Waiting Women (Ingmar Bergman, 1952)

Cast: Anita Björk, Eva Dahlbeck, Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Gunnar Björstrand, Karl-Arne Holmsten, Jarl Kulle, Aino Taube, Håkan Westergren, Gerd Andersson, Björn Bjelfvenstarm. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Gun Grut. Cinematography: Gunnar Fischer. Production design: Nils Svenwall. Film editing: Oscar Rosander. Music: Erik Nordgren. 

Ingmar Bergman's Waiting Women is also known by its slightly racier American title, Secrets of Women. Both titles are apt. Four women are waiting at the summer home of the Lobelius family for their husbands to arrive. Each is married to one of the four Lobelius brothers, who run the family business. When Annette (Aino Taube) complains about the lack of intimacy in her marriage to Paul (Håkan Westergren), the other three respond with stories about their marriages. Rakel (Anita Björk) tells how her confession to an affair with an old flame caused her husband, Eugen (Karl-Arne Holmsten), to threaten suicide. Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson) tells of her affair with the youngest of the Lobelius brothers, Martin (Birger Malmsten), who wanted to break free from the family business and become an artist in Paris. Marta discovered that she was pregnant with Martin's child, but when she went to tell him, his brothers had just arrived to tell him that their father has died and he's needed back home to run the company. She decided to have the baby on her own, but Martin returned to marry her. The oldest, Karin (Eva Dahlbeck), tells of attending a party with her husband, Fredrik (Gunnar Björnstrand), who scolded her on the way home afterward for wearing a dress that he thinks is too décolleté. We have already seen how pompous Fredrik can be in the scene in which the brothers try to persuade Martin to give up la vie bohème and join the business, but Fredrik loosens up a lot when he and Karin are trapped overnight in an elevator. It's one of Bergman's best early films, with his usual bittersweet comedy touch that he would perfect in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), though it's decidedly pre-feminist in its outlook: Contemporary viewers may wonder why marriage seems to be the only object in view for these intelligent women.  

The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1966)

Cast: Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, E.G. Marshall, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, Miriam Hopkins, Martha Hyer, Richard Bradford, Robert Duvall, James Fox, Diana Hyland, Henry Hull, Jocelyn Brando. Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, based on a novel by Horton Foote. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Production design: Richard Day. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: John Barry.

Bad movies are often fun to watch anyway, and most of the people involved with The Chase, including director Arthur Penn, screenwriter Lillian Hellman, and star Marlon Brando, agreed that it was a bad movie. Brando let his opinion show, giving a sluggish performance that validates the old criticism that he mumbled his lines. Hellman had her script taken away and rewritten, and Penn struggled to deal with an ill-conceived project. The chief interest the film generates today is seeing actors like Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Robert Duvall on the brink of major stardom. There's a good deal of miscasting, including E.G. Mashall as the boss of a small town that seems to be in Texas or Louisiana. Marshall lacks the ruthless aura that the character needs. Angie Dickinson is wasted as the loving and dutiful wife of the town sheriff played by Brando. And Redford feels out of place in the role of Bubber Reeves, the town bad boy who escapes from prison (it's never quite clear what he did to be sent there) and stirs a manhunt, a lynch mob, and a conflagration in a junkyard. The town itself is a hotbed where everyone sleeps with everyone else's spouse and goes orgiastic on the Saturday night when the news of Bubber's escape breaks. It's a silly and lurid movie, but a little too long to be entertainingly bad.

Bye Bye Africa (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 1999)

Cast: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Garba Issa, Aïcha Yelena, Akabar Mahamat-Saleh, Khayar Ouma Defallah, Abderamane Koulamallah, Issa Serge Coelo, Sophie Barrand. Screenplay: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Cinematography: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Stéphane Legoux, Robert Millié. Film editing: Mathilde Boussel, Sarah Taouss-Maton. 

Chad is one of the poorest countries on Earth, perpetually dragged down by corruption and ravaged by civil war, so you wouldn't expect it to have a thriving film industry. And it doesn't, as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun discovers when his mother's death prompts him to return to his native country after a 10-year exile in France learning his craft as a filmmaker. All of the theaters he knew while growing up are shuttered and fallen into ruins. Video has replaced the once-communal experience of moviegoing. A deep-seated prejudice against film as "stealing your image" has taken hold in part of the country, along with an ignorance about the distinction between acting and being, as he learns when he seeks out an actress who played the part of a woman with HIV in one of his films. She has been shunned by her community and family. Yet Haroun persists, trying to make a movie while he's in Chad, only to be thwarted by a lack of funding and an absence of a system of distribution for films. Haroun plays himself in this docudrama, a provocative portrait of not only a country but also the possible dark future for the art of cinema.

Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Cast: Maria Callas, Massimo Girotti, Lauren Terzieff, Giuseppe Gentile, Margareth Clémenti, Paul Jabara. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on a play by Euripedes. Cinematography: Ennio Guarnieri. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Costume design: Piero Tosi. Film editing: Nino Baragli.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's retelling of the story of Medea is a challenge to anyone who doesn't already know the story: Pasolini is not interested in conventional movie storytelling, so the film feels shapeless, lurching through some scenes and lingering through others until it ends almost abruptly. What he's interested in is crafting a vision of antiquity, of the age from which the myths and legends came, that's primitive and tribal, not at all the graceful world of marble gods and goddesses we've come to associate with ancient Greece. This is a world in which people scrabble for survival in bleak desert settings, filmed in Turkey and Syria. In Pasolini's film, the Argo, the ship that brings Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece,  is a cobbled-together raft. The fleece itself is a somewhat ratty-looking ram's head with gilded horns. It's not exactly a film in which you'd expect to find a diva like Maria Callas, and yet her out-of-placeness somehow fits the character of Medea, a woman who would rise above almost any setting only to be dragged down by it. 

Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992)

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Paul Calderón, Eddie Daniels, Bianca Hunter, Zoë Lund, Vincent Laresca, Frankie Thorn, Fernando Véléz, Joseph Michael Cruz, Paul Hipp. Screenplay: Zoë Lund, Abel Ferrara. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Harvey Keitel's lacerating performance and Abel Ferrara's narrative skill, using a baseball playoff series as a thread to hang his story on, almost made me think that Bad Lieutenant was some kind of good film. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me a tired reworking of the old motif of Catholic guilt, a kind of feint at creating a Dostoevskyan moral fable undermined by vulgarity. Was it necessary, for example, to cast a nubile young blond as the nun who gets raped, and to provide so many glimpses of her naked? 

Blood and Wine (Bob Rafelson, 1996)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, Stephen Dorff, Judy Davis, Jennifer Lopez, Harold Perrineau, Robyn Peterson, Mike Starr. Screenplay: Nick Villiers, Bob Rafelson, Alison Cross. Cinematography: Newton Thomas Sigel. Production design: Richard Sylbert. Film editing: Steven Cohen. Music: Michal Lorenc. 

It takes great acting to steal a movie from Jack Nicholson. In short, it takes Michael Caine. In Blood and Wine, Caine plays Victor, a sleazy ex-con with a hair trigger and a death-bed cough. It's a more physically violent role than we usually see Caine in, and it's startling to see him erupt, slamming into a hapless victim like Henry (Harold Perrineau), who just happens to get caught up in the movie's plot mechanism. Otherwise, Blood and Wine is mostly a forgettable throwback, informed by movies of the 1940s and 1970s, a neo-noir directed by Bob Rafelson, whose directing career was launched with movies starring Nicholson, like Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). It's a bleakly cynical movie with no good guys, except that everyone in it looks a little better in comparison with Caine's Victor.