Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)

Eihi Shiina in Audition

Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Jun Kunimura, Renji Ishibashi, Miyuki Matsuda, Toshie Negishi, Ren Osugi. Screenplay: Daisuke Tengan, based on a novel by Ryu Murakami. Cinematography: Hideo Yamamoto. Production design: Tatsuo Ozeki. Film editing: Yasushi Shimamura. Music: Koji Endo. 

Takashi Miike's Audtition evokes so many genres -- the femme fatale fable, the succubus myth, feminist revenge stories, body horror, even torture porn -- that it risks being overloaded with subtext. At the same time, combining all of those themes and tropes is what makes it rise above most horror movies. It's both gripping and audacious. Much of its audacity lies in the creation of an initially sympathetic protagonist, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), whom we originally see at the deathbed of his wife with his young son, who has just entered the hospital room with a present for his mother. Years later, we see Aoyama with his son, Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki), now a bright, handsome teenager with a pretty girlfriend and an absorbing interest in paleontology. Aoyama realizes that now that his son is almost grown up, he'll be left alone, so in a conversation with a friend, a film producer, a scheme is hatched: They will put out a casting call for young women, and in the audition process Aoyama will find another potential wife. Almost immediately, Aoyama is drawn to the beautiful Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), whose résumé says she trained in classical ballet until she incurred a hip injury and is now only partially employed in a bar. Aoyama's infatuation will slowly turn into terror. The moral crux of the film lies in whether the grisly punishment Aoyama receives fits the crime, his sexist attempt to forestall his loneliness. On that score, at least, Audition fails: Asami's actions go well beyond anything endorsed by the Me Too movement. So in the debate whether Audition is feminist or misogynist, I have to conclude that it's neither. It's just a well-made horror movie without a message of any coherence. 

Lifeforce (Tobe Hooper, 1985)

Mathilda May in Lifeforce

Cast: Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May, Patrick Stewart, Michael Gothard, Nicholas Ball, Aubrey Morris, Nancy Paul, John Hallam. Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby, based on a novel by Colin Wilson. Cinematography: Alan Hume. Production design: John Graysmark. Film editing: John Grover. Music: Henry Mancini. 

Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce is a delirious mashup of space travel sci-fi, vampire thrillers, zombie movies, sexploitation flicks, and apocalyptic disaster films. A British-American crew exploring Halley's comet, making its appearance near Earth, finds an alien vessel caught up in the comet's wake. All of its batlike crew seem to be dead, but there are three containers on board with naked humanoid beings, one female and two males, in some kind of stasis. Back on Earth, when mission control loses contact with the space ship, a rescue ship is sent. It discovers that everyone on board, except the three humanoids, is dead. The aliens, brought to Earth, awake and begin to create a mess: They apparently have the ability to shape-shift and to suck the life force from humans. Meanwhile, a member (Steve Railsback) of the crew from the original ship who managed to board an escape capsule arrives on Earth to explain what's going on and to help save the planet from the aliens. It's a standard horror-from-outer-space setup, but the script keeps embroidering on it until the creepiness turns ludicrous: Patrick Stewart, for example, plays the administrator of an insane asylum that belongs in a Universal horror movie from the 1930s. The heroes, played by Railsback and Peter Firth, have to dash across an embattled London to St. Paul's Cathedral to kill the female alien (Mathilda May), who is lying on the altar transmitting a glowing stream of human souls to her ship. Somehow, the only weapon that will kill her is an antique sword. Lifeforce, in short, is the stuff of which video games are made. Other than noise and carnage by the bucketsful, it has little to recommend it beyond some wildly entertaining overacting and a preposterousness that can only be called chutzpah. 

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

Hitoshi Omika and Ryo Nishikawa in Evil Does Not Exist

Cast: Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, Ayaka Shibutani, Hazuki Kikuchi, Hiroyuki Miura. Screenplay: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Cinematography: Yoshio Kitagawa. Production design: Masato Nunobe. Film editing: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Azusa Yamazaki. Music: Eiko Ishibashi. 

I happen to agree with the title of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's film: Evil does not exist, or at least not as some demonic entity named Satan or Lucifer. What we call evil are manifestations of human frailty and fallibility like ignorance and greed. What makes Hamaguchi's movie so challenging is that he's able to state the case for, or at least not lay the blame for, both of those manifestations. There's a long historical precedent for doing so: As Thomas Gray put it back in 1747, "Where ignorance is bliss,/'Tis folly to be wise." More recently, we've had assertions that "greed is good," which is the underpinning of laissez-faire economics and the trickle-down theory. Hamaguchi takes a long slow time establishing the idyllic setting of a rural community and the apparently simple man named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) who lives there with his small daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa). Into this earthly paradise come representatives of corporate greed, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), who are tasked with persuading Takumi and the other residents of this rural community that it would be in their interest to allow their company to build a facility for glamping there. (Glamping is a pursuit that reminds me of the court of Marie Antoinette playing shepherds and shepherdesses at the Petit Trianon.) Takahashi and Mayumi are overwhelmed by the well-founded environmental objections to their company's proposal. Both of the corporate emissaries find the villagers' objections persuasive, but when they return to headquarters in Tokyo they're stonewalled by management and forced to return for another pitch, this time directed at Takumi himself. And so goes the setup for a moral tale that has no easy conclusion. And it doesn't get one: Hamaguchi chooses to end the film enigmatically. Evil Does Not Exist wasn't received as whole-heartedly as Hamaguchi's Oscar-winning Drive My Car (2021), and its slowness and ambiguity turned off some viewers, but it's a deftly characterized movie made with a capable cast of unknown actors, beautifully filmed with a haunting score by Eiko Ishibashi. 

The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980)

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Tom Atkins, James Canning, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, Ty Mitchell, Hal Holbrook. Screenplay: John Carpenter, Debra Hill. Cinematography: Dean Cundey. Production design: Tommy Lee Wallace. Film editing: Charles Bornstein, Tommy Lee Wallace. Music: John Carpenter. 

John Carpenter's The Fog gets off to a great start with John Houseman playing an old salt with a plummy voice, telling a fireside ghost story to a bunch of wide-eyed kids. It sets up the plot gimmick and announces exactly what the movie is supposed to be: the kind of story you tell around a campfire. Unfortunately, Carpenter can't seem to play it straight on from there, but keeps introducing irrelevant elements, starting with Elizabeth, the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis. What is Elizabeth doing, hitchhiking on a lonely California back road in the middle of the night? We never exactly find out because it's just a way of getting Curtis, who had just made Carpenter's 1978 Halloween into a smash hit, into the movie. Anyway, she gets picked up by Nick (Tom Atkins) just before the spooky stuff really starts, and winds up in his bed. And from then on, Elizabeth doesn't really contribute much to the story: She just rides around Port Antonio with Nick and gets in jeopardy as things happen. The real star of the movie is Adrienne Barbeau, making her transition from TV into movies, particularly movies by Carpenter, whom she married. She plays Stevie Wayne, a late night disc jockey who broadcasts out of a lighthouse she owns. When the creepy stuff begins to happen in the isolated little town of Port Antonio, she interrupts her easy-listening playlist to provide news and warnings, and eventually to become a target of the phantoms lurking in the titular mist. There are too many narrative threads that need to be followed, and the denouement has trouble unknotting them. But The Fog still generates a good bit of tension, and it's handsomely filmed, with a good use of the location: Port Antonio is actually Point Reyes and Inverness, north of San Francisco.

Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)

Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers

Cast: Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor, Zendaya, Darnell Appling, Shane T Harris, Nada Despotovich, A.J. Lister, Naheem Garcia, Jake Jensen, Hailey Gates. Screenplay: Justin Kuritzkes. Cinematography: Saymombhu Mukdeeprom. Production design: Merissa Lombardo. Film editing: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. 

Luca Guadagnino's sexy, entertaining, and very well made Challengers set me to wondering once again why "love" is the word for "zero" in tennis. Nobody is entirely sure, it seems, but the most plausible explanation is that at some point in history players insisted that they played for love of the game and not just to win. Maybe it made the losing player feel better. There's plenty of love of various kinds in Guadagnino's movie, which is another two-guys-and-a-girl story made fresh by stellar performances by Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor and by a smart screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes that uses tennis as a metaphor for sex -- or maybe sex as a metaphor for tennis. It also has a cleverly elusive ending that somehow satisfies the demand for closure by avoiding it. 

On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1956)

Ray Salyer and Gorman Hendricks in On the Bowery

Cast: Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews, George L. Bolton. Screenplay: Richard Bagley, Lionel Rogosin, Mark Sufrin. Cinematography: Richard Bagley. Film editing: Carl Lerner. Music: Charles Mills. 

Although it was nominated for an Oscar as best documentary, the fictionalized elements of On the Bowery are patent. Lionel Rogosin created this classic docufiction to provide an entry into the blighted lives of the street people of New York City. The men (and a few women) we see in the film are the ones who almost don't need film to be visible: They were on display for passersby every day. What they needed was understanding, and Rogosin's film at least provides a start to that by dramatizing several days in their lives -- the parts we don't see after we've left them on the street. The "actors" for the most part aren't acting: Rogosin met them on the street and crafted situations for them and let them improvise. The central figure is Ray Salyer, a man whose damaged handsomeness makes him stand out from the paunchy and grizzled men among whom he exists. Several of the other men we meet in the film would be dead in a few years, and after attempts to get his life together, Salyer would eventually die on the streets too. Bosley Crowther, the influential New York Times film critic, dismissively called On the Bowery "sordid." Fortunately, less complacent viewers have preserved it as an enduring look at a problem that refuses to go away.  

Buddies (Arthur J. Bressan Jr., 1985)

Geoff Edholm and David Schachter in Buddies

Cast: Geoff Edholm, David Schachter, Billy Lux, David Rose, Libby Saines, Damon Hairston, Tracy Vivat, Susan Schneider, Joyce Korn. Screenplay: Arthur J. Bressan Jr. Cinematography: Carl Teitelbaum. Film editing: Arthur J. Bressan Jr. Music: Jeffrey Olmstead. 

Sure, the performances in Arthur J. Bressan Jr.'s Buddies could be more nuanced, and the lack of a generous budget shows, but this first ever feature film about AIDS holds up splendidly after almost 40 years. It's far more moving and effective than glossier treatments of the subject like Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), if only because it was made when the urgency of the syndrome was at its height. Both writer-director-producer-editor Bressan and Geoff Edholm, who plays the bedridden Robert, died of complications from AIDS a few years after the film was made. Bressan made a wise choice in treating the film as a two-hander. Although other actors than Edholm and David Schachter, who plays Robert's "buddy," David, are credited, they're mostly voiceovers -- the few who appear on screen are carefully kept out out of the center of the frame. The effect is to internalize and intensify the drama. In fact, the scenes that move out of the hospital room, even the flashbacks to the healthy Robert and the concluding scene in which David fulfills Robert's dying wish, felt intrusive, the way scenes from a play that has been turned into a movie often feel. But if Buddies had been a play and not a film we might have lost this record of a sad and terrible moment in time.   

The Student Nurses (Stephanie Rothman, 1970)

Karen Carlson in The Student Nurses

Cast: Elaine Giftos, Karen Carlson, Brioni Farrell, Barbara Leigh, Reni Santoni, Richard Rust, Lawrence P. Casey, Darrell Larson, Paul Camen, Richard Stahl, Katherine MacGregor, Pepe Serna, John Pearce, Mario Aniov, Ron Gans. Screenplay: Don Spencer, Stephanie Rothman, Charles S. Swartz. Cinematography: Stevan Larner. Art direction: David Nichols. Film editing: Stephen Judson. Music: Roger Dollarhide, Clancy B. Grass III. 

Yes, the dialogue is clunky, the acting is amateurish, and the nudity is gratuitous, but The Student Nurses has a heart. That heart is Stephanie Rothman's. Working for the great quickie producer Roger Corman, she devised a story that would be exploitative enough for audiences wanting a little sex and yet give her the opportunity to deal with hot-button issues like drugs, abortion, and social protest. So she came up with a quartet of student nurses and devised situations in which they might encounter one or more of those issues, at the same time making a case for female independence and strength. True, they're nubile and somewhat randy women with no hesitation about taking off their tops, and the men they encounter are far from ideal. Phred (Karen Carlson) hooks up with a young OB/GYN named Jim (Lawrence P. Casey), Priscilla meets a drug-selling biker named Les (Richard Rust) at a love-in, Lynn (Brioni Farrell) falls for a Chicano activist, and Sharon (Elaine Giftos) befriends an embittered young man named Greg (Darrell Larson) who is dying of cystic fibrosis. If The Student Nurses had a real budget and some sharper dialogue and the four nurses had been played by actors like Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Katharine Ross, and Faye Dunaway, it might be remembered as a minor classic of its day.    

Someone's Watching Me! (John Carpenter, 1978)

Adrienne Barbeau and Lauren Hutton in Someone's Watching Me!

Cast: Lauren Hutton, David Birney, Adrienne Barbeau, Charles Cyphers, Grainger Hines, Len Lesser, John Mahon, James Murtaugh, George Skaff. Screenplay: John Carpenter. Cinematography: Robert B. Hauser. Art direction: Philip Barber. Film editing: Jerry Taylor. Music: Harry Sukman. 

The hysterically titled Someone's Watching Me! (the working title was High Rise) was made for TV, and it's not up to John Carpenter's usual standards. But it's still a watchable thriller with a good performance by Lauren Hutton and some moments of genuine suspense. Hutton plays Leigh Michaels, a director of live television who comes to LA for a new job and takes an apartment in a newly built high rise that the leasing agent assures her has state-of-the-art computer-controlled amenities. She quickly makes a new friend in coworker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau), who lets her know that she's a lesbian but that Leigh "isn't her type." She also lands a new boyfriend, Paul Winkless (David Birney), by hitting on him in a bar -- a spur-of-the-moment thing after she gets tired of being hit on herself. He's a philosophy professor at USC, of all things. But then creepy things start to happen to Leigh, and she realizes she's in some kind of danger. Sophie and Paul urge her to call the police, but when she does they say they can't help her until she's got better evidence that something truly criminal is going on. So everything is set up for a solid woman-in-jeopardy tale. The only thing that struck me as novel about the movie was that the introduction of a queer character in a strong second role was unusual for a major network like NBC as early as 1978. And then when we had a second scene in which Leigh shows her comfort with Sophie's sexual identity I realized what was going on: Sophie was being set up as the sacrificial character, the one who would fall victim to the harasser, thereby heightening Leigh's peril. The Kill-the-Queers trope loomed its tired old head again. Too bad, because otherwise Someone's Watching Me! smartly displays its debt to Rear Window (1954) and to Hitchcock in general, and Hutton is an attractive heroine (though she smokes too much). 

Dolores Claiborne (Taylor Hackford, 1995)

Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Dolores Claiborne

Cast: Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judy Parfitt, Christopher Plummer, David Strathairn, Eric Bogosian, John C. Reilly, Ellen Muth, Bob Gunton, Roy Cooper. Screenplay: Tony Gilroy, based on a novel by Stephen King. Cinematography: Gabriel Beristain. Production design: Bruno Rubeo. Film editing: Mark Warner. Music: Danny Elfman. 

Stephen King is usually likened to Edgar Allan Poe, but the writer Taylor Hackford's film of King's Dolores Claiborne puts me in mind of is Dickens: the Dickens who respected melodrama and created flawed protagonists and convincing (and sometimes redeemable) villains. At 132 minutes, the movie is a little too long, but I wouldn't lose a minute of the performances by Kathy Bates as Dolores and Jennifer Jason Leigh as her daughter, Selena. Christopher Plummer, never reluctant to chew the hambone, threatens to go a bit over the top as Dolores's chief antagonist, Detective John Mackey, but Hackford keeps him under control. Judy Parfitt is superbly acidic as Vera Donovan, though it's a shame her later scenes had to be covered in old-age makeup. And David Strathairn does both the hair-trigger violence and the slimy seductiveness of Joe St. George well. It's also visually engaging, with Nova Scotia standing in for Maine, and Gabriel Beristain's cinematography making the most of the solar eclipse scenes. Dolores Claiborne has been praised for its feminist point of view, but perhaps that's because we so rarely see women dominate an American thriller as well as Bates and Leigh do.