Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow in Two Lovers

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Isabella Rossellini, Moni Moshonov, Elias Koteas, Bob Ari, Julie Budd, Iain J. Bopp, David Cale. Screenplay: James Gray, Ric Menello. Cinematography: Joaquin Baca-Asay. Production design: Happy Massee. Film editing: John Axelrad. 

A Jewish man who lives with his parents falls in love with a pretty blonde shiksa, despite his parents' urging him to marry the nice Jewish girl whose parents are involved in a business deal with them. Seen this one, have you? Was it an early Woody Allen movie? Or the one with Richard Benjamin and Cybill Shepherd? It was a comedy, right? With lots of ethnic jokes and some cringey scenes? No, it's a James Gray movie set in Brighton Beach. Oh, then the son is a hitman and the business deal is a shady one involving the mob? And it's bleak and unforgiving in both mood and setting? Sorry, no. It's a tender, romantic film, perhaps still a little bleak, about some damaged people who nevertheless find a resolution to their problems. Two Lovers marked a remarkable turn in Gray's filmography, not so much away from the melancholy New York streets of his first films as toward a perception that there's another side to the lives led there. Gray knows the clichés and stereotypes that his plot evokes and deftly avoids them. There's even a bar mitzvah scene that in other hands would have been fertile ground for ethnic stereotyping but just skirts it. It helps that he has actors who know how to avoid the clichés, too. Gwyneth Paltrow, who is sometimes mocked for epitomizing an aloof upper-middle-class image, finds the poignancy in her role as the kept woman of a married hotshot lawyer (Elias Koteas). Isabella Rossellini completely ignores the Jewish mother stereotype while managing somehow to remind us of it. Vinessa Shaw is terrific as the nice Jewish girl who may hear the ticking of her biological clock but doesn't show that she feels pressured by it. But mostly it's Joaquin Phoenix's film as Leonard Kraditor, a man in early middle life who has never found a place in life that wasn't prepared for him by someone else. He opens the film with what may be a suicide attempt -- he's tried it before -- from which he decides to rescue himself. He's had a breakdown before and is on medication, and he's something of a screwup in his work for his father's dry cleaning business, but he realizes that he's still loved by his somewhat bewildered parents. When he gets involved in a relationship with Paltrow's Michelle, a head case and a druggie, we fear for the worst -- which almost happens. But then it doesn't, and in a scene that might have been sentimental, except that it was created by Gray and Phoenix, one of the best director-actor relationships in film, things turn out at least provisionally okay. And we recognize that sometimes that's just the way life is.    

Working Girls (Lizzie Borden, 1986)

Louise Smith in Working Girls

Cast: Louise Smith, Ellen McElduff, Amanda Goodwin, Deborah Banks, Liz Caldwell, Marusia Zach, Boomer Tibbs, Frederick Neumann, Carla-Maria Sorey. Screenplay: Lizzie Borden, Sandra Kay. Cinematography: Judy Irola. Production design: Kurt Ossefort. Film editing: Lizzie Borden. Music: David Van Tieghem.

Working Girls puts the emphasis on the "work" in "sex work." All work is alienating in that we do it out of necessity rather than choice. Even the most enjoyable job involves the submission of self to the demands of the boss, the client, and time itself. That alienation is key to Lizzie Borden's deglamorizng of the profession of sex worker. The film's protagonist, Molly (Louise Smith) is a sensible, well-educated (if we take her at her word that she went to Yale) woman who has somehow become a prostitute in a New York City brothel, to which she commutes by bicycle through the city streets. For most of the film she is confined to a windowless apartment -- a feeling of claustrophobia develops through every scene in that setting -- where she services a series of men, feigning interest in them as well as orgasms. The men are ordinary, middle-class, mostly unthreatening business types with a few hangups and predilections. Molly collects her fees and sets aside part of the money for the madam, Lucy (Ellen McElduff), a giddy, vain, but shrewd businesswoman. Molly's downtime is spent chatting and gossiping (usually about Lucy) with the other women who work there, some of them bitter, some naive. The boredom and frustration the women express are much like the ones you'd expect from office workers, schoolteachers, retail clerks, anyone with a job routine: financial problems, relationship issues, resentment of the boss, distaste for some of the regular clients, and so on. It's hard to make a movie about boredom without being boring, but Borden succeeds, if only because of the titillation involved in a movie that focuses on sex. Smith and McElduff give good performances, but some of the other actresses deliver their lines a little woodenly. There's not much in the way of plot, but it's a solid, well-crafted film that feels a little obligatory, as if designed to make a point about sex work and the media's portrayal of it rather than just to tell a good story.  

Powwow Highway (Jonathan Wacks, 1988)

A Martinez and Gary Farmer in Powwow Highway

Cast: A Martinez, Gary Farmer, Amanda Wyss, Joanelle Romero, Geoff Rivas, Roscoe Born, Wayne Waterman, Margo Kane, Sam Vlahos, John Trudell, Wes Studi, Graham Greene. Screenplay: David Seals, Janet Heaney, Jean Stawarz, based on a novel by Seals. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Production design: Cynthia Sowder. Film editing: Jim Stewart. Music: Barry Goldberg. 

If you like the series Reservation Dogs, you ought to like Powwow Highway. To my mind (white, male, aged) these comic works get closer to capturing the Native American experience than do more earnest movies like Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1994) and Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023), which rely too heavily on the white man's point of view. As the title suggests, it's a road movie, and as with any good road movie, the travelers are an odd couple. Buddy Red Bow (A Martinez) is a hot-tempered activist, trying to stymie the latest corporate takeover of land on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer) is a corpulent, easy-going eccentric, enthralled by Native American myths and legends. When Buddy's sister is arrested on trumped-up charges in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he persuades Philbert to drive him there to get her released. Philbert has recently acquired (via a trade for some marijuana) an ancient wreck of a car that he refers to as his "pony" and calls Protector. Despite Buddy's insistence on going straight to Santa Fe, he can't keep Philbert from getting sidetracked onto locations associated with Native American history. The result is an engaging blend of farce and travelogue, with a provocative, sometimes bittersweet point of view. Farmer's creation of the endearing Philbert, a fine blend of sweet and stubborn, of naive and canny, is a remarkable performance. Martinez has just the right hair-trigger quality as Buddy, and the supporting cast, which includes bit parts for the then-unknown Wes Studi and Graham Greene (particularly good as an aphasic Vietnam veteran), is wonderful. The "happy ending" is by-the-book, but well-deserved nevertheless. 

The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in The Yards

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron, James Caan, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Steve Lawrence, Andy Davoli, Tony Musante, Victor Argo, Tomas Milian, Robert Montano. Screenplay: James Gray, Matt Reeves. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Jeffrey Ford. Music: Howard Shore. 

With its powerhouse cast acting glum, The Yards is a slow downer of a movie. But it repays attention, immersing us in an almost too-familiar milieu, the Mean Streets of New York City. It's more elegiac than the visions of the milieu given us by Scorsese, Coppola, Lumet and many others, portraying a city almost beyond hope and reform, in which the well-meaning can be dragged down by circumstance. Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) is certainly well-meaning: Just out of prison for a crime for which he took the fall for his friends, he would like to stay straight if only to help his ailing mother (Ellen Burstyn), but the corruption that is eating his friends and family, particularly his friend Willie Gutierrez (Joaquin Phoenix) and his uncle Frank (James Caan), is bound to swallow him up, too. Eventually, meaning well is not enough, and Leo finds himself taking the fall again. In the end, it turns out that the only way to fight the kind of corruption that ensnares Leo is with corruption itself, a truly vicious cycle. James Gray's steady, slow direction probably tested audiences too much, for the film was a box office loser. But it boasts superb ensemble work, with standout performances from Phoenix and Caan and particularly from Charlize Theron as Erica, Leo's cousin and Willie's girfriend. Howard Shore's music underscores Gray's melancholy vision. 

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, 1952)

Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Cast: Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Hildegard Knef, Leo G. Carroll, Torin Thatcher, Ava Norring, Helene Stanley, Marcel Dalio, Vicente Gómez, Richard Allan. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Leon Shamroy. John DeCuir, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Barbara McLean. Music: Bernard Herrmann.

The film version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro is handsome and dull, just like its protagonist, Harry Street, who lies waiting for death on the plains below the mountain as his life flashes past his eyes. Harry is a writer who has spent his life doing all the things he thinks a writer should, which amounts to a men's magazine version of masculinity: hunting big game, going to bullfights and to war, and sleeping with beautiful women. The actor who plays Harry, Gregory Peck, is handsome, too. And if he's also a little dull it's because Peck is miscast: The part needs an actor with a lived-in face, someone like Humphrey Bogart, who was considered for the role. At 36, Peck was about ten years too young for the role. (The 52-year-old Bogart might have been a shade too old.) Still, Peck does what he can, and it's credible that women like Ava Gardner, Susan Hayward, and Hildegard Knef would have fallen hard for him. But the screenplay by Casey Robinson is a rambling muddle that turns Hemingway's spare prose into melodrama, partly by crafting Gardner's role out of nothing -- or borrowing hints of it from other Hemingway works like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Henry King, one of those studio directors who were handed big projects because they wouldn't mess them up, brings no particular vision or style to the film. The handsomeness of the movie is mostly in its casting, and in the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Leon Shamroy. Bernard Herrmann's score helps, too.  

The Munekata Sisters (Yasujiro Ozu, 1950)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Hideko Takamine in The Munekata Sisters

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Ken Uehara, So Yamamura, Sanae Takasugi, Chishu Ryu, Yuji Hori, Tatsuo Saito. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu, based on a story by Jiro Osaragi. Cinematography: Joji Ohara. Production design: Seiya Kajima. Film editing: Toshiro Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Some very non-Ozu things happen in Yasujiro Ozu's The Munekata Sisters. For example, the camera actually moves in one scene. Granted, it's only a brief pan across the setting at the end of the scene, but it was enough to startle anyone used to Ozu's locked-in low-angle points of view. But more unusually, there is actual physical violence in the film: A man slaps his wife repeatedly, and a few scenes later drops dead on the floor. The most contemplative of filmmakers, Ozu rarely deals directly with violence, preferring to show us the emotional consequences of disturbing events. The man, Ryosuke Mimura (So Yamamura), is unemployed. During his desultory search for a job, he is supported by his wife, Setsuko (Kinyuo Tanaka), who runs a small bar with the help of her much younger sister, Mariko (Hideko Takamine). The two sisters are very different: Setsuko, brought up before the war, is quiet and reserved and dresses in traditional Japanese style. Mariko reflects postwar attitudes in dress and manner: She's outspoken, with a spunky carefree manner, and sharply critical of her brother-in-law, whom she sees as an idler and a drunk. Then an old flame of Setsuko's, Hiroshi Tashiro (Ken Uehara), returns to town. Setsuko might have married him, but he decided to go to France before the war, so she married Mimura instead. Hiroshi is handsome and successful, and Mariko immediately sets her sights on reuniting him with her sister. Ozu develops all four characters with great finesse. Mimura is something of a dead-end case, and his outburst of jealous rage at Mimura's seeing Hiroshi again is frightening, but he has a softer side that he shows with the clowder of cats that he apparently fosters. There is something of the too-detached sophisticate about Mimura that shows in his scenes with Mariko, who falls in love with him while she's trying to reunite him with her sister. As a whole, The Munekata Sisters is more melodramatic than Ozu's films usually are, including the ending, which involves one of those renunciations that movies typically rely on as a plot resolution. But it's beautifully acted, especially by Tanaka and Takamine. 

The Cassandra Cat (Vojtech Jasný, 1963)

Cast: Jan Werich, Emília Vášáryová, Vlastimil Brodský, Jiří Sovák, Vladimír Menšík, Jiřina Bohdalová, Karel Effa, Vlasta Chramostová, Alena Kreuzmannová. Screenplay: Jirí Brdecka, Vojtech Jasný, Jan Werich. Cinematography: Jaroslav Kucera. Production design: Oldrich Bosák. Film editing: Jan Chaloupek. Music: Svatopluk Havelka. 

Sometimes you have to wonder how a movie came about. I mean, how did the premise underlying The Cassandra Cat --  a cat whose gaze makes people change colors, revealing their true selves -- emerge? It surely didn't come from spitballing in a story conference. Was it from someone nibbling on a funky mushroom while foraging in the Bohemian forest? And even granted that premise, how did it become the basis for a fable about hidebound authority stifling the creative imagination? Actually, that latter is pretty much standard for Eastern European filmmakers under Soviet rule, finding any way to poke at the oppressors without waking the censors. Whatever the origins, the resulting film is a sprightly creation, featuring an astonishingly docile cat. I mean, if anyone tried to put sunglasses on one of my cats, or trundle them about a village square with a gang of children, I'm sure the results would have been unpleasant. Still, The Cassandra Cat makes me wish the story had been turned over to one of the Czech masters of animation like Karel Zeman or Jiří Trnka rather than made into a live action film. The special effects in the movie are just clunky enough to be distracting, especially if your tolerance for the kind of whimsy prevalent in the film is low.   

Broken English (Zoe R. Cassavetes, 2007)

Gena Rowlands and Parker Posey in Broken English

Cast: Parker Posey, Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Gena Rowlands, Peter Bogdanovich, Tim Guinee, Roy Thinnes, Dana Ivey, Bernadette Lafont, Thierry Hancisse. Screenplay: Zoe R. Cassavetes. Cinematography: John Pirozzi. Production design: Happy Massee. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Scratch Massive. 

The ending of Broken English is a direct copy, down to the dialogue, of the ending of Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (2004), a movie about a fractured relationship that finds a satisfactory resolution. This similarity can only be an homage, but it shows up the comparative lack of originality in Zoe R. Cassavetes' film. In fact, the copy is so blatant, and the plotline of Broken English is so familiar that I hope Cassavetes' intention was to parody romantic comedies, especially those about young women who have trouble finding satisfactory men. Unfortunately, the parody doesn't go far enough to relieve the sense I have of a movie gone flat. Parker Posey plays Nora Wilder, a young woman with a good job who is anxious about her future without a steady relationship with a man. She has a failed fling with an actor (Justin Theroux) that leaves her more in the dumps, but then she meets a lanky, easy-going Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud) who manages to overcome her anxieties and defense mechanisms. But then he returns to France, leaving his cell number with her. It's a fine cast: Posey displays her exceptional gift for edgy humor and Drea de Matteo fits nicely into the familiar role of the best friend and confidante. The invaluable Gena Rowlands rises above her role as the stereotypical mother who wants her to get married. And Poupaud, smoking like a chimney, is a steady foil for Nora's jitteryness. But by the time the movie gets Nora to Paris and the city casts its patented romantic spell over things, including a stereotypical older Frenchman (Thierry Hancisse) who imparts his worldly wisdom, we get the feeling we've seen it all before.   

Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984)

Cast: Karen Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, David Brierly, Rita May, Nicholas Lane, Jane Hazlegrove, Henry Moxon, June Broughton, Sylvia Stoker, Harry Beeton, Ruth Holden, Ashley Barker, Michael O'Hagan, Phil Vaughan (voice). Screenplay: Barry Hines. Cinematography: Andrew Dunn, Paul Morris. Production design: Christopher Robilliard. Film editing: Donna Bickerstaff, Jim Latham. 

Was it because it was a "made-for-TV movie," a label that was once a byword for mediocrity, that I never saw Threads before now? Or was it that I knew what it was about and didn't need to put myself through watching a film that existed to tell me something I already knew: that nuclear war would be unspeakably horrible? But knowing is one thing and seeing is another. Threads is propaganda of the best kind, designed to disseminate truth rather than opinion. Its visceral but wholly credible horrors make criticism impotent, even though as a creative work it's not immune to criticism: There is some clunky dialogue; the narrative voiceover is awkwardly inserted and sometimes sententious; the evocation of a nativity scene near the end is too obvious. But the performances of the unknown actors, the skillful editing of stock footage into vividly staged scenes, and the unrestrained depiction of human suffering and degradation add up to a punch to the gut. Threads is a movie that has to be seen, or ought to be at least by anyone who holds a political or military position and needs to be have what it's trying to tell us engraved on their consciences. And that boils down to a demonstration of something often attributed to, of all people, Nikita Khrushchev: that in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the living would envy the dead.    

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Yasujiro Ozu, 1941)

Shin Saburi and Mieko Takamine in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family

Cast: Mieko Takamine, Shin Saburi, Hideo Fujino, Ayako Katsuragi, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Chishu Ryu, Masao Hayama, Tatsuo Saito, Kuniko Miyake, Michiko Kuwano. Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura. Music: Senji Ito. 

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family is an insular work like the novels of Jane Austen, which were written during the upheavals in Europe during the Napoleonic wars. Austen created her own world of domestic conflict while ignoring the larger world's conflicts, alluding to them only with incidental characters like the soldiers who delight the younger Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice or the naval officers who appear in Persuasion. Similarly, Ozu creates a little island of family in the midst of Tokyo, and does so in the fateful year of 1941, when Japan's imperial ambitions would finally bring the United States and its allies into global war. The film focuses on family tensions following the death of the patriarch, Shintaro (Hideo Fujino), which reveals his bankruptcy and forces his widow (Ayako Katsuragi) and unmarried daughter Setsuko (Mieko Takamine) to depend on the other family members. The difficulties of living with Setsuko's siblings and in-laws form the plot of the film, until finally the two women go to live in a rundown family property by the sea. Meanwhile, the unmarried brother, Shojiro (Shin Saburi), is off running a business in the city of Tianjin, in China. When he returns for the anniversary of his father's death, Shojiro, who has always been somewhat at odds with his siblings, excoriates them for their neglect of their mother and sister, and invites the two women to come with him to China. There's a brief comic episode in which Shijoro arranges a marriage for Setsuko and she does likewise for him -- though the film ends with Shojiro shyly avoiding an encounter with the bride-to-be. What makes the insularity of Ozu's film so poignant is that Tianjin had been acquired by Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Japan ordered troops from Great Britain to leave in 1940 and followed with an expulsion of American Marines stationed there in November 1941, just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was clearly not a peaceful place to do business, let alone to bring one's wife and mother to. Censorship would have forbidden Ozu from acknowledging any of this, but history has a way of imposing irony where none would have been intended.