve-racking score by Pierre Barbaud adds to the dissonance of the relationships shown in it. 

Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua, 2024)

Lee Kang-sheng in Stranger Eyes

Cast: Wu Chien-ho, Lee Kang-sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Xenia Tan, Pete Teo, Maryanne Ng-Yu, Anya Chow. Screenplay: Yeo Siew Hua. Cinematography: Hideho Urata. Production design: James Page. Film editing: Jean-Christophe Bouzy. Music: Thomas Foguenne. 

In Stranger Eyes, Yeo Siew Hua attempts a deconstruction of the missing child thriller to make a comment on voyeurism and video surveillance. As we're trying to figure out how and why Little Bo disappeared and follow the attempts of her parents to find her, we're also thrust back into the life of the chief suspect, Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng). It turns out that well before their child vanished, he has been spying on Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), who live across from him in a Singapore high-rise. Eventually we're thrust into a web of motives and secret relationships documented on a variety of cameras. The narrative scrambling that lifts Stranger Eyes out of the routine keeps the viewer off base, but it also becomes a distraction, calling attention as much to the way the story is told as to the story itself and its implications for a world in which privacy is an illusion.  

Betty Blue (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986)

Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue

Cast: Jean-Hugues Anglade, Béatrice Dalle, Gérard Darmon, Consuelo De Haviland, Clémentine Célarié, Jacques Mathou. Screenplay: Jean-Jacques Beineix, based on a novel by Philippe Dijian. Cinematography: Jean-François Robin. Production design: Carlos Conti. Film editing: Monique Prim, Pablo Ferro. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Jean-Jacques Beineix's "director's cut" of Betty Blue is three hours long, more than an hour longer than its theatrical release, padding out its story of the relationship of a man and an unstable woman to epic length. I have to admit that it didn't feel that long, partly because its whiplash changes in tone and its constant introduction of new, oddball characters kept me wondering what might happen next. Some credit, too, must go to the actors who play its protagonists, the hapless Zorg (Jean-Hughes Anglade) and the unpredictable Betty (Béatrice Dalle), whose undeniable chemistry holds the whole thing together. It's often quite beautiful: Jean-François Robin's cinematography makes the most of its various French settings, and the frequently naked Anglade and Dalle are pleasant to see. But is it anything more than an overextended tale of an ill-fated couple, laced with soft-core porn? Is there a point in its switches from comedy to pain? Unfortunately, Beineix doesn't give us enough substance to make me feel that answering those questions is worth the effort.  

Four Murders Are Enough, Darling (Oldrich Lipsky, 1971)

Lubomír Lipsky and Jirina Bohdalová in Four Murders Are Enough, Darling

Cast: Lubomír Lipsky, Jirina Bohdalová, Iva Janzurová, Marie Rosulková, Frantisek Filipovsky, Jan Libícek, Josef Hlinomaz, Karel Effa, Lubomír Kostelka, Vlastomil Hasek, Stella Zâzvorková, Josef Kemr. Screenplay: Milos Macourek, Oldrich Lipsky, based on a novel by Nenad Brixi. Cinematography: Jirí Tantrík. Production design: Jirí Hlupy. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Vlastimil Hála. 

Oldrich Lipsky's Four Murders Are Enough, Darling is a throwback to the anarchic comedy of the silent era, so much so that for those of us who don't speak Czech the subtitles are almost a distraction. It's non-stop visual gags with only a thread of a plot to hold them together. All you need to know is that the MacGuffin is a check for a million dollars that rival gangs are trying to get their hands on. Caught in the middle is a mild-mannered schoolteacher, George Camel (Lubomír Lipsky, the director's brother), into whose hands the check manages to fall. After that, everything mushrooms into an explosion of cops and robbers, mistaken identities, corpses in closets and cupboards, car crashes and gunfire and fistfights. It's interlarded with comic book illustrations of the actors and action, mock TV commercials, and probably more than a few topical jokes that go over the heads of non-Czech viewers. Many find it hilarious, and I can see why, though I found it exhausting. 

Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975)

Robert Mitchum and Charlotte Rampling in Farewell, My Lovely

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Sylvia Miles, Anthony Zerbe, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack O'Halloran, Joe Spinell, Sylvester Stallone, Kate Murtagh, John O'Leary, Walter McGinn. Screenplay: David Zelag Goodman, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. Cinematography: John A. Alonzo. Production design: Dean Tavoularis. Film editing: Joel Cox, Walter Thompson. Music: David Shire. 

Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely had been filmed before, as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell playing Philip Marlowe and Edward Dmytryk directing, and it's in many ways better than this attempt by director Dick Richards and screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. What this version has going for it is the absence of Production Code censors blue-penciling the script. Goodman is able to be open about the fact that one character is gay and another is the madam of a whorehouse, and he can emphasize the homophobia and racism of some of his more unsavory characters. But his script lacks the wit of John Paxton's earlier screenplay, not to mention that of William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman's script for The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), the best of all the Philip Marlowe movies, in which Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe was paired with Lauren Bacall. That comparison is inevitable, because Charlotte Rampling in Farewell, My Lovely is made to look and act uncannily like Bacall, but there's no real heat between her and Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. Mitchum does what he can with the role, but he's too old for it. The standout in the cast is the Oscar-nominated Sylvia Miles as the alcoholic Mrs. Florian, one of the many gears and springs and cogwheels in the intricate, impenetrable plot. Dean Tavoularis's design and John A. Alozo's camera give us a gritty, neon-lit re-creation of 1940s Los Angeles, but there's something tired and perfunctory about the film.  

 

Bye Bye Love (Isao Fujisawa,1974)

Ren Tamura and Miyabi Ichijo in Bye Bye Love

Cast: Ren Tamura, Miyabi Ichijo, Atsuko Ami, Yuzo Morita, Satomi Oki, Enver Tenpai. Screenplay: Isao Fujisawa. Cinematography: Norimoto Ichinose. Art direction: Shinichi Otani. Film editing: Eiko Yoshida, Hisako Aizawa. 

Two young people go on the run when one of them shoots the man the other was living with, an official in the American embassy in Japan. The familiar fugitive road movie formula has caused Isao Fujisawa's Bye Bye Love to be compared to several films that are roughly of its era, like Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965), and Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973). But the treatment of gender identity in Bye Bye Love makes it feel ahead of its time: One of the fugitives has chosen a female persona. The shooter, who calls himself Utamaro (Ren Tamura), is a cocky young nihilist who first encountered his fugitive partner, Giko (Miyabi Ichijo), fleeing from a street cop. Utamaro interfered, knocked the cop out and stole his gun. Giko and Utamaro turn out to be the perfect team: After the initial surprise, Utamaro isn't bothered by Giko's gender fluidity, and Giko isn't bothered by Utamaro's nihilism.  Fujisawa's only fiction film was thought to be lost since it first appeared, but a negative was discovered in 2018, and it has continued to astonish new audiences since then. Fujisawa delights in off-beat choices: The music track that accompanies the pair's flight is organ music by Bach, and there's a threesome with a prostitute that is literally shocking. (It involves electric wires and a radio.) Not everything in the movie works -- the murdered official is heavy-handedly named Nixon -- and it risks associating queerness with criminality, but so much of it does that Bye Bye Love is one of the most fascinating rediscoveries of recent years.

Downpour (Bahram Beyzaie, 1972)

Cast: Parviz Fanizadeh, Parvaneh Massoumi, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Manucher Farid, Esmat Safavi, Abbas Dastranj, Parvin Soleymani. Screenplay: Bahram Beyzaie. Cinematography: Barbod Taheri. Film editing: Mehdi Rajaian. Music: Sheyda Garachedaghi. 

Most of us are familiar with Iranian film only through the work of the audacious and often courageous directors like Asghar Farhadi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jafar Panahi, who achieved international fame after the Islamic revolution. The restoration of a surviving print of Behram Beyzaie's first feature film, Downpour, once thought to have been destroyed, affords us a glimpse into the pre-revolutionary Iranian cinematic world. It's a charming, bittersweet tale of a schoolteacher who is transferred to an unfamiliar neighborhood, and immediately has to cope with his rowdy young pupils. Hekmati (Parviz Fanizadeh) also glimpses a pretty young woman, Atafeh (Parvaneh Massoumi), in the crowd that meets him as he moves into his lodgings. She turns out to be the sister of one of his pupils, and they meet face to face when she comes to complain that he has kicked the boy out of his class. Atafeh is being courted by her landlord, Rahim (Manucher Farid), whom she doesn't particularly care for, but she fears being evicted along with her elderly mother if she resists his advances. Eventually, the bookish Atafeh and the bullish Rahim confront each other. The post-revolutionary censors presumably suppressed the film because Atafeh sometimes wears short skirts and goes with her hair uncovered, and perhaps because there's a scene in which Hekmati and Rahim get drunk together. The sometimes had-to-read English subtitles of the original print had to be retained in the restoration, and some of the dialogue went untranslated, but the engaging and familiar story is simple and directly presented. 

Case for a Rookie Hangman (Pavel Jurácek, 1970)

Lubomír Kostelka in Case for a Rookie Hangman

Cast: Lubomír Kostelka, Klára Jerneková, Milena Zahrynowska, Radovan Lukavsky, Jirí Janda, Ludek Kopriva, Milos Vávra, Miroslav Machácek. Screenplay: Pavel Jurácek. Cinematography: Jan Kalis. Production design: Milan Nejedly. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Lubos Fiser. 

The protagonist of Pavel Jurácek's Case for a Rookie Hangman is called Lemuel Gulliver, but the film owes as much to Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and Luis Buñuel as it does to Jonathan Swift. It might almost have been titled Gulliver's Travels Through the Looking Glass to the Castle of the Exterminating Angel. Jurácek's Gulliver (Lubomír Kostelka) is on a trip through the countryside when he gets lost and his car crashes off the road. Extricating himself from the wreck, he comes across the body of a large white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch, which Gulliver takes from the rabbit. He soon finds that he is in the land of Balnibarbi, the locale of the third voyage of Swift's story, above which is the floating city of Laputa. At this point narrative logic gives way to a series of extraordinary incidents, which Jurácek presents without being limited by time and space. The film has its admirers, but I found its dreamlike transitions and off-kilter events less startling than soporific. The Czech government wasn't lulled to sleep, however, and as usual when it didn't understand something, it suspected it was being made fun of (as of course it was), so it banned it, putting an end to Jurácek's career as a filmmaker. 

Tricheurs (Barbet Schroeder, 1984)

Bulle Ogier in Tricheurs

Cast: Jacques Dutronc, Bulle Ogier, Kurt Raab, Virgilio Teixeira, Robby Müller, Claus-Dieter Reents, Carlos Wallenstein. Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Steve Baës, Barbet Schroeder, based on a book by Baës. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Zé Branco. Music: Peer Raben. 

Tricheurs are people who cheat at gambling, no easy feat in casinos where there are surveillance cameras and eagle-eyed croupiers. In Barbet Schroeder's film, they are a special breed, gamblers who add the thrill of possible capture to the compulsion to bet large sums of money. Elric (Jacques Dutronc) begins with the latter compulsion, and when we first see him he has lost big. And then he spots a woman in a red dress with a large number 7 on the back. Elric takes it as a sign and follows her to the casino, where she turns out to be his lucky charm, and soon he and Suzie (Bulle Ogier) have merged their compulsions. But then Elric meets Jorg (Kurt Raab), who claims to have a foolproof system for cheating at roulette, so Elric and Suzie go their separate ways and he begins touring the casinos of the world with Jorg, raking it in. Eventually Elric and Suzie meet again, and when Jorg gets careless and gets caught, Suzie tells him that she has met a croupier who knows a new way to cheat: a loaded roulette ball that can be triggered by remote control. The croupier, Toni (Virgilio Teixeira), wants to retire, and is willing to go in with Elric and Suzie on the scam, slipping the loaded ball onto the wheel. With a little practice, they can win big by triggering the ball at the right moment. Tricheurs is a clever morality fable and a shrewd portrait of compulsive behavior, but the techniques used by the cheaters -- distracting the croupiers, hitting the button on the remote at the right time -- seem clumsy, so that the film winds up feeling thin and contrived.  

Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani, 2007)

Alejandro Polanco in Chop Shop

Cast: Alejandro Polanco, Isamar Gonzales, Rob Sowulski, Carlos Zapata, Ahmad Razvi, Anthony Felton, Evelisse "Lilah" Ortiz, Michael "Gringo" Nieto, Carlos Ayala, Laura Patalano, Nick Jasprizza. Screenplay: Bahareh Azimi, Ramin Bahrani. Cinematography: Michael Simmonds. Production design: Richard A. Wright. Film editing: Ramin Bahrani. Music: M. Lo. 

Ramin Bahrani's docufictional Chop Shop takes us into a subterranean segment of American life, viewing it through a 12-year-old boy named Alejandro, played by 12-year-old Alejandro Polanco. Ale, as he's called, is a school dropout whose only known family is his older sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), who comes to live with him in a garage adjacent to an auto-repair shop in the Willets Point area of Queens, near Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets. It's a run-down area where no one but a handful of off-the-grid types like Ale and his sister live, but it comes to life during the day when the auto parts, repair shops, and junkyards are busy. "Urban blight" at its unloveliest. But there's nothing blighted about Ale, who has dreams and hustles to make them real. Even though the plot of the film demands that Ale's dreams don't come true, Bahrani and his remarkable cast of non-professionals give this story of human survivors heart and soul without compromise or sentimentality.

Obsession (Curry Barker, 2025)

Inde Navarrette in Obsession

Cast: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter, Haley Fitzgerald, Darin Toonder, Anthony Pavone, Justice, Anthony Casablanca, Chloe Breen. Screenplay: Curry Barker. Cinematography: Taylor Clemons. Production design: Vivian Gray. Film editing: Curry Barker. Music: Rock Burwell. 

Curry Barker's low-budget shocker Obsession hinges on one of those "be careful what you wish for" plots. Baron, aka "Bear" (Michael Johnston), works in a music store and is attracted to the pretty Nikki (Inde Navarrette), but he's too shy to make a play for her affections. So when he finds a magic gizmo in a New Agey store he makes a fatal wish that she will fall in love with him. Everything that could go wrong does. The film succeeds because of the commitment of its performers, particularly Navarrette, who switches deftly from modestly charming to murderously terrifying as the unwitting victim. Obsession was a big surprise hit, perhaps because there seems to be a lot of post-feminist angst going around. It's the age of the "manosphere," in which the secretary of war wants to pump up the troops with testosterone, so why shouldn't an incel like Bear turn to magic for help? Fortunately, Barker's horror-comic sensibility keeps that particular subtext in check.  

 

I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965)

Stefania Sandrelli in I Knew Her Well 

Cast: Stefania Sandrelli, Mario Adorf, Jean-Claude Brialy, Joachim Fuchsberger, Nino Manfredi, Enrico Maria Salerno, Ugo Tognazzi, Karin Dor, Franco Fabrizi, Franco Nero, Robert Hoffmann. Screenplay: Antonio Pietrangeli, Ruggiero Maccari, Ettore Scola. Cinematography: Armando Nannuzzi. Production design: Maurizio Chiari. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Piero Piccioni, Benedetto Ghilia.

Antonioni Pietrangeli's I Knew Her Well is a "lost girl" movie most often compared to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) because its setting is Rome in the hedonistic 1960s. But the film it most reminds me of is John Schlesinger's Darling, made the same year as Pietrangeli's. Both movies center on a pretty young model who comes to grief because she doesn't have much more than beauty going for her. Darling won an Oscar for Julie Christie, but Stefania Sandrelli is just as impressive in her performance as Adriana, who breezes through a series of men and incidents until she realizes that she's going nowhere fast. If I prefer Pietrangeli's film, it's because its satire is less heavy-handed. The cruelty and exploitation of the entertainment industry is skewered in both, but Pietrangeli at least demonstrates that the people it hurts and exploits feel something, especially in the scene in which the has-been actor Baggini (Ugo Tognazzi) is humiliated at a glamorous party. I Knew Her Well doesn't quite avoid the problem that movies about aimless and empty lives can be aimless and empty, but the performances give it an appearance of substance. 

People's Hero (Derek Tung-Sing Yee, 1987)

Ronald Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and Ti Lung in People's Hero

Cast: Ti Lung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Elaine Jin, Paul Chun, Bowie Lam, Ronald Wong, Sabrina Ho, Benz Kong, Jessie Lee, Wing-Cho Yip, Mansook Ahmed. Screenplay: Derek Tung-Sing Yee, Keith Lee, Kwan Yiu-Wing. Cinematography: Wilson Chan. Art direction: Yank Wong. Film editing: John Ma. Music: Lowell Lo. 

The bank heist hostage movie is a thriller subgenre that reached its glory in Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975), and Derek Tung-Sing Yee's People's Hero begins almost like a remake of that classic. Two inept would-be robbers, Sai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Boney (Ronald Wong), take the customers and staff of a bank hostage, immediately attracting the attention of the police. Like Lumet, Yee is as interested in the hostages and the cops as he is in the robbers. The hostages are a fractious, quarrelsome lot; the cops are hamstrung by bureaucracy. But People's Hero takes a twist almost as soon as the standoff of cops and robbers occurs: One of the hostages turns out to be a gangster, Sunny Koo (Ti Lung), who immediately takes charge, turning Sai and Boney into both hostages and accomplices. Koo is so well known to the police that he has the clout to summon an old adversary on the force, Capt. Chan (Tony Leung Ka-fai), to negotiate with. The result is an entertaining suspense thriller, more focused on characters than your usual Hong Kong action movie. The performances are stellar, particularly Lung as the masterly, cunning gangster and Elaine Jin as his girlfriend, Lotus, called on by Koo to help him make his getaway, only to show she has a mind of her own. People's Hero ends with a little more graphic bloodshed than necessary, but it's a movie with a perhaps unexpected wit and irony.