The Sound and the Fury (James Franco, 2014)

James Franco gets mocked for overreaching -- writing fiction, directing avant-garde films and multimedia art, taking graduate level courses at a variety of universities simultaneously -- and for what many see as an eccentric persona. So I don't want to come off as a mocker in my criticism of his film version of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. It's a failure for a variety of reasons, not least the extreme difficulty of translating into visual terms a novel that succeeds in the way its author uses language to convey the inner states of his characters. Franco makes the serious mistake of casting himself as the most interior and inarticulate of Faulkner's characters, the mentally handicapped Benjy Compson. Distractingly outfitted with oversize front teeth, Franco struggles to portray Benjy's torment at the loss of his beloved sister Caddy (Ahna O'Reilly), amid the declining fortunes of the Compson family. He can't dim the intelligence in his own eyes enough to suggest the blind struggle of memory and desire and frustration within the character. The screenplay by Matt Rager, who has also adapted Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (2013) and John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (2016) for Franco to direct, does a fairly good job of sticking to the narrative line of the novel: Benjy's loss, the suicide of his older brother Quentin (Jacob Loeb), the marriage that Caddy enters into because she is impregnated by Dalton Ames (Logan Marshall-Green), Caddy's sending her daughter, also named Quentin (Joey King), to live with the Compsons, and the rage of the youngest brother, Jason (Scott Haze), when the teenage Quentin runs away from home with the money he has hoarded after stealing it from the funds Caddy has sent for Quentin's support. Rager also draws heavily on the sententious speeches of the Compson children's ineffectual alcoholic father (Tim Blake Nelson), taken directly from the novel. The screenplay skimps on the key role played in the novel by the black servants, particularly that of Dilsey (Loretta Devine). Most of the performances are quite good, with the exception of Janet Jones Gretzky as the mother; she looks far too healthy, and never strikes the note of decayed gentility that the role demands. There are also some unnecessarily distracting cameos by Seth Rogen as a telegraph clerk and Danny McBride as the sheriff, bit parts that didn't need to be cast so prominently. As a whole, the film feels like the work of an amateur filmmaker with exceptional film industry connections, and that, I guess, is the very definition of overreaching.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)

I have to imagine some naive young person whose idea of outrageous filmmaking extends no further than the work of David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino, and who knows Helen Mirren only as the Oscar winner for The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006) and as a dame of the British Empire, coming across The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. It's a full-fledged assault on conventional movies, so provocative that it feels like it was made a decade or so earlier, when filmmakers were testing the limits, and not in the comparatively timid 1980s. The title itself sounds like the setup for a dirty joke, but writer-director Peter Greenaway delivers much more than that. The Cook (Richard Bohringer) runs the kitchen at a fancy restaurant that has been taken over by the Thief (Michael Gambon) and his retinue of thugs, who make a mess of things every night. Meanwhile, the Thief's Wife (Mirren) is carrying on an affair with her bookstore-owner Lover (Alan Howard) in every nook and cranny of the restaurant they can find. When the Thief finds out, the lovers hide from him at the book depository, but the Thief finds and murders him by stuffing pages from books down his throat. Eventually, the Wife, with the culinary assistance of the Cook, takes revenge in a most unappetizing way. The whole thing is played in the most over-the-top fashion imaginable, but the skill and daring of the actors makes it compelling. Gambon makes the Thief so colossally vulgar that we laugh almost as much as we cringe. Mirren and Howard are naked for great stretches of the film, but the effect is less erotic than you might think; instead, it emphasizes their vulnerability. Add to that the extraordinary production design of Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, the sometimes kinky costume design by Jean-Paul Gaultier, the cinematography of Sacha Vierny, and the musical score by Michael Nyman, and what you have is undeniably a work of art -- perverse and sometimes extremely unpleasant, but decidedly unforgettable.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Royal Tenenbaum: Gene Hackman
Etheline Tenenbaum: Anjelica Huston
Chas Tenenbaum: Ben Stiller
Margot Tenenbaum: Gwyneth Paltrow
Richie Tenenbaum: Luke Wilson
Eli Cash: Owen Wilson
Raleigh St. Clair: Bill Murray
Henry Sherman: Danny Glover
Dusty: Seymour Cassel
Pagoda: Kumar Pallana
Ari Tenenbaum: Grant Rosenmeyer
Uzi Tenenbaum: Jonah Meyerson
Narrator (voice): Alec Baldwin

Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Dylan Tichenor
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh

It's hard to be droll for an hour and a half, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which runs about 20 minutes longer than that, shows the strain. Still, I don't have the feeling with it that I sometimes have with Wes Anderson's  first two films, Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998), of not being completely in on the joke. This time it's the wacky family joke, familiar from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's You Can't Take It With You and numerous sitcoms. It works in large part because the cast plays it with such beautifully straight faces. And especially because it's such a magnificent cast: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson (who co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson), Bill Murray, and Danny Glover. It's also beautifully designed by David Wasco and filmed by Robert D. Yeoman, with Anderson's characteristically meticulous, almost theatrical framing. Hackman, as the paterfamilias in absentia Royal Tenenbaum, is the cast standout, in large part because he gets to play loose while everyone else maintains a morose deadpan, but also because he's an actor who has always been cast as the loose cannon. Even in films in which he's supposed to be reserved and repressed, such as The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), he keeps you waiting for the inevitable moment when he snaps. Here he's loose from the beginning, but he doesn't tire you out with his volatility because he knows how much of it to keep in check at any given moment.

Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2016)

Sebastian Stan and Chris Evans in Captain America: Civil War

Steve Rogers / Captain America: Chris Evans
Tony Stark / Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr.
Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow: Scarlett Johansson
Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier: Sebastian Stan
Sam Wilson / Falcon: Anthony Mackie
Lt. James Rhodes / War Machine: Don Cheadle
Clint Barton / Hawkeye: Jeremy Renner
T'Challa / Black Panther: Chadwick Boseman
Vision: Paul Bettany
Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch: Elizabeth Olsen
Scott Lang / Ant-Man: Paul Rudd
Sharon Carter: Emily VanCamp
Peter Parker / Spider-Man: Tom Holland
Zemo: Daniel Brühl
Brock Rumlow / Crossbones: Frank Grillo
Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross: William Hurt
Everett K. Ross: Martin Freeman
May Parker: Marisa Tomei
King T'Chaka: John Kani
Howard Stark: John Slattery
Maria Stark: Hope Davis
Miriam: Alfred Woodard

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Screenplay: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Cinematography: Trent Opaloch
Production design: Owen Paterson
Film editing: Jeffrey Ford, Matthew Schmidt
Music: Henry Jackman

Perhaps the greatest contribution of science to science fiction in recent years has been the theory of multiple universes, or that the universe is actually a multiverse. It enables sci-fi writers, especially those who create comic books, television shows, and movies that feature superheroes, to get away with almost anything. Marvel has created its own Marvel Cinematic Universe, which teems with superpeople out to solve the world's problems and as a consequence sometimes screwing things up even more. The Marvel world has even recognized the screwups caused by the plethora of mutants, aliens, and wealthy scientists both good and bad, to the point that after the damage caused in Sokovia -- as seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015) -- the United Nations has put together the Sokovia Accords, designed to regulate the activities of superheroes. Unfortunately, this doesn't sit well with Captain America, who is a bit of a Libertarian, especially when enforcing the accords threatens his old friend Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier -- see Captain America: The Winter Solder (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2014). So Cap's attempt to defend Barnes puts him at odds with Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, who thinks the Avengers need to display good faith with the accords. And so it goes, with various superheroes taking sides and doing battle for the cause they choose. The problem with Captain America: Civil War is essentially that of Avengers: Age of Ultron: Unless you're a Marvel Comics geek, you need a playbill in hand to figure out who's who and what their superpower is. Or you can, like me, just sit back and enjoy the ride. The Russo brothers have a skillful hand at keeping all of the mayhem going, and the screenplay by Christopher Marcus and Stephen McFeely provides enough quieter moments between the CGI-enhanced action sequences to stave off a headache. But the movie really does feel overpopulated at times: In addition to the combatants mentioned, there are also Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, Anthony Mackie's Falcon, Don Cheadle's War Machine, Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye, and a few newcomers like Paul Rudd's Ant-Man and Tom Holland as the latest incarnation of Spider-Man, the previous actors, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, having outgrown the role. There's some good quippy fun among the various members of the cast when they're not showing off their superpowers.

Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, 1937)

Roland Young, Cary Grant, and Constance Bennett in Topper

In a golden age for character actors, Roland Young stood out because he put the emphasis on "actor" as much as on "character." If you wanted a character type, such as a prissy fussbudget or an irascible fat man, you went to Franklin Pangborn or Eugene Pallette, but if you wanted depth and versatility, you went to Young, whose range extended from the fawning, vicious Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935) to the slyly lecherous Uncle Willy in The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940). The role for which he's most remembered, and the one that earned him his only Oscar nomination, was that of the repressed, henpecked husband Cosmo Topper in Topper. It was followed by two sequels, Topper Takes a Trip (Norman Z. McLeod, 1938), and Topper Returns (Roy Del Ruth, 1941). The first film, also directed by McLeod, is the best, partly because it's the only one with Cary Grant as the ghostly George Kerby, who with his (also ghostly) wife, Marion (Constance Bennett), haunts Topper out of his stuffy funk. The Kerbys, a wealthy, fun-loving couple, have died in an automobile accident and, finding themselves in a kind of limbo, decide that they must redeem themselves with a good deed. They hit upon the idea of cheering up the morose Topper, president of the bank on whose board George serves. The characters come from a pair of novels by Thorne Smith, a now mostly forgotten author of comic novels that in their day, the 1920s and early '30s, were thought to be quite risqué. As a kid, after seeing the Topper movies and the 1950s TV series based on them, I went to the library in search of the books and was told quite firmly that they were not suitable for young people. Whatever bawdiness may have been in the source has been edited out by the Production Code, although there are some glimpses of it still in the scenes in which Topper, at odds with his wife, Clara (Billie Burke), retreats to a hotel and is spied upon by the hotel detective (Pallette in his element), who thinks Topper has a woman in his room after overhearing Marion Kerby talking to him. There is also a bit involving Clara's discovery of a woman's undergarment -- Marion's -- in her husband's possession. Topper is a lightweight farce, but an engaging one, thanks to its cast, which also includes Alan Mowbray as the Toppers' butler. Young stands out not only for his portrayal of the put-upon husband but also for his skill at physical comedy. He gets drunk and hilariously demonstrates his dancing skills to Marion, and then, having passed out, is carried down the hall by the invisible Kerbys -- a brilliant bit in which Young has to walk on tiptoes with arms lifted to suggest their support. Young is his own special effect in a film full of clever ones.

The Double Life of Véronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)

The Netflix series Sense8 is about eight people born at the same moment in widely dispersed parts of the world. Each possesses the psychic gift to communicate with the others, sometimes to rescue one of the eight from danger. (They also occasionally participate in rather impressive group sex. Perhaps as a team-building exercise.) Sense8 takes the ancient idea that everyone has a Doppelgänger -- a physical and sometimes psychic twin -- and cubes it, eliminating the physical identity while boosting the psychic one. Krzystof Kieslowski sticks to the more traditional idea of the Doppelgänger in The Double Life of Véronique, in which Irène Jacob plays both a Polish woman named Weronika and a French woman named Véronique. Neither is fully aware of the other's existence, although Weronika once tells her father that she doesn't feel alone in the world, and Véronique tells hers that she has a feeling she has lost someone, as indeed she has: Weronika has died. Their paths crossed only once, when Véronique visited Kraków as a tourist, but although Weronika saw her double on a tour bus, Véronique learns of her existence only later, when she examines a photograph she took that includes Weronika. Kieslowski's film, from a screenplay he wrote with Krzysztof Piesewicz, deals with the parallel lives of the two women and with their emotional and symbolic intersections. It's all remarkably done, with a superb performance by Jacob that equals and sometimes surpasses her work in Kieslowski's Three Colors: Red (1994), and extraordinarily expressive cinematography by Slawomir Idziak that manipulates colors with haunting effect. As with Red, however, I feel a bit let down by Kieslowski's tendency to go for sentiment: I'm left with a feeling that there's something hollow at the film's core, a lack of substance underlying the impressive acting and technique. Still, a lesser director than Kieslowski might have gone all the way, to a Hollywood-style romantic ending instead of the somewhat ambiguous one he gives us.  

Two From Hawks

The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951)

James Arness in The Thing From Another World

Capt. Patrick Hendry: Kenneth Tobey
Nikki Nicholson: Margaret Sheridan
Dr. Arthur Carrington: Robert Cornthwaite
Ned Scott: Douglas Spencer
Lt. Eddie Dykes: James Young
Crew Chief, Bob: Dewey Martin
Lt. Ken Erickson: Robert Nichols
Cpl. Barnes: William Self
Dr. Stern: Eduard Franz
The Thing: James Arness

Director: Christian Nyby
Screenplay: Charles Lederer, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht
Based on a story by John W. Campbell Jr.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, John Hughes
Film editing: Roland Gross
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, and Marilyn Monroe in Monkey Business

Barnaby Fulton: Cary Grant
Edwina Fulton: Ginger Rogers
Oliver Oxley: Charles Coburn
Lois Laurel: Marilyn Monroe
Hank Entwhistle: Hugh Marlowe
Jerome Kitzel: Henri Letondal
Dr. Zoldeck: Robert Cornthwaite
G.J. Culverly: Larry Keating
Dr. Brunner: Douglas Spencer
Mrs. Rhinelander: Esther Dale
Little Indian: George Winslow

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, I.A.L. Diamond, Harry Segall
Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner
Art direction: George Patrick, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: William B. Murphy
Music: Leigh Harline

Oddly, the most "Hawksian" of these two early 1950s Howard Hawks movies is the one for which he is credited as producer and not as director. The fact that The Thing From Another World displays Hawks's typical fast-paced, overlapping dialogue and has a heroine who can hold her own around men has led many to suggest that Hawks really directed it. The rumor is that Hawks gave Christian Nyby the director's credit so that Nyby could join the Directors Guild. It was the first directing credit for Nyby, who had worked as film editor for Hawks on several films, including Red River (Hawks, 1948), for which Nyby received an Oscar nomination. He went on to a long career as director, mostly on TV series like Bonanza and Mayberry R.F.D., but the controversy over whether he or Hawks directed The Thing has never really quieted down. In any case, The Thing is a landmark sci-fi/horror film, with plenty of wit and some engaging performances, particularly by Margaret Sheridan as the no-nonsense Nikki, secretary to a scientist at a research outpost near the North Pole where a flying saucer has crashed with a mysterious inhabitant. Nikki's old flame, Capt. Hendry, arrives with an Air Force crew to investigate, and Sheridan and Tobey have a little of the bantering chemistry of earlier Hawksían couples like Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944) or Montgomery Clift and Joanne Dru in Red River. Though it's a low-budget cast, everyone performs with wit and conviction. The film has dated less than other invaders-from-outer-space movies of the '50s, partly because of its lightness of touch and a few genuine scares, though its concluding admonition, "Watch the skies," is pure Cold War paranoia at its peak. That's James Arness, pre-Gunsmoke, as the Thing. The screenplay is by Charles Lederer, with some uncredited contributions from Ben Hecht, both of them frequent collaborators with Hawks. Both of them also worked on Monkey Business, a very different kind of movie, whose writers also include Billy Wilder's future collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond. The film evokes Hawks's great Bringing Up Baby (1938) by featuring Cary Grant as a rather addled scientist, Dr. Barnaby Fulton, who becomes involved in some comic mishaps brought about by an animal -- a leopard in the earlier film, a chimpanzee in this one. But the giddiness of Bringing Up Baby never quite emerges, partly because of a lack of chemistry between Grant and Ginger Rogers, who plays his wife, Edwina. The script involves Fulton's work on a rejuvenating drug that the chimpanzee manages to empty into a water cooler, thereby turning anyone who drinks it into an irresponsible 20-year-old. Grant is an old master at this kind of nonsense, but Rogers looks stiff and starchy and ill-at-ease trying to match him -- except, of course, when she is called on to dance, which she still did splendidly. Fortunately, there's some engaging support from Charles Coburn as Fulton's boss, who has a "secretary" played by Marilyn Monroe. ("Find someone to type this," he tells her.) Her role is the air-headed blonde stereotype that she found so difficult to escape -- "Mr. Oxley's been complaining about my punctuation, so I'm careful to get here before nine," she tells Fulton -- but no one has ever been better at playing it. Where The Thing From Another World succeeds despite a less-than-stellar cast, Monkey Business depends heavily on star power, for it gives off a feeling that its genre, screwball comedy, had played out by the time it was made.

Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)

Emmanuelle Riva in Amour

Georges: Jean-Louis Trintignant
Anne: Emmanuelle Riva
Eva: Isabelle Huppert
Alexandre: Alexandre Tharaud
Geoff: William Shimell
Concierge: Rita Blanco
Concierge's Husband: Ramón Agirre

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Darius Khondji

As someone who knows what it's like to care for a disabled spouse, I commend writer-director Michael Haneke for getting so much right in Amour. Not that accuracy is of the essence in the film: Amour is not a documentary, it's a fiction, and as such needs a shape that lies beyond the depiction of the mundane pains and frustrations of the characters. And that way lie the pitfalls of sentimentality and melodrama, which Haneke mostly avoids, thanks in very large part to the brilliance of his actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert. Are there American actors, or even British ones, who could have performed these roles with commensurate skill, drawn from the depths of experience? Trintignant and Riva are Georges and Anne, retired piano teachers whom we first see at the triumphant performance by one of her former pupils, Alexandre (the real pianist Alexandre Tharaud). Shortly afterward, Anne suffers a mild stroke and submits to surgery to eliminate an arterial blockage, but the surgery leaves her paralyzed on the right side. Georges is able to cope with his caregiving duties, though Anne is increasingly distressed by her disability and by the burden it places on her husband. At one point she tells him that she wants to die. Another stroke then leaves her mostly speechless and virtually helpless, forcing Georges to hire part-time nursing help. Their daughter, Eva (Huppert), has her own life to live, and urges Georges to put Anne in institutional care, which he resists because of Anne's previously expressed wish to die in their home, not in a hospital. Unfortunately, despite inspired performances and mostly sensitive direction, the climax and the conclusion of Amour ring a little false, perhaps because the fictional construct demands a somewhat artificial closure to a film that has felt genuine up to that point. Amour received Oscar nominations for best picture, for Riva's performance, and for Haneke's direction and screenplay, and it won the best foreign-language film award.

Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)

Son of Saul begins with an out-of-focus figure walking across a field toward the camera until he finally comes into focus. This is Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a Sonderkommando -- a Jewish prisoner tasked with clean-up duties in a Nazi death camp. In a bravura sequence, the camera (the cinematographer is Mátyás Erdély) stays focused on Saul in near-closeup as it tracks what he is doing: helping herd naked people into the "showers" where they are gassed, rifling through their belongings that they have neatly hung up in an anteroom (they were, in a particularly sadistic stroke, told to remember the numbers of the hooks on which they hung their clothes and to hurry their showers because the promised soup is getting cold), then helping take the bodies (referred to by the Nazis as "die Stücke," or "pieces") to the crematorium, and scrubbing the floors in the gas chamber. It's a sequence made more horrifying by the fact that all of these events take place in the slightly out-of-focus background as the camera concentrates on Saul. But something out of the ordinary happens: A boy is found still alive in the gas chamber, and Saul recognizes him. He will later tell others that the boy is his son, from a liaison with a woman not his wife, which explains the unusual interest he takes in this particular victim: When the boy is sent to the doctors, he is smothered to death by an SS officer who then orders an autopsy to try to explain why he survived the gas. Saul, who witnesses this murder, persuades a sympathetic doctor to hold off on the autopsy and keep the body from being cremated. Saul's efforts to hide the body and to find a rabbi who can perform a ritual burial form the rest of the film's narrative. He is aided in his efforts but sometimes also resisted by other prisoners, who are plotting a rebellion against the guards. It's an extraordinarily harrowing film that won the foreign language film Oscar and numerous critics society awards. Remarkably, it's also writer-director László Nemes's first feature film, and Röhrig, on whom the camera is focused for virtually the entire time, had only a Hungarian TV miniseries made in 1989 as an acting credit. Like many films about the Holocaust it runs the risk of turning its subject into melodrama or of desensitizing the audience to the depicted horrors. It doesn't quite avoid the risk -- there are times when Saul's implacable determination tests our credulity, and there is always the awareness that these are "just actors" portraying things that happened to real people -- but it's an honorable contribution to a difficult genre.

Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994)

The American title, Chungking Express, may echo Josef von Sternberg's 1932 Marlene Dietrich classic Shanghai Express, but it resembles that film only in the presence in both of a blond femme fatale -- and in Wong Kar-Wai's film the blond is one only by virtue of a wig. The translated title -- the original meant something like "Chungking Forest" or "Jungle" -- fuses the film's two major settings: the Chungking Mansions, a low-rent building in Hong Kong, and the Midnight Express, a sandwich shop that provides the linkage between the film's two segments. The first part deals with the infatuation of a young police detective, He Qiwu, aka Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), with the woman in the blond wig (Brigitte Lin), who is mixed up in a drug-smuggling scheme that goes awry. The second part tells the story of Cop 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), and his involvement with Faye (Faye Wong), a young woman who works the counter at the sandwich shop. You might say that Chungking Express begins in the world of film noir and ends in that of romantic (and slightly screwball) comedy, but Wong's film transcends the simplicity of genres. As in his masterly In the Mood for Love (2000), Wong is dealing with characters on the brink of an uncertain future, but with a much lighter touch than the later film. The performances are uniformly fine. Faye Wong, a Hong Kong pop star, brings the quirky character of the young Shirley MacLaine to her role, but with a much greater fragility. Like MacLaine, she has been unfairly labeled with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype. The extraordinary cinematography is by Christopher Doyle and Wai-Keung Lau.