A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935)

Cast: Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, Henry B. Walthall, Donald Woods, Walter Catlett, Fritz Leiber, H.B. Warner, Mitchell Lewis, Claude Gillingwater, Billy Bevan, Isabel Jewell, Lucille La Verne. Screenplay: W.P. Lipscomb, S.N. Behrman, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Music: Herbert Stothart.

It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies. The best part is that Ronald Colman is a handsome Sydney Carton, who delivers the familiar closing line at the guillotine -- "It is a far, far better thing I do...." -- with the necessary nobility, and that the cast includes such ever-watchable character actors as Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka (an implacable Mme. De Farge), and Lucille La Verne (as The Vengeance, literally but not figuratively toothless). The worst part is that the screenplay leans heavily on the sentimental parts of the novel and Elizabeth Allan is, like most Dickens heroines, a pallid and forgettable Lucie Manette. David O. Selznick produced, but it's not as successful a foray into Dickens as his superb David Copperfield, made the same year and with a better director, George Cukor. 

The Slow Business of Going (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2000)

The Slow Business of Going (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2000)

Cast: Lizzie Curry Martinez, Maria Tsansanoglou, Gary Price, Kenny Strickland, Daniel Aukin, Sandra Carter, Mike Martin, Lauryn Pithey-Petrie, Steve Moore. Screenplay: Jim Davis, Matthew Johnson, Tasca Shadix, Athina Rachel Tsangari. Cinematography: Deborah Eve Lewis. Art direction: Tom Dornbush. Film editing: Leah Bowers, Kyle Henry, Matthew Johnson, Athina Rachel Tsangari. Music: Mark Orton.

She is a camera. The protagonist, Petra Going (Lizzie Curry Martinez), travels the world recording her encounters with a video camera built into her eyes. Then others can access her experiences through the archive of her recordings. Which is pretty much what this oddly fascinating jumble of a film amounts to: episodes often improvised by the actors over the course of five years of filming. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari's first feature will never attract a wide audience, but its enigmas are often dazzling. 

Les Girls (George Cukor, 1957)

Kay Kendall, Mitzi Gaynor, Gene Kelly, and Taina Elg in Les Girls

Cast: Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall, Taina Elg, Jacques Bergerac, Leslie Phillips, Henry Daniell, Patrick Macnee. Screenplay: John Patrick, based on a story by Vera Caspary. Cinematography: Robert Surtees. Art direction: Gene Allen, William A. Horning. Film editing: Ferris Webster. Music: Cole Porter, Saul Chaplin.

It should have been better. It had Gene Kelly's dancing, George Cukor's direction, Cole Porter's song score, and a performance by the wonderful comedian Kay Kendall -- two years before her untimely death. I'm tempted to blame the failure of this musical on Mitzi Gaynor, a performer to whom I've never felt attracted, or to the now long-forgotten Taina Elg. According to one source, it was planned to star Leslie Caron, Cyd Charisse, Jean Simmons, and Carol Haney, each of whom might have given a lift to the movie, but Kelly seems cranky and tired -- it was his last film for MGM -- and the Porter songs are completely forgettable. Cukor's direction is workmanlike: Despite My Fair Lady (1964) and the Judy Garland A Star Is Born (1954), musicals were not his forte.

Dodes'ka-den (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

Cast: Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Junzaburo Ban, Kiyoko Tange, Hisashi Igawa, Hideko Okiyama, Kunie Tanaka, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Ryo Sawagami, Yoko Kusunoki, Noboru Mitani, Hiroyuki Kawase, Hiroshi Akutagawa. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto. Cinematography: Yasumichi Fukuzawa, Takao Saito. Art direction: Shinobu Muraki, Yoshiro Muraki. Film editing: Reiko Kaneko. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Akira Kurosawa's first film in color, Dodes'ka-den was a critical hit, earning an Oscar nomination for foreign language film, but a commercial failure, sending the director into a deep, near-suicidal depression. It's a curious grab-bag of stories of people living in a trash dump, their lives connecting only tangentially for the most part. It has the appearance of such post-apocalyptic films as Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991), Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2014), Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1991), and The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969), though its setting is on the fringes of the actual 20th-century Japan -- apocalypse nigh, if you will. The title comes from what is perhaps its central figure, the mentally challenged Roku-chan (Yoshitaka Zushi), who is obsessed with streetcars and chugs through the dump chanting the nonsense words of the film's title, meant to be an evocation of the sound of the tram on the tracks.

The Newton Boys (Richard Linklater, 1998)

Skeet Ulrich, Dwight Yoakam, and Matthew McConaughey in The Newton Boys

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dwight Yoakam, Julianna Margulies, Chloe Webb, Bo Hopkins, David Jensen, Luke Askew. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Claude Stanush, Clark Walker, based on a book by Claude Stanush. Cinematography: Peter James. Production design: Catherine Hardwicke. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Edward D. Barnes, Bad Livers.

With Richard Linklater directing actors like Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Julianna Margulies, The Newton Boys ought to be a lot better than it is. Not that it's bad, it's just a solid and unmemorable story of the bank-robbing brothers and their accomplices, including nitroglycerin expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam), who plagued Texas and much of the central United States in the 1920s. The shadow of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) hangs long and heavy over this movie. A coda to the film shows the real, elderly Willis Newton, who was played by McConaughey, being interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. It may be more interesting than what precedes it, though it helps illuminate how well McConaughey caught the character.

Paradise: Hope (Ulrich Seidl, 2013)

Cast: Melanie Lenz, Verena Lehbauer, Joseph Lorenz, Michael Thomas, Viviane Bartsch, Maria Hofstätter, Leopold Schiel, Rainer Luttenberger, Hannes A. Pendl. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

The third film in Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy completes the story of a family of women: The mother, Teresa, was the focus of Paradise: Love (2012); the aunt, Anna Maria, that of Paradise: Faith (2012); and young Melanie's experiences at a "fat camp" are meant to be taking place at much the same time as Teresa is experiencing pleasures of the flesh in Kenya and Anna Maria is proselytizing for Catholicism in Austria. Like the other two films, Paradise: Hope is scathingly satirical about the inability of human beings to satisfy their wants and live up to their ideals. It's a discomfiting movie, as are the other two films in the trilogy. 

Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)

Cast: Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden, Howard St. John, Frank Otto, Larry Oliver, Barbara Brown, Grandon Rhodes, Claire Carlton. Screenplay: Albert Mannheimer, Garson Kanin, based on a play by Garson Kanin. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender.

Judy Holliday's best actress Oscar win, over the classic performances of Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. and Bette Davis in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, still ranks as one of the award's more jaw-dropping moments. But if there was ever a case for a three-way tie, this might be it. Because Holliday's Billie Dawn is a great performance, and it lacked the comeback aura of Swanson's or the career-valedictory overtones of Davis's. She had, of course, perfected the role on Broadway, but it's also to her credit that she never seems stagy, even in the confines of what is too often a filmed play dogged a bit by the censors.

Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Masao Wakahara, Chikage Awashima, Toshiko Kobayashi, Eiko Miyoshi, Chieko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Hideko Takamine returns as the ditsy strip tease artist, first seen in Keisuke Kinoshita's popular Carmen Comes Home (1951), who really thinks that stripping is an art. She gets involved with an avant-garde sculptor, whose mother is a fierce political activist, but the comedy is rather scattershot. The great character actress Chieko Higashiyama, for example, plays a maid who is terrified of another atomic bomb, freaking out at any loud noise. That this anxiety is played for laughs strikes us as odd, but the film is one of the first that was made after the end of the occupation in Japan, which forbade any mention of the bomb.

Mr. Skeffington (Vincent Sherman, 1944)

Bette Davis and Claude Rains in Mr. Skeffington

Cast: Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Walter Abel, George Coulouris, Richard Waring, Marjorie Riordan, Robert Shayne, John Alexander, Jerome Cowan, Johnny Mitchell, Dorothy Peterson, Peter Whitney, Bill Kennedy. Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, based on a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Franz Waxman.

Although the title role of Mr. Skeffington belongs to Claude Rains, the movie is really centered on Mrs. Skeffington, née Fanny Trellis, played by Bette Davis, a fact reflected in the Oscar nominations to Davis for best actress and to Rains for supporting actor. It's a film that gives Davis the opportunity to run the age gamut, from youthful beauty to haggard old lady. Unfortunately, although the screenplay is credited to the usually reliable Julius and Philip Epstein, who also served as producers, the director is the undistinguished Vincent Sherman, and the resulting film is tediously conventional. It lacks some of the verve of Hollywood movies of the era that was often supplied by a gallery of character players, leaving Davis and Rains to do what they can to carry the story: Spoiled, flighty woman marries a rich man she doesn't love, both of them suffer but are reconciled at the end when she's old and he's blind. It has the distinction of being one of the few films of the period to deal directly with antisemitism, but it doesn't do so with much real conviction. Still, Davis is always fun to watch, even if the nearly two and a half hour run time tends to challenge even that fun.

Paradise: Faith (Ulrich Seidl, 2012)

Maria Hofstätter in Paradise: Faith

Cast: Maria Hofstätter, Nabil Saleh, René Rupnik, Natalya Baranova, Trude Masur, Dieter Masur, Michaela Hurdes-Galli. Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz. Cinematography: Edward Lachman, Wolfgang Thaler. Production design: Andreas Donhauser, Renate Martin. Film editing: Christof Schertenleib.

Ulrich Seidl's intermittently fascinating, intermittently shocking, and even sometimes tedious Paradise: Faith is the middle film in his Paradise trilogy. It focuses on Anna Maria, the sister of the central character in Paradise: Love (2012) and the aunt of the teenager in Paradise: Hope (2013). Anna Maria is a religious zealot, who totes around a statue of the Virgin Mary while making door-to-door calls on strangers whom she persuades (sometimes) to pray with her. Her home is meticulously clean and adorned only with crucifixes, before which she prays and sometimes flagellates herself -- and with one of which she performs a sexual act. Before long, we discover that she's married to a Muslim, though we never quite find out how that happened. Seidl's distancing from his  characters allows us a lot of latitude in judging them, so the film is as much a provocation -- an opportunity for us to assess our responses to such religious extremism -- as it is a portrait of faith.