The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

I don't know how many years it's been since I saw this in some university film series or other, but I remember finding it rather silly and quaint. In the meantime it has been carefully restored: The flickering black-and-white images I must have seen have been replaced by smooth digitalized projection and the appropriate color filters, as well as the original hand-painted intertitles, and an appropriately spiky modern score by John Zorn has been added. It's clearly a classic, both of its time and enduring into future times. The film has been endlessly analyzed, most notoriously by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, in which Kracauer posits that the film reveals post-World War I Germany's subconscious desire for an authoritative leader. In other words, Caligari equals Hitler. Considering that in the film Caligari, as played by Werner Krauss, looks both sinister and absurd, something like an elderly owl in a top hat, I find the argument hard to swallow. But this is one film that will probably never exhaust interpretation. I think it's best just to enjoy it as a tremendously gripping artistic experience.

The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges, 1960

In July, Turner Classic Movies, my indispensable source for movies, ran two 1950 films by Akira Kurosawa that demonstrated how profoundly influenced by Hollywood Kurosawa was: the film-noir-steeped The Bad Sleep Well and the romantic drama Scandal. (In the latter, Toshiro Mifune plays a pipe-smoking, motorcycle-riding artist who could have come out of a Paramount or 20th Century-Fox film of the 1940s -- an imitation of any number of Hollywood leading men of the era, such as Gregory Peck, Dana Andrews, or Joel McCrea.) But as any Kurosawa fan knows, the major influence on his films, especially his samurai movies, was the American Western. No wonder that filmmakers eventually turned things around and borrowed from the borrower. Sturges's version of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), was the first to do so, but Martin Ritt soon followed suit with The Outrage (1964), his version of Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950), and Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone because of the unacknowledged remake of Yojimbo (1961) called A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Magnificent Seven, though probably the best of the Kurosawa copies, pales in comparison with its source, but it helped make Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn into stars. In his book Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges, my former Mercury News colleague Glenn Lovell has some amusing stories about the jousting among the actors for screen time, and you can clearly see McQueen, with his more naturalistic style, upstaging the stiff and mannered Yul Brynner.

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

T.E. Lawrence: Peter O'Toole
Prince Faisal: Alec Guinness
Auda Abu Tayi: Anthony Quinn
Gen. Allenby: Jack Hawkins
Sherif Ali: Omar Sharif
Turkish Bey: José Ferrer
Col. Brighton: Anthony Quayle
Mr. Dryden: Claude Rains
Jackson Bentley: Arthur Kennedy
Gen. Murray: Donald Wolfit
Gasim: I.S. Johar
Majid: Gamil Ratib
Farraj: Michel Ray
Daud: John Dimech
Tafas: Zia Mohyeddin

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Based on the writings of T.E. Lawrence
Cinematography: Freddie Young
Production design: John Box
Film editing: Anne V. Coates
Music: Maurice Jarre

It's often said -- in fact, it was said in today's San Francisco Chronicle -- that David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is one of those films that must be seen in a theater. That statement kind of gets my back up: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? As it happens, I first saw Lawrence in a theater in the year of its release (or at least its European release, which was 1963), but it was a theater in Germany and the film was dubbed in German. Only moderately fluent in spoken German, I don't think I followed the dialogue very well, though I certainly appreciated the spectacle, especially Freddie Young's Oscar-winning cinematography. It took some later viewings on TV in the States for me to grasp the movie's story, though the film was trimmed for time, interrupted by commercials, and subjected to atrocious panning-and-scanning because viewers objected to letterboxing of wide-screen movies. So this viewing was probably my first complete exposure to Lean's celebrated film. And though I watched it at home -- in HD on a 32-inch flat screen TV -- I think I fully appreciated both the spectacle and the story. Which is not to say that I think the movie is all it's celebrated for being. The first half of the film is far more compelling than the latter half, and some of the casting is unforgivable, particularly Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal and Anthony Quinn as Auda. Guinness was usually a subtle actor, but his Faisal is mannered and unconvincing. Quinn simply overacts, as he was prone to do with directors who let him, and his prosthetic beak is atrocious. Omar Sharif, on the other hand, is very good as Ali. The producers are said to have wanted Horst Buchholz or Alain Delon, but they settled on Sharif, already a star in Egypt, and made him an international star. His success points up how unfortunate it is that they couldn't have found Middle Eastern actors to play Faisal and Auda. In his film debut, Peter O'Toole gives a tremendous performance, even though he's nothing like the shorter and more nondescript figure that was the real T.E. Lawrence, and it's sad that screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson couldn't have found room in the script to trace the origins of Lawrence's obsession with Arabia. I recently read Scott Anderson's terrific Lawrence in Arabia: Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which not only depicts Lawrence's complexity but also the madness of the spy-haunted, oil-hungry wartime world in which he played his part. It's beyond the scope of even a three-and-a-half-hour movie to tell, though maybe it would make a tremendous TV miniseries some day.

Show People (King Vidor, 1928)

William Haines and Marion Davies in Show People

Peggy Pepper: Marion Davies
Billy Boone: William Haines
Col. Pepper: Dell Henderson
Andre Telfair: Paul Ralli
Casting Director: Tenen Holtz
Comedy Director: Harry Gribbon
Dramatic Director: Sidney Bracey
Maid: Polly Moran
Producer: Albert Conti

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Agnes Christine Johnston, Laurence Stallings, Wanda Tuchock; Titles: Ralph Spence
Cinematography: John Arnold
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Hugh Wynn

It's a shame that Marion Davies is known today primarily as William Randolph Hearst's mistress, and hence the presumable model for the talentless opera singer Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). For Davies was not only not an opera singer, she was also bursting with talent. King Vidor's Show People demonstrates her skill for comedy, acknowledged as an inspiration by such later glamorous comedians as Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball. Everything Davies could do except talk -- this is one of her last silent films -- is on display, including her skill at slapstick: She does a fine pratfall and takes copious amounts of seltzer in the face. (Hearst reportedly forbade her being the recipient of a custard pie -- that was somehow one shtick beneath her.) She mugs divinely as the comic actress Peggy Pepper who is "promoted" into the serious artiste Patricia Pepoire. Attempting a Mae Murray-style bee-stung lips, Davies comes up with a hilariously rabbity moue. The movie also gives us a chance to see William Haines at work. One of the few leading men of the day who dared to lead an almost openly gay life, Haines plays the comic actor who gives Peggy her first break into pictures, loses her when she tries to become a dramatic actress, but of course finally gets her after she sheds the Patricia Pepoire persona. When he was ordered by MGM's bullying Louis B. Mayer to pretend to be straight in his offscreen life, Haines quit pictures and became a successful interior designer; his life partner, Jimmie Shields, became his business partner as well. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were among their clients. Show People also has cameos by Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, and other stars of the day. Peggy Pepper even encounters Marion Davies herself in one scene.

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)

I didn't get Rushmore the first time I saw it, so I thought that, having seen most of Wes Anderson's subsequent films, it was time to revisit. And yes, I get it now. The problem is that it still leaves me a little cold. Part of my trouble with the movie lies with its central character, Max Fischer, who as played by Jason Schwartzman and written by Anderson and Owen Wilson begins as such an obnoxious twerp that it's hard to switch allegiance when the film eventually turns him into a sympathetic figure. It's difficult, too, to see why Olivia Williams's character, Miss Cross, puts up with him so long. My suspicion is that Williams didn't quite understand what Anderson and Wilson were going at with her part -- maybe she didn't get Rushmore either. As a result, we see her torn between two inappropriate suitors, Schwartzman and Bill Murray, but playing her part as a conventional romantic comedy heroine. Fortunately, everyone else in the cast, including such splendid actors as Seymour Cassel and Brian Cox, is completely into the loopy world that Anderson has created. There are those who think that in his later movies Anderson has either gone too cutesy or atrophied into a kind of zaniness for zaniness's sake, but I'm not one of them. I think he has learned how to superimpose his eccentric stories on the real world so that they work as the kind of satiric commentary that doesn't quite come off in Rushmore.

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)

Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi in A Separation

Nader: Peyman Moaadi
Simin: Leila Hatami
Razieh: Sareh Bayat
Hojjat: Shahab Hosseini
Termeh: Sarina Farhadi
Nader's Father: Ali-Asghar Shahbadi
Simin's Mother: Shirin Yazdanbakhsh

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi
Cinematography: Mahmoud Kalari

The original title in Persian translates as The Separation of Nader and Simin, but the film is about more separations than just that of the husband and wife played by Peyman Moaadi and Leila Hatami. It's about the separations between parents and children, between the middle class and the laboring class, between the devout and the worldly, and between the judicial system and those it supposedly serves. And for American audiences it also serves as a reminder of the separation that has existed between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran for more than 30 years. The movie was the first Iranian film to win the best foreign language film Oscar, and Farhadi's stunning script was also nominated for the best original screenplay Oscar. (It lost to Woody Allen's screenplay for Midnight in Paris.)  Whatever we may think of the regime in Iran, the universality of the human problems presented in the film stands in sharp contrast to the usual American attitude toward Iranians as alien and hostile. It struck me especially because this is the second film in a row I've watched about citizens caught in the inscrutable workings of their judicial system. Like the Russians in Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014), the two Iranian families locked in conflict in Farhadi's film must cope with the seeming indifference of the judges to their complicated problems. I was feeling complacent about the American justice system until I watched a segment of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on the horrific abuses of the public defender system which, especially if you happen to be poor and black, is every bit as cruelly broken as the corrupt Russian courts and the hidebound Iranian ones.

Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)

I happened on this movie by accident while browsing the Starz schedule, and had to look it up on IMDb before I remembered that it was the official Russian entry in the Oscar foreign film category -- and that there was some controversy in Russia over its portrayal of the hard-drinking Russians, the corrupt bureaucracy, and the complicit Russian Orthodox Church. It's a truly astonishing film when you consider all of these things, and that the villain of the film, the grasping, criminal major (played to the creepy depths by Roman Madyanov) presides over his malfeasance under a watchful portrait of Vladimir Putin. At one point in the movie, the protagonist, Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov), and his friends engage in some drunken target practice that involves shooting at pictures of Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and other former communist leaders. One of the group says he has pictures of some more recent targets once those are gone. Cynicism and bitterness prevail throughout the film, and with its dark humor and deep-rooted hopelessness it reminds me of hard-core American film noir. Through it all, though, there's the soiled beauty of the Russian landscape, splendidly filmed by Mikhail Krichman. There are some chilling moments, such as the monotone readings of the court's judgment against Kolya in his suit against the mayor and the even more devastating judgment against Kolya at the film's end. And it's heart-wrenching to watch the destruction of Kolya's home from inside, with furnishings that we have come to know from earlier scenes in the movie still in place, being swept away by the jaw of wrecking machine. Zvyagintsev is a director I want to see more of, especially his critically praised The Return (2003) and Elena (2011).

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

From the rather uninvolved performance he gives here, it's a little hard to realize that Ryan O'Neal was once a major movie star. Scenes are stolen from him right and left by such skilled character actors as Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff, Murray Melvin, Leonard Rossiter, and Leon Vitale. But this detachment of the titular character seems to be part of Kubrick's plan to de-emphasize the story's drama: He even provides a narrator (Michael Hordern) who gives away the plot before it develops on the screen. When actions and emotions erupt in the story, they do so with a kind of jolt, the audience having been lulled by the stately pace of the film and by the undeniably gorgeous visuals: Ken Adam's production design, Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero's costumes, and John Alcott's cinematography all won Oscars, as did Leonard Rosenman's orchestration of themes from Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Handel. It is undeniably one of the most visually beautiful films ever made, its images intentionally echoing works by Hogarth, Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, and other 18th-century artists. Alcott used specially designed lenses, created for NASA to allow low-light filming, to allow many scenes to be filmed by candlelight. But it's also a painfully slow movie, stretching to more than three hours. I don't have anything against slowness: One of my favorite movies, Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953), is often criticized for slowness. But the slowness of Ozu's film is in service of characters we come to know and care about. Kubrick gives us no one to care about very much, and O'Neal's Barry never registers as a developed character.

V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005)

I'm not sure how Guy Fawkes became a hero and blowing up the Houses of Parliament an admirable political act, but V for Vendetta certainly seems to endorse both of them. (The latter seems especially odd in a movie made only four years after the 9/11 attacks.) I haven't read the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, so I can't comment on the fidelity or lack of it to the source, which is just as well. But the film bears the stamp of most adaptations from graphic novel/comic book sources: an assumption that the viewer will accept the movie's milieu on its own terms, without trying to haul in real-world plausibility. It's easier to do that if you have a cast capable of playing almost anything from Shakespeare to soap opera. So the presence of actors like Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, John Hurt, Tim Piggott-Smith, Rupert Graves, and Sinéad Cusack goes a long way to keeping V for Vendetta alive. I particularly liked Roger Allam as a rabble-rousing news commentator in the mold of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. I was less impressed with Natalie Portman, whose British accent came and went fitfully and who generally seemed at sea. It may be that the script by Andy and Lana Wachowski called for her character, Evey, to be off-balance through most of the film, but I failed to connect with her performance, which since she is meant to be the audience's point-of-view character is something of a fatal flaw.

Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006)

I want to watch a movie about the calamity that befalls a Moroccan family when they acquire a rifle to shoot the jackals that prey on their herd of goats. Or a movie about a nanny for a well-to-do San Diego couple who unwisely decides to take her employers' small children with her when she goes to her son's wedding in Mexico. Or a movie about a deaf Japanese teenager who suffers from sexual confusion in the aftermath of her mother's suicide. But I don't want to watch them all at once, which is what Babel forces us to do. It's a terrifically ambitious film, with some stunning location work in four widespread countries, and it has some great performances, particularly by Oscar nominees Adriana Barraza as the nanny and Rinko Kikuchi as the teenager. It probably deserved the nominations for best picture and for González Iñárritu's direction, too. (It won for Gustavo Santaolalla's score.) But intercutting the three stories mentioned above and centering them on the plight of the San Diego couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) severely reduces their dramatic force and interest. Why, I wonder, were Pitt's and Blanchett's characters on a bus tour of Morocco with a bunch of rather unpleasant Brits? If, as the movie seems to suggest, it's to work on their relationship after their loss of a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, it's a very odd choice indeed. Their movie-star presence also skews the film away from the performances of the less well-known international stars. Structurally, the Japanese story seems poorly integrated: Its only link to the other stories is that the rifle that turns up in Morocco was originally owned by the Japanese girl's father. What struck me as strongest about the movie was its subtext: the bureaucratic paralysis of the American superpower in the wake of 9/11. Pitt and Blanchett are unable to get the help they need in Morocco because of the paranoia about Islamic terrorism that forces an unwanted and unnecessary caution on the U.S. State Department. American immigration policy also prevents a sensible resolution to the problem of the nanny and the children. Babel is certainly not without its rewards, but a scaling-back of its ambitions might have produced a better movie -- or maybe three or four of them.