Mud (Jeff Nichols, 2012)

Jacob Lofland, Matthew McConaughey, and Tye Sheridan in Mud

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Michael Shannon, Joe Don Baker, Paul Sparks, Bonnie Sturdivant. Screenplay: Jeff Nichols. Cinematography: Adam Stone. Production design: Richard A. Wright. Film editing: Julie Monroe. Music: David Wingo.

Mud is often cited as the beginning of the "McConaughnaissance" -- i.e., the start of the resurgence of Matthew McConaughey's career after a spell of vapid romantic comedies and forgotten action movies. His scruffy and sly but deeply self-deluding title character -- we never learn his full name, or even if he has one -- is not so much a departure from his previous persona as it is a new spin on the good looks and charisma of his earlier roles. It would take a physical transformation in Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013) to earn him an Oscar, but what that film, along with Mud and his much-talked-about performance in the 2014 TV series True Detective, really proved is that good actors need good scripts. And Jeff Nichols's screenplay for Mud is a good one, even if it falls back at the end on a conventional shootout and happy ending. Nichols has acknowledged that the river setting and the role played by two boys in the story are inspired by Mark Twain. Tye Sheridan as the Tom Sawyer analogue named Ellis and Jacob Lofland as the Huck Finn equivalent called Neckbone are superbly natural performers. Sam Shepard brings his usual gravitas to the part of the enigmatic Tom Blankenship, but Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Paulson are wasted in the chief female roles.

Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point

Mark: Mark Frechette
Daria: Daria Halprin
Lee Allen: Rod Taylor
Cafe Owner: Paul Fix
Lee's Associate: G.D. Spradlin
Morty: Bill Garaway
Kathleen: Kathleen Cleaver

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Rossetti, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe
Cinematography: Alfio Contini
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Music: Jerry Garcia, Pink Floyd

It sometimes seems as if every bad movie eventually finds an audience, even if only as fodder for wisecracks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Makers of bad movies even have movies made about them, like Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) or James Franco's The Disaster Artist, his upcoming film about Tommy Wiseau, the auteur of The Room (2003), a film whose badness turned it into a cult movie. Things get a little more complicated when the filmmaker is a director of the stature of Michelangelo Antonioni. Zabriskie Point is certainly a bad movie by any usual standards of plot or performance. Its endorsement of the revolutionary fervor of the young felt naive at the time and now seems at best simplistic. It was a critical and commercial flop: Roger Ebert called it "silly and stupid," and it banked only $900,000, against a cost of $7 million, on its initial theatrical run. But like another major flop, Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), it has been the subject of a continuing reassessment, attracting defenders and even a small coterie -- not to say cult -- of admirers, especially for its ending: a spectacular demolition of a desert house, with interpolated shots of the contents of a refrigerator and a closet being lofted in the air in slow motion. The fact remains, however, that Zabriskie Point really has nothing to say except that capitalist consumerism is bad and being young is good -- especially if you're hot. Neither point is made subtly and persuasively. The most glaring weakness is in the casting of its two young leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, who give almost hilariously inept performances as lovers drawn together in their rebellion. We never learn, for example, why Daria becomes so destructively disillusioned with her boss, real estate developer Lee Allen, that she imagines the cataclysm that ends the movie. It seems to have been inspired by her improbable encounter with Mark, who has stolen a small plane and, seeing her driving far below, decides to buzz her automobile. When he lands and they meet, they wander out into the desert, where they have sex. Their coupling is multiplied by a fantasy sequence of perhaps a score of couples rolling around in the dust. Incredible as the meeting of Mark and Daria is, it's perhaps more incredible that Antonioni, who had worked with actors of the caliber of Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, and Monica Vitti, should have found anything to work with in Frechette and Halprin, whose lack of affect and stilted delivery verge on the ludicrous. Still, the film always gives us something to look at. Cinematographer Alfio Contini has an especially keen eye for the absurd and ugly jumble of billboards and signs that clutter Los Angeles, but he's equally skilled at capturing the beauty of Death Valley and the high desert in Arizona. Too bad that the visuals only serve to reinforce the banal contrast between civilization's corruption and nature's purity.

Turner Classic Movies

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Nastassja Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas has so much going for it: the performances of Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, the dialogue by Sam Shepard, the cinematography of Robby Müller, the music by Ry Cooder. It won every major award at Cannes. So why do I feel like it's an unsatisfying film? It's not that I demand resolution from a work of art: That's a criterion long absent from modern and postmodern criticism. Life doesn't resolve itself, so why should art? I think it's partly that Paris, Texas resolves too much -- namely, its initial mystery: Why is Travis Henderson (Stanton) wandering in the desert, speechless and amnesiac? But the film doesn't make the explanation resonate with anything other than the failure of a marriage -- or perhaps two, since the marriage of Walt (Stockwell) and Anne (Aurore Clément) seems to be held together only by Travis's son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), whom they have been raising since his disappearance. It's as if L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) had concluded with an explanation for Anna's disappearance, when in fact that unresolved disappearance is the whole point of the film: a catalyst for the experiences of Claudia and Sandro. Are we supposed to feel that the reunion of Jane (Nastassja Kinski) with Hunter -- a sex worker and an uprooted child -- is a kind of closure? It was Jane, after all, who gave up Hunter to Walt and Anne after Travis's first disappearance. For me, the first half of Paris, Texas is brilliant moviemaking: among other things in its superb use of landscape -- both the bleakness of Texas and the freeway- and airport-choked Southern California -- as a correlative for the lives of Travis and Walt. It's when Travis takes Hunter on the road in a needle-in-a-haystack search for Jane that the film falls apart. Wenders had already made a film about this kind of search: Alice in the Cities (1974), which seems to me a more satisfying film than Paris, Texas because it doesn't overreach itself, it doesn't complicate things with too many backstories and too much striving toward significance. It comes as no surprise to learn that the film was only half-written when it was begun, and that Shepard, who had been called away to work on another film, literally phoned in the climactic narrative in which Travis explains his disappearance. Though it's a tribute to the brilliance of both Shepard and Stanton that the scene comes off as well as it does, it plays as a set piece, and not as an organic part of what has gone before.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Both the title and the film are overlong, but it's hard to see how either of them could have been trimmed. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a lingering, subtle meditation on the nature of celebrity set in an era long before the arrival of social media thrust celebrities like Donald Trump into our daily lives. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck give memorable performances in their respective title roles -- Affleck received a supporting actor Oscar nomination, although his role is surely larger than Pitt's -- and they're well supported by Sam Shepard as Frank James, Mary-Louise Parker in the thankless role of Jesse's wife, Sam Rockwell as Robert Ford's brother Charley, and Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, and Paul Schneider as various ill-fated members of the James gang. There's also a cameo by former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville as the governor of Missouri who precipitates the assassination. It was only the second feature directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik, who wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Ron Hansen. There's a bit too much lyric profundity in the screenplay, as in the voiceover by the narrator (Hugh Ross), who tells us about Jesse James: "Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified." That's a hard description for any actor to live up to, but Pitt does a good job of it in perhaps the best performance of his career. Since the title pretty much gives the plot away, the film wisely concentrates on exploring the characters of James and Ford, who meet when the latter joins the James gang for a train robbery in Blue Cut, Missouri. Ford has worshiped James since boyhood, and in one splendid scene James taunts and teases him into revealing the depths of his infatuation. Ford has memorized everything that could possibly link him to James: They both have brothers whose names contain six letters, for example. This is homoerotic hero-worship at its most intense -- and eventually, most deadly. The movie was filmed in Canada, with superb, Oscar-nominated cinematography by Roger Deakins. The score is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Cave himself plays the saloon singer who taunts Ford with "The Ballad of Jesse James," which refers to "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard" (James's pseudonym).

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.