Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

Peter Lorre in Mad Love

Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Edward Brophy, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty. Screenplay: Guy Endore, P.J. Wolfson, John L. Balderston, based on a novel by Maurice Renard. Cinematography: Chester A. Lyons, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Peter Lorre's American debut made him a specialist in creepy roles. He's Dr. Gogol, a mad physician, obsessed with a lovely actress (Frances Drake) married to a concert pianist (Colin Clive) who, when his hands are injured in an accident, allows the doctor to operate on them. But the doctor replaces the pianist's hands with those of a murderer, a specialist in knife-throwing, who has just been guillotined for his crimes. Naturally, this means that the pianist can't play anymore but develops a new talent for throwing sharp objects. And so on. It's a pretty well made piece of hokum that gained some late notoriety when Pauline Kael accused Orson Welles of stealing from it when he made Citizen Kane (1941), largely because both films had the same cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947)

Cedric Hardwicke and Sally Ann Howes in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Cast: Derek Bond, Cedric Hardwicke, Bernard Miles, Sally Ann Howes, Alfred Drayton, Aubrey Woods, Stanley Holloway, Jill Balcon, Mary Merrall, Athene Seyler, Sybil Thorndike, Fay Compton, Cathleen Nesbitt, James Hayter. Screenplay: John Dighton, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Gordon Dines. Art direction: Michael Relph. Film editing: Leslie Norman. Music: Lord Berners.

Forgettable and rather plodding version of the Dickens novel, kept alive only by some good actors doing their thing well.

Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Jonathan Pryce in Brazil

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. Cinematography: Roger Pratt. Production design: Norman Garwood. Film editing: Julian Doyle. Music: Michael Kamen.

I have to admit reluctantly that I'm not a fan of the kind of dystopian social satire epitomized by Terry Gilliam's Brazil and echoed in such films as Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991) and the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). They seem to me too scattered to be effective as satire, too dependent on production design and special effects to connect with the realities they're supposedly lampooning. I find myself forgetting them almost once they end. That said, Brazil is always worth watching just for the performances of a cast filled with specialists in a kind of British-style muddling through even the weirdest of situations.

Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961)

Cast: Cassen, José Luis López Vázquez, Elvira Quintillá, Manuel Alexandre, Mario Bustos, María Francés. Screenplay: Luis García Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, José Luis Colina, José Luis Font. Cinematography: Francisco Sempere. Art direction: Antonio Cortés. Film editing: José Antonio Rojo. Music: Miguel Asins Arbó.

Luis García Berlanga in fine form with yet another satire that conceals the knife edge within a depiction of village eccentrics. This time, it's the ostentatious and superficial charity of the bourgeoisie that gets the knife, as the title character (Cassen) tries to keep the truck on which he and his family's livelihood depends from being repossessed.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J.A. Bayona, 2018)

Chris Pratt in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon. Screenplay: Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow. Cinematography: Oscar Faura. Production design: Andy Nicholson. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Not quite as inane as its 2015 predecessor, this installment of the Jurassic World series -- if such there is to be, since Covid-19 seems to have put the filming of the next installment on hold -- benefits from making Bryce Dallas Howard's character less of a ditz in heels, and from eschewing the tired kids-in-jeopardy theme from the first. Still, this is one of those movies from which you know what you're going to get, and if you want that sort of thing, have at it. 

Viva (Anna Biller, 2007)

Anna Biller in Viva

Cast: Anna Biller, Jared Sanford, Bridget Brno, Chad England, John Klemantaski, Barry Morse. Screenplay: Anna Biller. Cinematography: C. Thomas Lewis. Production design: Anna Biller. Costume design: Anna Biller. Music: Anna Biller.

The 1970s are generally regarded as the souring of the 1960s, as the Peace and Love of Woodstock turned into the empty hedonism of the golden age of disco. And that's pretty much the way that inimitable auteur Anna Biller sees it in Viva, a parody of the softcore erotic movies of the time. It's all a bit too overheatedly obvious in its satire, but that makes it worth seeing once.

Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926)

Greta Garbo and Ricardo Cortez in Torrent

Cast: Greta Garbo, Ricardo Cortez, Gertrude Olmstead, Edward Connelly, Lucien Littlefield, Martha Mattox, Lucy Beaumont, Tully Marshall, Mack Swain. Screenplay: Dorothy Farnum, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez; titles by Katherine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan.

Greta Garbo's first American film gives her the chance to play rich and poor: She's a Spanish peasant girl whose love for the wealthy, dashing Rafael (Ricardo Cortez) is thwarted by his scheming mother (Martha Mattox), so she goes to Paris where her singing voice earns her wealth and fame but not true love, as the on-again off-again relationship with Rafael takes its course over the years. Garbo and Cortez strike no sparks, but the film was a hit anyway, launching her fabulous career.

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciarán Hinds, Dillon Freasier, Kevin J. O'Connor. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, based on a novel by Upton Sinclair. Cinematography: Robert Elswit. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Dylan Tichenor. Music: Jonny Greenwood.

Extraordinary filmmaking made even more extraordinary by Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, the second of his three Oscar wins. There are some who think the film is a little diffuse and eccentric, especially in its later scenes. But who needs ordinary movies?

The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, 1969)

Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell, Sigge Fürst. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren.

Sometimes linked with Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Shame (1968) as a third element of a trilogy set on Fårö island, Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna is a characteristically intense working out of themes of grief and guilt, involving two couples whose lives intersect against a backdrop of mysterious instances of cruelty toward animals. I find it one of Bergman's more forgettable films, but it has strong admirers. 

The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939)

Bette Davis in The Old Maid

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Jane Bryan, Louise Fazenda, James Stephenson, Jerome Cowan, William Lundigan. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a play by Zoe Akins and a novel by Edith Wharton. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Max Steiner.

The Old Maid is the kind of melodrama that never really made much sense, except in the original version, the novel by Edith Wharton, where the social taboos and psychological hangups could be dealt with more convincingly. And given that filmmakers under the Production Code had to tiptoe around topics like having a child without being married, the evasions of such key issues became even more ludicrous and artificial. Still, though the movie is fun to watch today because the evasions are so glaring, and because troupers like Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins knew how to make them entertaining. The making of the film is notorious because Davis and Hopkins were constantly feuding over old wrong: The one losing a coveted role to the other who was also suspected of sleeping with her husband, and so on. Davis is more fun when she's scheming and trying to get even in her movies than when she's suffering and self-sacrificing, so The Old Maid is not one of her juicier films.