Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964)

Anthony Quinn and Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek

Alexis Zorba: Anthony Quinn
Basil: Alan Bates
The Widow: Irene Papas
Madame Hortense: Lila Kedrova
Mavrandoni: Giorgos Foundas
Mimithos: Sotiris Moustakas
Soul: Anna Kyriakou
Lola: Eleni Anousaki
Pavlo: Yorgo Voyagis
Manolakis: Takis Emmanuel

Director: Michael Cacoyannis
Screenplay: Michael Cacoyannis
Based on a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis
Cinematography: Walter Lassally
Art direction: Vassilis Photopoulos
Film editing: Michael Cacoyannis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis

For a film that supposedly celebrates the life force embodied in its title character, Zorba the Greek sure is full of cruelty and death and destruction. I don't think I know a scene more horrifying than the ransacking of Madame Hortense's hotel after her death, when the black-clad, toothless harpies of the village swarm through in a riot of looting that ends with the dead woman on her bed in the stripped room. And yet at the end, after their mining efforts have collapsed spectacularly, after Basil has unwittingly caused the death of the widow and the suicide of his rival for her affections, Basil and Zorba dance. I suppose this is supposed to signify that life goes on. It was, nevertheless, a critical and commercial success, even though to my mind it's a disjointed film with radical switchbacks in tone. What it has going for it is a couple of colorful performances by Anthony Quinn and the Oscar-winning Lila Kedrova. Alan Bates, usually a fine actor, seems a little off in his performance, as if he hadn't quite got a hold on the character beyond the obvious odd-coupling of his mildly stuffy Brit with the flamboyant Zorba. It might be fun to see this film back-to-back with An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky, 1978), in which it's Bates who plays the life-force character, the shaggy artist Saul Kaplan, who brings Jill Clayburgh's Erica out of her post-divorce funk.

The Sun's Burial (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Isao Sasaki and Kayoko Honoo in The Sun's Burial 

Hanako: Kayoko Honoo
Shin: Masahiko Tsugawa
Takeshi: Isao Sasaki
Yosehei: Fumio Watanabe
Batasuke: Katamari Fujiwara
Chika: Tanie Kitabayashi
Yotsematsu: Junzaburo Ban
Agitator: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Toshiro Ishido, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata
Production design: Koji Uno
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Riichiro Manabe

A harrowing portrait of gangster life in Osaka, filmed with the kind of widescreen eloquence that Nagisha Oshima and cinematographer Takashi Kawamata brought to Cruel Story of Youth, made the same year. This is a cruel story of all ages in the Japanese underworld, with a remarkable performance by Kayoko Honoo as the ruthless young woman who survives (and perhaps thrives on) degradation. For a little perspective, see my comments on Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn, also from 1960.

Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

Joan Crawford and Eve Arden in Mildred Pierce 

Mildred Pierce: Joan Crawford
Wally Fay: Jack Carson
Veda Pierce: Ann Blyth
Monte Beragon: Zachary Scott
Ida Corwin: Eve Arden
Bert Pierce: Bruce Bennett
Lottie: Butterfly McQueen
Mrs. Maggie Biederhof: Lee Patrick
Inspector Peterson: Moroni Olsen
Kay Pierce: Jo Ann Olsen

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Ranald McDougal
Based on a novel by James M. Cain
Cinematography: Ernest Haller
Art direction: Anton Grot
Film editing: David Weisbart
Music: Max Steiner

Mildred Pierce provided Joan Crawford with her shining Oscar moment, even if she had to accept her statuette from her sickbed -- surrounded, to be sure, by press photographers. But I don't think it's her best performance. I prefer her as Crystal Allen in The Women (George Cukor, 1939), who, though she loses her sugar daddy still manages to kiss off the "respectable" women with a splendid curtain line. Or as Helen Wright, the consummate rich and predatory patroness in Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), treating the Fannie Hurst melodrama as if it were Ibsen, inhabiting every absurd moment with full conviction. Or even as Millicent Weatherby in Autumn Leaves (Robert Aldrich, 1956), in which she fights against the hardness into which her face was beginning to settle as she turned 50 by crafting an image of a younger, more vulnerable woman. There are things about Mildred Pierce that don't quite work,  particularly the shifts from film noir, shot with expressionist flair by Ernest Haller, to "woman's picture" opulence of setting. But it is still an indispensable film, as essential to defining Crawford's career -- and hence to an understanding of how Hollywood viewed women in the 1940s -- as Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) was to Bette Davis's.

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)

Ulrich Matthes and Bruno Ganz in Downfall

Adolf Hitler: Bruno Ganz
Traudl Junge: Alexandra Maria Laga
Magda Goebbels: Corinna Harfouch
Joseph Goebbels: Ulrich Matthes
Eva Braun: Juliane Köhler
Albert Speer: Heino Ferch
Ernst-Günter Schenk: Christian Berkel
Werner Haase: Matthias Habich
Hermann Fegelein: Thomas Kretschmann
Gen. Weidling: Michael Mendl
Heinrich Himmler: Ulrich Noethen

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Screenplay: Bernd Eichinger
Based on books by Joachim Fest and Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller
Cinematography: Rainer Klausmann
Production design: Bernd Lepel
Film editing: Hans Funck
Music: Stephan Zacharias

Downfall may be best known today for memes: the video parodies that take parts of the film, particularly the ranting of Bruno Ganz's Hitler, and supply new subtitles that spoof everything from contemporary politics to the efforts of the producers to suppress the parodies on YouTube because of copyright concerns. The producers were misguided: The parodies probably led more people to watch the actual film than would have without their notoriety. It's a well-made film, particularly because it manages to deal with an inherent problem: Would a dramatization of the last days of Hitler and his coterie tend to glamorize their futile struggle to survive, turning it into something like heroism? Ganz's superb performance helps the film sidestep that danger: His Hitler is humanized, to be sure, even to the point of once shedding a tear, but ultimately it's a portrait of repellent fanaticism and megalomania. He's a twitchy old man, one hand held behind his back in a palsied claw, but it's easy to see how the rather beleaguered men and women who surround him could be filled with a terrified awe of the man. I'm not particularly happy with the framing of Downfall, however. I think the decision to see much of the story through the eyes of Hitler's pretty secretary, Traudl Junge, shifts the focus away from the desperate horror of the final days, using a somewhat glossy survival story to keep the audience entertained. The footage of the real Traudl Junge that begins and ends the film doesn't much help illuminate why the "ordinary" German could be hoodwinked by Nazism, and her insistence that she didn't know of the true horrors of the Reich feels a little specious. There are, however, some moments of genuine drama in the film that emphasize how foul a spell Hitler cast over his followers, particularly the hysterical collapse of the otherwise icy Magda Goebbels at Hitler's feet when she realize the end is at hand. She pulls herself together and then proceeds to systematically murder her five children. I also liked the depiction of the cynicism of the Nazis who, when someone reminds them of the plight of the German people, sneeringly retort that it was their fault for bringing them to power in the first place. There's a lesson in the film somewhere for contemporary Americans, but I don't want to be the one to spell it out. Kudos to Stephan Zacharias for avoiding Wagnerian clichés in his score, although I thought the quotation from Purcell's aria "When I Am Laid in Earth" might have been a touch too sentimental.

Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)

Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie

Nana Kleinfrankenheim: Anna Karina
Raoul: Sady Rebbot
Paul: André S. Labarthe
Yvette: Guylaine Schlumberger
Le chef: Gérard Hoffman
Elisabeth: Monique Messine
Journaliste: Paul Pavel
Dimitri: Dimitri Dineff
Jeune homme: Peter Kassovitz
Luigi: Eric Schlumberger
Le philosophe: Brice Parain

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Guillemot
Music: Michel Legrand

The essential tension of Vivre Sa Vie comes from Jean-Luc Godard's dry intellectual detachment and self-conscious filmmaking set against his exquisitely passionate involvement with Anna Karina. It shows itself at the very beginning, when Godard gives us almost a mug shot treatment of Karina's face -- frontal, right profile, left profile -- and then follows with an extended scene that features only the back of her head. And it continues through to the end in which Edgar Allan Poe's story about an artist who sucks the life out of his beloved by painting her portrait foreshadows the death of Karina's character, Nana. On one level, the film posits art as the enemy of life, while on the other, art becomes a source of life. In the latter case, I'm thinking of the celebrated scene in which Nana is brought to tears by watching Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). It can be argued that Nana identifies with Joan as a fellow martyr: Joan to her faith in God, Nana to her faith in herself -- viz., the speech in which she claims "responsibility" for everything she does. Vivre Sa Vie is full of such intellectual puzzles, including the extended conversation between Nana and the philosopher Brice Parain. But it's Karina's performance that lifts the film out of the thicket of mid-century existentialism that it threatens to become ensnared by. She makes Nana one of the essential characters not just of the French New Wave but of the entire history of movies.

Our Marriage (Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

Noriko Maki and Chieko Baisho in Our Marriage

Keiko: Noriko Maki
Saeko: Chieko Baisho
Komakura: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Matsumoto: Isao Kimura
Father: Eijiro Tono
Mother: Sadako Sawamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masahiro Shinoda
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

It goes without saying (though I've said it often enough) that cultural differences are a hindrance to our understanding or enjoyment of films made in other countries, but Masahiro Shinoda's Our Marriage brought the point home for me in an unusual way. It's a simple, elegantly made film, scarcely over an hour long, about two sisters and the pressures on women to get married. That's nothing we haven't seen in films by Naruse and Ozu and others, but Shinoda is particularly focused on social and economic change -- not just in the role of women in Japan but also on a society in which upward mobility is becoming possible and desirable. Keiko and Saeko are office workers in a factory, the daughters of a man struggling to make ends meet by harvesting seaweed. His job has become more difficult because of industrial pollution, and his wife sometimes has to borrow money from the daughters to pay bills. So the parents begin looking for a husband for 22-year-old Keiko. The father wants her to marry the son of the union chief at the factory, a widower nearing 30, but another man, Matsumoto, who works for a dry goods company, also shows interest in her. The parents disapprove of Matsumoto because he traded in the black market in the postwar years, but he has since cleaned up his act. The complication is that Keiko has met a handsome young factory worker, Komakura. Saeko, who has a secret crush on Komakura, wants Keiko to marry him, and Keiko is certainly not averse to the idea except that Komakura doesn't make much money. Things work themselves out after some family drama, of course. But the cultural difference that mars the film for me is not the tension between arranged marriages and marrying for love -- that's familiar enough even in the Western tradition. The problem is that the music arranger has chosen the tune of the old spiritual "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore" as the film's main theme. Anyone who grew up singing it around a campfire, or knows the recorded versions by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, is going to have a hard time reconciling the music with the story.

Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

Jim Broadbent in Moulin Rouge!

Christian: Ewan McGregor
Satine: Nicole Kidman
Harold Zidler: Jim Broadbent
Toulouse-Lautrec: John Leguizamo
The Duke: Richard Roxburgh
The Doctor: Garry McDonald
The Unconscious Argentinean: Jacek Koman
Satie: Matthew Whittet
Marie: Kerry Walker
Nini Legs in the Air: Caroline O'Connor
Audrey: David Wenham
The Green Fairy: Kylie Minogue
Chocolat: Deobia Oparei

Director: Baz Luhrmann
Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann, Craig Pearce
Cinematography: Donald McAlpine
Production design: Catherine Martin
Film editing: Jill Bilcock
Music: Craig Armstrong
Costume design: Manolo Blahnik, Catherine Martin, Angus Strathie

The newspaper I used to work for had, at its heyday in the late '90s and early '00s, two staff film critics, with the result that at the end of the year, readers were given two 10 best and 10 worst lists of movies. Moulin Rouge! made one critic's 10 best list and the other's 10 worst. Well, it's that kind of movie: It either exhilarates you or exhausts you. I have a bent toward directors who have their own idiosyncratic visions, even if the idiosyncrasies can be annoying. So I will confess to being swept away by the tide of images and sounds that Baz Luhrmann crafts for his film. I wouldn't want every movie to be like it, but for me, Moulin Rouge! is fun to watch -- maybe every 10 years or so. There are those who think that Luhrmann confuses noise with life, and I get that objection, but his pastiche musical, a blend of Bollywood and Busby Berkeley filtered through what MTV used to be, has the kind of energy you don't see very often, and it's a beautiful showcase for Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, not to mention the production design of Catherine Martin, the cinematography of Donald McAlpine, and the film editing of Jill Bilcock that brings their work into a dazzling flurry of images. The objection that the film is all images -- i.e., camera tricks and cutting -- is probably justified, as is the observation that none of the leads is a real singer or dancer -- Ewan McGregor is more a shouter than a singer, and Nicole Kidman's moves are poses strung in sequence by the editor. But there's no market for Freds, Gingers, Judys, and Genes anymore, so finding people with star quality who can also sing and dance is tougher than it used to be.

Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)

Jenjira: Jenjira Pongpas
Itt: Banlop Lomnoi
Keng: Jarinpatta Rueangram
Nurse Tet: Petcharat Chaiburi
Teng: Sakda Kaewbuadee
Goddess 1: Sujittraporn Wongsrikeaw
Goddess 2: Bhattaratorn Senkraigul
Richard Widner: Richard Abramson

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cinematography: Diego Garcia
Art direction: Pichan Muangduang
Film editing: Lee Chatametikool

As I said in my brief note about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), I feel handicapped by my ignorance of Southeast Asian history and culture when I watch Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. I can appreciate them aesthetically but there are layers of significance hidden to me. Yet the more I watch his films, the more they draw me in, the more they linger in my thoughts, even stray ones when I'm not specifically concerned with trying to comprehend a particular film. His long takes, often with the key characters in the middle distance rather than in closeup, allow things to stray into the frame, the way a hen and her chickens do at one moment. They allow the eye to wander, and to wonder at the details of setting. In another filmmaker these would be distractions, but since Weerasethakul is not urgently concerned with telling a story, the distractions provide texture and surprise. We Westerners are not used to films that force us to contemplate -- I don't think any filmmaker since the art-house heyday of Antonioni and Resnais has so carefully taken the time to give us extended contemplative moments as Weerasethakul does. Is it, I sometimes wonder, the "exotic" quality of his settings that keeps us from boredom as we watch scenes in which nothing much happens?  But enough does happen in Cemetery of Splendor that I'm driven to keep watching and waiting for a theme or even a mood to resolve itself. Sometimes the things that do happen seem gratuitous, as when we watch a group of people in a park by a lake begin to swap places, moving from one bench to another, as in a dance or a game with no discernible rules. Sometimes they're strikingly beautiful, as in the slow dissolve from an Escher-like intersection of escalators to the light poles that stand beside the beds in the hospital. There is a wizardry in Cemetery of Splendor that gives it magic. But then I read that the film is in some ways a commentary on the politics of Thailand, and I'm brought up short by my own ignorance.

Immortal Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1961)

Hideko Takamine, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Yoshi Kato in Immortal Love

Sadako: Hideko Takamine
Heibei: Tatsuya Nakadai
Takashi: Keiji Sada
Tomoko: Nobuko Otowa
Yutaka: Akira Ishihama
Naoko: Yukiko Fuji
Sojiro: Yoshi Kato
Rikizo: Kiyoshi Nonomura
Eiichi: Masakazu Tamura
Morito: Masaya Totsuka
Heizaemon: Yasushi Nagata

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

I'm a little surprised to find that Keisuke Kinoshita's screenplay for Immortal Love is "original." The film has the feeling of an adaptation from one of those doorstop "sins of the father" family sagas like East of Eden. It's full of melodramatic moments, including at least one rape and several suicide attempts, including a successful one in which the character jumps into a volcano. It spans three decades and is loaded with enough plot and characters to fill a much longer film, which is why it sometimes seems a little skimpy. The plot is set in motion when Heibei, the son of a wealthy landowner, returns from the invasion of Manchuria in 1932 with a crippling war injury. He spies the pretty Sadako, the daughter of one of his father's tenants, but she loves Takashi, another tenant farmer's son who has also served in China. When Takashi returns he finds that Sadako has been raped by Heibei and is set to marry him. As the years pass, Sadako stays with Heibei, tending to him and his aging father, and bearing three children -- one of whom was conceived during the rape, a fact that will develop into a plot point. Takashi marries and moves away, but his wife, Tomoko, bears a kind of grudge against Sadako, her husband's first love. And things get complicated as the children grow up. The film works largely because of the actors, even though both Hideko Takamine and Tatsuya Nakadai, considerable performers, seem a little stretched to put across their characters. Heibei, for example, comes across as a deep-dyed villain until the very end, despite some closeups in which Nakadai seems to be trying to suggest the character's remorse for his villainy. And Takamine is faced with playing the dutiful wife to a man she despises, undermining him secretly and passive-aggressively. It's a tribute to both actors that they make the film as watchable as it is. Kinoshita tries some things that don't really work, like a ballad that bridges the time gaps between "chapters" (of which there are five), and the guitar-based score by his brother, Chuji Kinoshita, sounds like flamenco -- an odd choice for the very Japanese story and setting. Even the title given it for American distribution is askew -- none of the loves depicted in it seem particularly deathless. It was released in the United Kingdom as Bitter Spirit, which seems more appropriate. The film was Japan's entry for the foreign language film Oscar; it made the shortlist but lost to Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly. 

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)

Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone in Certain Women

Laura: Laura Dern
Gina: Michelle Williams
The Rancher: Lily Gladstone
Elizabeth Travis: Kristen Stewart
Ryan: James Le Gros
Fuller: Jared Harris
Sheriff Rowles: John Getz
Guthrie: Sara Rodier
Albert: Rene Auberjonois

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Screenplay: Kelly Reichardt
Adapted from stories by Maile Meloy
Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt
Production design: Anthony Gasparro
Film editing: Kelly Reichardt
Music: Jeff Grace

I haven't seen any other films by Kelly Reichardt and I haven't read the stories by Maile Meloy on which Reichardt based her film Certain Women, but it's clear to me that Reichardt has a sure hand with the essence of the contemporary short story: the pregnant slice of life that comes to no definitive conclusion within its confines, but reverberates long after you've read it. One touch struck me almost immediately: When we first meet Laura, the central character in the first third of the film, she is getting out of bed after a mid-day liaison with a man. We don't see him again until the second third of the film, when he turns up again as the husband of another woman, Gina. But Reichardt leaves this fact undeveloped: It's there as something to be contemplated as we watch the sections of the film that deal respectively with Laura and Gina. The two women never meet in the film, and if Ryan's infidelity has any effect on his marriage, it's only as backstory to the tensions that surface between Ryan and Gina when we see them together. This is a film in which nothing is ever really resolved: Laura's client, Fuller, goes a little mad and she has to talk him out of a hostage-taking situation, so he goes to jail and at the end of the film she brings him a vanilla milkshake and listens as he tells how his wife left him. Gina and Ryan are building a house and their sullen teenage daughter sulks in the car as Gina bargains with an old man for some sandstone blocks in his yard. The old man's mind wanders while she talks, and he seems to address all of his remarks to Ryan, when Gina usually handles business matters. Later, when they're loading the sandstone onto a truck, Gina waves to the old man as he stands in his window, but he doesn't respond. And in the most poignant section of the film, a young woman who tends to the horses on a ranch wanders into a night class taught by Elizabeth, a stressed-out young lawyer, and develops a crush on her. She returns to the class and takes Elizabeth to a diner several times until the night when a new instructor appears and tells them that the long drive Elizabeth has been making to teach the class has gotten too much for her. The young woman then takes the four-hour drive to the town where Elizabeth (as well as Laura and Gina) lives, seeks her out, and bids an awkward goodbye. Then she gets into her truck and drives back, falling asleep at the wheel but fortunately only running off the road into a field. The sequences meld into one another without breaks, and the whole thing is permeated by a sense of place: the beauty, loneliness, and subtle menace of the Montana landscape.