Samurai Spy (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965)

Koji Takahashi and Jitsuko Yoshimura in Samurai Spy

Cast: Koji Takahashi, Shintaro Ishihara, Eitaro Ozawa, Kei Sato, Mutsuhiro Toda, Tetsuro Tanba, Eiji Okada, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Hodaka, Misako Watanabe, Yasunori Irikawa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Jun Hamamura. Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Fukuda, based on a novel by Koji Nakada. Cinematography: Masao Kusugi. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Samurai Spy begins with a history lesson: a voiceover telling us about the chaos that set in after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and the rivalry between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Toyotomi Clan. Ordinarily, this kind of information would be helpful to the Western viewer in sorting out what takes place in the film, but such a welter of names and allegiances follows that it left me in a muddle -- one admirer of the film even suggests taking notes. But the point being made by director Masahiro Shinoda seems to be that even the participants in the conflicts of the time weren't sure who was on whose side at any given point. It came down to a spy vs. spy situation, with double crosses at every turn. Let it suffice to say that the central figure in the film is Sasuke Sarutobi, played with steely authority by Koji Takahashi, a spy for his clan who has wearied of unending war, but nevertheless gets caught up in its intrigues. At this point, I simply let myself go with the flow of the film, which is often extraordinarily beautiful. Shinoda intentionally underplays the action usually associated with samurai movies: One fight takes place in a field swept by fog, a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't tease that adds to the film's essential point that in warfare it's not always clear who are the winners and who the losers. Another sequence, beautifully filmed by Masao Kusugi, involves a duel between two men that's viewed from a distance: We see them as small almost antlike figures on a hillside, warily circling each other to the point that we don't know who is who. The nature that surrounds them is blithely indifferent to what seems so important to the combatants. Shinoda uses sound eloquently to reinforce this theme, sometimes introducing the call of a bird in the background to emphasize the beauty that's being violated by mere human concerns. And the movie is certainly flavored by Toru Takemitsu's score. Shinoda is often a difficult filmmaker to comprehend, and I wouldn't recommend his films -- with the possible exception of Pale Flower (1964), which seems to me the most American-inflected of the movies of his that I've seen -- to someone just starting out with Japanese films, but Samurai Spy has incidental pleasures even when you don't quite follow what's going on. Just don't expect the clarity of a Kurosawa-style samurai film.

Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)

Clark Gable and William Powell in Manhattan Meldodrama

Cast: Clark Gable, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Leo Carrillo, Nat Pendleton, George Sidney, Isabel Jewell, Muriel Evans, Thomas E. Jackson, Isabelle Keith, Frank Conroy, Noel Madison, Jimmy Butler, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Ross. Screenplay: Oliver H.P. Garrett, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Arthur Caesar. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ben Lewis. Music: William Axt.

This is the movie that John Dillinger saw before he was shot down outside the theater. It's the one in which Mickey Rooney grows up to be Clark Gable. It's the first film to team William Powell and Myrna Loy, months before they became Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (with the same director, W.S. Van Dyke). It's the one in which Shirley Ross sings Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon" with Hart's original lyrics, "The Bad in Every Man." It was made before the Production Code took effect, so there's no dodging the implication that Eleanor (Loy) is Blackie Gallagher's (Gable) mistress before she marries Jim Wade (Powell), leading to a crucial plot point. Manhattan Melodrama is, to say the least, of historical interest even if it's not really a very good movie. It can pass for one, however, because of Gable and Powell and Loy, James Wong Howe's cinematography, and some clever lines. It won an Oscar for Arthur Caesar's story, though what it really deserved was some kind of award for truth in labeling: In melodrama, characters do things in service of the plot, and not in the way real human beings behave. We are asked to believe that two very different boys, one a hedonistic rascal, the other studious and virtuous, would become close friends and remain so even after the former grows up to be a gangster and the latter a district attorney with high political ambitions. And that they would remain close friends after the gangster's mistress leaves him and marries the D.A. And that the gangster would sacrifice himself, going blithely to the electric chair after his old friend has convicted him of murder. Life may not be like that, but Manhattan Melodrama certainly is. 

Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019)

Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver in Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Anthony Daniels, Joonas Suotamo, Billy Dee Williams, Domhnall Gleeson, Richard E. Grant, Ian McDiarmid, Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell, Lupita Nyong'o, Kelly Marie Tran, Greg Grunberg, Shirley Henderson, Dominic Monaghan, Billie Lourd. Screenplay: Chris Terrio, J.J. Abrams, Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow. Cinematography: Dan Mindel. Production design: Rick Carter, Kevin Jenkins. Film editing: Maryann Brandon, Stefan Grube. Music: John Williams.

The saga began unwittingly in medias res in 1977, expanded in 1980 and 1983, then doubled back on itself in 1999, 2002, and 2005, then picked up where it left off earlier for episodes in 2015 and 2017. And with the cumbersome title of Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker, it comes to a stuttering halt. This, of course, disregards all the ancillary film and TV projects, not to mention books, that George Lucas's brainchild has added to the corpus over the years and seems intent on adding. It may be our greatest film epic, or at least the most influential: Would we have had, for example, the various excursions into the Marvel universe without Star Wars as a prototype? But the salient fact here is that no one is quite happy with the way the triple trilogy finally resolves itself in the latest (and supposedly final) episode -- not even those who profit financially from it, since the movie was a disappointment at the box office. The hardcore Star Wars fans point to inconsistencies, omissions, and downright contradictions to the core mythology. Those who just like action movies, or sci-fi movies, or just plain storytelling movies seem to feel a little let down by The Rise of Skywalker, whose very title doesn't even seem to follow through, since Rey assumes the family name after all of the rest of the Skywalkers have died off. I found myself a little creeped out by the postmortem use of Carrie Fisher in the film, and annoyed at the introduction of some new characters, like Naomi Ackie's Jannah and Keri Russell's Zorii, that don't seem to serve any real function in the plot. There are some suspense gimmicks, like the apparent death of Chewbacca and the memory-wipe of C3PO, that don't pay off in real narrative tension. The appearances of the "Force ghosts" of Han and Luke are a little cheesy, and the Force itself becomes a kind of narrative crutch, one that Rey can lean on when it helps advance the plot but which seems unavailable to her when she needs it. And the psychic link between Rey and Kylo Ren is a similar narratively flimsy gimmick. Still, I found myself occasionally able to let all of these real and nagging flaws go by and relax into watching some old familiar actors and characters go through their paces. John Williams's familiar music certainly helps, even if it's only to cue up memories of better Star Wars movies.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Samantha Robinson, Rafal Zawierucha, Lorenza Izzo, Costa Ronin, Kurt Russell. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Fred Raskin.

With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino proves himself to be perhaps the most superficial of our major filmmakers. I mean that as a compliment, recalling Oscar Wilde's remark, "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril." Tarantino exerts a lot of effort getting things right so he can get them wrong. He meticulously re-creates the Hollywood of the late 1960s just so he can change history. And so, Sharon Tate is not murdered by the Manson family. Instead, Tex and Squeaky and Sadie are done in by the fictional Cliff Booth, Francesca Capucci, and Rick Dalton, the last incinerating Squeaky with a flamethrower -- perhaps the only "Chekhov's flamethrower" in the history of movies, its existence and Dalton's prowess with it having been established earlier in the film. Tarantino did this kind of rewriting history before, in Inglourious Basterds (2009), but without the kind of luxuriating in upending our knowledge of things the way he does here. Like almost all of his other films, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a revenge fantasy, though here the revenge is the audience's: We get our gratification from revenge upon actuality, from seeing Sharon Tate spared a horrible death. But despite the violent outcome, this is also one of Tarantino's least violent films as well as one of his least flamboyant (perhaps owing to the absence of his signature actor, Samuel L. Jackson). It comes off eventually as a kind of homage to one of the film and TV industry's least honored periods: that late-'60s era, before the emergence of film brats like Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese gave a new direction to movies, a macho time filled with spaghetti Westerns, James Bond ripoffs like the "Matt Helm" series, and private eye shows like "Mannix," when fading stars like Rick Dalton were scrounging for whatever work they could land. Tarantino himself was a small child then, so his re-creation of the period is, like most of his oeuvre, drawn more from movies than from memory. Still, he knows how to create characters and write dialogue, and how to cast actors who can play and speak both. It won a well-deserved supporting actor Oscar for Brad Pitt, whose role seems to me at least as large as that of Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated as best actor but didn't win. 

Following (Christopher Nolan, 1998)

Jeremy Theobald in Following

Cast: Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, Lucy Russell, John Nolan, Dick Bradsell, Gillian El-Kadi, Jennifer Angel, Nicolas Carlotti, Darren Ormandy. Screenplay: Christopher Nolan. Cinematography: Christopher Nolan. Production design: Tristan Martin. Film editing: Gareth Heal, Christopher Nolan. Music: David Julyan.

Following, Christopher Nolan's first feature, is a clever thriller done in the hashed-up-narrative manner of his breakthrough film, Memento (2000). In that later film, however, the narrative scrambling seems to be done in service of the film's premise, the nature of memory and what might happened to someone deprived of it. If told linearly, Following is a mildly complex story about how an idle would-be writer starts following strangers on the street, only to be accosted by one of the people he's following and roped into a scheme that culminates in theft and murder. The narrative's skips back and forth in time aren't essential to telling the story, the way they are in Memento. Still, as a foreshadowing of Nolan's success as a filmmaker, Following is fascinating stuff, especially since it was made on a shoestring budget, the largest line item of which was the 16mm film stock on which it was shot. The actors are unknowns or amateurs (and sometimes show it). Some, like Jeremy Theobald, who plays the protagonist, and Lucy Russell, who has the leading female role, have gone on to careers in film and television. Both have bit parts in Nolan's Batman Begins (2005). Others, like Alex Haw, who plays Cobb, the man who lures the protagonist into his plot, gave up acting entirely; he earned a degree in architecture and now works for a New York architectural firm. 

The Crimson Pirate (Robert Siodmak, 1952)

Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat in The Crimson Pirate

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Nick Cravat, Eva Bartok, Torin Thatcher, James Hayter, Leslie Bradley, Margot Grahame, Noel Purcell, Frederick Lester, Eliot Makeham, Frank Pettingell, Dana Wynter, Christopher Lee. Screenplay: Roland Kibbee. Cinematography: Otto Heller. Art direction: Paul Sheriff. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: William Alwyn.

All flashing blue eyes and white teeth, Burt Lancaster swashbuckles in The Crimson Pirate like no one since the elder Douglas Fairbanks -- some of whose acrobatic gags were borrowed by the movie. It's one of those kids'  movies for all ages, with only just enough mushy stuff between Lancaster and Eva Bartok to hold adult interests. Actually, the real romance here is between Lancaster's Captain Vallo and Nick Cravat's Ojo, the latter a mute lieutenant to the dashing pirate captain. Some of the funniest sequences involve the movements in sync of the six-foot-one Lancaster and the five-foot-four Cravat -- the two once had a circus act together. There's perhaps more plot than the movie absolutely needs, involving the pirates coming to the aid of the anti-monarchical rebels on the mythical Caribbean island of Cobra. There Vallo, aka The Crimson Pirate, meets Consuelo (Bartok), the daughter of the rebel leader El Libre (Frederick Lester). Meanwhile, mutiny brews aboard Vallo's ship, fueled by his first mate, Humble Bellows (Torin Tatcher), disgruntled by the fact that Vallo's involvement in politics has got in the way of their routine piratical pursuits of treasure. Eventually, with the aid of a scientist, Prof. Elihu Prudence (James Hayter, Vallo and Ojo vanquish both the mutineers and the forces of the king, led by Baron Gruda (Leslie Bradley), by using the professor's scientific innovations, such as a hot-air balloon and nitroglycerin, as well as the theory that a capsized boat might hold enough air to be used as a kind of submarine. (That last gag was borrowed for the 2003 movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. It was later proved unfeasible on the Mythbusters TV show.) The Crimson Pirate was the kind of hit it deserved to be.

The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, 2015)

Michalina Olszanska and Marta Mazurek in The Lure

Cast: Marta Mazurek, Michalina Olszanska, Kinga Preis, Andrzej Konopka, Jakub Gierszal, Zygmunt Malanowicz, Magdalena Cielecka, Katarzyna Herman, Marcin Kowalczyk. Screenplay: Robert Bolesto. Cinematography: Jakub Kijowski. Production design: Joanna Macha. Film editing: Jaroslaw Kaminski. Music: Ballady i Romanse.

I'm pretty sure this is the only "Polish horror musical" I've ever seen, to put The Lure into the category Wikipedia assigns to it. It's not a genre I'm inclined to follow with any great enthusiasm if any others exist. It's the story of two mermaids who pop out of the water and join a group of musicians who play in a nightclub. The two, named Silver and Golden, begin as strippers with the group but eventually get their own act. When they're dry, the mermaids have what look like human legs but no sex or excretory organs (like a Barbie doll, as one musician observes); their tails appear only when they're wet. Tension between the mermaids arises when Silver falls in love with the bass player Mietek and Golden picks up a stranger and eats him. Silver still wants to be human and to marry Mietek, so she arranges for a sort of lower-body transplant: Her tail is cut off and replaced with human nether regions. (We don't learn anything about the human donor.) But Mietek decides to marry someone else, and when that happens, Silver is told by the god Triton, who has become a heavy-metal musician, that she must eat Mietek or else she'll turn into sea foam. Because Silver can't go through with it and, as the sun rises, dissolves into what look like soap suds, Golden tears Mietek's throat out. So if you thought this was going to be The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989) or even Splash (Ron Howard, 1984), too bad. There's a lot of pop music and some moments of grossly silly fun in the movie, but its main attraction is that you've probably never seen anything quite like it.

China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in China Seas

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, Dudley Digges, Robert Benchley, William Henry, Hattie McDaniel, Liev De Maigret, Lilian Bond, Edward Brophy, Soo Yong, Akim Tamiroff, Ivan Lebedeff. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, James Kevin McGuinness, based on a novel by Crosbie Garstin. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William LeVanway. Music: Herbert Stothart.

China Seas is a pretty good romantic adventure that seems to have been pieced together from better movies. Its romantic triangle of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Rosalind Russell mimics that of Gable, Harlow, and Mary Astor in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932). Harlow and Wallace Beery have a relationship that echoes the one their characters had in Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933). And the byplay between Harlow's character and her maid (Hattie McDaniel, of course) is a lot like the banter between Mae West and her maids in She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) and I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933). China Seas has a few standout moments of its own: There's a terrific typhoon sequence involving a runaway steamroller on the deck of the tramp steamer captained by Gable's Alan Gaskell, and Robert Benchley has some funny bits as an alcoholic writer who's usually too drunk to know where he is or to respond to other people with anything more than non sequiturs. There's a kind of uptightness to the movie that reminds us that the Production Code censors were breathing down people's necks, whereas all of those better movies mentioned above were pre-Code. But Gable and Harlow are in fine form. She's Dolly Portland, aka "China Doll," the shady lady (sometimes introduced as "an entertainer") who used to be involved with Capt. Gaskell and has now booked passage on his steamer from Hong Kong to Singapore in an effort to win him back. Russell plays Sybil Barclay, a high-class English lady who also has a past with the captain and nearly does succeed in recapturing him. Russell seems to be trying too hard at the role, slipping into stiff-upper-lip mannerisms and becoming rather arch, so there's no real heat between her character and Gable's. Another old flame of Dolly's, Jamesy McArdle (Beery), is also on board, and he's in cahoots with Malaysian pirates to board the ship and steal the gold it's carrying. Rejected by the captain, who decides to marry Sybil, Dolly joins forces with McArdle, though she doesn't really mean to. You've seen this sort of thing before, so there are no surprises, but relax and be entertained.

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?