The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2015)

Samantha Robinson and Gian Keys in The Love Witch

Laura Waddell and Samantha Robinson in The Love Witch

Cast: Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell, Jeffrey Vincent Parise, Jared Sanford, Robert Seeley, Jennifer Ingrum, Randy Evans, Clive Ashborn, Lily Holliman, Jennifer Couch, Stephen Wozniak. Screenplay: Anna Biller. Cinematography: M. David Mullen. Production design: Anna Biller. Film editing: Anna Biller. Music: Anna Biller. 

Anna Biller's The Love Witch is regarded as a feminist spoof or hommage to horror movies of the 1960s, but it's so uncannily straight-faced and precise in its recapturing of their style and mood that it's hard to tell that you're watching a movie made in the 21st century. It mimics the sources' wooden acting and leaden dialogue -- characters often address one another by name: "What do you think, Steve?" "I don't know, Griff!" It needles their male-gaze attitude toward women and recaptures their often flamboyant Technicolor sets and costumes: There's a scene at a celebration of the summer solstice with luscious primary colors not often seen outside of a candy shop or an MGM musical. It throws in some casual frontal nudity to remind us that the style lingered into the more permissive 1970s. Samantha Robinson plays Elaine, a beautiful, chain-smoking witch who comes to a California town in search of love and makes life first grand and then miserable for college professor Wayne (Jeffrey Vincent Parise), her friend Trish's (Laura Waddell) husband, Richard (Robert Seeley), and local police officer Griff (Gian Keys). Biller wrote, directed, edited, designed the sets and costumes, and even composed some of the music that isn't borrowed from Ennio Morricone's scores for Italian horror movies of the 1970s. The Love Witch probably works best if you're steeped in the source material, but it's undeniably watchable.  

Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)

Ralph Fiennes in Conclave

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini, Lucian Msamati, Sergio Castellito, Carlos Diehz. Screenplay: Peter Straughan, based on a novel by Robert Harris. Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Nick Emerson. Music: Volker Bertelmann. 

Conclave is an intelligently written, superbly acted film that has "Oscar contender" written all over it. Which also means that it has that middlebrow earnestness that dooms many good movies to temporary fame: just good enough to enjoy a period of enthusiasm and then be forgotten. It resorts to a few easy tricks to make the audience think they've seen something worthwhile, chiefly a denouement that happens only in the movies: a conflict settled by a Big Speech. It's a good Big Speech, full of irreproachable ideas, and the actor who gives it does so with admirably quiet conviction. But that it should so easily resolve a heated ideological conflict is scarcely credible. There's also a twist ending that does nothing but drag a contemporary issue into the concerns of an aging institution, and feels like the beginning of a story rather than the end of one. Still, if you want a movie that entertains by making you feel like you've seen something of substance, Conclave will do as well as any.  

The Light That Failed (William A. Wellman, 1939)

Ida Lupino and Ronald Colman in The Light That Failed

Cast: Ronald Colman, Walter Huston, Muriel Angelus, Ida Lupino, Dudley Digges, Ernest Cossart, Ferike Boros, Pedro de Cordoba, Colin Tapley, Ronald Sinclair, Sarita Wooton, Halliwell Hobbes. Screenplay: Robert Carson, based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling. Cinematography: Theodor Sparkuhl. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Odell. Film editing: Thomas Scott. Music: Victor Young. 

Screenwriter Robert Carson and director William A. Wellman do an efficient job of condensing Rudyard Kipling's 1891 novel The Light That Failed, leaving in not only the source's colonialism and resentment at the commercialization of art but also the hints of a queer subtext. For like most writers who choose war and adventure as their subject, Kipling tended to focus more on male bonding than on heterosexual relationships. Dick Heldar (Ronald Colman) is an artist who shares lodgings with a war correspondent named Torpenow (Walter Huston); they met in Sudan, where Heldar was wounded while saving Torpenow's life. His paintings based on his wartime sketches earn Heldar some wealth and celebrity, but he wants to be a "real" artist. He meets a childhood friend, Maisie (Muriel Angelus), who is also an artist, but whose career had not taken off as Heldar's had done. They have a platonic relationship that Heldar is interested in developing into something more, but she goes back to her studies in Paris. One night, Torpenow finds a streetwalker named Bessie Broke (Ida Lupino) who collapsed from hunger on the street and brings her back to the flat. Bessie makes a play for Torpenow, offering to keep house for him, but Heldar nixes it, angering her. Still, she agrees to model for Heldar, who finds her face interesting. He paints a portrait that blends her expression with Maisie's face, and is convinced that it will make his reputation as a serious artist, but just as he completes it, he goes blind, a consequence of the wound he received in Sudan. Despite some strain at stuffing all of this exposition and its fateful consequences, along with somewhat eccentric character relationships, into a 99-minute movie, The Light That Failed is a solid melodrama and an early triumph for Lupino, who makes the most of a role she eagerly sought. Colman wanted Vivien Leigh to play Bessie and didn't get along at all with Wellman, so he reportedly displayed some pique during the filming. 

A Real Young Girl (Catherine Breilliat, 1976)

Charlotte Alexandra and Hiram Keller in A Real Young Girl

Cast: Charlotte Alexandra, Hiram Keller, Rita Maiden, Bruno Balp, Georges Guéret, Shirley Stoler. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on her novel. Cinematography: Pierre Fattori, Patrick Godaert. Production design: Catherine Breillat. Film editing: Annie Charier, Michele Queyroy. Music: Mort Shuman. 

Catherine Breillat's first feature, A Real Young Girl, was made in 1976 but not released until 2000. Like the rest of her oeuvre, it's about female sexuality, in this case the sometimes perverse desires and fantasies of a 14-year-old girl, Alice Bonnard, played by the 20-year-old Charlotte Alexandra. Alice is home from school at her parents' farm and sawmill in the French countryside, and she doesn't have much to do other than indulge those fantasies. Many of them center on a handsome young man known as Jim (Hiram Keller), who works for her father at the sawmill. She hates her icy mother (Rita Maiden) but is a little too playful for comfort (ours) with her father (Bruno Balp). Alice's fantasies spill over into reality as the film goes on, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. It's a raw and unsettling film, just painful and messy enough to pull it this side of pornographic, with some narrative clichés that Breillat would outgrow, like naming her heroine Alice and resorting to a Chekhov's gun for what passes as climax in the slender plot. But it's undeniably the work of a uniquely skilled filmmaker. 

Strange Fascination (Hugo Haas, 1952)

Hugo Haas and Cleo Moore in Strange Fascination

Cast: Hugo Haas, Cleo Moore, Mona Barrie, Rick Vallin, Karen Sharpe, Marc Krah, Michèle Monteau, Pat Holmes, Maura Murphy, Brian O'Hara, Anthony Jochim, Ross Thompson, Maria Bibikov. Screenplay: Hugo Haas. Cinematography: Paul Ivano. Art direction: Rudi Feld. Film editing: Merrill G. White. Music: Václav Divina, Jakob Gimpel. 

Tired and hungry after a concert, touring classical pianist Paul Marvan (Hugo Haas) goes to a night club in his hotel where he's told he can get something to eat. He arrives in the middle of a dance number performed by Margo (Cleo Moore) and her partner Carlo (Rick Vallin), but his clumsy entrance annoys Margo so much that when she learns that Marvan is giving another concert the following night she decides to repay his rudeness. She arrives late, while he's performing, and intentionally makes a small disturbance while getting to her seat. To her surprise, she is captivated by Marvan's performance and goes to ask for his autograph after the concert. He's unaware that he had disturbed her performance but apologizes, and they agree to meet again when both return to New York. You guessed it: They see one another again and fall in love. But can this misalliance of a sophisticated middle-aged European and a bottle blonde showgirl thrive? Especially when Marvan has a wealthy patroness (Mona Barrie) of his own age and class? This familiar setup takes its familiar course, but Strange Fascination almost transcends its low budget and third-string cast by embracing its B-movie status and not camping it up too much. Haas made seven movies with Moore, and they're all watchable in their low-key way.  

Terrestrial Verses (Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami, 2023)

Cast: Bahram Ark, Sadaf Asgari, Ardeshir Kazemi, Gohar Kheirandish, Farzin Mohades, Faehzeh Rad, Majid Salehi, Arghavan Shabani, Hossein Soleimani, Sarvin Sabetian; voices of Ali Asgari, Sara Barami, Behnaz Jafari, Alireza Khatami. Screenplay: Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami. Cinematography: Adib Sobahni. Production design: Hamed Aslani. Film editing: Ehsan Vaseghi.  

The setting of Terrestrial Verses is Tehran, which we see as the sun rises in the film's opening, so we know from the outset that it's about life in the Islamic Republic. Which it is, and really isn't. The film consists of a series of long takes, vignettes of people confronting off-screen bureaucrats, bullies, bosses, and busybodies, whom we hear but don't see. Some of the scenes are specific to life in Iran: a man undergoing an interrogation about his religious faith, a little girl being outfitted with the prescribed garments, a woman accused of uncovering her hair. But some of them could occur anywhere: an elderly woman at a police station looking for her lost dog or a younger woman applying for a job with a boss who finds her attractive. The universality of the experience of dealing with authority gives Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami's film its familiar pain and humor, especially in an age of creeping authoritarianism. Could such a movie be made here featuring segments about a woman with a difficult pregnancy, or a man denied a medical insurance claim, or a student charged with cheating on an examination? And would it be as splendidly acted as this one is, by a cast of unknowns? 

The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)

Arthur Franz in The Sniper

Cast: Arthur Franz, Adolphe Menjou, Gerald Mohr, Marie Windsor, Frank Faylen, Richard Kiley, Mabel Paige, Marlo Dwyer, Geraldine Carr. Screenplay: Harry Brown, Edna Anhalt. Edward Anhalt. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: George Antheil.

Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper is a solid manhunt thriller that maybe gets a little heavy-handed in its promotion of treatment over incarceration for sex offenders, but also contains a few nice surprises. One of them is cinematographer Burnett Guffey's location shooting in San Francisco (except for an amusement park scene filmed in Long Beach), providing a nice record of how the city looked in 1952. Another is an almost unrecognizable Adolphe Menjou, who shaved his mustache to play the police detective in charge of capturing Edward Miller (Arthur Franz), who is gunning down women, driven by some undocumented childhood trauma. Menjou typically played well-groomed upper-middle-class types who looked like they were born wearing three-piece suits -- he was repeatedly voted one of America's best-dressed men -- but in The Sniper he manages to look rumpled for once. Menjou was an outspoken right-wing Republican who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hollywood was full of communists, making his appearance in The Sniper surprising, given that Dmytrk was one of the "Hollywood Ten," who had been blacklisted after refusing to testify before HUAC. Dmytryk recanted and in 1951 named names before the committee, which presumably put him back in Menjou's good graces. The film was produced by Stanley Kramer, and the speech written by his co-producers Edna and Edward Anhalt, and delivered by Richard Kiley, about the need for preventive treatment for potential criminals is characteristic of Kramer's fondness for message movies. The Sniper has a low-key ending, another surprise for a film whose genre typically provides an audience-pleasing catharsis.  

Fading Gigolo (John Turturro, 2013)

Woody Allen and John Turturro in Fading Gigolo

Cast: John Turturro, Woody Allen, Vanessa Paradis, Liev Schreiber, Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, Bob Balaban, Michael Badalucco, Tonya Pinkins. Screenplay: John Turturro. Cinematography: Marco Pontecorvo. Production design: Lester Cohen. Film editing: Simona Paggi. 

A lot about John Turturro's Fading Gigolo, from story to casting, doesn't work, but like other films he wrote and directed, it's so sweetly eccentric that I don't mind. The premise is this: When the bookstore he owns goes out of business, Murray (Woody Allen) persuades his friend Fioravante (Turturro) to go to work as a male prostitute, with Murray as his procurer. Of course, if you believe that a man in his mid-50s, as Turturro was when he made the film, is going to become a success as a gigolo, then you're well prepared to accept other improbabilities that the script throws at you. Like, for instance, that the idea was implanted in Murray's mind by his dermatologist, played by Sharon Stone, who mentions to him that she and her girlfriend (Sofia Vegara) would like to find a man for a three-way and would be willing to pay for it. And that Murray is living with a Black woman (Tonya Pinkins) with three small sons, and when one of them comes down with head lice, he takes the boy to a woman living in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn for treatment. She's Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), a widow who hasn't allowed a man to touch her since her husband died, though she's caught the attention of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), who works for a neighborhood watch group. And that Murray somehow persuades Avigal that Fioravante is a massage therapist, so when he touches her it releases all her pent-up emotions and they start to fall in love, which attracts the attention of Dovi who has Murray "arrested" by his group and taken before a rabbinic court. And ... you see where this is going. Or not. Although the credited screenwriter is Turturro alone, Fading Gigolo plays almost like a parody of an early Woody Allen film, so much so that it's hard to believe that he didn't have a hand in it. There's even a soundtrack of jazz standards that resembles those of Allen's movies. Turturro pulls off this oddity of a film by never letting it escape into the raunchy territories that the premise threatens to explore. The best reaction to it might be a puzzled smile. 

The Unfortunate Bridegroom (Jiri Krejcik, 1967)

Iva Janzurová in The Unfortunate Bridegroom

Cast: Iva Janzurová, Vladimr Pucholt, Jan Vostrcil, Frantisek Filipovsky, Stella Zazvorková, Jiri Hrzán, Alina Hessová, Pavel Landovsky, Jan Schánilek, Jan Libícek. Screenplay: Jiri Krejcik, Zdenek Mahler. Cinematography: Josef Strecha. Production design: Oldrich Okác. Film editing: Josef Dobrichovsky. Music: Zdenek Liska. 

A farce about a gang rape could never get made today, nor should it. So what does it say about Czechoslovakia in 1967 that Jiri Krejcik's The Unfortunate Bridegroom was a big hit? One thing it may say is that viewers were willing to see the rape as a metaphor for what the government and the police of their country were doing to them. That's the subversive premise underlying this raucous, knockabout comedy in which a young woman's attempt to get a ticket for her commute home leads to the near-undoing of a young man's wedding to his pregnant bride. Comically, it has a more-than-passing resemblance to all sort of madcap comedies from the Marx Brothers to some of the Preston Sturges oeuvre, and it made me laugh more than once (while feeling a little queasy), but I found it a little too frantic for its underlying premise.  

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).