Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)

Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper

Maureen: Kristen Stewart
Ingo: Lars Eidinger
Lara: Sigrid Bouaziz
Erwin: Anders Danielsen Lie
Gary: Ty Olwin
Detective: Hammou Graïa
Kyra: Nora von Waldstätten
Victor Hugo: Benjamin Biolay

Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe
Film editing: Marion Monnier

Olivier Assayas delights in showcasing Kristen Stewart's ambisexual persona in Personal Shopper, a tantalizing ghost story that carefully avoids predictability at every turn. At the end we're left to decide whether the ghosts Maureen encounters are real or just -- as the ghost itself seems to tell her with its single rap signifying "yes" in answer to her question -- projections of her own imagination. It's an ambiguity that seems to have frustrated audiences, which took less warmly to the film than the critics did: Critics see so many movies that resolve their enigmas too patly, so that any film which leaves a viewer dangling in uncertainty seems fresh. Stewart is onscreen for almost the entire film, so that it's easy enough to explain away her encounters with the supernatural as projections of her grief-sodden mind. But then Assayas presents inexplicable occurrences that Maureen doesn't or can't witness, such as the scene in which a hotel's elevator and automatic doors open at the command of an invisible figure, or the one in which we glimpse in the background, as the camera focuses on Maureen, a glass moving through the air and dropping to the ground to shatter behind her back. Assayas is deftly playing with our expectations that what the camera shows us must be real.

Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner in Arrival

Louise Banks: Amy Adams
Ian Donnelly: Jeremy Renner
Col. Weber: Forest Whitaker
Agent Halpern: Michael Stuhlbarg
Capt. Marks: Mark O'Brien
Gen. Shang: Tzi Ma

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenplay: Eric Heisserer
Based on a story by Ted Chiang
Cinematography: Bradford Young
Production design: Patrice Vermette
Film editing: Joe Walker
Music: Jóhann Jóhannsson

Like his film Sicario (2015), Denis Villeneuve's Arrival seems to be torn between two aims that don't merge comfortably. On one hand, it's a fairly conventional first-encounter sci-fi thriller, with plucky good guys at odds with the bureaucracy and the military, and an 11th-hour, 59th-minute rescue of the world from self-destruction. On the other, it's a provocative exploration of some big ideas about language and time and the nature of humanity. Villeneuve's natural inclination seems to be toward the latter, which may be why so much of the film is dark -- not just tonally, but visually, so that we only begin to see much of the action in full light toward the end. Cinematographer Bradford Young's cameras seem to be stopped down to the point that I often had trouble discerning what's happening. Presumably this gradual emergence into light is a metaphor for the illumination that comes to linguistics professor Louise Banks as she learns to communicate with the aliens and to understand not only why they are visiting the Earth but also what it means for her own life. It's a good, chewy film with some fine performances, and I welcome any sci-fi movie that makes its audiences work to comprehend its ideas. But I also wished for more exploration of those ideas, and how Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly, our heroes, came to arrive at them. The film stints on dramatizing the process of discovery for the sake of building suspense and making some obvious points about media hysteria. It gets in a nice dig at conspiracy charlatans like Alex Jones, and even at certain cable news outlets, as when Louise tells her mother she shouldn't be watching "that channel." But I wanted more specifics on how the teams of linguists and mathematicians began to decode the language of the heptapods, a close encounter of the word kind. Still, any movie that valorizes thought is welcome in these days of comic-book-based blockbusters aimed at the gut.

Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Tamura: Eiji Funakoshi
Yasuda: Osamu Takizawa
Nakamatsu: Mickey Curtis
Sergeant: Mantaro Ushio
Army surgeon: Kyu Sazanaka
Officer: Yoshihiro Hamaguchi
Soldier: Hikaru Hoshi
Soldier: Asao Sano
Soldier: Masaya Tsukida

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Based on a novel by Shohei Ooka
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Production design: Atsuji Shibata
Film editing: Tatsuji Nakashizu
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

War films often have much in common with horror movies: the impending dread, the omnipresence of death and mutilation. But none that I've seen goes quite so far in that direction as Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, which eventually takes on the character of a zombie movie. I don't mean that flippantly or facetiously, because Fires on the Plain is very much a serious film, thoughtful and unsparing in its treatment of the horrors of war. But the images of a swarm of Japanese soldiers crawling across a road in the near-dark and of starving, wounded men staggering toward a hoped-for rescue inevitably evoke those movies and TV series about the walking undead. From the beginning, the film's protagonist, Tamura, is one of those undead figures: Gaunt and tubercular, he is turned away from his company of soldiers making a last-ditch stand because he is of no use as a fighter, and sent back to the field hospital from which he has already been turned away. The officer who sends him off gives him a grenade and tells him that if the hospital won't take him, he's to blow himself up. Tamura doesn't do that, but he begins a long trek across Leyte as things go ever worse for the Japanese, targets not only of the American army but even more so of the vengeful Filipinos -- at one point, an American convoy stops to take prisoners, but a Filipina accompanying the Americans gleefully guns them down instead. Eventually, the most zombie-like thing of all happens to Tamura: He comes face to face with starving soldiers who are eating human flesh. Some of them call it "monkey meat," but one mad and dying man offers his own body to Tamura as food. With this premise, the film could have gone deep into sensationalism -- or worse, into Christian iconography -- but Ichikawa makes it clear that the cannibalism he portrays is a metaphor for the ultimate degradation of war. Critics are often puzzled by Ichikawa's career, which is marked by a great variety of films, all of them made with extreme technical finesse. His other great anti-war film, The Burmese Harp (1956), for example, has moments of lyricism and tenderness that are completely absent from Fires on the Plain. So if you're looking for the consistency of an auteur, you won't find it in his work. But that doesn't keep him from being an extraordinarily daring filmmaker.   

Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

Chester Kent: James Cagney
Nan Prescott: Joan Blondell
Bea Thorn: Ruby Keeler
Scotty Blair: Dick Powell
Francis: Frank McHugh
Silas Gould: Guy Kibbee
Harriet Gould: Ruth Donnelly
Bowers: Hugh Herbert
Vivian Rich: Claire Dodd

Director: Lloyd Bacon
Screenplay: Manuel Seff, James Seymour
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Anton Grot, Jack Okey
Film editing: George Amy
Choreography: Busby Berkeley

Busby Berkeley's great trifecta of 1933 also includes 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy). Footlight Parade is the least distinguished of the three by virtue of having the most inane of plots, but it also has a blazingly wonderful performance by James Cagney as the harried impresario Chester Kent, who creates "prologues" for movies -- live action musical numbers designed to precede feature films, a phenomenon that survives today only at Radio City Music Hall. Cagney not only gets to display his typical volcanic persona but also gets to strut his stuff as a dancer. As in other early Berkeley films, the great mad production numbers are not spread throughout but instead clustered at the end. First comes "Honeymoon Hotel," which is a string of double entendres about the fact that people have sex in hotels, and aren't necessarily newlyweds: e.g., everyone registers as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Then there's the lavish "By a Waterfall," which anticipates (and excels) the swimming pool numbers that Berkeley would later craft for Esther Williams at MGM. And finally, Chester Kent gets to save the show by going on for a lead dancer who comes down with stage fright in the "Shanghai Lil," number with Ruby Keeler in yellowface, dancing on the top of waterfront bars with Cagney -- her clunky, anxious tapping is an odd mixture with Cagney's stiff-legged style. (We are fortunately spared one of Kent's more appalling ideas, a musical number about slavery in which the female dancers would appear in blackface and be captured by the male dancers.) The whole thing is good, mildly ribald pre-Code stuff: Joan Blondell's Nan, who crushes on Chester Kent, introduces the predatory Vivian Rich by "accidentally" almost pronouncing her last name with a B, and comments that as long as there are sidewalks, Vivian will never be without a job.

A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)

Matthias Schoenaerts and Ralph Fiennes in A Bigger Splash 

Marianne Lane: Tilda Swinton
Paul De Smedt: Matthias Schoenaerts
Harry Hawkes: Ralph Fiennes
Penelope Lannier: Dakota Johnson
Sylvie: Lily McMenamy
Mireille: Aurore Clément
Clara: Elena Bucci
Maresciallo: Corrado Guzzanti

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: David Kajganich
Based on a novel by Alain Page and a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Jacques Deray
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: Maria Djurkovic
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Director Luca Guadagnino made his own bigger splash in 2017 with Call Me by Your Name, but his film called A Bigger Splash attracted admiring reviews two years earlier. Guadagnino has said that the two films and his 2009 I Am Love constitute a "Desire" trilogy. Erotic intrigue is at the heart of A Bigger Splash, which deals not with the eternal triangle so much as a fatal quadrangle. Marianne, a rock star, is recuperating from a throat operation on the island of Pantelleria with her lover, Paul, a documentary filmmaker, when her former lover, a music promoter named Harry, arrives with his daughter, Penelope. Neither Marianne nor Paul is especially pleased by having guests intrude on their solitude, especially since she has been ordered not to speak for a while. Marianne's voice problem is not the only sign of damage in the four characters: Paul is a recovering alcoholic who once attempted suicide, Harry is a manic egotist, and Penelope is a 17-year-old pretending to be 22 and -- we discover later -- speaks fluent Italian, a fact she chooses to hide from the others. She also lives with her mother in the States and neither she nor Harry knew of each other's existence until recently. There is a queasy touch of incestuousness to Harry's attentions to Penelope. Guadagnino and his actors keep the tension among the four characters at a low simmer for most of the film, and even after things reach the boiling point, the film deftly avoids melodramatic excess. Fiennes, usually a more reserved actor, gives an uncharacteristically flamboyant performance as Harry. The film oddly feels a little dated, like a French or Italian film from the 1960s, such as Jacques Deray's La Piscine (1969), the first filming of Alain Page's novel.

El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983)

Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez in El Norte

Enrique Xuncax: David Villalpando
Rosa Xuncax: Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez
Arturo Xuncax: Ernesto Gómez Cruz
Lupe Xuncax: Alicia del Lago
Nacha: Lupe Ontiveros
Monte Bravo: Trinidad Silva
Jorge: Enrique Castillo
Carlos: Tony Plana
Alice Harper: Diane Cary
Jaime: Mike Gomez
Raimundo: Abel Franco

Director: Gregory Nava
Screenplay: Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas
Cinematography: James Glennon
Art direction: David Wasco
Film editing: Betsy Blankett Milicevic

Thirty-five years have passed since the release of El Norte, and the problems it depicts seem as intractable as ever, adding the poignancy of ongoing history to the film's bleak ending. As a document of the tragedy wrought by colonialism and the muddle of U.S. immigration policy, Gregory Nava's film is an essential one. Regarded as a work of narrative filmmaking, it has some deep flaws, particularly in the resort to overly "cinematic" devices like suspense. The intercutting between the plane departing for Chicago and Rosa's hospital room feels like textbook filmmaking, making the audience hold its breath to find out whether Enrique will really abandon his sister in hope of getting a green card. We don't need movie suspense fakeouts at this painful moment. But Nava does so much else right in the rest of the film, including the staging of the harrowing border crossing, as well as allowing humor to share screen time with pathos, that it's hard to criticize his lapses. If sincerity were everything, El Norte could be hailed as a masterpiece.

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927)

Norma Shearer, Ramon Novarro, and Jean Hersholt in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg

Prince Karl Heinrich: Ramon Novarro
Kathi: Norma Shearer
Dr. Jüttner: Jean Hersholt
King Karl VII: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Lutz: Edgar Norton
Kellermann: Bobbie Mack
Young Karl Heinrich: Philippe De Lacy
Old Ruder: Otis Harlan

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Hanns Kräly
Based on a book and play by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster
Cinematography: John J. Mescall
Art direction: Richard Day, Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Andrew Marton

Though The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg sometimes seems as overextended as its title, given the slightness of its love-or-duty plot, it gets a good deal of zip from Ernst Lubitsch's direction and from the charm of its leads, Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer. The latter, especially, is seen to good advantage in a role that doesn't call on her to over-emote, a trap she sometimes fell into in many of her sound roles. Lubitsch inserts sly gags here and there to leaven the obviousness of the plot. After perhaps one too many scenes of students quaffing beer, there's a card to remind us that they were at the university to learn, too, followed by a shot of a professor droning away at a lectern to a classroom of a single student. Eventually, the film bogs down a bit when Novarro's Karl Heinrich is called away to princely duties and has to forsake Shearer's lovely barmaid. 

The Stranger (Satyajit Ray, 1991)

Utpal Dutt and Bikram Bhattacharya in The Stranger

Sudhindra Bose: Dipankar Dey
Anila Bose: Mamata Shankar
Satyaki Bose: Bikram Bhattacharya
Manomohan Mitra: Utpal Dutt
Prithwish Sen Gupta: Dhritiman Chatterjee
Ranjan Rakshit: Rabi Ghosh
Chhandra Rakshit: Subrata Chatterjee
Tridip Mukherjee: Promode Ganguly
Sital Sarkar: Ajit Banerjee

Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Cinematography: Barun Raha
Production design: Ashok Bose
Film editing: Dulal Dutta
Music: Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray's final film, The Stranger, based on one of his own short stories, ends with a rather sentimentally gratifying gesture on the part of its central character, but even this rather conventional narrative twist doesn't spoil the lovely seriocomic mood cast by the film as a whole. It's the story of a long-lost relative who suddenly, after 35 years without contact, arrives at the home of his one surviving family member, a niece who was 2 years old when he disappeared. Anila Bose and her husband, Sudhindra, are well-to-do residents of Calcutta who can't help being suspicious that the man who arrives on their doorstep may not be who he says he is, her mother's brother, Manomohan. Sudhindra is especially cautious, warning that the man may be planning to filch some of the valuable antiquities they have collected, so Anila dutifully locks some of them away. But almost from the beginning, the "uncle" begins to win Anila and especially her son, Satyaki, over with tales from his travels and unusual insights into the way of the world. Even Sudhindra is disarmed when the man produces his passport but also warns him that passports can be forged. Some curious friends of the Bose family "drop in" to form their own opinion of the stranger, and they, too, are won over. Anila begins to have her doubts, however, when, while reading an Agatha Christie novel in bed, it occurs to her that the long-lost uncle may be there to collect his share of her grandfather's will.  Finally, it falls to another, more deeply skeptical friend to challenge the man and his ideas: his observations on civilization that he has formed from his travels. Their heated debate is the intellectual and dramatic turning point in the story. Ray's typically roving camera keeps the film from becoming stagy: It takes place mostly  in the Bose home, because Ray's doctors had warned him to do most of his filming indoors, but there are also some lovely outdoor scenes, especially toward the end, when Manomohan takes the family to a tribal village where dancers show the family that there is more to Indian culture than their privileged middle-class lives. The Stranger is a fine farewell to an illustrious career.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn, 2017)

Peter Quill / Star-lord: Chris Pratt
Gamora: Zoe Saldana
Drax: Dave Bautista
Baby Groot (voice): Vin Diesel
Rocket (voice): Bradley Cooper
Ego: Kurt Russell
Yondu: Michael Rooker
Nebula: Karen Gillan
Mantis: Pom Klementieff
Stakar Ogord: Sylvester Stallone
Ayesha: Elizabeth Debicki
Taserface: Chris Sullivan
Kraglin: Sean Gunn

Director: James Gunn
Screenplay: James Gunn
Cinematography: Henry Braham
Production design: Scott Chambliss
Film editing: Fred Raskin, Craig Wood
Music: Tyler Bates

What can I say? There's lots of swooping and zooming and crashing, some spectacularly weird computerized sets and characters, cameos by David Hasselhoff and Howard the Duck (voiced by Seth Green), some good jokes and some duds, some cheeky music cues (e.g., George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord"), Chris Pratt takes his shirt off, and everything moves along efficiently to set up the next sequel. The movie doesn't dally too long on its Oedipal subplot -- Peter kills his father because he (the father) killed his (Peter's) mother. There were times, as when the only characters on screen are CGI ones like Rocket and Groot, when I wondered if a new Oscar category for semi-animated film shouldn't be considered. So I had as much fun as the latent 14-year-old boy in me is capable of having. I actually enjoyed Vol. 2 more than the first film in the series (James Gunn, 2014) because I didn't have to sit through exposition about who and what these characters are and could get right to the swooping and zooming and crashing.

The Wildcat (Ernst Lubitsch, 1921)

Pola Negri in The Wildcat

Rischka: Pola Negri
Commandant of Fort Tossenstein: Victor Janson
Lt. Alexis: Paul Heidemann
Claudius: Wilhelm Diegelmann
Pepo: Hermann Thimig
Lilli: Edith Meller
Commandant's Wife: Marga Köhler

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Hanns Kräly, Ernst Lubitsch
Cinematography: Theodor Sparkuhl
Art direction: Max Gronert, Ernst Stern

One of Ernst Lubitsch's last films made in Germany before he departed for Hollywood, The Wildcat, is subtitled A Grotesque in Four Acts, which is only mildly suggestive of its giddy absurdity. It doesn't resemble any other Lubitsch film I've seen, except in its uninhibited delight in playing with the medium. Pola Negri, usually cast in serious romances and initially burdened with a "femme fatale" label when she joined Lubitsch in Hollywood, here demonstrates a marvelous gift for knockabout comedy as the titular wildcat, the bandit's daughter who falls for a womanizing lieutenant and manages almost to bring an Alpine military fort to rubble. Working not only in actual snowy Alpine locations but also in some of the wackiest studio sets ever built, Lubitsch pulls out all the stops, using a mad variety of matte shots that frame the action at odd angles and in ridiculous compositions. The fort itself bristles with cannons from every corner, and its interiors are full of mad curlicues. The action is no less outlandish: At one point, the bandits breach the fort by using Negri as a kind of human battering ram. And when Negri's Rischka deserts her bandit husband to pursue the lieutenant, she returns to find a stream trickling out of their hut, created by the tears the bandit has shed. Sheer nonsense, but a kind of unknown classic of silent comedy, on a par with the work of Mack Sennett in its pioneering exploitation of the medium. Lubitsch would temper his imagination, but you can still see foreshadowings of the comedy tricks he would bring to less madcap work.