Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Chris Cooper, Louis Garrel, Jayne Houdyshell. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I didn't read Little Women as a child: Boys didn't read "girls' books" back then. And when I finally read it -- out loud, to my daughter -- I found it a little stiff and starchy. But it has made for some very good movies, particularly the 1933 Katharine Hepburn version directed by George Cukor and the 1994 Winona Ryder version directed by Gillian Armstrong. Somehow, I don't think we'll be calling this 2019 film the Soirse Ronan version, but rather the Greta Gerwig version. As writer and director, Gerwig has developed a complete and insightful view of the Louisa May Alcott novel, one that takes into account what was always present in the novel but brings it into the light of the 21st century: the changes in the roles and attitudes of women. By rearranging the chronology of the novel and structuring it around the development of Jo March (Ronan) as a writer, Gerwig has accomplished two things: She has allowed the other March sisters to share the spotlight that Jo hogged when she was played by Hepburn and Ryder. She has also revealed the rather sentimental endings of the other films as what they were: contrivances designed to please moviegoers, as they did readers, more than to reflect actual life. By establishing in the film that Jo is accommodating the desire of her publisher (Tracy Letts) that the heroine of her Little Women not remain a spinster, Gerwig is able to go a little bit over the top in the film, bringing back Prof. Bhaer (Louis Garrel), with whom Jo broke off over his criticisms of her writing, for a giddy reunion and wedding to Jo. This is all staged with the kind of unabashed sentimentality, including a glimpse of Jo's very improbable school, in which all the sisters and their husbands are the instructors and the curriculum includes fencing, that can't be taken with a straight face. We are meant to sense that the real Jo March might well have remained a spinster rather than capitulate to, as she puts it in the movie, "people saying that love is just all that women are fit for." It's also an ending that wouldn't have worked if Gerwig and her performers hadn't created characters that have a little more body than the source gives them: Timothée Chalamet's Laurie isn't just the slightly odd young man he is in the book (and in the performances of Douglass Montgomery and Christian Bale in the earlier versions), but rather spoiled, dilettantish, and probably alcoholic. Florence Pugh deserved the Oscar nomination she got for bringing more than just flightiness to the character of Amy. Even Beth (Eliza Scanlen) in this version is more than just the saintly innocent who dies young, and we have Gerwig's script and direction for allowing them to blossom rather than being overwhelmed by Jo, good as Ronan's performance is. I can't quite subscribe to Anthony Lane's comment that her Little Women "may just be the best film yet made by an American woman," which hardly seems fair to the work of directors from Dorothy Arzner to Ida Lupino to Kathryn Bigelow and Kelly Reichardt, but it's certainly a provocative and sometimes audacious triumph. 

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch, Marion Bessay. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Marco Bittner Rosser. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Josef van Wissem.

With its focus on vital fluids, the vampire genre has always been about sex, especially since at the end of the sexually repressed Victorian era, Bram Stoker gave it one of its definitive expressions in Dracula, where the fear of sexuality gets turned into a fear of a living death. But with the fall of so many sexual taboos in the 20th and 21st century, vampirism itself no longer holds the same kind of terrors. It takes an imagination like Jim Jarmusch's to turn things around, to make the vampires afraid of the living. Only Lovers Left Alive is only partly a post-AIDS fable, in which the substance that sustains a vampire can itself prove deadly. Jarmusch's Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are age-old predators reduced in this century to procuring only carefully screened blood, uncontaminated by the misadventures of human beings. He gets his from a hospital researcher who calls himself "Dr. Watson" (Jeffrey Wright), she from an old friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), whose source we never discover. Jarmusch is casual about providing the backstories of his characters; we have to take them for who and what they are, with only tantalizing hints about their long past and even much of their present lives. We gather that this Marlowe is the historical one, who didn't really die in a tavern brawl in 1593, but lived on in exile where he ghost-wrote the plays of Shakespeare and at one point, presumably late in his life, since he is quite elderly when we see him, became a vampire and moved to Tangier. We never learn, either, why Adam and Eve have gone their separate ways after having been married at least three times in their so-called lives. She, too, lives in Morocco, but he has settled in a desolate, abandoned section of Detroit, where he spends his nights composing music and tinkering with electronics. The plot begins when she comes to visit and they are soon joined by her younger sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), an incorrigible troublemaker. But plot isn't much to the point in Jarmusch's film, which is a character study of two sophisticated people who have lived long enough to see the world and human beings (whom he calls "zombies") change around them. It can be said that some of the humor in the movie is a little obvious, sometimes more like a spoof of vampire pictures than the elegant setup of the film deserves. But this is, I think, one of Jarmusch's best films, simply because he has gathered a wonderful company of actors and given them a finely wrought atmosphere to perform in.

Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas, 2018)

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Christa Théret, Nora Hamzawi, Pascal Greggory, Laurent Poitrenaux, Sigrid Bouaziz, Lionel Drey, Nicolas Bouchaud. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Simon Jacquet.

If we learn anything about the French from watching their movies, it's that they love to talk. So many French films are made up of scenes at a table, in a bed, on a train, where the people are less interested in food or sex or travel than in batting ideas back and forth. In Non-Fiction the ideas are about literature and its relationship to life, to commerce, to truth. And yes, the phrase "post-truth era" makes its sullen appearance in the discourse. We begin with the meeting of the poised, groomed publisher Alain Danielson (Guillaume Canet) with the shaggy, bearded writer Léonard Spiegel (Vincent Macaigne), and we can tell from Leónard's slightly anxious manner and Alain's smooth control that things will not end the way Léonard wants: Alain, who has published his other books, is not going to publish his latest. Underlying the situation is something Alain may or may not know (Léonard isn't sure): that Léonard has been having an affair with Alain's wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche), and moreover that the affair is the subject of Léonard's novel. (Léonard has always written romans à clef, although this time he thinks he has thrown Alain off the track by having slept with a popular TV anchorwoman as well as with Selena.) Of course, Alain has been having his own affair with a young woman, Laure (Christa Théret), who works for the publishing company as a sort of "new media" adviser -- leading the talk into conversations about the death of print, the power of the Internet, and so on. Léonard has a wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), who is a consultant to a leftist politician and is so busy that she barely has time for Léonard -- at one point, when she is leaving for an appointment, he goes in for a goodbye kiss and gets the door shut in his face. As for Selena, she's an actress trying to decide whether to commit to another season of the TV cop show she's currently appearing in, or to take an offer to appear in a stage production of Racine's Phèdre, a role she fears may be a sign that she's getting old. There's also a sly "meta" moment in the film when someone suggests that the publisher should hire Juliette Binoche to read the audiobook version of Léonard's novel and asks Selena if she knows her. Some may question whether the film is a satire that doesn't quite have the courage of its bite, or a commentary on the decline of the arts in an era of self-absorption. All of the relationships in the film eventually resolve themselves a little anti-climactically, but Olivier Assayas has such a light touch with the film that it's best to just relax and listen to the talk.

Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)

Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper

Maureen: Kristen Stewart
Ingo: Lars Eidinger
Lara: Sigrid Bouaziz
Erwin: Anders Danielsen Lie
Gary: Ty Olwin
Detective: Hammou Graïa
Kyra: Nora von Waldstätten
Victor Hugo: Benjamin Biolay

Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe
Film editing: Marion Monnier

Olivier Assayas delights in showcasing Kristen Stewart's ambisexual persona in Personal Shopper, a tantalizing ghost story that carefully avoids predictability at every turn. At the end we're left to decide whether the ghosts Maureen encounters are real or just -- as the ghost itself seems to tell her with its single rap signifying "yes" in answer to her question -- projections of her own imagination. It's an ambiguity that seems to have frustrated audiences, which took less warmly to the film than the critics did: Critics see so many movies that resolve their enigmas too patly, so that any film which leaves a viewer dangling in uncertainty seems fresh. Stewart is onscreen for almost the entire film, so that it's easy enough to explain away her encounters with the supernatural as projections of her grief-sodden mind. But then Assayas presents inexplicable occurrences that Maureen doesn't or can't witness, such as the scene in which a hotel's elevator and automatic doors open at the command of an invisible figure, or the one in which we glimpse in the background, as the camera focuses on Maureen, a glass moving through the air and dropping to the ground to shatter behind her back. Assayas is deftly playing with our expectations that what the camera shows us must be real.

A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)

Matthias Schoenaerts and Ralph Fiennes in A Bigger Splash 

Marianne Lane: Tilda Swinton
Paul De Smedt: Matthias Schoenaerts
Harry Hawkes: Ralph Fiennes
Penelope Lannier: Dakota Johnson
Sylvie: Lily McMenamy
Mireille: Aurore Clément
Clara: Elena Bucci
Maresciallo: Corrado Guzzanti

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: David Kajganich
Based on a novel by Alain Page and a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Jacques Deray
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: Maria Djurkovic
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Director Luca Guadagnino made his own bigger splash in 2017 with Call Me by Your Name, but his film called A Bigger Splash attracted admiring reviews two years earlier. Guadagnino has said that the two films and his 2009 I Am Love constitute a "Desire" trilogy. Erotic intrigue is at the heart of A Bigger Splash, which deals not with the eternal triangle so much as a fatal quadrangle. Marianne, a rock star, is recuperating from a throat operation on the island of Pantelleria with her lover, Paul, a documentary filmmaker, when her former lover, a music promoter named Harry, arrives with his daughter, Penelope. Neither Marianne nor Paul is especially pleased by having guests intrude on their solitude, especially since she has been ordered not to speak for a while. Marianne's voice problem is not the only sign of damage in the four characters: Paul is a recovering alcoholic who once attempted suicide, Harry is a manic egotist, and Penelope is a 17-year-old pretending to be 22 and -- we discover later -- speaks fluent Italian, a fact she chooses to hide from the others. She also lives with her mother in the States and neither she nor Harry knew of each other's existence until recently. There is a queasy touch of incestuousness to Harry's attentions to Penelope. Guadagnino and his actors keep the tension among the four characters at a low simmer for most of the film, and even after things reach the boiling point, the film deftly avoids melodramatic excess. Fiennes, usually a more reserved actor, gives an uncharacteristically flamboyant performance as Harry. The film oddly feels a little dated, like a French or Italian film from the 1960s, such as Jacques Deray's La Piscine (1969), the first filming of Alain Page's novel.

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)

Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria

Maria Enders: Juliette Binoche
Valentine: Kristen Stewart
Jo-Ann Ellis: Chloë Grace Moretz
Klaus Diesterweg: Lars Eidinger
Christopher Giles: Johnny Flynn
Rosa Melchior: Angela Winkler
Henryk Wald: Hanns Zischler

Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe
Film editing: Marion Monnier

Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria demands almost as much attention after you've finished it as it did while you were watching/reading it. The set-up is this: An actress, Maria Enders, is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous when she was only 18. Now that she's in her 40s, however, she will play the older woman who has a relationship with the character she earlier played. She accepts reluctantly, and then wants to back out when she finds that the younger actress, Jo-Ann Ellis, who has been cast in her original role is a Hollywood star best known not only for working in sci-fi blockbusters but also for her off-screen affairs that draw the attention of the paparazzi and Internet gossip sites. However, Maria's personal assistant, Valentine, thinks Jo-Ann is a good actress who has been exploited by the media, and persuades Maria to take the role. Maria and Valentine retreat to the home of the play's author, who has recently died, in Sils Maria, a Swiss village, where Valentine helps Maria learn her lines. As the film progresses, the lines of the play echo not only Maria's own feelings about growing older, but also the somewhat ambiguous relationship between Maria and Valentine. Indeed, it's often not entirely clear whether actress and assistant are reciting the lines of the play or are voicing their own feelings for each other. And then the casting of the film brings out another layer of meaning: Stewart is best-known for the Twilight movies, precisely the kind of Hollywood film that Maria turns up her nose at when she first hears about Jo-Ann's career. Assayas, who also wrote the screenplay, deftly juggles all these layers of art and reality, but the film would be nothing without Stewart's superb performance, which won her the César Award in France as well as the best supporting actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. There are those who think the film is more talk than substance and that it feels like a "high-concept" product: Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) meets All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), perhaps. But seeing Stewart interact with Binoche more than justifies it for me.