Limite (Mario Peixoto, 1931)

Olga Breno in Limite

 Cast: Olga Breno, Tatiana Rey, Raul Schnoor, Brutus Pedreira, Carmen Santos, Mario Peixoto, Edgar Brasil, Iolanda Bernardes. Screenplay: Mario Peixoto. Cinematography: Edgar Brasil. Film editing: Mario Peixoto.

Limite is a film for cinéastes, by which I mean anyone who feels compelled to watch almost anything that has a measure of acclaim from other cinéastes. I don't know that I fall neatly into that category, since I have some expectation from films that is satisfied only by the ones that have a coherent narrative. Limite almost has that, but only in hindsight and in reading what others tell me about it. Left to my own devices, I don't know that I would have figured out that the film is about the memories or past experiences of the three people, two women and a man, who are seated in a boat, aimlessly drifting in the sea. And even having been told that, I'm not sure I can make it cohere in my memory of watching the film. But Limite has a reputation as a great experiment, a film made by Mario Peixoto, a 22-year-old poet who never made another one though he lived to be 83. It was exhibited in his native Brazil shortly after it was made, and though it was caviar to the general it acquired some admirers of the years, including Orson Welles and David Bowie, but like the vast majority of movies, especially silent ones, it suffered from neglect until it was restored in 2010 and became widely available. I found it oddly hypnotic, especially in its use of a shrewdly assembled pastiche of musical themes by a variety of composers, including Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky, Borodin, and Prokofiev, which underscore and perhaps illuminate what's being done and felt by the people on screen. I doubt that I would have responded to it as positively as I did without the soundtrack, which is only to say that I expect cinema to be distinct from other visual arts like painting and still photography, which don't need to be "sweetened" by music to make their effect. There are some lovely images in Limite but they tease us into wanting them to fall into emotional and narrative shape. Life is so full of unanswered questions that I expect art to help us toward answering them. So if you watch Limite asking why these three people are in this boat together, you may find yourself hungering for more conventional film. Unconventional, let's say, isn't always a good thing.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, Aleksa Palladino, Michael Shannon, Amy Ryan, Brían F. O'Byrne, Rosemary Harris. Screenplay: Kelly Masterson. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Production design: Christopher Nowak. Film editing: Tom Swartwout. Music: Carter Burwell.

This unrelentingly bleak family/crime drama was Sidney Lumet's last film as a director, and I can only say that he went out at the top of his form. That it was also one of the last films of Albert Finney and also starred another actor gone before his time, Philip Seymour Hoffman, only adds to its melancholy weight. Hoffman is at his best as Andy Hanson, the financially overextended older son, who tries to drag his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) into a scheme to rob their parents' suburban mall jewelry store. Andy persuades Hank that it would be a victimless crime: They'd collect the loot and their parents would collect the insurance. Everything goes wrong with this scheme that you might imagine. It's complicated, for example, by the fact that Hank is sleeping with Andy's wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). Hawke is superb in the role of Hank, a weak, spoiled younger brother now gone to seed -- a part that fits the actor perfectly as he ages out of the boyish good looks that once made some critics dismiss him as a lightweight. And midway through the film, when things have gone so wrong that the men's mother, Nanette (Rosemary Harris), lies comatose from the shooting that took place during the botched robbery, we meet Charles, their father, played by the always reliable Finney. The brothers are already in trouble because the wife and brother of the man Hank hired to do the job, who was killed in the heist, want hush money. Things get even worse when their father, urged implacably on by grief and anger, begins investigating what brought about his wife's death. Kelly Masterson's screenplay doesn't give Tomei enough to do in the story, but every moment when she's on screen is memorable, particularly the scene in which she leaves Andy. Lumet stages this in their apartment with a long take that holds Andy in the background as Gina struggles to haul her suitcase to the door, all the while delivering the news that she's been sleeping with his brother. Andy doesn't react immediately to this bit of information, but even later when he meets with Hank again, Hoffman lets us see how it's seething inside him. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is not an easy film to watch; it's perhaps a little too grim and sordid for its own good. But at its best it's the kind of morality tale you might find in medieval literature, in the darker moments of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and it has some of the burden of greed and hubris that afflicts the families of Greek tragedy, even to the point of reversing the story of Oedipus in its stunning outcome.

If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Cast: KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, Ebony Obsidian, Dominique Thorne, Michael Beach, Aunjanue Ellis, Diego Luna, Emily Rios, Ed Skrein, Finn Wittrock, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Franco, Pedro Pascal. Screenplay: Barry Jenkins, based on a novel by James Baldwin. Cinematography: James Laxton. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders. Music: Nicholas Britell.

I wish I could watch and critique If Beale Street Could Talk, a two-year-old movie based on a 46-year-old novel, as a work of drama and filmmaking, instead of being tugged by it into considerations of politics and society. But George Floyd's death and the following two weeks of protests make it, to put it tritely, timely and topical. Writer-director Barry Jenkins subsumes an American tragedy in a richly detailed love story filmed with a slow, loving camera. We watch what should be the charmed lives of Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) turned into nightmare by systemic racism, to use a phrase that echoes through our current moment. Jenkins is a master at mixing moments of pain with moments of beauty. The film's great raw scenes -- Fonny's hyperreligious mother (Aunjanue Ellis) denouncing Tish's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and Tish's mother (the brilliant Regina King) confronting the woman (Emily Rios) who accused Fonny of rape -- are made even rawer by the contrast with the lyrical moments that depict the lives of the lovers before catastrophe, in the form of a bad cop (Ed Skrein), descends upon them. It's the kind of film that makes you want to explore what brought even its secondary characters to be what they are: What made Skrein's cop so bitter? What traumas underlie the victim's choice to pick Fonny as her rapist? What drove Fonny's mother so blindly into the arms of religion? Jenkins makes these characters and others so vivid that we don't just dismiss them as plot devices. Each of them could be the subjects of their own films, as could Fonny's friend Daniel, the ex-con who can barely speak of the horrors of prison. They make If Beale Street Could Talk a film of rich texture, allowing it to go beyond social-political commentary into a lived actuality.  

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

Theresa Harris and Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Theresa Harris, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat, Douglass Dumbrille. Screenplay: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Darryl F. Zanuck. Cinematography: James Van Trees. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Howard Bretherton.

Baby Face has a reputation as the raunchy film that helped bring about the stifling Production Code in 1934, the year after it was released. But even in its original version -- for years only the expurgated film could be seen -- it doesn't exhibit much that would bring a blush to today's maiden cheeks. To be sure, its heroine, Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck), sleeps around in her determination to get somewhere, which in her case is marriage to a bank president. But this moral deviance, the film suggests, is the result of having been pimped out by her bootlegger father from the age of 14. So when he's blown up by the explosion of one of his stills, what else can she do but head for the big city and try to better herself? She has, after all, only the guidance of a middle-aged German, a customer of her father's speakeasy, who quotes Nietzsche at her. Her will to power involves the only capital she has: her body. So she sleeps her way up the flowchart of a New York bank until she's the kept woman of a vice-president, and when that ends in his being murdered by an ex-lover who also commits suicide in what the newspapers call a "love nest," she gets paid off -- to prevent her selling her diary to the newspapers -- with a job at the bank's Paris branch. And then she goes straight, fending off the attentions of various men, and making a success of the bank's travel bureau division. It can't end there, however, because when the bank's young president, Courtland Trenholme (George Brent), comes to Paris on a visit, they fall in love and get married, causing a scandal that leads to the bank's closing and Trenholme's indictment for some kind of corporate malfeasance. When he asks Lily to help him out financially -- she has accumulated half a million dollars in gifts from him, and presumably from her former lover -- she refuses, reverting to the ruthless, hard-edged Lily. But just as she's about to leave him she has a change of heart, only to find that the desperate Trenholme has tried to commit suicide. He's not mortally wounded, however, and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital she confesses that she really loves him and he gazes gratefully at her. Fade out. Censors in states like New York bridled at the apparent rewarding of sin and forced Warner Bros. to cut some of the more scandalous scenes and to change the ending so that Lily does penance by returning to her old home town to live a chastened life. But even in its long-lost uncensored version, there's something a little off about Baby Face, a feeling that it wants to be more than just a story about sex and upward mobility. The men in the film, including the young John Wayne, are an unmemorable series of himbos and sugar daddies, easy pushovers for the likes of an ambitious and unscrupulous young woman. The last-minute change of heart and the squishy happy ending feel unearned. What coherence the film has comes not from the script but from Barbara Stanwyck's performance, from her tough likability.

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, 2018)

Xi Zi, Kong Yixin, Peng Yuchang, and Wang Uvin in An Elephant Sitting Still

Cast: Zhang Yu, Peng Yuchang, Wang Uvin, Xi Zi, Dong Xiangrong, Lin Zhanghui, Guo-Zhang Zhao-Yan, Ning Wang, Guo Jing, He Miaomiao, Huang Ximan, Kong Wei, Kong Yixin, Li Binyuan, Li Danyi, Li Qing, Li Suyun, Zhu Yanmanzi. Screenplay: Hu Bo. Cinematography: Fan Chao. Production design: Xie Lijian. Film editing: Hu Bo. Music: Lun Hua.

Albert Camus formulated the most familiar tenet of existentialism: "There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide." It's a phrase that haunts every moment of Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still, and not only because the writer-director chose to resolve the problem by taking his own life after completing his one and only feature film. The irony is that for his film, after depicting the desperate, intersecting lives of four people, Hu chose a different answer to the problem, something more in line with Samuel Beckett's familiar formulation, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." That's the choice made by the young Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) and Huang Ling (Wang Uvin) on the advice of the elderly Wang Jin (Xi Zi), even though the last has already admitted that in his long life he has never found anything different from the existential misery in which they exist. "So I have to sugar-coat it," he says. "There must be a difference." So the three of them, along with Wang Jin's young granddaughter, continue their journey to see the titular elephant, a ponderous symbol of elective inertia, introduced into the film by the gangster Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu), telling his girlfriend about "an elephant in Manzhouli. It sits there all day long. Perhaps some people keep stabbing it with forks. Or maybe it just enjoys sitting there. I don't know." This is a four-hour film that's anything but epic. Hu makes no attempt to enliven it with sensational moments, though it contains violence: two suicides, several other deaths including that of Wang Jin's small dog, and several beatings. But all of them occur just off camera. In perhaps the central event, when Wei Bu shoves the bully tormenting his friend down a flight of stairs, we barely even see the shove, but only hear the muffled sound of the fall, and finally glimpse the bully on the flight below. The bully, who dies in hospital, is Yu Cheng's brother, which serves to link his story with that of Wei Bu, but it's not the only death Yu has witnessed today: Earlier, he has slept with the wife of a friend who, on discovering Yu Cheng in their apartment, jumps off the roof of the building. We don't see that fall either. Instead, the camera lingers throughout the film in extended takes, usually keeping one or more of the characters in close-up. Even when encounters between characters take place, there's none of the usual cross-cutting, and often they enter and even remain out of focus in the background. If this sounds like mannered filmmaking, I'm afraid it often is. And if the existentialist drift of the narrative sounds pretentious, I'm afraid that's also true. And yet, this is a film that can draw you in and hold you in its spell for an unconscionably long time, simply because it's so beautifully assembled, so deft at drawing you into its world, holding you to its characters and their plight.

Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019)

Nell Williams, Viveik Kaira, and Aaron Phagura in Blinded by the Light

Cast: Viveik Kaira, Kulvider Ghir, Meera Ganatra, Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura, Dean-Charles Chapman, Hayley Atwell, Nikita Mehta, Tara Divina, David Hayman, Rob Brydon, Sally Phillips, Marcus Brigstocke, Olivia Poulet, Frankie Fox. Screenplay: Sarfraz Manzoor, Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges, based on a book by Manzoor. Cinematography: Ben Smithard. Production design: Nick Ellis. Film editing: Justin Krish. Music: A.R. Rahman.

Blinded by the Light is old-fashioned in several ways. For one, it's a feel-good movie in times that expect a little more edge to movies than it possesses. For another, it's devoted to a kind of idolatry of Bruce Springsteen's music that even in the year it depicts, 1987, was beginning to be a little old-hat. It's awash with nostalgia, especially when it tries to portray the triumph of innocence in the face of the economic hardship and unchecked racism of the Thatcher-Reagan era. The protagonist, Javed Khan (Viveik Kaira), is a British-Pakistani teenager whose father (Kulvider Ghir) gets laid off from his factory job and wants his only son to better the family's fortunes by upward mobility, which he defines as becoming a lawyer or an accountant or an estate agent. But Javed wants to write, and when he's introduced to the songs of Springsteen, he blossoms, leading to the eventual showdown with the old man. In the end, everything is resolved somewhat tritely by a Big Speech scene, in which Javed expresses both his respect for his father and his determination to be himself -- although being himself consists largely of trying to become a Pakistani Springsteen. Writer-director Gurinder Chadha has made this movie before, when it was called Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Like that film, Blinded by the Light is hard to resist, especially if you enjoy the early songs of Springsteen, which helped me endure the Reagan years the way they smooth out the Thatcher years for Javed. But resist it we should, if we want our movies to be more truthful and less candy-coated, which I think Springsteen himself would prefer.

Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954)

Dan O'Herlihy in Robinson Crusoe

Cast: Dan O'Herlihy, Jaime Fernández, Felipe de Alba, Chel López, José Chávez, Emilio Garabay. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Luis Buñuel, based on a novel by Daniel Defoe. Cinematography: Alex Phillips. Art direction: Edward Fitzgerald. Film editing: Carlos Savage, Alberto Valenzuela. Music: Anthony Collins.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those books I feel like I've read even when I haven't. Its myth, of the solitary man tormented by solitude but inwardly driven to survive, is among the more potent ones. But in a social context, it's also a fable about colonialism. Crusoe, at least in Luis Buñuel's version, is a man carrying the white man's burden, needing to master the environment and its other inhabitants. The ship that carries him to his destiny is involved in the slave trade, and one of the moments in the film that shocked me the most was when Crusoe decides to put Friday in leg shackles, which are among the items that, for some reason, he salvaged from the wreck of his ship. Even after the agony of his long solitude, when he longs to hear another human voice, his first thought when he encounters Friday is not that he has found a companion but that he's found a servant. Presuming to give Friday a name instead of learning the one we assume he must already have, Crusoe also introduces himself as "Master." Both of them must be identified by their relationship. Eventually, Crusoe recognizes Friday as friend as much as servant, admiring the skills he brings to their existence on the island, but it's also Crusoe's "civilization" to which the two men journey at the film's end, rather than remain in the world they have created for themselves. And the relinquishing of the island to the band of mutineers as punishment for their mutiny is filled with irony: Crusoe has founded a penal colony like Australia. Buñuel is acutely aware of these ironies, of course, laying them on without preachiness, just as he slyly undercuts Crusoe's religiosity by having Friday ask Crusoe an unanswerable question about the relationship between God and the devil. Dan O'Herlihy makes a fine Crusoe, in a performance that got him an Oscar nomination, and Jaime Fernández, who learned English for the part, is an excellent foil as Friday. It was Buñuel's first color film, though the print shown on the Criterion Channel suggests that it may be in need of some cleaning and restoration.

Double Harness (John Cromwell, 1933)

Ann Harding and William Powell in Double Harness

Cast: Ann Harding, William Powell, Lucile Browne, Henry Stephenson, Lilian Bond, George Meeker, Reginald Owen, Kay Hammond, Leigh Allen, Hugh Huntley, Wallis Clark, Fred Santley. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, based on a play by Edward Poor Montgomery. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: George Nichols Jr.

Double Harness is a rather brittle comedy of manners that might be better known if it hadn't vanished for years, owing to a dispute between producer Merian C. Cooper and RKO. Because it was withheld from release until Turner Classic Movies obtained the rights to it in 2007, we had one less opportunity to see Ann Harding, once expected to become a major Hollywood star on the strength of her looks and her stage-trained voice, the latter a great asset in the early years of talking pictures. Harding gives a good performance in Double Harness, but she lacked the vivid personality of actresses of the period who became bigger stars, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck, so her career never quite took off. She plays Joan Colby, member of a well-to-do family that finds itself on the skids in the depression, so that she and her giddy sister, Valerie (Lucile Browne), need to marry well in order to regain status. Valerie does marry, but her spendthrift ways keep her on the hunt for money to pay the debts she hides from her husband. Joan is taken with John Fletcher (William Powell), heir to a successful shipping company but more interested in playing polo than in running the business -- or in getting married. Joan overcomes the latter obstacle by a trick: She arranges for her father (Henry Stephenson) to discover her in Fletcher's apartment, which she has more or less moved into, one night. Fletcher does the right thing and marries her, unaware that he's been tricked, but he and Joan also come to an agreement that they will divorce after a suitable period of time elapses. Naturally, they begin to fall more deeply in love, as Fletcher begins to realize that Joan has not only made life more pleasant for him, she has also begun to take a hand in his shipping business. But then Valerie spills the beans about how Joan had tricked Fletcher into marrying her, and an old flame of his, Monica Page (Lilian Bond), takes advantage of his anger and tries to snare him for herself. And so on to the anticipated outcome. Double Harness is a little too arch and stagey for its own good, and the idea that a man might have to marry a young woman because she's found in his apartment at night was a little old-fashioned even at the time, but Harding and Powell do what they can with the material.

Uncut Gems (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2019)

Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems

Cast: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Judd Hirsch, Keith Williams Richards, Jonathan Aranbayev, Noa Fisher, The Weeknd, Mike Francesca, Jacob Igielski, Wayne Diamond. Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie. Music: Daniel Lopatin.

Hyperactive, motormouthed Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is trying to make it big in the bling trade, purveying jewelry, watches, and expensive geegaws to musicians, athletes, and the nouveau riche. But he keeps getting sidetracked by his own gambling and speculative ventures, the central one in Uncut Gems being an Ethiopian uncut black opal. The film begins in fact with a severely wounded Ethiopian miner at the site of the discovery of the opal. We then peer into the depths of the large uncut gemstone, a mysterious cosmic vision that eventually segues into the interior of Howard himself as he undergoes a colonoscopy. It's a striking journey, to be sure, and one that sets the tone for a movie that teeters between comedy and social consciousness, never quite resolving itself. The movie is held together by Sandler's performance, which seems to have taken many critics by surprise, even though he's done good work before for directors like James L. Brooks (Spanglish, 2004) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love, 2002). Spiraling into a chaos of his own making, taking his family and his mistress with him, Howard lives on the brink -- and dies there. The chief problem with the film is ending it: Howard can't be allowed to triumph, although he sort of does, or any hope of satisfying the demand for even poetic justice goes out the window. But the abruptness of his anticlimactic comeuppance seems just as arbitrary as a "happy ending" would have been. Better, I think, to have let Howard hustle his way onward into an ever more chaotic future. Worth watching for yet another dark safari conducted by the Safdie brothers, and for a career redefining performance by Sandler. 

Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935)

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Roberta

Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Helen Westley, Claire Dodd, Victor Varconi, Luis Alberni, Ferdinand Munier, Torben Meyer, Adrian Rosley, Bodil Rosing. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott, Glenn Tryon, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Cinematography: Edward Cronjager. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Jerome Kern, Max Steiner.

If Roberta is less well-known than most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, it's partly because it was out of circulation for a long time after 1945, when MGM bought up the rights to the film and the Broadway musical on which it was based, planning to remake it in Technicolor as a vehicle for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. That plan fell through, and the actual remake, Lovely to Look At (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952) with Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Red Skelton, and Marge and Gower Champion, is nothing special. But MGM's hold on the property meant that, unlike the other Astaire-Rogers films, it didn't show up on television until the 1970s. But it was also a kind of throwback to the first of their movies, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933), in that they weren't the top-billed stars of Roberta, and their plot is secondary to that of the star, Irene Dunne, and her leading man, Randolph Scott. It doesn't matter much: What we remember from the film are the great Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, "I'll Be Hard to Handle," "I Won't Dance," and the reprises of "Lovely to Look At" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Scott's inability to sing resulted in the big number for his character in the Broadway version, "You're Devastating," being cut from the song score of the movie. "I Won't Dance" was brought in from another Jerome Kern musical, and Kern and Jimmy McHugh composed that fashion-show/beauty-pageant classic "Lovely to Look At," with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, for the film, earning Roberta its only Oscar nomination. Except when Astaire and Rogers are doing their magic, the film is a little draggy, and Dunne and Scott strike no sparks. Look for a blond Lucille Ball, draped in a feathery wrap, as one of the models in the fashion show.