Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

Sal Mineo in Who Killed Teddy Bear

Cast: Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray, Elaine Stritch, Margot Bennett, Daniel J. Travanti, Diane Moore, Frank Campanella. Screenplay: Leon Tokatyan, Arnold Drake. Cinematography: Joseph C. Brun. Art direction: Hank Aldrich. Film editing: Angelo Ross. Music: Charles Calello. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear is about kinks, and it has one of its own: the fetishization of Sal Mineo's body. The film takes every opportunity to explore it, showing the actor in his underwear or swim suit whenever possible. But this is only one of the peculiarities of a very odd film that falls somewhere between exploitation flick and serious exploration of a culture, that of New York City, poised between the repressions of the 1950s and the frenzy of the 1970s. Mineo plays Larry Sherman, who lives with his sister (Margot Bennett), mentally handicapped since a trauma that occurred when she was a child. He works as a busboy in a discotheque -- not one of the mirror-balled hothouses of the next decade, but a well-lighted place that looks like a suburban rec room. Juliet Prowse plays Norah, a DJ at the club, which is managed by the tough-talking Marian (Elaine Stritch). When Norah starts getting creepy phone calls, she contacts the police, and Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray) takes charge of the case. Madden is obsessed with sex crimes, and in his off time he studies his extensive collection of literature on the subject and listens to tapes of the victims he has interviewed, undisturbed that his 10-year-old daughter can also hear them. Norah is at first grateful for Madden's help, but eventually repulsed by his obsessions. Unfortunately, neither director Joseph Cates nor screenwriters Leon Tokatyan and Arnold Drake seem to know what to do with this assortment of characters and what might have been a solid thriller veers off into incoherence. 

Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925)

Belle Bennett in Stella Dallas

Cast: Belle Bennett, Ronald Colman, Lois Moran, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Screenplay: Frances Marion, based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Film editing: Stuart Heisler. 

Although eclipsed by the 1937 version directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the first filming of Olive Higgins Prouty's lachrymose novel Stella Dallas is well worth seeing, chiefly because of Belle Bennett's blowsy, undaunted Stella. It's hard to see why suave Ronald Colman's Stephen Dallas  would fall so completely for Stella's unkempt charms that he's willing to marry her, except as a kind of penance for his father's criminality and loss of the family fortune, but this is not a story for skeptics or realists. This is domestic melodrama of the purest sort, in which conventional psychology plays only the faintest role. It's a tale that requires you to believe that there's a maternal instinct that overcomes all, even the disapproval of polite society, and that it will be rewarded by seeing your daughter married to a product of that society, even if you have to do it standing in the rain outside the wedding. Bennett is grand in the role, even if her character doesn't have the complexities that Stanwyck brings to it. 

A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Nelly Frijda, Edda Barends, and Henriëtte Toll in A Question of Silence 

Cast: Edda Barends, Nelly Frijda, Henriëtte Toll, Cox Habbema, Eddie Brugman, Hans Croiset, Erik Plooyer. Screenplay: Marleen Gorris. Cinematography: Frans Bromet. Art direction: Harry Ammerlaan. Film editing: Hans van Dongen. Music: Lodewijk de Boer, Martijn Hasebos.

Janine (Cox Habbema), a court-appointed psychiatrist, examines three women on trial for a mysteriously random murder of the owner of a boutique. The women were strangers to each other before they assaulted the man, who accused one of them of shoplifting. Janine's task is to determine whether the women were insane when they committed the crime, and she comes to feel empathy for them when she examines the ways in which they were discriminated against by the men in their lives. Marleen Gorris crafts an intriguing courtroom drama that has been dismissed by some as feminist agitprop, but deserves praise for the way Gorris manipulates our attitudes toward the issues it raises.   

Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)

Masayuki Mori in Love Letter

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Juzo Dosan, Yoshiko Kuga, Jukichi Uno, Kyoko Kagawa, Shizue Natsukawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Chieko Seki, Ranko Hanai, Chieko Nakakita, Keisuke Kinoshita. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Fumio Niwa. Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki. Art direction: Seigo Shindo. Film editing: Toshio Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Struggling to get by in postwar Japan, Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori) spends his idle time searching for his childhood sweetheart Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga). Then one day he finds her and berates her for what she did to survive: become the mistress of an American soldier. That is the crux of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka's first film as a director, Love Letter. The letter itself is the giveaway to Michiko's secret. Reikichi overhears her dictating it to his friend Naoto Yamaji (Jukichi Uno), who ekes out a living by writing letters for women whose GI boyfriends have left them behind when they returned to the States. Michiko bore the soldier's child, but it died, and now she urgently seeks his financial aid, fearing that she will have to prostitute herself to live. Tanaka creates a vivid portrait of a wounded country where regret about the past is secondary to the need to survive. In this context, Reikichi's rigid morality seems out of place. Alive with secondary characters, the film gives us more than just a tortured romance, and although it contains a soap opera crisis, Tanaka wisely avoids a pat reconciliatory ending.    

War Machine (Patrick Hughes, 2026)

Alan Ritchson in War Machine

Cast: Alan Ritchson, Stefan James, Blake Richardson, Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, Jai Courtney, Alex King, Keiynan Lonsdale, Jack Patton, James Beaufort, Joshua Diaz, Jacob Hohua, Daniel Webber. Screenplay: Patrick Hughes, James Beaufort. Cinematography: Aaron Morton. Production design: Enzo Iacono. Film editing: Andy Canny. Music: Dmitri Golovko. 

I think I would have enjoyed War Machine more if it didn't feel like the kind of movie Pete Hegseth would love. At the beginning it's a straightforward celebration of military machismo, but then it turns into an invasion from outer space sci-fi movie while still retaining its conviction that the warrior ethos of muscle and grit is what will save us. Granted, it does give a nod to intelligence, as the hero manages to conquer the alien war machine with his knowledge of applied physics. The movie doesn't give Alan Ritchson much of an opportunity to play anything but Reacher gone Ranger, but he demonstrates the kind of presence that should ensure his continuance in action flicks, including the franchise that War Machine seems likely to produce.    

Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

Jacques Dutronc in Every Man for Himself

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Cécile Tanner, Paule Muret, Anna Baldaccini, Roland Amstutz. Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Renato Berta, William Lubtchansky, Jean-Bernard Menou. Art direction: Romain Goupil. Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself is about transactional lives: Everyone in the film is trying to get something from someone else. Naturally, the key figure is a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who eventually gets involved in the lives of a couple dissolving their relationship: the filmmaker Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) and his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye). It's a droll, talky, and sometimes bitterly funny film with a melancholy undertone reinforced by several reprises of the aria "Suicidio" from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda. For the real-life Godard it represented a return to more or less conventional filmmaking after the late '60s and '70s immersion in politics and experimentation, and it shows his mastery of creating vivid characters with problems of their own self-centered making. 

The Million Dollar Hotel (Wim Wenders, 2000)

Jeremy Davies in The Million Dollar Hotel

Cast: Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Mel Gibson, Jimmy Smits, Peter Stormare, Amanda Plummer, Gloria Stuart, Tom Bower, Donal Logue, Bud Cort, Julian Sands, Harris Yulin, Charlayne Woodard, Tim Roth. Screenplay: Nicholas Klein, Bono. Cinematography: Phaedon Papamichael. Production design: Robbie Freed, Arabella Serrell. Film editing: Tatiana S. Riegel. Music: Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, Daniel Lanois.

The idea for Wim Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel was conceived by Bono while he was filming the video for "Where the Streets Have No Name" in downtown Los Angeles near the Cecil Hotel, a run-down residence hotel. At its Australian premiere, the film's star, Mel Gibson, in one of those unfiltered remarks that wrecked his career, told an interviewer that the movie was "as boring as a dog's ass." He later backtracked, saying that he didn't really mean what he said, but it stuck. Wenders's film isn't boring, but it's not a highlight of the career of the director who gave us Wings of Desire (1987) and Paris, Texas (1984). It's a muddled blend of satire, whodunit, and tragic romance with tinges of magic realism, based on the weary premise that outcasts and the mentally challenged possess a higher wisdom. Gibson plays Skinner, an FBI agent investigating the death of a resident of the titular Los Angeles hotel: Did the artist Izzy Goldkiss (Tim Roth in a cameo) fall from the hotel roof, or was he pushed? Skinner is there at the behest of Izzy's wealthy father (Harris Yulin). He finds that the residents of the hotel are mostly deinstitutionalized mental patients, and they're no help in solving the case. Skinner is not a model of normality himself: He wears a neck brace and it's later revealed that he once had a third arm growing from his back: "I could play the violin and wipe my ass all at the same time." In his investigation, he centers on Geronimo (Jimmy Smits), an artist like Izzy, and employs Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), one of the residents who is infatuated with another, the pretty Eloise (Milla Jovovich). The performances are mostly good, although Davies plays Tom Tom as a little more manic than he needs to. But in the end it's a movie mostly for U2 fans and Wenders completists. 

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Marcus Carl Franklin, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere in I’m Not There 

 Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson (voice), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Bob Dylan. 

I'm Not There is a kind of giveaway title: Bob Dylan isn't there on the screen either. Confronted with the most enigmatic music figure of the 20th century, Todd Haynes resorts to a deconstructed biopic. Bob Dylan's personae are so varied that he evokes the young man addressed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 53: "What is your substance, whereof are you made./That millions of strange shadows on you tend?" Haynes doesn't find a million Dylans, but he sticks to half a dozen, played by as many different performers, including a young Black actor (Marcus Carl Franklin) and a woman (Cate Blanchett, who earned an Oscar nomination for the role). Each of them represents a different stage in Dylan's life and career, but you really have to be steeped in knowledge of his biography already to fully appreciate the skill with which Haynes makes it all work. Or you can simply sit back and enjoy the audacity and originality of the film.

"Wuthering Heights" (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in "Wuthering Heights"

Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell, Amy Morgan, Jessica Knappett, Charlotte Mellington, Owen Cooper, Vy Nguyen. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell, based on a novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis. 

I am not a teenage girl, which means that my particular sensibility may hinder me from fully appreciating what Emerald Fennell has done with Emily Brontë's great mad novel, Wuthering Heights. Fennell said that she approached making a film of the novel as if it were being imagined by a teenage girl who had just read the book. She also did something of which I wholeheartedly approve: She put the title in quotation marks because movies and literature are distinctly different media -- no film, however closely it sticks to the source, is the equivalent of a written work. And on those terms, I have to applaud Fennell's movie: It does what it sets out to do. Sometimes at the expense of taste, to be sure: Any movie that starts with an ejaculating corpse is going to have to justify itself, and "Wuthering Heights" never quite recovers from that scene. The scene in which Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) finds Cathy (Margot Robbie) masturbating on the moors, her flesh-colored room at Thrushcross Granger, and her strapless mourning dress continue to push the boundaries of audacity. But the movie benefits from Fennell's decision to go all the way and from its cast's willingness to follow her. This is, in short, one of those movies that are better appreciated if you haven't read the book on which it's based: Brontë's novel is not a paperback bodice-ripper (the covers of which Fennell copies to the point of parody). The film is a sometimes campy but occasionally tedious exercise in excess. 

Not Fade Away (David Chase, 2012)

Bella Heathcote and John Magaro in Not Fade Away

Cast: John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett, Christopher McDonald, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Dominique McElligott, Molly Price, Meg Guzulescu, Gerard Canonico. Screenplay: David Chase. Cinematography: Eigil Bryld. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Film editing: Sidney Wolinsky. 

David Chase created The Sopranos, one of the greatest dramatic TV series of all time, rich in character and incident, with a superb evocation of a particular milieu. But what makes a series work doesn't necessarily make for a successful movie. Not Fade Away gives us a portrait of a corner of suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, with a youth culture at odds with the older generation and the Vietnam War seething in the background. The central story is that of Doug Damiano (John Magaro), who begins the film as a high school kid intoxicated with rock 'n' roll, especially after the emergence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He and his friends Gene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) start a band, and he gets a girlfriend, Grace (Bella Heathcote). Doug is at odds with his father, Pat (James Gandolfini) over his hair and his music, especially after Doug drops out of college to try to make it in the record business. It might have made a good TV series, but Chase fails to give it shape and coherence as a film, tossing in scenes that don't work with the main story, such as a needlessly included encounter of the young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train at the start of the film. He occasionally inserts a narrative voiceover by a secondary character whose identity isn't revealed until the very end, and then to no great point. There are some good performances by Magaro, Huston, and Gandolfini, but the movie's lack of focus and narrative drive undermines them.

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Cast: Jane Russell, Richard Egan, Joan Leslie, Agnes Moorehead, Jorja Curtright, Michael Pate, Richard Coogan, Alan Reed. Screenplay: Sydney Boehm, based on a novel by William Bradford Huie.  Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Mark-Lee Kirk, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler.  Music: Hugo Friedhofer. 

Loosely based on a novel that was loosely based on the memoirs of the sex worker Jean O'Hara, Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover is one of those dodges around the Production Code that kept cropping up in the 1950s. Set mostly in Honolulu before and after the Pearl Harbor attack, it's the story of a woman who parlayed her earnings as a "dance-hall hostess" into a fortune by buying up real estate when people fled the island at the start of the war and leasing it to the military. Jane Russell got the role of Mamie Stover -- which was one of O'Hara's actual pseudonyms after Marilyn Monroe, originally cast in the part, rebelled against her 20th Century Fox contract, and Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward, and Lana Turner were considered. It's a perfect fit for Russell. The movie is nothing special, but it's directed efficiently by Walsh, and has solid action scenes during the Pearl Harbor bombing, and colorful views of Hawaiian scenery. 

Yeast (Mary Bronstein, 2008)

Mary Bronstein in Yeast

Cast: Mary Bronstein, Greta Gerwig, Amy Judd, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Sean Price Williams, Ignacio Carballo, David Sandholm. Screenplay: Mary Bronstein. Cinematography: Michael Tully, Sean Price Williams. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein. 

Rachel (Mary Bronstein) is wound a little too tight, but her friends Alice (Amy Judd) and Gen (Greta Gerwig) are barely wound up at all: They are the very definition of "slackers." And that's the relationship that plays out through Bronstein's itchy movie Yeast. The more Rachel tries to get Alice and Gen to straighten up their lives, the more passively aggressive they become. Yeast runs for a mercifully brief 78 minutes --  I say "mercifully" because I don't know how much longer I could take having my nose rubbed, via hand-held camerawork and extreme closeups, in the lives of these dysfunctional young women. Which is not to say that Bronstein didn't succeed, maybe just short of brilliantly, at giving a portrait of millennials uncertain where they fit in the scheme of things they were thrust into. It's easy to dismiss Yeast as just another "mumblecore" movie, proudly low-budget, improvised, and unstructured, and the presence of Gerwig and the Safdie brothers (in a loopy cameo) reinforces that. But there's a real poignancy at the film's end, when Rachel, irritating as she can be, finds herself alone.     

Mr. Freedom (William Klein, 1969)

John Abbey in Mr. Freedom

Cast: John Abbey, Delphine Seyrig, Donald Pleasence, Jean-Claude Drouot, Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Lefebvre, Sabine Sun, Rita Maiden, Colin Drake, Pierre Baillot, Raoul Billerey, Philippe Noiret, Sami Frey, Catherine Rouvel, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret. Screenplay: William Klein. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Production design: William Klein. Film editing: Anne-Marie Cotret, Valérie Mayoux, Monique Teisseire. Music: Serge Gainsbourg. 

William Klein's sledgehammer satire Mr. Freedom was made at a time when revolutionary posturing was all the rage in France and things seemed to be coming apart in the United States. It stars John Abbey, an expatriate in France like his director, as a cop turned superpatriotic superhero. Donning the guise of Mr. Freedom, which involves a lot of padded musculature and a costume made out of sports gear, he descends on France to save it from the commies and ends up nuking much of it. For a contemporary equivalent to the character, think of Homelander from The Boys. The movie is a gleefully unsubtle mess, filled with cameos by French actors and a larger role by Delphine Seyrig as Marie-Madeleine, a French collaborator with Mr. Freedom. (Or is she?) The movie's lampoon of American political and cultural imperialism (the American embassy is a shopping mall) is almost too broad to cause offense. It's about half an hour too long, like an SNL skit run amok, but there are laughs to be had.   

Lingua Franca (Isabel Sandoval, 2019)

Isabel Sandoval and Eamon Farren in Lingua Franca

Cast: Isabel Sandoval, Eamon Farren, Lynn Cohen, Ivory Aquino, Megan Channel, Lev Gorn. Screenplay: Isabel Sandoval. Cinematography: Isaac Banks. Production design: Maxwell Nalevansky, Clint Ramos. Film editing: Isabel Sandoval. Music: Teresa Barrozo. 

The problems facing the protagonist of Isabel Sandoval's Lingua Franca are even more urgent today than they were when the film was made. Sandoval herself plays Olivia, a transgender Filipina who works as a live-in caregiver for Olga (Lynn Cohen), an elderly woman on the verge of dementia. An undocumented immigrant, Olivia sends some of what she earns to her mother in the Philippines and pays much of the rest of it to a man who promises to marry her, which would allow her to get a green card. But when he announces that he's met someone he really wants to marry, she's left on her own, just as ICE is stepping up a crackdown in the Brighton Beach area where she lives. Then Olga's grandson Alex (Eamon Farren),  who has just been released from prison, moves in with his grandmother. After initial wariness, Alex and Olivia develop a relationship. As writer and director, Sandoval handles the nuances of the situation well, giving us enough of Alex's own difficulties to understand why he may not be the ideal solution to Olivia's problems. As actress, she is also up to the task of portraying Olivia's mixture of hope and fear as a resolution to those problems presents itself. Except for a few scenes where the revelation of Olivia's sexual identity and the threat of deportation feel contrived, Sandoval mostly resists conventional plotting, and the bittersweet conclusion of the film is deftly achieved. Lingua Franca is one of those movies that need to be better known. 

Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993)

Madonna in Body of Evidence

Cast: Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Jürgen Prochnow, Lillian Lehman, Frank Langella. Screenplay: Brad Mirman. Cinematography: Douglas Milsome. Production design: Victoria Paul. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Graeme Revell.

Perhaps the only effective performance and convincing characterization in Uli Edel's Body of Evidence is that of Lillian Lehman as the judge presiding over a tawdry trial, who is rightly pissed off at the nonsense taking place in her courtroom. The film was a vanity project, designed to make Madonna into a major movie star. She plays Rebecca Carlson, a gallery owner in Portland, Oregon, who indulges in BDSM but winds up on trial for murder when one of her partners, a wealthy older man, dies after having sex with her after, leaving her $8 million in his will. Rebecca's sexual tastes are "explained" by a passing reference to childhood abuse, but her anything-goes approach to sex seems to stop short at bisexuality: She broke off with another partner when she found him in bed with a man. It would take an actress more adept at nuance than Madonna to make sense of such an ill-conceived role. There are some fine actors in the movie, including Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Frank Langella, and Julianne Moore (who has expressed regret at taking her role in the film), but the screenplay, filled with "surprise twists" that land with a thud, does them no good. Body of Evidence bombed with critics and audiences, and it holds favor today only with die-hard Madonna fans. 

Seen But Not Reviewed

Queen Bee (Ranald MacDougall, 1955)

Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953)

Lumière, le Cinéma (Thierry Frémaux, 2025)

The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason, 2025)

The Suicide Squad (James Gunn, 2021)

Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)

Send Help (Sam Raimi, 2026)

52 Pick-Up (John Frankenheimer, 1986)

Thirteen Lives (Ron Howard, 2022)

Four Letter Words (Sean Baker, 2000)

Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

Antitrust (Peter Howitt, 2001)

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (Koganoda, 2025)

Breathless (Jim McBride, 1983)

The Office Wife (Lloyd Bacon, 1930)

The International (Tom Tykwer, 2009)

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham, 2010)

Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper, 2025)

Magellan (Lav Diaz, 2025)

Hart's War (Gregory Hoblit, 2002)

Welcome II the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1995)

The Host (Bong Joon Ho, 2006)

Honey Don't! (Ethan Coen, 2025)

Next of Kin (Atom Egoyan, 1984)

Black Phone 2 (Scott Derrickson, 2025) 

Hidden in the Fog (Lars-Eric Kjellgren, 1953)

Fountain of Youth (Guy Ritchie, 2025)

Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016)

Maze Runner: The Death Cure (Wes Ball, 2018)

The Big Hit (Kirk Wong, 1998)

Saving Mr. Banks (John Lee Hancock,2013)

My Father Is Coming (Monika Treut, 1991)

Ondine (Neil Jordan, 2009)

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)

Anniversary (Jan Komasa, 2025)

Remote Control (Jeff Lieberman, 1988)

Deepwater Horizon (Peter Berg, 2016)

We're All Going to the World's Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021)

Before We Go (Chris Evans, 2014)

Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948)

Caddo Lake (Celine Held, Logan George, 2024)

Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019)

Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994)

Love and Monsters (Michael Matthews, 2020)

Resurrection (Bi Gan, 2025)

Thelma (Joachim Trier, 2017)

The Internship (Shawn Levy, 2013)

Ballad of a Small Player (Edward Berger, 2025)

Ava (Tate Taylor, 2020)

Naked Acts (Bridgett M. Davis, 1996)

Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan, 1987)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, 2025)

Two Minutes Late (Torben Anton Svendsen, 1952)

Twinless (James Sweeney, 2025)

Hard to Handle (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)

Wicked: For Good (Jon M. Chu, 2025)

The Model Couple (William Klein, 1977)

Virgin Machine (Monika Treut, 1988)

Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025)

Aurora (Cristi Puiu, 2010)

Re-Wind (Hisayasu Soto, 1988)

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025)

Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999)

Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, 1974)

Hamnet (Chloë Zhao, 2025)

Hooper (Hal Needham, 1978)

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025)

High Pressure (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)

Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (William Klein, 1966)

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Elfi Mikesch, Monika Treut, 1999)

12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006)

Bleeder (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1999)

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, 2006)

Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai, 2008)

A Different Image (Alile Sharon Larkin, 1982)

SLC Punk! (James Merendino, 1999)

Big City Blues (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Maniac Cop 2 (William Lustig, 1990)

Sex (Dag Johan Haugerud, 2024)

The Hunted (William Friedkin, 2003)

King of the Night (Hector Babenco, 1975)

Lúcio Flávio (Hector Babenco, 1977)

Prison on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987)

Prison on Fire II (Ringo Lam, 1991)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson, 2025

Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025)

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, 2017)

West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (Med Hondo, 1979)

You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)

Framed (Richard Wallace, 1947)

The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)

Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009)

Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)

The Bellboy (Jerry Lewis, 1960)(

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-wai, 2007)

Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997)

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024)

Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025)

Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011)

To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985)

William Petersen in To Live and Die in L.A. 

Cast: William Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow, Debra Feuer, John Turturro, Darlanne Fluegel, Dean Stockwell, Steve James, Robert Downey Sr., Michael Greene, Christopher Allport. Screenplay: William Friedkin, Gerald Petievich, based on a novel by Petievich. Cinematography: Robbie Müller. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: M. Scott Smith. Music: Wang Chung. 

William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. is a darkly cynical thriller in the mode of Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and Friedkin's own The French Connection (1971), though instead of the tough cops played by Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman, we get the solid but miscast William Petersen as Richard Chance, a Secret Service agent grimly determined to catch the counterfeiter Eric Masters (Willem Dafoe), who murdered his partner. It all leads up to a celebrated car chase going the wrong way on an L.A. freeway, but then fizzles into a downer anticlimax. There's too much lame dialogue, some of it apparently ad libbed under Friedkin's instructions. At one point, a snitch asks Chance to be reimbursed for her expenses, to which he retorts, "Uncle Sam don't give a shit about your expenses. If you want bread, fuck a baker." Chance seems to have been instructed in this kind of reply by a stoolie he tried to employ earlier, who told him "If you want a pigeon, go to the park." Undeniably kinetic, To Live and Die in L.A. is riddled with too many improbabilities and plot holes to be fully satisfying. The car chase is the best thing about the movie, along with Robbie Müller's cinematography.  

Peter Hujar's Day (Ira Sachs, 2025)

Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw in Peter Hujar's Day

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Ben Whishaw. Screenplay: Ira Sachs, based on a book by Linda Rosenkranz. Cinematography: Alex Ashe. Art direction: Ryan Scott Fitzgerald. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. 

Ira Sachs's Peter Hujar's Day lacks everything that people go to movies for: action, conflict, spectacle, laughter, tears, even plot. And yet it's wonderful, a small brilliant gem of a film. It consists of two characters, Linda Rosenkranz (Rebecca Hall) and Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), talking about what happened on a recent day in Hujar's life, detailing every event he can recall from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night. The film is based on transcripts of a tape Rosenkranz made of her interview with Hujar, a freelance photographer, for a "day in the life" book. It helps that Hujar moves in circles that include such mid-1970s celebrities as Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and that he lives in a city like New York, undergoing a constant social upheaval, so what might be an ordinary day for him is more colorful than most of our days. But we never meet these celebrities or see the streets of the city except through Hujar's narrative. What we do see is the confines of Rosenkranz's apartment as Hujar talks and Rosenkranz prods, and the light shifts from day to dusk to night. Cinematographer Alex Ashe's deft use of that light gives the movie what action it possesses beyond the two people moving about the apartment, lying on the couch, talking on the balcony, and Hujar smoking incessantly even as Rosenkranz scolds him for it. Sachs never even lets us see the photos Hujar took, like this one of Ginsberg.

But Peter Hujar's Day is a small triumph of filmmaking, reliant heavily on the consummate acting skill of Whishaw and Hall. 

Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025)

Andrew Scott and Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney, Giles Surridge, Cillian Sullivan, Michael James Ford, John Doran, Anne Brogan. Screenplay: Robert Kaplow. Cinematography: Shane F. Kelly. Production design: Susie Cullen. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Graham Reynolds.

I wish I liked Richard Linklater's Blue Moon more than I do. He's one of my favorite directors, and Ethan Hawke is terrific as Lorenz Hart, whose lyrics I love. But Robert Kaplow's screenplay, "inspired by" the correspondence between Hart and Elizabeth Weiland (played by Margaret Qualley), turns the lyricist into a spiteful, deluded bore, and I can't believe that Hart was so lacking in insight into himself and others. The cast is phenomenal, especially Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers, basking in the success of   Oklahoma! and trying to enjoy the moment while placating the envious Hart, and Bobby Cannavale as the bartender trying to lift Hart out of his bitter funk. Qualley brings to life a fictionalized character based on some letters exchanged with the real Weiland, who seems to be otherwise unknown except through her flirtatious correspondence with Hart. Patrick Kennedy, an actor otherwise unfamiliar to me, has some fine, small moments as E.B. White, though I wish Kaplow hadn't invented the bit about Hart inspiring White to write Stuart Little. There's enough wit and truth in Blue Moon almost to overcome the screenplay's prevarications, but only the performances make it more than a melancholy misfire.

Happyend (Neo Sora, 2024)

Yukito Hadaka and Hayata Kurihara in Happyend

Cast: Hayata Kurihara, Yukito Hadaka, Yuta Hayashi, Shina Peng, Arazi, Kilala Inori, Pushim, Ayumu Nakajima, Makiko Watanabe, Shiro Sano. Screenplay: Neo Sora. Cinematography: Bill Kirstein. Production design: Norifumi Ataka. Film editing: Albert Tholen. Music: Lia Ouyang Rusli. 

Disaffected students at a Tokyo school pull a prank on their principal that gets labeled (as things often do these days) "terrorism" in Neo Sora's debut feature, Happyend. The consequence is that the principal (Shiro Sano) installs a radical new surveillance system that causes still more turmoil at the school. Sora's look into the near future resonates with our anxious present, touching on such issues as authoritarianism, racism, and invasive technology. The touch is light, however, thanks to an engaging young cast and a plot that never turns as grim as it might.