Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988)

Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons

Cast: Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, Keanu Reeves, Mildred Natwick, Uma Thurman, Peter Capaldi. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on his play and a novel by Choderlos de Laclos. Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot. Production design: Stuart Craig. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: George Fenton. 

"Wicked" is a word that has lost a good deal of its pejorative quality, and not just in Boston where it became slang meaning "excellent." There's an attractive quality to wickedness that's lacking in words like "evil." Which is not to say that the wicked pair of the Marquise de Marteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) aren't reprehensible, but that they fascinate us with their sly wit and determined pursuit of their aims. Close in particular makes the marquise so delicious that there's a considerable shock when she self-destructs upon the failure of her plans, and perhaps the audience even has a glimmer of pity for her final comeuppance. The choice of Malkovich to play Valmont was controversial: He's an actor known for eccentric roles, not the type for a suave seducer. And yet he gives Valmont a snake-like fascination -- so snaky that at one point he even hisses at Swoosie Kurtz's Madame de Volanges -- that makes his conquests of Uma Thurman's Cécile and Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel plausible. He also brings out the vulnerable side of Valmont, so that we find it credible that this implacably rakish figure could find himself undone by this conquest of Madame de Tourvel. But then again, who wouldn't find themselves undone by Michelle Pfeiffer, then at the early peak of her career? In casting Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Frears followed the lead of Milos Forman, who cast Amadeus (1984) with American actors instead of the British ones usually called on for costume dramas set in Europe, a move that shocked some critics -- especially the British. (The exception in Dangerous Liaisons is Peter Capaldi as Valmont's henchman Azolan, and his Scottish accent stands out oddly.) The irony here is that Forman was at work on his own version of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, called Valmont (1989), which was doomed by being released a year after Frears's film. Dangerous Liaisons won Oscars for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Stuart Craig's art direction and Gérard James's set decoration, and for James Acheson's costumes. Close and Pfeiffer were nominees, as was George Fenton for a score that blended nicely with excerpts from Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, and Gluck.

Idiot's Delight (Clarence Brown, 1939)

Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Idiot's Delight

Cast: Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Burgess Meredith, Laura Hope Crews, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Peter Willes, Pat Paterson, William Edmunds, Fritz Feld. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on his play. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Herbert Stothart.

To make a critic's obvious joke, Idiot's Delight is sometimes idiotic and rarely delightful. It's mostly a rather ill-advised filming of Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 play about a world on the brink of war. The world was even further out on that brink by the time the film was made, and two distinct endings were shot. One, for U.S. audiences, is conventionally neutral (as the United States was at the time) about whether a world war was about to happen. The other, to be shown abroad, takes a more pessimistic view. But the whole film is riddled with a confusion of tone. This is the movie in which Clark Gable, playing a vaudevillian, sings and dances to Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and is carried offstage by a group of chorus girls -- a sequence revived by its inclusion in the 1974 celebration of MGM musical numbers, That's Entertainment. Gable is game throughout the film, especially when he has to play opposite Norma Shearer at her most arch. The original Broadway version starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Gable and Shearer are not the Lunts.

Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)

Cast: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Traore, Nicole Sougou, Aminata Kane, Coumba Dieng, Ibrahim Mbaye, Diankou Sembene, Abdou Balde, Babacar Sylla. Screenplay: Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel. Cinematography: Claire Mathon. Art direction: Yves Capell (concept artist), Laura Bücher (assistant art director). Film editing: Aël Dallier Vega. Music: Fatima Al Qadiri.

Atlantics is a fascinating mixture of social commentary about contemporary Senegal and a ghost story with touches of vampire lore. It centers on a love story: Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) loves Souleiman (Traore) but is being forced to marry the wealthy Omar (Babacar Sylla). Souleiman is a construction worker on a huge project: a towering building that looms improbably (and in fact digitally) over the low-rising city of Dakar. He and his co-workers are fighting for the back pay that is owed them, and when that is once again denied, they decide to set sail for Spain in search of better work. When they have been gone for a while, Ada reluctantly gives in to the pressure to marry Omar, and after the wedding shows her friends through her new home. The young women particularly admire the fancy white marriage bed, but while they're out of the room the bed catches fire. A young detective named Issa (Amadou Mbow) is called in to investigate the suspected case of arson, and because there have been rumors that Souleiman has returned to Dakar, he becomes the chief suspect and Ada is grilled by Issa on whether she has seen him. Meanwhile, several of Ada's friends come down with a mysterious illness -- as does Issa, who begins feeling its symptoms at sunset. When Western medicine fails, shamans and imams are called in to try to cure the young women, but the illness persists. This is the start of the film's striking shift into fantasy, with a romantic resolution that doesn't vitiate but rather reinforces writer-director Mati Diop's view of the post-colonial world.

Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Lupita Nyong'o in Us

Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley McKoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan. Screenplay: Jordan Peele. Cinematography: Mike Gioulakis. Production design: Ruth De Jong. Film editing: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.

The Wilsons have met the enemy and they are them. Jordan Peele's Us is a darker film than his Oscar-winning Get Out (2017), more purely a horror film than that satiric horror-comedy, but it's just as assured in achieving its aims, which are largely to scare us while making us think. Peele has said that the movie's theme is the consequences of "privilege," and by making his central characters a well-to-do black family who suffer in part because of their assumptions about the world they feel entitled to, he gives the theme a sharp focus. There is a sci-fi explanation for the encounter of the Wilson family and others with their doppelgängers, who call themselves "the Tethered" and emerge from their subterranean hiding places to torment the privileged surface-dwellers, but it fades into the background of the battle for survival. Lupia Nyong'o gives a brilliant performance as Adelaide Wilson and her doppelgänger, Red, building toward a shocking moment of recognition at the film's end.

Travels With My Aunt (George Cukor, 1972)

Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen in Travels With My Aunt

Cast: Maggie Smith, Alec McCowen, Louis Gossett Jr., Robert Stephens, Cindy Williams, Robert Flemyng, José Luis López Vázquez, Raymond Gérôme. Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen, Hugh Wheeler, based on a novel by Graham Greene. Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe. Production design: John Box. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Tony Hatch.

Graham Greene's novel Travels With My Aunt is a contribution to the "wacky aunt" genre whose most popular constituents include Arsenic and Old Lace and Auntie Mame. Greene, a more substantial writer than the authors of either of those works, added his usual layers of international intrigue and espionage to the story of a mild-mannered bank clerk dragooned into risky business by his elderly aunt -- who may in fact be his mother. The film version jettisons most of Greene's subtext and a good deal of his plot, especially toward the end of the film. The project began with director George Cukor's interest in the book and his hope that he could persuade Katharine Hepburn to play Aunt Augusta. For a time Hepburn was interested even to the point of helping write a screenplay, but the original deal fell through. It was revived for Maggie Smith, playing to her strength as a specialist in eccentric and imperious women, which helped her win an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 1969). But Smith was in her late 30s, much too young for the film's Aunt Augusta, so she is heavily made up and affects a drawn-down mouth and a fluty treble for much of the role. (She was not too young for the flashbacks that show Augusta in her earlier years -- scenes that may have would have been impossible for Hepburn.) Smith was also nine years younger than the actor playing her putative nephew, Alec McCowen, who seems a little ill at ease in some of the film and never quite makes Henry's transition from mouse to lion convincing. The best performances in the film, surprisingly, are given by the American actors, Louis Gossett Jr. as Augusta's lover Wordsworth and Cindy Williams as the hippie known as Tooley. Though Travels With My Aunt fails to capture the spirit and depth of Greene's novel, suffers from miscasting, and ends weakly, it has some amusing moments and some opulent views of Paris locations. 

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.