Ken (Kenji Misumi, 1964)

Raizo Ichikawa in Ken

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Yusuke Kawazu, Hisaya Morishigi, Akio Hasegawa, Noriko Sengoku, Keiju Kobayashi, Yuko Konno, Junko Kozakura, Yoshio Inaba, Rieko Sumi, Kuniichi Takami. Screenplay: Kazuo Funahashi, based on a novel by Yukio Mishima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Kanji Sukanuma. Music: Sei Ikeno. 

Kenji Misumi's Ken, also known as The Sword, is based on a novel by Yukio Mishima and shares that author's intense focus on Japanese tradition. It centers on Jiro Kokubun (Raizo Ichikawa), the captain of his university's kendo club, which is preparing for a tournament against a rival university. Kendo is swordplay, performed with bamboo swords, and Kokubun is obsessively devoted to the sport -- so much so, in fact, that he almost loses out on the captaincy because his coach fears he's a little too intense. His chief rival for the position, Kagawa (Yusuke Kawazu), is equally proficient, but not so obsessive. Eventually this leads to a conflict between the two young men, especially after Kokubun punishes Kagawa for a minor infraction, using him to set an example of complete devotion to the sport. Kagawa retaliates by asking a pretty classmate, Kiuchi (Noriko Sengoku), to try to seduce the chaste and ascetic Kokubun. But the real crisis comes when the club goes on a training retreat in which Kokubun tries to instill the same devotion to the sport in the rest of the team. It takes place in a seaside town, but Kokubun prohibits swimming in the ocean even though the trainees suffer from the intense heat of summer. Kagawa seizes another opportunity to undermine Kokubun, with terrible consequences. The film sympathizes with Kokubun, turning him into a tragic figure, while at the same time suggesting that his intense virtue, analogous to the bushido code of the samurai, is out of place in a modern context. Handsomely photographed and superbly acted, Ken is the middle film in Misumi's Sword Trilogy, which includes Kiru (1962) and Kenki (1965).  

Forbidden (Frank Capra, 1932)

Adolphe Menjou and Barbara Stanwyck in Forbidden

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, Myrna Fresholt, Charlotte Henry, Oliver Eckhardt. Screenplay: Frank Capra, Jo Swerling. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Maurice Wright. 

If you can bring yourself to believe that Barbara Stanwyck's character would spend her life devoted to Adolphe Menjou's, you might like Forbidden. Its writer and director, Frank Capra, didn't, almost apologizing for it in his memoirs. Menjou was a fine character actor with a film career that stretched from 1916 to 1960, but he was no leading man. He was the guy you called on for suave but starchy, not for a lifetime of illicit passion. In Forbidden he's a lawyer and aspiring politician who meets Stanwyck's Lulu on a cruise to Havana. She's a librarian longing for romance, so she spends all her savings on that fateful cruise. They meet cute, of course: He's a little drunk and somehow mistakes her room, No. 66, for his, No. 99. Unfortunately, he's married (she doesn't know this till later) and unwilling to divorce his wife because she was seriously injured in an automobile accident he caused. But they keep seeing each other after they return to the States, she gets pregnant, and through a preposterous series of events winds up letting him and his wife adopt the child she gives birth to. Meanwhile, his political career takes off, although he has made an enemy of a newspaper editor (Ralph Bellamy), who just happens to be Lulu's boss and who wants to marry her. This elaborate contraption of a plot creaks and groans its way to a denouement that's as improbable as the rest of ir. If anything redeems the movie, it's Stanwyck's professionalism, her commitment to creating a character that's almost credible while you're watching her, but really doesn't when you think about it afterward. Capra also directs as if his story makes sense, which is no small feat. 

Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra, 1930)

Ralph Graves and Barbara Stanwyck in Ladies of Leisure

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ralph Graves, Lowell Sherman, Marie Prevost, Nance O'Neil, John Fawcett, Juliette Compton, Johnnie Walker. Screenplay: Jo Swerling, based on a play by Milton Herbert Gropper. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Harrison Wiley. Film editing: Maurice Wright. Music: C. Bakaleinikoff. 

Barbara Stanwyck's mastery of timing and inflection and her sheer camera presence made her a star, and Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure was one of the first films to showcase what she could do. It's an engaging film at the start, with Stanwyck as Kay Arnold, tossing off snappy banter with Dot Lamar (Marie Prevost), her roommate and fellow "party girl." Soon there's a meet-cute with Jerry Strong (Ralph Graves), a rich guy who wants to be an artist. He asks Kay to model for him, and even though he's sort of engaged to a woman of his society set and his family disapproves of her indiscreet past, they fall in love. That's when the movie bogs down into sentimentality, Capra's fatal flaw. The only thing that holds it together is Stanwyck's obvious total commitment to making the character work. It's too bad that her leading man isn't capable of making a similar commitment -- Graves just looks a little flummoxed at what happens. Still, there's some breathless and implausible eleventh-hour suspense to liven things up at the end. 

The Linguini Incident (Richard Shepard, 1991)

Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie in The Linguini Incident

Cast: Rosanna Arquette, David Bowie, Eszter Balint, Andre Gregory, Buck Henry, Viveca Lindfors, Marlee Matlin. Screenplay: Richard Shepard. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Sonya Polonsky, David Dean. Music: Thomas Newman.

Richard Shepard's The Linguini Incident is frequently called "off-beat," but to me it just seems off. Its gags never quite land, its narrative is scattered, its design is drab, and its lead characters, played by Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie, have very little chemistry. Still, it has a cult following that rescued it from obscurity after initial box office and critical failure and inspired a "director's cut" that added ten minutes to its run time. I admit that I laughed a few times, as when Arquette, playing a would-be escape artist who idolizes Houdini, tries to make her way out of a bag in which she's been locked, but even that bit goes on just a few seconds beyond the point at which it's funniest. 

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.