Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958)

Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, unidentified baby, Marcello Mastroianni, and Renato Salvatori in Big Deal on Madonna Street

Cast: Vittorio Gassman, Renato Salvatori, Memmo Carotenuto, Rossana Rory, Carla Gravina, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, Totò. Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Mario Monicelli. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo. Production design: Piero Gherardi. Film editing: Adriana Novelli. Music: Piero Umiliani. 

According to director Mario Monicelli, Big Deal on Madonna Street was intended not just as a parody of heist thrillers like Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) but also of neorealism as a genre. We may get a glimpse of that when Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni) hears that the target of the heist is a pawn shop: "My sheets are there," he says, perhaps reminding the audience of the scene in Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) when the couple pawn their sheets so the husband can buy a bicycle. Whatever the target, Big Deal stands on its own as an Italian comedy classic, revealing the comic gifts of actors like Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman, and providing a small but important role in the budding career of Claudia Cardinale. It's a tale of screw-ups, as everything possible goes wrong in the attempts of a crew of ne'er-do-wells to pull off a burglary that involves extensive planning, surveillance, and other feats that are just beyond their abilities. The comedy ranges from small ironies to broad slapstick, all set to a lively jazz score by Piero Umiliani. 

Come Back, Africa (Lionel Rogosin, 1959)

Zachariah Mgabe in Come Back, Africa

Cast: Zachariah Mgabe, Vinah Bendile, Miriam Makebe, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisani, Can Themba, Myrtle Berman, George Malabye, Morris Hugh, Hazel Futa. Screenplay: Bloke Modisani, Lewis Nkosi, Lionel Rogosin. Cinematography: Ernest Artaria, Emil Knebel. Film editing: Carl Lerner, Hugh A. Robertson. Music: Chatur Lal. 

Filmed surreptitiously and edited with skill, Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa is everything a docufiction film should be, with the chief weakness being the fiction part. It's a revelatory exploration of apartheid in South Africa, concentrated on Johannesburg, that gets its focus by following the misadventures of Zachariah Mgabe, which is also the name of the actor who plays him. Zachariah comes to Johannesburg in search of work, leaving his wife and children in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal province. He finds work in the gold mines, but when the agreed-upon term of employment is over, he wants something that pays more. He negotiates the "pass laws," a notorious system of internal passports devised by the white South African government to enforce segregation, and finds work as the "house boy" for a white couple. But the mistress of the household, played by anti-apartheid activist Myrtle Berman, constantly scolds, berates, and finally fires him, so Zachariah moves from job to job, encountering suspicion and contempt from the white employers. Things become more desperate when his wife, Vinah (Vinah Bendile), and their children join him in Johannesburg. The film vividly explores the street life of the city, and climaxes in a scene set in a shebeen where Black intellectuals discuss their situation and Miriam Makeba, already a celebrity in the country, sings two songs -- a  superb performance that helped launch her international career. But the narrative thread of the film isn't sustained as well as the documentary scenes and after an act of brutality that isn't set up properly, the film ends on a harsh but inconclusive note.   

One From the Heart: Reprise (Francis Ford Coppola, 1981, 2024)

Teri Garr in One From the Heart

Cast: Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, Lainie Kazan, Harry Dean Stanton, Allen Garfield. Screenplay: Armyan Bernstein, Francis Ford Coppola. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García, Vittorio Storaro. Production design: Dean Tavoularis. Film editing: Rudi Fehr, Anne Goursaud, Randy Roberts. Music: Tom Waits. 

Was it the success of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Damien Chazelle's La La Land (2016) that inspired Francis Ford Coppola to try revamping One From the Heart, the 1981 musical that destroyed his hopes of creating a film studio? One From the Heart had often been called "ahead of its time," for its attempt to revive the movie musical with stylized sets and performers that weren't known for singing and dancing. The knock against One From the Heart was chiefly that the elaborate production overwhelmed the rather thin story: a couple who quarrel, split up, have flings with others, but return to each other at the end of the film. Unfortunately, that defect remains in the re-edited version, with previously unseen footage, that Coppola called One From the Heart: Reprise. And both Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr feel miscast: Forrest was a fine character actor, not a leading man, and Garr was a wonderful comic actress in movies like Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) and Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), but they have no chemistry together as the sparring lovers. Tom Waits's songs, beautifully sung by Waits and Crystal Gayle, work nicely as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the action, but some who admire the original version of Coppola's film object that in the Reprise they've been smothered by dialogue. Mostly it's a treat for the eye and sometimes for the ear, but it never reaches the heart.    

The Spell (Lee Phillips, 1977)

Susan Myers in The Spell

Cast: Lee Grant, Susan Myers, Lelia Goldoni, Helen Hunt, Jack Colvin, James Olson, James Greene, Wright King, Barbara Bostock, Doney Oatman, Richard Carlyle, Kathleen Hughes, Robert Gibbons, Arthur Peterson. Screenplay: Brian Taggart. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Art direction: Robert MacKichan. Film editing: David Newhouse. Music: Gerald Fried. 

The Spell was planned as a theatrical feature, but when Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) became a big hit, the producers decided that another film about a telekinetic teenager would be dismissed as a copycat, so it was reworked into a TV movie. In the process, as its writer and director responded to tighter censorship, time constraints, and the need to accommodate commercial breaks, it lost a lot of suspense as well as some essential characterization and backgrounding. The Matchetts, Marion (Lee Grant) and Glenn (James Olson), are an affluent couple with two daughters, 15-year-old Rita (Susan Myers) and 13-year-old Kristina (Helen Hunt). Rita is overweight, and her father criticizes her at the dinner table for eating too much. She's a misfit at school, taunted by the mean girls, and when she's asked to do a rope-climbing exercise, she's unable to do it. The girl she was paired with in the exercise succeeds and starts showing off, but when Rita glares menacingly at her, the girl falls from the rope and breaks her neck. It's not an accident: Others who cross Rita, including her father and her sister, find themselves in danger, too. Marion  is closer to Rita and more defensive of her than the others in the family, but when a friend of hers dies in a freakishly inexplicable manner, she too becomes concerned. The story builds to a surprise twist, but the ending fizzles into anticlimax. The cast, especially Grant and Hunt, does the best they can with a clumsily mishandled narrative. 

Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977)

Cast: Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore, Joe Silva, Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman, J. Roger Periard, Lynne Deragon, Terry Schonblum, Victor Désy, Julie Anna, Gary McKeehan. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: René Verzier. Art direction: Claude Marchand. Film editing: Jean LaFleur. 

David Cronenberg admitted he had trouble writing the screenplay for Rabid, and it shows. The movie begins promisingly in a somewhat isolated plastic surgery clinic in Quebec, where the surgeon, Dr. Keloid (Howard Ryshpan), is persuaded to try a new technique whose side effects are still unknown. When a young woman named Rose Miller (Marilyn Chambers) is seriously injured in a motorcycle accident near the clinic, he decides to use the technique to save her life. Rose lingers in a coma after the operation until she wakes up screaming one night with a serious hunger for human blood. The surgery has somehow left a sphincter-shaped organ in her armpit, from which a kind of stinger emerges that allows her to feed on other people. The victims wake up with no memory being attacked but with a similar hunger, and they swiftly go mad, infect others, and die. Rose escapes from the clinic and makes her way to Montreal, spreading the plague behind her. Rose doesn't suffer the madness and death that her victims do, so nobody suspects that she's the carrier of what is initially diagnosed as a new strain of rabies. Rose's story should provide a steady through line for the film, but Cronenberg gets sidetracked too often into scenes that take the plot nowhere and dissipate the suspense a thriller needs. Cronenberg had Sissy Spacek in mind for the role of Rose, but the producers disagreed, thinking that Chambers's notoriety as a porn actress wanting to go straight would attract audiences. Chambers gives a competent performance, but the role needs an actor who can generate both sympathy and menace -- the sort of thing Spacek demonstrated in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976).

Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)

Cast: Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Koyuki, Kurume Arisaka, Masatoshi Matsuo, Shinji Takeda, Jun Fubuki, Shun Sugata, Sho Aikawa, Koji Yakusho, Kenji Misuhashi. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Jun'ichiro Hayashi. Production design: Tomoyuki Maruo. Film editing: Jun'ichi Kikuchi. Music: Takefumi Haketa. 

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse is a quietly unnerving movie about the apocalypse, which comes not with a bang but with a slow (very slow) fading away. It seems to be brought about by technology, particularly the internet, which causes people to become lonely and isolated. The film is also a ghost story, which posits that the afterlife is a place of intense loneliness and isolation. As the film progresses, cities thin out and some of the characters simply fade into blurry splotches on the wall. One crumbles into flakes and is blown away by the wind. Unfortunately, we expect more from movies than melancholy disintegration, so the impact of Pulse disintegrates too, as it takes its long slow time to create a mood at the expense of telling a story. 

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.