The Haunted Strangler (Robert Day, 1958)

Boris Karloff in The Haunted Strangler

Cast: Boris Karloff, Anthony Dawson, Derek Birch, Dorothy Gordon, Elizabeth Allan, Diane Aubrey, Tim Turner, Jean Kent, Vera Day, Max Brimmell, Leslie Perrins. Screenplay: Jan Read, John Croydon. Cinematography: Lionel Banes. Set designer: John Elphick. Film editing: Peter Mayhew. Music: Buxton Orr. 

The Haunted Strangler is a moderately effective B-movie from Britain, created mainly to exploit the skill and reputation of Boris Karloff. He plays a writer, James Rankin, who becomes obsessed with a crime that happened 20 years earlier: the strangling and stabbing of five women by an assailant who had the use of only one arm. Circumstantial evidence pointed to a man named Edward Styles, who was hanged for the murders. We see his public execution at the beginning of the film, an effective mood-setter. In the course of investigating the crime, Rankin becomes convinced that a physician named Tennant, who conducted autopsies on both Styles and his victims, was the true killer. His investigations take him to a shabby music hall called The Judas Hole, where he interrogates witnesses to the last of the murders, and eventually to the grave of Styles, where he exhumes the body -- and where the plot takes a sudden twist. Although burdened with lame expository dialogue and mediocre performances (aside from Karloff, professional and effective as always), The Haunted Strangler gives the viewers the creeps they came for. 

Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026)

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia, Robert Bobroczkyi, Ember Ambrose, Krista Kosonen, Philip Granger. Screenplay: Will Soodik. Cinematography: Jeremy Cox. Production design: Danny Vermette. Film editing: Greg Ng. Music: Kane Parsons, Edo Van Breemen. 

Eerie and empty, like the rooms it features. Kane Parsons's Backrooms was a hit debut that reminds me a lot of another sleeper hit, The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick, 1999), and not just because so much of it features hand-held video camera work. We seem to like watching people fall apart. The backroom world of the film is an obvious metaphor for the recesses of our repressed memories, mostly empty and unremarkable. Parsons makes the most of it by having his protagonists struggling to come to terms with the past: Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) with the failure of his career and his marriage, Mary (Renate Reinsve) with her childhood as the daughter of a woman suffering and eventually institutionalized with agoraphobia. What better setting for a failed architect and someone with a history of dealing with the fear of open spaces than a maze-like agglomeration of windowless rooms? The problem with the film is that it never goes beyond concept into anything that merits interpretation and analysis. It's staged and acted well, and it probes nicely into universal fears of the unknown and feelings of claustrophobia. But is that enough?  

Padre Pio (Abel Ferrara, 2022)

Shia LaBeouf in Padre Pio

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Cristina Chiriac, Marco Leonardi, Asia Argento, Vincenzo Crea, Luca Lionello, Salvatore Ruocco, Brando Pacitto, Stella Mastrantonio, Federico Majorana, Michelangelo Dalisi. Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Abel Ferrara. Cinematography: Alessandro Abate. Production design: Tommaso Ortino. Film editing: Leonado Daniel Bianchi. Music: Joe Delia. 

Although Shia LaBeouf said that he became a devout Christian while making Abel Ferrara's Padre Pio, his performance is one of the worst things about a misfired film. Now officially Saint Pio of Pietrelcina after his canonization by Pope John Paul II in 2002, the Capuchin friar played by LaBeouf lends his name to a film that's not very much about him. Most of Padre Pio, and certainly the more interesting part, deals with the conflict in the village of San Giovanni Rotondo between socialists and the landowners who became part of the emerging National Fascist Party, culminating in a massacre following an election that went against the landowners in 1920. Ferrara stages the scenes that culminate in the massacre well, beginning with the arrival in the village of the men who had served in World War I, and continuing with the exploitation of farmworkers by the landowners, some of whom had fought side by side in the war. But the depiction of Padre Pio's spiritual torment, including a literal fight with the devil and his receiving the stigmata at the film's end, feels cooked up in comparison with the realistic depiction of the political conflict. LaBeouf's American accent also clashes distractingly with the accents of the Italian actors who surround him. Ferrara stunt-casts Asia Argento as a man who confesses his incestuous desire for his daughter to the friar. The gender switch of the casting only adds to the film's general incoherence. 

Sweet Hours (Carlos Saura, 1982)

Iñaki Aierra and Assumpta Serna in Sweet Hours

Cast: Iñaki Aierra, Assumpta Serna, Álvaro de Luna, Jacques Lalande, Alicia Hermida, Luisa Rodrigo, Alicia Sánchez, Pedro Sempson, Isabel Mestres, Pablo Hernández Smith, Magdalena García. Screenplay: Carlos Saura. Cinematography: Teo Escamilla. Art direction: Emilio Sanz de Soto. Film editing: Pablo G. del Amo. 

 Carlos Saura's Sweet Hours is about a man in the grip of the past. Juan (Iñaki Aierra), a writer, is in the process of turning his memories of childhood and family into a play whose central consciousness is himself as a boy, called Juanico. (Sometimes the Juanico on screen is played by a young actor, Pablo Hernández Smith, but at others Aierra fills the role himself.) Juanico adores his mother, Teresa (Assumpta Serna), and is alienated from his father (Pedro Sempson). During rehearsals, Juan finds himself falling in love with the actress, Berta (also Serna), playing Teresa. And so begins a complex alternation of scenes from Juan's own past, his theatrical re-creation of it, and his affair with Berta. Saura uses  the Oedipal relationship of Juan and his mother to color the developing one with the actress playing her. He also explores the political past, as Spain's fascist era under Franco dominates the discourse of Juan's family at the dinner table. Nostalgia lies to us, Saura demonstrates, as the sentimental images in old family albums take on a more sinister significance, especially when we learn that Juanico was intimately connected with his mother's suicide. By the end of the film, when Juan and Berta have become lovers, we see even that rosy-hued affair shadowed by the past. Sweet Hours is skillful in its presentation of the complexity of memory, but almost too delicately ironic. 

Romería (Carla Simón, 2025)

Llúcia Garcia in Romería

Cast: Llúcia Garcia, Mitch Martín, Tristán Ulloa, Celine Tyll, León Romagosa, Hans Romagosa, Marina Troncoso, José Ángel Egido, Miryam Gallego, Sara Casonovas. Screenplay: Carla Simón. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. Art direction: Mónica Bernuy. Film editing: Sergio Jiménez, Ana Pfaff. Music: Ernest Pipó. 

Who are you if you don't know where you came from? That's the question that haunts Marina (Llúcia Garcia) in two ways: technically, because she needs documentation that establishes her parentage, and emotionally, because both of her parents are now dead and what little she knows about her father came from her mother, who raised her. She needs her grandparents, whom she has never known, to certify that he was her father, a fact that she discovers went unrecorded on his death certificate. So she visits his birthplace in Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain, and is plunged into a vibrant, fractious family with some secrets they'd rather remain unknown. In Romería, Carla Simón follows Marina's pilgrimage into the past, first as a kind of detective story and then, with a beautifully accomplished segue, as she imagines the life of her mother and father before she was born. It's not a sentimental film, however. Marina's story is haunted by family pride and greed, by drug trafficking, drug use, and AIDS. Simón defily handles these sometimes conflicting elements, skillfully avoiding melodrama.  

Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987)

Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui in Rouge

Cast: Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alex Man, Emily Chu, Irene Wan, Tam Sin-Hung, Chu Shui-Tong. Screenplay: Lee Pik-Wah, Chiu Kang-Chien, based on a novel by Lee. Cinematography: Bill Wong. Production design: Pan Lai, Horace Ma. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Lai Siu-Tin.

Stanley Kwan's Rouge is a bittersweet love story about a ghost in search of the man who joined her in a suicide pact half a century earlier. Fleur (Anita Mui) and Chan (Leslie Cheung) overdosed on opium after Chan's well-to-do parents refused his request to marry Fleur, who worked in a Hong Kong brothel. Failing to find him in the afterlife, Fleur enters the world of the living, appearing one day in a newspaper office, wanting to place an ad in hope that it will somehow get his attention. Yuen (Alex Man), who takes her request, is initially frightened to discover that she's a ghost, but her plight intrigues him. He enlists his girlfriend, Chor (Emily Chu), in an attempt to reunite Fleur with Chan. They succeed, but not without some surprise narrative twists. Kwan maintains a nice variation of tone in the film, from languorous to comic, with the substantial help of the quartet of actors.    

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

Micky Dolenz in Head

Cast: Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, Timothy Carey, Logan Ramsey, Abraham Sofaer, Vito Scotti, Charles Macaulay, T.C. Jones. Screenplay: Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson. Cinematography: Michael Hugo. Art direction: Sydney J. Litwack. Film editing: Michael Pozen, Monte Hellman. Incidental music: Ken Thorne. 

Bob Rafelson's Head feels like an attempt at an apology for creating the Monkees, the pop rock quartet that emerged full grown from the heads of Rafelson and fellow producer Bert Schneider in the mid-1960s as the stars of a musical sitcom. They were meant partly to spoof groups like the Animals, the Byrds, and above all, the Beatles. After they became commercially successful not only on TV but also on records, it became inevitable that they would make a movie. So, fueled by LSD and some other drugs, Rafelson sat down with his friend Jack Nicholson to come up with a screenplay. Watching it today, it's hard to believe that any of Head was ever set down on anything so tangible as paper. Much of it consists of what would become music videos a decade later, linked by something that never really qualifies as a story, but instead as a linked series of crises and outrageous situations. Cinematic genres like war movies, Westerns, and detective stories get lampooned. Camera tricks abound. Guest stars and celebrities like Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, Sonny Liston, Carol Doda, Frank Zappa, and even Rafelson and Nicholson pop up almost randomly, and newsreel clips hint that the movie has an intended relevance to what's going on in the real world, like the Vietnam war. But although television, the medium that gave birth to the Monkees, seems to be the movie's primary target, Head never coalesces into anything that can comfortably be called satire. It was a box office failure, partly because Rafelson misguidedly took charge of promoting it, and it exists today because of a cult following. But it's really not much more than an artifact of an era.  

Baxter, Vera Baxter (Marguerite Duras, 1977)

Claudine Gabay and Delphine Seyrig in Baxter, Vera Baxter

Cast : Delphine Seyrig, Claudine Gabay, Gérard Depardieu, Noëlle Châtelet, Claude Aufaure, François Périer ( voice ). Screenplay : Marguerite Duras. Cinematography: Sacha Vierny. Film editing : Dominique Auvray, Caroline Camus, Roselyne Petit. Music : Carlos D'Alessio. 

Static in the extreme, Marguerite Duras's Baxter, Vera Baxter gets what little energy it has from the music of Carlos D'Alessio, a kind of nagging on-again, off-again presence throughout the film that is explained as coming from a nearby party, although Duras clearly doesn't intend us to take the explanation seriously. Otherwise, it's a movie about people talking about the title character (Claudine Gabay) and her husband, Jean (François Périer's voice), and a man named Michel Cayre (Gérard Depardieu in what amounts to a cameo). Most of this talk is generated by a woman who remains anonymous (Delphine Seyrig), who hears the name Vera Baxter in a hotel bar and decides to know more. It takes her about 90 minutes to explore the marriage of Vera and Jean and its relationship to Michel, and if you're like me, you may be wondering why we should care. This is cinema as contemplative object, which goes against the very nature of the medium. 

Days and Nights in the Forest (Satyajit Ray, 1970)

Subhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja, Soumitra Chatterjee and Rabi Ghosh in Days and Nights in the Forest

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Subhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja, Rabi Ghosh, Pahari Sanyal, Sharmila Tagore, Kaberi Bose, Simi Garewal, Aparna Sen. Screenplay: Satyajit Ray, based on a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay. Cinematography: Soumendu Roy. Production design: Bransi Chandragupta. Film editing: Dulal Dutta. Music: Satyajit Ray. 

Four men from the city take off for the country in search of adventure and encounter the unexpected. Satyajit Ray's Days and Night in the Forest has a setup similar to Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972). In both films, the city guys are condescending to the rurals with unexpected consequences. But Ray's amusing, low-key story is focused on character more than action. Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), Hari (Samit Bhanja), and Shekhar (Rabi Bhosh) leave Kolkata for the district of Palamu in eastern India, their heads full of tales about beautiful tribal women and peaceful forests. They're all bachelors, though Hari has just had a bruising breakup with his girlfriend. They hire a local boy to guide them to a vacation home, where they bribe the caretaker to let them stay there although they don't have a reservation. After symbolically severing their ties to civilization by burning a newspaper from back home, they go out to a village to get drunk and flirt with women, one of whom, Duli (Simi Garewal), hits it off with Hari. The next day, they discover that one of their neighbors is the owner of a country home who is currently being visited by his daughter, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (Kaberi Bose). Suddenly their decision to go native takes a turn in another direction, when Ashim is attracted to Aparna and Sanjoy to Jaya. Only Shekhar is left to his own devices. With his usual insight into human nature, Ray beautifully produces a satire on urban attitudes and a comedy of manners that transcends both genres.

Clean, Shaven (Lodge Kerrigan, 1993)

Peter Greene in Clean, Shaven

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

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

Detention (John Hsu, 2019)

Gingle Wang in Detention

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

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

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

Benoît Poelvoorde in Man Bites Dog

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

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

The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991)

Meg Ryan and Val Kilmer in The Doors

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

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

Permanent Vacation (Jim Jarmusch, 1980)

Chris Parker and Leila Gastil in Permanent Vacation

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

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

Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Madonna and Harvey Keitel in Dangerous Game

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

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

Maidstone (Norman Mailer, 1970)

Rip Torn and Norman Mailer in Maidstone

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

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

The Little Sister (Hafsia Herzi, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994)

Elina Löwensohn in Nadja

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

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

Distant Journey (Alfréd Radok,1949)

Blanka Waleská in Distant Journey

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

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