Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Michele Valley, and Christos Stergioglou in Dogtooth

Father: Christos Stergioglou
Mother: Michele Valley
Older Daughter: Angeliki Papoulia
Son: Hristos Passalis
Younger Daughter: Mary Tsoni
Christina: Anna Kalaitzidou

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Philippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis

Dogtooth might be taken as a satire on helicopter parenting, were it not that the imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos seems too expansive to be confined that way. The film begins with Mother providing vocabulary lessons to her children, except that the definitions of the words are hilariously incorrect: The word "sea," for example, means "a large armchair." And soon we meet Father, who is bringing home Christina, a young female security guard from the place where he works. She is securely blindfolded during the trip, and when they get there she is shown to a room where she and the Son strip and have sex -- a task the Father occasionally hires her to perform. Other than that, the three children, all of them young adults, have no contact with the outside world -- they've been told that they can go outside only when they shed one of their "dogteeth." They live in an expensive house surrounded by a high wall, and are never allowed outside. They have a television set, but it is used only for home videos. When a cat wanders onto the grounds, the Son kills it with garden shears, and on learning of the intruder the Father slashes his clothes and smears himself with fake blood, then tells them that cats are the most dangerous creatures on Earth and has them get down on all fours and bark like dogs, training them on how to respond if another cat should make its way into their enclave. Eventually, however, the world intrudes, largely because of Christina, who gets bored with the perfunctory sex with the Son, who refuses to gratify her orally, so she teaches the Older Daughter the fine art of cunnilingus, setting off some experiments with licking between the two daughters, usually involving body parts like the shoulder or the inside of the thigh. Christina also gives the Older Daughter some videotapes in exchange for her sexual favors. We gather from the Older Daughter's parroting of lines from the movies that they include Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). When Christina's transgression is discovered, she's banished from the enclave and the parents decide that one of the daughters should take her place in gratifying the Son. But the damage has been done: Older Daughter knocks out one of her canines with a dumbbell and, bleeding profusely, hides in the trunk of the Father's Mercedes. The macabre humor of Lanthimos's film lends itself to all sorts of interpretations: Is it, for example, a lampoon of homeschooling? A fable about the repressive power of society? A knock on utopian theorizing? Dogtooth never quite goes as crazily baroque as Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) -- or, to judge from the reviews, his latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) -- but its consistent exploration of a warped worldview is fascinating.

Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)

Anna Massey and Barry Foster in Frenzy

Richard Blaney: Jon Finch
Robert Rusk: Barry Foster
Brenda Blaney: Barbara Leigh-Hunt
Babs Milligan: Anna Massey
Chief Inspector Oxford: Alec McCowen
Mrs. Oxford: Vivien Merchant
Hetty Porter: Billie Whitelaw
Johnny Porter: Clive Swift
Felix Forsythe: Bernard Cribbins
Monica Barling: Jean Marsh

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer
Based on a novel by Arthur La Bern
Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Film editing: John Jympson

Frenzy is so often called a "return to form" by critics commenting on Alfred Hitchcock's films that it's worth parsing that phrase a bit. What's generally meant is that after the triumph of Psycho (1960), Hitchcock's films seemed to decline in quality: To the critics of the day, The Birds (1963) felt like a gimmicky monster movie, Marnie (1964) an overdone, miscast psychological drama, Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) attempts to cash in on the James Bond-era vogue for spy movies. Later generations of critics have found intelligent things to say about some of these films (though there are few ardent defenders of Torn Curtain and Topaz), largely because of their ability to see the Hitchcock oeuvre as a whole and to work in the revelations of the Hitchcock biographers about the director's obsessions and predilections. But Frenzy was for many mainstream critics what Roger Ebert called it: "the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn't commit." I would qualify that observation with the remark that Frenzy is the kind of film Hitchcock couldn't have made in the 1940s because of the Production Code's restrictions on nudity, sex outside of marriage, and excessive violence. Liberated from the Code, Frenzy is rated R. And I think Hitchcock's delighted rush into the new era of frankness in film may have had a destructive effect on his ability to maintain consistency of tone. A scene like the rape-murder of Brenda Blaney belongs to a different kind of film than the domestic comedy of Inspector Oxford and his gourmet-cook wife, and there's something a little too sick about the snap of Mrs. Oxford's bread stick as her husband is recounting how Rusk had to break Babs Milligan's fingers to retrieve his stickpin. There is no heart in the film, the way there was in films of the 1940s like Shadow of a Doubt (1943) or Notorious (1946), in which we could feel anxiety over the plight of the characters. Hitchcock does seem to want us to feel some real-world horror at Brenda's reciting Psalm 91 and trying to cover her bared breast as she's being raped, but even that invocation of sympathy feels out of place later, especially when Babs's corpse is treated for comedy when her feet keep finding their way into Rusk's face. And a "joke" like that of the man in the pub who quips "every cloud has a silver lining" on learning that the killer rapes his victims before strangling them should never have found its way onto film. There is much to admire in Frenzy: Hitchcock never did a more skillful scene than the one in which the camera follows Babs and Rusk up to the flat where we know she's going to die, and then silently retreats back down the stairs and across the busy street. Alec McCowen and Vivien Merchant skillfully play the comedy of the husband and wife dinner table scenes -- the soupe aux poissons is particularly unappetizing. I especially like the bit in which Mrs. Oxford offers a drink to the sergeant who brings news of the case to the inspector: It's a new cocktail called a "margarita," she explains, made with what she pronounces "tekwila." The sergeant has to leave, however, so she swigs the drink he has abandoned and then, with a rather odd look on her face, hastily makes her exit. But too often in Frenzy what Hitchcock thinks is naughty is just nasty.

Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1966)

Mbissine Thérèse Diop in Black Girl

Diouana: Mbissine Thérèse Diop
Madame: Anne-Marie Jelinek
Monsieur: Robert Fontaine
Diouana's Boyfriend: Momar Nar Sene
Boy With Mask: Ibrahima Boy

Director: Ousmane Sembene
Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene
Based on a story by Ousmane Sembene
Cinematography: Christian Lacoste

With a run time of just about an hour, Black Girl is a marvel of condensed storytelling, even though it uses a sophisticated technique like flashbacks to create its powerful portrait of the wounds of colonialism. It begins in medias res, with Diouana's arrival in France to serve as the maid -- although she expects to work as a nanny, as she had in Dakar -- to a French couple. We learn a bit of her life in Senegal at the same time that we see her disillusionment and eventual slump into depression with what she becomes in the small apartment in Antibes of the couple. The children are away -- presumably at boarding school or with relatives -- and Diouana is forced into a round of cooking and cleaning that she had never expected. She sees nothing of the city outside of the apartment, and is subjected to insults from the couple's guests: An older man, for example, insists on grabbing her and kissing her because, he says, "I've never kissed a negress." The Frenchwoman's friends chatter about Diouana as if she is invisible, asking if she understands French. Told that she does, one of them says she must do so "instinctually" and adds, "like an animal." The result of the exploitation and abuse is tragic, and although what happens might seem melodramatic to some, I think it feels consistent with the way Sembene tells the story, almost as a moral fable. The central symbol of the fable is a mask that Diouana gave to her employers when she first went to work for them in Dakar. She finds it hanging on a wall of the stark modern apartment in Antibes, a touch of decor without significance, and when she decides she's had enough with her life there, she takes it down and puts it with her luggage. She never goes back to Dakar, however, but the man for whom she worked does, and he returns the mask with her belongings to Diouana's mother. A small boy, whom we first saw playing with the mask before Diouana gave it away, finds it and follows the Frenchman, who takes fright and runs away from him -- the European colonizer fleeing the new Africa. 

Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)

Julie Andrews and Paul Newman in Torn Curtain

Michael Armstrong: Paul Newman
Sarah Sherman: Julie Andrews
Countess Kuchinska: Lila Kedrova
Heinrich Gerhard: Hansjörg Felmy
Ballerina: Tamara Toumanova
Gustav Lindt: Ludwig Donath
Hermann Gromek: Wolfgang Kieling
Jacobi: David Opatoshu
Dr. Koska: Gisela Fisher
Farmer: Mort Mills
Farmer's Wife: Carolyn Conwell

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Brian Moore
Cinematography: John F. Warren
Production design: Hein Heckroth

I saw Torn Curtain in the year of its initial release and was never tempted to watch it again until last night. I had forgotten almost everything about it except its general dullness and the one great scene when Armstrong and the farmer's wife take an extraordinary time (for a movie at least) to kill Gromek. It's an exceptionally well-directed scene, harrowing in its unexpected realism in the midst of a film that's anything but realistic. I particularly like the way the struggle leaves Armstrong exhausted when it's over, a refreshing change from the usual movie action in which the protagonist picks himself up and dusts himself off after a fight as if it was no big deal. There is one other thing that struck me when I first saw Torn Curtain: the way Michael and Sarah supposedly blend in with the crowds in East Germany. I had lived in Germany for almost a year several years earlier, and I know how easy it is to spot American haircuts and clothes, like the kind Paul Newman and Julie Andrews have in the movie, so their going unnoticed on a bus full of Germans struck me as silly movie fakery. But almost everything about Torn Curtain feels fake. Andrews and Newman are miscast, apparently having been foisted on Hitchcock by the studio, Universal. Granted, Andrews's role is a particularly thankless one, the stand-by-your-man helpmeet, but it's particularly unfortunate in the context of a film by a director who had traditionally given women strong leading roles. And despite an opening scene that puts the two of them in bed, there is no sexual chemistry between Andrews and Newman. (Was there ever sexual chemistry between Andrews and a leading man? Is that a consequence of having been introduced to movie audiences as a nanny and a novice in a convent?) The one interesting performance in the movie is Lila Kedrova's Polish countess, trying to get Michael and Sarah to sponsor her immigration to the United States, but it goes on much too long, as if Hitchcock knew what a drag the rest of the film was and wanted to showcase this florid eccentric. This was the first film Hitchcock made without the team of cinematographer Robert Burks, composer Bernard Herrmann, and film editor George Tomasini, who had seen him through most of the glories of his 1950s and early '60s classics.

Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Toshiko Iizuka and Minosuke Bando in Utamaro and His Five Women

Utamaro: Minosuke Bando
Okita: Kinuyo Tanaka
Seinosuke: Kotaro Bando
Oran: Hiroko Kawasaki
Takasode: Toshiko Iizuka
Oman: Kyoko Kusajima
Yukie: Eiko Ohara
Shozaburo: Shotaro Nakamura
Oshin: Kiniko Shiratao
Takemara: Minpei Tomamoto

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Kanji Kunieda
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Utamaro and His Five Women is a film about the male gaze, but is it a celebration or a criticism of it? Kenji Mizoguchi is well-known for films like The Life of Oharu (1952) that explore the lives of women with deep sympathy and understanding, so it's easy to read the Utamaro biopic as a criticism, a portrait of the sometimes desperate existence of the women who inhabited "the floating world" of the 18th-century Japanese demimonde that was the subject of much of the artist's work. But the film also teeters over into exploitation even as it's revealing the seamy side of the male-dominated society. There's a satiric edge to the scene in which Utamaro and his assistants clandestinely observe a powerful lord's gathering of young women who strip to their underclothes and run into the water to catch fish. In a long pan down a row of the women, they disrobe in sequence like a chorus line in a musical. Meanwhile, the assistants are obviously taking more than an aesthetic interest in what's happening. Utamaro and His Five Women was Mizoguchi's first film after the war, and was made under the close observation of the occupying forces who were generally opposed to historical films for fear that they would celebrate the values of pre-war militaristic Japan. Fortunately, the film passed muster, probably because Mizoguchi's subject, a famous artist, represented the positive in Japanese culture. Even so, it's a subtle film with a sly double edge. 

Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)

Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Marnie

Marnie Edgar: Tippi Hedren
Mark Rutland: Sean Connery
Sidney Strutt: Martin Gabel
Bernice Edgar: Louise Latham
Lil Mainwaring: Diane Baker
Mr. Rutland: Alan Napier
Susan Clabon: Mariette Hartley
Sailor: Bruce Dern

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Marnie, once dismissed as just a stew of melodrama and pop psychology, has undergone a wholesale re-evaluation in recent years, much of it spurred by revelations about Alfred Hitchcock's sexual harassment of Tippi Hedren. Now it's often seen as not only one of his most revealing films about his personal obsessions -- second perhaps only to Vertigo (1958), which it much resembles -- but also one of his greatest. Its champions include the New Yorker's Richard Brody and filmmaker Alexandre Philippe. In the introduction to a recent showing of Marnie on Turner Classic Movies, Philippe even compared Hedren's performance to that of Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001). I wouldn't go that far. In fact, the most I'm willing to say is that Marnie is a very odd duck of a movie, one that just thinking about for a while can give me the creeps, especially in these times when each day seems to bring a new revelation about powerful men and their treatment of vulnerable women (and men). That's why the key to Marnie seems to me not so much Marnie herself but Mark Rutland. Hedren is very good in her role, fully playing up her character's ever-present self-consciousness, born of being the constant object of the male gaze. But the film turns on an actor's ability to make Mark's obsession with Marnie, his persistence in trying to treat her disorder, and the breakdown of his endurance when he rapes her into something both credible and meaningful. I doubt that even Hitchcock's most gifted leading men, i.e., Cary Grant and James Stewart, could have brought off the role with much success. Sean Connery brings his Bondian smirk to the part, which heightens our sense of Marnie's fear of men, but also undercuts what should be at least a plausible interest on his part of treating her illness. There's no gentleness in Connery's performance, so that even Mark's attempts to win her over -- buying her beloved horse, for example -- look like power plays. But Marnie's response to Mark is equally perverse: After the rape, she tries to drown herself in the ship's swimming pool, and when he asks why she didn't just jump overboard, she replies, "The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish." Not only is the reply nonsensical but it also underscores the truth: The idea was obviously to let herself be found, either to be rescued or by her death to score another point against men. So it's clear that Marnie is the kind of film that invites exhaustive comment, which is not exactly the same thing as saying it's a great film, or even a good one. To my mind, it's a showcase of Hitchcockian technique without heart or wit. It has some fine touches, such as the scene in which Marnie goes to rob the Rutland safe and we watch as she goes about it on one side of the screen while on the other a cleaning woman comes closer and closer to discovering her. Once again, Hitchcock makes us root for someone who's doing something we should disapprove of, but there's also something overfamiliar about it: We saw something like it in Psycho (1960), when Norman tries and almost fails to sink the Ford containing Marion's body in the swamp. But there it was an important alienating moment; here it just seems like a trick to build suspense in a film that doesn't particularly need it. It's style for style's sake, the essence of decadence, and Marnie may be Hitchcock's most decadent film.

The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, 1966)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Sword of Doom

Ryunosuke Tsukue: Tatsuya Nakadai
Ohama: Michiyo Aratama
Hyoma Utsuki: Yuzo Kayama
Omatsu: Yoko Naito
Taranosuke Shimada: Toshiro Mifune
Shichibei: Ko Nishimura
Bunnojo Utsuki: Ichiro Nakaya
Kamo Serizawa: Kei Sato
Isami Kondo: Tadao Nakamura

Director: Kihachi Okamoto
Screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto
Based on a novel by Kaizan Nakazoto
Cinematography: Hiroshi Murai
Art direction: Takashi Matsuyama
Film editing: Yoshitami Kuroiwa
Music: Masaru Sato

One of the joys of my pilgrimage through film history has been the discovery of great actors who aren't exactly household names in the United States. One of the best of them is Tatsuya Nakadai, who threw himself into roles with such commitment that it's almost a surprise to realize that he's still alive: He's 84 and still making movies. Even with the presence of the charismatic -- and, in the West, better-known -- Toshiro Mifune in the cast, Nakadai carries The Sword of Doom on his considerable shoulders, playing Ryunosuke, a psychotic samurai, with frightening conviction. In his first appearance, his face is partly hidden by the latticework of a hat, but his eyes burn brightly through the shadowing. He calmly murders an old man whose granddaughter has gone to fetch water. Granted, the old man is praying for death, but an easy one, not the blow of the titular sword. By the end of the film the madness that glitters in Ryunosuke's eyes has been responsible for countless deaths, and it flares up in a cataclysmic ending in which he slashes out at the ghosts he sees behind the bamboo shades of a brothel and eventually at the assassins who come for him. Nakadai does something extraordinary with his body in this final sequence: As Ryunosuke's mind comes unhinged, so does his body, killing in a kind of Totentanz that looks spasmodic but never loses its lethal precision. And there the film ends, on a freeze frame of Nakadai's face and its glittering eyes. The Sword of Doom was meant to have sequels, but they were never made. Yet although we never learn what happens to several other characters whose subplots have centered on Ryunosuke, or indeed whether he survived this orgy of blood, it doesn't really matter much. It's almost enough to have watched Nakadai in performance. 

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)

Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek in Toni Erdmann

Ines Conradi: Sandra Hüller
Winfried Conradi: Peter Simonischek
Henneberg: Michael Wittenborn
Gerald: Thomas Loibl
Tim: Trystan Pütter
Anca: Ingrid Bisu
Steph: Lucy Russell
Tatjana: Hadewych Minis
Ilescu: Vlad Ivanov
Flavia: Victoria Cocias

Director: Maren Ade
Screenplay: Maren Ade
Cinematography: Patrick Orth

The nearly three hours -- well, two hours, 42 minutes -- of Toni Erdmann don't exactly fly by. It's more that they sometimes pause while we accustom ourselves to the eccentricity of the characters and begin to absorb some of the satire, build up another head of steam, and speed into another head-spinning but frequently funny episode. There's a feeling of improv about the film, and with improv there are often dead spots between outbursts of brilliance. The film is about a father and daughter, Winfried and Ines Conradi. He's a shaggy old prankster who teaches music in a school; she's an intensely driven corporate consultant now working to land a contract in Romania that would help companies streamline -- but mostly by jettisoning their unionized work force. The film is thus a satire on global corporate capitalism, with side glances at the pervasive sexism in that world. But writer-director Maren Ade has chosen not to weight the film in the direction of either character study or satire, and I think the film suffers from tone problems occasionally. Granted, it would be easy to slip into formula with such mismatched characters, and I say this knowing that an American remake with Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig is in the works, both of whom are more than capable of doing the conventional if satisfyingly funny thing with the setup: a father who delights in comic disguises like fright wigs and false teeth to shake up his uptight daughter's aggressively workaholic ways. It's to the credit of the film that there are enough unexpected moments -- such as Ines's singing "The Greatest Love of All" at a Romanian family's Easter celebration that Winfried has crashed -- that it never sinks to the routine and conventional. Finally, the film does, I think, go too far, when Ines suddenly decides to host a corporate party in the nude, insisting that all the guests strip too, and claims that it's a "team-building" exercise. Winfried, of course, crashes this party as well, wearing a Bulgarian kukeri costume -- it almost literally turns the film into a shaggy-dog story. Toni Erdmann was a big critical hit, and was a major contender for the foreign film Oscar that went, I think correctly, to Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman.

Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)

Josette Day and Jean Marais in Beauty and the Beast

The Beast/The Prince/Avenant: Jean Marais
Belle: Josette Day
Félicie: Mila Parély
Adélaïde: Nane Germon
Ludovic: Michel Auclair
Father: Marcel André

Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Based on a story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Christian Bérard, Lucien Carré
Film editing: Claude Ibéria
Costume design: Antonio Castillo, Marcel Escoffier
Music: Georges Auric
Makeup: Hagop Arakelian

There are no singing teapots in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, but there's more than enough magic -- almost too much to provide a satisfying ending, hence Greta Garbo's alleged lament, "Give me back my Beast." This is a fairy tale old style, which means that there's something unsettling about the happily-ever-after. Why does the Beast revert to the form of Avenant, whom it is never quite clear that Belle really loves? Where are they sailing off to at the end? Why does Belle seem oddly not quite enraptured with the turn of events? It's a sublimely erotic, if slightly kinky, film: I love the moment when, making his exit after seeing Belle, the Beast reaches out to caress the bare breast of a statue, as if copping a feel denied to him by his deeply conflicted nature. "Love can make a beast of a man," says the Prince at the end, and it's Cocteau's great achievement that this idea simmers beneath the surface of the entire film.

Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, Jenette Goldstein in Aliens

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Newt: Carrie Henn
Hicks: Michael Biehn
Burke: Paul Reiser
Bishop: Lance Henriksen
Hudson: Bill Paxton
Gorman: William Hope
Vasquez: Jenette Goldstein
Apone: Al Matthews

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
Production design: Peter Lamont
Film editing: Ray Lovejoy
Music: James Horner

Before James Cameron become "king of the world" and infatuated with the possibilities of CGI, he made this exciting sequel to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), which is not only a superb movie on its own but also one of the few sequels whose creator has actually studied what made the first film so satisfying. In this case, characters. Just observe the still above and compare it with the one I chose from Alien in which the crew of the Nostromo gathered around the infected Kane. In the one from the sequel we see Newt, Hicks, Ripley, Hudson, Burke, and Vasquez gathered around a schematic to plot out a way of dealing with the alien threat. And if you remember the film at all, you can immediately recall what made these characters so appealing -- or in the case of Burke, so appalling. Aliens could have been your standard shoot-'em-up in space, with lots of mindless action. In fact, it starts out that way, with an obnoxiously gung-ho crew of space marines blustering about how they're going to kick some extraterrestrial ass. But as the cast is whittled down by the monsters, we get to know the seven survivors -- Bishop, the android so mistrusted by Ripley, is missing from the picture -- and to feel a genuine concern about their fates. Moreover, because Cameron hasn't yet fallen under the spell of CGI, what takes place looks and feels real -- there's a tactility about the sets that computers have yet to learn how to supply. Action movies don't come any better than Alien and Aliens.