Nomad (Patrick Tam, 1982)

Patricia Ha in Nomad

Cast: Patricia Ha, Kent Tong, Cecilia Yip, Leslie Cheung, Stuart Ong. Screenplay: Chiu Kang-chien, Joyce Chan, Eddie Fong, Kam Ping-hin, John Chan Koong-chun, Patrick Tam. Cinematography: Peter Ngor Chi-Kwan, David Chung, Bill Wong. Production design: William Chang, John Hau. Film editing: Cheung Kwok-kuen. Music: Violet Lam. 

The English title Nomad refers to the yacht owned by the family of Louis (Leslie Cheung), an idle young man who finds himself entangled with a working-class young woman called Tomato (Cecilia Yip), while his cousin, Kathy (Patricia Ha), is toying with the affections of Pong (Kent Tong), who scrapes out a living as a lifeguard and a cab driver. But the Chinese title of Patrick Tam's film, which translates as "Youth on Fire," is more to the point. It starts out as a scattered, sexy movie about the escapades of four Hong Kong twentysomethings with not much more on their minds than what their hormones put there. But then it veers off in another direction with the arrival of Kathy's former boyfriend, Shinsuke (Stuart Ong), a deserter from the Japanese militant organization known as the Red Army. Things do not go well for the hedonistic quartet. The credits list six screenwriters, which is a sign that too many ideas have been tossed into the mix for the viewer to assimilate into a coherent story. But Nomad is undoubtedly provocative on many social, political, and historical levels.  

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Callan Mulvey, Tao Okamoto. Screenplay: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer. Cinematography: Larry Fong. Production design: Patrick Tatopoulos. Film editing: David Brenner. Music: Tom Holkenborg, Hans Zimmer. 

Dark, brutal, noisy, and glum, Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is unleavened by wit. The meeting of the self-made superhero and the benevolent alien was bound to happen eventually, but why did anyone have to take it so seriously? Why couldn't it have been fun, like an encounter of the campy Batman of the old TV series and the naïf Superman of James Gunn's 2025 reboot? Or if not that, at least not something so goddamn apocalyptic. You can see some of its actors, particularly Amy Adams and Holly Hunter, trying to rise above the chaos, but they keep getting sucked down into a plot that seems to go out of its way to make less sense than most comic book movies do. 

Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, 1987)

Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire in Under the Sun of Satan

Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Alain Artur, Yann Dedet, Brigitte Legendre, Jean-Claude Bouriat, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Sylvie Pialat, Maurice Pialat, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. Cinematography: Willy Kurant. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Henri Dutilleux. 

Are the torments that afflict the priest played by Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan mental or spiritual? And is there a difference? That's the conundrum the film leaves us to ponder and the reason the film caused so much uproar when it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a tense, talky film that begins with the young priest, Donnisan, confessing his self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy to his superior, Menou-Segret (Pialat), who is shocked to find that Donnisan wears a hair shirt under his cassock -- he also secretly flagellates himself. Then the film shifts to Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a 16-year-old girl with two lovers. She visits the first, Cadignan (Alain Artur) to tell him that she's pregnant and then, playing with his rifle, shoots him. Then she has sex with the other, a physician named Gallet (Yann Dedet), who has examined Cadignan's body and ruled the death a suicide. He tells her that he won't perform an abortion for her. The stories of Donnisan and Mouchette will intersect eventually, but not before the priest experiences a dark night of the soul in an encounter with the devil. Donnisan is transformed but destroyed by this meeting. The denouement, in which Donnisan seems to perform a miracle, has caused the film to be likened to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955), but Pialat's work is messier than Dreyer's.   

Straight to Hell (Alex Cox, 1987)

Courtney Love in Straight to Hell

Cast: Dick Rude, Sy Richardson, Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Sara Sugarman, Biff Yeager, Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Jim Jarmusch, Grace Jones, Zander Schloss. Screenplay: Dick Rude, Alex Cox. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: David Martin. Music: The Pogues, Dan Wool. 

About 40 years ago, a group of Very Cool People found themselves with time on their hands, so they gathered some of their Very Cool Friends and went to the place in Spain where a lot of spaghetti Westerns were made and made one of their own. The story of Alex Cox's Straight to Hell is negligible because nobody took it seriously: Four bank robbers stash the loot in the desert and hole up in a ghost town that suddenly comes alive with a variety of residents, and then everybody pretty much kills everybody else. It's scarcely even a parody of the spaghetti Western. Nobody much liked it at the time. Roger Ebert called it "an indulgent mess" and it bombed at the box office. But it survived as a cult film, and in 2010 it got a "director's cut" version. It's still an indulgent mess, but a few comic moments survive the mayhem, and there is occasionally some funny dialogue: "A gun is like a tool. Ain't no better or no worse than the man that uses it." "Just like shoes." 

Rude (Clement Virgo, 1995)

Richard Chevolleau in Rude

Cast: Maurice Dean Witt, Rachael Crawford, Clark Johnson, Richard Chevolleau, Sharon Lewis, Melanie Nicholls-King, Stephen Shellen, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Dayo Ade, Dean Marshall, Ashley Brown. Screenplay: Clement Virgo. Cinematography: Barry Stone. Production design: William Fleming. Film editing: Susan Maggi. Music: Aaron David, John Lang. 

In his first feature film, Rude, Clement Virgo makes the rookie mistake of trying to do too much, telling stories of three residents of the Toronto neighborhood Regent Park when just one story would be enough. They are familiar stories, too: an ex-con trying to avoid being drawn back into drug-running, a closeted gay man fearful of being outed, and a young woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Virgo ties them all together with the running commentary of a disc jockey called Rude (Sharon Lewis), on her pirate radio show. Fortunately, Virgo has chosen capable actors and he displays a great deal of cinematic style that almost overcomes the familiarity of the material.  

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Sam Locke, Robert Rhodes, Ghazi Al Ruffai, Maura Bird, Connor Newall, Lewis Ashbourne Serkis, Mirren Mack, David Sterne, Cillian Murphy. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Carson McCall, Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir. 

A pandemic has swept the world, leaving the survivors at the mercy of the worst among them. Good thing it's just a movie, right? I won't say that Alex Garland, who gave us Civil War (2024), about an American citizenry at odds with its government, didn't have something more in mind than a post-apocalyptic Britain, so let's just keep in mind Oscar Wilde's pronouncement: "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." On the surface, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a worthy successor to, maybe even an improvement on, Danny Boyle's 2025 film 28 Years Later, which introduced Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a solo survivor fending off those infected by the Rage Virus we first encountered in Boyle and Garland's 28 Days Later (2003). Film series usually peter out after one or two sequels, but this one has somehow gotten stronger. (I'm not going to say it's because life has copied art, to invoke another Wilde aphorism.) Nia DaCosta's direction is sure-handed, and the cast is more than up to the often gruesome demands of the script. The ending, reintroducing Cillian Murphy as Jim, the survivor from 28 Days Later who hasn't aged much in 28 years, lets us know a sequel is on the way, and for once I don't mind. 

Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

Isabelle Weingarten and Guillaume des Forêts in Four Nights of a Dreamer

Cast: Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Giorgio Maulini, Lidia Biondi, Patrick Jouané, Jérôme Massart. Screenplay: Robert Bresson, based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Production design: Pierre Charbonnier. Film editing: Raymond Lamy. Music: F.R. David, Louis Guitar, Chris Hayward, Michel Magne. 

Robert Bresson's spare, terse Four Nights of a Dreamer is not for those who want their love stories lush and passion-filled. It's about the accidental and fragile nature of mutual attraction. Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) is an artist whom we first see thumbing a ride out of Paris into the country, where he does somersaults and annoys a promenading family by briefly bursting into song. Then he returns to the city where, out walking at night, he sees a young woman on the verge of flinging herself into the Seine. She is Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), who is distraught because she thinks she has been abandoned by the man she loves. For four nights, Jacques tries to help her reconnect with him, and just when they seem to be forming their own connection, they encounter her lover on the street and she goes off with him. Jacques  returns to his apartment and resumes work on his painting and his dreams. The Parisian night's soft colors and shadows and the music of street performers provide the emotional content of this understated romance, which shows the steady hand of its director without his frequently harsh view of human attempts to connect with one another. 

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)

Jacques Dutronc in Van Gogh

Cast: Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London, Bernard Le Coq, Gérard Sèty, Corinne Bourdon, Elsa Zylberstein, Leslie Azzoulai, Jacques Vidal, Chantal Barbarit, Claudine Ducret, Frédéric Bonpart. Screenplay: Maurice PIalat. Cinematography: Gilles Henry, Jacques Loiseleux, Emmanuel Machuel. Production design: Philippe Pallut, Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet, Nathalie Hubert, Hélène Viard. 

Maurice Pialat's avoidance of melodrama, sentimentality, and biopic clichés makes his Van Gogh an exceptional contribution to the flood of films about the life and death of the artist. Pialat even avoids the one fact that everyone seems to know about Vincent Van Gogh: the mutilation of an ear. There's a passing reference to it, but no prosthetic has been attached to Jacques Dutronc's head to represent it. Pialat is as much concerned with the milieu, the village of Auvers-sur-Oise and the vie bohème of Paris, as he is with the facts of Van Gogh's last days. And by casting Dutronc, better known as a singer, in the role, he avoids the "movie star syndrome" that tainted the characterization when the part was played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2016), and Tim Roth in Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990): We don't have to filter Van Gogh through our familiarity with the actor. Pialat also avoids focusing on the pictures themselves: He wants us to see the man more than the paintings. The result is occasionally frustrating. Pialat is fond of jump cuts that leave us momentarily trying to figure out where and when we are, and though the scene set in a Montmartre brothel that serves as a kind of climax to the film is exhilarating, it feels like an overextended set piece rather than an integral part of Van Gogh's story. But I know of no film that gives a richer sense of the world in which Van Gogh and his contemporaries -- the movie verbally and visually invokes Cézanne, Renoir, Lautrec, and others -- lived and worked. 

The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson in The Batman

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson. Screenplay: Matt Reeves, Peter Craig. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: William Hoy, Tyler Nelson. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

No, we didn't need a Batman reboot, and certainly not one at an epic length. But I appreciated Matt Reeves's visually and tonally dark The Batman for its coherent and sometimes original reworking of too-familiar material. If we must have billionaire vigilantes, let them be like Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne, at least a little tormented by self-doubt. Batman has always seemed to me the weirdest of superheroes, Wayne's role-playing being just this side of psychosis, and Pattinson gives the part some of that quality. I also like the transformation of the Penguin into a crippled mob henchman who hates his nickname, and I'm grateful that it gave Colin Farrell a chance to show what a protean actor he is, here and in the TV series that was spun off from the film. The considerable talents of Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Paul Dano, and Andy Serkis are well-used too, and I liked Michael Giacchino's melancholy score, with its variations on Schubert's "Ave Maria." But really, the best I can say for the movie is that as insults to my intelligence go, it was a well-made one. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

Sal Mineo in Who Killed Teddy Bear

Cast: Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray, Elaine Stritch, Margot Bennett, Daniel J. Travanti, Diane Moore, Frank Campanella. Screenplay: Leon Tokatyan, Arnold Drake. Cinematography: Joseph C. Brun. Art direction: Hank Aldrich. Film editing: Angelo Ross. Music: Charles Calello. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear is about kinks, and it has one of its own: the fetishization of Sal Mineo's body. The film takes every opportunity to explore it, showing the actor in his underwear or swim suit whenever possible. But this is only one of the peculiarities of a very odd film that falls somewhere between exploitation flick and serious exploration of a culture, that of New York City, poised between the repressions of the 1950s and the frenzy of the 1970s. Mineo plays Larry Sherman, who lives with his sister (Margot Bennett), mentally handicapped since a trauma that occurred when she was a child. He works as a busboy in a discotheque -- not one of the mirror-balled hothouses of the next decade, but a well-lighted place that looks like a suburban rec room. Juliet Prowse plays Norah, a DJ at the club, which is managed by the tough-talking Marian (Elaine Stritch). When Norah starts getting creepy phone calls, she contacts the police, and Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray) takes charge of the case. Madden is obsessed with sex crimes, and in his off time he studies his extensive collection of literature on the subject and listens to tapes of the victims he has interviewed, undisturbed that his 10-year-old daughter can also hear them. Norah is at first grateful for Madden's help, but eventually repulsed by his obsessions. Unfortunately, neither director Joseph Cates nor screenwriters Leon Tokatyan and Arnold Drake seem to know what to do with this assortment of characters and what might have been a solid thriller veers off into incoherence.