Dragnet Girl (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Dragnet Girl

Tokiko: Kinuyo Tanaka
Joji: Joji Oka
Kazuko: Sumiko Mizukubo
Hiroshi: Koji Mitsui
Misako: Yumeko Aizome
Senko: Yoshio Takayama
Misawa: Koji Kaga
Okazaki: Yasuo Nanjo

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
Based on a story by Yasujiro Ozu (as James Maki)
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Art direction: Yonekazu Wakita

Yasujiro Ozu clung to silent film for a long time, but who needs sound when you and your cinematographer, Hideo Shigehara, can use the camera as eloquently as they do in Dragnet Girl? Early in the film, the camera explores an office setting, panning over rows of young women at typewriters, clocks slowly ticking away the workday, and rows of men's hats hanging in a hallway. In the last take, one of the hats drops from its hook, as if impatient for quitting time. One of the typists, Tokiko, is summoned from her machine to the office of the president, where she finds his son, Okazaki, who has been putting the moves on her by giving her jewelry, this time a ruby ring. She shrugs off his advances but accepts the ring -- she's living with a gangster, an ex-boxer named Joji, and it's his world that she prefers. This is one of Ozu's forays into the underworld made familiar to us by Hollywood, and it's permeated with echoes of Warner Bros. movies of the 1930s. American culture creeps in everywhere: Even the rules of conduct in a pool hall are written in English on the wall, and in the boxing gym that Joji frequents a sign proclaims the virtues of "The Manly Art of Self-Defense." When an eager young kid named Hiroshi shows up in the gym wanting to become a champion fighter, Joji takes an interest in him, and through him meets his sister, Kazuko, who works in a record store that prominently features the RCA Victor mascot, Nipper. Tokiko gets jealous of Joji's interest in Kazuko, but when she decides to emulate her rival by taking up knitting and other domestic pursuits, she and Joji quarrel. She storms out, but later returns to persuade Joji that it might be a good thing to go straight. Things get complicated, however, when Hiroshi, Joji's protégé, steals money from the cash register at his sister's store. Joji persuades Tokiko that they should pull off one last heist, robbing from the office where Tokiko works to get cash so Hiroshi can pay back what he stole. Ah, but crime does not pay. All of this melodramatic business is elevated not only by Ozu's sure-footed direction and attention to visual detail but also by the performances, especially that of  Kinuyo Tanaka, who once again shows why she should be honored as one of the great film actresses. She has Bette Davis's toughness combined with Lillian Gish's gift for pathos.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Jeff Spicoli: Sean Penn
Stacy Hamilton: Jennifer Jason Leigh
Brad Hamilton: Judge Reinhold
Mike Damone: Robert Romanus
Mark "Rat" Ratner: Brian Backer
Linda Barrett: Phoebe Cates
Mr. Hand: Ray Walston
Mr. Vargas: Vincent Schiavelli
Charles Jefferson: Forest Whitaker

Director: Amy Heckerling
Screenplay: Cameron Crowe
Based on a book by Cameron Crowe
Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti
Art director: Daniel A. Lomino

Of the few standouts in the teen comedy genre, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the one most beloved of that pig in the python, the Baby Boomers. It's not as nostalgic as the granddaddy of the genre, American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), or as smart as Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993), or as savagely witty as Tina Fey's Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004). It's not even as cleverly conceived as director Amy Heckerling's other major outing in the genre, Clueless (1995). But it is the one most frank about teenage sexuality, especially in the relationship between Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy and Phoebe Cates's Linda, in which the supposedly "experienced" Linda serves as the virginal Stacy's mentor. The film also admirably confronts the question of abortion straightforwardly: Stacy has one and suffers no lasting trauma. Instead the condemnation lands on the guy, Mike Damone, whose callous treatment of Stacy is devastatingly portrayed. Otherwise, Fast Times is best seen as a landmark in the careers of future Oscar winners Sean Penn, Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage (who has a small part billed as "Brad's Bud" under the name Nicolas Coppola), and as a demonstration of the skill of someone who has always deserved the Oscar she hasn't won, namely Jennifer Jason Leigh. The cast also features future big names like Eric Stolz and Anthony Edwards in small roles, and gave a brief boost to the career of Judge Reinhold that flared in the mid-1980s and then fizzled. But while Fast Times at Ridgemont High is never quite the "scuz-pit" that Roger Ebert, on an off night, saw it as, it hasn't worn very well. The acting is sometimes just this side of amateurish and the blend of the seriousness of Stacy's scenes with the more familiar classroom comedy involving Spicoli and Mr. Hand lacks finesse. While the movie has a slight feminist edge in its treatment of sex, it also involves some gratuitous breast-baring on the part of Leigh and Cates.

Dry Summer (Metin Erksan, 1964)

Ulvi Dogan and Erol Tas in Dry Summer

Osman: Erol Tas
Bahar: Hülya Koçygit
Hasan: Ulvi Dogan
Veli Sari: Hakki Haktan

Director: Metin Erksan
Screenplay: Metin Erksan, Kemal Inci, Ismet Soydan
Based on a novel by Necati Cumali
Cinematography: Ali Ugur
Music: Manos Hatzidakis

"Other cultures, other customs." That's the liberal mantra when it comes to things other countries do that we disapprove of, though we usually work on persuading them toward our views, especially when those things seem exceptionally cruel, like footbinding or female genital mutilation. Sometimes, though, we have to swallow hard and accept. This blog is a record of movies that I've seen, and I don't expect (and don't often get) drop-ins looking for recommendations. But I welcome them, and if you're one of those, I feel obliged to issue a warning: Metin Erksan's Dry Summer, a much-praised Turkish film, contains two instances of animal cruelty that may be more than you can take. The first is a close-up of a chicken having its head cut off. We've grown so far from our rural roots that a scene like this can be shocking, but we should be obliged to realize that it's a routine occurrence on farms around the world -- and that thousands of chickens are slaughtered in supposedly more humane ways every day so they can arrive in supermarkets neatly wrapped in plastic. The other scene is much harder to take: A dog is shot and yelps in pain before it dies. I see no way that director Metin Erksan has faked this animal's suffering and death -- we later see its carcass being hauled away, head lolling -- and I can't bring myself to countenance its raw inclusion in Dry Summer, even though the killing plays a role in establishing the mood and intensity of the film. Otherwise, Dry Summer, which was chosen for inclusion in Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project and released in the Criterion Collection, is a savage melodrama about a war between a landowner and the other farmers who depend on the spring on his property to water their crops. As characters in the film repeatedly say, "Water is the earth's blood." When Osman decides to dam up the water near the source on his property, he naturally inspires animosity: The dog that's shot is Osman's. But there is a war in Osman's household as well, when his younger brother, Hasan, takes a pretty young wife, Bahar. Osman is a widower, and he spies through a crack in the wall at Hasan and Bahar making love. As the war between the water-deprived farmers and the brothers intensifies, with the dam -- little more than a sluice gate -- continually under attack, Osman finally sheds blood, killing Veli Sari, the leader of the rebelling farmers, during a nighttime assault on the gate. But he persuades Hasan to take the rap: Osman claims that he's more mature and experienced and so the better choice to keep the farm going while Hasan goes to prison. Naturally, Hasan's absence also gives Osman an opening to seduce his brother's wife, which he finally succeeds in doing when a newspaper report says that a man named Hasan has died in prison. Osman has been intercepting Hasan's letters to Bahar, so ít's easy for him to tell her that her husband is now dead. Erksan stages Osman's obsessive pursuit of Bahar well, including a scene in which he's milking a cow as she watches, so he begins fingering and even mouthing the teats suggestively. In another scene, Bahar is bitten by a snake, and Osman relishes the opportunity to suck the poison from the wound in her leg. Eventually, of course, Hasan turns up alive, after being released from prison in a general pardon, and takes his revenge on his brother, resulting in a strong closing scene in which Osman's corpse floats down the watercourses after the dam is broken. Some very sophisticated camerawork adds to the impact of the story, and Erol Tas makes Osman into a memorable villain. Which is why I regret that the killing of the dog mars my reception of the film.

The Crowd Roars (Howard Hawks, 1932)

James Cagney in The Crowd Roars

Joe Greer: James Cagney
Lee Merrick: Ann Dvorak
Anne Scott: Joan Blondell
Eddie Greer: Eric Linden
Spud Connors: Frank McHugh
Pop Greer: Guy Kibbee

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: John Bright, Niven Busch, Kubec Glasmon
Based on a story by Howard Hawks and Seton I. Miller
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox, John Stumar
Film editing: Thomas Pratt

The "Hawksian woman," able to crack wise and exhibit grace under pressure as well as any man, is one of the glories of Hollywood movies. Actresses as various as Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Lauren Bacall, Joanne Dru, and Angie Dickinson held their own with domineering males like Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne, among others. So when I saw that TCM had scheduled a Howard Hawks film I hadn't seen starring James Cagney and Joan Blondell, I thought I knew what I was in for. If anyone could take down a peg the Cagney who became famous for abusing Mae Clarke with half a grapefruit in The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931) it would be Blondell, Warners' likable tough girl. Blondell never got the chance in The Public Enemy, in which she's linked up with Edward Woods instead of Cagney. Well, here's another missed opportunity: Though Blondell gets top billing with Cagney, he's paired off with Ann Dvorak; Blondell gets the forgettable (and forgotten) juvenile Eric Linden instead. And Dvorak's character is no Hawksian woman: Instead of toughing it out with a wisecrack when Cagney's character dumps her, she goes into hysterics. So instead of the witty battle of the sexes we have come to expect from Hawks, in The Crowd Roars we get a passable and sometimes exciting action movie about race car drivers, with a little romantic entanglement thrown in to bridge the well-shot and well-staged racing scenes. Cagney's Joe Greer is a champion race car driver -- he's won at Indianapolis three times -- who goes home to find that his kid brother, Eddie, wants to follow in his footsteps. So Joe takes Eddie back to L.A. with him, where he's been living without benefit of wedlock -- this is a pre-Code film -- with Lee Merrick. Initially he tries to hide his relationship with Lee to protect the younger man's morals -- to "keep him off of booze and women," as he puts it -- but truth will out. When he decides to break up with Lee, she enlists her friend Anne in a revenge plot: Anne will frustrate Joe's puritanical scheme by seducing Eddie. This doesn't work out: Anne and Eddie fall in love. Meanwhile, Joe and Eddie compete in a race in which Joe's sidekick Spud is killed in a flaming crash -- there's a remarkable series of scenes in which drivers, including Joe, drop out of the race because they're nauseated by having to repeatedly pass the crash site with its smell of burning flesh. Eddie wins the race and goes on to become the star driver that Joe was, while Joe hits the bottle and the skids. Redemption and reconciliation of course ensue. None of this is new and all of it is predictable, but Hawks knows how to pump up the action when everything gets soppy. As for the Hawksian woman, she will have to wait until 1934 and Twentieth Century for Carole Lombard to give her the first satisfactory outing.

Walk Cheerfully (Yasujiro Ozu, 1930)

Minoru Takada and Hisao Yoshitani in Walk Cheerfully

Kenji Koyama: Minoru Takada
Yasue Sugimoto: Hiroko Kawasaki
Senko: Hisao Yoshitani
Chieko: Satoko Date
Ono: Takeshi Sakamoto
Gunpei: Teruo Mori
Yasue's Sister: Nobuko Matsuzono
Mother: Utako Suzuki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda
Based on a story by Hiroshi Shimizu
Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara
Set decoration: Hiroshi Mizutani

The English titles of Yasujiro Ozu's films are typically oblique, ranging from the atmospheric but uninformative -- Late Spring (1949),  Early Summer (1951) -- to the proverbial or epigrammatic (but only in Japanese) -- The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), A Hen in the Wind (1958) -- to the simply mistranslated -- Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947). The title of Walk Cheerfully would seem to be similarly somewhat aside of the mark for what started as a gangster movie, but at least the phrase appears in an intertitle in the film as the parting advice given by Yasue to Kenji as he's being taken away by the police -- she seems to mean it somewhat in the spirit of "take care." The film itself is a curious blend of gangster film and romance. In fact, the work it reminded me of sometimes was Frank Loesser's musical Guys and Dolls, which has a similar theme of a shady guy being redeemed by a good girl. The analogy leaped to mind when some of Ozu's gangsters did synchronized routines and gag soft-shoe dances in the pool hall where they meet. For these are not hard-core American gangsters or even murderous yakuza; they're small-time pickpockets and thieves. We meet our hero, Kenji, while he's still a thug known as "Ken the Knife" for the tattoo on his left forearm. The movie begins with a chase: Kenji's sidekick, Senko, being pursued by a mob who think he has stolen a man's wallet. When the mob catches up with Senko, Kenji appears out of the crowd and suggests that they search him for the wallet. Nothing turns up, so Senko goes free, but later we see them meet up and discover that they're in cahoots: Kenji has picked the wallet from Senko as the mob was roughing him up. Eventually, however, both Kenji and Senko try to go straight when Kenji meets and falls in love with Yasue. When they first see her, they think Yasue is a rich woman: She arrives at a jewelry store in a large car and goes in to buy a diamond ring. But it turns out that she's running an errand for her boss, the head of the Ono Trading Co., who puts the moves on her when she brings it to him. Eventually, after Kenji and Yasue meet up again and he learns the truth, that she's just an office worker, he will have an opportunity to beat up Ono for sexually harassing Yasue. This is very minor Ozu, but he handles it well, demonstrating not only his skill at telling a story but also the way American movies influenced him: On the wall at Ono Trading Co. there's a poster for Joan Crawford's Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928). Movies, big cars, and pop music -- Senko has written the English lyrics to the 1928 song "The Gay Caballero" on the wall of the room he shares with Kenji and is trying to learn them -- figure large with these very modern Japanese gangsters.

Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)

Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top

Joe Lampton: Laurence Harvey
Alice Aisgill: Simone Signoret
Susan Brown: Heather Sears
Mr. Brown: Donald Wolfit
Charles Soames: Donald Houston
Elspeth: Hermione Baddeley
George Aisgill: Allan Cuthbertson
Mr. Hoylake: Raymond Huntley
Jack Wales: John Westbrook
Mrs. Brown: Ambrosine Phillpotts

Director: Jack Clayton
Screenplay: Neil Paterson
Based on a novel by John Braine
Cinematography: Freddie Francis
Art direction: Ralph W. Brinton
Music: Mario Nascimbene

Laurence Harvey's narrow eyes and sharpish features (and a long brush cut that makes him look a little like Clint Eastwood) provide the right wolfish look for Joe Lampton, a young man from the provinces on the make. Heir to such classic challengers to the class system as Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré, and Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths, Lampton is determined to break down the British barriers to upward movement. He arrives in the Yorkshire city of Warnley to take on a government job and walks right into a hormonal stew, the eager young men and women of his office casting eyes on one another, but especially on the newcomer. But Lampton knows what he wants when he sees her: a rich young woman named Susan Brown, whose father is a local factory owner. Learning that Susan is a member of an amateur theatrical group, Lampton joins up, only to find himself edged aside by the well-to-do Jack Wales, who is paying court to Susan. Every move Lampton makes to ingratiate himself with Susan, who is inclined to return his attentions, is thwarted by her parents, especially her formidably snobbish mother. We sense Mrs. Brown's backstory: She has married rich herself, to a working-class self-made man, and is determined to keep climbing higher -- no lower-class Lamptons allowed. Determined as he is to win Susan, whose parents send her away on an extended vacation on the Riviera,  Lampton comforts himself with another member of the theater company, Alice Aisgill, an older woman with a bullying, unfaithful husband. When Susan returns, Lampton resumes his pursuit of her, but finds that he has fallen in love with Alice, whose maturity offers something that makes Susan's girlishness seem cloying. When he manages to seduce Susan, he's bored and annoyed by her reaction to losing her virginity: She doesn't feel different, she simpers and keeps asking him if she looks different. But Susan gets pregnant, forcing the Browns into an accommodation with him: marriage and a lucrative job -- everything he wanted. The crisis with Alice this precipitates is predictable, but the film makes a sharp turn into melodrama before the ending. Room at the Top was a hit, winning Simone Signoret a best actress Oscar and Harvey a nomination (along with a nomination for Hermione Baddeley in the very small role of the friend who lends Alice her flat for the trysts with Lampton). It's a little slow in the middle section, as the affair with Alice progresses, and Harvey was an actor of limited range, so the shift from the predatory Lampton of the first part of the film to the man infatuated with Alice doesn't quite come off. But it's a perfect example of the Angry Young Men films, plays, and novels that revolutionized British culture in the austere postwar 1950s.

An Innocent Witch (Heinosuke Gosho, 1965)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in An Innocent Witch

Ayako Oshima: Jitsuko Yoshimura
Kikuno: Kin Sugai
Kansuke Yamamura: Taiji Tonoyama
Kanjiro Toda: Minoru Terada
Kanichi Yamamura: Keizo Kawasaki
Father: Yoshio Yoshida
Shaman: Eijiro Tono
Narrator: Takayuki Akutagawa

Director: Heinosuke Gosho
Screenplay: Hideo Horie
Based on a novel by Hajime Ogawa
Cinematography: Sozaburo Shinomura
Art direction: Totetsu Hirakawa
Film editing: Sadako Ikeda
Music: Sei Ikeno

An Innocent Witch begins like a documentary, with a voiceover narration describing the pilgrimages to Mount Osore, where the faithful gather to ask blind seers to facilitate communication with their dead loved ones. One of the pilgrims is Kikuno, who wants to speak with her daughter, Ayako. As the seer goes into her trance, the film switches abruptly to a conventional narrative in which we learn that Ayako was sold -- willingly, it seems -- into prostitution by her mother because Ayako's father is too ill to continue supporting the family as a fisherman and gatherer of seaweed. (The father is never told about Ayako's work as a prostitute; he thinks only that she has gone to the city to earn more money.) In the brothel, Ayako loses her virginity to her first customer, a wealthy lumber wholesaler named Kansuke. Pleased with the young woman, Kansuke becomes Ayako's regular customer. Then one evening a shy young man named Kanjiro arrives with his fellow military cadets and Ayako relieves him of his virginity. They begin to fall in love, but just before he is called up for service, Kanjiro realizes that his own father, Kansuke, has been one of Ayako's customers. Kansuke, it turns out, has been aware that Kanjiro has also been seeing Ayako, and doesn't really mind sharing her with his son. But Ayako has promised Kanjiro that she won't see his father again, and when Kansuke insists on having sex with her anyway, he dies of an apparent heart attack. Soon word arrives that Kanjiro has also died at the front. The coincidence of the deaths of a father and son causes Ayako to be labeled a "femme fatale." But while visiting Kanjiro's grave, Ayako meets his older brother, Kanichi, and her involvement with this ill-fated family deepens into further tragedy. The film climaxes with Ayako seeking a kind of exorcism that will purify her of guilt, but that, too, has fatal consequences. The core story of An Innocent Witch is very well handled by screenwriter Hideo Horie and director Heinosuke Gosho, but the framing of it in the context of a documentary about the search for communication with the afterlife feels awkward, as if Horie and Gosho were trying to impose a larger statement about the consequences of superstition on the material. Ayako's story speaks for itself without extra help.

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

Keith David, Richard Dysart, T.K. Carter, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, and Kurt Russell in The Thing

MacReady: Kurt Russell
Dr. Blair: Wilford Brimley
Nauls: T.K. Carter
Palmer: David Clennon
Childs: Keith David
Dr. Copper: Richard Dysart
Vance Norris: Charles Hallahan
George Bennings: Peter Maloney
Clark: Richard Masur
Garry: Donald Moffat
Fuchs: Joel Polis
Windows: Thomas G. Waites

Director: John Carpenter
Screenplay: Bill Lancaster
Based on a story by John W. Campbell Jr.
Cinematography: Dean Cundey
Production design: John J. Lloyd
Creature design: Rob Bottin
Music: Ennio Morricone

John Carpenter's The Thing is one of those movies that have undergone radical re-evaluation over the years since it was released to mediocre box office and mostly scathing reviews. In the New York Times, for example, Vincent Canby panned it as "foolish, depressing, overproduced" and "instant junk." Today, however, it's regarded as a classic of the horror sci-fi genre and has an 83% "fresh" ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, with a whopping 92% audience score. My own evaluation would fall somewhere in between: The Thing does what it sets out to, i.e. scare us, with efficiency, but unlike the films to which it is often compared -- the Howard Hawks-produced The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951), which was based on the same short story, and the more recent predecessor in the genre, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) -- it lacks heart. The Thing doesn't give us characters to root for. When successive members of its all-male cast are gobbled up by the monster, we don't feel any sense of loss -- except perhaps for the dogs, there's no one we feel a connection with. Kurt Russell is a very good action hero, but Bill Lancaster's script gives him no wit, no memorable lines other than shouting, "Yeah, fuck you, too!" at the monster when it roars at him. The real star of the film is Rob Bottin's creature, all gooshy innards, tentacles, and crablike legs. But once the monster gets going, there's no let-up. In Alien, for example, Ridley Scott very smartly created pauses in the action to lull us into complacency before pulling another shocker. Carpenter, however, gives us no time to breathe, and the piling-on of attacks becomes tiresome. Ennio Morricone's score is skillfully laid on, but unless you're in the mood for a freakout, The Thing offers few other lasting rewards.

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)

Koji Tsuruta and Shin Saburi in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Mokichi Satake: Shin Saburi
Taeko Satake: Michiyo Kogure
Noboru Okada: Koji Tsuruta
Setsuko Yamauchi: Keiko Tsushima
Aya Amamiya: Chikage Awashima
Sadao Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Chizu Yamauchi: Kuniko Miyake
Naosuke Yamauchi: Eijiro Yanagi
Toichiro Amamiya: Hisao Toake

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

Yasujiro Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice begins like a 1950s American TV sitcom in which Lucy and Ethel try to pull a fast one over Ricky. In this case, Lucy is Taeko Satake, who wants to get away for a day with Ethel, or Aya Amamiya, at a resort spa without letting Ricky, or Mokichi Satake, know what she's up to. So Taeko decides to tell Mokichi that her niece has fallen ill at a class reunion and she needs to go tend to her. But just as she's about to depart, the niece, Setsuko, drops by the Satake home, so Taeko has to swiftly come up with a Plan B. What we are in for, obviously, is a comedy of marital errors. The Satakes have no children and their marriage has grown stale, which provides an object lesson for Setsuko, whose parents are pressuring her into an arranged marriage and have set up a meeting with the potential groom. Seeing that not only do Taeko and Mokichi have no passion in their lives but Aya is also insouciant about the extramarital affairs of her husband, Toichiro, Setsuko is determined not to fall into their trap. Where Ozu excels is in the presentation of the texture of his characters' lives -- Taeko with her gossipy friends, Mokichi with his daily office grind followed by visits to bars and pachinko parlors, sometimes with his young friend Noboru, whom Mokichi is helping get a start in life after Noboru graduates from college. (There's a wonderful little moment when a slightly inebriated Noboru sings "Gaudeamus Igitur.") At one pachinko parlor, Mokichi discovers that the owner is an old army buddy, Sadao, played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu, whose chief role in the film is to provide a note of nostalgia for the more adventurous days during the war. Escaping from the meeting with her prospective groom, Setsuko joins Mokichi at the parlor, where she also meets Noboru, and we see a potential relationship spark between the two young people. But when Taeko learns that Mokichi has met with Setsuko when she should have been at the matchmaking session, she's furious and refuses to speak to her husband. Eventually, the crisis is resolved in a lovely scene in which Taeko and Mokichi begin to resolve their marital problems while raiding the larder after the maid has gone to bed, though the film ends with Setsuko and Noboru having what looks like their first fight. Ozu's bittersweet little comedy is sometimes dismissed as a minor work by a master director, but the mastery is very much in evidence.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (David Yates, 2016)

Dan Fogler, Eddie Redmayne, and Katherine Waterston in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Newt Scamander: Eddie Redmayne
Tina Goldstein: Katherine Waterston
Jacob Kowalski: Dan Fogler
Queenie Goldstein: Alison Sudol
Credence Barebone: Ezra Miller
Mary Lou Barebone: Samantha Morton
Henry Shaw Sr.: Jon Voight
Seraphina Picquery: Carmen Ejogo
Gnarlack: Ron Perlman
Percival Graves: Colin Farrell

Director: David Yates
Screenplay: J.K. Rowling
Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot
Production design: Stuart Craig
Costume design: Colleen Atwood
Music: James Newton Howard

I think I enjoyed Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them more than I did any of the Harry Potter movies, but mainly because I wasn't distracted by thinking about what had been left out between the novel and the film. That's because Fantastic Beasts is J.K. Rowling's first original screenplay. She has a way to go yet as a screenwriter: There are too many events and incidents to keep track of, and the story gets swamped by the special effects. But we are clearly in the same realm as the Potter books, even if this movie is set in the 1920s and in New York City, where Muggles are called Non-Majes. (Which even an explanation didn't keep me from hearing "non-Madges" and thinking, "people who don't like Madonna.") And even though there's a lot of noisy CGI work going on, Rowling and her cast have given us some engaging new characters in Newt Scamander, Tina and Queenie Goldstein, and Jacob Kowalski, all of whom seem to be set for a long run of sequels. Eddie Redmayne is terrific as usual, and Colin Farrell makes a fine villain until the ending reveals him to be Johnny Depp in disguise. It was a box office hit, of course, and most of the critics seemed to like it -- the pans seemed to be colored by a weary recognition that here was what seemed to be the launch of yet another blockbuster franchise. I agree that we could do without that, but it's better than yet another Transformers movie. And there's something agreeable about even a Potter-adjacent work.