Cain and Abel (Lino Brocka, 1982)

Carmi Martin and Christopher De Leon in Cain and Abel

Cast: Christopher De Leon, Phillip Salvador, Carmi Martin, Camille Castillo, Baby Delgado, Mona Lisa, Ruel Vernal, Michael Sandico, Venchito Galvez. Screenplay: Ricky Lee. Cinematography: Conrado Baltazar. Production design: Joey Luna. Film editing: Efren Jarlego. Music: Max Jocson. 

Lino Brocka's Cain and Abel doesn't really take much from the archetypal family feud story in Genesis other than the conflict between brothers and the fact that it takes place in an agricultural setting. Like the Cain of Genesis, Lorenzo (Phillip Salvador) is a farmer, tending the fields owned by his mother, Señora Pina (Mona Lisa). But his brother, Ellis (Christopher De Leon), is no shepherd like the biblical Abel. Instead, he's a mama's boy, favored by his imperious mother because she blames Lorenzo for the death of his father. (It seems that the two boys had a fight, and in trying to break it up, the father suffered a fatal heart attack.) So while Lorenzo sweats out a living in the fields, Ellis has been sent off to university in Manila. And while Lorenzo has married and has two sons, Ellis has always been a playboy, impregnating several local girls, including Rina (Cecille Castillo). The Señora paid for the other girls to have abortions, but she was fond of Rina and allowed her to carry the child to term and to remain as her servant. Then Ellis comes home from university, announcing that he's dropping out and plans to marry Zita (Carmi Martin), who comes with him. Though the Señora is none too pleased with Zita, she nevertheless announces that Ellis will take over the management of the estate and that Lorenzo will work for him. Angered, Lorenzo takes his family and moves out. And so begins a lurid melodrama that ends well for no one. Cain and Abel never achieves the symbolic dimensions promised by the title, and there are some overstated performances, but it's as watchable as a bloodier version of a prime-time soap opera like Dynasty or Dallas.

Maine-Océan Express (Jacques Rozier, 1986)

Luis Rego, Lydia Feld, and Rosa-Maria Gomes in Maine-Océan Express

Cast: Rosa-Maria Gomes, Luis Rego, Bernard Menez, Lydia Feld, Yves Afonso, Pedro Armendáriz Jr. Screenplay: Lydia Feld, Jacques Rozier. Cinematography: Acácio de Almeida. Film editing: Marine Brun, Jacques Rozier. Music: Hubert Degex, Anne Frédérick, Francis Hime. 

If I had to say what Jacques Rozier's Maine-Océan Express is about, which as a movie blogger I kind of have to do, I'd say it's about 130 minutes long. Forced to do better, I'd have to call it a screwball odyssey in which, although it begins and ends with two different travelers, the viewer is the Odysseus, forced to come to terms with a variety of wacky incidents. It starts with a Brazilian samba dancer (Rosa-Maria Gomes) boarding a train, on which, because she has failed to have her ticket stamped at the station, she is confronted by a ticket inspector (Luis Rego) who, because she speaks only a little French and English and he speaks no Portuguese, has trouble explaining what the problem is. He calls in his supervisor (Bernard Menez), who insists that rules must be followed and she must pay a fine, but has just as much trouble explaining the problem, until a lawyer (Lydia Feld), accompanied by her large black dog, tries to act as interpreter since she speaks a little Portuguese. Things get sorted out a little, and when they reach the town where the lawyer is scheduled to act in defense of a fisherman (Yves Afonso) who is being sued for an act of road rage, the samba dancer accompanies the lawyer -- for some reason I'm not quite clear about. Eventually, the samba dancer, the lawyer, the dog, the fisherman, the two ticket inspectors, and the dancer's manager (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) all wind up on the Île d'Yeu -- please don't ask me why or how -- where things are sort of sorted out. It's goofy French nonsense in Rozier's style, which amounts to dreaming up an assortment of characters and a situation to put them in, and seeing what comes of it. I have a bit of resistance to this approach to filmmaking but I have to admit that I found myself laughing out loud once or twice.    

PTU (Johnnie To, 2003)

Lam Suet in PTU

Cast: Simon Yam, Maggie Siu, Lam Suet, Ruby Wong, Raymond Ho-Yin Wong, Eddy Ko, Lo Hoi-Pang, Jerome Fung, Frank Zong-Ji Liu, Chiu Chi-Shing. Screenplay: Yau Nai-Hoi, Au Kin-Yee. Cinematography: Chen Siu-Keung. Production design: Ringo Cheung, Jerome Fung. Film editing: Law Wing-Cheung. Music: Chung Chi Wing. 

One of Akira Kurosawa's best early films was Stray Dog (1949), in which a cop's gun is stolen, necessitating a frantic search for the weapon. Johnnie To must surely have had that film in mind when he made PTU, although he takes a very different approach to the search, laying bare the inner workings of the Hong Kong police force and its relationship with the gangs it battles. Unlike the anxious rookie played by Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's film, the cop with the missing gun is a slovenly veteran, Sgt. Lo (Lam Suet), who loses the gun when he slips and falls and is knocked out while giving chase to some young gangsters. The Police Tactical Unit, headed by Sgt. Mike Ho (Simon Yam), comes to his aid, hoping to recover the weapon before they have to report its loss to the authorities. The rest is a series of colorful and sometimes deadly encounters, made vivid by cinematographer Chen Siu-Keung's visions of the city at night, its shadowy streets sometimes garishly lighted by signs. It's a twisty, ironic, and decidedly antiheroic thriller.  

Mallrats (Kevin Smith, 1995)

Art James, Jeremy London, Jason Lee, and Brian O'Halloran in Mallrats

Cast: Jeremy London, Jason Lee, Shannen Doherty, Claire Forlani, Ben Affleck, Michael Rooker, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Priscilla Barnes, Joey Lauren Adams, Ethan Suplee, Brian O'Halloran, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Art James, Stan Lee. Screenplay: Kevin Smith. Cinematography: David Klein. Production design: Dina Lipton. Film editing: Paul Dixon. Music: Ira Newborn. 

The success of his microbudget indie Clerks (1994) gave Kevin Smith the clout and the cash to make a more ambitious feature, but some think Smith was undone by his own success, overloading Mallrats with too much plot and too many extraneous characters and incidents. This comedy about the misadventures of two motormouth slackers is a bit too frantic and uninvolving, and some of its slapstick stunts centered on Smith's duo of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are poorly conceived. There's a gross-out joke that's more gross than funny, a bludgeoning of an Easter Bunny that comes out of nowhere, and an encounter with a topless fortune teller (Priscilla Barnes) that belongs in some other movie. You kind of have to be a fan of Smith's better films, especially Clerks, Chasing Amy (1997), and Dogma (1999), to be in the frame of mind to put up with the misfires in Mallrats.   

Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992)

Jeff Goldblum and Laurence Fishburne in Deep Cover

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Jeff Goldblum, Charles Martin Smith, Victoria Dillard, Gregory Sierra, Sydney Lassick, Roger Guenveur Smith, Clarence Williams III. Screenplay: Michael Tolkin, Henry Bean. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Pamela B. Warner. Film editing: John Carter. Music: Michael Colombier. 

If nothing else, Bill Duke's Deep Cover is notable for casting actors against type. Some of it works: Jeff Goldblum's lawyer turned would-be drug lord is full of humorous self-assurance tinged with menace. But Charles Martin Smith never overcomes the actor's nerdy image to establish him as a DEA agent confident enough to ask a series of Black federal agents a shockingly racist question and to manage the perilous situation he thrusts the agent played by Laurence Fishburne into. As for Fishburne himself, the role came early enough in his career that he was still being billed as Larry, which he insisted on changing once his career took off. He holds the film together even when it sometimes threatens to get derailed by too many plot twists. Although the movie asks the right questions about the compromised motives and veiled racism behind the so-called War on Drugs, it's undermined by generic thriller conventions and some preachy moments. 

Stowaway in the Sky (Albert Lamorisse, 1960)

André Gille and Pascal Lamorisse in Stowaway in the Sky

Cast: André Gille, Pascal Lamorisse, Maurice Baquet. Screenplay: Albert Lamorisse. Cinematography: Maurice Fellous, Guy Tabary. Production design: Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Film editing: Pierre Gillette. Music: Jean Prodromidès. 

After the success of his short film The Red Balloon (1956), Albert Lamorisse conceived another aerial adventure on a larger scale. It became his first feature, Stowaway in the Sky, and also starred his son, Pascal. It's a fanciful tale of an inventor (André Gille) who develops what he thinks is a revolutionary ballooning technique. On the maiden flight, his young grandson (Pascal) manages to scramble aboard after clinging to the gondola at liftoff. The inventor reluctantly allows the boy to accompany him on the flight, and they set off on a series of adventures that take them over spectacular French landscapes from Brittany to the Camargue and into close encounters with the Strasbourg Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, and Mont Blanc. They're tracked on the ground by an assistant (Maurice Baquet), who gets into comic scrapes of his own. To get the effects he needed for the film, Lamorisse helped develop a shock-absorbing mechanism called Helivision, which eliminated the vibrations of a camera mounted on a helicopter. All of the aerial sequences were shot this way, including those that appear to be taking place inside the gondola of the balloon: A half-basket was attached to the side of the helicopter and the actors rode in it while filming took place. Although there is some dialogue in setting up the premise and advancing what plot there is, it's essentially a silent film. Jack Lemmon, who liked the film so much that he bought the rights to it,  added his own voiceover narration scripted by S.N. Behrman for the American release. I haven't seen it, but some who have think it detracts from the charm of the film, which is often breathtakingly beautiful. 

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1993)

Colm Feore in Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

 Cast: Colm Feore, Derek Keurvorst, Katya Ladan, Kate Henning, Sharon Bernbaum, Don McKellar, David Hughes, Gale Garnett. Screenplay: François Girard, Don McKellar. Cinematography: Alain Dostie. Art direction: John Rubino. Film editing: Gaétan Huot. 

The conventional biopic uses narrative devices that subject it to distortions and falsifications, so in an attempt to avoid those in his portrait of the life of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, François Girard resorts to something like a mosaic or collage -- a bit like those portraits that are made up of dozens of smaller photographs. Gould was, above all, an eccentric and a master of technique, so the story of his life demands the eccentric technique of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Certainly what we get from Girard's approach and actor Colm Feore's performance as Gould is eccentricity -- a man who even in a crowd is as solitary as we see him at the beginning of the series of short films, walking toward the camera across an icy vastness. What we don't get, I think, is much of a sense of Gould as musician -- the images and the talk overwhelm the music except on occasion, as in the one segment in which a string quartet plays one of Gould's compositions or in the Norman McLaren animation of Fugue No. 14 from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. Gould loved talk, so some of the sequences are all talk. The chief criticism of Gould as pianist is that he was a master of technique, which suited the intricacies of Bach, but that he was so limited emotionally -- today, he might be diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum of autism -- that he played everything as if it were Bach. For example, in the excerpt from Beethoven's Sonata No. 17 in D minor played in one segment, the cascading notes fail to evoke the emotions that give the sonata its nickname, "Tempest." Sometimes, the film seems more preoccupied with what other people thought about Gould, especially in the scenes in which he's hounded by interviewers, than in examining the man himself. 

Eastern Condors (Sammo Hung, 1987)

Cast: Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Haing S. Ngor, Joyce Godenzi, Chui Man-yan, Ha Chi-chun, Lam Ching-ying, Melvin Wong, Charlie Chin, Cheung Kwok-keung, Billy Lau, Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen, Peter Chan, Chin Kar-lok, Hsiao Ho, Lau Chau-sang, Yuen Wah. Screenplay: Barry Wong. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Production design: King Man Lee. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Danny Chung. 

Blithely stealing from classics in the genre, Sammo Hung crafts in Eastern Condors the action film to end all action films. (If only.) The premise is that after the fall of Saigon, the retreating Americans left behind a missile installation that they now want to disarm, lest it fall into the wrong hands. So the American military recruits undocumented Chinese immigrants now in prison for a variety of offenses to be air-dropped into Vietnam to destroy the facility. If they succeed, they will be rewarded with American citizenship and a large sum of money. If this sounds familiar, at least there are more than a dozen of them and they're not particularly dirty. Eastern Condors is full of gags ribbing the Americans, as well as a few that wouldn't pass muster in an American movie, such as a volunteer whose stutter is played for laughs until it proves fatal. There's more gunplay than kung fu in Hung's movie, although it ends with a great martial arts standoff that's worth sitting through the rest of the movie for. Hung, slimmed down for the film, plays a more serious role than usual, but the movie is stolen by Yuen Biao as the wily Rat Chien and Yuen Wah as a giggling Viet Cong general modeled on some of James Bond's more epicene villains. 

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke, 2024)

Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides

Cast: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin, Zhou You, Xu Changchu, Lan Zhou, Hu Maotao, Pan Jianlin. Screenplay: Wan JIahuan Wan, Jia Zhang-ke. Cinematography: Eric Gautier, Nelson Lik-wai Yu. Production design: Liu Weixin. Film editing: Yang Chao, Matthieu Laclau, Xudong Lin. Music: Lim Giong. 

I can't imagine watching Caught by the Tides without having seen Jia Zhang-ke's earlier films, particularly Unknown Pleasures (2002), Sill Life (2006), and Ash Is Purest White (2018), which introduced us to his characters, settings, and themes. The docufictional Caught by the Tides is part reprise of and part coda to those films. The first two-thirds of it are actually patched together with outtakes and footage from them, along with personal footage shot by Jia himself during their production, and then blended into a narrative centered on Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao) and her sometime lover, the shady Guo Bin (Li Zhubin). The titular tides are those of Chinese history and society in the first quarter of the 21st century, sweeping Qiao and Bin apart and together again. They're also, in the middle part of the film, the tides of the Yangtze, as the immense Three Gorges Dam project transforms the geography of China. It's a film about "progress" and its human consequences, most human at its beginning in the industrial city of Datong, where the declining old city is being redeveloped. By the end of the film, which returns to Datong, the city has been transformed by technology into something glossier but less human. The plot, such as it is, involves Qiao's attempt to reconnect with Bin, who noticeably declines as she seems to grow stronger. If there's a failing in Jia's work, it's that his vision is too personal, too concerned with working out a commentary on the history of modern China, with a consequential loss of connection to international audiences. But the skill with which he works out that vision may also be his greatest strength.      

The Sandpiper (Vincente Minnelli, 1965)

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Sandpiper

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint, Charles Bronson, Robert Webber, James Edwards, Torin Thatcher, Tom Drake, Douglas Henderson, Morgan Mason. Screenplay: Martin Ransohoff, Irene Kamp, Louis Kamp, Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: George W. Davis, Urie McCleary. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Johnny Mandel. 

Cynically concocted by its producer, Martin Ransohoff, as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the peak (or nadir) of their celebrated relationship, The Sandpiper steals its dialectic from the hoary old Somerset Maugham tale of Sadie Thompson and the missionary. Ransohoff set a team of writers, including former blacklistees Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, to work on fleshing out his idea to tell the purloined story of a free-spirited woman and an uptight male. The best the writers could do was to lard the story with glitzy profundities, e.g. "Man is doomed by his myths" or "Man is essential to any concept of the universe" or "Saints tend to be myopic, whereas the atheist is almost always innocent." Burton looks especially uncomfortable mouthing lines like "I cannot dispel you from my thoughts," and Taylor has to say things like "Life always flies back to life if it isn't penned in." We get some relief from the tedious course of the plot, which anyone can see coming almost before the movie starts, with some lovely shots of the scenery at Big Sur. Otherwise, The Sandpiper doesn't even offer the delight of camp, since its stars are so uninterested in the story that they don't even bother overacting.