The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

Thomas Vinterberg and his co-screenwriter, Tobias Lindholm, load so much misery on the protagonist of The Hunt that they find themselves in a bind: How do you resolve a plot that inflicts so much suffering on an innocent man without resorting to either a saccharine happy ending or a depressingly cataclysmic one? When Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a man in his 40s who teaches in the kindergarten of a small Danish village, is accused by one of the children of exposing himself to her, his life goes to hell. He loses his job and his friends, including his girlfriend, and ruins his chances of a more favorable custody agreement with his ex-wife. And even after the authorities find that there is no evidence to substantiate the little girl's charge, he is still harassed by his neighbors and even denied service at the local grocery store. It's a superb part for Mikkelsen, whose death's-head cheekbones naturally made him the right choice as the most recent incarnation of Hannibal Lecter on TV's Hannibal, but who proves in this film that he can play a sympathetic victim as well as a psychotic villain. But the film depends equally on the performances of Susse Wold as Grethe, the principal of the kindergarten; Thomas Bo Larsen as Theo, the father of the little girl; Lasse Fogelstrøm as Lucas's teenage son, Marcus; and especially the very young Annika Wedderkopp as Klara, Lucas's accuser. The suspicions directed at Lucas gain credibility from the fact that he's an anomaly in the somewhat macho culture of the village: Well into middle age, he is the only male teacher in the kindergarten -- it was apparently the only available teaching job after the school he once taught at closed. Klara is drawn to him as a kind of father figure: Her parents spend much time fighting with each other. Somewhat withdrawn, she has a childish ritual of never stepping on the lines in the sidewalk, and she gets lost because she looks at her feet and not where she's going. Lucas finds her one day and gets her home safely, and promises her that she can come to his house and play with his dog, Fanny. But Klara develops a kind of crush on Lucas, and when she gives him a present and tries to kiss him on the lips, he is forced to establish some limits. Hurt by the rejection, Klara tells the principal that she doesn't like Lucas because he's a man and has a penis. The principal unfortunately takes her remark too seriously and pursues the matter, whereupon Klara remembers a pornographic image that her older brother had shown her on his phone and describes it as if it were Lucas's penis. The principal's amateurish investigation feeds parental hysteria which ultimately results in other children coming forward to accuse Lucas. The film recalls the widespread incidents of sexual abuse accusations that took place particularly in the 1980s, as in the notorious McMartin preschool case in Los Angeles. Fortunately, Vinterberg and Lindholm keep the larger issues in the background as they concentrate on its effect on Lucas, his family, and his friends. The end of the film is, however, something of a muddle: Lucas's life has returned to normal, as far as we can see, as he celebrates Marcus's coming of age by letting the boy join a deer hunt. Only in the concluding sequence do we get a suggestion that the incident will never be fully resolved.

Before the Rain (Milcho Manchevski, 1994)

Before the Rain wears its fractured and inconsistent narrative proudly, as if daring us to make sense not only of the film's plot but also of the centuries-old tradition of violent revenge that had recently manifested itself in the states of the former Yugoslavia. It seems to be three stories that, by the time the film ends, have merged -- or like the snake eating its tail, begun to swallow up one another. The first story, "Words," set in the Republic of Macedonia, is about a young monk (Grégoire Colin) who shelters a girl (Labina Mitevska) from a pursuing mob. The second, "Faces," which takes place in London, centers on a photo editor, Anne (Katrin Cartlidge), and her relationships with a prize-winning photojournalist, Aleksander (Rade Serbedzija), as well as her husband, Nick (Jay Villiers). The third, "Pictures," returns with Aleksander to his home village in Macedonia, where, weary of and disillusioned by his career, he plans to settle. Each segment of the film ends violently, suggesting that the murderous impulse is immanent not only in the world's hot spots but in the heart of civilization itself. As director and screenwriter, Manchevski attempts to explore the dark side of human nature and society without suggesting that he has an explanation, much less a solution, for it. He intentionally undercuts the coherence of the film by introducing inconsistencies between the three sections, such as photographs in one section of events that have not yet happened if the three stories are to be rearranged as a linear progression. The effect is to unsettle the viewer, to heighten the emotional impact of events by denying the intellectual response to them. I think Manchevski largely succeeds, although the London section strikes me as the most weakly conceived, and its climax rather too cinematically staged, especially in comparison with the more subtly terrifying scenes in Macedonia.

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Like Zvyagintsev's 2014 Oscar-nominated Leviathan, Elena is a scathing portrait of contemporary Russian society. But where Leviathan was rough and boisterous, Elena is quiet, austere, and slow. Perhaps too slow for some tastes: The film begins with a long take of the balcony of an apartment house seen through the branches of a tree. For a long time, nothing happens. We hear only the bark of a dog and some street noises. Then we gradually become aware that we are watching the sun rise, reflected in the windows of an apartment. It's the sleek, modern home of the wealthy retired businessman Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) and his wife, Elena (Nadezhda Markina). A couple in late middle age, they have been married for ten years, having met when he was hospitalized for peritonitis and she was his nurse. It's the second marriage for both, and each has a child from the previous marriage: he a daughter, Katya (Elena Lyadova), she a son, Sergey (Aleksey Rozin). But Elena resents the fact that Vladimir dotes on the spoiled playgirl Katya, complaining that she gets in touch with her father only when she wants money. And Vladimir disapproves when Elena gives the money from her own pension to support the unemployed Sergey, his wife, and their two children, 17-year-old Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov) and an infant, who live in a cramped Soviet-era apartment house with a view of the cooling towers of a nuclear plant. Elena wants Sasha to go to university -- otherwise, he'll be drafted into the army -- and appeals to Vladimir for financial help. He refuses: Sergey should get a job and support his own family, besides, the army will be good for Sasha. Then Vladimir suffers a heart attack, and while recovering decides that he should make a will, leaving his estate to Katya and an annuity to support Elena. Before he can see a lawyer, however, Elena slips a couple of Viagra -- knowing that they are contraindicated for heart attack patients -- in with his other meds. After the funeral, the lawyer tells Elena and Katya that the estate will have to be divided between them. The story, by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin, moves with the inexorable melancholy of the excerpts from Philip Glass's Symphony No. 3 that sometimes accompany it on the soundtrack. Zvyagintsev's refusal to urge along the story and instead to concentrate on the measured pace of Elena's life, gives the film a grounding in actuality, reinforced by Markina's subtle underplaying of her role. It's a chilly film in many ways, but in its depiction of a society defined by the extremes of new rich and old underclass, it has a decided impact.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

Picnic at Hanging Rock is an unstable mix of a film, playing on, among other things, themes of sexual repression, homoerotic attraction, colonialism, and the curious draw of geological anomalies: Hanging Rock is to the characters in the film as Devil's Tower is to Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) or Sedona is to contemporary New Agers. We never learn how two schoolgirls and a teacher disappeared on their visit to the volcanic outcropping, but it doesn't much matter. What's clear is that the characters are misfits in both place and time, Australia in 1900. As one of the disappeared girls, Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), says, "Everything begins and ends in the right time and place." Like the hoopskirted women and top-hatted men in the wilds of New Zealand in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), these schoolgirls are uncomfortably muffled against the reality of an Australian summer, to the point that, when they set out for the picnic, they are prevented from even removing their gloves until they have left the village of Woodend, their outpost of civilization. So the three girls who set out on their rebellious adventure shock a fourth, the whining, conventional Edith (Christine Schuler), when they dare to remove their shoes and stockings and proceed barefoot. Edith, who decides to leave the group, will later report that when she met Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray), who followed the girls' path, the teacher was not wearing a skirt. And when one of the girls, Irma (Karen Robson), is found alive but with no memory of what happened, she has mysteriously lost her corset. Several other stories, including the persecution by the headmistress (Rachel Roberts) of the misfit student Sara (Margaret Nelson), are interwoven with the principal incident. But for all its inconclusive narrative and sometimes clashing themes, the movie works by creating a complex symbolic texture. Peter Weir and screenwriter Cliff Green, adapting Joan Lindsay's novel (which was initially thought to be non-fiction), craft a story that tantalizes without frustrating. (Lindsay drafted but didn't publish a chapter with a sci-fi solution involving time warps; her editor was smart to excise it, and Weir and Green were wise to ignore it.)

La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950)

Love supposedly makes the world go around, but in La Ronde it's sex that provides the spin. Ophuls and his fellow screenwriter, Jacques Natanson, put us in the hands of a narrator (Anton Walbrook) who facilitates the couplings of the various characters, beginning with a prostitute and a soldier, followed by the soldier's liaison with a chambermaid, her fling with the young man for whom she works, his with a married woman, and so on, until the merry-go-round (a literal presence on the screen) brings us back again to the prostitute. It's an ingenious business, first devised for the stage by the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler in 1897 -- one reason why the film takes place in Vienna in 1900. At its best, La Ronde is a showcase for some lovely performances, including Walbrook's, but also those of Simone Signoret as the prostitute, Simone Simon as the chambermaid, Danielle Darrieux as the married woman, and, later in the circle dance, Jean-Louis Barrault as a pretentious poet. There are some witty moments: When one of the characters experiences erectile dysfunction, the merry-go-round breaks down and the narrator-facilitator is forced to repair it. In 1950, the movie taught American audiences who got a chance to see it what they were missing because of the hidebound Production Code. The Academy, whose members often chafed against the Code, honored it with two Oscar nominations: Ophuls and Natanson for their screenplay and Jean d'Eaubonne for art direction. Ophuls has a little fun with the censors, too, when one very close encounter is interrupted by the narrator seizing the film and cutting a section from it. Our age, haunted by various STD's, might take a darker view of the film's blithe copulation, which is why, I think, Ophuls's film seems a little hollow: too much style, not enough substance. Even in its day, La Ronde was little more than a charming anachronism, a fantasia about a world that never was, and if it had been, would have been swept away by two World Wars.

The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)

There are few scenes in movies that I cherish more than the encounter of Gerry (Claudette Colbert) and the Wienie King (Robert Dudley). Then again, The Palm Beach Story is filled with things I cherish: The wonderfully enigmatic opening credits, which must have had people sitting through the film twice to comprehend. The way William Demarest drawls out "bangbaang" when he's pretending to shoot targets on the train -- before the rest of the Ale and Quail Club arrives with loaded shotguns to blow the hell out of the club car. J.D. Hackensacker III's (Rudy Vallee) inexhaustible supply of pince-nez. The fetching outfit Gerry fashions from a pair of men's pajamas and a bath towel, using the pajama shirt as a blouse, the pants as a kind of snood, and the towel as a wraparound skirt -- as she remains blithely unconscious that the word "Pullman" is emblazoned on the backside. The way Sig Arno as Toto steals every scene he's in, even if he's only standing in the background. Mary Astor's giddy, horny Princess Centimillia. The sly fun poked at Vallee's past as a crooner. The way Sturges finds something funny for even bit players, like the cops on the street, to do or say. Joel McCrea and Colbert are of course peerless at this sort of comedy. I do have to admit that I'm a little distracted every time I watch Colbert on screen, tracking the way she always manages to get on the right side in every scene, the better to show off the preferred left side of her face. I wonder, though, if Sturges and cinematographer Victor Milner didn't pull a trick on Colbert in the scene in which Gerry is sitting at a dressing table: Though she's on the right side of the screen, the only view we get of her face is a reflection in the mirror of her supposedly inferior right profile. The Palm Beach Story is not as sexy as The Lady Eve (1941) or as satiric as Sullivan's Travels (1941), but it remains for me an inexhaustible delight.

About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti in About Elly

Sepideh: Golshifteh Farahani
Ahmad: Shahab Hosseini
Elly: Taraneh Alidoosti
Shohreh: Merila Zare'i
Amir: Mani Haghighi
Peyman: Peyman Moaadi
Manoochehr: Ra'na Azadivar
Alireza: Saber Abar

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi, Azad Jafarian
Cinematography: Hossein Jafarian
Music: Andrea Bauer

Sepideh invites the unmarried Elly, one of her daughter's teachers, to spend a three-day weekend with her, her husband, and two other couples and their children, at a villa overlooking the Caspian Sea. Also joining the group is the recently divorced Ahmad, who is taking a vacation from his job in Germany. Because of the Islamic Republic's prohibitions against unmarried men and women traveling together, Sepideh persuades the group to pretend that Elly and Ahmad are newlyweds, a lie that begins to backfire when the managers of the seaside property want to celebrate the young couple's marriage. Embarrassed by the attention, Elly decides to leave after the first night, which Sepideh, set on her matchmaking, tries to prevent. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi sets all of this up carefully, so that the story could easily turn toward comedy. It doesn't. When the young son of Shoreh and Peyman almost drowns, Elly disappears during the chaos of his rescue and resuscitation. Has she drowned trying to rescue the boy, or has she made good on her determination to return to Tehran? Sepideh is particularly frantic when Elly's disappearance is noted, plunging into the sea to try to find her. It's then that we begin to discover that Sepideh knows a great deal more about Elly than she has told the others, and a great snarl of complications develops, especially when the group begins to create more stories to tell the police, the property managers, and Elly's family. The performances of the cast -- some of whom, like Peyman Moaadi, Merila Zare'i, and Shahab Hosseini, will be familiar from Farhadi's 2011 Oscar-winning A Separation --  are uniformly brilliant, and Farhadi's script and direction result in a film that is both suspenseful and morally complex. It has been suggested that the film has a subtext of criticism directed at the Iranian government, under which people routinely dissemble in order not to bring censure upon themselves -- especially the young professionals like the ones in the film. Is it significant that the last scene of the movie shows the group trying to free a red BMW from the sand in which it has bogged down?

The Beggar's Opera (Peter Brook, 1953)

The Beggar's Opera, Act V, by William Hogarth, c. 1728

I watch TV with the closed captions on, partly from age-related hearing loss, but also because it helps me savor dialogue better. Sometimes, however, I find that the caption writers go hilariously astray, especially if they're transcribing what they think they hear instead of following a script. In this case, I was amused to find that references to Newgate, the old London prison that is the scene of much of The Beggar's Opera, were being recorded as "Nougat." John Gay's 1728 ballad opera is said to have been inspired by a suggestion of Jonathan Swift that someone should compose "a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there." Peter Brook's film, his first as a movie director, isn't exactly a "nougat pastoral," but it's a pleasant enough confection, with Technicolor cinematography by Guy Green and production design and handsome costuming by Georges Wakhévitch that give the film a Hogarthian ambiance. Best of all, it has Laurence Olivier, Hugh Griffith, Dorothy Tutin, Stanley Holloway, and Athene Seyler in the cast. Gay's songs, originally set to familiar folk song tunes, have been remusicalized by Arthur Bliss, with some additional lyrics by Christopher Fry, who also wrote the screenplay with Denis Cannan. Most of the singing was dubbed, with the exceptions of Olivier and Holloway: The latter nicely displays a basso buffo style and Olivier has a pleasant if sometimes slightly stressed baritone. The film was a flop, unfortunately, and isn't much seen today, but it's worth checking out when it comes around again to TCM.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

Sandwiched between two epic versions of the life of Jesus released in the 1960s -- King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965) -- Pasolini's version looks like the most successful today. It is raw and unfiltered through Technicolor and wide-screen processes, unencumbered with movie stars. Its Jesus is not blue-eyed like Jeffrey Hunter or Max von Sydow, but a darkly handsome Spanish economics student named Enrique Irazoqui, who had never acted before. (His voice is dubbed by Enrico Maria Salerno, a professional actor who also dubbed Clint Eastwood's voice in the Italian releases of Sergio Leone's Westerns.) The film takes no liberties with the story as presented in the New Testament Gospel of St. Matthew, following it virtually to the letter. The dialogue in Pasolini's screenplay relies for the most part only on the words actually spoken in the gospel. In fact, those unfamiliar with the narrative presented there may sometimes find the film's story hard to follow. No elaborate sets were constructed: Pasolini filmed on locations in Calabria and Sicily and other parts of southern Italy, enlisting the locals as cast members and extras. Like Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), it is a film of faces, and seldom handsome ones -- with the exception of the delicately beautiful Margherita Caruso, who plays the young Mary. (The older Mary is played by Pasolini's mother, Susanna.) Irazoqui, with his unibrow, looks strikingly like a figure out of a Byzantine mosaic or a Russian icon. The cumulative effect of the film is of having sat through something plausibly much closer to the actual events than the more conventional dramatizations of them like the Hollywood epics. Pasolini was, of course, an unbeliever, a gay Marxist, and the effect of the film is more intellectual than spiritual. The Jesus of the film preaches love, but he can also be harsh and enigmatic, proclaiming that he comes to bring not peace but a sword and, in one of the oddest moments in the gospel, smiting a fig tree for some unspecified offense. There are moments when, by following the biblical narrative so closely, the film falls apart, as in the interpolation of the story of Salome (Paola Tedesco) and John the Baptist (Mario Socrate), and it's clear that, as he later admitted, Pasolini's heart is not in the depiction of such miracles as the loaves and fishes and Jesus's walking on water. The choice of music to accompany scenes is curiously eclectic, ranging from the obvious, Bach and Mozart, to the derivative, a bit of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky score, to the startling, African-American spirituals. But even when Pasolini's film goes awry, it remains a fascinatingly personal response to the source material.

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

With 12 Oscar nominations and three wins for directing, William Wyler holds a firm place in the history of American movies. But not without some grumbling on the part of auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who observed, "Wyler's career is a cipher as far as personal direction is concerned." His movies were invariably polished and professionally made, but if what you're looking for is some hint of personality behind the camera, the kind that Hitchcock or Hawks or Ford displayed no matter what the subject matter of the film, then Wyler is an enigma. His most personal film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), grew out of his wartime experiences, but they are subsumed in the stories he has to tell and not revealed with any assertively personal point of view on them. And anyone who can trace a Wylerian personality latent in movies as varied as Mrs. Miniver (1942), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and Funny Girl (1968) has a subtler analytical mind than mine. What they have in common is that they are well made, the work of a fine craftsman if not an artist. The other thing they have in common is that they won Oscars for their stars: Greer Garson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, and Barbra Streisand, respectively. The Heiress, too, won an Oscar for its star, Olivia de Havilland, suggesting that in Wyler we have a director whose virtue lay not in his personal vision but in his skill at packaging, at arranging a showcase not just for performers -- he also directed Oscar-winning performances by Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and by Fredric March and Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives -- but also for production designers, costume designers, composers, and cinematographers: Oscars for The Heiress went to John Meehan, Harry Horner, and Emile Kuri for art direction and set decoration, to Edith Head and Gile Steele for costumes, and to Aaron Copland for the score, and Leo Tover was nominated for his cinematography. Wyler lost the directing Oscar to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives, but is there any doubt that The Heiress would have been a lesser film than it is without Wyler's guidance? All of this is a long-winded way to say that although I honor, and in many ways prefer, the personal vision that shines through in the works of directors like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, et al., there is room in my pantheon for the skilled if impersonal professional. As for The Heiress itself, it's a satisfying film with two great performances (de Havilland's Catherine and Ralph Richardson's Dr. Sloper), one hugely entertaining one (Miriam Hopkins's Lavinia Penniman), and one sad miscasting: Montgomery Clift's Morris Townsend. It's a hard role to put across: Morris has to be plausible enough to persuade not only Catherine but also the somewhat more worldly Lavinia that he is genuinely in love with Catherine and not just her money, but he also needs to give the audience a whiff of the cad. Clift's Morris is too callow, too grinningly eager. There is no ambiguity in the performance. If we like Morris too much, we risk seeing Dr. Sloper more as an over-stern paterfamilias and less as the cruelly self-absorbed man he is. Richardson's fine performance goes a long way to righting this imbalance, but he's fighting Clift's sex appeal all the way.