Anatomy of Hell (Catherine Breillat, 2004)

Amira Casar and Rocco Siffredi in Anatomy of Hell

Cast: Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi, voice of Catherine Breillat. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on her novel. Cinematography: Giorgos Avanitis, Guillaume Schiffman. Production design: Jean-Marie Millon, Pedro Sá. Film editing: Pascale Chavance. 

I don't quite believe anyone who says they found Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell boring. There's certainly enough that's unforeseen in it to hold the attention of even the most jaded viewer. It may be that we expect better of Breillat, who has made her reputation on candid treatments of sex, especially female sexuality, so that the more novel transgressive elements of the film feel less like the work of a major director than of one who's out just to shock and/or disgust. And it may certainly be that the dialogue in the film feels like talk for talk's sake, a tiresome attempt to stimulate the mind as well as the body. The film also seems not to understand sexual pleasure and desire very well, especially where it comes to gay men. I'm not sure that it demonstrates homophobia on Breillat's part, as some have charged, so much as a wrong-headed feint at inclusivity. Still, so few films today give us much to talk about after viewing, so we ought to credit Breillat with an attempt at that at the very least. 

Kiru (Kenji Misumi, 1962)

Raizo Ichikawa in Kiru

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Shiho Fujimura, Mayumi Nagisa, Masayo Banri, Jun'ichiro Narita, Matasaburo Niwa, Teru Tomota, Eijiro Yanagi, Shigeru Amachi, Yoshio Inaba. Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. Cinematography: Shozo Honda. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

I knew Kenji Misumi's work mostly from the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which is fairly unabashed in its bloodletting, so I was surprised by the almost meditative tone of Kiru, which is also known as Destiny's Son. It's the story of Shingo Takakura (Raizo Ichikawa) and his search for a father figure. When he comes of age, Shingo asks the man he thinks is his father for permission to go on what you might call walkabout: to spend a year wandering in 19th century Japan. He returns home with a secret: He has learned a mastery of an indefensible sword technique. Unfortunately, this mastery inspires an attack on his home, in which his supposed father is killed, but not before revealing to Shingo his true parentage. That sends Shingo on another pilgrimage in which he meets his biological father and eventually a father figure, Matsudaira (Eijiro Yanagi), the head of a powerful clan whom Shingo serves as a samurai. It's a film full of stylized combat and astonishing scenes that proceeds at a contemplative pace which belies its relative brevity (71 minutes): One tense scene, for example, has no background sound other than the intermittent call of a bird. 

The Cry of Granuaile (Dónal Foreman, 2022)

Dale Dickey in The Cry of Granuaile

Cast: Dale Dickey, Judith Roddy, Andrew Bennett, Rebecca Guinnane, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Donald Clarke, Bob Quinn. Screenplay: Dónal Foreman. Cinematography: Diana Vidrascu. Art direction: Nina McGowan. Film editing: Dónal Foreman. Music: Nick Roth, Olesya Zdorovetska. 

Dale Dickey is a familiar face: She has 140 film and TV credits spanning almost 30 years. You've probably seen her most often playing hard-bitten frontier, backwoods, or Southern women, but she's demonstrated skill and versatility in all her performances. So it's good to see her in a leading role, playing Maire, an American filmmaker visiting Ireland to try to launch a film about Grace O'Malley, aka Gráinne O'Malley or Gráinne Mhaol or Granuaile, or often just the Pirate Queen. It's a film of little plot beyond the development of the relationship of Maire and her guide, Cáit (Judith Roddy), as they travel through Ireland to see the places where the legend of Granuaile began in the 16th century. It's a picturesque and poetic film in which the remote past rubs up against the feminist present, and mostly held together by the performances of  Dickey and Roddy.  

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.