The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1982)

Ron Silver and Barbara Hershey in The Entity

Cast: Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa, George Coe, Margaret Blye, Jacqueline Brookes, Richard Brestoff, Michael Alldredge, Raymond Singer, Allan Rich, Natasha Ryan, Melanie Gaffin, Alex Rocco. Screenplay: Frank De Felitta, based on his novel. Cinematography: Stephen H. Burum. Production design: Charles Rosen. Film editing: Frank J. Urioste. Music Charles Bernstein. 

The Entity was inevitably compared to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), often unfavorably. Unlike the earlier film, The Entity doesn't dabble in theology to explain why Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) is being subjected to terrifying attacks by an unseen assailant. Instead it dabbles in psychology and research into the paranormal. Neither of which ultimately can explain what's happening to Carla. The psychologist, Dr. Phil Sneiderman (Ron Silver), has a plausible diagnosis for what's happening to her, rooted in sexual repression. But not all of the pieces fit, and when Carla rejects the treatment Sneiderman proposes, the attacks continue. Carla, afraid of being judged mentally ill, turns to researchers in the paranormal, whose scientific bona fides is questioned by Sneiderman and his colleagues. When neither approach succeeds, Carla is left on her own. If the film works as anything more than a horror shocker it's because of Hershey's splendidly convincing performance, which takes the focus of the film off of the supernatural and onto issues of trust and credibility. Carla's plight becomes a parable about women who fail to find empathy and support for a personal trauma, particularly rape. But only that subtext saves The Entity from being anything other than a routine thriller.

The Public Eye (Howard Franklin, 1992)

Joe Pesci and Barbara Hershey in The Public Eye

Cast: Joe Pesci, Barbara Hershey, Stanley Tucci, Jerry Adler, Dominic Chianese, Richard Riehle, Richard Schiff, Jared Harris. Screenplay: Howard Franklin. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Evan A. Lottman. Music: Mark Isham. 

Before they were paparazzi, they were shutterbugs, and the most notorious of them was Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee. Fellig's ability to get to a crime scene first, often before the police, made him famous, but he also thought of himself as a serious documentary photographer. Howard Franklin based the protagonist of The Public Eye, Leon Bernstein, aka Bernzy (Joe Pesci), on Fellig/Weegee, including the character's willingness to cheat a little to make his pictures better. Bernzy, for example, coming upon a corpse before the cops arrive, rearranges the body a little to make the composition of the shot better. Once, he asks a bystander to toss the victim's hat into the frame: "People like to see the hat," he says. Weegee likewise knew how to pose and frame his pictures: One of his most famous documents the arrival of a pair of bejeweled and befurred dowagers at the Metropolitan Opera opening night in 1943, while a drab and frowzy woman gawps at them. It was published in Life magazine and in the following year was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, where the reaction to its comic juxtaposition gave the shutterbug a reputation as an artist. But it was not a candid photograph: Weegee and his friends had found a barfly, plied her with wine, and shoved her into the frame at just the right moment. Franklin gives Bernzy some of Weegee's duplicity, but he's more intent on making his shutterbug into a hero who uses his street smarts to foil a plot by the mob to muscle in on the distribution of gasoline rationing coupons -- the film takes place in 1942. He also falls in love with Kay Levitz (Barbara Hershey), a beautiful nightclub owner. In short, the movie is slick when it should be gritty. Pesci gives a restrained performance, almost as if he doesn't want to repeat himself, having just won an Oscar as the volatile Tommy DeVito ("What do you mean I'm funny?") in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). There are good performances by Hershey, Stanley Tucci as a young mobster, Jerry Adler as a newspaper columnist friend of Bernzy's, and Jared Harris as a doorman at Kay's nightclub. But the movie never builds the tension it needs for the story to have much payoff at the end. 

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Benjamin Millepied and Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Screenplay: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Clint Mansell.

Overheated melodrama with horror movie elements that seems determined to make ballet into more of a psychological and physical trial by torture than is entirely plausible. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as the tormented dancer, and she gets good support from Mila Kunis as her potential rival and Barbara Hershey as her mother. But I found myself laughing at its excesses when I think director Darren Aronofsky, over the top as usual, meant for me to shudder at them.

The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)

With its brightly irreverent tone toward subject matter that typically brought out pious patriotism in Americans, The Right Stuff feels more like a film of the 1970s than of the Reagan '80s, which may be why it was a box-office disappointment. It remains true that some of the parts of the film -- the caricatures of the German scientists, the publicists, the press, and politicians like Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) -- don't fit snugly with the genuine heroism shown by the astronauts and test pilot. But that's because writer-director Philip Kaufman dared to assume a point of view on the material that was fresh and unconventional -- a rarity in American film of the '80s. Some of the tone of the film can be found in its source, Tom Wolfe's book, which was designed as a corrective to the "official story" of the Mercury 7 that was provided by Life magazine. Instead of squeaky clean superbeings devoted to wife and family, the astronauts were just human beings, frequently raunchy, irreverent, and more than a little inclined to step out of marital bounds. The film's great glory is its all-star cast (though few of the actors in it were stars before it was made), with particularly good work coming from Sam Shepard, who received a supporting actor Oscar nomination as Chuck Yeager, the test pilot that the astronauts wanted to be, even as NASA and the scientists wanted them just to be glorified lab rats, plus Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, Ed Harris as John Glenn, Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper, and Fred Ward as Gus Grissom. There is similar strength in the female cast, particularly Barbara Hershey as Glennis Yeager, Veronica Cartwright as Betty Grissom, Pamela Reed as Trudy Cooper, and Mary Jo Deschanel as the publicity-shy Annie Glenn, whose embarrassment at her stammer leads to a wonderfully satisfying standoff against an increasingly irate LBJ -- a man whose whims were seldom ignored. Deschanel's husband, Caleb, is the film's cinematographer. (Yes, they are the parents of Zooey Deschanel.) The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four: for sound, film editing, sound effects editing, and Bill Conti's score.

Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)

In the films in which he appears, Woody Allen has two personae: the nebbishy neurotic that was the mainstay of his early career as a standup comedian, and the witty, self-effacing charmer who can credibly win the hearts of such co-stars as Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, and Dianne Wiest. He appears in both personae in Hannah and Her Sisters. As Mickey, he suffers from hypochondria and a fear of death so severe that when he discovers he doesn't have a brain tumor he goes through a desperate but hilarious search for God, even going so far as to try to convert to Catholicism. (The gag involving Wonder Bread and mayonnaise is, I think, a bit too forced.) He also plays the successful lover, winning Holly (Wiest) after an earlier misfired attempt. But Allen is not the only actor in the film who is playing the two "Woody Allen" personae: As Elliot, who is married to Mickey's ex-wife, Hannah (Farrow), Michael Caine also becomes both the neurotic and the charmer in his obsession with Hannah's sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey). So what we get is Elliot as Mickey's psychological doppelgänger. (Mickey was once married to Hannah and Holly is also her sister, reinforcing the duplication.) That all of this works as well as it does -- and sometimes it doesn't -- is why the film remains one of Allen's most successful. It was a critical and commercial hit, receiving seven Oscar nominations (including best picture) and winning three: for Caine and Wiest as supporting performers and for Allen as writer -- he was also nominated as director. It is certainly well-structured, given the intricacy of the various interrelationships of the three sisters and their husbands and lovers. I think the weakest part of the structure is Allen's own performance; unlike Caine, he never succeeds in integrating the two personae. Some of the problem is the way his role is written: The comedy of his hypochondria is too broad for a film that takes on some serious issues in the way people deal with infatuation and infidelity, and when Mickey recovers from his obsession with God and death, Allen borrows shamelessly from Preston Sturges's great Sullivan's Travels (1941) by having Mickey snap out of it while watching the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933), just as Sullivan recovers from his own funk by watching a Disney cartoon. But there is a real sophistication in the way Allen ends his somewhat Chekhovian comedy by playing on our expectation of a happy ending. All of the characters in the film are far too morally compromised for a simple resolution, so Allen gives us what just appears to be one: a Thanksgiving party with all of the sisters and their husbands accounted for. At the very end, we find that Mickey and Holly are not only married now, but she's pregnant. Fade out, music and credits up. Perhaps only as we're walking out of the theater do we remember that it has earlier been well established that Mickey is infertile.