Twelve Angry Men (William Friedkin, 1997)

Cast: Courtney B. Vance, Ossie Davis, George C. Scott, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Dorian Harewood, James Gandolfini, Tony Danza, Jack Lemmon, Hume Cronyn, Mykelti Williamson, Edward James Olmos, William Petersen, Mary McDonnell. Screenplay: Reginald Rose. Cinematography: Fred Schuler. Production design: Bill Malley. Film editing: Augie Hess. 

William Friedkin's Twelve Angry Men is not so easily dismissed as an unnecessary remake of Sidney Lumet's classic 1957 film, itself a remake of Reginald Rose's 1954 television drama. Forty years of change have taken place, and although such a jury today would almost certainly have women on it, at least Friedkin's version includes four Black men. One of them, strikingly, is the most virulent racist on the panel: a former Nation of Islam follower played by Mykelti Williamson, who delivers a vicious diatribe against Latinos. Which incidentally brings up another anomaly: There are no Latinos on this jury, even though it is impaneled in New York City, which certainly has a significant Latino population. Oddly, one of the actors, Edward James Olmos, is Latino, but he plays an Eastern European immigrant. The rant of the juror played by Williamson has perhaps even more significance today than it did in 1997, after an election campaign tainted by racist taunts against immigrants: The speech sounds like it might have been delivered at Donald Trump's infamous Madison Square Garden rally. As for the film itself, it retains the 1954 movie's power to entertain, if only the pleasure of watching 12 good actors at peak performance (and in George C. Scott's case, a bit over the peak). It also retains the tendency to preachiness, like a dramatized civics lesson, though maybe we need that more than ever.  

The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961)

Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf

Cast: Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed, Yvonne Romain, Catherine Feller, Anthony Dawson, Josephine Llewellyn, Richard Wordsworth, Hira Talfrey, Justin Walters, John Gabriel, Warren Mitchell, Anne Blake. Screenplay: Anthony Hinds, based on a novel by Guy Endore. Cinematography: Arthur Grant. Production design: Bernard Robinson. Film editing: Alfred Cox. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

Hammer Films thoroughly exploited the public taste for monster movies by borrowing story ideas from the classic black-and-white horror films of the 1930s and '40s that originated at Universal Studios. It gave Dracula and Frankenstein's creature multiple outings, but surprisingly only once made a film about a werewolf. It was a success, and launched the career of Oliver Reed, who played Leon Corledo, a young man afflicted by lycanthropic tendencies. Reed actually doesn't appear in The Curse of the Werewolf until well into the film, after an extensive backstory that explains how he became a monster under the spell of the full moon. That's the chief flaw of this otherwise solid, if not terribly scary film, which is handsomely photographed by Arthur Grant and moodily scored by Benjamin Frankel. The bulk of the narrative is handled by Clifford Evans as Don Alfredo Corledo, Leon's adopted father. Reed doesn't get a chance to wolf out until the very end of the movie, but he does so effectively.  

Early David Cronenberg

Clara Mayer in Stereo

Stereo (David Cronenberg, 1969)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jack Messinger, Paul Mulholland, Iain Ewing, Arlene Mlodzik, Clara Mayer, Glenn McCauley. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg. 

Ronald Mlodzik in Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 1970)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Ronald Mlodzik, John Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Paul Mulholland, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, William Haslam, Raymond Woodley, Stefan Czernecki, Rafe Macpherson, Willem Poolman. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg.  

I can't imagine there's much of an audience for David Cronenberg's Stereo and Crimes of the Future (a title he reused in the 2022 feature, which borrows an element of the 1970 film but otherwise has no resemblance to the first one) except among film scholars and passionate devotees of his work. They look like the work of a film school student, although Cronenberg was teaching himself how to make movies at the time. Both are silent except for voiceovers that do what they can to give the images a narrative shape. In the case of Stereo, there's very little of that: The voiceovers sound like excerpts of lectures given by social science professors about a research project concentrated on telepathy and sexuality. Crimes of the Future has a more complex narrative line, as Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik), a dermatologist who heads a clinic called the House of Skin, tells about the attempts to halt a plague caused by cosmetics. It's a creepier film than Stereo, more in the line with Cronenberg's later work, with a nice performance by Mlodzik, who appeared in several of his films before entering the clergy.    

An Egyptian Story (Youssef Chahine, 1982)

Nour El-Sherif and Mohamed Mounir in An Egyptian Story

Cast: Nour El-Sherif, Oussama Nadir, Mohsen Mohieddin, Yousra, Ahmed Mehrez, Mohamed Mounir, Ragaa Hussein, Seif Abdelrahman, Hanan, Layla Hamadah, Magda El-Khatib, Ragaa Al-Gidawy. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine. Cinematograpby: Mohsen Nasr. Art direction: Gabriel Karraze. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Gamal Salamah. 

An Egyptian Story is the middle film of Youssef Chahine's autobiographical "Alexandria trilogy," and it may be the most accessible to people not familiar with his work. Perhaps inspired by Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), it centers on the memories and fantasies of a film director, Yehia Choukry Mourad (Nour El-Sherif), who is Chahine's alter ego, as he undergoes open heart surgery. Some of the action takes place in a set designed to resemble Yehia's chest cavity, where a trial takes place. The defendant is Yehia's "inner child," played by young Oussama Nadir, who is on trial for killing the mature Yehia -- though he isn't really dead yet. Key events of Yehia's life take place in flashbacks that are sometimes realistic, sometimes surreal. In the first film of the trilogy, Alexandria ... Why? (1979), Yehia was played by Mohsen Mohieddin, who appears in this film as Yehia as a young man. In the third film, Alexandria Again and Forever (1990), Chahine himself takes the role as the aging Yehia. Because of the trial setting, the narrative of An Egyptian Story is more linear than the first and third stories in the trilogy, and might be the one to watch if you're just getting started with Chahine's work or if, like me, you're not well versed in the history of Egypt in the 20th century that serves as the backdrop of Yehia's story. Chahine doesn't spare himself in any of the films, revealing much about his ego and ambition, his neglect of his family, and even hinting rather broadly at his bisexuality. Those more familiar with his work may find An Egyptian Story a little less colorful and creative than the others, but it's still a remarkable movie.  

Hold Your Man (Sam Wood, 1933)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess, Muriel Kirkland, Garry Owen, Barbara Barondess, Elizabeth Patterson, Blanche Friderici, Theresa Harris, George Reed. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Howard Emmett Rogers. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. 

Part sexy pre-Code romp and part weepie melodrama, Hold Your Man succeeds on both counts. Clark Gable plays small-time con man Eddie Hall, who while fleeing from the cops winds up in the apartment of Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), while she's taking a bath. He winds up there for good until he slugs an intruder into her apartment, accidentally killing him. He takes it on the lam and she takes the rap, going to a women's prison where she learns that she's carrying his child. The denouement, in which Ruby's fellow inmates help unite her with Eddie, is full of suspense. In a surprisingly almost enlightened twist, the heroine of this section of the movie is a Black prisoner, Lily Mae (Theresa Harris), whose father, a minister (George Reed), just happens to be at the prison for visitors' day, and thus available with a little maneuvering to marry Ruby and Eddie. (I say "almost enlightened" because neither Harris nor Reed gets a screen credit, and an alternate ending was filmed for Southern release, in which the minister was played by Henry B. Walthall.) The switch from hijinks among lowlifes to redemptive love story is a little jarring, but Harlow was never more in her element, and Gable's smirky charm is engaging.  

Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015)

Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, and Jesuthasan Antonythasan in Dheepan

Cast: Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, Vincent Rottier, Faouzi Bensaïdi, Marc Zinga, Bass Dhem, Franck Falise, Joséphine de Meaux, Jean-Baptiste Pouilloux. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré. Cinematography: Éponine Momenceau. Production design: Marcel Barthélémy. Music: Nicolas Jaar. 

Writer-director Jacques Audiard has a recurring theme in his films: the search for redemption thwarted by past transgressions. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), for example, an enforcer for a corrupt real estate firm decides to turn away from the gangster life of his father and instead follow in the footsteps of his mother, a classical pianist, but doesn't succeed. And in his current film, Emilia Pérez, a drug lord transitions from male to female, but old relationships undo the attempt to become a better person. Much of Dheepan is a stirring, fascinating story about a makeshift family: three unrelated refugees from the civil war in Sri Lanka, who take on new names and pose as husband, wife, and daughter to escape the country and find safety in a suburb of Paris. How they manage to endure cultural, social, and linguistic changes and form a new family is the heart of the film. Unfortunately, they find themselves in a housing development that is the locus of a turf war between various drug cartels, and Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) discovers that his old identity as a fighter for the Tamils in Sri Lanka hasn't been hidden. Memories of that old conflict possess him, and Audiard climaxes his story by having Dheepan pull off a single-handed rescue of Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and Ilayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), resorting to old combat techniques. Although this part of the film is exciting, it's a reversion to conventional movie-making, turning Dheepan into Rambo, and it upends the neo-realistic style of the rest of the film. 

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)

Zoe Saldaña in Emilia Pérez

Cast: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir, Eduardo Aladro, Emilio Hasan. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, based on a novel by Boris Razon. Cinematography: Paul Guilhaume. Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay. Film editing: Juliette Welfling. Music: Camille, Clément Ducol. 

While I was watching Emilia Pérez I was caught up in the audacity of its neat intermeshing of drama with song and dance, but when it ended I felt let down. Jacques Audiard accomplishes what he set out to do: tell a story about a drug lord who transitions from male to female in search of authenticity and redemption. And he does it with the help of superb performances by Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, and Selena Gomez, and witty choreography by Damien Jalet. But the film is all surface: It doesn't treat its characters as real people but rather as figures in a neo-noir melodrama laden with contemporary attitudes about sexuality and identity. The ending is far more conventional than I expected from such an interesting premise, turning the premise into a gimmick.

The Killer That Stalked New York (Earl McEvoy, 1950)

Evelyn Keyes in The Killer That Stalked New York

Cast: Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, William Bishop, Dorothy Malone, Lola Albright, Barry Kelley, Carl Benton Reid, Ludwig Donath, Art Smith, Whit Bissell, Roy Roberts, Connie Gilchrist, Dan Riss, Harry Shannon, Jim Backus, Reed Hadley (voice). Screenplay: Harry Essex, based on a magazine article by Milton Lehman. Cinematography: Joseph F.  Biroc. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Hans J. Salter. 

I wonder what RFK Jr. would have to say about The Killer That Stalked New York, now that he threatens to put his anti-vax quackery into effect. It's a taut little thriller about a smallpox epidemic, in which the heroes are the governmental and medical officials who race against time to vaccinate 8 million people against the disease while its carrier moves among them. The carrier is Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes), who has been to Cuba to retrieve some diamonds that her boyfriend, Matt Krane (Charles Korvin), wants to fence. Somewhere in her journey, she started to get sick, and by the time she arrives in New York City, she's really not feeling so well. Trying to dodge the Treasury agent (Barry Kelley) who's on her tail, she plays hide-and-seek around the city, and when she discovers her boyfriend is double-crossing her, she gets even more furtive. Several people will die from direct contact with her, and others will become carriers before her pursuers, including the doctor (William Bishop) who treated her without knowing the real nature of her disease, finally track her down. A voiceover (Reed Hadley) keeps hyping the urgency of the situation, but it's really not necessary -- Earl McEvoy's crisp pacing and the effective location shooting by Joseph F. Biroc supply enough intensity and reality. There are some nice surprises among the cast, including Dorothy Malone as a nurse and Jim Backus as a club owner, both of them pre-stardom.  

 

Illuminata (John Turturro, 1998)

Katherine Borowitz and John Turturro in Illuminata

Cast: John Turturro, Katherine Borowitz, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Ben Gazzara, Bill Irwin, Donal McCann, Aida Turturro, Leo Bassi. Screenplay: Brandon Cole, John Turturro, based on a play by Cole. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Robin Standefer. Film editing: Michael Berenbaum. Music: Arnold Black, William Bolcom.

Illuminata is poetic, witty, and beautifully filmed, designed, and acted. But it's also a little twee, which means it misses the mark for a lot of viewers. It's a tale of the theater, which means it comes with one strike against it already: Movies about the stage inevitably fail to capture what's most important about theater, the quality of being live. The theater in question is a small New York repertory company in 1905, a time and place when the stage and actors were most alive, before they became canned by radio, movies, and television. Almost all of the characters have Europeanish names, not because they're immigrants but because the film has a commedia dell'arte quality to it and a sense of playing to the rafters. John Turturro is the playwright Tuccio, married to the actress Rachel (Katherine Borowitz), but tempted by the diva Celimene (Susan Sarandon). His nemesis is the theater critic Bevalaqua (Christopher Walken), and the company includes a Beppo (Leo Bassi), a Dominique (Rufus Sewell), a Marta (Aida Turturro), a Flavio  (Ben Gazzara), and a Marco (Bill Irwin). The theater is owned by the Astergourds (Beverly D'Angelo and Donal McCann). Everyone in the cast seems to be sleeping with everyone else, or at least trying to. Bevalaqua, for example, tries to seduce Marco, the occasion for much clowning by Walken and Irwin. As noted, it's not for all tastes: It has a 46% rating on the Tomatometer. But I found it sweet and amusing, and I don't get much sweetness and amusement from movies these days.  

Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022)

Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Vic Carmen Sonne, Jacob Lohmann, Hilmar Guðjónsson, Waage Sandø, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir. Screenplay: Hlynur Pálmason. Cinematography: Maria Von Hausswolff. Production design: Frosti Fridrikkson. Film editing: Julius Krebs Damsbo. Music: Alex Zhang Hungtai. 

Godland is the age-old tale of man against the elements, as a Danish preacher, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), makes his way across the unforgiving landscape of Iceland to a place where he plans to build a church for the settlers. He is working with a guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), who doesn't (or won't) speak Danish, so he relies on an interpreter played by Hilmar Guðjónsson until the interpreter is drowned in a river crossing that Lucas stubbornly insists on. From then on, he's in Ragnar's hands, and he will be until the fated ending of the film. When they reach the settlement he finds shelter with Carl (Jacob Lohmann) and his two daughters, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir. director Hlynur Pálmason's actual daughter). Since the settlement is near the coast, Carl wonders why Lucas has taken such a long overland route. Lucas explains that he wanted to get a feeling for the land and to photograph it: The crew has hauled his bulky photographic equipment all the way. From then on, it's a story of Lucas against Ragnar and to some extent Carl, who wants to protect his daughters, especially the marriageable Anna, against the priest. Cinematographer Maria Von Hausswolff provides spectacular images, viewed not in the widescreen panoramas usually called on for such photogenic landscapes, but in the old, narrow Academy ratio that was standard in movies until the 1950s, when the film industry decided to compete with television with techniques like CinemaScope. The images in Godland even have rounded corners, an evocation of the wet-plate photography used by Lucas. The film is technically dazzling, a visual tour de force, but I just wish it moved me more. Too often it feels like the creation of a gifted and imaginative director out to display his gifts rather than one who wants to tell a story and evoke human emotions.