Shazam! (David F. Sandberg, 2019)

Jack Dylan Grazer and Zachary Levi in Shazam!

Cast: Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Djimon Hounsou, Adam Brody, Faithe Herman, Meagan Good, Grace Fulton, Michelle Borth, Ian Chen, Ross Butler, Jovan Armand, D.J. Cotrona, Marta Milans, Cooper Andrews, John Glover. Screenplay: Henry Gayden, Darren Lemke. Cinematography: Maxime Alexandre. Production design: Jennifer Spence. Film editing: Michael Aller. Music: Benjamin Wallfisch.

When I was a kid, Shazam was Captain Marvel. But lawsuits intervened, so now the red-clad superhero into whom Billy Batson transforms has the magic word he speaks as a name. I always liked the comic books, maybe because they featured the one superhero whose secret identity was that of a kid. And who of us didn't go around muttering "Shazam" under their breath, trying out different pronunciations and emphases in hope that one would really work? The movie based on the character overplays the childishness: I don't remember the Shazam/Captain Marvel from the comics I read being quite so goofy when he transforms -- it seems to me he took on some wisdom and maturity as well as muscles and superpowers when he spoke the word. After all, the S in Shazam stood for Solomon. Still, the movie is good noisy fun for the most part, lacking the reverential tone that sometimes afflicts superhero movies.

El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983)

Omero Antonutti and Sonsoles Aranguren in El Sur

Cast: Omero Antonutti, Sonsoles Aranguren, Icíar Bollaín, Lola Cardona, Rafaela Aparicio, Aurore Clément, Maria Caro, Francisco Merino, José Vivó, Germaine Montero. Screenplay: Victor Erice, based on a story by Adelaida García Morales. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Antonio Belizón. Film editing: Pablo G. del Amo. Music: Enric Granados. 

The ending of El Sur feels right: After her father's suicide, Estrella (Icíar Bollaín) falls ills and to recover goes to stay with her grandmother in el sur, the southern Spain that she has never seen, from which her father exiled himself because his Republican sympathies were at odds with the Nationalism of his father during the Spanish Civil War. We've seen how Estrella has imagined the South as warmly antithetical to the often chilly and sometimes bleak environs of Madrid where she and her parents live. She is also tantalized by the mysterious past of her father (Omero Antonutti), who once loved a woman who had a brief film career under the name Irene Rios (Aurore Clément), and who made a phone call to a number in the South shortly before he killed himself. Do we need to follow Estrella to the South to know that other mysteries will open themselves to her? And yet writer-director Victor Erice wanted to do so: He planned another 90 minutes to El Sur that would show us what Estrella did and found there, but was stymied by his producer's insistence that there was no money to film it. The remarkable thing is that the film as stands feels complete. What feels right about the ending of the film that we now have is that it's a part of what we know about Estrella: her solitary pursuit of things of mysterious things. This is a film about awakening and illumination: It begins with the dawn's light gradually penetrating the sleeping Estrella's room, and windows play a significant role in creating the film's symbolic texture. The scenes from the movie in which Irene Rios stars provide another kind of window. The most brilliant sequence in El Sur is the final meal Estrella shares with her father in a hotel dining room illuminated by high windows. She and her father are the only diners in this space, but a wedding party is taking place in an adjacent room whose windowed doors are covered by curtains. At one point Estrella goes to the doors and peeks into the room, whose music echoes that played at the party after her first communion, when the younger Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren), dressed in white "like a bride," danced with her father. El Sur has the wholeness we expect of good films, and though we may wish that Erice had been allowed to give us more, we can be content with what we have. 

Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)

Evangelia Randou and Ariane Labed in Attenberg

Cast: Ariane Labed, Vangelis Mourikis, Evangelia Randou, Yorgos Lanthimos, Alexandros Niagros, Kostas Berikopoulos. Screenplay: Athina Rachel Tsangari. Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis. Set decoration: Dafni Kalogianni. Film editing: Sandrine Cheyrol, Matthew Johnson.

I don't know much about the so-called "Greek New Wave" (which has also been called the "Weird Wave," from the uncanny quality of some of its films) beyond the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, who has broken out into international prominence. And now I've seen Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg, which isn't really much like Lanthimos's work, except that he has an on-screen role in it and was one of its producers. It's the story of Marina (Ariane Labed), a young woman who works in a steel mill and tends to her father, Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis), who is terminally ill. When she's not doing that, she's with her friend Bella (Evangelia Randou), talking about her alienation from other human beings and about sex -- the latter involving some experimentation with various forms of kissing. Oh, and occasionally doing some routines that look like John Cleese's old "silly walks" bit for Monty Python. Marina looks on human behavior with the kind of distanced curiosity with which she watches the TV nature documentaries by David Attenborough. (A mispronunciation of his name gives the film its otherwise inexplicable title.) Eventually she has sex with an engineer played by Lanthimos, and encourages Bella to have sex with the dying Spyros. He dies, Marina and Bella scatter his ashes, and the film closes by watching trucks hauling dirt from a mine. Yet somehow Attenberg is strangely watchable, enough to keep me pondering its oblique view of the characters and their world.

All Is True (Kenneth Branagh, 2018)

Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in All Is True

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Kathryn Wilder, Lydia Wilson, Hadley Fraser, Jack Colgrave Hirst, Sam Ellis, Clara Duczmal, Alex Macqueen, Gerard Horan, Nonso Anozie. Screenplay: Ben Elton. Cinematography: Zac Nicholson. Production design: James Merifield. Film editing: Úna Ní Donghaíle. Music: Patrick Doyle.

Not much of All Is True is true; most of it is extrapolated from the scraps of documentation we possess about the life of William Shakespeare and turned by screenwriter Ben Elton into a domestic drama about the playwright's last years. It might have been called Shakespeare in Retirement. In Elton's imagining, Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh hidden beneath a prosthetic nose and forehead) has left London after the Globe burns down during a performance of Henry VIII, which was also known as All Is True. He goes home to Stratford to mourn his son Hamnet, who had died many years earlier, and to plant a garden in his memory. Reunited with his wife, Anne (Judi Dench) and his daughters Susanna (Lydia Wilson) and Judith (Kathryn Wilder), he is plunged into various family difficulties. Susanna's husband, John Hall (Hadley Fraser), is a stern Puritan who, as Shakespeare says, would like to close the theaters from which the poet made his fortune. In fact, Susanna may be cheating on her husband and have contracted syphilis, as a scene in which she orders mercury -- then a treatment for the disease -- implies. Judith is a sulky 28-year-old self-declared "spinster," who resents her father for his preference for her dead brother. Eventually she marries Thomas Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst), only to find out that he has impregnated another woman, whereupon Shakespeare strikes Quiney from the will in which he has also left Anne the "second-best bed." (A real Shakespeare conundrum that gets a sly explication in the film.) It turns out that Shakespeare thought Hamnet to have inherited his gifts on the basis of some poems the boy supposedly wrote, when in fact Judith was the author of the poems. And though Hamnet was said to have died of the plague, the truth comes out that he committed suicide when Judith threatened to expose her authorship. The preposterous melodramatics of the screenplay and the plodding direction by Branagh fatally undermine the film, which has occasional good moments. There's a scene in which Shakespeare meets the Earl of Southampton, the beautiful youth of the sonnets now grown old, that's mostly a showpiece for Branagh and Ian McKellen as Southampton. Branagh/Shakespeare recites Sonnet No. 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes") and McKellen/Southampton repeats it. I think the scene was intended to introduce a frisson of homoeroticism, but it's not strong enough. Still, there's pleasure to be had in hearing two great actors speak Shakespeare's words. 

Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar

Cast: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady, Ward Bond, Ben Cooper, Ernest Borgnine, John Carradine, Royal Dano. Screenplay: Philip Yordan, based on a novel by Roy Chanslor. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: James W. Sullivan. Film editing: Richard L. Van Enger. Music: Victor Young.

Nicholas Ray's weird Western baffled critics and audiences at the time, but is now celebrated as a visionary triumph, even interpreted as a satire on McCarthyism. In 2008 it was added to the "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" films preserved in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. I don't know about its cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance, but I do know that its performances by Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge are some of the most entertaining ever put on film, even if the actresses hated what they were doing at the time -- and hated each other. There's nothing else like it.

Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)

Anaïs Reboux and Roxane Mesquida in Fat Girl

Cast: Anaïs Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero De Rienzo, Arsinée Khanjian, Romain Goupil, Laura Betti, Albert Goldberg. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat. Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Pascale Chavance.

Human beings develop sexually, both in capability and desire, long before their societies typically allow them to demonstrate the capability and fulfill the desire. Which is the source of much comedy and much drama. As it happens, last night I watched a drama, Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, and a comedy, the TV series Sex Education, both of which center on the conundrum of adolescent sexuality. I preferred the comedy, in large part because the series created by Laurie Nunn takes what seems to me a more balanced and humane and nuanced view of the subject than the film, which is so provocative and shocking that it verges on nihilism. It's about two sisters, Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) and Elena (Roxane Mesquida). Elena is 15 and beautiful; Anaïs is 12 and has a weight problem. But the two are close and spend a lot of their time together talking about sex until one day, while on a vacation with the family, Elena is seduced by Fernando (Libero De Rienzo), a law student. The sisters share a room, and on the first night that Fernando sneaks into the room, she lies in her bed pretending to be asleep while Fernando tries to persuade Elena into having sex with him and eventually penetrates her anally. Several nights later, he returns and consummates their relationship, while Anaïs, her back to the couple, silently weeps. When the girls' mother (Arsinée Khanjian) learns of the relationship of Fernando and Elena, she gathers them into the car and begins a harrowing freeway journey, dodging huge trucks, back to their home near Paris. Exhausted by driving, she pulls into a rest stop to sleep. Elena dozes off, too, but Anaïs stays awake until suddenly a man smashes the windshield and kills Elena and the mother. Anaïs flees into a nearby wooded area where the man rapes her. But when the police arrive at the scene, Anaïs claims that she wasn't raped and the film ends. Interpretations abound of this disturbing film, ranging from the extreme feminist view that all penetrative sex is rape to a more conventional view that it's our culture that views sex and violence as equivalents. But my own view is that Fat Girl (the original French title is À ma soeur! -- "for my sister") fails because the violent ending doesn't follow the first part of the film with any dramatic logic, but instead feels driven by a desire to provoke and shock. It' s an effective film in that regard, but one that shows its creator's hand more than it serves our understanding of the characters Breillat has so effectively created and developed. 

The Smart Set (Jack Conway, 1928)

William Haines in The Smart Set

Cast: William Haines, Jack Holt, Alice Day, Hobart Bosworth, Coy Watson, Constance Howard, Paul Nicholson, Julia Swayne Gordon. Screenplay: Byron Morgan, Ann Price; titles: Robert E. Hopkins. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist.

Given that we now know what everyone in Hollywood knew at the time, namely that William Haines was one of the few openly gay leading men of the 1920s and '30s, it's fascinating to watch how he camps up the role of Tommy Van Buren in The Smart Set. Haines mugs, poses, and generally upstages everyone in the film -- and gets away with it, considering that his performance is almost the only entertaining thing about this silly romantic comedy. Tommy is a conceited champion polo player, and the plot, such as it is, deals with his self-centered sabotage of the United States polo team in a match against the British, and his developing relationship with the pretty Polly Durant (Alice Day), the daughter of a wealthy owner of polo ponies. Does Tommy come to his senses and save the day at the film's end, winning the game and Polly, too? What do you think?

River's Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986)

Cast: Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, Daniel Roebuck, Dennis Hopper, Joshua John Miller, Roxana Zal, Josh Richman, Phillip Brock, Tom Bower, Constance Forsland, Leo Rossi, Jim Metzler. Screenplay: Neal Jimenez. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: John Muto. Film editing: Howard E. Smith, Sonya Sones. Music: Jürgen Knieper.

I'm a faithful watcher of credits, even though today they're sometimes as long as the movie itself. I think if those people devoted their time to making the movie, they deserve a little of my time watching their names scroll by. Not really. The actual reason for watching the credits is that sometimes they reveal tidbits of fascinating information, such as this one for River's Edge: "trainer: Mr. Glover." I have to wonder what Crispin Glover's trainer did: It's not a particularly challenging role physically, so I have to assume it had something to do with keeping the actor from going further over the top than he does in his mannered and eccentric performance as Layne, an adolescent pothead who gets caught up in the aftermath of the murder of a teenage girl. River's Edge was something of a shocker in its day, variously interpreted as an indictment of American society's failure to provide a clear direction for bored and alienated youth, or as a critique of parenting or the school system, or just as a horror story masked as a true crime movie. The screenplay by Neal Jimenez has its roots in two news stories about teenagers in different parts of California who knew about the murder of one of their schoolmates but covered it up. It's not just the teens who get their share of blame: The adults include negligent parents, a half-crazed loner, an ineffective teacher, bullying cops, and the usual gaggle of reporters. That the half-crazed loner is played by Dennis Hopper links River's Edge with another and more celebrated movie of 1986: David Lynch's Blue Velvet. There are moments in Tim Hunter's film, especially when Hopper's character is clinging to his beloved inflatable sex doll, that rival Lynch's. Lynch, however, would probably not have been so tender as Jimenez and Hunter are to the lovers played by Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye, who lend a romantic John Hughes note to the film that dulls its edge.

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)

Cast: Isaach De Bankolé, Alex Descas, Jean-François Stévenin, Óscar Jaenada, Luis Tosar, Paz de la Huerta, Tilda Swinton, Yûki Kudô, John Hurt, Gael García Bernal, Hiam Abbass, Bill Murray. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: Eugenio Caballero. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz.

The Limits of Control displays the limits of Jim Jarmusch's quirky minimalism. It's a story about an assassin (Isaach De Bankolé) who moves from place to place as he receives coded messages from various agents, zeroing in on his target (Bill Murray). The places are picturesque and nicely filmed by Christopher Doyle, and the agents are played in cameos by the likes of Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Gael García Bernal, which provides some interest to an otherwise rather plodding and repetitious movie.

Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019)

Cast: voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Annie Potts, Tony Hale, Keegan-Michael Key, Madeleine McGraw, Christina Hendricks, Jordan Peele, Keanu Reeves, Ally Maki, Jay Hernandez, Lori Alan, Joan Cusack, Bonnie Hunt, Kristen Schaal, Emily Davis. Screenplay: Andrew Stanton, Stephany Folsom, Josh Cooley. Cinematography: Jean-Claude Kalache, Patrick Lin. Production design: Bob Pauley. Film editing: Axel Geddes. Music: Randy Newman.

Wouldn't you know it: On the night that the Oscars get interesting, I decide not to watch them. Instead, I watched Toy Story 4, which at least won for best animated feature while I was watching it. That was, of course, one of the more predictable wins of the night, along with the four acting awards. The fourth Toy Story movie is on a par with the other three: a solid representative of the Pixar formula mix of laughs, thrills, and tears. I did have the feeling that by now its world of toys has become overpopulated, and that the movie might have been better if the old familiars from Andy's (now Bonnie's) toy box -- Rex, Hamm, Slinky, the Potato Heads, etc. -- had been jettisoned so that the adventures of the newcomers could have been given a sharper focus. But I did like the attempt at closure in the film's ending, when Woody goes off to start a new life with Bo Peep and the other lost toys. I just hope Pixar can resist the temptation to make Toy Story 5 or to start a new series of Lost Toys that will go to infinity and beyond.