End of the Road (Aram Avakian, 1970)

James Earl Jones and Stacey Keach in End of the Road

Cast: Stacey Keach, Harris Yulin, Dorothy Tristan, James Earl Jones, Grayson Hall, Ray Brock, John Pleshette, Gail Gilmore. Screenplay: Dennis McGuire, Terry Southern, Aram Avakian, based on a novel by John Barth. Cinematography: Gordon Willis. Production design: Jack Wright III. Film editing: Robert Q. Lovett. Music: Teo Macero. 

Tonally and narratively chaotic from the outset, Aram Avakian's End of the Road finally settles into a straightforward plot line before its nihilistic ending. It earned an X rating for a truly harrowing abortion scene (and perhaps also for a scene in which a naked man tries to copulate with a chicken), but it's no skin flick. Instead it's a fable about ... oh, maybe about the malaise of life in the middle of the twentieth century, to judge from the montage of scenes from the era spanning Adolf Hitler to Richard Nixon. If it needs to be seen for anything it's for the astonishing and out-of-character performance by James Earl Jones as a psychiatrist who runs a very unconventional mental institution. Otherwise, it's a movie to be endured more than to be savored. 

The Deep (Peter Yates, 1977)

Nick Nolte, Robert Shaw, and Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep

Cast: Nick Nolte, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Shaw, Louis Gossett Jr., Eli Wallach, Robert Tessler, Dick Anthony Williams, Earl Maynard, Bob Minor, Teddy Tucker, Lee McClain. Screenplay: Peter Benchley, Tracy Keenan Wynn, based on a novel by Benchley. Cinematography: Christopher Challis. Production design: Anthony Masters. Film editing: David Berlatsky. Music: John Barry. 

The Deep is a slackly put-together thriller about a search for sunken treasure. It was a big box office hit despite tepid reviews, partly because it was based on a best-seller by Peter Benchley, whose novel Jaws was turned into the paradigmatic summer blockbuster movie by Steven Spielberg in 1975. and partly because of shrewd marketing that featured Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt. But Bisset and Nick Nolte, the romantic leads, have little chemistry with each other, and although the underwater photography is sometimes spectacular it's also sometimes undecipherable during key action sequences. It's hard to find anyone today who remembers it with much enthusiasm. 

Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)

Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D'Onofrio, Glenn Plummer, Brigitte Bako, Richard Edson, William Fichtner, Josef Sommer. Screenplay: James Cameron, Jay Cocks. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: Howard E. Smith, James Cameron. Music: Graeme Revell. 

Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days contains one of the most painful and disturbing scenes I've ever witnessed. In it a woman, through a perversion of technology, is forced to experience her rape through the eyes and sensations of her rapist. The film was a box office failure, usually ascribed to poor marketing, but I suspect that word-of-mouth about that scene has a lot to do with keeping audiences away. It makes the protagonist, played well by Ralph Fiennes, vomit when he experiences it through a virtual reality recording device that plays back not only the visual but also the physical sensations that the recorder experienced while wearing it. Bigelow was the right director for the film, conceived by her then-partner James Cameron. Making such a scene virtually demands that a woman be responsible for it, but Bigelow is also a master of the hyperactive thriller, which Strange Days wants to be when it's not being so outrageously transgressive. It's well-acted, particularly by Fiennes and Angela Bassett, and it builds to a smashing, noisy climax on New Year's Eve at the dawn of the millennium, but it's overlong, and to my mind its over-the-top violence dissipates the points it wants to make about police brutality, racial injustice, and the dangers of invasive technology. 

None Shall Escape (André De Toth, 1944)

Marsha Hunt and Alexander Knox in None Shall Escape

Cast: Alexander Knox, Marsha Hunt, Henry Travers, Erik Rolf, Richard Crane, Dorothy Morris, Richard Hale, Ruth Nelson, Kurt Krueger, Shirley Mills, Elvin Field, Trevor Bardette, Frank Jaquet, Ray Teal. Screenplay: Lester Cole, Alfred Neumann, Joseph Than. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Ernst Toch. 

By imagining the trial of a Nazi officer for war crimes a year or so before the war actually ended, André De Toth's None Shall Escape took a risk of seeming dated once Germany was defeated and the exposure of the real atrocities committed during the Third Reich would be known. But it's an honorable effort, a gripping portrayal of what can happen when a person with grudges to nurse takes power and can enact revenge. It mostly steers away from Hollywood-style sentimentality in its depiction of the victims of Nazism. 

Ladies' Paradise (Julien Duvivier, 1930)

Cast: Dita Parlo, Armand Bour, Pierre De Guingand, Ginette Maddie, Germain Rouer, Nadia Sibirskaïa, Fabien Haziza, Adolphe Candé, Mireille Barsac. Screenplay: Noël Renard, based on a novel by Émile Zola. Cinematography: André Dantan, René Guichard, Émile Pierre, Armand Thirard. Production design: Christian-Jaque, Fernand Delattre. 

With its spectacular set design, lively action sequences, and compelling montage, Julien Duvivier's Ladies' Paradise is an entertaining film about the devastating effect of big business on a small shopowner, like Wal-Mart obliterating a Mom-and-Pop store or Amazon steamrolling the corner bookshop. But surprisingly, the film winds up celebrating the capitalist behemoth it initially seems to cast in the role of villain. Which is an irony in itself, since it was one of the last movies to be made before the avalanche of sound doomed silent films to the oblivion that M. Baudu's little fabric shop experiences with the arrival of the giant department store called Au Bonheur des Dames, the original French title. 

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)

Yun Jeong-hi in Poetry

Cast: Yun Jeong-hi, Lee Da-wit, Kim Hee-ra, Ahn Nae-sang, Kim Yeong-taek, Park Myung-shin, Kim Jong-goo, Kim Hye-jun, Min Bok-gi. Screenplay: Lee Chang-dong. Cinematography: Hyun Seok Kim. Production design: Jum-hee Shin. Film editing: Hyu Kim. 

Haunting and unsentimental in its portrait of a woman in pain, victimized by circumstance, Lee Chang-dong's Poetry is at once a celebration of its title subject and an exploration of its limits.

Assassin (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

Tetsuro Tanba in Assassin

Cast: Tetsuro Tanba, Shima Iwashita, Eiji Okada, Isao Kimura, Tamotsu Hayakawa, Eitaro Ozawa, Fujio Suga, Muga Takewaki, Takanobu Hozumi, Hideo Kidokoro, Tetsuji Takechi, Gen Shimizu. Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada, based on a book by Ryotaro Shiba. Cinematography: Masao Kosuji. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Eiichi Amano. Music: Toru Takemitsu. 

Masahiro Shinoda's Assassin (also known as Assassination and Ansastsu) is the story of Hachiro Kiyakawa (Tetsuro Tanba), an enigmatic figure who played both sides in the conflict between the Tokugawa shogunate and the imperial forces in 1860s Japan. Tanba gives a commanding performance, and the film is distinguished by Masao Kosuji's cinematography and Toru Takemitsu's score, but Shinoda's decision to tell the story in flashbacks is a challenge to anyone not well-versed in Japanese history, even though he provides several screenfuls of background text at the beginning of the film. 

Up, Down, Fragile (Jacques Rivette, 1995)

Marianne Denicourt and Bruno Todeschini in Up, Down, Fragile

Cast: Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard, Laurence Côte, André Marcon, Bruno Todeschini, Wilfred Benaïche, Enzo Enzo, Anna Karina, Stéphanie Schwartzbrod, Christine Vézinet, László Szabó (voice). Screenplay: Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard, Laurence Côte, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette. Cinematography: Christophe Pollock. Production design: Emmanuel de Chauvigny. Film editing: Nicole Lubtchansky. Music: François Bréant. 

Jacques Rivette's Up, Down, Fragile is a dawdling, self-indulgent film for cinéastes with a lot of time on their hands. It intrigued me for about an hour, but then my patience with Rivette's send-up of movie tropes and genres began to wear thin. 

The Raggedy Rawney (Bob Hoskins, 1988)

Dexter Fletcher in The Raggedy Rawney

Cast: Dexter Fletcher, Zoë Nathensen, Zoë Wanamaker, Bob Hoskins, Dave Hill, Ian McNeice, Gawn Grainger, Jim Carter, Veronica Clifford, Rosemary Martin, J.G. Devlin, Jane Wood, Ian Drury, Timmy Lang, Jenny Platt. Screenplay: Bob Hoskins, Nicole De Wilde. Cinematography: Frank Tidy. Production design: Jiri Matolin. Film editing: Alan Jones. Composer: Michael Kamen. 

The Raggedy Rawney was not well-received by critics when it was released, and it's certainly messy in tone and narrative. But I found it oddly compelling, if only because it's not quite like anything I've seen lately. It's a fable with anti-war overtones about a deserter in the middle of an unspecified war in an unspecified Eastern European country. (It was filmed in the former Czechoslovakia.) Tom (Dexter Fletcher) is a new soldier who is shocked into deserting by the carnage of an attack. Lashing out and partially blinding his commanding officer (Jim Carter), he escapes into the forest where he encounters a little girl (Jenny Platt) whose family has been killed and strung up as a warning to anyone who would hide men deserting from the army. She is playing with her dead mother's makeup, and the traumatized Tom lets her make up his face and dress him in one of her mother's dresses. Scared off by the movement of troops nearby, he runs deeper into the forest, still wearing dress and makeup, where he spots a caravan of Roma. When he comes across Darky (Bob Hoskins), the de facto leader of the caravan, Tom points him toward a spot in the river where the fish are plentiful, which motivates Darky to bring him back to the group and treat him as a "rawney," a madwoman with second sight. Tom remains mute until he strikes up a relationship with Darky's daughter, Jessie (Zoë Nathensen), who discovers that he's not a woman but keeps his secret. It's a setup with Shakespearean overtones that meanders first into comedy and then into tragedy. The Raggedy Rawney marked Hoskins's debut as a director and is the only film for which he wrote the screenplay (in collaboration with Nicole De Wilde), basing it on a tale told him by his Romani grandmother. 

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Jeffrey Lau, 2002)

Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Wei Zhao in Chinese Odyssey 2002

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Fay Wong, Wei Zhao, Chang Chen, Roy Cheung, Athena Chu, Rebecca Pan, Jan Lamb (voice). Screenplay: Jeffrey Lamb. Cinematography: Peter Ngor. Production design: Tony Au. Film editing: Wing-Ming Wong. Music: Frankie Chan, Roel A. García. 

You have to know Hong Kong cinema better than I do to fully appreciate the spoofery involved in Chinese Odyssey 2002, but it's still a giddy lark, with some handsome actors poking fun at their serious roles and a lot of amusing sight gags. The version I saw on the Criterion Channel seems to have been shorn of some of its musical sequences.