The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)

Aleksey Batalov and Tatyana Samoylova in The Cranes Are Flying

Cast: Tatyana Samoylova, Aleksey Batalov, Vasiliy Merkurev, Aleksandr Shvorin, Svetlana Kharitonova, Konstantin Kadochnikov, Valentin Zubkov, Antonina Bogdanova, Boris Kokovkin, Ekaterina Kupriyanova. Screenplay: Viktor Rozov, based on his play. Cinematography: Sergey Urusevskiy. Production design: Evgeniy Svidetelev. Film editing: Mariya Timofeevna. Music: Moisey Vaynberg.

The Cranes Are Flying was received enthusiastically on its international release in 1957, partly as a sign of a thaw between the Soviet Union and the West. Among other things, it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Today, I think it's more likely to be judged for its visuals and its almost formalist construction than for the well-worn theme of its narrative, a romantic drama set against the backdrop of war. From the beginning I was struck by the compositions of cinematographer Sergey Urusefskiy, an evocative use of diagonals, framing the lovers Veronika (the extraordinary Tatyana Samoylova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) within the angles made by bridges and causeways, roads and ramps and staircases, all of which echo the image evoked in the title: the V-shaped flight of migrating cranes. Director Mikhail Kalatozov uses the image of flying cranes at the beginning of the film, almost as a harbinger of the coming war, and again at the end of the film, this time precisely as an image of returning peace. The V of the flying cranes at the beginning is soon mocked by the X of anti-tank barriers set up in the wartime street. But his entire film is structured of such echoes, including the crowds that weep at the departure of soldiers and at the end weep at their return -- or failure to do so. The film is full of beautifully staged moments, such as the return of Veronika to her home after a bombing raid. She has taken shelter in the subway but her family hasn't, and she rushes into the bombed-out building, climbs the burning stairs, and opens a door to nothingness, with only a dangling lampshade to recall the scene that had taken place in the apartment before. There are striking cuts, such as the one of feet walking across broken glass in a bombed apartment that's followed immediately by a soldier's feet slogging through mud. This particular cut also serves to link two key moments in the film: Veronika's rape by Boris's cousin Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) and Boris's death from a sniper's bullet. The Cranes Are Flying can be faulted for melodramatic excesses: Veronika's decision to marry her rapist doesn't come out any perceptible necessity, and the failure to report Boris as dead rather than missing seems there only to heighten her futile hope that he will return to her. But if you're going to be melodramatic, you should embrace it as whole-heartedly as Kalatazov does.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Kayo Matsuo, Akiji Kobayashi, Minoru Oki, Shin Kishida, Shogen Nitta, Takashi Ebata, Kappei Matsumoto, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hideaki Sakurai.

Among the cinematic innovations that Akira Kurosawa is credited with is the use of a pressurized hose to spew fake blood in his 1962 film Sanjuro. The story has it that the amount of pressure needed was miscalculated, and the explosion of gore nearly knocked Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet when he received the fatal blow from Toshiro Mifune's Sanjuro. But the effect was so startling -- and so in keeping with the comic tone that pervades the movie -- that Kurosawa decided to keep it in rather than go to the trouble of reshooting. And so a continuing motif of excessive bloodletting was introduced to the samurai movie. The pressure hoses get quite a workout in Kenji Misumi's second film (of six) in his Lone Wolf and Cub series, as his hero, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) continues to trundle little Daigoro (Akihiro Kobyashi) across the landscape of 17th-century Japan. Wide-eyed Daigoro is witness to all sorts of bloody encounters, and even at one point participates in them: Under attack by a small army, Ogami gives the pram containing the boy a shove into the melee, signaling him to release a mechanism that shoots blades out of the cart's wheels, cutting off a couple of the attackers below the knees. The story doesn't matter much: It's about Ogami's being commissioned to assassinate a man who threatens to reveal a clan's secret process for making indigo dye. This secret is so important that the people who plan to steal it commission ninjas to guard the man who plans to leak it, including a small army of female assassins and a trio of brothers who wear what look like large straw lampshades. Ogami bests them all in various ways, while continuing to defend Daigoro, who at one point is kidnapped and threatened with being dropped into a deep well. The film is full of ingenious ways of putting people to death, including a scene in which the guardians of the thief are crossing a desert when one of the brothers stops and plunges his iron-clawed hand into the sand, out of which bubbles a geyser of blood -- their opponents have buried themselves in the desert, planning an ambush that gets thwarted by the keen-eared brother. But eventually he too, gets what he deserves from Ogami, who cuts his throat, resulting in an almost touching moment in which the dying man listens to his final breath whistling through the wound -- a sound, he says, he always wanted to hear, but not from his own throat. It's this kind of distancing from the dismemberments and blood fountains that makes Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx tolerable, and sometimes even poetic.

Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas, 2018)

Juliette Binoche and Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne, Christa Théret, Nora Hamzawi, Pascal Greggory, Laurent Poitrenaux, Sigrid Bouaziz, Lionel Drey, Nicolas Bouchaud. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe. Film editing: Simon Jacquet.

If we learn anything about the French from watching their movies, it's that they love to talk. So many French films are made up of scenes at a table, in a bed, on a train, where the people are less interested in food or sex or travel than in batting ideas back and forth. In Non-Fiction the ideas are about literature and its relationship to life, to commerce, to truth. And yes, the phrase "post-truth era" makes its sullen appearance in the discourse. We begin with the meeting of the poised, groomed publisher Alain Danielson (Guillaume Canet) with the shaggy, bearded writer Léonard Spiegel (Vincent Macaigne), and we can tell from Leónard's slightly anxious manner and Alain's smooth control that things will not end the way Léonard wants: Alain, who has published his other books, is not going to publish his latest. Underlying the situation is something Alain may or may not know (Léonard isn't sure): that Léonard has been having an affair with Alain's wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche), and moreover that the affair is the subject of Léonard's novel. (Léonard has always written romans à clef, although this time he thinks he has thrown Alain off the track by having slept with a popular TV anchorwoman as well as with Selena.) Of course, Alain has been having his own affair with a young woman, Laure (Christa Théret), who works for the publishing company as a sort of "new media" adviser -- leading the talk into conversations about the death of print, the power of the Internet, and so on. Léonard has a wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), who is a consultant to a leftist politician and is so busy that she barely has time for Léonard -- at one point, when she is leaving for an appointment, he goes in for a goodbye kiss and gets the door shut in his face. As for Selena, she's an actress trying to decide whether to commit to another season of the TV cop show she's currently appearing in, or to take an offer to appear in a stage production of Racine's Phèdre, a role she fears may be a sign that she's getting old. There's also a sly "meta" moment in the film when someone suggests that the publisher should hire Juliette Binoche to read the audiobook version of Léonard's novel and asks Selena if she knows her. Some may question whether the film is a satire that doesn't quite have the courage of its bite, or a commentary on the decline of the arts in an era of self-absorption. All of the relationships in the film eventually resolve themselves a little anti-climactically, but Olivier Assayas has such a light touch with the film that it's best to just relax and listen to the talk.

The Scar of Shame (Frank Peregini, 1927)

Norman Johnstone, Harry Henderson, Ann Kennedy, Lucia Lynn Moses in The Scar of Shame

Cast: Harry Henderson, Lucia Lynn Moses, Norman Johnstone, Ann Kennedy, William E. Pettus, Lawrence Chenault, Pearl McCormack. Screenplay: David Starkman. Cinematography: Al Liguori.

The Scar of Shame is usually categorized as a "race" movie -- one made for exclusively African-American audiences -- but it's really more about caste than about race. As sociologists point out, any group of people set aside for some overriding characteristic -- age, skin color, language, religion, sexual orientation, you name it -- tends to subdivide, to establish its own hierarchies, cliques, clans, privileged or subjugated groups. In its melodramatic way, The Scar of Shame is a keen-edged portrayal of black Americans under segregation, and the more remarkable because it was produced, written, and directed by white men. But the acceptance of the film by the audiences for which it was made suggests that it may have embodied some home truths. It's mostly a well-made film, though one in need of a stronger editor -- none is credited -- and eventually it has a misfire of an ending. The story centers on the fortunes of Alvin Hillyard (Harry Henderson), a young musician with ambitions to prove himself a serious (i.e., not jazz) composer, or as another character puts it in an intertitle, to become "the leading composer of our race." He rescues a young woman, Louise Howard (Lucia Lynn Moses), from being abused by her alcoholic stepfather, Spike (William E. Pettus), and marries her, mainly because she's pretty and he feels sorry for her. Unfortunately, he can't bring himself to tell his mother that he's wed someone not of their social class, and whenever he goes to visit her he leaves Louise at home. Meanwhile, the crooked Eddie Blake (Norman Johnstone) wants Louise to become a star attraction in the club he plans to open, and engineers a showdown with Alvin in which shots are fired and Louise is wounded. Having discovered that Alvin is ashamed of her lack of social status, Louise blames him and goes to work for Eddie. Alvin goes to prison, escapes, starts a new life under an assumed name, and falls in love with the pretty and socially prominent Alice Hathaway (Pearl McCormack). Meanwhile, Eddie has made a success of his club and Louise has a new admirer -- none other than Ralph Hathaway (Lawrence Chenault), Alice's father. It all ends with Louise first trying to blackmail Alvin but having a change of heart. She kills herself and exonerates Alvin in her suicide note, leaving Hathaway to moralize in a wordy intertitle, opining that if Louise had "had the proper training, if she had been taught the finer things in life, the higher aims, the higher hopes, she would not be lying cold in death! -- Oh! our people have much to learn!" Which is, of course, not the point at all: If Alvin hadn't been such a snob, such a "dicty sap," as Eddie calls him (the touches of African-American slang in the intertitles are delicious), Louise wouldn't have had to suffer. It would have been nice if the makers of The Scar of Shame had been more attentive to the ironies of their story and not so quick to slap on a wrong-headed moral about the need of the black community to pull itself up by its bootstraps. Still, it's a useful window onto the mindset of an era.

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.