High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in High Noon

Marshal Will Kane: Gary Cooper
Amy Fowler Kane: Grace Kelly
Harvey Pell: Lloyd Bridges
Helen Ramirez: Katy Jurado
Jonas Henderson: Thomas Mitchell
Percy Mettrick: Otto Kruger
Martin Howe: Lon Chaney Jr.
Sam Fuller: Harry Morgan
Frank Miller: Ian MacDonald
Jack Colby: Lee Van Cleef
Mildred Fuller: Eve McVeagh
Dr. Mahin: Morgan Farley
Jim Pierce: Robert J. Wilkie
Ben Miller: Sheb Wooley

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Screenplay: Carl Foreman
Based on a story by John W. Cunningham
Cinematography: Floyd Crosby
Production design: Rudolph Sternad
Film editing: Elmo Williams, Harry Gerstad
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

High Noon, as has often been noted, is a movie of almost classical simplicity, adhering to the unities of place (the town of Hadleyville) and time (virtually, with perhaps only a little fudging, the runtime of the film). There are no flashbacks -- the only expository moment involves a shot of an empty chair -- and no preliminaries or codas: It begins with the wedding of Will Kane and Amy Fowler, and ends with a shot of them riding out of town. It's what makes the movie enduringly satisfying, but also what once seemed to make people want to superadd a layer of significance by interpreting it as a parable about blacklisting. That would have been inevitable anyway, since screenwriter Carl Foreman had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and left the country before the film was released. But it strains the tight confines of the film's narrative. Not surprisingly, High Noon took some hits from critics on the right like John Wayne, but it was also stigmatized for a long time as "pretentious." Andrew Sarris called it an "anti-populist anti-Western," but that, too, seems to me to burden the film with too much message. (Anyway, aren't Westerns, with their emphasis on wandering loners, essentially "anti-populist"?) Sixty-five years later, it's possible to view High Noon as nothing more than a neat and tidy narrative about simple heroism, which is not at all "anti-Western," a phrase that suggests far more psychological complexity than the movie possesses. Will Kane is still the good guy and Frank Miller and his gang are black-hearted baddies. If you want moral complexity, go watch The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) or The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969). It's true that High Noon was overpraised at the time, winning four Oscars -- for Cooper, film editors Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad, composer Dimitri Tiomkin for the score and, with lyricist Ned Washington, the song "High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin')" -- and nominations for best picture, director, and screenplay. But that the Academy should even have acknowledged the virtues of a Western, a genre it typically looked down upon, is significant -- even though it reverted to its usual indifference to the genre a few years later, when it entirely ignored The Searchers.

Omar (Hany Abu-Assad, 2013)

Omar is an involving thriller that earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, and currently has a 90 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But a few critics think it goes too far in depicting its Palestinian characters as good guys and the Israelis as villains -- the word "agitprop" has been used. Which goes to show once again that art and politics are uneasy, if necessary, companions. The film was made with Palestinian money, and the country submitting it for the Oscar was Palestine (whose designation as a country itself stirs controversy), but it was filmed in the Israeli city of Nazareth as well as in the West Bank city of Nablus. Omar (Adam Bakri) is a young man who, after being tormented by Israeli soldiers, joins with his friends Tarek (Eyad Hourani) and Amjad (Samer Bisharat) in retaliation. They sneak up on an Israeli encampment and Amjad (though reluctantly) shoots one of the soldiers. When Omar is captured and tortured, he is tricked by an Israeli officer, Rami (Waleed Zuaiter), posing as a Palestinian, into saying "I will never confess," which the military courts recognize as tantamount to a confession. But Rami persuades Omar to take a deal: He can go free if he will work to lead them to Tarek, whom they identify as the leader of the group. What follows is a complex story of betrayal and retribution, complicated by Omar's love for Tarek's sister Nadia (Leem Lubany). Omar stays just shy of sinking into pure melodrama, thanks to director Abu-Assad's screenplay, his well-handled action sequences of the pursuit of Omar through the narrow streets and across the rooftops of Nazareth, and some effective performances by attractive young actors like Bakri and Lubany. The glimpses of a culture too often seen through the lens of geopolitics also strengthen the film. The film may be politically biased, but it's also a tale of the strong vs. the weak, which may be why so many of us can ignore the complexities of the actuality underlying it.

Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

The raw pathos of Broken Blossoms has probably never been equaled on film, thanks to three extraordinary performers. Lillian Gish is a known quantity, of course, but it's startling to see Donald Crisp as one of the most odious villains in film history. Crisp, whose film-acting career spanned more than fifty years, from the earliest silent shorts through his final performance in Spencer's Mountain (Delmer Daves, 1963), is best known today for fatherly and grandfatherly roles in How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941), Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943), and National Velvet (Clarence Brown, 1944), but his performance as Battling Burrows is simply terrifying. As the cockney fighter, he displays a macho strut that might have influenced James Cagney. Richard Barthelmess is no less impressive as Cheng Huan, known in the film mostly as The Yellow Man. We have to make allowances for the stereotyping and the "yellowface" performance today, but Barthelmess (and Griffith) deserve some credit for ennobling the character, running counter to the widespread anti-Asian sentiments and fear of miscegenation in the era. Barthelmess, who became a matinee idol, makes The Yellow Man simultaneously creepy and sympathetic. And then there's Gish, who as usual throws herself (almost literally) into the role of the waif, Lucy. It's an astonishing performance that virtually defined film acting for at least the next decade, until sound came in and actors could rely on something other than their faces and bodies to communicate. True, some of her gestures lent themselves to parody, as when Buster Keaton steals Lucy's trick of pushing up the corners of her mouth to force a smile in Go West (1925), but parody is often the sincerest form of flattery.

A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014)

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year

Abel Morales: Oscar Isaac
Anna Morales: Jessica Chastain
Julian: Elyes Gabel
Andrew Walsh: Albert Brooks
D.A. Lawrence: David Oyelowo
Peter Forente: Alessandro Nivola

Director: J.C. Chandor
Screenplay: J.C. Chandor
Cinematography: Robert Levi, Bradford Young

In a movie that might have been called "Do the Most Right Thing," Oscar Isaac plays yet another ethically challenged protagonist. Abel Morales is not as cranky as Llewyn Davis or as politically savvy as Nick Wasicsko, the beleaguered Yonkers mayor of the 2015 HBO series Show Me a Hero, but he's another little guy who deserves better than the forces opposed to him will allow. He's no moral paragon: He couldn't have built a successful heating oil company in New York City without bending a few of the rules -- and without the help of his less-scrupulous wife, Anna. It's 1981, and Morales is on the brink of a big deal, purchasing property on the East River that will enable him to eliminate some of the middlemen in the business. But then everything starts going awry: His trucks are being hijacked and the district attorney has decided to make him a target in his exposé of corrupt practices in the heating oil business. It's a gritty urban tale, the kind that the movies haven't seen much of lately, demanding an audience that doesn't ask for a lot of glamour and knows how to wait patiently for things to unfold. As director and screenwriter, J.C. Chandor resists the temptation to reveal too much too swiftly, building a quiet tension as we begin to bring the story into focus. He also handles action well, as the title suggests, although much of the violence is latent. Best of all, he showcases some fine performances, not only from Isaac and Chastain and Oyelowo, but also from Albert Brooks as Morales's attorney, Elyes Gabel as one of the victimized truck drivers, and Alessandro Nivola as one of Morales's mobbed-up competitors. There are moments when the script's depiction of Morales's determination to go as straight as possible seems a little too much like forcing him into the good-guy role, and the climax is too melodramatic, but on the whole it's a solid movie.

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

Preston Sturges, who was a screenwriter before he became a hyphenated writer-director, has a reputation for verbal wit. It's very much in evidence in The Lady Eve, with lines like "I need him like the ax needs the turkey."  But what distinguishes Sturges from writers who just happen to fall into directing is his gift for pacing the dialogue, for knowing when to cut. What makes the first stateroom scene between Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) and Charles (Henry Fonda) so sexy is that much of it is a single take, relying on the actors' superb timing -- and perhaps on some splendid coaching from Sturges. But he also has a gift for sight gags like Mr. Pike (Eugene Pallette) clanging dish covers like cymbals to demand his breakfast. And his physical comedy is brilliantly timed, particularly in the repeated pratfalls and faceplants that Fonda undergoes when confronted with a Lady Eve who looks so much like Jean. Fonda is a near perfect foil for gags like those, his character's dazzled innocence reinforced by the actor's undeniable good looks. There's hardly any other star of the time who would make Charles Pike quite so credible: Cary Grant, for example, would have turned the pratfalls into acrobatic moves. The other major thing that Sturges had going for him is a gallery of character actors, the likes of which we will unfortunately never see again: Pallette, Charles Coburn, William Demarest (who made exasperation eloquent), Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, and numerous well-chosen bit players.  

Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton and Richard Starzak, 2015)

The look of Aardman Animations' stop-motion characters hasn't changed much in the years since the first Wallace and Gromit short in 1990, though the humanoid characters have become more diverse. We now see people of color, including a Muslim woman wearing a hijab, on the street. And the basic slapstick humor hasn't changed, either. It still has that essentially British overtone, even in Shaun the Sheep Movie, which has no intelligible dialogue. I doubt, for example, that Pixar, even though its films are perceptibly influenced by Aardman, would venture into the kind of fart jokes and the gags based on the anus of a pantomime horse that are on display in this movie. And all of that is to the good. For what the Aardman films do so well -- especially the ones by Nick Park, who created Shaun and his colleagues, and is listed as executive producer on this film -- is revive the fine art of Sennett and Chaplin and Keaton and Arbuckle, the masters of silent slapstick comedy. Aardman has the advantage that its actors are clay and not flesh, so they can undergo assaults that would obliterate even so resilient an actor as Buster Keaton, but it succeeds in making its characters believable by putting limits on the mayhem. We know that the actors are putty in the hands of the animators, and yet somehow we wince at their peril when they're trapped by the villain on the edge of what a sign describes as "Convenient Quarry." (One of the delights of the movie, which makes you want to watch it again, are the blink-and-you-miss-it gags on the fringe of the action, like that sign.) Shaun the Sheep Movie was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar, but lost to Pixar's brilliant Inside Out. These are grand times indeed for animation.

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

The technology used in it may have dated, but The Conversation seems more relevant than ever. When it was made, the film was very much of the moment: the Watergate moment, which was long before email and cell phones. Julian Assange was only 3 years old. What has kept Coppola's film alive is that he had the good sense to make it a thriller about the consequences of knowledge. The real victim of Harry Caul's snooping is Harry Caul himself, the professional whose delight in what he can do with his microphones and tape recorders begins to fade when he realizes that technology is not an end in itself. It is one of the great Gene Hackman performances from a career crowded with great and varied performances. Ironically, the film that The Conversation most reminds me of today is The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 film about eavesdropping by the Stasi in East Germany, which was praised by conservatives like John Podhoretz and William F. Buckley and called one of "the best conservative movies of the last 25 years" by the National Review for its account of surveillance by a communist regime. But Harry Caul is a devout Roman Catholic and an entrepreneur, making his living with the same technology and the same techniques as the Stasi spy of Donnersmarck's film -- capitalism alive and well. The film is something of a technological marvel itself: The great sound designer and editor Walter Murch was responsible for completing it after Coppola was called away to work on The Godfather, Part II, and the texture of the film depends heavily on the way Murch was able to manipulate the complexities of sound that form the key scenes, especially the opening sequence in which Caul is conducting his surveillance of a couple in San Francisco's crowded and busy Union Square. It's true that Murch cheats a little at the ending, when the line, "He'd kill us if he got the chance," is repeated. Caul had extracted it from a distorted recording, and took it to mean that the couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) were in danger from the man who commissioned the surveillance. But at the end, the line is heard again as "He'd kill us if he got the chance," an emphasis that reveals to Caul, too late, that they are the killers, not the victims. It's unfortunate that so much depends on the discrepancy between the way we originally hear the line and the later delivery of it. Still, I don't think it's a fatal flaw in a still vital and gripping movie.

Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

Is Goodbye to Language the autumnal masterwork of a genius filmmaker? Or is it just an exercise in playing with old techniques -- montage, jump cuts, oblique and fragmented narrative -- in a new (at least to Godard) medium -- 3D? Not having seen the film in 3D, I'm not perhaps fully qualified to comment, but I have to say that it didn't open any new insights for me into the potential of film or the Godard oeuvre as a whole. That in the film Godard makes the wanderings of a dog more coherent and interesting than the conflicts of his human characters is telling: He is obviously more emotionally invested in the dog, played by his own pet, Roxy Miéville, than in the people, whose story can only be pieced together from the fragments of what they do and say to each other. Language, as the title suggests, is subordinate to direct sensation, in which the dog has an advantage over the incessantly chattering and analyzing humans. Godard suggests this through a barrage of quotations from philosophers and novelists, which keep tantalizing us away from simply absorbing the images that he also floods the film with -- the cinematographer, responsible for many of the novel 3D effects, is Fabrice Aragno. Even without 3D, Goodbye to Language is often quite beautiful, with its saturated colors, but I'm not convinced that it adds up to anything novel or revelatory.

David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935)

As long as there are novels and movies, there will be people trying to turn novels into movies. Which is a task usually doomed to some degree of failure, given that the two art forms have significantly different aims and techniques. Novels are interior: They reveal what people think and feel. Movies are exterior: Thoughts and feelings have to be depicted, not reported. Novels breed reflection; movies breed reaction. Novel-based movies usually succeed only when the genius of the filmmakers exceeds that of the novelist, as in the case, for example, of Alfred Hitchcock's transformation (1960) of Robert Bloch's Psycho, or Francis Ford Coppola's extrapolation (1972) from Mario Puzo's The Godfather. We mostly settle for, at best, a satisfying skim along the surface of the novel, which is what we get in Cukor's version of Dickens's novel. I'm not claiming, of course, that Cukor or the film's producer, David O. Selznick, was a greater genius than Dickens, but together -- and with the help of Hugh Walpole, who adapted the book, and Howard Estabrook, the credited screenwriter -- they produced something of a parallel masterpiece. They did so by sticking to the visuals of the novel, not just Dickens's descriptions but also the illustrations for the original edition by "Phiz," Hablot Knight Brown. The result is that it's hard to read the novel today without seeing and hearing W.C. Fields as Micawber, Edna May Oliver as Betsey Trotwood, or Roland Young as Uriah Heep. The weaknesses of the film are also the weaknesses of the book: women like David's mother (Elizabeth Allan) and Agnes Wickfield (Madge Evans) are pallid and angelic, and David himself becomes less interesting as he grows older, or in terms of the movie, as he ceases to be the engaging Freddie Bartholomew and becomes instead the vapid Frank Lawton. But as compensation we have the full employment of MGM's set design and costume departments, along with a tremendous storm at sea -- the special effects are credited to Slavko Vorkapich.

Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015)

Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson in Room

As emotionally affecting as Room is, and as brilliant as the performances of Oscar-winner Brie Larson and the equally worthy Jacob Tremblay are, the film left me dissatisfied. The premise is an intriguing one: Joy (Larson) was abducted at the age of 17 by a man (Sean Bridgers) who locked her in a shed, where she gave birth to Jack (Tremblay), who has just turned 5 when the film begins. Left alone together for all this time, with only periodic visits by the captor for sex and to bring supplies, mother and son have bonded uniquely. She has allowed Jack to believe that the shed, which they call "Room," is the only reality -- even the people they see on the television set the captor has supplied are just colorful shapes; they are "TV." The sky they can see through Room's one window, a skylight, is "outer space." The only other entity Jack knows about is "Old Nick," the captor, and Joy keeps the two of them separated as much as possible, shutting Jack in the closet when the man visits. We are in Plato's Cave here, and to follow up on that fable, which is beautifully established in the first part of the film, we need an awakening to reality that is both dramatically and thematically powerful. We get a good start on that when Joy, thinking that Jack is old enough for the truth, begins to break down the myth of Room and suggest to him that there is in fact a world outside. Jack responds with something like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: He denies what she is telling him, grows angry and depressed, but finally accepts it as truth, which then allows Joy to enlist Jack in an attempt to escape. Unfortunately, after the excitingly suspenseful escape succeeds, the film begins to disintegrate into an often sketchy and unconvincing tale of recovery, and concludes with a tenuous "happy ending." Jack, a doctor tells Joy, is still "plastic," a word that Jack overhears and indignantly rejects: He's real, not plastic. But Joy sinks into a deep depression, partly aided by the fact that the world is going to test the bonds she has formed with Jack, and by the fact that things are not what they were before her abduction. Her parents, for example, have divorced and her mother (Joan Allen) has remarried. Her father (William H. Macy) has moved far away and can't bring himself to accept Jack as his grandson. She and Jack move in with her mother, Nancy, and stepfather, Leo (Tom McCamus), but the tensions of the household grow as they are besieged by reporters, and when an interviewer awakens feelings of guilt and responsibility she has repressed, Joy attempts suicide and is hospitalized. The problem with this part of the film is that there are no easy solutions to the crisis it has created. Moreover, we don't know enough about the characters it introduces to understand their behavior: Why, for example, is it so hard for Joy's father to accept Jack as his grandson? As brilliant an actress as Joan Allen is, she doesn't quite make the loving, gentle grandmother much more than a stereotype. How much hope can we hold out for Joy's full recovery and Jack's successful integration into a world he had previously never envisioned? I haven't read Emma Donoghue's novel, so it's possible that this part of the story is better developed and the characters are more plausible on the page than they are on the screen, although Donoghue also wrote the screenplay. There is, however, a scene at the end, in which Joy and Jack return to Room, now about to be demolished, that provides a kind of closure to the film that's satisfying artistically -- if not psychologically.