Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

Cast: Günes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu, Elit Iscan, Ilayda Akdogan, Nihal G. Koldas, Ayberk Pekcan, Bahar Kerimoglu, Burak Yigit, Erol Afsin, Suzanne Marrot, Serife Kara, Aynur Komecoglu, Sevval Aydin. Screenplay: Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Alice Winocour. Cinematography: David Chizallet, Ersin Gok. Production design: Turker Isci. Film editing: Mathilde Van de Moortel. Music: Warren Ellis.

The sheer energy that bursts from the screen as the five girls in Mustang play and rebel is the film's greatest strength. It's a story about five Turkish girls in a small village, orphaned sisters raised by their grandmother and an uncle, whose joie de vivre gets them into trouble when a busybody neighbor sees them playing with some male schoolmates, celebrating the arrival of the end of term, and interprets their horseplay as shamefully erotic. The girls are swiftly imprisoned in their home, which becomes a "school for wives," as the youngest girl, Lale (Günes Sensoy), puts it in her occasional voiceover commentary. Eventually, two of the girls are married off, one commits suicide, and two escape to Istanbul, which evokes for them what Moscow did for the sisters in Chekhov's play. The casting is the chief marvel of the film -- none of the girls is a professional actress and they aren't really siblings -- and director and co-writer Deniz Gamze Ergüven makes the most of it. She's less successful at handling the more sensational elements of the plot, the molestation of some of the girls and the suicide, which are treated a little too obliquely. The film was not received well in the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but since it was co-produced by France, Germany, and Turkey, it was eligible to be submitted as the French contender for the Oscar, and earned a nomination.    

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi. Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch, Marion Bessay. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Marco Bittner Rosser. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Josef van Wissem.

With its focus on vital fluids, the vampire genre has always been about sex, especially since at the end of the sexually repressed Victorian era, Bram Stoker gave it one of its definitive expressions in Dracula, where the fear of sexuality gets turned into a fear of a living death. But with the fall of so many sexual taboos in the 20th and 21st century, vampirism itself no longer holds the same kind of terrors. It takes an imagination like Jim Jarmusch's to turn things around, to make the vampires afraid of the living. Only Lovers Left Alive is only partly a post-AIDS fable, in which the substance that sustains a vampire can itself prove deadly. Jarmusch's Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are age-old predators reduced in this century to procuring only carefully screened blood, uncontaminated by the misadventures of human beings. He gets his from a hospital researcher who calls himself "Dr. Watson" (Jeffrey Wright), she from an old friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), whose source we never discover. Jarmusch is casual about providing the backstories of his characters; we have to take them for who and what they are, with only tantalizing hints about their long past and even much of their present lives. We gather that this Marlowe is the historical one, who didn't really die in a tavern brawl in 1593, but lived on in exile where he ghost-wrote the plays of Shakespeare and at one point, presumably late in his life, since he is quite elderly when we see him, became a vampire and moved to Tangier. We never learn, either, why Adam and Eve have gone their separate ways after having been married at least three times in their so-called lives. She, too, lives in Morocco, but he has settled in a desolate, abandoned section of Detroit, where he spends his nights composing music and tinkering with electronics. The plot begins when she comes to visit and they are soon joined by her younger sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), an incorrigible troublemaker. But plot isn't much to the point in Jarmusch's film, which is a character study of two sophisticated people who have lived long enough to see the world and human beings (whom he calls "zombies") change around them. It can be said that some of the humor in the movie is a little obvious, sometimes more like a spoof of vampire pictures than the elegant setup of the film deserves. But this is, I think, one of Jarmusch's best films, simply because he has gathered a wonderful company of actors and given them a finely wrought atmosphere to perform in.

Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, 2018)

Tang Wei and Huang Jue in Long Day's Journey Into Night

Cast: Huang Jue, Tang Wei, Sylvia Chang, Lee Hong-Chi, Chen Yongzhong, Luo Feiyang, Chloe Maayan, Tuan Chun-hao, Bi Yanmin, Xie Lixun, Qi Xi, Ming-Dao, Long Zezhi. Screenplay: Bi Gan. Cinematography: David Chizallet, Wang Dong Li, Wu Changhua. Production design: Liu Qiang. Film editing: Qin Yanan. Music: Hsu Chin-Yuan, Lim Giong.

Bi Gan's second feature feels to me like the work of a young director whose debut feature, Kaili Blues (2015), may have gotten more praise than was good for him. It has the first film's relative indifference to conventional narrative and tendency to dazzle with cinematic technique, namely impossibly long traveling takes. In Kaili Blues, there was a breathtaking one-shot sequence that lasted 41 minutes, so almost inevitably Long Day's Journey Into Night has to extend its climactic take to almost an hour. I'm not saying that the second film is a failure -- it may one day be certified as a masterpiece -- but that Bi is in danger of becoming a mannerist filmmaker, one who lets his infatuation with the possibilities of his medium betray him into excess, to a preoccupation with form and style that fails to serve the imaginative potential of film. Long Day's Journey had the critics counting allusions, from the film noir setup to the apparent hommages to any number of other directors, not to mention his tribute to his literary heroes, evoking Eugene O'Neill in the English title of his film, and Roberto Bolaño in the Chinese title, which translates to an equivalent of Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth. More than one critic has added Kafka and Borges to the source list, and I will add another: Bi's exploration through memories and dreams of Kaili, in southwestern China, reminds me of Faulkner's treatment of the North Mississippi past. And yet, Bi is his own auteur, one whose next film is bound to be met with eager anticipation by many. He just bears the burden of doing something new next time. 

The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

Cheryl Dunye and Valarie Walker in The Watermelon Woman

Cast: Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner, Valarie Walker, Lisa Marie Bronson, Cheryl Clarke, Irene Dunye, Brian Freeman, Ira Jeffries, Alexandra Juhasz, Camille Paglia, Sarah Schulman, V.S. Brodie, Shelley Olivier, David Rakoff, Toshi Reagon, Christopher Ridenhour, Kat Robertson, Jocelyn Taylor. Screenplay: Cheryl Dunye, Doug McKeown. Cinematography: Michelle Crenshaw. Production design: Robert Holtzman. Film editing: Annie Taylor. Music: Paul Shapiro.

Fiction is often a surer way of getting to the truth than fact. Or as Cheryl Dunye puts it in a title card at the end: "Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction." So by inventing a Black lesbian film actress of the 1930s, Fae Richards, known as "The Watermelon Woman," Dunye is able to capture some of the unwritten history of Black women who also happened to be lesbians in the era when to be Black, female, and lesbian was a kind of triple whammy. What sustains the film is the skill with which Dunye crafts her Watermelon Woman, an analog to the actresses like Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, and Butterfly McQueen who found themselves stuck playing maids and mammies, upholders of the straight white norm, in motion pictures. Dunye manages to almost make us believe in the existence of Fae Richards, helped by photographer Zoe Leonard, who shot the stills and archival photographs that give the actress a reality she never really had. The Watermelon Woman could be too easily pigeonholed as a "niche film," one aimed at a Black audience or a lesbian audience or even an audience of film scholars who get the allusions to real actors (and directors such as Dorothy Arzner) in the movie. But it manages to transcend such reductive labeling. It's a film about marginalizing, misrepresentation, stereotyping, and all the common forms of willful ignorance of lives other than the ones we consider normative. That it's also often a very funny film doesn't hurt. I happen to think Dunye's movie falls apart toward the end, when it doesn't reach a logical or emotional climax, but that's not a fatal flaw for a movie of such penetrating intelligence.

Hollywood Shuffle (Robert Townsend, 1987)

Jimmy Woodard and Robert Townsend in Hollywood Shuffle

Cast: Robert Townsend, Anne-Marie Johnson, Craigus R. Johnson, Helen Martin, Starletta DuPois, David McKnight, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Lou B. Washington, Brad Sanders, John Witherspoon, Eugene Robert Glazer, Lisa Mende, Dom Irrera. Screenplay: Robert Townsend, Keenen Ivory Wayans. Cinematography: Peter Deming. Production design: Melba Katzman Farquhar. Film editing: W.O. Garrett. Music: Udi Harpaz, Patrice Rushen.

Thirteen years ago, Vanity Fair ran an article about how Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle hadn't aged in its then-30 years of existence. But in their essentials, neither the article nor the movie has aged since then. Granted, some of the movie's satiric targets, like the TV reviews of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert or the search for Eddie Murphy clones, are no longer fresh, and movie and TV stereotypes are somewhat more self-consciously maintained today. Now, Townsend would probably be lampooning the Magical Negro stereotype instead of the pimps and hoods that his comedy centers on. And Hollywood Shuffle is a little more brash and raw than might win critical favor today. Still, as a wakeup call for Black artists and for white audiences, the movie still rings true and cuts deep.

Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold, 2019)

Matt Damon and Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari

Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal, Catriona Balfe, Josh Lucas, Noah Jupe, Tracy Letts, Remo Girone, Ray McKinnon, JJ Feild. Screenplay: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: François Audouy. Film editing: Andrew Buckland, Michael McCusker, Dick Westervelt. Music: Marco Beltrami, Buck Sanders.

They don't make 'em like they used to do, except when they do, and with Ford v Ferrari they did. This story about spunky underdogs taking on the big boys of the racing world could have been made in the 1930s by Raoul Walsh or Henry Hathaway or any capable action movie director. The difference then would have been that the bad guys would just have been crooks and cheats, whereas in Ford v Ferrari they are bureaucrats, corporate suits stifling innovation and initiative. Even though the title suggests an international rivalry, the key conflict pits "real" racers like Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale) against the bean-counters and marketing M.B.A.s like Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), sucking up to the boss, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). Granted, there is an international rivalry at work, with the Ford Motor Co. trying to recapture some of its old eminence by taking on Ferrari, the Italian auto manufacturer that has for years dominated the prestigious 24-hour road race at Le Mans. What spurs this rivalry is a loss of face by Ford after being finessed out of the acquisition of Ferrari and then being insulted by Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) himself. Shelby and Miles have not always been on the best of terms -- Miles once threw a wrench at Shelby, and the two have a fistfight in mid-film -- but they get sucked into the Ford vs. Ferrari competition because they both love auto racing and are tempted by the opportunity to build the world's greatest race car. Naturally, it all ends in triumph, but not in the way an old-fashioned movie would: The bureaucrats manage to tarnish their victory. The movie doesn't quite avoid the old clichés: Miles has the usual cute kid and loving wife, with Catriona Balfe taking on the latter role, an updated version of June Allyson dutifully supporting James Stewart in all those 1950s movies. Still, Balfe plays it well, particularly in the scene in which she drives the family station wagon the way her husband drives his race cars, scaring some sense into him. The leads, too, are fine. Damon gives Shelby substance, a taciturn cunning, when he's dealing with the volatile Miles or with the stodgy suits. Bale's Miles has a lean and hungry look that suggests his unpredictability, but he manages to make the character human in his scenes with Balfe and Noah Jupe as their son, Peter. One other difference from the old movies: A director like Walsh or Hathaway would have brought the film in at a tidy 90 minutes or so. James Mangold lets Ford v Ferrari sprawl over 152 minutes, with some inevitable sagging in between the snazzily edited racing scenes.

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)

Alva Rogers, Trula Hoosier, and Barbarao in Daughters of the Dust

Cast: Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbarao, Trula Hoosier, Umar Abdurrahamn, Adisa Anderson, Kaycee Moore, Bahni Turpin, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Tommy Redmond Hicks, Tony King, Cornell Royal, Vertamae Grosvenor. Screenplay: Julie Dash. Cinematography: Arthur Jafa. Production design: Kerry Marshall. Film editing: Joseph Burton, Amy Carey. Music: John Barnes.

The Great Migration, the movement northward of Black Americans in the 20th century, was one of the most unreported major stories of its day, and it's only in hindsight that authors and filmmakers have been able to re-create the immense cultural upheaval that it represents. Julie Dash does it in the most intimate and delicate way possible, by letting us meet the Peazant family on the eve of their departure from the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for an unknown future in the North. It's one of those films that need a solid grounding in American history, and particularly in the history of Black people in America, to be fully appreciated, for Dash throws us into the lives of the Peazant family and the centuries of tradition, religion, and oppression that they embody, not to teach us about these things, but to spur us to learn. The film was originally released without subtitles to aid the viewer's comprehension of the dialogue, spoken in the Gullah dialect, and though I'm happy to have that help now, the beauty of the setting and the faces in it communicate nearly as much as the words. It's a film about the ability to endure and prevail, as Faulkner might have put it. 

D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949)

Neville Brand and Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, Neville Brand, Laurette Luez, Jess Kirkpatrick, Cay Forester, Frank Jaquet, Lawrence Dobkin, Frank Gerstle, Carol Hughes, Michael Ross, Donna Sanborn. Screenplay: Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene. Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Arthur H. Nadel. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Who knew that being a notary public could be so dangerous? D.O.A. is a frenetic, mostly implausible thriller that somehow works, even though no one in it acts like a human being. I mean, if you found that you'd been poisoned and had only a short time to live, you'd get in touch with the police, check into a hospital, and call your loved ones, right? Not Frank Bigelow, a tax accountant on a rather odd vacation to San Francisco, who visits a jazz bar where he's given a drink containing a "luminous toxin." The next morning, feeling a little unwell, he goes to a doctor who gives him the bad news, so he rushes to a hospital for a second opinion, and then, following a slim lead, rushes to Los Angeles to try to find out why he's being done in. All this rushing, which includes a famous tracking shot of Bigelow running down Market Street, elbowing aside the crowds, can't have been good for him, perhaps only speeding up the effects of the poison. But by this time we have been so caught up in his plight that we don't really care. One of the reasons is that Edmond O'Brien, an actor who was typically a kind of movie Everyman, is perfectly cast as Bigelow. The other is that Rudolph Maté, abetted by a pounding score by Dimitri Tiomkin, never gives us time for anything so mundane as thought. It's a film full of absurdities, starting with Bigelow's curiously distant relationship with his secretary and lover, Paula (Pamela Britton), and continuing through his arrival at a hotel in San Francisco during "Market Week," where hordes of salesmen, clients, and (presumably) hookers are partying. (I don't know who thought it was a great idea to add a slide-whistle wolf whistle on the soundtrack every time a pretty woman appears on screen. Surely it isn't indicated on Tiomkin's score.) Anyway, Bigelow gets swept away to a bar where a lot of hipsters are grooving to some hyped-up jazz, and it's there that he gets slipped the mickey. The film takes off and never lets up from there, with some fisticuffs and gunplay and a toothy psychopath named Chester (Neville Brand), as the plot thickens so much that by the end I really couldn't tell you why Bigelow's notarizing a bill of sale put him in such final jeopardy. Nor do I care: By the end, I was so exhausted by its audacious silliness that I was content to accept it as the classic good bad movie.

The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)

Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers

Cast: Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson, Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Manfredi Aliquo, David Ford, Daniel Franco, Rossana Canghiari, Fabrizio Sergenti Castellani, Mario Cotone, Giancarlo Previati, Antonio Serrano. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Dante Spinotti. Production design: Gianni Quaranta. Film editing: Bill Pankow. Music: Angelo Badalamenti. 

Like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers exploits the enclosed and labyrinthine character of Venice for sinister potential, but unlike Roeg, Schrader and screenwriter Harold Pinter, following Ian McEwan's book, make the city into a place where psychosis and not the supernatural seems to flourish. It was probably the wrong place for a handsome young couple like Colin (Rupert Everett) and Mary (Natasha Richardson) to come to, as they say, "work on their relationship." She is the divorced mother of two small children, an actress who does voiceover work for commercials; he's apparently some kind of editor, for he sometimes fiddles around with a manuscript that he proclaims "unreadable." But what matters more than what they do is how they look: They're quite beautiful. And that attracts the notice of Robert (Christopher Walken), a bar owner who surreptitiously photographs them and, we later learn, takes the pictures back to his opulent flat to show his disabled wife, Caroline (Helen Mirren). Eventually, Robert lures Colin and Mary to his bar, where he tells them stories of his past, of his cruel, overbearing father. Colin and Mary get lost on the way back to their hotel, and an exhausted (and perhaps drugged) Mary collapses, so they spend the night huddled in an alley. The next day, they agree that Robert is not someone they want to spend a lot of time with, but nevertheless he manages to find them and invite them to his apartment to meet his wife. The spider has lured them to his web. Eventually, we will learn that Robert is a psychopath and that his relationship with Caroline is sadomasochistic. That fact makes the emotional and sexual vulnerability of Colin and Mary more acute. This is one of those instances where the casting of an actor, namely Everett, inevitably adds a layer of significance to the character he's playing. Everett had come out as gay only the year before The Comfort of Strangers was made, and it's almost too easy to read this aspect of the actor's real life into his art. When we first meet Colin and Mary there's an element of sexual tension between them: They are sleeping in separate beds in their hotel room, and at one point she says that what he really needs is more sex. Later, after their encounter with Robert and Caroline has released something in them, Colin and Mary have passionate sex, but at one point he admits that he has always wondered what it's like to be the woman during sex. Robert, meanwhile, accuses Colin of being a "communist poof," and later tells him that he has told the men in the bar that Colin is his lover. I can't help feeling that Schrader has exploited Everett's real-life sexuality in the film, and Everett himself has notoriously advised gay actors not to come out of the closet if they want major careers -- his own hit the skids not long after the release of The Comfort of Strangers. Setting that aside, the film is opulently staged and filmed, well acted, and Schrader sets up the revelations of its plot and characters skillfully. But there's also something airless and perfunctory about it. I don't know enough about Colin and Mary to feel a sense of violation at what happens to them, to regard it as more than just formulaic psychological thriller stuff.  

The Cat and the Fiddle (William K. Howard, 1934)

Ramon Novarro and Jeanette MacDonald in The Cat and the Fiddle

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Jeanette MacDonald, Frank Morgan, Charles Butterworth, Jean Hersholt, Vivienne Segal, Frank Conroy, Henry Armetta, Adrienne D'Ambicourt, Joseph Cawthorn. Screenplay: Bella Spewack, Sam Spewack, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and Jerome Kern. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke, Ray Rennahan, Harold Rosson. Art direction: Alexander Toluboff. Film editing: Frank E. Hull. Music: Herbert Stothart, songs by Jerome Kern and Otto A. Harbach.

The Cat and the Fiddle marks a change in Jeanette MacDonald's career: It was her first film for MGM after the classic series of witty, racy movies co-starring Maurice Chevalier at Paramount, and it neatly bridges her way into the more famous but less interesting operetta films she made with Nelson Eddy at MGM. Here her co-star is Ramon Novarro, a charming actor with great comic skills and a nice singing voice, but they don't mesh the way she did with either Chevalier or Eddy; she seems a little too stiff, he a little too boyish. Made before the full introduction of the Production Code, the movie tries for some of the sexiness of the Paramount films made under the aegis of the master of the sly wink, Ernst Lubitsch. The lovers, Novarro's Victor and MacDonald's Shirley, live together without benefit of clergy, a thing impossible under the code. There is fun to be had watching the film: The dialogue -- among the uncredited contributors to the screenplay are Anita Loos and James Kevin McGuinness -- is often smart and funny, the songs are pleasant, and the giddy nonsense of the plot skips along merrily. And at the end there's a nice surprise: The final reel is in Technicolor, giving audiences a first glimpse of MacDonald's red hair. But this is minor MGM musical stuff, even in comparison with the later MacDonald/Eddy movies.