Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023)

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker in Last Summer

Cast: Léa Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Oliver Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau, Serena Hu, Angela Chen, Romain Maricau, Romane Violeau, Marie Lucas, Neilia Da Costa, Lila-Rose Gilberti, Jean-Christophe Pilloix. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Pascal Bonitzer, based on a screenplay by Marie-Louis Käehne and May el-Toukhy. Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie. Production design: Sébastien Danos. Film editing: François Quiqueré. 

When we first meet Anne (Léa Drucker), she's using her considerable skills as a lawyer to help a young woman prosecute her rapist, and we learn that she has devoted much of her career to helping women in abusive situations. So why does Anne, all of a sudden, start having sex with her 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher)? Catherine Breillat's Last Summer never quite comes to terms with Anne's hypocrisy, which is compounded by the lies she tells to her husband after his son tells him of the affair. Still, the film works, thanks to skillful performances by Drucker and Oliver Rabourdin as Anne's husband, Pierre, a rather dull businessman who doesn't have the emotional wherewithal to cope with the revelation. Breillat plays down the sensational aspects of the plot in various ways: in the sex scenes, the focus is on faces rather than bodies, and in the confrontation of husband and wife, the violence is emotional rather than physical. Even the revelation that Pierre has been told of the affair is postponed until he and Anne have had dinner with their two young adopted daughters and sent them to bed, although you can sense the tension building. Last Summer is a fine example of directorial restraint, up to the ending. The only question is whether restraint is appropriate to the subject matter.  

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996)

Cast: Voices of Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Cloris Leachman, Robert Stack, Eric Bogosian, John Doman, Tim Guinee, David Letterman, Richard Linklater, Greg Kinnear, David Spade. Screenplay: Mike Judge, Joe Stillman. Cinematography: David J. Miller. Art direction: Jeff Buckland. Film editing: Gunter Glinka, Terry Kelley, Neil Lawrence. Music: John Frizzell. 

Maybe the funniest thing about Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is reading serious film critics trying to defend it. "Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message," intoned Roger Ebert. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden found it provided something like the catharsis Aristotle found in tragedy, saying of its protagonists, "They distill the agony of adolescence, the queasy feeling of being trapped in a body going through monstrous changes, at the same time that they purge it of its terror." For those of us less serious about wasting our time, let's just say it's dumb fun and a flashback to the Clinton era, which seems somehow more innocent than the current one.

Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006)

Paula Patton and Denzel Washington in Deja Vu

Cast: Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel, Adam Goldberg, Elden Henson, Erika Alexander, Bruce Greenwood, Rick Hutchman, Matt Craven, Donna W. Scott, Elle Fanning. Screenplay: Bill Marsilii, Terry Rossio. Cinematography: Paul Cameron. Production design: Chris Seagers. Film editing: Jason Hellmann, Chris Lebenzon. Music: Jared Lee Gosselin, Harry Gregson-Williams. 

Tony Scott's Deja Vu (the screen title doesn't have the accent marks) is a Scott specialty: a hyperactive thriller with a charismatic star. Denzel Washington's casual savoir faire as an uncannily savvy agent for the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms keeps the movie alive as it ventures out from conventional crime-solving into time travel sci-fi. The movie opens with the sinking of a New Orleans ferry by a mad bomber. Washington's Doug Carlin is on the scene to investigate, and immediately starts finding clues that everyone else has missed. (He investigated the Oklahoma City bombing, so he has some expertise to bring to bear.) So he's asked to join a federal team headed by Agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) that's using a top-secret spyware gizmo that allows them to look back in time at the moments surrounding the explosion. Carlin thinks that a woman named Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), who actually died before the explosion, is somehow linked to it. It's convenient that Claire was also quite pretty, so Carlin gets somewhat more fascinated with her case. So when he learns that the technology can potentially be used not only to look at the past but also travel to it, you can see where this is headed. There's the usual sci-fi talk about time lines and altering history, but Scott keeps things moving along through it, so although what happens probably doesn't make sense, it's hard to care. Washington gets good support from a lively cast.    

Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)

Linda Manz and Dennis Hopper in Out of the Blue

Cast: Linda Manz, Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farrell, Don Gordon, Raymond Burr, Leon Eriksen, Fiona Brody, David L. Crowley, Joan Hoffman, Carl Nelson. Screenplay: Leonard Yakir, Brenda Nelson. Cinematography: Marc Champion. Production design: Leon Eriksen. Film editing: Doris Dyck. Music: Tom Lavin. 

You'd think that a film that begins with a truck barreling into a school bus full of kids couldn't get any worse. Out of the Blue does. The unpleasantness has only begun for the driver of the truck, Don (Dennis Hopper); his wife, Kathy (Sharon Farrell); and their daughter, Cindy (Linda Manz), known as Cebe -- short for "citizens' band," as in radio. Don goes to prison, Kathy is a heroin addict, and Cebe, in her early teens, does whatever she wants, which includes idolizing Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious, running away from home, and loving her father until she confronts the truth about him. The truth is not pretty. Despite the efforts of a child psychologist, Dr. Brean (Raymond Burr), to rescue Cebe from her dysfunctional parents and aimless life, the outcome is bleak. In the original script, Dr. Brean played a more positive role in Cebe's life, but when Hopper took over as director he was of a different mind. Let's just say that this is a painful, harrowing movie with some gritty performances and a grim determination to face the unpleasant fact that some lives are doomed. Is it a good film? Well, some films transcend such questions, and Out of the Blue is one of them. 

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian in Identification of a Woman

Cast: Tomas Milian, Daniel Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel, Veronica Lazar, Enrica Antonioni, Sandra Monteleoni, Marcel Bozzufi, Giampaolo Saccarola, Dado Ruspoli, Arianna De Rosa. Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra. Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma. Production design: Andrea Crisanti. Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni. Music: John Foxx. 

In the middle of Identification of a Woman, the protagonist, Niccolò (Tomas Milian), and his girlfriend, Mavi (Daniela Silverio), get lost in a fog. They emerge from it eventually, but they leave some of the audience behind, to judge from the rather chilly critical reception. Niccolò is a film director trying to focus his ideas for a new film, and you can see from his experiences how much of Antonioni's own frustration in trying to make his ideas cohere is reflected in the film. The difficulty may lie in the milieu, the 1980s, the Reagan-Thatcher era, with its triumphant resurgence of conservatism and capitalism -- so different from the angst-ridden, activist, youth-oriented 1960s in which Antonioni made his name. The political, social, and sexual concerns that seethed underneath the films of the '60s were exploded by Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970), leaving him lost for a subject. Even the sex in Identification of a Woman, though more explicit than his earlier films, has no heat, no risk, no daring. 

In the Folds of the Flesh (Sergio Bergonzelli, 1970)

Eleanora Rossi Drago and Pier Angeli in In the Folds of the Flesh

Cast: Eleanora Rossi Drago, Pier Angeli, Fernando Sancho, Alfredo Mayo, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, María Rosa Sclauzero, Victor Barrera, Gaetano Imbró, Luciano Catenacci, Bruno Ciangola. Screenplay: Fabio De Agostini, Sergio Bergonzelli, Mario Caiano. Cinematography: Mario Pacheco. Art direction: Eduardo Torre de la Fuente. Film editing: Donatella Baglivo. Music: Jesús Villa Rojo. 

Death by cuckoo clock. That's one of the less outrageous moments in the violent vulgarity that is In the Folds of the Flesh, a film that goes so far over the top that you realize there isn't a top. Murder, incest, rape, Nazi extermination camps, gratuitous nudity, orgasmic bathing -- there's almost nothing that Sergio Bergonzelli's exercise in the worst possible taste won't exploit. Throw in a couple of pet vultures and some Etruscan skeletons along with multiple mistaken identities and some truly awful performances, and you've got a trash heap of a movie that even some lovers of horror films and giallo are inclined to admit goes too far. If you still really want to see it, don't say I didn't warn you.  

 

Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

Megumi Okina in Ju-on: The Grudge

Cast: Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara, Yui Ichikawa, Kanji Tsuda, Kayoko Shibata, Yukako Kukuri, Suri Matsuda, Yoji Tanaka, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Hideo Sakaki, Takashi Matsuyama. Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu. Cinematography: Tokusho Kikumura. Production design: Toshiharu Tokiwa. Film editing: Nobuyuki Takahashi. Music: Shiro Sato. 

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Grudge didn't scare me much, partly because I go to horror movies to watch the techniques used to scare people, but also because its major effect is simple creepiness. Some of that comes from the nonlinear narrative technique: We spend so much of our attention on sorting out when things happened and to whom that the story doesn't build the suspense it might. This is a feature, not a bug in Shimizu's scheme of things. The essential point is that a murder took place in a house, which then became haunted by the victims, and that the evil infecting the house is spread by anyone who visits it. In fact, it's spread so widely that there's a hint -- shots of empty streets -- that it has begun to infect the entire city. While the movie is undoubtedly unsettling, I think it needs better character development to have its best effect. 

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.