Lips of Blood (Jean Rollin, 1975)

Catherine Castel and Marie-Pierre Castel in Lips of Blood

Cast: Jean-Loup Philippe, Annie Bell, Natalie Perrey, Martine Grimaud, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel, Hélène Maguin, Anita Berglund, Claudine Beccarie, Béatrice Harnois. Screenplay: Jean-Loup Philippe, Jean Rollin. Cinematography: Jean-François Robin. Production design: Alain Pitrel. Film editing: Olivier Grégoire. Music: Didier William Lepauw. 

Would Jean Rollin's Lips of Blood be as creepy if it had been made on a generous budget with capable actors? Or is it the very cheesiness -- the fake fangs, the clumsy continuity, the gratuitous nudity, the patchy editing -- that makes it more interesting and memorable than slicker Hollywood horror movies? Because even when I'm laughing at some of Rollin's dodges and exploitative moments or wondering why he paces the action so slowly, I find myself drawn into the movie. Rollin is a master at finding and using real settings, from the crumbling Château Gaillard in Normandy to the Métro, the Trocadero gardens, and the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, which provide the right atmosphere and give the preposterous vampire love story an actuality that it doesn't deserve.   

The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova, 1971)

Oleg Vladimirsky and Zinaida Sharko in The Long Farewell

Cast: Zinaida Sharko, Oleg Vladimirsky, Yuriy Kayurov, Svetlana Kabanova. Screenplay: Natalya Ryazantseva. Cinematography: Gennady Karyuk. Production design: Enrique Rodriguez. Film editing: Valentina Oleynik. Music: Oleg Karavaychuk. 

Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) has just returned home to his mother, Yevgeniya (Zinaida Sharko), from a visit to his father in Novosibirsk, a long way away from their home in Ukraine. His parents separated when he was very small, but now that he's a teenager, about to set out on his own, Sasha thinks he might just go live with his father. Yevgeniya, naturally, isn't very happy about this. That situation gives Kira Muratova's The Long Farewell its substance; there is no plot. It's a film that depends greatly on our empathy with the characters, and empathy was not valued very much by the Soviet ideologues who got Muratova into a bit of trouble. (The same attitude seems to be true of the right-wingers currently in charge in the U.S.) But Muratova and her two lead performers know exactly how to generate it in the audience, which makes the film such a quietly memorable one. Most of it deals with the fraying relationship between mother and son, as they get on each other's nerves, but there's a key scene that brings the movie's themes into focus. Yevgeniya is in the post office where she's asked by a man to write a letter to his family for her -- he has forgotten his glasses. As he dictates it to her, the things he says about being separated from them clearly resonate with her. Sharko, who was a celebrated stage actress in the Soviet Union, is marvelous. Vladimirsky, an actor whose career is otherwise undocumented on the internet, is equally good, with a presence reminiscent of the young Anthony Perkins. The Long Farewell is a slender but poignant film much enlivened by Muratova's sly finesse with the camera and in the editing room.  

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Demi Moore in The Substance

Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Edward Hamilton-Clark, Gore Abrams, Oscar Lesage, Christian Erickson, Robin Greer, Tom Morton, Yann Bean (voice). Screenplay: Coralie Fargeat. Cinematography: Benjamin Kracun. Production design: Stanislas Reydellet. Film editing: Jerome Eltabet, Coralie Fargeat, Valentin Féron. Music: Raffertie. 

The fluids and textures of body horror have seldom been used for a satirically intense purpose as in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance. But the film wouldn't work without the courageous performance of Demi Moore, who brings her own image as a fading superstar to the movie. She provides a core of actuality to what is often an absurdly tongue-in-cheek film, in which people (including the character she plays) blithely do stupid things and in which plot holes and improbably over-the-top doings are abundant. The scene in which she prepares for a date in front of a mirror, applying and wiping away her makeup and then applying and removing it again, is more effective in its way than any of the scenes in which she is smothered in slimy and oozing prosthetics. As a fable about Hollywood's exploitation of women by men, embodied by Dennis Quaid as the producer named (with obvious aptness) Harvey, The Substance is sometimes blatant and a bit shrill, but the deeper target is our own body-consciousness, and in this area the film leaves us queasily examining our private obsession with age and decay.  

A Confucian Confusion (Edward Yang, 1994)

Chen Shiang-chyi and Suk Kwan Ni in A Confucian Confusion

Cast: Chen Shiang-chyi, Yiwan Chen, Danny Dun, Hung Hung, Elaine Jin, Chen Limei, Richie Li, Suk Kwan Ni, Bosen Wang, Weiming Wang, Yeming Wang. Screenplay: Edward Yang. Cinematography: Chang Chan, Hung Wu-hsiu, Li Lung-yu, Arthur Wong. Production design: Ernest Guan, Tsai Chen, Edward Yang, Yao Jui-chung. Film editing: Chen Po-wen. Music: Antonio Lee. 

Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion is a satiric but ultimately benign look at yuppies in a boom town, Taipei in the '90s. Nothing is fixed and stable about their lives, as they rise and fall, couple and uncouple in their pursuit of fortune. It's animated by the lively performances of its ensemble and the typically novelistic detail of Yang's narrative. The film itself had deteriorated somewhat since it was released, and has been restored, but I still found some of its scenes less clearly lit than they could have been. 

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999)

James Earl Jones in The Annihilation of Fish

Cast: James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder. Screenplay: Anthony C. Winkler. Cinematography: John L. Dempsey Jr., Rick Robinson. Production design: Nina Ruscio. Film editing: Nancy Richardson. Music: Laura Karpman. 

I was surprised that The Annihilation of Fish was written for the screen and not adapted from a play. Anthony C. Winkler's script is mostly talk, the action is largely confined to one setting, and it makes use of only three characters. James Earl Jones plays Fish, a man who believes he is being harassed by a demon; Lynn Redgrave is Poinsettia, who believes that her lover is Giacomo Puccini; and Margot Kidder is their landlady, Mrs. Mudroone, and God forbid if you ever spell her name without the final E. The plot, such as it is, comes from bringing the three together in Mrs. Muldroone's Los Angeles rooming house, where the two misfits, Fish and Poinsettia, fall in love (and into bed) while dealing with Fish's invisible demon, whom he literally wrestles and she finally kills, precipitating a crisis that threatens to end their affair. All three performers are wonderful, and some people find the film charming and funny, but I began to be more annoyed than intrigued by their eccentricities. 

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

Masaki Suda in Cloud

Cast: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Masaaki Akahori, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Yugo Mikawa, Maho Yamada, Toshihiro Yashiba. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Yasayuki Sasaki. Production design: Kyoko Matsui. Film editing: Koichi Takahashi. Music: Takuma Watanabe. 

A cloud is just a fog that keeps its distance. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud, it's that place in cyberspace where we do and store things, but it descends upon Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) as a miasma filled with people who wish to do him harm. He has been raking in the yen as a reseller of dubious goods, buying them from distressed sellers and putting them online at marked-up prices. He has made enough money to quit his factory job and move with his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), to a place in the country, where he continues his work with the aid of a young man called Sano (Daiken Okudaira), whom he hires as an assistant. But then he starts getting mysteriously harassed and threatened, and before long he discovers that a group has formed online of people who would do him real harm. They include his former boss, a rival reseller, retailers whose goods he has bought and resold, and dissatisfied customers -- some of the products he sold were fakes. Things escalate until he is fighting for his life, aided to his surprise by Sano, whom he has fired. Cloud is a bit of a mashup: It's a satire on capitalism, an old-fashioned revenge thriller, and a moral fable, and its ending suggests that there's more going on in the background of the story than has met the eye. The film disappointed some of Kurosawa's fans, who expected more of the psychological horror for which he has become known, but I found it skillfully made and provocative. 

Judgment Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993)

Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven, Emilio Estevez, Stephen Dorff, and Michael DeLorenzo in Judgment Night

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Denis Leary, Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven, Peter Greene, Erik Schrody, Michael Wiseman, Michael DeLorenzo, Relioues Webb, Will Zahrn, Eugene Williams. Screenplay: Lewis Colick, Jere Cunningham. Cinematography: Peter Levy. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Tim Wellburn. Music: Alan Silvestri. 

Judgment Night is a routine thriller about four suburban knuckleheads who head into the big bad city and wind up in a preposterous amount of trouble. They're the usual types: the Good Guy (Emilio Estevez), the Kid Brother (Stephen Dorff), the Adrenaline Junkie (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and the Jerk (Jeremy Piven). In the Dark City -- the Chicago of Donald Trump's imaginings -- they face off against the Sneering Gang Boss (Denis Leary), his Menacing Sidekick (Peter Greene), and a host of undifferentiated Thugs. They're chased through a Bleak Railyard, into a Decaying Housing Project, and everything winds up in a place where there's a lot of Stuff to Break. Director Stephen Hopkins, working from a much-rewritten script, treats it all as if it were new and interesting, but this is a case where if you've ever seen an action thriller you know what to expect. 

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, 1976)

Joel Grey, Geraldine Chaplin, and Paul Newman in Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Cast: Paul Newman, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster, Allan F. Nicholls, Geraldine Chaplin, John Considine, Will Sampson, Frank Kaquitts, Robert DoQui, Mike Kaplan, Burt Remsen, Bonnie Leaders, Noelle Rogers, Evelyn Lear, Denver Pyle, Pat McCormick, Shelley Duvall. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph, Robert Altman, suggested by a play by Arthur Kopit. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Production design: Anthony Masters. Film editing: Peter Appleton, Dennis M. Hill. Music: Richard Baskin. 

"Nostalgia ain't what it used to be," says Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) in Robert Altman's deconstruction of the Wild West myth that Bill Cody, with the help of the novelist Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster), had created. Buffalo Bill and the Indians premiered in the bicentennial year of 1976 and was poorly received by both critics and audiences, though probably not because of any offenses to patriotism. It's overlong and unfocused, relying more on Newman's charisma than on any attempt at giving the character depth and substance. It's no revelation that the man who made the myth of the Wild West was a racist and an egomaniac. There are amusing moments: Joel Grey delivers the malapropisms of Nate Salisbury, the producer of Bill's show, with sly finesse, and Geraldine Chaplin and John Considine spar nicely as Annie Oakley and Frank Butler. Bill's supposed infatuation with opera singers lets Evelyn Lear, as a soprano called Nina Cavallini, beautifully sing "The Last Rose of Summer" in Italian. But the movie has nowhere to go. If Sitting Bull does teach Buffalo Bill a history lesson, as the subtitle suggests, it doesn't seem to have any effect.  

Alucarda (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)

Tina Romero and Susana Kamini in Alucarda

Cast: Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, Claudio Brook, David Silva, Tina French, Brigitta Segerskog, Lili Garza, Adriana Roel, Martin LaSalle. Screenplay: Alexis Arroyo, Juan López Moctezuma, Tita Arroyo, Yolanda López Moctezuma, based on a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. Cinematography: Xavier Cruz. Art direction: Kleomenes Stamatiades. Film editing: Maximo Sánchez Molina. Music: Anthony Guefen.

Juan López Moctezuma's lurid, loony Alucarda takes place mostly in the environs of an orphanage run by nuns, who seem to belong to no usual order: Instead of black, their habits and wimples are a dingy white -- the better to get soiled and bloodied, as we'll see. The plot, such as it is, centers on Justine (Susana Kamini), a teenager who comes to the orphanage on the death of her parents, and is immediately taken under the wing of another teenage orphan, Alucarda (Tina Romero), who seems not to have given the nuns much trouble until Justine arrives, and then ... well, for once the cliché "all hell breaks loose" seems appropriate. Both girls go nuts, but it's Justine in particular who causes the attending priest, Father Lázaro (David Silva), to intone "we must do [portentous pause] an exorcism!" [Gasp from the assembled nuns.] In this case expelling the demon appears to involve stripping Justine naked, chaining her to a forked cross, and poking holes into her. This goes on until the attending doctor (Claudio Brook, who also doubles as an avatar of Satan) arrives to put a stop to it, whereupon Father Lázaro and the nuns go into a frenzy of penitential flagellation. But the doctor's efforts to use reason don't work either. Alucarda has some of the clunkiest dialogue and most wooden delivery of it that I've encountered in many a month of movie-watching. But it's also compulsively, perversely watchable, and not just in a condescending way because of its campiness or its exploitative nudity and blasphemy. In this tale of God vs. Satan, Satan seems to get the upper hand, despite the efforts of both religion and science to thwart him.  

Hard-Boiled (John Woo, 1992)

ChowYun-fat in Hard-Boiled

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan, Phillip Kwok, Anthony Wong, Kwan Hoi-san, Stephen Tung, Bowie Lam, Lo Meng, Bobby Au-yeung. Screenplay: John Woo, Barry Wong, Gordon Chan. Cinematography: Wang Wing-heng. Production design: James Leung. Film editing: John Woo, David Wu, Kai Kit-wai, Jack Ah. Music: Michael Gibbs.

About as much fun as you can have watching people die by the dozens. Don't get me wrong: I laughed out loud several times during John Woo's action masterpiece Hard-Boiled, as when Tequila's pants caught fire and the baby he was carrying peed and doused the flames. It's a rush of kinetic effects, and Chow Yun-fat as Yuen (aka Tequila) and Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Alan (or perhaps Ah Long, as the subtitles put it) have chemistry and charisma to spare. But once the dizzying, exhilarating action is over, you're not left with much beyond a pleasant buzz and in my case a nagging feeling that maybe you shouldn't really enjoy mindless violence so much. It's an "it's only a movie" movie that depends on your assurance that those are stuntmen firing fake guns and flinging themselves about and the blood is red stuff packed into squibs. Yet maybe, living as we Americans do in a gun culture, we ought to have an occasional afterthought about what we enjoy so much.