Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)

Emma Stone in Bugonia

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone. Screenplay: Will Tracy, based on a film by Jang Joon-hwan. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: James Price. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix. 

Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia feels less inventively off-beat than some of his other films, like the macabre fable Dogtooth (2009), the dystopian fantasy The Labster (2015), or the sendup of the costume drama The Favourite (2018). That may be because it's a remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! (2003), whose director, Jang Joon-hwan, was originally supposed to make it, so the material didn't originate in Lanthimos's imagination. Which is not to say it isn't full of his delirious inventiveness, especially since he's working with his favorite actress, Emma Stone, who seems to share his predilection for the absurd (viz. her work with Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie on the 1923 series The Curse). Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceuticals CEO who is kidnapped by Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), who is convinced that she's an alien and that the Andromedan mother ship is about to return to Earth for her. Imprisoned in his basement, with only Teddy's timorous cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), to guard her, Michelle proves resourceful and resistant. But is Teddy really deluded in his beliefs about her? What suspense the film generates comes from that question. Stone and Plemmons, the former indomitable and the latter sometimes explosively brutal, are at peak form. The only reservations I have lie in the rather cobbled-together ending of the film, which seems to me an apocalypse that the movie neither earns nor justifies.  

Girl With Hyacinths (Hasse Ekman, 1950)

Ulf Palme and Anders Ek in Girl With Hyacinths

Cast: Eva Henning, Ulf Palme, Birgit Tengroth, Anders Ek, Gösta Cederlund, Karl-Arne Holmsten, Keve Hjelm, Marianne Löfgren, Björn Berglund, Anne-Marie Brunius. Screenplay: Hasse Ekman. Cinematography: Göran Strindberg. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Lennart Wellèn. Music: Erland von Koch. 

A young woman kills herself, leaving a letter for her neighbors across the hall that names them as her heirs, even though they were only passing acquaintances. That's the setup for Hasse Ekman's Girl With Hyacinths. The neighbors, writer Anders Wikner (Ulf Palme) and his wife, Britt (Birgit Tengroth), are left to solve the mystery of why Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning) chose to take her life. Ingmar Bergman named Girl With Hyacinths as one of the greatest Swedish films, and while it never achieves the distinction of the best of Bergman's own films, it's an absorbing precursor to them. The secrets of Dagmar Brink's life are uncovered by the Wikners in a series of flashbacks, as they encounter a bristly banker (Gösta Cederlund), an alcoholic painter (Anders Ek), a giddy actress (Marianne Löfgren), Dagmar's ex-husband (Keve Hjelm), and a womanizing popular singer (Karl-Arne Holmsten). Although Anders Wikner does most of the sleuthing, it's his clever and more sympathetic wife who really understands what led to Dagmar's death, bringing to mind the collaboration of Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). The film also touches on themes that were taboo in the Hollywood of 1950. Hasse Ekman's skillful direction is aided by Göran Strindberg's cinematography. 

Films I've Seen Recently

 Prison on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson, 2025

Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025)

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, 2017)

West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (Med Hondo, 1979)

You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)

Framed (Richard Wallace, 1947)

The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)

Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009)

Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)

The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-Wai, 2013)

Zhang Ziyi in The Grandmaster

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Zhang Ziyi, Zhang Jin, Song Hye-ko, Yuen Woo-ping, Wang Qingxiang, Zhao Benshan, Shang Tielong, Chin Shih-chieh, Wang Jue, Chang Chen. Screenplay: Wong Kar-Wai, Zou Jingzhi, Xu Haofeng. Cinematography: Philippe Le Sourd. Production design: William Chang, Alfred Yau. Film editing: William Chang, Benjamin Courties, Poon Hung Yiu. Music: Stefano Lentini, Nathaniel Méchaly, Shigeru Umebayashi. 

A luminous Zhang Ziyi haunts every frame in which she appears in Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, which somewhat distorts the story, which is based on the life of Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), the kung fu grandmaster best known perhaps in the West as the teacher of Bruce Lee. But anyone expecting the flash and dazzle of Lee's movies will be confused by Wong's dreamlike romanticism, merging scenes of action into a tale of doomed love against a backdrop of the history of 20th-century China. Wong struggles to bring coherence to a number of narrative threads, many of which involve the philosophical underpinnings of the various styles of martial art, but unless you're a devotee of the practice, it's best to let the lush filming and scoring carry you along. 

Four Rooms (Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, 1995)

Jennifer Beals and Tim Roth in Four Rooms

Cast: Tim Roth, Sammi Davis, Amanda de Cadenet, Valeria Golino, Madonna, Ione Skye, Lili Taylor, Alicia Witt, David Proval, Jennifer Beals, Antonio Banderas, Tamlin Tomita, Lana McKissack, Danny Verduzco, Kathy Griffin, Marisa Tomei, Quentin Tarntino, Paul Calderón, Bruce Willis. Screenplay: Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography: Rodrigo García, Guillermo Navarro, Phil Parmet, Andrzej Sekula. Production design: Gary Frutkoff. Film editing: Margaret Goodspeed, Elena Maganini, Robert Rodriguez, Sally Menke. Music: Combustible Edison.

Four directors on their way up concocted Four Rooms, a knockabout anthology comedy set in a rundown LA hotel. The four segments are linked by the hotel bellhop, Ted, played by a twitchy Tim Roth in a performance that's supposed to be reminiscent of Jerry Lewis, but for once makes the viewer long for the real Jerry Lewis. Roth mugs and flinches and mutters his lines so much that you might be grateful for closed captions except that the lines aren't particularly funny. A few actors survive this mess: Jennifer Beals keeps her head in the two segments in which she appears, and Antonio Banderas does over-the-top machismo well, but most of them succumb to the general anarchy. Four Rooms was savaged by critics, but you'll find people who think it's one of the funniest films ever made. 

No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)

Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankolé in No Fear, No Die

Cast: Isaach de Bankolé, Alex Descas, Jean-Claude Brialy, Solveig Dommartin, Christopher Buchholz, Christa Lang, Gilbert Felmar, Daniel Bellus, François Oloa Biloa, Pipo Saguera, Alain Banicles. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Pascal Marti. Production design: Jean-Jacques Caziot. Film editing: Dominique Auvray. Music: Abdullah Ibrahim. 

Claire Denis's No Fear, No Die is a story about exiles trying to make it in the land that colonized their homelands: Dah (Isaach de Bankolé) is from Benin and Jocelyn (Alex Descas) is from the West Indies. They have come to France to make a fortune in cockfighting. Dah is the businessman and Jocelyn the trainer. Jocelyn provides the contact, Pierre (Jean-Claude Brialy), whom he knew when he was a boy. Eventually, tensions arise between Jocelyn and Pierre, especially after Pierre notices that Jocelyn finds his wife, Toni (Solveig Dommartin), attractive and even names one of the fighting cocks after her. Pierre suggests to Jocelyn that he used to have sex with the man's mother. The explosive human situation is heightened by the sequences depicting cockfights. Denis directs with her usual no-nonsense approach to the brutal actuality that lies hidden beneath the veneer of civilization. 

The Sealed Soil (Marva Nabili, 1977)

Flora Shabaviz in The Sealed Soil

Cast: Flora Shabaviz. Screenplay: Marva Nabili. Cinematography: Barbod Taheri. Music: Hooreh. 

With its static camera, long takes, and lack of a conventional plot, Marva Nabili's The Sealed Soil has earned comparisons to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975). It has the same unrelenting focus on a central figure, in this case Rooy-Bekhir (Flora Shabaviz), an 18-year-old woman in an Iranian village, who resists pressures from her family and her society to enter an arranged marriage. She is told at one point that her mother was engaged to be married at the age of 7. Eventually, the pressure to conform breaks her down. Much of the film focuses on her daily life in a place that seems suspended in time -- it's a film in which ambience rather than incident dominates. Made on the sly, with Shabaviz the only professional actor in its cast, the film was smuggled out of Iran (where it has never been exhibited) and edited back at the City University of New York, where Nabili was a film student. For those willing to endure its lack of narrative urgency, The Sealed Soil has a quiet power.  

Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971)

Bobby Kendall in Pink Narcissus

Cast: Bobby Kendall, Don Brooks, Charles Ludlam. Screenplay: James Bidgood. Cinematography: James Bidgood. Art direction: James Bidgood. Film editing: Martin Jay Sadoff. Music: Gary Goch, Martin Jay Sadoff. 

James Bidgood's shoestring fantasy is a reminder of the fine line between the erotic and the comic. Filmed in his apartment with a cast of friends, it's a lush evocation of the daydreams of a man (Bobby Kendall) waiting for the client for his sexual favors, in which the man, credited as Pan, imagines himself in various guises: a bullfighter, a harem boy, a Roman slave, and so on. In short, the familiar setups for gay porn. Though there is plenty of male nudity and at least one sexually explicit moment, Pink Narcissus never quite crosses over into pornography -- at least in the eye of this beholder. The score is made up of snippets of Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and a Haydn horn concerto, designed to set up a languorous mood. There's no plot, but none is needed. The usual word for this sort of film is camp, and the presence of Charles Ludlam in a variety of roles reinforces that adjective. Certainly it's all a little too much, and the blazes of color, soft-focus photography, and busy editing are sometimes eye-straining, but it's still an intriguing glimpse into one man's imagination.   

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)

Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Amy Madigan, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Whitmer Thomas, Callie Schuttera, Scarlett Sher (voice). Screenplay: Zach Cregger. Cinematography: Larkin Seiple. Production design: Tom Hammock. Film editing: Joe Murphy. Music: Zach Cregger, Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay.

In Weapons, Zach Cregger takes a gut-level nightmare, the abduction of children, and turns it into a horror movie centered on social scapegoating. When all of the children except for one in the third-grade class taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) disappear one night, she becomes the target of suspicion. The details of their disappearance is uncanny: Seventeen children all left their homes at the same time of night and completely vanished, with only a few videos made by home surveillance cameras to record their departure. The police are baffled even after grilling Justine and the boy (Cary Christopher) who was left behind. Justine is harassed: The word WITCH is painted on her car, and she begins to drink heavily. One of her chief accusers is Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew was one of the disappeared. Cregger tells the story in overlapping segments, each from a different point of view, a device that’s a little too repetitive but eventually pays off, revealing a villain with supernatural powers – ordinarily a cop-out device in a mystery story, but made effective by a wonderfully creepy performance by Amy Madigan. There are some plot holes that irritate those who look too closely, but Weapons is the kind of film you watch without expecting actuality to intrude.

Dr. T and the Women (Robert Altman, 2000)

Shelley Long and Richard Gere in Dr. T and the Women

Cast: Richard Gere, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Shelley Long, Laura Dern, Tara Reid, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler, Robert Hays, Matt Malloy, Andy Richter, Lee Grant, Janine Turner. Screenplay: Anne Rapp. Cinematography: Jan Kiesser. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Geraldine Peroni. Music: Lyle Lovett. 

More noisy than funny, Robert Altman's Dr. T and the Women has his characteristic generous casting and overlapping dialogue, but it also displays the limitations of both. We want to see more of some of the performers, like Lee Grant and Laura Dern, than we do, and we want them to say cleverer things than they do. Richard Gere plays a Dallas gynecologist whose office is crowded with eager patients and whose family is full of women demanding his attention. Though Altman's movie was scripted by a woman, Altman portrays women as so foolishly self-obsessed that when he delivers a baby at the end of the film, his proclamation, "It's a boy," is made to sound like a cry of relief.