Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925)

Belle Bennett in Stella Dallas

Cast: Belle Bennett, Ronald Colman, Lois Moran, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Screenplay: Frances Marion, based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Film editing: Stuart Heisler. 

Although eclipsed by the 1937 version directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the first filming of Olive Higgins Prouty's lachrymose novel Stella Dallas is well worth seeing, chiefly because of Belle Bennett's blowsy, undaunted Stella. It's hard to see why suave Ronald Colman's Stephen Dallas  would fall so completely for Stella's unkempt charms that he's willing to marry her, except as a kind of penance for his father's criminality and loss of the family fortune, but this is not a story for skeptics or realists. This is domestic melodrama of the purest sort, in which conventional psychology plays only the faintest role. It's a tale that requires you to believe that there's a maternal instinct that overcomes all, even the disapproval of polite society, and that it will be rewarded by seeing your daughter married to a product of that society, even if you have to do it standing in the rain outside the wedding. Bennett is grand in the role, even if her character doesn't have the complexities that Stanwyck brings to it. 

A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Nelly Frijda, Edda Barends, and Henriëtte Toll in A Question of Silence 

Cast: Edda Barends, Nelly Frijda, Henriëtte Toll, Cox Habbema, Eddie Brugman, Hans Croiset, Erik Plooyer. Screenplay: Marleen Gorris. Cinematography: Frans Bromet. Art direction: Harry Ammerlaan. Film editing: Hans van Dongen. Music: Lodewijk de Boer, Martijn Hasebos.

Janine (Cox Habbema), a court-appointed psychiatrist, examines three women on trial for a mysteriously random murder of the owner of a boutique. The women were strangers to each other before they assaulted the man, who accused one of them of shoplifting. Janine's task is to determine whether the women were insane when they committed the crime, and she comes to feel empathy for them when she examines the ways in which they were discriminated against by the men in their lives. Marleen Gorris crafts an intriguing courtroom drama that has been dismissed by some as feminist agitprop, but deserves praise for the way Gorris manipulates our attitudes toward the issues it raises.   

Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)

Masayuki Mori in Love Letter

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Juzo Dosan, Yoshiko Kuga, Jukichi Uno, Kyoko Kagawa, Shizue Natsukawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Chieko Seki, Ranko Hanai, Chieko Nakakita, Keisuke Kinoshita. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Fumio Niwa. Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki. Art direction: Seigo Shindo. Film editing: Toshio Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Struggling to get by in postwar Japan, Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori) spends his idle time searching for his childhood sweetheart Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga). Then one day he finds her and berates her for what she did to survive: become the mistress of an American soldier. That is the crux of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka's first film as a director, Love Letter. The letter itself is the giveaway to Michiko's secret. Reikichi overhears her dictating it to his friend Naoto Yamaji (Jukichi Uno), who ekes out a living by writing letters for women whose GI boyfriends have left them behind when they returned to the States. Michiko bore the soldier's child, but it died, and now she urgently seeks his financial aid, fearing that she will have to prostitute herself to live. Tanaka creates a vivid portrait of a wounded country where regret about the past is secondary to the need to survive. In this context, Reikichi's rigid morality seems out of place. Alive with secondary characters, the film gives us more than just a tortured romance, and although it contains a soap opera crisis, Tanaka wisely avoids a pat reconciliatory ending.    

War Machine (Patrick Hughes, 2026)

Alan Ritchson in War Machine

Cast: Alan Ritchson, Stefan James, Blake Richardson, Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, Jai Courtney, Alex King, Keiynan Lonsdale, Jack Patton, James Beaufort, Joshua Diaz, Jacob Hohua, Daniel Webber. Screenplay: Patrick Hughes, James Beaufort. Cinematography: Aaron Morton. Production design: Enzo Iacono. Film editing: Andy Canny. Music: Dmitri Golovko. 

I think I would have enjoyed War Machine more if it didn't feel like the kind of movie Pete Hegseth would love. At the beginning it's a straightforward celebration of military machismo, but then it turns into an invasion from outer space sci-fi movie while still retaining its conviction that the warrior ethos of muscle and grit is what will save us. Granted, it does give a nod to intelligence, as the hero manages to conquer the alien war machine with his knowledge of applied physics. The movie doesn't give Alan Ritchson much of an opportunity to play anything but Reacher gone Ranger, but he demonstrates the kind of presence that should ensure his continuance in action flicks, including the franchise that War Machine seems likely to produce.    

Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

Jacques Dutronc in Every Man for Himself

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Cécile Tanner, Paule Muret, Anna Baldaccini, Roland Amstutz. Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Renato Berta, William Lubtchansky, Jean-Bernard Menou. Art direction: Romain Goupil. Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself is about transactional lives: Everyone in the film is trying to get something from someone else. Naturally, the key figure is a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who eventually gets involved in the lives of a couple dissolving their relationship: the filmmaker Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) and his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye). It's a droll, talky, and sometimes bitterly funny film with a melancholy undertone reinforced by several reprises of the aria "Suicidio" from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda. For the real-life Godard it represented a return to more or less conventional filmmaking after the late '60s and '70s immersion in politics and experimentation, and it shows his mastery of creating vivid characters with problems of their own self-centered making. 

The Million Dollar Hotel (Wim Wenders, 2000)

Jeremy Davies in The Million Dollar Hotel

Cast: Jeremy Davies, Milla Jovovich, Mel Gibson, Jimmy Smits, Peter Stormare, Amanda Plummer, Gloria Stuart, Tom Bower, Donal Logue, Bud Cort, Julian Sands, Harris Yulin, Charlayne Woodard, Tim Roth. Screenplay: Nicholas Klein, Bono. Cinematography: Phaedon Papamichael. Production design: Robbie Freed, Arabella Serrell. Film editing: Tatiana S. Riegel. Music: Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, Daniel Lanois.

The idea for Wim Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel was conceived by Bono while he was filming the video for "Where the Streets Have No Name" in downtown Los Angeles near the Cecil Hotel, a run-down residence hotel. At its Australian premiere, the film's star, Mel Gibson, in one of those unfiltered remarks that wrecked his career, told an interviewer that the movie was "as boring as a dog's ass." He later backtracked, saying that he didn't really mean what he said, but it stuck. Wenders's film isn't boring, but it's not a highlight of the career of the director who gave us Wings of Desire (1987) and Paris, Texas (1984). It's a muddled blend of satire, whodunit, and tragic romance with tinges of magic realism, based on the weary premise that outcasts and the mentally challenged possess a higher wisdom. Gibson plays Skinner, an FBI agent investigating the death of a resident of the titular Los Angeles hotel: Did the artist Izzy Goldkiss (Tim Roth in a cameo) fall from the hotel roof, or was he pushed? Skinner is there at the behest of Izzy's wealthy father (Harris Yulin). He finds that the residents of the hotel are mostly deinstitutionalized mental patients, and they're no help in solving the case. Skinner is not a model of normality himself: He wears a neck brace and it's later revealed that he once had a third arm growing from his back: "I could play the violin and wipe my ass all at the same time." In his investigation, he centers on Geronimo (Jimmy Smits), an artist like Izzy, and employs Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies), one of the residents who is infatuated with another, the pretty Eloise (Milla Jovovich). The performances are mostly good, although Davies plays Tom Tom as a little more manic than he needs to. But in the end it's a movie mostly for U2 fans and Wenders completists. 

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Marcus Carl Franklin, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere in I’m Not There 

 Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson (voice), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Bob Dylan. 

I'm Not There is a kind of giveaway title: Bob Dylan isn't there on the screen either. Confronted with the most enigmatic music figure of the 20th century, Todd Haynes resorts to a deconstructed biopic. Bob Dylan's personae are so varied that he evokes the young man addressed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 53: "What is your substance, whereof are you made./That millions of strange shadows on you tend?" Haynes doesn't find a million Dylans, but he sticks to half a dozen, played by as many different performers, including a young Black actor (Marcus Carl Franklin) and a woman (Cate Blanchett, who earned an Oscar nomination for the role). Each of them represents a different stage in Dylan's life and career, but you really have to be steeped in knowledge of his biography already to fully appreciate the skill with which Haynes makes it all work. Or you can simply sit back and enjoy the audacity and originality of the film.

"Wuthering Heights" (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in "Wuthering Heights"

Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell, Amy Morgan, Jessica Knappett, Charlotte Mellington, Owen Cooper, Vy Nguyen. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell, based on a novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis. 

I am not a teenage girl, which means that my particular sensibility may hinder me from fully appreciating what Emerald Fennell has done with Emily Brontë's great mad novel, Wuthering Heights. Fennell said that she approached making a film of the novel as if it were being imagined by a teenage girl who had just read the book. She also did something of which I wholeheartedly approve: She put the title in quotation marks because movies and literature are distinctly different media -- no film, however closely it sticks to the source, is the equivalent of a written work. And on those terms, I have to applaud Fennell's movie: It does what it sets out to do. Sometimes at the expense of taste, to be sure: Any movie that starts with an ejaculating corpse is going to have to justify itself, and "Wuthering Heights" never quite recovers from that scene. The scene in which Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) finds Cathy (Margot Robbie) masturbating on the moors, her flesh-colored room at Thrushcross Granger, and her strapless mourning dress continue to push the boundaries of audacity. But the movie benefits from Fennell's decision to go all the way and from its cast's willingness to follow her. This is, in short, one of those movies that are better appreciated if you haven't read the book on which it's based: Brontë's novel is not a paperback bodice-ripper (the covers of which Fennell copies to the point of parody). The film is a sometimes campy but occasionally tedious exercise in excess. 

Not Fade Away (David Chase, 2012)

Bella Heathcote and John Magaro in Not Fade Away

Cast: John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett, Christopher McDonald, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Dominique McElligott, Molly Price, Meg Guzulescu, Gerard Canonico. Screenplay: David Chase. Cinematography: Eigil Bryld. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Film editing: Sidney Wolinsky. 

David Chase created The Sopranos, one of the greatest dramatic TV series of all time, rich in character and incident, with a superb evocation of a particular milieu. But what makes a series work doesn't necessarily make for a successful movie. Not Fade Away gives us a portrait of a corner of suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, with a youth culture at odds with the older generation and the Vietnam War seething in the background. The central story is that of Doug Damiano (John Magaro), who begins the film as a high school kid intoxicated with rock 'n' roll, especially after the emergence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He and his friends Gene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) start a band, and he gets a girlfriend, Grace (Bella Heathcote). Doug is at odds with his father, Pat (James Gandolfini) over his hair and his music, especially after Doug drops out of college to try to make it in the record business. It might have made a good TV series, but Chase fails to give it shape and coherence as a film, tossing in scenes that don't work with the main story, such as a needlessly included encounter of the young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train at the start of the film. He occasionally inserts a narrative voiceover by a secondary character whose identity isn't revealed until the very end, and then to no great point. There are some good performances by Magaro, Huston, and Gandolfini, but the movie's lack of focus and narrative drive undermines them.

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Cast: Jane Russell, Richard Egan, Joan Leslie, Agnes Moorehead, Jorja Curtright, Michael Pate, Richard Coogan, Alan Reed. Screenplay: Sydney Boehm, based on a novel by William Bradford Huie.  Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Mark-Lee Kirk, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler.  Music: Hugo Friedhofer. 

Loosely based on a novel that was loosely based on the memoirs of the sex worker Jean O'Hara, Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover is one of those dodges around the Production Code that kept cropping up in the 1950s. Set mostly in Honolulu before and after the Pearl Harbor attack, it's the story of a woman who parlayed her earnings as a "dance-hall hostess" into a fortune by buying up real estate when people fled the island at the start of the war and leasing it to the military. Jane Russell got the role of Mamie Stover -- which was one of O'Hara's actual pseudonyms after Marilyn Monroe, originally cast in the part, rebelled against her 20th Century Fox contract, and Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward, and Lana Turner were considered. It's a perfect fit for Russell. The movie is nothing special, but it's directed efficiently by Walsh, and has solid action scenes during the Pearl Harbor bombing, and colorful views of Hawaiian scenery.