Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)

Ethan Hawke and Gore Vidal in Gattaca

Vincent Freeman: Ethan Hawke
Irene Cassini: Uma Thurman
Jerome Morrow: Jude Law
Director Josef: Gore Vidal
Detective Hugo: Alan Arkin
Anton Freeman: Loren Dean
Dr. Lamar: Xander Berkeley
German: Tony Shalhoub
Caesar: Ernest Borgnine
Marie Freeman: Jayne Brook
Antonio Freeman: Elias Koteas

Director: Andrew Niccol
Screenplay: Andrew Niccol
Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak
Production design: Jan Roelfs
Film editing: Lisa Zeno Churgin
Music: Michael Nyman

It's refreshing these days to see a science fiction movie not dependent on special effects to make its point, which is why the 21-year-old Gattaca feels retro, even dated in so many ways. The focus remains on ideas about genetic manipulation as its protagonist, Vincent, tries to elude detection as an "in-valid" -- one who was conceived in the messy old random way rather than the "valid" one of pre-screened fertilization that produced his brother, Anton. Vincent wants to go to space, and by working with a shady organization that provides in-valids with the identities of certified valids, he gets his chance, taking on the identity of Jerome Morrow, an athlete who was so depressed at coming in second that he walked in front of a moving car and is crippled for life. The film strains a bit to persuade us that people will accept Vincent's new identity, since Ethan Hawke's Vincent doesn't look a lot like Jude Law's Jerome, except in an ID photo that tries to strike some kind of plausible middle between the two. And later in the film we'll be forced to believe that Vincent and his brother, Anton, don't immediately recognize each other as the grownup versions of the siblings who used to compete with each other in swimming races. But suspension of disbelief aside, Gattaca manages to be a fairly witty and intelligent film. I particularly like the scene in which Vincent/Jerome and the other astronauts board the spaceship to Titan, wearing business suits, not the usual Mylar spacesuits we associate with space travel. It reminds me a bit of the men who board the rocket ship in Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902), wearing top hats.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)

I have to imagine some naive young person whose idea of outrageous filmmaking extends no further than the work of David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino, and who knows Helen Mirren only as the Oscar winner for The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006) and as a dame of the British Empire, coming across The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. It's a full-fledged assault on conventional movies, so provocative that it feels like it was made a decade or so earlier, when filmmakers were testing the limits, and not in the comparatively timid 1980s. The title itself sounds like the setup for a dirty joke, but writer-director Peter Greenaway delivers much more than that. The Cook (Richard Bohringer) runs the kitchen at a fancy restaurant that has been taken over by the Thief (Michael Gambon) and his retinue of thugs, who make a mess of things every night. Meanwhile, the Thief's Wife (Mirren) is carrying on an affair with her bookstore-owner Lover (Alan Howard) in every nook and cranny of the restaurant they can find. When the Thief finds out, the lovers hide from him at the book depository, but the Thief finds and murders him by stuffing pages from books down his throat. Eventually, the Wife, with the culinary assistance of the Cook, takes revenge in a most unappetizing way. The whole thing is played in the most over-the-top fashion imaginable, but the skill and daring of the actors makes it compelling. Gambon makes the Thief so colossally vulgar that we laugh almost as much as we cringe. Mirren and Howard are naked for great stretches of the film, but the effect is less erotic than you might think; instead, it emphasizes their vulnerability. Add to that the extraordinary production design of Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, the sometimes kinky costume design by Jean-Paul Gaultier, the cinematography of Sacha Vierny, and the musical score by Michael Nyman, and what you have is undeniably a work of art -- perverse and sometimes extremely unpleasant, but decidedly unforgettable.

Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

As the truism has it, the movies taught us to see. But the great achievement of Man With a Movie Camera, the thing that causes critics to repeatedly put it on lists of the greatest films of all time, is that it helps us understand what the movies are making us see. In its tour of a city in the Soviet Union -- actually a composite of four cities: Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow, and Odessa -- the film works by montage, by swift cutting from one scene to another, juxtaposing birth and death, marriage and divorce, humanity and the machine, and any number of other supposed opposites, giving us a sense of the interwoven texture of life itself. But at the same time, it exposes us to its own tricks: It shows a carload of people, then it shows us the cameraman precariously perched in another automobile, filming the group. It could even have pulled back to show us the camera filming the car with the cameraman who is filming the original carload, but by that time we've gotten the idea: Movies, like any attempt to construct reality, which we do in every waking moment, are a trick of perception. "Dziga Vertov," which translates from the Ukrainian as something like "spinning top," was the pseudonym of a director also known as Denis Kaufman, whose brother, Boris Kaufman, won an Oscar as the cinematographer for On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954). Unlike Boris, Denis remained in the Soviet Union until his death in 1954, a loyal Marxist who was considered a major director and film theorist well into the 1930s, though his later career was stymied by the ideological changes that took place under Stalin. His wife, Elizaveta Svilova, worked as his editor, and the actual "man with a movie camera" seen in the film was his other brother, Mikhail Kaufman. Man With a Movie Camera is one of the essential films, even today, when almost everyone is a person with a movie camera in the shape of a smartphone in their pocket. It's also one of the most available films ever, readily accessible online. The version on Amazon and YouTube is enhanced by a hypnotic Philip Glass-like score by contemporary film composer Michael Nyman, although other musical accompaniments exist.