Pleasures of the Flesh (Nagisa Oshima, 1965)

Mariko Kaga in Pleasures of the Flesh

Atsushi Wakazaka: Katsuo Nakamura
Shoko: Mariko Kaga
Hitomi: Yumiko Nagawa
Shizuko: Masako Yagi
Mari: Toshiko Higuchi
Keiko: Hiroko Shimizu
Hayami: Shoichi Ozawa
Police Inspector: Kei Sato
Sakurai: Rokko Toura
Gang Member: Fumio Watanabe
Egi: Hosei Kamatsu
Mari's Pimp: Akiji Kobayashi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Based on a novel by Futaro Yamada
Cinematography: Akira Takada
Art direction: Yasutaro Kon
Music: Joji Yuasa

With a burst of bluesy music, Pleasures of the Flesh starts out like a film noir, and the plot setup follows suit. The young tutor to a pretty teenager kills a man who has molested her, but the act has been witnessed by a man who has embezzled funds from his place of work. In an attempt to blackmail the tutor, the embezzler says he won't tell the police if the young man will hide 30 million yen of the loot. The embezzler expects to be arrested, he says, but he'll return for the money after serving his prison sentence. If the tutor has spent any of it, he'll tell the police about the murder. The tutor reluctantly agrees, but then the plot not unexpectedly begins to tangle. The tutor, Atsushi, is in love with the teenager, Shoko, but too poor to win her parents' approval. He's so devastated when she marries that he begins to lose his mind. The embezzler has in fact gone to prison, and Atsushi decides to live it up on the 30 million yen, then kill himself when the embezzler has served his term. And so begins a series of flings with four women, each of whom he pays to live with him. There's a showgirl with a gangster boyfriend, a married woman whose husband is desperately in debt, a doctor who insists on remaining a virgin, and a mute prostitute with a thuggish pimp. None of these attempts to wallow in the titular pleasures of the flesh ends well, and then, just as Atsushi spends the last of the money, he learns that the embezzler has died in prison. As if that outcome weren't ironic enough, the embezzler also told a fellow inmate about the 30 million yen he had stashed with Atsushi and when he's released he comes in search of the money. It's a moral tale straight out of Boccaccio or Chaucer, but writer-director Nagisa Oshima is faced with modernizing it and doesn't quite succeed. There's a bit too much fancy camerawork as Oshima interpolates Atsushi's obsessive visions of Shoko and paranoid ones of the embezzler into the narrative. The moral tale still feels heavyhanded. But Pleasures of the Flesh is the work of a major filmmaker at the outset of his career, and as such rewards watching.

Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals

Amy Adams in Nocturnal Animals

Susan Morrow: Amy Adams
Edward Sheffield / Tony Hastings: Jake Gyllenhaal
Bobby Andes: Michael Shannon
Ray Marcus: Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Laura Hastings: Isla Fisher
India Hastings: Ellie Bamber
Hutton Morrow: Armie Hammer
Lou: Karl Glusman
Turk: Robert Aramayo
Anne Sutton: Laura Linney
Samantha Morrow: India Menuez

Director: Tom Ford
Screenplay: Tom Ford
Based on a novel by Austin Wright
Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey
Production design: Shane Valentino
Film editing: Joan Sobel
Music: Abel Korzeniowski

Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams are two of our best actors, but even they can't do what writer-director Tom Ford calls on them for in Nocturnal Animals: pull the two halves of his movie into coherence. Part of the film is a savage satire on the art world's high end and its wealthy patrons. The other part is a story of sexual violence and revenge. Adams's Susan Morrow exists in the first part as a wealthy gallery owner in Los Angeles with a husband who is cheating on her. One day she receives a manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield. It provides the second story, about Tony Hastings, who is waylaid by vicious young thugs while driving across West Texas by night. His wife, Laura, and his teenage daughter, India, are in the car with him, but Tony, who survives by hiding from the men, is unable to save Laura and India from being raped and murdered. With the help of Bobby Andes, a detective who is dying of lung cancer, he gets his revenge but, as they say, at a cost. As Susan reads the manuscript, she envisions Tony as Edward, whom she had betrayed by leaving him and aborting their child, then marrying the wealthy Hutton Morrow, with whom she has a now-grown daughter, Samantha. The story so disturbs Susan that she wonders why Edward chose to send it to her after so many years -- is this tale of revenge itself  a kind of threat? As well-done as the Tony Hastings story is, with strong performances by not only Gyllenhaal but also Michael Shannon as Andes and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the vicious Ray Marcus, it never comes into the same focus as the "real" story of Susan and the rather decadent art world in which she moves. That said, the best scene in the film may be the one in which Susan has lunch with her mother, a big-haired Texas grande dame played with finesse by Laura Linney. Ford has a way of tossing in secondary characters whose backstories sound potentially more interesting than the ones in the foreground. Nocturnal Animals is a disappointment, but only because it feels like it skims the surface of what it has to tell us.

Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist

He: Willem Dafoe
She: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Nic: Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle 
Production design: Karl Júlíusson
Film editing: Åsa Mossberg, Anders Refn

Any film that begins with a toddler climbing to an upper-story window and falling to his death while his parents have graphically photographed sex has a lot of work cut out for it. Unfortunately, Lars von Trier isn't up to the task he sets for himself: Antichrist is morally and intellectually confused in ways that even arch-provocateur von Trier's earlier films haven't been. It plays like a horror film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (if Tarkovsky had been a less grounded and imaginative director), which shouldn't be surprising since the film's credits include a "horror film researcher" and is dedicated to Tarkovsky, whose film The Mirror (1975) reportedly served as a direct inspiration for von Trier. Antichrist became a cause célèbre when it was shown at Cannes, where some people reportedly fainted and others walked out, but Charlotte Gainsbourg went on to win the best actress award. American critics were similarly divided, with A.O. Scott of the New York Times calling it "ponderous" and "conceptually thin and ... dull" but Roger Ebert praising both the commitment of the actors and the director's drive "to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker -- even Buñuel and Herzog." Some critics had it both ways, praising it with reservations: Tom Long of the Detroit News labeled it "probably the best film ever that you'd recommend to absolutely no one." Ebert's measured praise seems to me the most appropriate: Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are the main reasons anyone who is fascinated by the art of acting should see Antichrist. They throw themselves into near-impossible roles, full of contradictions and sometimes misconceived ideas about psychotherapy and the relationship between men and women, and yet manage to overcome the limitations of the screenplay. And while I would never mention von Trier in the same breath as Tarkovsky or Buñuel (Herzog, maybe), I can't help feeling that there is an immense talent at work in his films. Antichrist was born out of von Trier's period of clinical depression, and while that's not enough to excuse the film's incoherence, it certainly makes it more interesting as a personal work of art.

Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016)

Jeff Bridges, Margaret Bowman, and Gil Birmingham in Hell or High Water

Marcus Hamilton: Jeff Bridges
Toby Howard: Chris Pine
Tanner Howard: Ben Foster
Alberto Parker: Gil Birmingham
Elsie: Dale Dickey
Debbie Howard: Marin Ireland
Jenny Ann: Katy Mixon
Justin Howard: John Paul Howard
T-Bone Waitress: Margaret Bowman

Director: David Mackenzie
Screenplay: Taylor Sheridan
Cinematography: Giles Nuttgens
Production design: Tom Duffield
Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis

Hell or High Water has a resonance in Trumpian America, with its portrayal of a kind of rural desperation that echoes the era of Bonnie and Clyde, when robbing banks was seen as a kind of stick-it-to-the-man activity, a way of getting back at an economic system that allowed no other way of breaking a cycle. As Toby Howard puts it, "I've been poor my whole life, like a disease passing from generation to generation." Toby enlists his ex-con brother, Tanner, in a scheme to rob the small-town branches of the fictional Texas Midland Bank to build up enough cash to pay off the reverse mortgage that threatens the foreclosure of their recently dead mother's ranch, and then to put the property in trust -- with the same bank -- as a guarantee of a better future for Toby's sons. He is, in short, buying off the bank with the bank's money. Given that the Howard brothers have nothing to lose, it's a risk they think worth taking. On the other hand, there is the law to contend with, in the form of Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton, just days away from a retirement he dreads. Hamilton, too, has nothing to lose, which means he doesn't mind dragging along his partner, Alberto Parker, on an pursuit that Parker thinks is absurd. It's a film of beautiful performances, not only another laurel for Jeff Bridges, but also a potential career-maker for Ben Foster and a chance for Chris Pine to show that he's not just another pretty face -- he grunges up well. The West Texas setting -- though the film was shot just across the border in eastern New Mexico -- is exploited skillfully, with deft touches like the frequent billboards advertising ways to get out of debt and the moribund small towns that cause Parker to ask, "Do you want to live here? Got an old hardware store that charges twice what Home Depot does, one restaurant with a rattlesnake for a waitress." The film also plays on the Texan love of guns when the robbers discover that the patrons of the banks are taking full advantage of the state's concealed-carry laws. Hamilton also echoes the region's casual racism, perhaps ironically, with his digs at his partner's American Indian heritage, though the point is made without irony when an old man is surprised that the robbers "ain't Mexican." Hell or High Water perhaps doesn't reach the elegiac heights of No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007, but in its simpler, less florid way it's an equally worth companion in the neo-Western genre.

With Beauty and Sorrow (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965)

Mariko Kaga in With Beauty and Sorrow

Otoko Ueno: Kaoru Yachigusa
Keiko Sakami: Mariko Kaga
Toshio Oki: So Yamamura
Taichiro Oki: Kei Yamamoto
Fumiko Oki: Misako Watanabe
Otoko's Mother: Haruko Sugimura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Junichi Osumi
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Toru Takemitsu

Some mannered acting and stagy blocking mars Masahiro Shinoda's otherwise involving With Beauty and Sorrow, a revenge drama that doesn't quite transcend its genre. Toshio Oki, a womanizing novelist whose wife just barely puts up with his extramarital exploits, once had an affair with the young artist Otoko Ueno. She became pregnant but lost the baby at birth, and suffered severe psychological trauma. Now she lives with a young woman, Keiko, her student and her lover. Otoko has recovered her emotional stability, and even agrees to meet Oki when he telephones her on a visit to Kyoto, sending Keiko to his hotel to take him to the restaurant where they will reunite. But Keiko is, as even Otoko suggests, a little "crazy," and after the meeting begins to plot ways to bring about her lover's revenge on Oki. Eventually, this involves Keiko's seducing not only Oki but also his son, Taichiro, a graduate student of medieval Japanese history, with predictably disastrous consequences. Old pro So Yamamura is excellent as Oki, and it's good to see the great Haruko Sugimura, veteran of many films by Shinoda's mentor, Yasujiro Ozu, in the small part of Otoko's mother. But the younger actors, particularly Mariko Kaga as Keiko and Kei Yamamoto as Taichiro, turn what might have been an affecting portrayal of doomed characters into melodrama. The film benefits from Toru Takemitsu's score, though it sometimes feels a bit at odds with the soap-operatic events on screen.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Scott Pilgrim: Michael Cera
Ramona Flowers: Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Knives Chau: Ellen Wong
Kim Pine: Alison Pill
Stephen Stills: Mark Webber
Young Neil: Johnny Simmons
Wallace Wells: Kieran Culkin
Stacey Pilgrim: Anna Kendrick
Julie Powers: Aubrey Plaza
Matthew Patel: Satya Bhabha
Lucas Lee: Chris Evans
Envy Adams: Brie Larson
Roxy Richter: Mae Whitman
Todd Ingram: Brandon Routh
Gideon Graves: Jason Schwartzman

Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Bill Pope
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Film editing: Jonathan Amos, Paul Macliss

Edgar Wright's hyperactive but witty Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was a box-office failure, despite being an entertaining farrago of everything in 21st century pop culture: comic books, video games, anime, rock, superhero movies, and so on. Critics generally praised it, but that may have been something of a kiss of death, making it too mainstream for the hip. It has since, as such commercial misfires tend to do, become something of a cult movie, finding its audience as it ages and turns into a nostalgia piece. It gets much of its strength from Michael Cera's performance as the sweet slacker Scott, who plays bass in a garage band and has to balance an inappropriate infatuation with the underage Knives Chau and a more appropriate attraction to the très hip Ramona Flowers. Unfortunately, Ramona has a slate of evil ex-boyfriends, each of whom Scott is obliged to vanquish. Chris Evans and Brandon Routh send up their own superhero roles as two of the evil exes, the former a skateboarding movie star with an entourage of stunt doubles, the latter a bassist for a rival band who gets his superpowers from veganism -- about which he is willing to go on at hilarious length. Presiding over the evil exes is record producer Gideon Graves, sneeringly played by Jason Schwartzman. It's all very silly, but it's also bright and colorful fun if you want a break from reality.

The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990)

John Cusack and Anjelica Huston in The Grifters

Lilly Dillon: Anjelica Huston
Roy Dillon: John Cusack
Myra Langtry: Annette Bening
Bobo Justus: Pat Hingle
Mr. Simms: Henry Jones
Cole: J.T. Walsh
Joe: Gailard Sartain
Gloucester Hebbing: Charles Napier
Jeweler: Stephen Tobolowsky

Director: Stephen Frears
Screenplay: Donald E. Westlake
Based on a novel by Jim Thompson
Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Mick Audsley
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Stephen Frears's ice-cold neo-noir The Grifters works as well as it does because of the trio of top-notch leads, a tough-minded screenplay based on a tough-minded novel, unsentimental direction, and a magnificent score by Elmer Bernstein. In short, it's an easy film to admire, but a harder film to like. If it has a message to convey it's that crime may pay, but at the expense of all humanity, including love and family. The most brutal moment comes not with bloodshed, but with Lilly Dillon's attempt to seduce her own son, a moment that has been foreshadowed earlier when Myra Langtry voices her suspicion that Roy Dillon has been sleeping with his mother. Anything goes, it seems, when you're on the grift. This was the film that made Annette Bening a star -- after a well-reviewed but little-seen performance in Frears's Valmont a year earlier -- and earned her the first of her four Oscar nominations. Adopting a Marilyn Monroe-ish little girl voice as Myra, she makes the character a near-equal to Anjelica Huston's Lilly, both of them trying to manipulate Roy to succeed in their respective grifts. But as good as Bening, Huston, and John Cusack are in their roles, the film also rides smoothly on its supporting actors, especially Pat Hingle as the brutal Bobo, Henry Jones as a kind of Greek-chorus hotelier, and the always marvelous J.T. Walsh as the cunning but ultimately fragile Cole. (Walsh's early death -- he was only 54 when he succumbed to a heart attack in 1998 -- deprived us of one of our most watchable supporting actors. Like Bill Paxton, whose death at 61 earlier this year recalls the premature departure of Walsh, he was one of those actors who made any film he appeared in just a little bit better.) 

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)

Hohi Aoki and Choko Iida in Record of a Tenement Gentleman

Otane: Choko Iida
The Boy: Hohi Aoki
Tashiro: Chishu Ryu
Tamekichi: Reikichi Kawamura
Kawayoshi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Kikuko: Mitsuko Yoshikawa
The Father: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

There are Web pages devoted to the "funny titles" that other countries give American films. The Japanese title for Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995) allegedly translates as I'm Drunk and You're a Prostitute, and Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) becomes The Hole of Malkovich. But presumably other countries have similar sites devoted to silly Anglicizations of their film titles, too. Certainly the Japanese have every reason to wonder how the translators came up with an off-the-mark title like Record of a Tenement Gentleman for Yasujiro Ozu's film. The setting is not what we call a tenement: a multistory apartment building in a slum. It takes place instead in a row of small houses in an impoverished suburb of Tokyo, where people eke out a living as artisans or peddlers. And the protagonist of the film is not a gentleman but a middle-aged widow named Otane, who agrees to take in for a night a small boy who has followed one of her neighbors home. The boy was separated from his father, a carpenter, when the two of them went into the city in search of work after the apartment building in which they lived burned down. He made his way back to where they used to live, which is where he began to tag along with Tashiro, a fortune-teller by trade. Tashiro shares a home with Tamekichi, a tinker, who refuses to take the boy in, so they persuade Otane to shelter the boy for a night. Things do not go well: The boy wets the bed, and Otane, already grumbling at having been pressured to take him in, becomes even more grouchy at the "stupid" child. She takes the boy to the place where he once lived, but the neighbors there say that the father hasn't yet returned. Otane even tries to abandon the boy, running away from him when they start back, but he's too quick for her. Of course, anyone who's ever seen a movie knows where this is going: After he wets the bed again, the boy runs away, afraid of Otane's anger, but she realizes how much she has come to enjoy his presence and her heart softens when he returns home. She begins to indulge the boy with new clothes and even has their photograph taken together. And then, of course, just as Otane has decided that motherhood suits her, the father arrives, having tracked the boy down. That Ozu manages never to descend into mawkishness with this familiar premise is remarkable, but also a great tribute to his actors, especially Choko Iida as Otane, who makes the transformation from grumpiness to affection entirely credible. The film is also a tribute to the stubborn endurance of the Japanese working classes in the difficult environment of the immediate post-war period. 

Story of a Prostitute (Seijun Suzuki, 1965)

Yumiko Nogawa in Story of a Prostitute

Harumi: Yumiko Nogawa
Shinkichi Mikami: Tamio Kawaji
Lt. Narita: Isao Tamagawa
Sgt. Akiyama: Shoichi Ozawa

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Hajime Takaiwa
Based on a story by Tajiro Tamura
Cinematography: Kazue Nagatsuka
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki seems to have been a kind of Japanese Samuel Fuller, a director initially dismissed by critics as a maker of B-movies, but re-evaluated by a later generation as an auteur with a distinct and innovative style. Certainly Story of a Prostitute is loaded with style, including unabashed subjective camera tricks like the moment when the prostitute of the title, Harumi, sees the brutish Lt. Narita enter her room and freezes his image until it's torn to shreds like a paper doll. Harumi is a "comfort woman" at the front in Manchuria in the 1930s, and the lieutenant is especially taken with her. But she favors his gentle, even initially virginal orderly, Pvt. Mikami. The two fall in love, but Mikami has been so brainwashed by the Japanese army's code bushido-like code of loyalty and honor that he is trapped in a suicidal spiral. When he is wounded and trapped by the enemy, Harumi, who has pursued him behind the lines, persuades him not to kill himself as honor demands. But then he is rescued by his own forces, who suspect him of treason and propose a court-martial. His superiors decide that instead of court-martialing him, which would lead to a conviction that would dishonor his family, they will execute Mikami and report that he died in battle, but in a great scene, Mikami insists on looking his would-be executioner in the eye, and the man refuses to follow through. Eventually, however, he chooses suicide and Harumi, who has procured a grenade for Mikami, who has told her he's going to use it to escape, dies with him. It's a rather florid and sometimes confusing wartime melodrama, but Suzuki transforms it into an effective statement about the absurdity of war and the foolish codes of militarism.

Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

Isuzu Yamada in Tokyo Twilight

Takako Numata: Setsuko Hara
Akiko Sugiyama: Ineko Arima
Shukichi Sugiyama: Chishu Ryu
Kikuko Soma: Isuzu Yamada
Shigeko Takeuchi: Haruko Sugimura
Sakae Soma: Nobuo Nakamura
Gihei Shimomura: Kamatari Fujiwara
Yasuo Namata: Kinzo Shin
Kenji Kimura: Masami Taura

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Takanobu Saito

In commenting on Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain (1954), I noted that some critics saw his film as a kind of reaction against films by Yasujiro Ozu like Late Spring (1949) in which the plot climaxes with the marriage of a young woman. Naruse was exploring the fact that marriage is not always, or even seldom, the fulfillment of things that the bride and her family have wished for. But I also noted that Ozu himself is not above his own skepticism about marriage, and no film of his depicts that skepticism more keenly and tragically than Tokyo Twilight, in which a father whose own marriage has failed is trying to cope with the failed marriage of one daughter and the troubled love life of another. The father in this case is played, as it so often was in Ozu's films, by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor. I can see why Ozu liked him so much: Is there any other actor who can say "Hmm" with such eloquence and variety of intonation than Ryu? He has many opportunities to pack that internalized sound with meaning in Tokyo Twilight, expressing everything from doubt to contentment to disapproval, or just reinforcing his character's stoic resignation to the misfortunes that life continues to bring him. Shukichi Sugiyama and his three children were abandoned by his wife during the war, when he was stationed in Seoul, and he has done what he can to raise the family. The son from the marriage has died in an accident several years earlier, and now his daughter, Takako, has left her husband, bringing their toddler daughter to live with Shukichi. The other daughter, Akiko, has a disastrous fling with the irresponsible Kenji, who leaves her pregnant and looking for the money to have an abortion. The various secrets that the family, packed into one of the boxlike homes Ozu has made into such eloquent settings (expressing both closeness and confinement), only become more pressing when the girls' mother, Kikuko, returns to their lives: She and her new husband (the man she left Shukichi for has died) run a mah jongg parlor that Akiko, searching for Kenji, finds herself in. Kikuko overhears the young woman's name and, realizing she's her daughter, strikes up a conversation, asking about the family without revealing the truth. But then Shukichi's sister accidentally encounters Kikuko while shopping and brings him the news that she's returned. When Takako overhears, she goes to Kikuko and asks her not to reveal her identity to Akiko. But secrets will out, and Akiko, racked with guilt not only for the abortion but also for having been arrested under suspicion of prostitution while waiting for Kenji in a bar, decides that she has inherited a bad streak from Kikuko, even questioning whether Shukichi is her actual father. Events are set in motion that culminate in Takako denouncing Kikuko, who decides to leave town. There is a poignant scene at the end in which Kikuko, hoping that she has made amends with Takako, looks out of the window of the train for her daughter to say goodbye. If you know Isuzu Yamada only as the sinister "Lady Macbeth" of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), her performance as the woman who has spent a lifetime of quiet regret will be eye-opening. As usual, Ozu transcends the potential for sentimental excess and arrives at just the right blend of pathos and quiet endurance.