Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)

Richard Harris and Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Maximus: Russell Crowe
Commodus: Joaquin Phoenix
Lucilla: Connie Nielsen
Proximo: Oliver Reed
Marcus Aurelius: Richard Harris
Gracchus: Derek Jacobi
Juba: Djimon Hounsou
Falco: David Schofield
Gaius: John Shrapnel
Quintus: Thomas Arana
Hagen: Ralf Moeller
Lucius: Spencer Treat Clark
Cassius: David Hemmings
Cicero: Tommy Flanagan
Tigris: Sven-Ole Thorsen
Slave Trader: Omid Djalili

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: David Franzoni, John Logan, William Nicholson
Cinematography: John Mathieson
Production design: Arthur Max
Film editing: Pietro Scalia
Music: Lisa Gerrard, Hans Zimmer

"Are you not entertained?" Well, to answer the question Maximus bellows at the crowd: No, not very much.

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch, 1938)

David Niven, Gary Cooper, and Claudette Colbert in Bluebeard's Eighth Wife

Nicole De Loiselle: Claudette Colbert
Michael Brandon: Gary Cooper
The Marquis De Loiselle: Edward Everett Horton
Albert De Regnier: David Niven
Aunt Hedwige: Elizabeth Patterson
M. Pepinard: Herman Bing
Kid Mulligan: Warren Hymer
Assistant Hotel Manager: Franklin Pangborn

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder
Based on a play by Alfred Savoir and its English adaptation by Charlton Andrews
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher
Film editing: William Shea
Music: Werner R. Heymann, Friedrich Hollaender

Almost anything goes in screwball comedy, but why does Bluebeard's Eighth Wife feel just a tad off the mark? It has everything going for it: director, screenwriters, stars and supporting cast. But something seems to be missing. There are those who think Gary Cooper is miscast, but Cooper pulled off similar roles -- lovable eccentrics like Longfellow Deeds in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) and Bertram Potts in Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) -- and director Ernst Lubitsch had established Cooper's gift for sophisticated comedy in Design for Living (1933). There is a certain lack of spark between Cooper and his costar, Claudette Colbert, but that's partly because their characters are not supposed to spark but rather flare. I think the fault lies mainly in the script, which springs Michael Brandon's many previous marriages on us as a surprise and never makes us feel that they're integral to his character. I suspect that the Production Code, which was administered with a heavy hand by Catholic laymen like Joseph I. Breen, blue-penciled so much of the humor surrounding Brandon's divorces that they no longer get the attention they deserve. Still, Cooper and Colbert et al. are fun to watch, and it may be that they are so much more fun to watch in other movies that Bluebeard's Eighth Wife simply suffers by comparison.

Cléo From 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)

Antoine Bourseiller and Corinne Marchand in Cléo From 5 to 7

Florence "Cléo" Victoire: Corinne Marchand
Antoine: Antoine Bourseiller
Angèle: Dominique Davray
Dorothée: Dorothée Blanck
Bob the Pianist: Michel Legrand
The Lover: José Luis de Vilallonga
Irma, the Fortune-Teller: Loye Payen
The Taxi Driver: Lucienne Marchand
Plumitif, the Lyricist: Serge Korber

Director: Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Agnès Varda
Cinematography: Paul Bonis, Alain Levent, Jean Rabier
Production design: Jean-François Adam
Film editing: Pascale Laverrière, Janine Verneau
Music: Michel Legrand

Has any director ever so successfully combined the keen editorial eye of the documentary filmmaker with the storytelling gifts of the creator of fictional films as Agnès Varda? From the beginning, with the vivid setting of the small Mediterranean fishing community of La Pointe Courte (1955) serving as background and correlative for the troubles of a married couple, Varda has known how to reverse Marianne Moore's formula of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" and tell stories about imaginary people in real places. The real place in Cléo From 5 to 7 is the city of Paris, where Varda continually finds ways to enhance her slice-of-life story of pop-singer Cléo, waiting out the results of a medical test that she is sure will doom her to death from cancer. When her protagonist leaves the sanctuary of her apartment and wanders the streets of the city, Varda continually finds little bits of memento mori to insert into the frame, such as the Pompes Funèbres sign on a mortician's place of business that we glimpse from the windows of the bus in which Cléo is riding. It's not done with a heavy hand, but rather with a slyly macabre irony, for Cléo is as much a target of Varda's wry humor as she is an object of concern. We glimpse her vanity and frivolity and superstition while we also feel sympathy with her anxiety and fear of death.

The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (Masahiro Shinoda, 1970)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan

Naojiro Kataoka: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michitose: Shima Iwashita
Soshun Kochiyama: Tetsuro Tanba
Ushimatsu: Shoichi Ozawa
Moritaya Seizo: Fumio Watanabe
Okuna, Naojiro's Mother: Suisen Ichikawa
Kaneko Ichinojo: Masakane Yonekura
Kanoke-boshi: Jun Hamamura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Shuji Terayama
Based on a play by Mokuami Kawatake
Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki
Art direction: Shigemasa Toda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Masaru Sato

I think I was culturally ill-equipped for The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan, a wittily stylized film that presupposes an acquaintance with Japanese history and culture that I don't possess. From my own culture, I bring a knowledge of 18th-century portrayals of London lowlife, such as the pictures of Hogarth and the satire in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Buraikan has echoes for me of those, as well as, in its portrayal of the puritanical reformer's zeal, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. But for much of the film I felt at sea.

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

Girl: Jenny Agutter
White Boy: Luc Roeg
Black Boy: David Gulpilil
Father: John Mellon

Director: Nicolas Roeg
Screenplay: Edward Bond
Based on a novel by James Vance Marshall
Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg
Production design: Brian Eatwell
Film editing: Antony Gibbs, Alan Pattillo
Music: John Barry

Walkabout is both provocative and provoking. It stimulates thoughts about humankind's relationship to nature, about the fragility and even perniciousness of civilization, and about what happens to everyone as they grow up and learn to "fit in" to societal expectations. It's a film in which brutality jostles beauty. But it's as provoking, as annoying in its way, as a 3-year-old's constantly questioning "Why?" You start out trying to answer, but eventually realize that there's no end to the game. Nicolas Roeg has so loaded the familiar tale of the clash of civilization and the primitive with images and narrative incidentals that defy explanation. We begin with trying to understand the film's initial shock, in which the Father drives his children into the desert for a picnic and then tries to kill them before setting fire to the auto and turning the gun on himself. We want to know what brought him to such a terrible moment, but Roeg has no interest in giving us an answer. We want to know why the Girl so stoically accepts this horror, in the face of which most children would break down. Later in the film, we want to explain interpolated scenes like the one of the scientific crew in the outback -- what are they doing, and why is the one female in the crew so provocatively sexy? And the ending, in which we see the now-grown and -married Girl preparing dinner for her husband, who is crowing about his job advancement, juxtaposed with a scene of the three children playing naked in a pond, has a heavy-handed voiceover quoting A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
 I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

It feels oddly false and sentimental, an evocation of something untrue to the events shown in the film.  Does Roeg intend this ironic jolt, this disjunction of reality and sentiment? If so, he does little to prepare us for it. It's a fascinating film, but it feels incoherent.

A Woman of Paris (Charles Chaplin, 1923)

Adolphe Menjou and Edna Purviance in A Woman of Paris

Marie St. Clair: Edna Purviance
Jean Millet: Carl Miller
Pierre Revel: Adolphe Menjou
Jean's Mother: Lydia Knott
Jean's Father: Charles K. French
Marie's Stepfather: Clarence Geldart
Fifi: Betty Morrissey
Paulette: Malvina Polo

Director: Charles Chaplin
Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Cinematography: Roland Totheroh, Jack Wilson
Art direction: Arthur Stibolt
Film editing: Monta Bell, Charles Chaplin
Music (1976 re-release): Charles Chaplin

Was it Charles Chaplin's great ego that kept him onscreen for almost his entire career as a director? Because on the evidence of A Woman of Paris, his only "serious" film and the only one aside from A Countess From Hong Kong (1967) in which he doesn't appear onscreen (except for blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameos), he was a considerable director of other people. He also had a deftly light touch, not unlike that of Ernst Lubitsch, for livening up a scene with a surprising angle -- such as the way he comments on the frivolity of the Parisian demimonde by concentrating on the somewhat disgusted face of a masseuse as she works on the pampered body of Marie St. Clair and listens to the gossip of Marie's friends. A Woman of Paris is weighed down a bit by the built-in moral assumptions that Marie is to be scorned for allowing herself to become the mistress of Pierre Revel, but Adolphe Menjou's performance as Revel has such gusto that he we understand why Marie is taken with him -- just as we don't understand what she ever saw in the dour, hawk-faced Carl Miller's Jean Millet. A Woman of Paris is a more sophisticated film than it has any right to be, given the melodramatic framework. I like the way Chaplin makes a smart time jump from Marie's departure for Paris to her establishment as Pierre's kept woman. We don't need to know how she got there, just that she did. And the ending, with the obligatory self-sacrifice, is not as saccharine as it could have been: There's wit in the final montage, in which Pierre's automobile passes the wagon in which Marie and one of the orphans she tends are sitting. Pierre's car disappearing into the distance is almost a parody of the endings of Chaplin's "Little Tramp" comedies, in which the Tramp saunters off into the sunset.

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.