The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975)

Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, and Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King

Daniel Dravot: Sean Connery
Peachy Carnehan: Michael Caine
Rudyard Kipling: Christopher Plummer
Billy Fish: Saeed Jaffrey
Ootah: Larbi Doghmi
District Commissioner: Jack May
Kafu Selim: Karroom Ben Bouhi
Roxanne: Shakira Caine

Director: John Huston
Screenplay: John Huston, Gladys Hill
Cinematography: Oswald Morris
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Russell Lloyd
Music: Maurice Jarre

John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King is not quite the unalloyed delight I remember it being, but in large part that's because I last saw it well before we became so inextricably embroiled in conflicts in the region where the film's action takes place. We've had our consciousness raised so high about the Middle East and Central Asia that larky adventures, even ones like Rudyard Kipling's story that don't end well for the adventurers, no longer seem so amusing when they take place there. And comic natives like Ootah, religious fanatics like Kafu Selim, or even collaborators with the West like Billy Fish, feel like distasteful stereotypes. As I've said about another film drawn from a Kipling source, George Stevens's Gunga Din (1939), "I have to swallow a lot that I object to when I admit that I still like" The Man Who Would Be King. Objections swallowed, is there another film team more beautiful than that of Sean Connery and Michael Caine, who bring their previous movie personae -- including James Bond and Alfie Elkins -- so effectively into the roles of Danny and Peachy? The story goes that Huston originally saw it as a vehicle for two other vivid stars with trailing personae, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, who never made a film together but should have. It would have been a very different film, of course, probably shot in black and white in the Sierra Nevada (like Gunga Din), but an entertaining one. As the years passed, the roles were handed down, at least in theory, to Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, and then to Paul Newman and Robert Redford, until Newman supposedly knocked some sense into the producers' heads and suggested Connery and Caine. As for the film, is there more to it than just larky adventure in colorful locations? Is it, perhaps, a warning about getting involved in politics and cultures that we don't fully understand? We are still getting our heads handed to us, and they don't usually wear crowns from Alexander's treasury.

God's Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017)

Alec Secareanu and Josh O'Connor in God's Own Country

Johnny Saxby: Josh O'Connor
Gheorghe Ionescu: Alec Secareanu
Deirdre Saxby: Gemma Jones
Martin Saxby: Ian Hart

Director: Francis Lee
Screenplay: Francis Lee
Cinematography: Joshua James Richards
Production design: Stéphane Collonge
Film editing: Chris Wyatt
Music: Dustin O'Halloran, Adam Wiltzie

Inevitably called "a Yorkshire Brokeback Mountain," Francis Lee's debut feature, God's Own Country has a forthrightness about gay sex that Ang Lee's more celebrated 2005 film lacked, and which, I recently noted, is also missing from the more popular Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017). There's no shyness about the mechanics of sex or about frontal male nudity -- one scene, of Johnny and Gheorghe talking together, plays out with both actors casually showing their privates. To my mind, this acceptance of the body defuses the sensationalism that "discreet" treatments, like the pan to the window in Call Me by Your Name, actually tend to heighten. It also brings the outsider status of the two men more clearly into focus -- if we can observe and accept  the fact of their relationship, then why can't others? God's Own Country is otherwise a familiar -- slightly over-familiar -- story of the course of a love affair: meeting, attraction, consummation, discord, separation, resolution. Johnny is a surly lout in a bleak, unloving milieu until Gheorghe comes into his life and teaches him tenderness and self-respect. It's enough to make us want to see the other side of the story: What about Gheorghe's life in post-Ceausescu Romania made him a stronger and better person than Johnny? That said, it's a well-made film, with superlative performances from Josh O'Connor and Alec Secareanu, and beautiful support from old pros Gemma Jones and Ian Hart as Johnny's worn and weary but always crabby parents.

Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011)

Aris Servetalis in Alps

Nurse: Angeliki Papoulia
Stretcher-bearer: Aris Servetalis
Coach: Johnny Vekris
Gymnast: Ariane Labed
Lamp Shop Owner: Efthymis Filippou
Teenager: Nikos Galgadis
Tennis Player: Maria Kyrozi
Tennis Player's Mother: Tina Papanikolaou
Tennis Player's Father: Sotiris Papastamatiou
Nurse's Father: Stavros Psyllakis
Nurse's Father's Girlfriend: Konstadina Papoulia
Blind Woman: Eftychia Stefanidou

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay: Efthymis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Cinematography: Christos Voudouris
Set decoration: Anna Georgiadou
Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis

Like his Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimo's Alps is a fable about hubris, a kind of screwball tragedy. The Alps are four people who have taken it upon themselves to relieve the suffering of those whose loved ones have recently died. This they do by acting as surrogates for the dead, reliving moments the bereaved once shared with their loved ones, which can range from conversations to care-giving (one of the bereaved is blind) to sex. The head Alp, who calls himself Mont Blanc, is an ambulance driver, and another Alp, who calls herself Monte Rosa, is a nurse, which puts them both in a good position to locate those in need of their services. The other two are a young gymnast and her hypercontrolling coach. We first meet them when the gymnast is performing a floor routine to the accompaniment of "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. She protests that she wants to perform to pop music, but he sternly insists that she's not ready for that yet. The gymnast, however, is deemed ready for her first turn as a surrogate, and the opportunity affords itself when the ambulance driver brings in a young accident victim, and the nurse takes over care of her as a patient, ingratiating herself with the young woman's parents. But the nurse has other plans: She wants to take over as the surrogate and pocket the money earned herself. So when the patient dies, she tells the other Alps that the woman has gone home to recuperate. What plot Alps contains centers on this subterfuge and its discovery. Other Alpine relationships form the rest of the story, which like most of the films directed by Lanthimos and co-written with Efthymis Filippou, becomes engagingly weirder as it goes along. Some critics have objected to the detached tone of the film -- Roger Ebert called it "a sterile exercise" -- and following it is sometimes like trying to work a puzzle in the dark -- Christos Voudouris's cinematography literally keeps some scenes in the shadows -- but Lanthimos is, as usual, a filmmaker like no other.

Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis, 2017)

Juliette Binoche and Xavier Beauvois in Let the Sunshine In

Isabelle: Juliette Binoche
Vincent: Xavier Beauvois
The Actor: Nicolas Duvauchelle
François: Laurent Gréville
Marc: Alex Descas
Fabrice: Bruno Podalydès
Sylvain: Paul Blain
Denis: Gérard Depardieu
Mathieu: Philippe Katerine
Maxime: Josiane Balasko
Ariane: Sandrine Dumas

Director: Claire Denis
Screenplay: Christine Angot, Claire Denis
Based on a book by Roland Barthes
Cinematography: Agnès Godard
Production design: Arnaud de Moleron
Film editing: Guy Lecorne
Music: Stuart Staples

I'm not familiar with the films of Claire Denis, and to judge from the somewhat mixed reviews of Let the Sunshine In, I may have picked the wrong one to start with. It is certainly talky, in that peculiarly French way of batting ideas back and forth like tennis balls, without anyone ever scoring. It's hard for someone coming into it cold to figure out what it is: a psychological drama, a comedy, a treatise on love and sex? And it was only at the end, when Gérard Depardieu imposes his corporosity on the film, playing a kind of upscale guru/fortune teller who wags a pendant over the photographs of Isabelle's lovers and delivers "predictions" that have all the soothing ambiguity of a newspaper horoscope column, that I decided: It's a satire. Specifically, one directed at everyone's confusion about relationships. That realization almost made me want to go back and watch it again to confirm my revelation, but I'm not sure I can subject myself so soon again to all that talk. What makes the film work as well as many think it does is the performance of the always-wonderful Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, a woman with several lovers ... no, strike that, I mean sexual partners. The first one we see right away, the banker named Vincent, having sex with Isabelle. But there's no postcoital glow: Immediately, Vincent reveals himself as an absolute jerk, which is reinforced by a subsequent scene in a bar where Vincent pointlessly torments an innocent bartender, ordering him to place the bottle here, the glass there, and asking him if they have any "gluten-free olives." Next, there's an unnamed actor, with whom Isabelle definitely has chemistry, but who reveals himself to be as self-conscious about relationships as she is. And so on. The upshot is that Isabelle and her partners are guilty of what D.H. Lawrence denounced as "sex in the head." But the trouble with the film seems to me that it has no narrative shape: Isabelle is as confused at the end as she is at the beginning, so there's no arc to follow though the film. Her life is a series of crises that may feel achingly familiar to many viewers, but aside from some wonderful moments -- as when Isabelle mocks a group of her fellow artists, gathered for a symposium in the country, for their pretentious admiration of nature -- I felt emptier at the end of Let the Sunshine In than at the beginning.

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)

Cleo: Yalitza Aparicio
Sofia: Marina de Tavira
Toño: Diego Cortina Autrey
Paco: Carlos Peralta
Pepe: Marco Graf
Sofi: Daniela Demesa
Adela: Nancy García García
Teresa: Verónica García
Ignacio: Andy Cortés
Antonio: Fernando Grediaga
Fermín: Jorge Antonio Guerrera
Ramón: José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza
Prof. Zovek: Latin Lover

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Screenplay: Alfonso Cuarón
Cinematography: Alfonso Cuarón
Production design: Eugenio Caballero
Film editing: Alfonso Cuarón, Adam Gough

Award season buzz has been intense around Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, partly because it was released in the United States by Netflix, with a short, Oscar-qualifying theatrical run before its appearance on the streaming service in December. It deserves the attention: It's a satisfying, handsomely mounted story with some moments of intense action and genuine heartfelt drama. There are those who think it may be too handsomely mounted, too beautifully photographed, with its peak moments, such as the struggle in the surf, subtly sweetened by special effects, all of this at the expense of some spontaneity and heart. Richard Brody of the New Yorker has argued that its point of view on the central character, Cleo, a woman of indigenous origins, is too external, too much informed by the "colonialist gaze" of Cuarón, who is admittedly basing the film on his memory of the woman who worked as nanny for his upper-class Mexico City household when he was a boy. She becomes the stereotypical strong, silent peasant, and the story becomes more about how Cuarón sees Cleo than about Cleo herself. I think perhaps Brody is guilty of something that critics so easily fall prey to: The desire to see another movie than the one that's on the screen. What's there is, setting aside any political or sociological matters, absorbing enough, and Yalitza Aparicio's performance gives us more of Cleo's inner life than Brody allows credit for. I would object to some of the conventional manipulation of the narrative, such as Cleo's encounter with Fermin in the chaotic midst of the Corpus Christi massacre, upon which she goes into labor with their stillborn child. That's taking coincidence to the breaking point while imbuing it with symbolic significance. But Roma takes me someplace I've never been before in the movies, and gives me much in both technique and story to appreciate. Best picture of the year? Probably not. But it's a good one.

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)

Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama

Don Diego de Zama: Daniel Giménez Cacho
Luciana: Lola Dueñas
Vicuña Porto/Gaspar Toledo: Matheus Nachtergaele
Ventura Prieto: Juan Minujín
Fernández: Nahuel Cano
Malemba: Mariana Nunes
El Oriental: Carlos Defeo
Capitán Parrilla: Rafael Spregelburd

Director: Lucrecia Martel
Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel
Based on a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto
Cinematography: Rui Poças
Art direction: Renata Pinheiro
Film editing: Karen Harley, Miguel Schverdfinger

In her New York Times review of Lucrecia Martel's Zama, Manohla Dargis suggests that we should see the film, then read the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, and then see the film again. That's a little more work than many of us are prepared to put into our movies, but it gets at one central fact about Zama: It's a brilliant movie, but appreciating it -- perhaps even comprehending it -- demands a viewer's attention. Just figuring out who Zama is takes a little effort: When we first see him he's striking a kind of heroic pose on the seashore, but his life is anything but heroic. Don Diego de Zama is a magistrate in a backwater of the 18th-century Spanish colonial empire, somewhere in Argentina. The place is a kind of hell-hole, the sort of colony where the settlers constantly badger the officials for help in getting native laborers, the ones they once had having either escaped or died from overwork. Zama wants to escape, too, to return to his wife and children, or at least to be transferred to a better place, but bureaucracy stymies him constantly. Eventually, he agrees to go on an expedition to capture a notorious bandit, but that doesn't end well. It's a scathing, often funny, eventually tragic portrayal of colonialism, and Martel is unwilling to let Zama's story take a predictable course. The land, the New World environment, is too much for the people trying to tame it. The randomness of existence in this outpost is captured by a beautifully absurd moment when Zama is trying to deal with a recalcitrant superior and a llama wanders into the frame, peering with a blankly benign gaze over Zama's shoulder, mocking his serious mien. Rui Poças's cinematography superbly captures both the beauty and cruelty of this inhuman landscape.

Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)

Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield in Sorry to Bother You

Cassius Green: Lakeith Stanfield
Detroit: Tessa Thompson
Salvador: Jermaine Fowler
Mr. ______: Omari Hardwick
Sergio: Terry Crews
Diana DeBauchery: Kate Berlant
Johnny: Michael X. Sommers
Langston: Danny Glover
Squeeze: Steven Yeun
Steve Lift: Armie Hammer

Director: Boots Riley
Screenplay: Boots Riley
Cinematography: Doug Emmett
Production design: Jason Kisvarday
Film editing: Terel Gibson
Music: The Coup, Merrill Garbus, Boots Riley, Tune-Yards

Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You inevitably got compared to Jordan Peele's 2017 hit Get Out because both were satiric fantasies with sci-fi overtones made by black filmmakers with black stars. But while Get Out was a direct confrontation with racism, Riley's film seems more concerned with adding race to the mix of an assault on capitalist exploitation of all working people, regardless of race. It's a scathing but funny look at economic inequality and the illusion that upward mobility remains possible. The setting is, appropriately, Oakland, where the high and low of economic status can be glimpsed in the very geography. What keeps the film from descending into angry agitprop is Riley's anarchic wit -- you never know what improbable means he will use, from puppets to horse people, to keep you off balance. There are bad jokes -- a character named Diana DeBauchery, pronounced "de beau cheri" -- and near-subliminal puns -- the central character, played with finesse by Lakeith Stanfield, is Cassius Green, i.e., "cash is green." Armie Hammer's slick megacapitalist is named Steve Lift, an almost perfect evocation of the celebrity CEOs of our time, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Some critics have voiced disappointment that Riley's satire starts out in something so old-hat and so frequently satirized as telemarketing, but in his hands it becomes a good vehicle for debunking the myth of upward mobility, as Cassius finds himself almost shoved up the ladder, betraying his old co-workers despite his better intentions. Sorry to Bother You goes out of focus sometimes, and there's really nowhere for what plot the film has to go at the end, but an enormously skilled cast and some very incisive jokes keep the energy high.

American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)

Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Martin Smith, and Ron Howard in American Graffiti

Curt: Richard Dreyfuss
Steve: Ron Howard
John: Paul Le Mat
Terry: Charles Martin Smith
Laurie: Cindy Williams
Debbie: Candy Clark
Carol: Mackenzie Phillips
Disc Jockey: Wolfman Jack
Joe: Bo Hopkins
Carlos: Manuel Padilla Jr.
Ants: Beau Gentry
Bob Falfa: Harrison Ford

Director: George Lucas
Screenplay: George Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck
Cinematography: Jan D'Alquen, Ron Eveslage; Haskell Wexler, visual consultant
Art direction: Dennis Lynton Clark
Film editing: Verna Fields, Marcia Lucas, George Lucas

American moviegoers, like Victorian novel-readers, love closure. They want movies to end with all the plot threads tied, with the good rewarded and the bad punished, and with a sense that nothing more needs to be told -- unless you're talking about movies that are obviously designed to springboard into sequels. George Lucas obviously felt the need for closure on American Graffiti, which is why he provided two endings. In the first, John wins his race with Bob Falfa, Terry and Debbie decide to meet again, Steve and Laurie are reconciled, and Curt goes off to college with a symbolic resolution of his pursuit of the Blonde in the T-Bird provided by a glimpse of the car from an airplane window. But because American Graffiti is set in 1962, and an awful lot happened to the generation portrayed in the film, Lucas also felt obliged to provide a second ending: a screen card that tells us John was killed by a drunk driver, Terry went missing in action in Vietnam, Steve sells insurance in Modesto, and Curt is "a writer in Canada." Critics have made some serious comments about this second ending's failure to tell us what happened to the female characters in the film: Laurie, Debbie, and Carol. And they're right, of course. But I think Lucas would have been better advised to stop with the first ending: His characters, with the possible exception of Curt, are not so well-drawn that they need to be dragged into the real world; the second ending feels more like a need to make a statement about the Vietnam War than a necessary coda to his story. American Graffiti is often compared to Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), another film about young men aimlessly lingering on the brink of maturity, and Lucas's Curt is an echo of Fellini's Moraldo, who at the end of the film leaves their small town for an uncertain future. But Fellini was content just to put Moraldo on the train and end his film, whereas the demand for closure pushes Lucas further. Fellini was pushed further, too, of course: We can see the characters played by Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) as possible versions of what Moraldo might have become. I somehow regret that Lucas didn't find that way of taking Curt into the future; instead he got sidetracked into a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away. American Graffiti remains a landmark film, not only because it made Lucas very rich and able to indulge his bent toward space opera, but also because it established the teen-movie genre, sometimes for better -- e.g., Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993) -- but more often for worse -- e.g., the Bob Clark Porky's movies (1981, 1983) and even the dud sequel More American Graffiti (Bill Norton, 1979).

Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018)

Luca Chikovani and Adriano Tardiolo in Happy as Lazzaro

Lazzaro: Adriano Tardiolo
Antonio as a girl: Agnese Graziani
Tancredi as a boy: Luca Chikovani
Antonia as an adult: Alba Rohrwacher
Ultimo: Sergi López
Nicola: Natalino Basso
Tancredi as an adult: Tommaso Ragno
Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna: Nicoletta Braschi

Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Screenplay: Alice Rohrwacher
Cinematography: Hélène Louvart
Production design: Emita Frigato
Film editing: Nelly Quettier

The title character of Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro is the perfect embodiment of the Holy Fool archetype, the naïf whose steady detachment from what "normal" people call reality provides a corrective influence on an increasingly haywire and self-obsessed society. Lazzaro begins as a worker on a hellish tobacco plantation somewhere in the heart of Italy, run by a marchesa whose sharecroppers are little more than slaves, kept in poverty and ignorance. But Lazzaro is happy, doing his part to help out everyone without complaint. And his happiness infects the surly son of the marchesa, Tancredi, who is bored and alienated, so that he enlists Lazzaro's help to fake his own kidnapping, while hiding out on a remote corner of the estate that Lazzaro shows him. Tancredi's ruse leads the police to investigate and to uncover the marchesa's illegal operation, shutting down the plantation and rescuing the workers from their enslavement. But in the midst of this upheaval, Lazzaro's part in the story takes a sharp and magical turn, as time passes and the scene shifts from rural exploitation to urban anomie. I'm not one for avoiding "spoilers," but the richness of discovery is part of this film's remarkable essence. Things happen that couldn't really happen, but even within the context of a brutal portrait of the real world they feel exactly right. Rohrwacher deftly avoids a descent into romantic primitivism while bringing to light some harsh truths about the world we have made for ourselves. In the end, we are led to contemplate the nature of happiness itself.

First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)

Ethan Hawke in First Reformed

Toller: Ethan Hawke
Mary: Amanda Seyfried
Jeffers: Cedric the Entertainer
Esther: Victoria Hill
Michael: Philip Ettinger
Balq: Michael Gaston

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan
Production design: Grace Yun
Film editing: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Music: Brian Williams

"Derivative" is a much-overused word in film criticism: Everything comes from something else, and even the film praised as "original" is eventually going to reveal its sources. So it's not a knock on Paul Schrader's First Reformed that it feels so strongly influenced by the directors Schrader wrote about in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. What directors haven't been influenced by them, or at least had to acknowledge that the intensity and commitment of their work suffers in comparison? The resemblance to Ozu's work is purely stylistic in First Reformed: a spareness and stillness of image, sometimes even a sense of claustrophobia in Schrader's determined use of the so-called "Academy ratio," the 1:37:1 frame familiar to us from movies made before widescreen technique became common to moviemaking. A more direct borrowing comes from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) whose title character has intestinal torments that are reflected in those of Schrader's upstate New York priest, Toller. And the spectrum of religious faith, from non-belief to obsession, exhibited by Schrader's characters is found among the characters of Dreyer's Ordet (1955). But the film that seems to have most directly influenced Schrader is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), whose ailing, doubt-ridden pastor finds himself unable to prevent a troubled member of his congregation from committing suicide. There are times when Schrader's cinematographer, Alexander Dynan, even seems to be copying the setups of Bergman's, Sven Nykvist: Both, for example, give us views of the preachers facing out upon chilly, nearly empty sanctuaries, backed up by the emblems of the faith they barely cling to. If anything, Schrader's film is a kind of updated version of Winter Light; in First Reformed the existential dread of the times is no longer annihilation by nuclear warfare but instead the uncertainly looming cataclysm of climate change. Schrader of course goes beyond mere time-shifting: Ethan Hawke's Toller is not just a latter-day version of Gunnar Björnstrand's Tomas Ericsson, but a contemporary man with contemporary problems like dealing with the clammy hold that corporate capitalism has on his church, in the form of Michael Gaston's Balq and the toadying Jeffers, the preacher for a "prosperity Gospel"-style megachurch, surprisingly played by Cedric the Entertainer. And Toller finds ways to console the widow of the man who commits suicide that might have shocked Ericsson. This is the point at which derivativeness becomes a virtue in Schrader's film, when we can superimpose Bergman's vision of faith onto our own, more than half a century later. There are moments when Schrader's film seems to miss the mark and slip over into mere thriller-movie melodrama, particularly the introduction of ecoterrorism in the form of a suicide vest, so that we miss the maturity with which filmmakers like Bergman and Bresson and Dreyer resolved their characters' spiritual crises. But Hawke, in a performance that is more assured and sensitive than any I've seen him give, holds the film together admirably.