Lions Love (...and Lies) (Agnès Varda, 1969)

James Rado, Viva, and Gerome Ragni in Lions Love (...and Lies)

Cast: Viva, James Rado, Gerome Ragni, Shirley Clarke, Carlos Clarens, Eddie Constantine, Max Laemmle, Steve Kenis, Hal Landers, Peter Bogdanovich, Billie Dixon, Richard Bright. Screenplay: Agnès Varda. Cinematography: Stevan Larner. Art direction: Jack Wright III. Film editing: Robert Dalva, Carolyn Hicks. Music: Joseph Byrd.

Things have been bad before. Maybe Agnès Varda's pseudo-documentary Lions Love (...and Lies) is just what we need to watch in this time of a rampaging pandemic and collapsing economy presided over by a corrupt and malignant narcissist, if only to remind us that things looked pretty grim in the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War seemingly unstoppable and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy casting a pall. We survived that, and we'll survive this. We can hope. Not that Lions Love starts out on a grim note. Instead, we find ourselves at a performance of Michael McClure's play The Beard, about an encounter between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, and then hanging out in a Hollywood mansion with one of Andy Warhol's entourage, Viva, and the creators of the musical Hair, James Rado and Gerome Ragni. Frivolity with an edge, you might say. But things darken with the arrival of filmmaker Shirley Clarke, playing herself as a New Yorker in La La Land, where she hopes to get studio backing for a film. She's not at all at home there, not in the hedonistic way of the aforementioned trio, who revel in the glitz of the setting. And then the calendar begins to remind us that this is 1968, the windup of Bobby Kennedy's campaign for the Democratic nomination in California, and the darkness deepens -- at least for the moment. To add to the chaos of Kennedy's assassination, Viva receives word that Warhol himself has been shot. Yet before long, the trio are back in their old hedonistic mode. Varda handles this tonally complex subject (I hesitate to call it a story) with all the irony it deserves, and even makes an on-screen appearance when Clarke rebels against the demands of Varda's script that she attempt suicide. It's a movie that only looks like a mess, because once it was over, I found myself sorting through my own memories of the period to try to bring order out of the chaos it portrays. Lions Love is history as tragicomedy.

The Reckoning (Paul McGuigan, 2002)

Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany in The Reckoning

Cast: Paul Bettany, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Gina McKee, Simon McBurney, Tom Hardy, Stuart Wells, Vincent Cassel, Ewen Bremner, Matthew Macfadyen, Hamish McColl, Simon Pegg, Marián Aguilera, Trevor Steedman, Elvira Minguez. Screenplay: Mark Mills, based on a novel by Barry Unsworth. Cinematography: Peter Sova. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: Andrew Hulme. Music: Adrian Lee, Mark Mancina.

Nobody, I think, sets out to make a mediocre movie; they just happen to turn out that way. Certainly, the makers of The Reckoning must have had hopes of excellence when they hired such fine actors as Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox, Vincent Cassel, Matthew Macfadyen, and a 20-something up-and-comer named Tom Hardy. The story they wanted to film came from Morality Play, Barry Unsworth's novel, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, about the theater in medieval England as it edged away from dramatized Bible stories into secular material, mixed with a murder mystery solved by a renegade priest. Unfortunately, The Reckoning is something of a mess, starting with the priest, Nicholas (Paul Bettany), cutting off his hair and escaping through the woods after being discovered in flagrante with a married woman, whose husband he killed in the ensuing melee. On the road, he encounters a troupe of traveling players headed by Martin (Dafoe) and persuades them that he would be an asset to their company. They go to a village by the castle of Lord De Guise (Cassel) where the trial of a woman accused of killing a teenage boy has just concluded with her conviction and sentence to be hanged. One thing leads to another as Nicholas becomes involved with proving the woman's innocence and exposing De Guise as a murderous pedophile, dragging not only the acting troupe but also the villagers into his exposé. The narrative is muddled by too many unnecessary flashbacks into Nicholas's past, by the intervention of a character known only as "the King's Justice" (Macfadyen), and by a half-hearted attempt to strike up a romance between Nicholas and the woman accompanying the acting troupe, Martin's sister, Sarah (Gina McKee). The brightest moment in the movie comes when the players perform their version of the story of Adam and Eve, with Hardy's Straw, the actor tasked with playing women, as Eve in a sort of bare-breasted body suit and a ropy blond wig. He looks a little like Botticelli's Venus in the get-up. If The Reckoning had more moments like that, and less of the mystery-solving plot, it might have been a better movie, but as it is, the mise-en-scène is cluttered and gloomy and the action unconvincing.

Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

Evelyn Preer and Jack Chenault in Within Our Gates

Cast: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith, Charles D. Lucas, Bernice Ladd, Mrs. Evelyn, William Starks, Mattie Edwards, Ralph Johnson, E.G. Tatum, Grant Edwards, Grant Gorman. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No credited cinematographer, production designer, or film editor.

Famous as the oldest surviving feature film made by a Black director -- Oscar Micheaux's first movie, The Homesteader (1919), is lost -- Within Our Gates is not only a powerful response to the kind of racism represented by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) but it's also a clear demonstration of Micheaux's skill as a director. It spares no one in its portrayal of the poison of racism: Its Black sycophants, toadying to the dominant white power, are as odious as its white bigots. The story centers on Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer), an educated Black woman who has moved north to try to work on behalf of the people she left behind in the South. She carries with her a secret about her parentage that is finally revealed only when she returns to the South to aid a Black minister who is trying to run a school. Micheaux lays several subplots, and perhaps a few too many melodramatic coincidences, onto this central one, but he keeps the drive of the film moving steadily through the climactic lynching scene and the revelation of Sylvia's secret. Within Our Gates was reconstructed from a print found in a Spanish archive, and although there are some visible gaps -- the largest one explained by a title card -- the restored version is remarkably coherent.

Girl With Green Eyes (Desmond Davis, 1964)

Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in Girl With Green Eyes

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Peter Finch, Lynn Redgrave, Marie Keen, Arthur O'Sullivan, Julian Glover, T.P. McKenna, Liselotte Goettinger, Pat Laffan, Eileen Crowe, May Craig, Joe Lynch, Yolande Turner, Harry Brogan, Michael C. Hennessy, Joseph O'Donnell, Michael O'Brien, David Kelly. Screenplay: Edna O'Brien, based on her novel. Cinematography: Manny Wynn. Art direction: Edward Marshall. Film editing: Brian Smedley-Aston, Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

Rita Tushingham had a brief period as a movie star after a striking debut in Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey in 1961. For a time she was the embodiment of British young womanhood, with an appeal that suggested a more homely, down-to-earth Audrey Hepburn. Girl With Green Eyes, her fourth feature, captures her at her best. She plays Kate Brady, a bright young Dublin shop-girl, raised on an Irish farm and educated in a convent school, who finds herself out of her depth when she gets involved with Eugene Gaillard, a much older intellectual, married but on the brink of divorce, played by Peter Finch. He's taken with her girlish frankness, she with his maturity and wealth of the kind of experience she has only read about in books. Yet a clash of cultures is inevitable: She's still clinging to her Roman Catholic upbringing, attending Mass every week, and although he prides himself on being a kind of lone wolf, a writer and translator who lives alone in his large house on the outskirts of Dublin, he's still tied to a coterie of cynical sophisticates. It can't work, and it doesn't, especially when her family learns that she's sleeping with an older man who is about to commit the mortal sin of divorce. At the end, she sets sail for London with her boisterous friend Baba (Lynn Redgrave) and a life more in keeping with her age and experience. It's a coming-of-age movie, and a pretty good one, with fine performances all round, solidly directed by Desmond Davis -- it was his first film as a director after working as camera operator for many years. It was Tony Richardson, for whom he had worked on A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), who gave him the Edna O'Brien novel on which the film is based and suggested he direct it.

Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2010)

Mimi Branescu, Maria Popistasu, Sasa Paul-Szel, and Mirela Oprisor in Tuesday, After Christmas

Cast: Mimi Branescu, Mirela Oprisor, Maria Popistasu, Sasa Paul-Szel, Victor Rebengiuc, Dragos Bucur, Dana Dembinski Medeleanu, Silvia Nastase, Adrian Vancica, Carmen Lopazan, Ioana Blaj. Screenplay: Alexandru Baciu, Radu Muntean, Razvan Radulescu. Cinematography: Tudor Lucaciu. Production design: Sorin Dima. Film editing: Alma Cazacu, Cristina Hincu, Matei Ovejan, Andu Radu, Andrei Scutaru.

Tuesday, After Christmas has virtually no plot. It's more of a series of tableaus, scenes composed of long takes, as the marriage of Paul (Mimi Branescu) and Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) disintegrates under the pressure of Paul's affair with Raluca (Maria Popistasu). It takes place over the Christmas weekend, starting with the naked Paul and Raluca in bed, followed by scenes of Christmas shopping by Paul and Adriana, a visit by Paul and Adriana and their daughter to the girl's dentist, who is none other than Raluca, Paul's visit to Raluca in another city where she's gone to see her mother, climaxing in a scene in which Paul confesses the affair to Adriana, followed by their separation, and concluding with a terrifically uncomfortable Christmas dinner with Paul's parents, who are, like the daughter, still unaware of the impending divorce. It ends on a quiet note, a simple gesture in which Adriana hands a present to Paul behind her back. The film gets its forward drive from the performances, from the things the characters say -- and don't say -- to each other. It's a fly-on-the-wall movie, with the viewer stuck there uncomfortably watching things work out, tempted to flee but hypnotized by our own voyeuristic interest in the way things will go next. There's a theatricality to the film in Radu Muntean's use of long takes, each of which lasts several minutes, making us aware of the skill of performers who can't rely on multiple retakes to get a scene right, but it never feels stagy. Instead, it feels observed, which may be the film's strength for those who like to savor the moment as well as its greatest weakness for those who want an imposed significance.

The Merchant of Venice (Michael Radford, 2004)

Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins, Al Pacino, Zuleikha Robinson, Kris Marshall, Charlie Cox, Heather Goldenhersh, Mackenzie Crook, John Sessions, Gregor Fisher, Ron Cook, Allan Corduner, Anton Rodgers, David Harewood, Antonio Gil. Screenplay: Michael Radford, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Bruno Rubeo. Film editing: Lucia Zucchetti. Music: Jocelyn Pook.

Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice is a respectable, almost satisfying version of an unsatisfying play. To put it mildly, The Merchant of Venice has not worn well over time, especially in the post-Holocaust world, and not just because of the potential for anti-Semitic caricature in the presentation of the Jewish moneylender, Shylock. Taken as a whole, it's one of Shakespeare's most cynical plays, a portrait of mistrust, not only between Christians and Jews, but also between men and women, husbands and wives, old and young, rich and poor, and perhaps, if we adhere to the contemporary reading that seems to inflect Radford's version, between gay and straight. It's a play full of "othering." In that context, the play's two most familiar speeches, Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes" and Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strained" stand out, not as the homiletic antidotes to the prevalent mistrust in the play that they have often been taken to be, but as an ironic response to the omnipresent reality of avarice and prejudice that informs the play. Radford has done a good job of emphasizing the unsavory side of the mercantile life presented in the play. For all that Bassanio and Portia are embodiments of the traditional romantic hero and heroine of Shakespeare comedy, it also becomes clear that they enter into their relationship with less than noble sentiments: Bassanio needs money, which is why he goes to wive it wealthily in Belmont. Portia needs to be relieved of the absurd burden imposed by her late father's will, which leaves to blind chance the identity of her future husband. Radford also underscores the fact that the real love match of the play is between two men, Antonio and Bassanio, with the former willing to risk his fortune and eventually his life for the latter, whereas Bassanio can't even be bound not to part with the ring Portia has given him. It's a queer play indeed. The film is full of good performances, starting with Al Pacino's as Shylock, perhaps the raison d'être of the film. The part could have brought out Pacino's worst scenery chewing, but he reins himself in to emphasize the long-suffering Shylock, not the bloodthirsty Shylock, and in the end makes the character less stereotypically avaricious. Jeremy Irons is most effective when he shows Antonio's increasing awareness that he has been trapped, partly at least by his love for Bassanio. Joseph Fiennes is less effective as the wooer of Portia than he is as the stalwart friend of Antonio, but that's partly because Lynn Collins maintains Portia as the upper hand in their relationship -- so much so, that we might wonder what she sees in him. Radford has trimmed and rearranged some of the play, downgrading its great purple passage, Lorenzo's speech to Jessica that opens the somewhat anticlimactic Act V, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank." In fact, he gives the opening lines of the speech to an off-screen singer, and lets Lorenzo pick up with "Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold." It's a sacrifice of poetry for the sake of drama, and I won't complain. There's poetry enough in the handsome production design and cinematography, full of echoes of Renaissance art. 

Ten Nights in a Barroom (Roy Calnek, 1926)

Lawrence Chenault and Charles Gilpin in Ten Nights in a Barroom

Cast: Charles Gilpin, Myra Burwell, Lawrence Chenault, Harry Henderson, William A. Clayton Jr., Ethel Smith, Arline Mickey, Edgar Moore, Reginald Hoffer, William J. Milton. Based on a novel by Timothy Shay Arthur. No credited screenwriter, cinematographer, production designer, or film editor.

Timothy Shay Arthur's 1854 novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There is sometimes called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Temperance movement, especially after it was turned into a play in 1858 by William W. Pratt and began touring the country. Not surprisingly, it was made into a movie as early as 1901, and at least four remakes preceded this all-Black film, credited to director Roy Calnek and the Colored Players of Philadelphia. The failure of Prohibition tarnished the property a bit, and the last known version, the only talkie, was made by William A. O'Connor in 1931. The 1926 film holds up well for many reasons, including the performance of Charles Gilpin as Joe Morgan, who turns to drink after he's cheated out of the mill he owns by Simon Slade (Lawrence Chenault, a character actor mainstay of Black film in the era). Gilpin, who founded his own theatrical company in Harlem, was the creator of the title role of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, but was fired from the play for too many conflicts with O'Neill over the racial epithets the play forced him to utter. (He was replaced by Paul Robeson, who became famous for the part.) Gilpin gives a natural, untheatrical performance as Morgan, whose downfall leads to the death of his young daughter -- a very effective young performer who is unidentified in the credits and in any other source I've found. There's also some skillfully directed and edited action at the climax of the film, when a mob burns down Slade's barroom, with the evil gambler Harvey Green (William A. Clayton Jr.) trapped inside, and Morgan pursues Slade in a rowboat chase on the river. Though the didacticism and melodrama, along with some unfortunate attempts at humor featuring Arline Mickey as the dime-novel addict Mehitable Carwright and Edgar Moore as a drunk called Sample Swichel, slow things down a bit, Ten Nights in a Barroom stays watchable today.

This Means War (McG, 2012)

Tom Hardy, Reese Witherspoon, and Chris Pine in This Means War

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, Til Schweiger, Chelsea Handler, John Paul Ruttan, Abigail Spencer, Angela Bassett, Rosemary Harris, George Touliatos. Screenplay: Timothy Dowling, Simon Kinberg, Marcus Gautesen. Cinematography: Russell Carpenter. Production design: Martin Laing. Film editing: Nicolas De Toth. Music: Christoph Beck.

Professionalism consists of doing your best even when the task assigned to you isn't worthy of your talents. This Means War certifies the professionalism of Tom Hardy, Chris Pine, and Reese Witherspoon, who do every absurd thing and speak every inane line that they're given as if the project warranted their full commitment. The experience of making the film caused Hardy to vow that he'll never do another rom-com, and it's likely that Pine and Witherspoon don't highlight the movie on their résumés. The film is, in short, a terrible mess, a mashup of action movie and sex farce, almost unwatchable except for the sheer charisma of its three principles. Its chief virtue, aside from the handsome performers, is that it's short: only 97 minutes, after being reduced from a director's cut of 107 minutes. This reduction seems to have jettisoned the backstory about the bad guys who put the three leads in jeopardy, making the film less coherent but probably more tolerable. Once upon a time, the presence of Hardy, Pine, and Witherspoon -- as well as such skilled performers as Angela Bassett and Rosemary Harris in barely there supporting roles -- would have been easy to explain: Under the studio system, stars were obligated by their contracts to do what they were handed. But that system vanished half a century ago, and nothing can justify wasting the time and talent of actors like these on This Means War.

The Official Story (Luis Puenzo, 1985)

Héctor Alterio and Norma Aleandro in The Official Story

Cast: Norma Aleandro, Héctor Alterio, Chunchuna Villafañe, Hugo Arana, Guillermo Battaglia, Chela Ruíz, Patricio Contreras, Maria Luisa Robledo, Anibal Morixe, Jorge Petraglia, Analia Castro. Screenplay: Luis Puenzo, Aída Bortnik. Cinematography: Félix Monti. Production design: Abel Facello. Film editing: Juan Carlos Macías. Music: Atilio Stampone.

The Official Story is a gripping film about guilt that might have more resonance in this politically charged year than in any other since it was made. Norma Aleandro plays Alicia, a woman whose suspicions about the parentage of her adopted daughter, Gaby (Analia Castro), lead her to investigate her way into the sufferings of others and thereby to share in that suffering. The film might be criticized for coming at the sordid history which underlies it, the "disappeared" citizens who opposed the Argentine junta that took power in 1976, from the wrong point of view, for turning the complacent bourgeois into victims. But the victimization game is all too easy to play, and I think it's better to see The Official Story as a film about the consequences of evil. Luis Puenzo controls the many ironies of Alicia's story, such as the fact that she's a history teacher who doesn't understand the history of own times, without letting his film become too heavy-handed and didactic. For me the climax of the film comes not when Alicia makes her shattering discovery, but in what spurs her to set out on her quest for the truth: a reunion with an old friend, Ana (Chunchuna Villafañe), who fled the country after being arrested and tortured by the junta. It begins as a light-hearted moment, with the two women getting snockered on egg nog, laughing together until the laughter turns hysterical, and Ana delivers the full story of her torture and abuse. It's a moment that brilliantly evokes the fragility of friendship and the consequences of moral and political choice.

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas. Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker.

Shutter Island is two hours and 18 minutes long, and it feels like it. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) is almost as long (two minutes shorter) and it doesn't. Yet Martin Scorsese, who made Shutter Island, is one of the few contemporary directors who are spoken of with much the same reverence as Hitchcock. Granted, comparing the two films is unfair: North by Northwest is meant to be giddy fun, constantly on the move, while Shutter Island is a psychological thriller with horror movie overtones and a claustrophobic setting. So perhaps the more appropriate comparison would be one of Hitchcock's explorations of disordered psychology, Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958). The former comes in at 109 minutes, the latter at just a few minutes over two hours. The point here is that Hitchcock knew how to tighten things up. Scorsese may know how, but he doesn't seem to care. He lets Shutter Island slop around, losing tension and focus in the process, when all he really has to do is guide us to a surprise twist and shocking climax. I seem to be one of the few who feel that the film is a tedious indulgence in material of no great matter: Its psychology is unconvincing, its characters are toys, and its payoff is rather pat and formulaic. Still, it gets a whopping 8.2 rating from viewers on IMdB, so I seem to be among the few who feel that too much acting and directing talent has been expended on too little.