Dead Presidents (Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes, 1995)

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

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

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

Winter Brothers (Hlynur Pálmason, 2017)

Elliott Crosset Hove in Winter Brothers

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

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

Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012)

Gustavo Jahn and Irma Brown in Neighboring Sounds

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

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

F1 (Joseph Kosinski, 2025)

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

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

Trade Winds (Tay Garnett, 1938)

Fredric March and Joan Bennett in Trade Winds

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

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

Vigilante (William Lustig, 1982)

Fred Williamson in Vigilante

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

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

Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)

Rinaldo Smordoni and Franco Interlenghi in Shoeshine

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

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

Queen of the Desert (Werner Herzog, 2015)

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

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

Leaves of Grass (Tim Blake Nelson, 2009)

Edward Norton in Leaves of Grass

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

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

Reprise (Joachim Trier, 2006)

Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Høiner in Reprise

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

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

Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998)

Vince Vaughn in Psycho

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

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

The Fan (Otto Preminger, 1949)

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

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

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

The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)

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

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

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

Limonov: The Ballad (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2024)

Ben Whishaw in Limonov: The Ballad

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

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

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)

Emma Stone in Bugonia

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

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

Girl With Hyacinths (Hasse Ekman, 1950)

Ulf Palme and Anders Ek in Girl With Hyacinths

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

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