Election (Johnnie To, 2005)

Cast: Simon Yam, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Louis Koo, Nick Cheung, Gordon Lam, Cheung Siu-fai, Lam Suet, Wong Tin-lam, Tam Ping-man, Maggie Shiu, David Chiang, You Yong, Berg Ng, Raymond Wong. Screenplay: Yau Nai-Hoi, Yip Tin-shing. Cinematography: Cheng Siu-Keung. Art direction: Tony Yu. Film editing: Patrick Tam. Music: Lo Ta-Yu. 

If nothing else, Johnnie To's Election shows that you don't need guns to take out your enemies: A large rock, a log, a tree branch, or even a passing car will do the job. And you can soften up a guy by nailing him in a crate and rolling him down a steep hill a couple of times. This is a gangster film without much glamour beyond the swagger provided by Tony Leung Ka-fai as Big D, whose opponent in the election to head up their Hong Kong triad is the more reserved Lok (Simon Yam). Mostly these gangsters are older guys, many of them referred to as "uncle," and with nicknames like Big Head, Whistle, Fish Ball, and Four Eye. When Lok defeats Big D in the first round of the election, complications ensue, much of them centered on finding and possessing the film's MacGuffin, a carved dragon head that's a symbol of authority from the days of the formation of the triad -- which we see re-created in a flashback. Election is often hard to follow, partly because allegiances to Lok and Big D are somewhat fluid, but it repays attention as a vivid portrait of a subculture.  

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (Massimo Dallamano, 1974)

Giovanna Ralli in What Have They Done to Your Daughters?

Cast: Giovanna Ralli, Claudio Cassinelli, Mario Adorf, Franco Fabrizi, Farley Granger, Marina Berti, Paolo Turco, Corrado Galpa, Michaela Pignatelli, Ferdinando Murolo. Salvatore Puntillo, Eleonora Morana. Screenplay: Ettore Sanzò, Massimo Dallamano. Cinematography: Franco Delli Colli. Art direction: Franco Bottari. Film editing: Antonio Siciliano. Music: Stelvio Cipriani.

When a pregnant 14-year-old girl is found hanging naked from the rafters of a garret apartment, the first thought from the police is suicide, but that quickly turns to murder. And so begins the lurid, exploitative What Have They Done to Your Daughters? Naturally, the filmmakers try to take the edge off of the charges of exploitation by suggesting in the opening credits that the nudity and violence in their film serves a larger purpose of exposing an important social problem: the sexual trafficking of adolescent females. Still, the movie has all the thrills of its hybrid genre: a fusion of giallo and poliziottesco. There's a masked killer wielding a butcher's cleaver, an exciting car chase, a grisly dismembered body, some good-looking leads in Giovanna Ralli as the DA in charge of the case and Claudio Cassinelli as the chief investigator, and even a cameo by Farley Granger as the victim's father. But there's also an eerie prescience about the film's conclusion: For although the immediate case is solved, the investigators learn that the trafficking problem stems from sources they can't approach for investigation. So we find ourselves reminded by a 50-year-old movie of the Jeffrey Epstein case, with its own lesson about the invulnerability of the very rich and very powerful. 

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Patsy Ferran, Cameron Britton, Daniel Henshall, Steve Park, Anamaria Vartolomei, Holliday Grainger. Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Fiona Crombie. Film editing: Jinmo Yang. Music: Jung Jae-il. 

Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 is carpet-bomb satire, spread out over so many social, political, scientific, and theological targets that it's bound to hit all of them but inflict no lasting damage on any of them. What it has going for it is a watchable cast, starting with Robert Pattinson, who adds to his reputation as one of our most versatile young actors. Pattison is Mickey Barnes, whom technology allows to essentially live forever as a succession of Mickeys who die and get reborn. By the time the film starts, he's Mickey 17, an "Expendable" on a voyage to settle a new planet. He's essentially a guinea pig, sent out to test whether humans can survive the new environment. Each time something on the planet, such as a virus, kills him, he's re-created out of something like a 3-D printer and his previously stored memories are replaced so he can go out again, after the scientists on-board have discovered a cure or preventative for what killed him. That's the principal set-up, but Bong has more twists to Mickey's story in line. The captain of the spaceship, for example, Kenneth Marshall, is a wealthy politician out for glory. He's played well over the top by Mark Ruffalo in a performance that evokes several contemporary egomaniacs with more money and power than scruples and common sense. And the planet is inhabited by creatures that look like large pill bugs; they turn out to be intelligent beings, setting the plot up for a showdown with the blustering Marshall. It's a darkly funny movie that reflects Bong's somewhat jaundiced view of humankind. 

The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)

Allan Corduner and Kamelia Grigorova in The Grey Zone

Cast: David Arquette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Daniel Benzali, Allan Corduner, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Kamelia Grigorova, Mira Sorvino, Natasha Lyonne, Jessica Hecht, Brian F. O'Byrne. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson, based on his play and a book by Miklos Nyiszli. Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine. Production design: Maria Djukovic. Film editing: Michelle Botticelli, Tim Blake Nelson. 

In basing his film (originally a play) on the memoirs of Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish physician who aided Josef Mengele in his hideous experiments at Auschwitz, Tim Blake Nelson makes one grave mistake. Instead of making Nyiszli the focus of the film, he chooses to scatter the narrative among others imprisoned at the death camp. One of the strengths of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) was its use of Oskar Schindler as a pivotal figure, and Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015), a much better film about the Sonderkommandos, the Jews who did the dirty work for the Nazis at the camps, is centered on the dilemma of one man. The Grey Zone remains a harrowing film, but it's easy to get lost as it shifts from the discovery of a girl found alive in one of the gas chambers to the plotting that results in the destruction of one of the crematoria. 

  

Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang-ke, 2002)

Zhao Tao and Wu Qiong in Unknown Pleasures

Cast: Zhao Wei Wei, Zhao Tao, Wu Qiong, Li Zhubin, Wang Hongwei, Zhou Qingfeng, Bai Ru, Liu Xi An, Xu Shou Lin, Xiao Dao, Ying Zi. Screenplay: Jia Zhangke. Cinematography: Nelson Yu Lik-wai. Production design: Jingdong Liang. Film editing: Keung Chow. 

At one point in Jia Zhangke's Unknown Pleasures, a character tells another about a movie he saw that sounds a lot like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), and it's followed by a cut to a shabby discotheque where people are dancing to music that sounds like a bad imitation of "Misirlou," the number that opens Tarantino's film. The homage is ironic, because the young idlers of Jia's film are a world away from the stylish gangsters and lowlifes of the American film. They're wannabes and would-bes, trapped in a decaying backwater and trying to get as much pleasure as they can out of life, which isn't much. China has never looked more drab than in Unknown Pleasures, which is usually taken to be a portrait of the generation produced under China's "one child" policy that was initiated in 1979. They long for what they see as the glamour of Beijing, but have to settle for what little glamour they can milk out of popular culture. Bin Bin (Zhao Wei Wei) has a frustrating relationship with his more ambitious girlfriend, Yuan Yuan (Zhou Qingfeng), and decides to rob a bank. Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong) aimlessly rides his unreliable motorbike as he tries to get the attention of Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), who works as a singer and dancer promoting the wares of a liquor company.  It's sometimes a confusing film, taking sidetracks into the stories ancillary to those of the principal characters, but what it lacks in narrative structure it makes up for in atmosphere.

The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath, 1969)

Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan in The Magic Christian

Cast: Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Isobel Jeans, Caroline Blakiston, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Richard Attenborough, Leonard Frey, Laurence Harvey, Christopher Lee, Spike Milligan, Roman Polanski, Raquel Welch, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Yul Brynner. Screenplay: Terry Southern, Joseph McGrath, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Peter Sellers, based on a novel by Southern. Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: Kevin Connor. Music: Ken Thorne. 

There are some funny people doing funny things in The Magic Christian: John Cleese as a Sotheby's employee aghast when the billionaire played by Peter Sellers mutilates a painting thought to be a Rembrandt; Spike Milligan as a traffic warden bribed into eating the ticket he's given the billionaire for parking in a loading zone; and Sellers himself trying out an unpredictable variety of accents. There are also some inspired moments: Laurence Harvey playing Hamlet and doing a striptease during the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and an unbilled Yul Brynner in drag, singing "Mad About the Boy." But this scattershot, anything-for-a-gag movie has too many gags that don't land, including some dodgy gay jokes like a swishy character named Laurence Faggot -- pronounced fa-GOH. It's a sledgehammer satire on the familiar premise that people will do anything for money, and it often lands flat on its own banality. 

Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ron Silver, Clancy Brown, Elizabeth Peña, Louise Fletcher, Philip Bosco, Kevin Dunn, Richard Jenkins. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red. Cinematography: Amir Mokri. Production design: Toby Corbett. Film editing: Lee Percy. Music: Brad Fiedel. 

Whatever points Kathryn Bigelow may earn for style in her direction of Blue Steel have to be offset by the fact that she co-wrote (with Eric Red) its nonsensical screenplay. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop who becomes the obsession of a psychotic commodities trader and serial killer played by Ron Silver. The setup isn't a bad one, but the film is padded out with an unnecessary subplot in which Curtis's character is trying to persuade her mother (Louise Fletcher) to leave her abusive father (Philip Bosco) and a gratuitous sex scene before the expected final shootout. Bigelow demonstrated her gift for narrative economy in The Hurt Locker (2008) and for over-the-top action sequences in Point Break (1991). Blue Steel could use both.  

The Loveless (Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery, 1981)

Willem Dafoe in The Loveless

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Robert Gordon, Marin Kanter, J. Don Ferguson, Tina L'Hotsky, Lawrence Matarese, Danny Rosen, Phillip Kimbrough, Ken Call, Jane Berman. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery. Cinematography: Doyle Smith. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: Nancy Kanter. Music: Robert Gordon. 

If, as it's said to be, The Loveless is an homage to The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953), it's not a bad example of the truism that there's a thin line between homage and parody. It's hard not to laugh at the poses of its leather-clad 1950s-style bikers, saying things like "daddio" and "cool your jets." One of them is an up-and-coming Willem Dafoe, making his debut as a movie lead. It was also Kathryn Bigelow's debut as a feature-film director, and was made as her master's thesis in the film program at Columbia -- the university, not the studio. Both Dafoe and Bigelow, as they say, show promise. Though it's slow and somewhat overcooked, it demonstrates, among other things, Bigelow's eye for male posturing, which would serve her well in a later film like Point Break (1991). It was her co-director Monty Montgomery's one outing as a feature director; he's better known as a producer, working with among other, David Lynch. The Loveless is one of those movies that are less interesting in themselves than for the conditions and circumstances under which they were made and as the harbinger of better things for some of its personnel.

The Runner (Amir Naderi, 1984)

Madjid Niroumand in The Runner

Cast: Madjid Niroumand, Behrouz Maghsoudlou, Mohsen Shah Mohammadi, Abbas Nazeri, Reza Ramezani, Musa Torkizadeh. Screenplay: Behrouz Gharibpour, Amir Naderi. Cinematography: Firooz Malekzadeh. Production design: Mohammad Hassanzadeh, Amir Naderi. Film editing: Bahram Beyzale. 

Amir Naderi's enthralling The Runner is about escape. Or, more particularly, about escape from one's own limits. When the protagonist, Amiro (Madjid Niroumand), keeps running after losing a footrace to another boy, he's asked why he didn't stop. "I wanted to see how far I could run," he replies. Amiro is a street kid with no parents, living in an abandoned boat on the shore in a coastal Iranian town. He survives with odd jobs: scavenging in a rubbish dump, collecting bottles that float ashore, peddling ice water, shining shoes. But he dreams of escape, of sailing on the ships that he sees in the harbor, flying on the planes that take off from a nearby airfield. Scorned for his illiteracy by a newsstand owner whose magazines he collects for images of airplanes and another world, he enrolls in a night class to learn to read. And he runs and runs, not only in races with other boys, but also to assert himself, chasing down a bicyclist who cheats him of a rial owed for a glass of ice water, pursuing a man who grabs a block of ice Amiro needs for the water he sells. He wins both times, even though the sum of money is petty and the ice has melted by the time he catches the thief. There is no story, only a fable of determination, and although the film ends in a fiery scene of triumph, Amiro's circumstances have not altered. Beautifully filmed, with a charismatic performance by Niroumand, The Runner is a neglected classic of childhood. 

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Isaac De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola, Ariane Labed, Michael Epp, Emma Laird, Jonathan Hyde. Screenplay: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold. Cinematography: Lol Crawley. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Dávid Jancsó. Music: Daniel Blumberg. 

Reading some of the online comments about Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, I was surprised to learn that some people thought László Tóth was a real person. Which made me realize that I much prefer a faux biopic like The Brutalist to the ones like Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) that purport to be about a real person. Tóth may be based on architects like Gropius, Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe, but he's wholly the creation of Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold, and we don't need to waste time fussing over what's fact and what's fiction. To be sure, with its curlicues of plot and eruptions of emotion, The Brutalist feels more Baroque than Bauhaus, the spare and linear architectural style it celebrates in the film's epilogue. It's also overlong and sometimes substitutes caricature for characterization, as in the role of Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who utters lines more florid than any real American captain of industry ever mustered. Still, Adrien Brody's performance brings Tóth to life and richly deserved the Oscar it received.