Hopscotch (Ronald Neame, 1980)

Glenda Jackson and Walter Matthau in Hopscotch

Cast: Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom, David Matthau, George Baker, Ivor Roberts, Lucy Saroyan, Severn Darden. Screenplay: Brian Garfield, Bryan Forbes, based on a novel by Garfield. Cinematography: Arthur Ibbetson, Brian W. Roy. Production design: William J. Creber. Film editing: Carl Kress. Music: Ian Fraser.

Hopscotch is an engaging trifle with just enough bite into the hindquarters of international espionage bureaus to make it seem more substantial. It also has the improbable teaming of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, who have a kind of chemistry that recalls Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn at their best (which was mostly when George Cukor was directing them). It was their third film together, and Jackson reportedly accepted the part because she liked working with Matthau so much. With good reason: Their first film together, Melvin Frank's 1973 A Touch of Class, won her an Oscar, and their second, House Calls (Howard Zieff, 1978), was a solid box office success. Hopscotch actually doesn't give Jackson much to do: Her character, Isobel, is an old flame of Matthau's Miles Kendig, a CIA agent who decides to write a tell-all memoir to even the score with his blustering boss, Myerson (Ned Beatty), a far more committed Cold Warrior than Kendig, who sees the spy games for what they are. Isobel's role is mainly to help out occasionally when Kendig needs it, which he mostly doesn't; he's almost always ahead of the game. They have a few good scenes together, including their first encounter in the film, when they pretend not to know each other -- a scene that was actually written by Matthau. There are also some breezy moments between Kendig and his opposite number from the KGB, played with weary good humor by Herbert Lom. There's a special buoyancy to the film contributed by abundant borrowings from the music of Mozart, along with some Rossini and Puccini -- Matthau was an opera lover, so these bits of filigree are probably his contribution to the film, too.

The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Bill Murray and Adam Driver in The Dead Don't Die

Cast: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Larry Fessenden, Maya Delmont, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, RZA. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch. Cinematography: Frederick Elmes. Production design: Alex DiGerlando. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Sqürl.

I suppose that having made a vampire movie, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Jim Jarmusch may have felt he had to make a zombie movie, but I wish he hadn't. The Dead Don't Die might have become a cult film if there weren't so many good Jarmusch films to choose from: It has all the earmarks of a guilty pleasure movie, like cheeky dialogue and a trendy horror movie trope, the zombie apocalypse. And I have to admit that it's not as bad as most of the zombie fare, and that it's not even Jarmusch's worst film -- I'd have to rank it above The Limits of Control (2009) for that dubious distinction. But there's something dispirited about it, a feeling that having latched onto the idea for the movie, Jarmusch grew bored with it. That reflects itself in the gimmick that gradually creeps into the film: that the cops Cliff (Bill Murray) and Ronnie (Adam Driver) know they're in a movie. It first surfaces when the song "The Dead Don't Die" keeps reappearing on the radio and Ronnie refers to it as "the theme song." Then, in the middle of some byplay between the two of them, Cliff asks, "What, are we improvising here?" And eventually, after Ronnie says, "Oh man, this isn't gonna end well" one time too many, Cliff objects, and Ronnie admits that he's read the script. Cliff is incredulous: "Jim only gave me the scenes I appear in," he fumes. These "meta" moments are amusing, but they counter any involvement a viewer might have in the fates of the characters, predictable as the genre makes them. Still, I liked some things in the film, especially Tilda Swinton's eerie undertaker, who speaks with a Scottish accent and wields a mean samurai sword. I still think Jarmusch is a wonderful writer-director -- Paterson (2016) was clear evidence that he hasn't lost his touch -- when he's got the right subject in mind, but I think he needs to edit himself more, and not just make movies when an idea strikes his fancy.

Golden Eyes (Jun Fukuda, 1968)

Akira Takarada in Golden Eyes

Cast: Akira Takarada, Beverly Maeda, Tomomi Sawa, Makoto Sato, Andrew Hughes, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Nadao Kirino, Sachio Sakai, Toru Ibuku, Seishiro Kuno, Mari Sakurai. Screenplay: Jun Fukuda, Ei Ogawa, Michio Tsuzuki. Cinematography: Kazuo Yamada. Production design: Shigekazu Ikuno. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Masaru Sato.

Golden Eyes -- not to be confused with the real James Bond pic GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995) -- is a followup to Jun Fukada's 1965 Bond spoof Ironfinger. It's just as goofy but a little more slickly made than the first film. It also stars Akira Takarada as the Franco-Japanese spy Andrew Hoshino, who may or may not be an Interpol agent, and who seems to be devoted to his mother -- although this time he gets called on that when someone suggests that "Mom" is a code word or even an acronym for some mysterious agency. The action moves from Beirut to Japan and involves some jaw-droppingly improbable setups like a man impaled on a hook dangling from a helicopter, a group of assassins dressed like nannies pushing perambulators along a desert cliff, and a crate of Champagne used as an assault weapon. There are two pseudo-Bond Babes in this one, a knife-throwing hit-woman (Beverly Maeda) who turns out to be the heroine and a ditzy singer (Tomomi Sawa) who gets an extended take in which she sings a nonsense pop song. There's also a climactic shootout between Hoshino and a blind millionaire called Stonefeller (Andrew Hughes), who "sees" his target by means of a rifle fitted out with a directional microphone. No, really. Someone else made all of this up. It wasn't me.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019)

Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Far From Home

Cast: Tom Holland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Zendaya, Samuel L. Jackson, Jon Favreau, Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, Tony Revolori, Angourie Rice, Remy Hii, Martin Starr, J.B. Smoove, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Cobie Smulders, Numan Acar. Screenplay: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers. Cinematography: Matthew J. Lloyd. Production design: Claude Paré. Film editing: Leigh Folsom Boyd, Dan Lebental. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire are fine actors, but neither of them made the role of Spider-Man their own the way Tom Holland has done. His training as a dancer helped him get the moves right for the stunts as Spider-Man, and he's the right height (five-eight) and age (early 20s) to keep him credible as the adolescent Peter Parker. Beyond that, he's a gifted actor, more than holding his own in scenes with veterans like Samuel L. Jackson and Jake Gyllenhaal. It's hard to know what Marvel Studios will do when Holland eventually ages out of the role. He's the main reason I liked Spider-Man: Far From Home much more than the usual superhero movie. He makes the slam-bang special effects tolerable. It helps, too, that he's up against one of the more engaging villains in the genre, Gyllenhaal's Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio. Gyllenhaal -- who was once considered for the role of the webslinger in Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004) when Maguire was sidelined -- makes the seduction of Peter Parker into handing over the gizmo that gives him power credible, and then does a fine job of unveiling Beck's bad side. But mostly it's Holland's ability to sustain Peter's boyish gullibility, and his reluctance to give up his teenage life (and his pursuit of Zendaya's MJ) to become one of the Avengers, that brings the implausible superhero to life. The screenplay is efficient and sometimes witty, often at the expense of Peter, who gushes "Oh, I love Led Zeppelin!" when Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) plays a track by AC/DC and who gets zinged by Nick Fury (Jackson) with "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Stark said you wouldn't get that because it's not a Star Wars reference."

Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017)

Garrett Hedlund and Jason Mitchell in Mudbound

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, Jonathan Banks, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Dylan Arnold, Kerry Cahill, Lucy Faust, Jason Kirkpatrick. Screenplay: Virgil Williams, Dee Rees, based on a novel by Hillary Jordan. Cinematography: Rachel Morrison. Production design: David J. Bomba. Film editing: Mako Kamitsuna. Music: Tamar-kali.

Mudbound is a solid, hard-edged, sometimes raw look at Mississippi in the post-World War II period, one I know well, having been born into that time and place. It only occasionally slips into the "Magical Negro" and "White Savior" tropes that afflict so many films about race relations. For example, it has Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) in his crippled bomber saluted by one of the Tuskegee Airmen, who have just rescued him from an attack by German fighter planes. This serves as a predicate for Jamie's friendship with Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) and his attempt to save him from a lynch mob headed by Jamie's own father, known as "Pappy" (Jonathan Banks). The screenplay also subverts some of the film's earlier harshness by tacking on a somewhat happy ending for Ronsel, who reunites with his German girlfriend and their son. It feels gratuitously sentimental in comparison with what has gone before. Nevertheless, Mudbound is a well-acted film, sometimes beautifully acted, as in the case of the Oscar-nominated Mary J. Blige as Florence Jackson, the tower of strength for both the Jackson and the McAllan families. Rachel Morrison also deserved her Oscar nomination -- the first ever for a woman -- for cinematography. She provides images of both the stark beauty of the Mississippi Delta landscape and the oppressiveness of the mud that clings to and clots the lives of its inhabitants.

Satansbraten (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976)

Kurt Raab and Margit Carstensen in Satansbraten

Cast: Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Helen Vita, Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Y Sa Lo, Ulli Lommel, Armin Meier, Katherina Buchhammer, Vitus Zeplichal, Brigitte Mira, Hannes Kaetner, Heli Finkenzeller, Marquard Bohm, Christiane Maybach, Nino Korda, Adrian Hoven. Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus, Jürgen Jürges. Production design: Ulrike Bode, Kurt Raab. Film editing: Thea Eymèsz. Music: Peer Raben.

Although it was written for the screen, Rainer Maria Fassbinder's Satansbraten (aka Satan's Brew) feels stagy. Its absurdist comedy evokes Beckett and Ionesco, and especially Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, which Fassbinder more or less acknowledges by appending a quotation from Artaud as a kind of epigraph for the film. But it also harks back to Fassbinder's earliest films, the ones like Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) and Gods of the Plague (1970) that followed his involvement with the Anti-Theater in Munich. In a way it merges the often eccentric performance in those films with the florid style of Fassbinder's Douglas Sirk-inflected melodramas like The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Veronika Voss (1982). The central character of Satansbraten, Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), is a poet with writer's block who, while trying to work his way out of inertia, unconsciously (or not?) plagiarizes a poem by Stefan George, and when his theft is brought to his attention decides that he is the reincarnation of George. Among other things, this leads him to explorations of his sexuality -- George was gay. But mostly the film tracks Kranz's various involvements with women, including his wife, Luise (Helen Vita), who claims that he hasn't slept with her for 17 days, as well as Lisa (Ingrid Caven), the wife of his friend Rolf (Marquard Bohm); a prostitute (Y Sa Lo) whom he interviews; a wealthy patron, Irmgart von Witzleben (Katherina Buchhamer), who has an orgasm while signing a check for him and whom he then murders; and an adoring fan, Andrée (Margit Carstensen). Meanwhile, he is also dodging a detective (Ulli Lommel) investigating the murder of Irmgart while contending with his brother, Ernst (Volker Spengler), a mentally disordered man who is fascinated with the sex lives of houseflies. It's all very silly but watchable in a "what next?" way. Efforts have been made to explicate the film as a commentary on fascism -- George was enthusiastically courted by the Nazis for his visions of an emergent Germanic national culture, though he shrugged off their approaches -- but such exegeses are kind of wobbly.

Ironfinger (Jun Fukuda, 1965)

Mie Hama and Akira Takarada in Ironfinger

Cast: Akira Takarada, Mie Hama, Ichiro Arishima, Jun Tatara, Akihiko Hirata, Sachio Sakai, Susumo Kurobe, Toru Ibuki, Chotaro Togin, Naoya Kusakawa, Koji Iwamoto, Mike Daneen. Screenplay: Michio Tsuzuki, Kihachi Okamoto. Cinematography: Shinsaku Uno. Production design: Kazuo Ogawa. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii, Yoshitami Kuroiwa. Music: Masaru Sato.

Ironfinger is a wacky and somewhat cheesy Japanese entry into the subgenre of James Bond spoofs that swept through movies internationally in the 1960s, attracting not only American and British filmmakers but also Frenchmen like Philippe de Broca (That Man From Rio, 1964) and even Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, 1965). Which may be why the pseudo-Bond of Ironfinger is part French. He calls himself Andrew Hoshino -- though it's not exactly clear that that's his name -- and is played a little more broadly than is necessary by Akira Takarada, a veteran not only of films by Yasujiro Ozu (The End of Summer, 1961) and Mikio Naruse (A Woman's Life, 1963) but also of numerous Godzilla movies, starting with Ishiro Honda's original Gojira in 1954. His leading lady, Mie Hama, made her own appearance in the real James Bond series in You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967), playing Kissy Suzuki to Sean Connery's Bond. Ironfinger isn't unwatchable: There are some good gags, but also some bad ones. The climactic action sequence, in which the good guys foil the bad guys by tossing lighted matches into oil drums, which then explode into an impossible cascade of drums coming from every corner, is flat-out ridiculous. Still, if you can put up with some tacky pop songs and a needlessly complicated plot, Ironfinger is a tolerably amusing period artifact and only 93 minutes long.

Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)

Allakariallak in Nanook of the North

Cast: Allakariallak, Alice Nevalinga, Cunayoo, Allegoo. Screenplay: Frances H. Flaherty, Robert J. Flaherty. Cinematography: Robert J. Flaherty. Film editing: Robert J. Flaherty, Charles Gelb.

Today, Nanook of the North would have to be called a "docudrama," or a re-creation of a faded actuality. The real Inuit of 1922 were a lot more conscious of technological advances than Nanook's biting of the phonograph record would suggest. In fact, they regularly viewed the footage that Robert J. Flaherty was filming of them. They had already begun to integrate modern clothing with their traditional garb of skins and furs, and they carried rifles along with knives and harpoons. A cutaway igloo was constructed because Flaherty couldn't film inside a traditionally closed structure, ice window notwithstanding. The tug-of-war with the seal under the ice was faked: The seal was already dead and Nanook's struggle with it was staged by men off-camera pulling on the rope. Nanook himself is a fiction: An actual Inuit hunter named Allakariallak played him, and the wife and family who accompanied him were not really his own. And despite the title card announcing that Nanook starved to death, Allakariallak seems to have died of tuberculosis. Still, is there a more fascinating portrait of a vanishing culture than Flaherty's film? Not only does it give a credible account of what life must have been at one time for the Inuit, it also gives us insight into the nature of documentary filmmaking in its formative years. Its great popularity at the time of its initial release tells us something about the hunger of audiences for knowledge of a world they had never been able to see before except through lantern slides and the narratives of intrepid travelers -- most of whom had their own imperialist designs. Flaherty had the taste and sense not to see the Inuit as exploitable resources -- something he would be guilty of later in his career when he made Louisiana Story (1948), a paean to the petroleum industry funded by Standard Oil -- but rather as a culture to be valued for its own strengths.

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.