The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, Valeriia Karaman, Logan Hawkes, Kyla Nicolle, Shaun Clarke, Pierre Richard, Preston Hudson, Jeffrey Cruts. Screenplay: Robert Eggers, Max Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blasche. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Korven.

Two men arrive on a lonely, deserted, rocky island where they take over the maintenance of a lighthouse. They proceed to drive each other into madness and death. That pretty much sums up The Lighthouse, a psychological drama with horror movie tinges. Clearly, to make such a simple story work, you need topnotch actors and good dialogue, camerawork, design, music, and editing. The Lighthouse succeeds in all these areas. Willem Dafoe is already established as one of our best actors, and Robert Pattinson has been building an exceptional career since coming out of the shadow of the Twilight movies. Jarin Blasche's cinematography, which works with an almost square frame, even tighter than so-called "Academy ratio," won him an Oscar nomination, and all the other elements work to build a sense of loneliness, isolation, and claustrophobia, of things closing in on the two men. So why do I feel it doesn't quite add up to the sum of its excellent parts? Perhaps because the course of the narrative is so obvious from the outset. Its opening scenes, the arrival at the lighthouse and the establishment of the characters, reminded me of those Ingmar Bergman films set on Fårö island. But where Bergman can turn weirdness resulting from isolation into a statement about humanity, Robert Eggers doesn't give us much beyond the spectacle of two only roughly civilized men disintegrating into savagery as they unmask each other's secrets and suffer from dreams and hallucinations. Still, if that's the kind of thing you want -- or feel you need -- to watch, there's not a much better portrayal of it than The Lighthouse. It might make for provocative viewing, come to think of it, in a time of quarantine and social distancing.

Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976)

Mona Lisa and Hilda Koronel in Insiang

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Mona Lisa, Ruel Vernal, Rez Cortez, Nina Lorenzo, Marlon Ramirez, Mely Mallari, Carpi Asturias. Screenplay: Mario O'Hara, Lamberto E. Antonio. Cinematography: Conrado Baltazar. Art direction: Fiel Zabat. Film editing: Augusto Salvador. Music: Minda D. Azarcon.

Lino Brocka's Insiang begins with a scene of pigs in an abattoir that's likely to put most carnivores off their feed for a while. It sets the tone for a story whose neo-realist approach is tinged with overtones of Greek myth: a tale of revenge that centers on a young woman betrayed by her lover as well as by her mother and her mother's lover. Think of Medea or Elektra brought up in the slums of Manila. The title character, played beautifully by Hilda Koronel, lives with her tense, quarrelsome mother, Tonya (Mona Lisa), who takes out her fury on Insiang at having been left by her husband. Then Tonya takes a much younger lover, Dado (Ruel Vernal), who furtively lusts after the pretty daughter. Insiang has a suitor her own age, Bebot (Rez Cortez), who wants her to sleep with him, but she insists on waiting until they have good jobs -- unemployment is rife in the slums -- and get married. But when Dado, who has moved in with the two women, rapes Insiang and then lies to Tonya that the young woman provoked him by bathing and sleeping naked, Insiang agrees to spend the night with Bebot and to begin a life with him. She wakes up in the sleazy hotel to find that Bebot has already gone, and when she finally finds him he gives her a cold shoulder. At this point, Insiang, once mild-mannered and long-suffering, turns into a woman bent on revenge, and finds ways to inflict it on Bebot, Dado, and her mother. Lino Brocka's direction and the performances by actors drawn from his theatrical company elevate the film into something of a small tour de force: It was shot in only seven days in places where it must have been difficult to film. There are no overt political messages being delivered by the film, but it's hard to avoid the consciousness that people have been forced into lives like these and shouldn't be. Is it enough to note that Imelda Marcos hated the film?

Something Wild (Jack Garfein, 1961)

Ralph Meeker and Carroll Baker in Something Wild

Cast: Carroll Baker, Ralph Meeker, Mildred Dunnock, Jean Stapleton, Martin Kosleck, Doris Roberts, Charles Watts, Clifton James, George L. Smith, Ken Chapin. Screenplay: Jack Garfein, Alex Karmel, based on a novel by Karmel. Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan. Art direction: Albert Brenner, Richard Day. Film editing: Carl Lerner. Music: Aaron Copland.

A young woman is brutally raped on her way home, but she tells no one and next day tries to act as if nothing has happened until she is overcome by the crowds on the subway and faints. A policeman brings her home, where her self-centered mother is more concerned that the neighbors saw her in a police car than about her health. Unable to tolerate her mother's whiny self-centered behavior, she runs away, rents a tiny room in a dirty, run-down tenement, and gets a job as a clerk in a five-and-dime store. But her stand-offish behavior, the result of her distaste for being touched, annoys the other clerks, who ostracize her. Wandering aimlessly through the city streets, she finds herself on a bridge and, in a daze, starts to climb over the railing. She is stopped by a garage mechanic on his way to work, and he persuades her to come back to his basement apartment to rest. In her exhaustion, she agrees, but he later comes home from work falling-down drunk and attempts to rape her. She fights him off, kicking him in the eye when he's down, and he passes out. But she discovers that he has locked the door and she can't escape. When he awakes the next morning, he has no memory of attacking her and thinks that he must have sustained the eye injury in a fight at the bar. But when he leaves for work, he won't let her go and locks the door behind him. She becomes his prisoner, while he pleads for her love and eventually proposes marriage. So far, Jack Garfein's Something Wild succeeds as a harrowing, vivid portrait of lost lives in the city. Carroll Baker gives a fine performance as the young woman, Mary Ann, and Ralph Meeker shifts convincingly from tenderness to menace and back again as her captor, Mike. Mildred Dunnock makes the most of her role as Mary Ann's mother, and there are some good performances by future TV sitcom actresses Jean Stapleton and Doris Roberts, the former as the noisy prostitute who has a room next to Mary Ann's in the tenement, the latter as Mary Ann's co-worker at the five-and-dime, who leads the other clerks in shunning her. Best of all are the cinematography of Eugen Schüfftan, capturing New York City at its grandest and grimmest, and the edgy score by Aaron Copland. But just when things look the most hopeless for Mary Ann, Mike goes out one day without locking the door -- perhaps intentionally -- and she escapes. It's a beautiful spring day in the city and she wanders through Central Park, her spirits reviving, and returns to the apartment where she accepts Mike's proposal. Then it's Christmas and Mary Ann has sent a note to her mother telling where she now lives. The mother visits the basement apartment to plead with Mary Ann to return home, but Mary Ann tells her that this is now her home and moreover that she's pregnant. And on a moment that is fairly drenched with Hollywood-style sentiment, though this has been a fearlessly unsentimental and independently gritty movie, the film ends. I suppose it's possible to take this wrap-up as Garfein's parody of the Hollywood ending, but it's difficult to countenance the film's undercutting of itself any other way, not to mention that it seems to suggest that the trauma of rape can be "cured" by another kind of rape: imprisonment. Something Wild seems to me a collection of brilliant moments and skilled performances, and to provide a compelling portrait of urban alienation whose tone is set with the striking opening credits by Saul Bass. But by losing its integrity of vision at the end, it fails to be a whole film.

Siren of the Tropics (Mario Nalpas, Henri Étiévant, 1927)

Josephine Baker and Pierre Batcheff in Siren of the Tropics

Cast: Josephine Baker, Pierre Batcheff, Georges Melchior, Régina Dalthy, Regina Thomas, Kiranine, Adolphe Candé. Screenplay: Maurice Dekobra. Cinematography: Paul Cotteret, Albert Duverger, Maurice Hennebains. Production design: Eugène Carré, Pierre Schild.

Siren of the Tropics is a silly showcase for the gangly impishness of Josephine Baker. The plot is the usual colonialist nonsense: The wealthy Count Sévéro (Georges Melchior) lusts after his goddaughter, Denise (Regina Thomas), so he sends the man she wants to marry, André Berval (Pierre Batcheff), off to prospect for minerals in the property he owns in the West Indies, secretly writing a note to the brutish Alvarez (Kiranine), who manages the property, that André should never return to France. But André meets up with the native Papitou (Baker), who falls in love with him, helps save his life, and then, when André returns to France, stows away on a boat to Paris. There she becomes a hit music hall star and reconnects with André, but gives him up so he can marry Denise. The whole thing is an excuse for some dancing -- but no singing, since it's a silent movie -- and a lot of clowning by Baker, who also has a couple of topless scenes. It was Baker's first feature as a star and much of it was thought to be lost for a while. The print shown on TCM has some choppy moments where frames seem to be missing, as well as some eye-straining tinted scenes, but it's still essential for its glimpse of an immortal. It also has an interesting credit: Luis Buñuel is listed as an assistant director.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Phoebe Augustine, Eric DaRe, Grace Zabriskie, Moira Kelly, James Marshall, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, Kyle MacLachlan, David Bowie, Pamela Gidley, Miguel Ferrer. Screenplay: David Lynch, Robert Engels, based on the television series by Lynch and Mark Frost. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García. Production design: Patricia Norris. Film editing: Mary Sweeney. Music: Angelo Badalamenti.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was widely panned when it was released, but it has since developed a stout corps of admirers, some of whom think it's Lynch's masterpiece. I think I would have been among the naysayers when it first appeared, partly because I was never a follower of the TV series for which it's a prequel, an account of the last days of Laura Palmer, the teenager whose murder precipitated so much confusion and intrigue in the town of Twin Peaks. The film begins with another murder, that of Teresa Banks, another teenager in another town, and the investigators are not the familiar Dale Cooper and Harry S. Truman of the TV series, but Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), who are sent on their mission by FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch) in scenes that have an off-beat enigmatic style: They're hilariously weird and played in a dead-pan artificial manner. But Lynch switches tone and style when we reach Twin Peaks a year later, shifting to his usual plausible nightmare mode. For devotees of the series, there are cameo appearances by familiar characters as well as some allusions that went over my head. But at its essence, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a straightforward story of a lost girl, caught up in a web of sex and drugs and adolescent rebellion. It seems to me that Lynch does this much better in other films, like Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), that aren't encumbered with the mythos generated by a popular TV series.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)

John Cameron Mitchell in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Cast: John Cameron Mitchell, Miriam Shor, Michael Pitt, Andrea Martin, Maurice Dean Wint, Ben Mayer-Goodman, Alberta Watson, Stephen Trask, Theodore Liscinski, Rob Campbell, Michael Aronov, Gene Pyrz. Screenplay: John Cameron Mitchell, based on the musical by Mitchell and Stephen Trask. Cinematography: Frank G. DeMarco. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Marcus. Music: Stephen Trask.

If nothing else, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a landmark in queer culture, a rock musical about a non-binary performer that moved from Off-Broadway to movies to a Broadway production with big-name stars like Neil Patrick Harris and Darren Criss. But is it anything else? Does it deserve to be celebrated as something other than a colorful anomaly in the usually gender-stable milieu of theater and film? Does it speak to anything enduring about humanity? I think it probably does, largely because it extended my sympathies to a portion of humanity of which I'm not a part, but that's fortunately not for me to decide. I enjoyed it, which may just be enough.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (Bong Joon-ho, 2000)

Lee Sung-Jae and Doona Bae in Barking Dogs Never Bite

Cast: Lee Sung-Jae, Doona Bae, Kim Ho-jung, Byun Hee-Bong, Go Su-hee, Kim Roe-ha, Kim Gin-goo, Im Sang-soo, Seong Jeong-seon. Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho, Song Ji-ho, Derek Son Tae-woong. Cinematography: Cho Yong-kyou. Production design: Lee Hang. Film editing: Lee Eun Soo. Music: Jo Sung-woo.

After watching several films by Bong Joon-ho, I should know to expect the unexpected, but even his very first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, threw me for a loop. What to make of a film whose protagonist, an unemployed academic kept sleepless by the demands of his pregnant wife and a barking dog in his apartment building, captures what he thinks is the offending animal and, failing in his attempt to throw it off the roof or to hang it by its leash, shuts it into a cabinet, but after finding that it was the wrong dog, unable to bark because of a throat operation, returns to the basement to release it, only to find that it's being stewed and eaten by the janitor? Moreover, after this experience, he does find the barker and this time succeeds in throwing it off the roof. And eventually the janitor finds the carcass and eats it too. Would it be fair to say that a failure of tone if not taste has taken place? But tone is something, to judge by Bong's other films, the director thumbs his nose at. Suffice it to say that there's something to offend almost everyone in Barking Dogs Never Bite, which seems to delight in treating animal cruelty as a subject for comedy. The film actually begins with the proclamation that no animals were harmed in its production, which doesn't exactly get Bong off the hook for his depiction of animal abuse. But what it does is remind us that this is "only a movie," or that we should approach the film with the awareness that there's a reason it's going to shock or offend us. The reason, I think is that Bong wants us to question our reactions, to examine why our responses are the way they are. Does the death of the small animal flung from the roof offend us more or less than the death of its somewhat addled human owner? Barking Dogs Never Bite doesn't succeed in part because it meanders a bit into the lives of its ancillary characters, such as the young woman who accidentally witnesses the killing of the second dog and pursues the killer, filled with dreams of being celebrated as a hero on television when she captures him. And then there's the protagonist's attempt to raise enough money to bribe a dean into giving him a professorship. It often seems as if Bong had ideas for at least three movies that he tried to blend into one. Still, as an expression of an ironic vision by a gifted artist, the movie can't be dismissed simply as a failure. Rather, it's an astonishing feature film debut by a director who would find his footing soon enough. 

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton, Earl Boen, S. Epatha Merkerson, Castulo Guerra, Jenette Goldstein, Xander Berkeley, Danny Cooksey. Screenplay: James Cameron, William Wisher. Cinematography: Adam Greenberg. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Conrad Buff IV, Mark Goldblatt, Richard A. Harris. Music: Brad Fiedel.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a complex system that would use satellites to detect the launch of nuclear missiles and then destroy them in mid-flight with automatically launched anti-ballistic missiles. Critics of SDI called it unrealistic, fanciful, and ultimately destablizing for international peace. It became known by a nickname familiar from the movies: "star wars." The following year, James Cameron released a film called The Terminator in which a cyborg arrived from the future to make sure that a potential leader of a rebellion against his fellow cyborgs and other creatures of artificial intelligence never gets born. It wasn't immediately clear to most people at the time that Cameron's film contained a sly reference to what many people feared might be a consequence of Reagan's SDI: out-of-control automated weaponry. By 1991, when Cameron released the sequel to that film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that reference had become explicit: The "Skynet" of the sequel is clearly a fantasized version of SDI, in which the AI creations began a war against humans with a nuclear strike that killed three billion people in 1997. Today, that historical subtext is probably lost on most viewers of the movie, as Reagan's "star wars" has faded from memory, except in some think tanks and Pentagon brainstorming sessions. But to those of us who lived through the Reagan years, the reference in the movie was more than just subtext. There are some actual digs at supporters of SDI in the film, as when Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the scientist behind Skynet, attempts to defend technological research and John Connor (Edward Furlong) retorts that the kind of research that proceeds without considering the consequences produced the hydrogen bomb. One of the most ardent proponents of SDI, who sold Reagan on the idea, was Edward Teller, the physicist who became known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," a title he never fully rejected. But even without the historical underpinnings, Terminator 2 is a kind of landmark in popular entertainment: an exciting concoction of violence and special effects, with old-fashioned touches of humanity and wit that lots of today's CGI blockbusters no longer find necessary. Cameron never seems content just to dazzle us but to make us think and feel. If there's too much feeling in his Titanic (1997) and not enough thought in Avatar (2009), there's the right amount of both in Terminator 2.  

Magnet of Doom (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Vanel in Magnet of Doom

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Vanel, Michèle Mercier, Malvina Silberberg, Stefania Sandrelli, Todd Martin, E.F. Medard, Barbara Sommers, André Certes, Andrex, Jerry Mengo, Delia Kent, Ginger Hall. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville, based on a novel by Georges Simenon. Cinematography: Henri Decaë. Production design: Daniel Guéret. Film editing: Monique Bonnot, Claude Durand. Music: Georges Delerue.

I don't know what the title Magnet of Doom means -- the original French title is L'aîné des Ferchaux, which means "The elder Ferchaux" -- but its elusive quality seems about right for Jean-Pierre Melville's shaggy dog of a movie. Ostensibly a thriller, a genre of which Melville was a master, Magnet of Doom meanders as much as the road trip which its central characters, Michel Maudet (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Dieudonné Ferchaux (Charles Vanel), set out upon. Especially in its peregrinations through the United States, it reminds me a bit of Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities (1974) and even more of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), two films that I suspect owe a bit to Melville's movie, and even more to Henri Decaë's cinematography for it. The story, such as it is, details the flight from prosecution in France of crooked banker Ferchaux, accompanied by Michel, a young man he hires as a secretary. Since Michel is a lean, lithe ex-boxer played by lean, lithe ex-boxer Belmondo, there's a touch of homoeroticism in Ferchaux's choice of secretary, especially since the interview is perfunctory and it becomes clear that Michel doesn't really know how to type -- he does it with two fingers. Mostly Michel's job is to drive Ferchaux on his trip through the States to New Orleans. At the outset, Michel is taciturn and submissive, doing Ferchaux's bidding without question. But after they make a stop at a bank in New York City where Ferchaux has a safe-deposit box full of cash that he loads into a suitcase, Michel begins to assert himself a little: One of his first stops on their trip is in Hoboken, N.J., so he can see the birthplace of Frank Sinatra, whom he idolizes. And after they pick up an improbably pretty hitchhiker named Angie, played by Stefania Sandrelli, he begins to turn the tables on Ferchaux, ordering the older man into the back seat and stopping to go for a swim in a river with Angie. Ferchaux regains control, however, by flinging the cash from the suitcase off a cliff, holding on to a wad of money that he can use to maintain dominance. Michel and Angie clamber down the hill to retrieve what they can of the money. But when they stop at a service station and Michel goes to the restroom while Ferchaux dozes, Angie absconds with the suitcase containing the recovered cash and hitches a ride with a trucker. Michel gives chase and outruns the truck, gets the money back, and orders the trucker to leave and Angie to resume hitchhiking. The rest of the film is a series of power plays between Ferchaux and Michel as they wait in a cabin near New Orleans for the arrival of the money Ferchaux has arranged to be sent to him upon the closing of his main account in New York, after which they plan to avoid extradition by taking up residence in Venezuela. But the older man begins to suffer health problems and Michel starts to collaborate with the authorities who are pursuing Ferchaux. This summary makes the film sound more cut-and-dried than it is, however. The pacing is, if not off, at least off-beat, sometimes engaging, sometimes lethargic, and sometimes frustrating. Melville's take on America makes it worth watching, and the performances of Belmondo and Vanel are as good as one might anticipate. It's the kind of film you watch just to try to anticipate what's going to happen next, and you usually can't.

The Children's Hour (William Wyler, 1961)

Audrey Hepburn, James Garner, and Shirley MacLaine in The Children's Hour

Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, Miriam Hopkins, Fay Bainter, Karen Balkin, Veronica Cartwright, Mimi Gibson, Debbie Moldow, Diane Mountford, William Mims, Sally Brophy, Hope Summers. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, Lillian Hellman, based on a play by Hellman. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Fernando Carrere. Film editing: Robert Swink. Music: Alex North.

Time has not been kind to Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, either the play or the second film adaptation. It had been filmed once before, also under the direction of William Wyler, as These Three, in 1936, only two years after it had become a Broadway sensation. At that time, the central accusation that the two schoolmistresses, Karen and Martha, were lesbians had to be changed to a heterosexual moral transgression -- that both were lovers of the same man, Dr. Joe Cardin. Despite this bowdlerization, there are many who think that the earlier movie is the better one, largely because it puts the emphasis on what Hellman said was the play's theme: "the power of a lie." In our contemporary climate, the idea that Karen and Martha might be lovers has much less power to shock, so that to our eyes, the furor that arises from a child's confused and devious accusation seems excessive. But perhaps more to the point is an artistic one: In today's LGBT community the idea that a work of fiction dealing with non-heterosexual relationships has to end in the death of one or more of its supposed transgressors has been labeled a "kill the queers syndrome." Even more recent films such as Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999) and Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), though praised for dealing candidly with transgender characters and gay relationships, have been faulted for too easily resolving their plots by having their central characters murdered by bigots. The Children's Hour falls more blatantly into this trap with Martha's suicide, which seems not to come out of anything integral to the character but instead out of the need for a dramatic conclusion to the play and film. It's a film with good performances, though its actors sometimes have to struggle against their star personae. James Garner was so familiar as a smart aleck on the TV series Maverick that he feels a little miscast as Dr. Cardin, Karen's fiancé, who is unable to convince her that he may indeed have believed in the rumor about her relationship with Martha. Audrey Hepburn, too, carries the aura of winsome romantic comedy heroine into her performance as Karen, but is more successful at overcoming the image. Of the three leads, Shirley MacLaine is the most successful, since she doesn't have to deal with a too-precisely established screen persona, and she brings real depth to Martha's conflicts, including her simmering resentment of Karen's supposed abandonment of their plans in order to marry Joe, and her anguished recognition of her possibly repressed lesbianism. But the real standouts in the cast are the supporting players, Miriam Hopkins (who had played Martha in These Three) as the flibbertigibbet Aunt Lily and Fay Bainter, Oscar-nominated for her role as Amelia Tilford, whose credulity when her niece tells her the lie about Karen and Martha brings about the crisis. Wyler's direction is, as always, precise and professional, and the art direction of Fernando Carrere and the cinematography of Franz Planer make the primary setting, the girls school, follow the film's changes in mood, from innocent to grim.