First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit, Christopher Abbott, Ciarán Hinds, Olivia Hamilton, Pablo Schreiber, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas, Ethan Embry, Brian D'Arcy James. Screenplay: Josh Singer, based on a book by James R. Hansen. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.

Sometime in the middle of First Man, I found myself wishing that Buzz Aldrin had been the first person to set foot on the moon. Not that Neil Armstrong didn't deserve the honor -- Damien Chazelle's movie makes us certain that he had the right stuff -- but because Armstrong, as conceived by screenwriter Josh Singer and played by Ryan Gosling, is so remote, chilly, and uptight. Aldrin at least had a sense of humor and was a bit of a maverick, but all we get of Armstrong is a grim determination, a sense of duty that the job was paramount and had to be suffered through at the expense of human tenderness. Gosling's Armstrong is death-haunted, emotionally frozen by the deaths of his young daughter and of his fellow pilots and astronauts. We don't connect with him except through his wife, Janet, played by Claire Foy, who endures her husband's remoteness but is powerless to get him to snap out of it. The result is a somewhat depressing treatment of heroism as a kind of dead end, which seems to fit the facts of Armstrong's rather colorless and uneventful later life, and also suggests why he and Janet separated in 1990 and divorced four years later. It's a well-made movie but a curiously unsettling one.

Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)

Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)

Cast: Yuya Yagira, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, Mamoko Shimizu, Hanae Kan, You, Kazuyoshi Kushida, Yukiko Okamoto, Sei Hiraizumi, Ryo Kase, Takako Tate, Yuichi Kimura, Ken'ichi Endo, Susumu Terajima. Screenplay: Hirokazu Koreeda. Cinematography: Yutaka Yamazaki. Production design: Toshihiro Isomi, Keiko Mitsumatsu. Film editing: Hirokazu Koreeda. Music: Gontiti.

Like his Shoplifters (2018), Hirokazu Koreeda's film is about a family in crisis. Not a dysfunctional family in the usual sense -- the families in both films function fairly well until the crisis -- but families that function despite not exactly being families. The one in Nobody Knows consists entirely of four children, ages 5 to 12. When the film starts there is a fifth member, their mother, but she's still a child herself, so hedonistic and irresponsible that she abandons them, leaving the oldest, Akira, in charge of his four siblings -- or rather half-siblings, since each of them has a different father. How Akira and the others managed to develop enough maturity and self-control to survive on their own in a Tokyo apartment is one of the unsolved mysteries of the film, but we somehow never question it as we live through the better part of a year with them. That's partly because Koreeda maintains a child's-eye view throughout the film, treating their efforts to stay together at all costs as an essential. We may sometimes think they'd be better off if the authorities learned about their situation, that they then might get the schooling and nutrition they deserve to become functioning adults. But when a friend suggests that they go to social services or the police, Akira rejects it out of hand: They would be separated, he says. It happened once before and it was a big mess. Togetherness is all. Eventually, the worst happens, but even then they take it in stride, and as the film ends the remaining children stay together somehow. Nobody Knows is a tearjerker and a heartbreaker, but it's also a tribute to the will to survive, made powerful by the remarkable performances of the very young actors, especially Yuya Yagira as Akira, who was 14 when he won the best actor award at Cannes -- the youngest person ever to do so.

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

Cast: Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Kay Francis, Charles Coburn, Helen Vinson, Katharine Alexander, Jonathan Hale, Nella Walker, Alan Baxter, Maurice Moscovitch, Peggy Ann Garner, Spencer Charters. Screenplay: Richard Sherman, based on a novel by Bessie Breuer. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Perry Ferguson. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Roy Webb.

You have to feel a little sorry for Kay Francis in In Name Only, stuck there as the villain opposite two witty luminaries, Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. Their background as comic actors make Grant and Lombard even more appealing in this mostly serious drama about frustrated love. We see the potential for happiness in their characters even as Lombard's is suffering and Grant's almost dies, mostly because we've seen the actors be giddy and funny before. Poor Francis is stuck in full grim glower as her character, Maida Walker, tries to hold on to her husband, Alec (Grant), and it doesn't help that we have seen Francis be funny before, in Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), though even there she was the other woman to Miriam Hopkins. Maida's motives are impure, of course: She married Alec for his money, even though she was in love with another, less affluent man. Their marriage has long since gone sour, so when Alec finds himself falling for the pretty widow Julie Eden (Lombard), Maida has to pull out all stops to put a kibosh on their affair. In Name Only is one of the more cynical movies about marriage to come out of Hollywood under the Production Code, which while it didn't prohibit the treatment of married couples falling out of love with each other and even getting divorced to marry their true loves, tried, under the Catholic leadership of Joseph Breen, to discourage it -- or at least to make sure that it was as painful for the participants as possible. So Maida has to be as cunningly deceitful as possible in her attempts to hold on to her man, and other marriages in the movie are just as unhappy: Maida's friend Suzanne (Helen Vinson) is married to a lush, so she plays the field, making a stab at Alec, and Julie has an embittered sister, Laura (Katharine Alexander), who divorced her philandering husband and now distrusts all men. Naturally, in the end Maida gets her comeuppance and agrees to divorce Alec so he can marry Julie, but it's a long time coming. Alec even has to be on the brink of death before this can happen, which provides one of the weaker moments in the film: Grant is so typically full of life that it's almost beyond his considerable acting skills to seem to be seriously ill. In Name Only is no great film, but you probably can't even care about its defects when Grant and Lombard are on the screen -- they're that good.

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)

Cast: Dennis O'Keefe, Alfred Ryder, Wallace Ford, Charles McGraw, Mary Meade, Jane Randolph, June Lockhart, Art Smith, Herbert Heyes, Jack Overman, John Wengraf, Jim Bannon, William Malten. Screenplay: John C. Higgins. Cinematography: John Alton. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Paul Sawtell.

With its tough-guy cast, suspenseful screenplay, and superb noir-and-white cinematography by John Alton, T-Men is only slightly hindered by efforts to sell itself as a ripped-from-the-headlines True Story. It has a heavy-handed opener featuring the real head of the Treasury Department's investigative division, Elmer Lincoln Irey, selling us on the idea that the IRS is really our friend, and an ongoing voiceover narrative by the actor Reed Hadley that provides exposition we mostly don't need -- it could easily have been integrated into the dialogue. These flaws aside, the film has real grit as it follows T-man Dennis O'Brien (Dennis O'Keefe) and his partner Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder) in their investigation of a counterfeiting scheme, encountering the usual menacing thugs and hard-bitten dames. Neither of the good guys has it easy, getting beat up and shot as they sleuth through the seamy side of '40s Los Angeles. Alton's camera gives us expressionistic angles and sinister shadows as it explores some well-chosen locations from Chinatown to a Turkish bath to the waterfront.

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Cast: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robins, Heather O'Rourke, Michael McManus, Virginia Kiser, Martin Casella, Richard Lawson, Zelda Rubinstein, James Karen. Screenplay: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design: James H. Spencer. Film editing: Michael Kahn. Music: Jerry Goldsmith.

Poltergeist has Steven Spielberg written all over it -- literally, since he wrote the story and collaborated on the screenplay, but also thematically, since its setting is the suburbia in which he grew up and which he portrayed in so many of his films. So it's no surprise that the controversy over how much of the film is really Tobe Hooper's continues to this day. It's clear that Poltergeist is a lot closer in tone and technique to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) than it is to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1972). That in itself should put an end to any arguments over authorship. I am not a fan of horror movies, and I found Hooper's earlier film simply unpleasant -- shocks without substance. Not that there's much substance in Poltergeist, either. It's full of hokum about the afterlife and exploitation of some elementary terrors, but not much else that would ever make me want to think about it, let alone watch it again.

The Juniper Tree (Nietzchka Keene, 1990)

The Juniper Tree (Nietzchka Keene, 1990)

Cast: Björk, Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir, Valdimar Örn Flygenring, Guðrún Gisladóttir, Geirlaug Sunna Þormar. Screenplay: Nietzchka Keene. Cinematography: Randolph Sellars. Art direction: Dominque Polain. Film editing: Nietzchka Keene. Music: Larry Lipkis.

Nietzchka Keene's The Juniper Tree, the first feature in her sadly brief career, reminded me of films by Bergman and Dreyer, largely because of its bleakly beautiful, isolated, apparently medieval setting. It has also been called "feminist," a label often pasted on films directed by women, though I think it transcends labels and influences, working its effect largely through the strength of some well-imagined characters. The sisters Margit and Katla have been left homeless after their mother was burned as a witch, so Katla, the elder, casts a spell on Jóhann, a handsome young widower, and the sisters go to live with him.  Jóhann's young son, Jónas, resents his stepmother and lovingly tends his mother's grave, a devotion that only feeds his animosity toward Katla, though he makes friends with Margit, who has visions of her own late mother. Eventually, as in all such tales, tensions, fed by Katla's witchcraft, Margit's visions, and Jónas's resentment, result in calamity. It's a simple story with roots in a tale from the Brothers Grimm, given potency by good performances, particularly Björk as the pivotal character of Margit, by a strong eroticism in the relationship of Katla and Jóhann, and by the exploration of the Icelandic setting in Randolph Sellars's handsome black-and-white cinematography.