PTU (Johnnie To, 2003)

Lam Suet in PTU

Cast: Simon Yam, Maggie Siu, Lam Suet, Ruby Wong, Raymond Ho-Yin Wong, Eddy Ko, Lo Hoi-Pang, Jerome Fung, Frank Zong-Ji Liu, Chiu Chi-Shing. Screenplay: Yau Nai-Hoi, Au Kin-Yee. Cinematography: Chen Siu-Keung. Production design: Ringo Cheung, Jerome Fung. Film editing: Law Wing-Cheung. Music: Chung Chi Wing. 

One of Akira Kurosawa's best early films was Stray Dog (1949), in which a cop's gun is stolen, necessitating a frantic search for the weapon. Johnnie To must surely have had that film in mind when he made PTU, although he takes a very different approach to the search, laying bare the inner workings of the Hong Kong police force and its relationship with the gangs it battles. Unlike the anxious rookie played by Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's film, the cop with the missing gun is a slovenly veteran, Sgt. Lo (Lam Suet), who loses the gun when he slips and falls and is knocked out while giving chase to some young gangsters. The Police Tactical Unit, headed by Sgt. Mike Ho (Simon Yam), comes to his aid, hoping to recover the weapon before they have to report its loss to the authorities. The rest is a series of colorful and sometimes deadly encounters, made vivid by cinematographer Chen Siu-Keung's visions of the city at night, its shadowy streets sometimes garishly lighted by signs. It's a twisty, ironic, and decidedly antiheroic thriller.  

Mallrats (Kevin Smith, 1995)

Art James, Jeremy London, Jason Lee, and Brian O'Halloran in Mallrats

Cast: Jeremy London, Jason Lee, Shannen Doherty, Claire Forlani, Ben Affleck, Michael Rooker, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Priscilla Barnes, Joey Lauren Adams, Ethan Suplee, Brian O'Halloran, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Art James, Stan Lee. Screenplay: Kevin Smith. Cinematography: David Klein. Production design: Dina Lipton. Film editing: Paul Dixon. Music: Ira Newborn. 

The success of his microbudget indie Clerks (1994) gave Kevin Smith the clout and the cash to make a more ambitious feature, but some think Smith was undone by his own success, overloading Mallrats with too much plot and too many extraneous characters and incidents. This comedy about the misadventures of two motormouth slackers is a bit too frantic and uninvolving, and some of its slapstick stunts centered on Smith's duo of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are poorly conceived. There's a gross-out joke that's more gross than funny, a bludgeoning of an Easter Bunny that comes out of nowhere, and an encounter with a topless fortune teller (Priscilla Barnes) that belongs in some other movie. You kind of have to be a fan of Smith's better films, especially Clerks, Chasing Amy (1997), and Dogma (1999), to be in the frame of mind to put up with the misfires in Mallrats.   

Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992)

Jeff Goldblum and Laurence Fishburne in Deep Cover

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Jeff Goldblum, Charles Martin Smith, Victoria Dillard, Gregory Sierra, Sydney Lassick, Roger Guenveur Smith, Clarence Williams III. Screenplay: Michael Tolkin, Henry Bean. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Pamela B. Warner. Film editing: John Carter. Music: Michael Colombier. 

If nothing else, Bill Duke's Deep Cover is notable for casting actors against type. Some of it works: Jeff Goldblum's lawyer turned would-be drug lord is full of humorous self-assurance tinged with menace. But Charles Martin Smith never overcomes the actor's nerdy image to establish him as a DEA agent confident enough to ask a series of Black federal agents a shockingly racist question and to manage the perilous situation he thrusts the agent played by Laurence Fishburne into. As for Fishburne himself, the role came early enough in his career that he was still being billed as Larry, which he insisted on changing once his career took off. He holds the film together even when it sometimes threatens to get derailed by too many plot twists. Although the movie asks the right questions about the compromised motives and veiled racism behind the so-called War on Drugs, it's undermined by generic thriller conventions and some preachy moments. 

Stowaway in the Sky (Albert Lamorisse, 1960)

André Gille and Pascal Lamorisse in Stowaway in the Sky

Cast: André Gille, Pascal Lamorisse, Maurice Baquet. Screenplay: Albert Lamorisse. Cinematography: Maurice Fellous, Guy Tabary. Production design: Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Film editing: Pierre Gillette. Music: Jean Prodromidès. 

After the success of his short film The Red Balloon (1956), Albert Lamorisse conceived another aerial adventure on a larger scale. It became his first feature, Stowaway in the Sky, and also starred his son, Pascal. It's a fanciful tale of an inventor (André Gille) who develops what he thinks is a revolutionary ballooning technique. On the maiden flight, his young grandson (Pascal) manages to scramble aboard after clinging to the gondola at liftoff. The inventor reluctantly allows the boy to accompany him on the flight, and they set off on a series of adventures that take them over spectacular French landscapes from Brittany to the Camargue and into close encounters with the Strasbourg Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, and Mont Blanc. They're tracked on the ground by an assistant (Maurice Baquet), who gets into comic scrapes of his own. To get the effects he needed for the film, Lamorisse helped develop a shock-absorbing mechanism called Helivision, which eliminated the vibrations of a camera mounted on a helicopter. All of the aerial sequences were shot this way, including those that appear to be taking place inside the gondola of the balloon: A half-basket was attached to the side of the helicopter and the actors rode in it while filming took place. Although there is some dialogue in setting up the premise and advancing what plot there is, it's essentially a silent film. Jack Lemmon, who liked the film so much that he bought the rights to it,  added his own voiceover narration scripted by S.N. Behrman for the American release. I haven't seen it, but some who have think it detracts from the charm of the film, which is often breathtakingly beautiful. 

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1993)

Colm Feore in Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

 Cast: Colm Feore, Derek Keurvorst, Katya Ladan, Kate Henning, Sharon Bernbaum, Don McKellar, David Hughes, Gale Garnett. Screenplay: François Girard, Don McKellar. Cinematography: Alain Dostie. Art direction: John Rubino. Film editing: Gaétan Huot. 

The conventional biopic uses narrative devices that subject it to distortions and falsifications, so in an attempt to avoid those in his portrait of the life of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, François Girard resorts to something like a mosaic or collage -- a bit like those portraits that are made up of dozens of smaller photographs. Gould was, above all, an eccentric and a master of technique, so the story of his life demands the eccentric technique of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Certainly what we get from Girard's approach and actor Colm Feore's performance as Gould is eccentricity -- a man who even in a crowd is as solitary as we see him at the beginning of the series of short films, walking toward the camera across an icy vastness. What we don't get, I think, is much of a sense of Gould as musician -- the images and the talk overwhelm the music except on occasion, as in the one segment in which a string quartet plays one of Gould's compositions or in the Norman McLaren animation of Fugue No. 14 from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. Gould loved talk, so some of the sequences are all talk. The chief criticism of Gould as pianist is that he was a master of technique, which suited the intricacies of Bach, but that he was so limited emotionally -- today, he might be diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum of autism -- that he played everything as if it were Bach. For example, in the excerpt from Beethoven's Sonata No. 17 in D minor played in one segment, the cascading notes fail to evoke the emotions that give the sonata its nickname, "Tempest." Sometimes, the film seems more preoccupied with what other people thought about Gould, especially in the scenes in which he's hounded by interviewers, than in examining the man himself. 

Eastern Condors (Sammo Hung, 1987)

Cast: Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Haing S. Ngor, Joyce Godenzi, Chui Man-yan, Ha Chi-chun, Lam Ching-ying, Melvin Wong, Charlie Chin, Cheung Kwok-keung, Billy Lau, Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen, Peter Chan, Chin Kar-lok, Hsiao Ho, Lau Chau-sang, Yuen Wah. Screenplay: Barry Wong. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Production design: King Man Lee. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Danny Chung. 

Blithely stealing from classics in the genre, Sammo Hung crafts in Eastern Condors the action film to end all action films. (If only.) The premise is that after the fall of Saigon, the retreating Americans left behind a missile installation that they now want to disarm, lest it fall into the wrong hands. So the American military recruits undocumented Chinese immigrants now in prison for a variety of offenses to be air-dropped into Vietnam to destroy the facility. If they succeed, they will be rewarded with American citizenship and a large sum of money. If this sounds familiar, at least there are more than a dozen of them and they're not particularly dirty. Eastern Condors is full of gags ribbing the Americans, as well as a few that wouldn't pass muster in an American movie, such as a volunteer whose stutter is played for laughs until it proves fatal. There's more gunplay than kung fu in Hung's movie, although it ends with a great martial arts standoff that's worth sitting through the rest of the movie for. Hung, slimmed down for the film, plays a more serious role than usual, but the movie is stolen by Yuen Biao as the wily Rat Chien and Yuen Wah as a giggling Viet Cong general modeled on some of James Bond's more epicene villains. 

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke, 2024)

Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides

Cast: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin, Zhou You, Xu Changchu, Lan Zhou, Hu Maotao, Pan Jianlin. Screenplay: Wan JIahuan Wan, Jia Zhang-ke. Cinematography: Eric Gautier, Nelson Lik-wai Yu. Production design: Liu Weixin. Film editing: Yang Chao, Matthieu Laclau, Xudong Lin. Music: Lim Giong. 

I can't imagine watching Caught by the Tides without having seen Jia Zhang-ke's earlier films, particularly Unknown Pleasures (2002), Sill Life (2006), and Ash Is Purest White (2018), which introduced us to his characters, settings, and themes. The docufictional Caught by the Tides is part reprise of and part coda to those films. The first two-thirds of it are actually patched together with outtakes and footage from them, along with personal footage shot by Jia himself during their production, and then blended into a narrative centered on Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) and her sometime lover, the shady Guo Bin (Li Zhubin). The titular tides are those of Chinese history and society in the first quarter of the 21st century, sweeping Qiao and Bin apart and together again. They're also, in the middle part of the film, the tides of the Yangtze, as the immense Three Gorges Dam project transforms the geography of China. It's a film about "progress" and its human consequences, most human at its beginning in the industrial city of Datong, where the declining old city is being redeveloped. By the end of the film, which returns to Datong, the city has been transformed by technology into something glossier but less human. The plot, such as it is, involves Qiao's attempt to reconnect with Bin, who noticeably declines as she seems to grow stronger. If there's a failing in Jia's work, it's that his vision is too personal, too concerned with working out a commentary on the history of modern China, with a consequential loss of connection to international audiences. But the skill with which he works out that vision may also be his greatest strength.      

The Sandpiper (Vincente Minnelli, 1965)

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Sandpiper

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bronson, Robert Webber, James Edwards, Torin Thatcher, Tom Drake, Douglas Henderson, Morgan Mason. Screenplay: Martin Ransohoff, Irene Kamp, Louis Kamp, Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: George W. Davis, Urie McCleary. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Johnny Mandel. 

Cynically concocted by its producer, Martin Ransohoff, as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the peak (or nadir) of their celebrated relationship, The Sandpiper steals its dialectic from the hoary old Somerset Maugham tale of Sadie Thompson and the missionary. Ransohoff set a team of writers, including former blacklistees Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, to work on fleshing out his idea to tell the purloined story of a free-spirited woman and an uptight male. The best the writers could do was to lard the story with glitzy profundities, e.g. "Man is doomed by his myths" or "Man is essential to any concept of the universe" or "Saints tend to be myopic, whereas the atheist is almost always innocent." Burton looks especially uncomfortable mouthing lines like "I cannot dispel you from my thoughts," and Taylor has to say things like "Life always flies back to life if it isn't penned in." We get some relief from the tedious course of the plot, which anyone can see coming almost before the movie starts, with some lovely shots of the scenery at Big Sur. Otherwise, The Sandpiper doesn't even offer the delight of camp, since its stars are so uninterested in the story that they don't even bother overacting. 

Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959)

Sandra Dee and Cliff Robertson in Gidget

Cast: Sandra Dee, James Darren, Cliff Robertson, Arthur O'Connell, The Four Preps, Mary LaRoche, Joby Baker, Tom Laughlin, Sue George, Robert Ellis, Joe Morrow, Yvonne Craig, Patti Kane, Doug McClure, Burt Metcalfe. Screenplay: Gabrielle Upton, based on a novel by Frederick Kohner. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: William A. Lyon. Music: Arthur Morton.

Deconstructing Gidget is an amusing pastime. This is a movie made four years after the publication of Lolita, in which Burt Vail, aka Kahuna (Cliff Robertson), a 36-year-old man, almost seduces Francie Lawrence, aka Gidget (Sandra Dee), a 17-year-old girl. (For another perspective, try to imagine Gidget being screened at the Jeffrey Epstein mansion.) Of course, the unmarried Kahuna also hangs around with a bunch of half-naked college boys. And Gidget has an androgynous friend called B.L. (Sue George) who claims to have a boyfriend we never meet. Eventually, to be sure, tomboy Gidget, who claims to be repulsed by the physical advances of boys, will succeed in the "man hunt" initiated by her other, more nubile girlfriends and land the handsome, hunky Jeffrey Matthews, aka Moondoggie (James Darren), one of Kahuna's male followers. It's a movie that launched sequels, a TV series, and a whole subgenre of beach party movies. But were we ever so naive as to take Gidget as just wholesome entertainment? 

Pilgrim, Farewell (Michael Roemer, 1980)

Elizabeth Huddle and Christopher Lloyd in Pilgrim, Farewell

Cast: Elizabeth Huddle, Christopher Lloyd, Laurie Prange, Leslie Paxton, Shelley Wyant, Elizabeth Franz, Robert Curtis Brown. Screenplay: Michael Roemer. Cinematography: Franz Rath. Film editing: Terry Lewis. 

Life is messy, but dying is messier. That seems to be the point of Michel Roemer's emotionally raw Pilgrim, Farewell. Kate (a compelling Elizabeth Huddle) is not going to let cancer take her without making a fuss about it, which involves lashing back at the well-meaning people, her physicians and family, who would like to make it easier for her. She's especially hard on her sister, Rebecca (Leslie Paxton), and her daughter, Annie (Laurie Prange), both of whom have problems of their own, even if they aren't fatal ones. Annie and Rebecca both collapse under Kate's pain-driven assault, but manage to recover with the aid of Paul (Christopher Lloyd), the man Kate is living with. There are times when I felt that Roemer had crammed too much backstory into the lives of her characters, bringing a whiff of melodrama into what is mostly a serious film. And he makes Paul just a little too sturdy and patient in dealing with the women who are acting out the crisis of Kate's illness. (The film was made before Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) established Lloyd as a comic character player, specializing in eccentrics. I wish we'd seen more of this side of him as an actor.) It's also unfortunate that the story of the effect of a woman's slow death on others brings to mind a greater film, Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972). Pilgrim, Farewell can't hope to match up to that standard, but it's a solid and often profoundly moving work.