Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, Shirley Douglas, Stephen Lack. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider, based on a  book by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

Jeremy Irons's performance as the twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle is spectacular in its subtle differentiation between the two men. It's one of David Cronenberg's body-horror films, and is said to have given many viewers, especially women, nightmares. 

The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003)

The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001

The Two Towers, 2002

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood in The Two Towers

The Return of the King, 2003

Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and Ian McKellen in The Return of the King

Frodo: Elijah Wood
Gandalf: Ian McKellen
Aragorn: Viggo Mortensen
Sam: Sean Astin
Pippin: Billy Boyd
Merry: Dominic Monaghan
Legolas: Orlando Bloom
Gimli/Treebeard (voice): John Rhys-Davies
Arwyn: Liv Tyler
Elrond: Hugo Weaving
Gollum (voice and motion capture)/Smeagol: Andy Serkis
Bilbo: Ian Holm
Saruman: Christopher Lee
Galadriel: Cate Blanchett
Boromir: Sean Bean
Eowyn: Miranda Otto
Theoden: Bernard Hill
Denethor: John Noble
Eomer: Karl Urban
Faramir: David Wenham
Haldir: Craig Parker
Wormtongue: Brad Dourif

Director: Peter Jackson
Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Stephen Sinclair
Based on a novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cinematography: Andrew Lesnie
Production design: Grant Major
Film editing: John Gilbert (The Fellowship of the Ring), Michael Horton (The Two Towers), Jamie Selkirk (The Return of the King)
Music: Howard Shore

There is a clarity of narrative and action in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings that seems to me to be lacking in the blockbusters that have followed in its sizable wake, even those that have been scaled down for serialization on television, like Game of Thrones. (And even, I might add, in Jackson's own attempt to expand J.R.R. Tolkien's much more modest novel The Hobbit into a similarly epic film trilogy.) Some of this clarity lies in the source, in Tolkien's vividly characterized and shrewdly plotted novel. But Jackson and his team also display an ability to stage action sequences like the Helm's Deep scenes in The Two Towers and the assault on Minas Tirith in The Return of the King while both keeping things exciting and making sure we know where the characters we most care about are in the thick of things. Too often, especially in recent superhero films, the big battles of action movies seem to be either taking place in the dark or are simply a blur of quick cuts, with the revelation of who's up and who's down taking place after the dust clears. In The Lord of the Rings, there's a logic to what's taking place, and an awareness of peril and triumph that threads through the action. This is the more to the good because Jackson makes us care about Tolkien's characters, even the ones who seem less vulnerable or lovable than the small beings who bear the burden of the Ring. I think the special effects have begun to show their age: The group shot of the fellowship, for example, in the first film in the trilogy, feels awkwardly tricksy, with the hobbits and the dwarf obviously "pasted in" along with the human-sized characters. But the great vast project of bringing Tolkien's book to the screen remains a landmark and a stunning success.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

Hugo Cabret: Asa Butterfield
Georges Méliès: Ben Kingsley
Isabelle: Chloë Grace Moretz
Station Inspector: Sacha Baron Cohen
Mama Jeanne: Helen McCrory
Rene Tabard: Michael Stuhlbarg
Uncle Claude: Ray Winstone
Lisette: Emily Mortimer
Monsieur Labisse: Christopher Lee
Madame Emilie: Frances de la Tour
Monsieur Frick: Richard Griffiths
Hugo's Father: Jude Law

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: John Logan
Based on a novel by Brian Selznick
Cinematography: Robert Richardson
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker
Costume design: Sandy Powell
Music: Howard Shore

Martin Scorsese's fantastical tribute to pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès begins with a spectacular traveling shot, a combination of CGI and live action, sweeping across Paris and into the Gare Montparnasse until it finishes on a shot of young Hugo Cabret in the clock tower. Normally, I feel that too much CGI robs a movie of its grounding in reality, drawing attention to itself at the expense of characters and story. But on the other hand, who can really doubt that if computer graphics had been available to Georges Méliès, he wouldn't have done something similarly amazing with them, the way he relied on papier-mâché, cardboard, flash powder, and whatever camera tricks he could muster? One of the great delights of Hugo is its re-creations of parts of Méliès's movies, particularly from the behind-the-scenes angle. It's a charming film, perhaps a little overloaded with effects, but Scorsese has a light touch with the story and he has a cast equal to the task of standing up to the computer trickery. A few critics demurred, finding the special effects oppressive, especially in the 3-D version, but on the whole the reviews were raves. It also won Oscars not only for the effects but also for cinematography, art direction, and sound mixing and editing, and was nominated for best picture, director, screenplay, film editing, costumes, and musical score. It seems to me a much better film than the year's best picture winner, The Artist (Michel Haznavicius), coincidentally a movie set in a significant moment in film history. Yet it was a major box-office flop, which may have shadowed its chances at the awards.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method

Carl Jung: Michael Fassbender
Sigmund Freud: Viggo Mortensen
Sabina Spielrein: Keira Knightley
Otto Gross: Vincent Cassel
Emma Jung: Sarah Gadon

Director: David Cronenberg
Screenplay: Christopher Hampton
Adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton based on a book by John Kerr
Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
Production design: James McAteer
Music: Howard Shore

Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, as Viggo Mortensen, playing the man himself, demonstrates, a cigar is a prop that can help you win an acting contest. Because too often a costume drama based on a play becomes just that: a contest among actors to show who can come out on top, especially when the cast consists of actors like Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Vincent Cassel -- none of them exactly shy of showing what they can do before a camera. When I heard of it, I thought Mortensen was a decidedly off-beat choice to play the father of psychoanalysis, and he was in fact the second actor to be cast in the role, after Christoph Waltz, an almost inevitable choice, found he had a scheduling conflict. Mortensen had worked with director David Cronenberg twice before, but playing men of violent action in Eastern Promises (2007) and A History of Violence (2005), not a pre-World War I middle-European Jewish intellectual. And yet Mortensen gives a delicious performance as Freud: puckish, proud, intellectually combative. And the cigar helps, whether brandished elegantly or plugged defiantly in the middle of his face. By contrast, everyone else seems a little over the top. Fassbender (who was second choice after Christian Bale) is his usual handsome presence, but he frets a little too visibly and never quite establishes Jung as the challenger to Freud's authority that Freud seems to have thought him to be. Keira Knightley acts the electrons off the screen as Sabina, almost popping out an eye and dislocating her jaw in her mad scenes, but recovers nicely in her later moments in the film. And Vincent Cassel, as the mad Otto Gross, takes his role to the extreme as the man who carries Freud's theories about repression to their logical extreme: Don't repress anything. Ever. The film's battle of ideas gets a little bit lost in all the emoting, and as so often happens in filmed costume dramas, the scenery and the sets capture the eye when the words should be capturing the mind. But Howard Shore's evocation of the melancholy side of Wagner's music is perfect for the era in which the film is set, the transition from 19th-century Weltschmerz into 20th-century bloodshed, a time when, as Joyce punned, we were Jung and easily Freudened. Jung's prophetic dream of a bloody tide sweeping over Europe is cited in the film, as a warning that all of this intellectual (and sexual) ferment was about to be inundated by war.  

Watched on Starz Encore