All Shall Be Well (Ray Yeung, 2024)

Lin-Lin Li and Petra Au in All Shall Be Well

Cast: Petra Au, Lin-Lin Li, Tai-Bo, Siu Yin Hui, Chung-Hang Leung, Fish Liew, Yung Ting Rachel Leung, Chai-Ming Lai, Cheng Cheuck Lam, Kiana Ng Ki Yan, Lai-Ha Li, Gia Yuk-Wah Yu, Luna Shaw. Screenplay: Ray Yeung. Cinematography: Ming-Kai Leung. Production design: Albert Poon. Film editing: Lai Kwun Tung. Music: Veronica Lee. 

Love doesn't really conquer all. Angie Wan (Petra Au) learns of its impotence in the face of the law when her wife, Pat Wu (Lin-Lin Li), dies. That's because the law doesn't recognize Pat as her wife, even though Pat's family accepted their relationship and referred to them as Aunty Pat and Aunty Angie. Still grief-stricken, Angie very reluctantly gives in to the family's decision concerning Pat's remains: Pressured by a religious adviser, the family wants them placed in a columbarium, even though Angie knows of Pat's wish to have her ashes scattered at sea. But the family's wishes concerning the apartment she shared with Pat for many years become far more crucial. Because Angie's name is not on the contract, she has no legal right to stay there. Angie and Pat became wealthy in business, whereas Pat's brother, Shing Wu (Tai-Bo), has failed to prosper. In overcrowded Hong Kong, the apartment is highly valuable. Writer-director Ray Yeung makes Angie's plight especially poignant by choosing not to turn it into a melodrama. The Wu family aren't portrayed as heartless monsters or villainous bigots, and the only real lesson to be drawn from the film is that Pat lacked foresight in failing to make a will that established Angie's right to the property. Yeung's low-key approach to the material is admirable, as is Petra Au's quietly revealing performance as Angie. 

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Dan Vogler, Eriko Hatsune, Scoot McNairy, Boyd Holbrook, Will Harrison, Norbert Leo Butz, David Alan Basche. Screenplay: James Mangold, Jay Cocks, based on a book by Elijah Wald. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: François Audouy. Film editing: Andrew Buckland, Scott Morris. 

Timothée Chalamet's fine, inward portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown put me in mind of T.S. Eliot's proclamation that poetry "is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Eliot went on to add, "only those who have personality and emotions know what it is to want to escape from those things." Chalamet's Dylan is so elusive that others who encounter him are able to find what they want in him. The dying Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy) finds in him a kind of afterlife or reincarnation. Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) sees Dylan as the future of his kind of modern folk music. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) learns from him that her music needs more bite and bitterness. Elle Fanning's Sylvie Russo (based on Suze Rotolo) discovers an opportunity to nurture, to find a direction in life for a lost lamb. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) embraces him as a fellow outlaw, someone to "track mud on the carpet." The music business types, of course, see a halo of dollar bills around him. And the film ends with the folkies at Newport denouncing him as Judas. It's to Chalamet's credit that he can play the role so that Dylan looks like a mirror image, a mentor, a companion, a project, or a traitor at any turn. Still, A Complete Unknown is such a conventional biopic that it has to be compared unfavorably to Todd Haynes's more unconventional approach to Dylan, I'm Not There (2007), which employed six very different actors to suggest his multifaceted nature. For in the end, it's the music that matters, not the man. 

Four Frightened People (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)

Cast: Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, Mary Boland, William Gargan, Leo Carillo, Nella Walker, Ethel Griffies, Tetsu Komai, Chris-Pin Martin, Joe De La Cruz. Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a novel by E. Arnot Robertson. Cinematography: Karl Struss. Art direction: Roland Anderson. Film editing: Anne Bauchens. Music: Karl Hajos, John Leipold, Milan Roder, Heinz Roemheld. 

Four Frightened People is a film that keeps running off in various directions: Sometimes it's an adventure thriller, sometimes a romantic drama, and sometimes it's a comedy of manners. It's as if Gilligan's Island suddenly turned in mid-season into a grim struggle for survival, and then went goofy all over again. A movie so muddled needs the help of strong casting, but instead it has four actors who look like they needed the work and this was the best they could find. As the nominal romantic leads, Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall have no chemistry, even after she stops being a mousy schoolteacher and starts slinking around in leopard-skin outfits, Mary Ann metamorphosed into Ginger. Marshall's chief rival for her attention, a macho adventurer played by William Gargan, is just a bullying grouch. And Mary Boland is there for comic relief as a feather-brained dowager clutching her lapdog to her breast, a shtick that gets so tiresome we need relief from the relief. It's the kind of movie that raises only one question: What the hell were they thinking when they made it? 

Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)

Cast: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Aleksei Serebryakov, Darya Ekamasova, Luna Sofia Miranda, Lindsey Normington. Screenplay: Sean Baker. Cinematography: Drew Daniels. Production design: Stephen Phelps. Film editing: Sean Baker. Music: Joseph Capalbo. 

Of the record-setting four Oscars producer-director-writer-editor Sean Baker won for Anora, the one for editing may be the most significant. Though they get little notice from moviegoers, film editors are the ones who shape a movie's pace and mood and tone, and often the ones who accomplish the director's vision, which is why so many great directors choose to work with the same editor on every film, as Steven Spielberg does with Michael Kahn or Martin Scorsese with Thelma Schoonmaker. If they can, directors often edit themselves, as Joel and Ethan Coen do under the nom de moviola Roderick Jaynes. Anora is the kind of movie that needs the right editor. It's a comedy with elements of slapstick and screwball and a soupçon of rom-com thrown in, but it has dark edges. Too much violence or wackiness or mush or realism and it could go sour. It's also a movie with the right texture, achieved by elements that don't need to be there, like the Coney Island candy shop that plays only a passing role in the plot but adds a sweet little offbeat flavor to the film. To appreciate the way Baker plays with tone in both directing and editing, watch the character of Igor (Yura Borisov), who seems at first to be just another thug, hired muscle to bring Mikey Madison's Anora into line. But Baker manages to insert Igor into the frame just often enough and subtly enough to build him into a character with an essential role at the film's end. If Anora isn't a great movie -- there's nothing of moral or intellectual importance about it -- it does the right thing often enough to qualify it as an exemplary one.

Nobody's Hero (Alain Guiraudie, 2022)

Jean-Charles Clichet in Nobody's Hero

Cast: Jean-Charles Clichet, Noémie Lvovsky, Ilies Kadri, Michel Masiero, Doria Tillier, Renaud Rutten, Philippe Fretun, Farida Rahouadj, Miveck Packa, Yves-Robert Viala, Patrick Ligardes. Screenplay: Alain Guiraudie, Laurent Lunetta. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. 

Nobody's Hero has no credited production designer or film editor, which suggests that it all somehow came together on the streets of the French city of Clermont-Ferrand and in the head of writer-director Alain Guiraudie. And considering the almost random and accidental events and eccentric, impulsive characters that make up its narrative, that could be true. It's one of those movies in which no one does or is precisely what you expect. Suffice it to say that it's a slightly darkish comedy about a  middle-aged man who picks up a prostitute, takes her to a seedy hotel run by an elderly man and a teenage girl, discovers that she's married to a jealous man, and somehow gets himself and the others, as well as the tenants of the apartment house where he lives, involved in an international terrorist incident that may not be international or terrorist after all. All the actors in this head-spinning but amusing movie play it as if it makes sense, which is the only way to do this sort of thing. Whether you think this sort of thing is worth doing is another matter entirely.

Wicked (Jon M. Chu, 2024)

Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage (voice), Andy Nyman, Courtney Mae-Briggs, Bowen Yang. Screenplay: Winnie Holman, Dana Fox, based on the musical play by Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz and the novel by Gregory Maguire. Cinematography: Alice Brooks. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Myron Kerstein. Music: John Powell, Stephen Schwartz. 

I admit that I didn't much care for Wicked. The few things I did like about it, such as Jonathan Bailey's impish Fiyero, were overwhelmed by frantic choreography, ugly (and naturally Oscar-winning) sets, and noisy special effects. It's a movie for children of all ages, but especially hyperactive ones. 

Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 1999)

Sul Kyung-gu in Peppermint Candy

Cast: Sul Kyung-gu, Moon So-ri, Kim Yeo-jin, Park Soo-young, Park Sung-yeon. Screenplay: Lee Chang-dong. Cinematography: Hyung Koo Kim. Art direction: Park Il-hyun. Film editing: Hyun Kim. Music: Jaejin Lee. 

What could have been a gimmick in the hands of a lesser writer-director than Lee Chang-dong becomes  revelatory in Peppermint Candy: Life can only be understood through hindsight. The film begins with the moments leading up to the suicide of Yongho (Sul Kyung-gu) after he shows up at the reunion picnic of a group of factory workers. Behaving erratically, he first disturbs the group and then climbs to a railway trestle where he stands in front of an oncoming train. The film then flashes back to scenes from Yongho's life, each one earlier than the one that has gone before: first three days earlier, then in succession, five years before, 12 years before, 15 years before, 19 years before, and finally 20 years before -- the only sequence that takes place at the site of his suicide. The accumulation of details, laced through with various leitmotifs such as the candy that gives the film its title, presents a portrait of a man brutalized by experience, and in particular by the experience of living through two decades of South Korea's troubled history. It's a study in remorse and guilt and compulsive misbehavior that succeeds because of Lee's storytelling skill and Sul's lacerating performance.  

Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024)

Cast: Josh Harnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill, Hayley Mills, Jonathan Langdon, Mark Bacolcol, Marnie McPhail, Kid Cudi, Russ, Marcia Bennett, Vanessa Smythe. Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan. Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Production design: Debbie DeVilla. Film editing: Noemi Katharina Preiswerk. Music: Herdis Stefánsdóttir. 

Viewing the manhunt for a killer from the killer's point of view is a good premise for a thriller, one that was done classically by Fritz Lang in M (1931). And M. Night Shyamalan gets off on the right foot by casting the attractive, underrated, and underused actor Josh Hartnett in the lead. He plays Cooper, the psychopath next door, a capable and loving family man whom no one would suspect of being a serial killer called The Butcher. He is just being a good dad when he takes his 12-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a concert by her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), only to find out that the arena is under tight surveillance by the police and the FBI under the supervision of a profiler (Hayley Mills, in the most improbable bit of casting in this or any other year). Will he be able to outwit his pursuers? Do we really want him to? Unfortunately, Shyamalan botches things in working out the plot, in large part by making the concert, of which we see much more than necessary, a crashing bore. The writer-director's daughter, Saleka, wrote and performed her own rather lackluster songs, one of the instances that justify the phrase "nepo baby." She's also not up to the acting demands of the role when she's off-stage. Worst of all, the film ends with a scene that leaves room for a sequel. I'm surely not the first one to suggest that it be called Claptrap?   

Le Jour Se Lève (Marcel Carné, 1939)

Cast: Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty, Jacqueline Laurent, Mady Berry, René Génin, Arthur Devère, René Bergeron, Bernard Blier, Marcel Pérès, Germaine Lix, Gabrielle Fontan, Jacques Baumer. Screenplay: Jacques Viot, Jacques Prévert. Cinematography: Philippe Agostini, André Bac, Albert Viguier, Curt Courant. Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: René Le Hénauff. Music: Maurice Jaubert. 

Daybreak, the Anglicized title of Marcel Carné's Le Jour Se Lève, recalls another great attempt at poetic cinema, F.W. Murnau's late silent Sunrise (1927). But where Murnau strove for a kind of allegorical poetry, to the extent of labeling his characters The Man, The Wife, and The Woman From the City, Carné's poetry is rooted in actuality. Jean Gabin plays François, a factory worker who falls in love with Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent), who works in a flower shop. He follows her one night to a music hall, where she watches an act by the animal trainer Valentin (Jules Berry). At the bar, he strikes up a conversation with Clara (Arletty), who was Valentin's stage assistant but has just broken up with him. When he discovers that Françoise is infatuated with Valentin, François lets himself be drawn into a relationship with Clara. Eventually this quartet of relationships will turn fatal. But Carné and his screenwriters Jacques Viot and Jacques Prévert choose to tell the story in flashbacks: The film begins with François shooting Valentin and then holing up in his apartment as the police lay siege to it, trying to arrest him. The film superbly mixes suspense, as we wait for the outcome of François's standoff with the police, with romance, as we learn of the affairs with Françoise and Clara that brought him to this point. It's often cited as a precursor of film noir for its mixture of passion and violence. Gabin is the quintessential world weary protagonist, Berry the embodiment of corruption, and Arletty the woman who's seen it all too often.  

Smile (Parker Finn, 2022)

Cast: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan, Gillian Zinser, Judy Reyes, Jack Sochet, Nick Arapoglu, Perry Strong, Matthew Lamb, Dora Kiss. Screenplay: Parker Finn. Cinematography: Charlie Saroff. Production design: Lester Cohen. Film editing: Elliot Greenberg. Music: Cristobal Tapia de Veer. 

The rictus that spreads across the faces of those who are about to kill or be killed is probably the scariest thing about Smile, a routine horror movie that has not much going for it other than some committed performances, particularly by Sosie Bacon as the psychiatrist being driven mad by a supernatural being. Horror movie fans accepted it despite a phony premise and some deep inconsistencies in the plotting, so it spawned the inevitable Smile 2, from the same writer-director, Parker Finn, in 2024. You know who you are and whether you want to watch it.