The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969)

Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in The Bed Sitting Room

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Richard Warwick, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Frank Thornton, Dandy Nichols. Screenplay: John Antrobus, Charles Wood, based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Ken Thorne.

Seemingly every comic actor in 1960s Britain turns up somewhere in Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, but they don't generate many laughs. The problem with most absurdist comedies is the absence of a grounding normality, and in the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, in which Britain has been turned into a vast trash dump by a nuclear war, there's not much to serve as a norm against which its silliness can play out. The point is to satirize our pre-apocalyptic complacency, and once you get that point the film mostly asks you to sit around and wait for your particular favorite actor to make his or her appearance. Oh, there's Ralph Richardson. Ah, that's Mona Washbourne. Good, that's Marty Feldman. And so on for 90 minutes. It only seems longer.

True Stories (David Byrne, 1986)

David Byrne in True Stories

Cast: David Byrne, John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Spalding Gray, Swoosie Kurtz, Jo Harvey Allen, Alix Elias, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Tito Larriva, John Ingle, Matthew Posey. Screenplay: Stephen Tobolowsky, Beth Henley, David Byrne. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Caroline Biggerstaff. Music: David Byrne.

Does David Byrne's film about Texans celebrating the state's sesquicentennial reflect the condescending view of a hipster or is it a good-hearted tribute to human eccentricity? It's probably a bit of both, I suspect, having done time in Texas, where a non-native can find a good deal to smirk about but can also be worn over by something warm and genuine. There's a good deal of the ludicrous in the "Celebration of Specialness" mounted by Byrne's Texans, but allow yourself to rise above ironic distancing and get swept up in the variety of human individuality in True Stories and I think you can sense that Byrne isn't really there just to poke fun at his characters, that he kind of loves them. Some of the film falls flat, but it's usually picked up again by performers like John Goodman and Swoosie Kurtz, and of course by the music of Byrne, Talking Heads, and others.

The Better 'Ole (Charles Reisner, 1926)

Syd Chaplin in The Better 'Ole

Cast: Syd Chaplin, Harold Goodwin, Jack Ackroyd, Edgar Kennedy, Charles K. Gerrard, Theodore Lorch, Doris Hill, Arthur Clayton. Screenplay: Darryl F. Zanuck, Charles Reisner, intertitles by Robert E. Hopkins, based on a play by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Eliot. Cinematography: Edwin B. DuPar. Art direction: Ben Carré. Film editing: Ray Enright. Music: Maurice Baron.

Slapstick comedy starring Charles Chaplin's older brother Syd Chaplin as "Old Bill," a British soldier in World War I. Based on a 1917 stage musical that had been filmed once before, The Better 'Ole was released in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process with a synchronized music track and sound effects but no dialogue. The character of Old Bill was created by Bruce Bairnsfather in a newspaper cartoon published as a morale builder during the war. The film, which centers on Bill's involvement in exposing a German spy ring, tends to drag a bit as it works out some plot switches, and most of the physical comedy is old hat.

Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

Cast: Fumio Watanabe, Miyuki Kuwano, Takao Yoshizawa, Akiko Koyama, Masahiko Tsugawa, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Kei Sato, Rokko Toura, Shinko Ujiie, Ichiro Hayami. Screenplay: Toshiro Ishido, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Takashi Kawamata. Art direction: Koji Uno. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Riichiro Manabe.

The wedding of Nozawa (Fumio Watanabe) and Reiko (Miyuki Kuwano) is interrupted by protesters who denounce the couple for betraying the ideals of the Japanese student movement of the 1950s. Nagisa Oshima's Night and Fog in Japan is a heady portrait of ideological conflict filled with flashbacks as a variety of witnesses open old political wounds, but it's hard to follow especially for Westerners not well versed in the history of the period.

Bad Times at the El Royale (Drew Goddard, 2018)

Chris Hemsworth in Bad Times at the El Royale

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Chris Hemsworth, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman. Screenplay: Drew Goddard. Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey. Production design: Martin Whist. Film editing: Lisa Lassek. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Giddy, bloody thriller that has been called "Tarantinoesque" for its blend of violence and humor, Bad Times at the El Royale runs too long at 141 minutes, but it has good performances, particularly from Jeff Bridges and Cynthia Erivo, and Chris Hemsworth (shirtless of course) as a sadistic villain. It feels like a cult film that hasn't yet found its cult the way, say, writer-director Drew Goddard's The Cabin in the Woods (2011) did. 

The Witnesses (André Téchiné, 2007)

Johan Libéreau and Sami Bouajila in The Witnesses

Cast: Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Béart, Sami Bouajila, Johan Libéreau, Julie Depardieu, Constance Dollé, Lorenzo Balducci, Alain Cauchi. Screenplay: André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Viviane Zingg. Cinematography: Julien Hirsch. Production design: Michèle Abbé-Vannier. Film editing: Martine Giordano. Music: Philippe Sarde.

The time is 1984, and AIDS has just begun to make its menace completely known in the small circle of friends who constitute André Téchiné's "witnesses." They include Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) and Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a married couple with a baby; Adrien (Michel Blanc), their middle-aged doctor friend; and Manu (Johan Libéreau), a gay man who is Adrien's protégé (i.e., he loves the young man but they don't have sex). Eventually, Manu will contract AIDS, complicating things because he and Mehdi have begun having sex. Téchiné works out all of these complications with a beautiful deftness that avoids sugarcoating the fatal epidemic but still manages to leave viewers with a satisfactory resolution.

Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

Mariko Kaga and Ryo Ikebe in Pale Flower

Cast: Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga, Takashi Fujiki, Naoki Sugiura, Shin'ichiro Mikami, Isao Sasaki, Koji Nakahara, Chisako Hara, Saiji Miyaguchi, Eijiro Tono, Mikizo Hirata. Screenplay: Masaru Baba, Masahiro Shinoda, based on a novel by Shintaro Ishihara. Cinematography: Masao Kosugi. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu.

Masahiro Shinoda does noir better than almost anybody in Pale Flower, a lush, brooding film about a middle-aged, burning-out yakuza and a beautiful but damned young woman, both played to perfection by, respectively, Ryo Ikebe and Mariko Kaga. Also near perfection: Masao Kosugi's chiaroscuro cinematography and Toru Takemitsu's nervous score. 

Sing a Song of Sex (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)

Cast: Ichiro Araki, Kazuko Tajima, Juzo Itami, Akiko Koyama, Koji Iwabuchi, Kazuyoshi Kushida, Hiroshi Sato, Nobuko Miyamoto, Hiroko Masuda, Hideko Yoshida. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Toshio Tajima, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Set decoration: Jusho Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Politics and pornography intersect in Sing a Song of Sex, a film which, though it has four credited screenwriters, was largely improvised by its young cast. It's set at a time of political demonstrations, during which the teacher (Juzo Itami) of a group of young men preparing for their examinations tells them that bawdy songs -- the film's Japanese title has also been translated as A Treatise on Bawdy Songs -- are themselves a political statement, a way for the poorer classes to find release from oppression. And so the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred in the film as the young men act, if only in their imaginations, upon their desires, many of which focus on the pretty Mayuko (Kazuko Tajima), whom they depersonalize by referring to her by her seat number in class, 469. Often enigmatic, Sing a Song of Sex is the kind of film for which it's best that many of us just go along for the ride rather than to try to unravel its social and political implications, which are very much of a particular time and place.

Old Acquaintance (Vincent Sherman, 1943)

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance

Cast: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, John Loder, Gig Young, Dolores Moran, Phillip Reed, Roscoe Karnes, Anne Revere, Esther Dale. Screenplay: John Van Druten, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a play by John Van Druten. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Terry O. Morse. Music: Franz Waxman.

One of those actress pairings that you can't help being drawn to, no matter the quality of the movie: Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Fortunately, the movie, Old Acquaintance, is pretty good. (So was their earlier teaming in 1939, in William Goulding's The Old Maid, during which they are said to have had off-screen battles.) It's a story of two childhood friends who both grow up to be successful novelists, though Davis's Kit Marlowe is a critical darling while Hopkins's Millie Drake is a commercial success. They also grow up orbiting the same man, Preston Drake (John Loder), though Millie is the one who marries him and has a daughter with him. Eventually, Millie and Preston split, and the daughter, Dede, grows up to be played by Dolores Moran, and wouldn't you know it, to take Kit's much younger lover, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young), away from her. The central fact of the relationship between Kit and Millie, however, is that they represent opposite temperaments: Kit is solid and cynical, while Millie is high-strung and manic. All of this makes for some entertaining scenes, which is all that's needed in a Bette Davis movie, or a Miriam Hopkins one, for that matter.

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson, Sabu, Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, Jenny Laird, Judith Furse, Esmond Knight, Eddie Whaley Jr. Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, based on a novel by Rumer Godden. Cinematography: Jack Cardiff. Production design: Alfred Junge. Film editing: Reginald Mills. Music: Brian Easdale.

This much-loved film has so far escaped condemnation for its "orientalism," the brown-face performances of Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, and Esmond Knight, and its treatment in general of the Indian characters as mysterious and alien. And perhaps it's better to concentrate on the erotic instead of the exotic in Black Narcissus, to enjoy its stunning, Oscar-winning cinematography and production design. Who can forget the vertiginous moments at the precipice where the bell was rung -- even though those moments were sheer camera-trickery, accomplished in the Pinewood Studios with matte paintings? Or the erotic charge every time David Farrar walks shirtless among the nuns and Kathleen Byron gives him the eye?