Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)

The Russian mafia seems to have supplanted the Italian kind in the popular imagining of the violent criminal world. It has long been a staple of TV crime shows like Law & Order, but David Cronenberg gave it the most impressive and terrifying embodiment yet in Eastern Promises. The film, set in London, is a strikingly globalized production, with a Canadian director and English screenwriter (Steven Knight) and actors who are Danish-American (Viggo Mortensen), British (Naomi Watts), German (Armin Mueller-Stahl), French (Vincent Cassel), Polish (Jerzy Skolimowski), and Irish (Sinéad Cusack). Yet the film somehow maintains a strong semblance of authenticity, thanks to strong performances. Mortensen, long a favorite of mine, gives an intensely compelling, and Oscar-nominated, portrayal of a Russian undercover agent infiltrating the mob. His celebrated battle in the steam bath, in which he, naked and unarmed, is attacked by two well-clothed thugs carrying linoleum knives should never let you take another two-against-one battle in a James Bond film seriously. (Or not until Daniel Craig does it in the nude.) Mueller-Stahl demonstrates once again that one can smile and smile and be a villain, and Cassel steals scenes with his portrayal of Mueller-Stahl's careless, dissipated weakling of a son. My only complaint about Eastern Promises is a rather saccharine ending to Watts's portion of the story. The story of Mortensen's character ends inconclusively, with his apparent ascension to the role of boss of the mob, a risky position for an undercover agent. A sequel has been proposed and postponed, and at last report seems to be dead.

Stage Beauty (Richard Eyre, 2004)

It's a measure of how the discourse on sexual identity has changed over the past 12 years that Stage Beauty, in which it is a central theme, seems now to have missed the mark completely. Billy Crudup, an actor who should be a bigger star than he is, plays Edward Kynaston, an actor in Restoration London who was noted for his work in female roles at a time when such parts were usually still played by boys and men. Kynaston, as the film tells us, was praised by the diarist Samuel Pepys as "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life." As the film begins, he is performing as Desdemona in a production of Othello, and is aided by a dresser, Maria (Claire Danes), who longs to act. After his performance ends, she borrows his wig, clothes, and props, and performs in a local tavern as "Margaret Hughes." When King Charles II (Rupert Everett) lifts the ban on women appearing on stage, Kynaston not only finds his career threatened, but when the king's mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoë Tapper), overhears him fulminating about the inadequacy of actresses, she persuades the king to forbid men from playing women's roles: The king gives as his reason that it encourages "sodomy." Although the actual Kynaston performed male as well as female roles, in the film he is stymied by an inability to act male parts. Eventually, Maria, who is having trouble with her own new career, calls upon Kynaston to coach her in his most famous role, Desdemona, while at the same time teaching him how to act like a man on stage. Together, they appear as Othello and Desdemona and, with a violently naturalistic performance of the death scene, bring down the house. The premise, taken from a play by Jeffrey Hatcher, who also wrote the screenplay, allows for some insight into the nature of gender, but the film never approaches it satisfactorily. Instead, we have a conventional ending that suggests not only that Kynaston and Hughes revolutionized acting with less stylized performance -- something that certainly didn't occur in the classically oriented Restoration theater -- but also that they fell in love. Earlier in the film, Kynaston is shown in a same-sex relationship with George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), who leaves him to get married. The film never quite resolves whether Kynaston is gay, bi, sexually fluid, or simply somehow confused by having been celebrated as a beautiful woman. And while it's risky to apply 21st-century psychology to 17th-century sexual mores, Stage Beauty's indifference to historical accuracy seems to demand that it do so. As unsatisfactory a film as it is, Stage Beauty has a few things to recommend it, starting with Crudup's fine performance. Danes is hindered by a screenplay that never concentrates on her character long enough to bring it into focus, but she and Crudup have strong chemistry together. And the supporting cast includes such British acting stalwarts as Everett, Chaplin, Tom Wilkinson, Richard Griffiths, and Edward Fox, as well as Hugh Bonneville, now best known for Downton Abbey, as Pepys. It's startling to see Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, peering out from beneath a Restoration periwig.

What's Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972)

As a film genre, the screwball comedy flourished for about a decade, from 1934 to 1944, or from Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934) to Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944.) Like so much else in movie history, including the Western, it was killed off by television, by half-hour sitcoms like I Love Lucy that slurped up its essence and made the 90-minute theatrical versions seem like overkill. We can still glimpse some of the heart of the screwball comedy in films like David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013) or Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), but Peter Bodganovich's What's Up, Doc? is probably the last pure example of the genre as it was in its heyday. Like the masters of the genre -- Hawks and Sturges are the masters, but Gregory La Cava, George Stevens, Mitchell Leisen, and Frank Capra made worthy contributions -- Bogdanovich followed a few rules: One, get stars who usually played it straight to make fools of themselves. Two, make use of as many comic character actors as you can stuff into the film. Three, never pretend that the world the film is taking place in is the "real world." Four, never, ever let the pace slacken -- if your characters have to kiss or confess, make it snappy. On the first point, Bogdanovich found the closest equivalents to Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn (or Clark Gable, Joel McCrea, James Stewart on the one hand, Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur on the other) that he could among the stars of his day. Ryan O'Neal was coming off the huge success of the weepy Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) and a five-year run on TV's Peyton Place and Barbra Streisand had won an Oscar for Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968). Granted, O'Neal is no Cary Grant: His timing is a little off and he overdoes a single exasperated look, but he makes a suitable patsy. But has Streisand ever been more likable in the movies? She plays the dizzy troublemaker with relish, capturing the essence of Bugs Bunny -- the other inspiration for the movie -- to the point that you almost expect her to turn to the camera and say, "Ain't I a stinker?" As to the second point, we no longer have character actors of the caliber of Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, or William Demarest, but Bogdanovich recruited some of the best of his day: Kenneth Mars, Austin Pendleton, Michael Murphy, and others, and introduced moviegoers to the sublime Madeline Kahn. And he set it all in the ever-picturesque San Francisco, while making sure no one would ever confuse the movie version with the real thing, including a chase sequence up and down its hills that follows no possible real-world path. And he kept the pace up with gags involving bit players: the pizza maker so distracted by Streisand that he spins his dough up to the ceiling, the banner-hanger and the guys moving a sheet of glass, the waiter who enters a room with a tray of drinks but takes one look at the chaos there and turns right around, the guy laying a cement sidewalk that's run over so many times by the car chase that he flings down his trowel and jumps up and down on his mutilated handiwork. This is masterly comic direction of a sort we don't often see -- and, sadly, never saw again from Bogdanovich, whose career collapsed disastrously with a string of flops in the mid-1970s. Here, he was working with a terrific team of writers, Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton, who turned his story into comedy gold.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc

Music has been an integral part of the cinematic experience since the days before sound, when the small-town exhibitor would hire a local pianist to play "Hearts and Flowers" to sweeten the love scenes. So it was a surprise to watch The Passion of Joan of Arc with no soundtrack at all on the new streaming service Filmstruck,* which has pulled the great Criterion Collection of classic films away from its old home on Hulu. I have seen The Passion before, and I'm certain that it had a music track then -- almost all restorations of silent films have some kind of music, typically a pastiche of themes from classical music. Over the years, since its rediscovery, there have been many attempts to add a music track to The Passion, including a pastiche of music by Baroque composers like Bach and Vivaldi that Dreyer heard and disliked. I notice on the Criterion site that the disc set includes an oratorio, "Voices of Light" by Richard Einhorn, that was inspired by the film, but it apparently wasn't approved for the streaming version. And after all that, I'm glad it wasn't. The Passion shines forth in silence, allowing you to reflect on the spareness of its images and the astonishing performance by Renée Falconetti as Joan. We don't need underscoring for Joan's emotions: They are present on Falconetti's face and in her extraordinarily expressive eyes. Dreyer's celebrated use of closeups throughout the film is varied with remarkable compositions of figures in groups that always feel organic, not something imposed by the director, and when the film erupts in violence as the soldiers attack the crowd at the film's end, the irruption of action is startling. The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté, who later turned director, and his low-angle camerawork -- Dreyer reportedly had holes dug in the floor of the set to get the angles he wanted -- anticipates that of Yasujiro Ozu, giving us a sense on the one hand of Joan as floating above us and on the other of her judges as looming menace. The final shots of Joan's slumped, burned body seen through the smoke and flames are harrowing and poignant without being grisly. There aren't many greater films than this one.

*So far, Filmstruck hasn't moved much beyond streaming on the computer, though it's supposed to be included on Roku early next year. In my household, with two others competing for bandwidth, this meant that I had frequent interruptions as the film refreshed itself. Oddly enough, I didn't mind as much as I usually would, because Dreyer's images are so compelling that I was content to pause and study them.

Wizard of Oz (Larry Semon, 1925)

Dorothy Dwan and Larry Semon in Wizard of Oz

A critical and commercial flop that seriously damaged the career of its director and writer, Larry Semon, Wizard of Oz (as the on-screen title has it) somehow survived the mass extinction of silent films, perhaps because of the perennial interest in Oz stories that was fed by the later and greater 1939 film with Judy Garland. But only the most die-hard Oz fans need to bother checking it out: It's a hopeless mess, a mishmash of conventional slapstick comedy and rather lame fantasy. It features characters from L. Frank Baum's book: Dorothy (Dorothy Dwan), the Wizard (Charles Murray), the Scarecrow (Semon), and the Tin Woodman (Oliver Hardy). But it does nothing with them but place them in various kinds of comic jeopardy that usually climax in pratfalls. Much of the film takes place in Kansas, where Dorothy is a farm girl about to turn 18, an age when she can open a mysterious letter that was delivered to her Uncle Henry (Frank Alexander) and Aunt Em (Mary Carr) when she was a foundling infant. The letter, of course, reveals that she is Princess Dorothea of Oz. She is being courted by two farmhands, also played by Semon and Hardy -- perhaps the inspiration for the 1939 film's casting of Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr as both farmhands and the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion. In Semon's film, the farmhands are swept off to Oz by a tornado -- or rather just a strong windstorm, since there's no funnel cloud -- along with Dorothy and Uncle Henry, where they assume disguises: Semon swipes the clothes off of a scarecrow and Hardy improvises an outfit from a scrap heap. In addition to the others, there's a black farmhand known, inevitably, as Snowball played by Spencer Bell under the pseudonym G. Howe Black. Get it? We first see him eating a watermelon, too. Aside from that, the racist humor is fortunately kept to a minimum, and in Oz, to which Snowball is somehow chased by lightning, he adopts a lion costume, creating the third in Dorothy's familiar trio of companions. The scenario was written by Semon, Leon Lee (who also wrote the intertitles), and Frank Joslyn Baum, credited as "L. Frank Baum Jr." (Frank J. Baum's efforts to capitalize on his father's name led to a break with the rest of his family.)

Queen Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994)

Daniel Auteuil and Isabelle Adjani in Queen Margot

I thought I knew enough about 16th-century French history, if only from reading Robert Merle's Fortunes of France books, to follow Patrice Chéreau's Queen Margot fairly easily. But the film's rather hyperactive opening almost kept me in the dark: literally, because it begins with a Protestant man accidentally getting in bed with a Catholic man, and an ensuing fight. Then we shift to the wedding of the Catholic Marguerite de Valois (Isabelle Adjani) to the Protestant Henri de Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), and an ensuing riotous wedding night, during which Marguerite refuses to go to bed with her new husband but, feeling randy, goes out into the streets to pick up a man. The man, with whom she has very passionate sex against a wall, turns out to be the Protestant we saw earlier, La Môle (Vincent Pérez). And when Marguerite rescues him during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, they begin an affair. But wait, there's more. There's court intrigue involving the somewhat insane Charles IX (Jean-Hugues Anglade); his mother, Catherine de' Medici (Virna Lisi); and his brother, the Duke of Anjou (Pascal Greggory). There's internal and international squabbling between Protestants and Catholics. There are poisonings and boar hunts, and a lot of other stuff. Eventually, I sorted it all out, but it left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. It's beautifully filmed by Philippe Rousselot, and the costumes by Moidele Bickel were nominated for an Oscar. The screenplay by Chéreau and Danièle Thompson is adapted from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, and neither screenplay nor novel should be relied on for historical accuracy. Adjani seems to struggle a bit with the vagaries of her character, whose sympathies shift from Catholic to Protestant and from man to man all too easily. The standout performance is that of Lisi, who was an international sex symbol in the 1950s and '60s, and makes the scheming Catherine a figure of some complexity.

Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

According to Stephen Whitty's excellent The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, the director thought Jamaica Inn "completely absurd" and didn't even bother to make his familiar cameo appearance in it. Hitchcock was right: It's a ridiculously plotted and often amateurishly staged film -- although Hitchcock must take some of the blame for the scenes in which characters sneak around talking in stage whispers and pretending they're hidden from their pursuers when they're in plain sight for anyone with average peripheral vision. Much of Hitchcock's attitude toward the film has been ascribed to his clashes with Charles Laughton, who was an uncredited co-producer and resisted any attempts by the director to rein in one of his more ridiculous performances. As Sir Humphrey Pengallan, the county squire and justice of the peace who is secretly raking in a fortune by collaborating with smugglers who loot shipwrecked vessels after murdering their crew, Laughton wears a fake nose and oddly placed eyebrows and hams it up mercilessly. Maureen O'Hara, in her first major film role, struggles with a confusingly written character who sometimes displays fire and initiative and at other times seems alarmingly obtuse. The rest of the cast includes such stalwarts of the British film and stage as Leslie Banks, Emlyn Williams, and Basil Radford, with a surprising performance by Robert Newton as the movie's romantic lead, Jem Traherne, an agent working undercover to expose the smugglers. You look in vain at the young Newton for traces of his terrifying Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) or his Long John Silver in Treasure Island (Byron Haskin, 1950). The production design is handsome, and the film begins with an exciting storm at sea, but the screenplay, based on a Daphne Du Maurier novel and written by the usually capable Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, quickly falls apart. Hitchcock's last film in England, Jamaica Inn was a critical flop but a commercial success.

The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)

What are the limits of narrative cinema? If, indeed, The Mirror is narrative -- that question needs to be developed in more ways than I care to go into here. It's easy to say that Andrei Tarkovsky's film is non-linear, jumping back and forth in time with no clues about when and where we are in any given moment. Even the switches from black-and-white to color turn out to be red herrings if you're trying to sort out chronology. There is a fine line between frustration and stimulation, and Tarkovsky dances along it as we the viewers similarly traverse the line between ennui and involvement. It is, I gather from reading several essays that reinforce my impressions of the film, a memory piece in which Alexei, a man on his deathbed, recalls his childhood in Russia before, during, and after World War II. His memories include his mother, Maria, and his wife, Natalia, both played beautifully by Margarita Terekhova. Similarly, Ignat Daniltsev plays both the young Alexei and his son, Ignat. There are lucid episodes throughout the film, mixed with newsreel footage from the wartime and postwar periods, along with bits of fantasy and surrealism. I would like to say that The Mirror is hypnotic, because it begins with a scene in which a therapist uses hypnotism to try to cure a young man of a speech impediment, but that oversimplifies the effect of the film. I love and admire the previous Tarkovsky films I have seen -- Ivan's Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), and Solaris (1972) -- but I will have to see it again to decide if I want to join the consensus on its greatness: It took 19th place in the 2012 Sight and Sound critics poll of the greatest films of all time, and an astonishing 9th place in the directors' poll. I concede that it is "poetic," including the fact that Arseniy Tarkovsky, the director's father, reads his own poems in the film, and there are scenes of extraordinary beauty, the work of cinematographer Georgi Rerberg. But is that all we should ask of a film?

The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015)

I have suggested before, in my comments on Birdman (2014), Babel (2006), and 21 Grams (2003), that in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's films there seems to be less than meets the eye, but what meets the eye, especially when Emmanuel Lubezki is the cinematographer, as he is in The Revenant, is spectacular. The Revenant had a notoriously difficult shoot, owing to the fact that it takes place almost entirely outdoors during harsh weather, and it went wildly over-budget. Leonardo DiCaprio underwent significant hardships in his performance as Hugh Glass, the historical fur trader who became a legend for his story of surviving alone in the wilderness after being mauled by a grizzly bear. In the end, it was a major hit, more than making back its costs and getting strong critical support and 12 Oscar nominations, of which it won three -- for DiCaprio, Lubezki, and Iñárritu. I won't deny that it's an impressive accomplishment, and probably the best of the four Iñárritu films I've seen. It's full of tension and surprises, and fine performances by DiCaprio; Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald, the man who leaves Glass to die in the wilderness; and the ubiquitous Domhnall Gleeson as Andrew Henry, the captain of the fur-trapping expedition who aids Glass in his final pursuit of Fitzgerald. Lubezki's cinematography, filled with awe-inspiring scenery and making good use of Iñárritu's characteristic long tracking takes, fully deserves his third Academy Award, making him one of the most honored people in his field. The visual effects blend seamlessly into the action, especially in the harrowing grizzly attack. And yet I have something of a feeling of overkill about the film, which seems to me an expensive and overlavish treatment of a tale of survival and revenge -- great and familiar themes that have here been overlaid with the best that today's money can buy. The film concentrates on Glass's suffering at the expense of giving us insight into his character. It substitutes platitudes -- "Revenge is in God's hands" -- for wisdom. And what wisdom it ventures upon, like Glass's native American wife's saying, "The wind cannot defeat the tree with strong roots," is undercut by the absence of characterization: What, exactly, are Glass's roots?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2000)

On the scale for goofy Coen brothers films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? falls somewhere between Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) from goofiest to least goofy. It is, I think, more over-the-top than is absolutely necessary, especially in the idiot hick accents adopted by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson in their roles. Or maybe they just seem that way because of the differently over-the-top performance of George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, a man who thinks he talks more intelligently than he does. Still, I like Clooney in this mode, more than I do when he's playing a serious character, and it's to the Coens' credit that they cast him in the role: His performance gives an odd kind of off-balance stability to that of the other two. The chief glory of the movie, however, is its music, chosen by T Bone Burnett, superbly evoking a time and place. As for that time and place, Depression-era Mississippi, the movie pretty much ignores reality in favor of goofing around. It was the era of Bilbo and Vardaman, politicians of deeply cynical evil, and the rival candidates played by Charles Durning and Wayne Duvall don't even approach their horror, even when lampooning it. I laughed when the Ku Klux Klan performed what looked like a marching band half-time routine with a chant that evokes the parading monkey guards in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), but maybe it's the outcome of the recent presidential election that made me feel a little nauseated at even the notion of a comical Klan. A kind of irresponsibility mars the Coens' approach to the material, brilliantly funny as it often is. That said, the pacing of the movie is lively, and it's filled with ever-watchable performers like Durning, Holly Hunter, and John Goodman at their best. And there's always that music: If I'm inclined to forgive the Coens for their irresponsibility, it's because they introduced a lot of people who went out and bought the soundtrack album to some great music.