eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenZ

Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Ian Holm, Willem Dafoe, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Christopher Eccleston, Sarah Polley, Robert A. Silverman, Oscar Hsu, Kris Lemche, Vik Sahay, Kirsten Johnson, James Kirchner. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

It would be easy to ascribe the "body horror" of David Cronenberg's films to an adolescent desire to gross people out, but eXistenZ shows, more than perhaps any other of his movies, a deeper satiric intent. It establishes his kinship to authors like Swift and Kafka and D.H. Lawrence: a recognition of our alienation from the organic. I think the moment that shocked me most in the early part of the film came when I saw the console, the controller for the VR game that Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is demonstrating to her audience of potential players. Instead of a box of metal and plastic, it's a flesh-colored blob. It connects to the players not with headsets or helmets but with an UmbiCord, which is exactly what it sounds like: a fleshy rope that attaches to the player's spine, not with anything like a USB port but with an implanted orifice that's very like an anus. Throughout the film, we are confronted with the moist, the slimy, the irregular, from a gun that's flesh and bone and shoots teeth to a Chinese restaurant's "special" that makes the gorge rise. Cronenberg is intent on reminding us that though we are flesh and blood, we shy from the fact. When Ted Pikul (Jude Law) recoils from having a port implanted in his spine, he objects to the vulnerability of an opening directly into his body, whereupon Allegra simply opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue, reminding him that we already have physical openings to the world. On this premise, Cronenberg builds his intricate, recursive story, one that defies summary but carries a multitude of meanings. Yes, it's a satire on the videogame industry, and yes, it's a commentary on our notions of reality itself. It's often compared to The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski), which came out the same year, but I think it's a superior, more layered film.  

21 (Robert Luketic, 2008)

Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess in 21 

Cast: Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Laurence Fishburne, Jack McGee, Josh Gad, Sam Golzari, Helen Carey, Bob Phillips. Screenplay: Peter Steinfeld, Allan Loeb, based on a book by Ben Mezrich. Cinematography: Russell Carpenter. Production design: Missy Stewart. Film editing: Elliot Graham. Music: David Sardy. 

Harvard has a very fine medical school, no doubt. But so do NYU, Penn, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, and the University of Washington, to name a few. And 21 asks us to believe that its protagonist, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), is so set on going to Harvard's, and only Harvard's, that he will betray his friends, lie to his mother, and put his life in jeopardy to raise the money he needs to attend. He's already been admitted, of course. He has straight A's at MIT and a genius IQ. Moreover, he's an ideal candidate for financial support: He has a single mother and has to work part time. But according to the screenplay, there's only one scholarship available and it has scores of other applicants. So Ben will find himself roped into a card-counting system devised by a rather shady MIT professor of statistics, Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), who takes a group of hand-picked students and trains them in a foolproof system of beating the odds at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. The premise is valid: Ben Mezrich reported on an actual MIT Blackjack Team in his 2003 book Bringing Down the House. But the makers of 21 aren't interested in the actuality of Mezrich's book, maybe because it involves a lot of boring stuff like mathematics. So they cobbled it into a routine con-game drama, with some Vegas glamour, a little romance, some snaky double-crossing, a little violence, and a moderately happy ending. The actual MIT team was mostly Asian, so there are some token Asians in the cast, but the movie's story centers on the good-looking white guy and the dishy blonde. That the Vegas casinos wouldn't spot this gang of pretty people as phonies defies belief. At best, 21 is a passable time-waster.

Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933)

Fay Wray and Glenda Farrell in Mystery of the Wax Museum

Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Allen Vincent, Gavin Gordon, Edwin Maxwell, Holmes Herbert, Claude King, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Thomas E. Jackson, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betz, Monica Bannister. Screenplay: Don Mullaly, Carl Ericson, Charles Belden. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy. 

The ever-imperiled Fay Wray gets higher billing, but the real star of Mystery of the Wax Museum is Glenda Farrell, playing an intrepid (what else?), tough-talking (ditto) newspaper reporter, Florence Dempsey. Flo's boss, Jim (Frank McHugh), gives her her walking papers, so she sets out to find a sensational story to save her job. She uncovers the sinister plot of Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill), who is opening a new wax museum in New York. Igor had a similar museum in London, but it was losing money, so his partner in the business, Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell), burned it down to collect the insurance. Igor was trapped in the conflagration but survived. Handicapped by his wounds, he trains new sculptors to re-create the glories of the old museum. One of the trainees is Ralph Burton (Allen Vincent), whose fiancée, Charlotte Duncan (Wray), turns out to be the spitting image of Igor's most prized sculpture in the old museum, an effigy of Marie Antoinette. Naturally, Igor plans to "sculpt" Charlotte into a new Marie: His method of capturing images is, let's say, not the traditional one. By a bit of breaking and entering, Flo manages to discover the macabre truth behind the wax museum's images. The plot gimmick -- a reporter uncovers a madman's schemes -- is exactly that of Doctor X (1932), Michael Curtiz's other venture into horror movie territory filmed in two-strip Technicolor, which also starred Atwill and Wray. Mystery of the Wax Museum is the better movie, with Farrell giving a better performance as the snoopy reporter than Lee Tracy in the earlier movie. It also has a neater plot, and a real creep factor in the spooky statues -- most of which are actors standing very still. Makeup artists Ray Romero and Perc Westmore and costume designer Orry-Kelly deserve special mention.

The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston, and Judith Anderson in The Furies

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston, Wendell Corey, Judith Anderson, Gilbert Roland, Thomas Gomez, Beulah Bondi, Albert Dekker, John Bromfield, Wallace Ford, Blanche Yurka. Screenplay: Charles Schnee, based on a book by Niven Busch. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Henry Bumstead, Hans Dreier. Film editing: Archie Marshek. Music: Franz Waxman. 

The Furies takes place in a West that never was: Would any real cattleman name his ranch "The Furies"? But that's because the film aims at the mythic, and darn near succeeds. The Furies of myth were goddesses of vengeance, also known as the Eumenides, which means "the gracious ones" -- they were so terrible that humans tried to placate them by calling them by a nice name. In the film, all of the women are to some degree vengeful: Barbara Stanwyck's Vance Jeffords chafes against the notion that because she's a woman, she can't run a ranch; Judith Anderson's Flo Burnett tries to get her hooks into Vance's father and bypass Vance's claim to his estate; Beulah Bondi's Mrs. Anaheim is the real power behind her banker husband; and the most vengeful of them all, Blanche Yurka's Mother Herrera, seeks justice for the hanging of her son. For a Western, it's also awfully talky, with some lines that sound like film noir: "I don't think I like love," says Vance. "It puts a bit in my mouth." Others are obvious attempts to sidestep cliché: Vance's father, T.C. (Walter Huston), tells her she has a "dowry if you pick a man I can favor, one I can sit down at the table with and not dislodge my chow." I suspect that a lot of the dialogue, as well as a lot of the slightly overcomplicated plot, comes from its source, a novel by Niven Busch, adapted by Charles Schnee: Busch knew his way around tough dialogue, having written the screenplay for one of film noir's classics, The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946). Anthony Mann keeps the action from overwhelming the talk and the mythologizing, greatly helped by Stanwyck and Huston (in his final film) as the sparring but inextricably bonded Jeffordses. The movie could have used a stronger love interest than Wendell Corey as Rip Darrow, the man who wants to get the better of T.C., and woos Vance as part of the plot. Corey and Stanwyck don't strike sparks; she's more in tune with Gilbert Roland as Juan Herrera, the squatter on The Furies who has been her friend since childhood -- a subplot that's in some ways more interesting than the financial struggles to get hold of the ranch. Initially a box office failure, the film has grown in stature over the years as a showcase for some of the best work of Stanwyck, Huston, and Mann. 

The Rapture (Michael Tolkin, 1991)

Kimberly Cullum and Mimi Rogers in The Rapture

Cast: Mimi Rogers, David Duchovny, Patrick Bauchau, Darwyn Carson, James Le Gros, Will Patton, Carole Davis, Sam Vlahos, Stéphanie Menuez, Marvin Elkins. Screenplay: Michael Tolkin. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Robin Standifer. Film editing: Suzanne Fenn. Music: Thomas Newman.  

European filmmakers are less skittish about dealing with religious belief than Americans are: Think of the three B's, Bergman, Buñuel, and Bresson, for example. But apart from biblical epics, which we don't see much of anymore, American movies usually avoid putting characters in situations that test their faith. Michael Tolkin's The Rapture is such an obvious exception to the rule that I think it has been a bit overpraised as a result. It succeeds as much as it does on the strength of Mimi Rogers's performance as Sharon, a woman whose life is empty: She works in a grindingly routine job as a telephone operator and escapes from it by going out at night with a friend, Vic (Patrick Bauchau), picking up other couples for sex. She begins a relationship with Randy (David Duchovny), the male half of one of the couples they meet, but remains as bored and depressed as ever. At work she overhears people talking about a religious group to which they belong, and how good it makes them feel, so she investigates and soon becomes a devout member of a sect that believes the Rapture is at hand, that the end of the world is nigh and the true believers will be transported directly to Heaven. She finds comfort in the belief, converts Randy to it, and they marry and have a child, only to face a real crisis of belief. Up to this point, The Rapture is a solid and mostly convincing portrayal of the way religious belief can sometimes become a last resort. Unfortunately, Tolkin chose to end the film with a low-rent Apocalypse that tests the movie's budget and the audience's credulity as much as it does Sharon's faith.  

Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, 1931)

Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored

Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Victor McLaglen, Warner Oland, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Lew Cody, Barry Norton. Screenplay: Josef von Sternberg, Daniel Nathan Rubin. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Costume design: Travis Banton. Film editing: Josef von Sternberg. Music: Karl Hajos, Herman Hand. 

Of the seven films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich, Dishonored is probably the weakest. Dietrich is not to blame: Photographed by Lee Garmes and dressed by Travis Banton, she looks as good as she ever did, and the movie gives her a chance to show her talent for comedy for the first time, when she pretends to be a rather bumptious girl from the country. But the story concocted by Sternberg and co-scripted with Daniel Nathan Rubin, a not particularly distinguished playwright, lacks wit and tension. Sternberg's direction allows the pace of the film to go slack, and his decision to edit the film himself doesn't help: His lap dissolves, for example, linger too long on the old scene as the new one fades in, causing visual confusion. Moreover, Dishonored features Victor McLaglen, of all actors, as the romantic lead. McLaglen was skilled as a heavy or a clumsy goof, and John Ford directed him to an Oscar for The Informer (1935), but he's out of place as the Russian spy who gets entangled with Dietrich's Austrian spy. For some reason, he spends a lot of the film flashing a rictus-like grin. Sternberg's story is based on the career of Mata Hari, about whom MGM made a competing movie starring Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro the same year. Dietrich plays a war widow who has turned prostitute to survive, and is recruited for the Austrian Secret Service by its chief (Gustav von Seyffertitz) when she proclaims, "I've had an inglorious life. It may become my good fortune to have a glorious death." Through her career as Agent X-27 she is accompanied by a cat who is so faithful -- she even carries it in the open cockpit of an airplane -- that it suggests a witch's familiar. She's also a pianist, who encodes secrets in musical notation. (Not that she's a good pianist: At one point she plays the usually quietly serene opening of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata as if it were the "Appassionata.") Dishonored is no sillier than most of the Sternberg-Dietrich movies, but it doesn't wear its silliness with style the way the best of them do. 

The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)

Cindy Hinds in The Brood

Cast: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Cindy Hinds, Susan Hogan, Gary McKeehan, Michael Magee, Robert A. Silverman, Joseph Shaw, Larry Solway, Reiner Schwarz. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spier. Film editing: Alan Collins. Music: Howard Shore. 

Creepy children have become a staple of horror movies ever since Patty McCormack terrorized everyone as Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956). The key here is the depiction of evil lurking behind a façade of innocence. Actually, the creepy child in The Brood is not Candice Carveth (Cindy Hinds), an otherwise ordinary 5-year-old, except as a vehicle for bringing out the creepy childlike creatures that are the movie's menace. It's a good, bloody, somewhat queasy film that plays on all sorts of phobias, including our suspicions about psychiatrists, and our tolerance for bodily functions. It proved too much for some of its early critics, including Roger Ebert, who dismissed it as an exploitation film, "reprehensible trash," and a bore. It may be the first, and perhaps the second -- given that one person's trash is another person's genre classic -- but it's certainly not the last. David Cronenberg is an insidious filmmaker, who constantly plays on our nerves without resorting to cheap jump scares. He makes you back off at times: In the scene that made most people feel at least faintly nauseated, I found myself saying, "It's only corn syrup and food coloring." We may also debate whether the film is fair to the psychiatric profession and even if there's a touch of antifeminism, but that means he's left you with something to think about. To dismiss The Brood as exploitative is to overlook the satire with which it's laced. 

Nine Queens (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000)

Ricardo Darín and Gastón Pauls in Nine Queens

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Gastón Pauls, Leticia Brédice, Ignasi Abadal, Tomás Fonzi, Oscar Núñez, Celia Juárez, Elsa Berenguer, Leo Dyzen. Screenplay: Fabián Bielinsky. Cinematography: Marcelo Camorino. Production design: Daniela Passalaqua. Film editing: Sergio Zottola. Music: César Lerner.

Marcos (Ricardo Darín), a seasoned con artist, spots Juan (Gastón Pauls) making what looks like a rookie mistake trying to con a cashier making change for him in a convenience store. So, being in need of a partner, he takes Juan under his wing for a day. Both men are down on their luck and in need of substantial sums of money, so when Juan proves to be adept, the two launch on a major scam: selling a sheet of forged collectible postage stamps known as the Nine Queens to a wealthy mark. That's the setup for an entertaining genre piece with attractive performances and more than a few surprise twists. Writer-director Fabián Bielinsky guides his cast through some lively scenes, many of which were shot on the streets of Buenos Aires. Lacking the budget for a full complement of extras, Bielinsky surrounded his stars with a small cadre of hired actors to act as a buffer against lookie-loos; the result has energy and veracity. (Moviemaking is often a con game itself.) Naturally, the movie hinges on who's conning whom: the sharpie Marcos, the less-experienced Juan, or their mark, the wealthy stamp collector (Ignasi Abadal), who just happens to be staying in a hotel where Marcos's sister, Valeria (Leticia Brédice) works? (There's some family tension around an inheritance that Marcos cheated Valeria out of.) The ending is a jaw-dropper that works as long as you don't ask the questions that you aren't supposed to ask. Nine Queens was remade in the United States as Criminal (Gregory Jacobs, 2004), with John C. Reilly and Diego Luna in the roles played by Darín and Pauls.  

New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

Asia Argento and Willem Dafoe in New Rose Hotel

Cast: Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento, Annabella Sciorra, John Lurie, Kimmy Suzuki, Miou, Yoshitaka Amano, Gretchen Mol, Phil Neilson, Ken Kelsch, Ryuiki Sakamoto. Screenplay: Abel Ferrara, Christ Zois, based on a story by William Gibson. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Frank DeCurtis. Film editing: Jim Mol, Anthony Redman. Music: Schoolly D. 

Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel is more an exercise in style than a satisfactory movie. The plot is simple: Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) are agents for a Japanese technology firm plot tasked with raiding a top scientist from a German company. They do so by hiring a beautiful prostitute called Sandii (Asia Argento) to seduce the scientist, whom they will set up in a laboratory in Marrakech. The plot goes awry when one of the agents falls in love with Sandii and overlooks some evidence that she may be working for the German company, putting the agents in danger. Padding this plot into a 93-minute movie means a lot of filler, including an extended opening scene set in a kinky nightclub where some lugubrious songs get sung and the necessary exposition gets spilled. Then there are some irrelevant sex scenes while the scheme is being set up, and after it fails there are extended flashbacks that add little to our understanding of what has happened. The three leads are capable and watchable, but the film leaves us with no revelations about corporate rivalry in the age of technology that we haven't seen in better movies. 

No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

Linda Darnell, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Widmark in No Way Out

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Stephen McNally, Mildred Joanne Smith, Harry Bellaver, Stanley Ridges, Dots Johnson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Amanda Randolph, Maude Simmons. Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Lesser Samuels. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Barbara McLean. Music: Alfred Newman.

Although its treatment of race relations in America seems naive today, No Way Out stands up as a solid drama about an issue that in the post-war years was finally receiving the attention from Hollywood filmmakers that it had too long deserved. It also launched the career of Sidney Poitier as well as, in smaller roles, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The plot hinges on the novelty of a Black doctor, Luther Brooks (Poitier), serving as an intern in hospital in a large city. When two brothers, Ray (Richard Widmark) and Johnny Biddle (Dick Paxton) are admitted to the prison ward of the hospital after being shot by the police during a robbery, Brooks notices that Johnny's symptoms are not just that of a leg wound; suspecting some sort of mental impairment, Brooks does a spinal tap, during which Johnny dies. Ray Biddle has already demonstrated his racist animosity toward Brooks, and claims that he killed his brother. An autopsy would confirm Brooks's suspicion that Johnny's death was caused by an undiagnosed brain tumor, but Ray won't allow it, and he's backed up by his brother George (Harry Bellaver) and initially by Johnny's ex-wife, Edie (Linda Darnell). She once had an affair with Ray, but she loathes him and has done what she can to escape the poor-white neighborhood, Beaver Canal, where she grew up and the Biddles still live. Ray spurs the rabble-rousers of Beaver Canal to start a race riot, but they are met with resistance from the Black neighborhoods. The film is a little over-plotted: The crux of the plot, the autopsy, gets resolved in a way that isn't entirely convincing, and the confrontation of Brooks and Ray Biddle arrives in what's almost a coda, as an anti-climax. Widmark is allowed to overact in the role of Ray, and Poitier has yet to acquire the confident presence that made him a star. The best performance in the film comes from a deglamorized Darnell, who gives Edie a real toughness and vulnerability, suggesting that her inclination to do the right thing is at war with her experience growing up in Beaver Canal. The film's portrayal of raw racism still has the power to shock: We rarely hear white actors use the N-word today, even when their roles as bigots might seem to require it, and I flinched when a white woman spat in the face of Poitier's character. It's weaker in the treatment of racial violence: No one on either side seems to have any guns.