Intervista (Federico Fellini, 1987)

Cast: Federico Fellini, Sergio Rubini, Antonella Ponziani, Maurizio Mein, Paola Liguori, Lara Wendel, Antonio Cantafora, Nadia Ottaviani, Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Mario Miyakawa. Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Gianfranco Angelucci. Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli. Production design: Danilo Donati. Film editing: Nino Baragli. Music: Nicola Pionvani. 

Federico Fellini is a colorful hodgepodge of Fellinian themes, a kind of nesting doll movie in which several stories reside within one another. There's the interview itself, by a Japanese television crew, which frames a story about Fellini and his career, which frames stories about Fellini's early days at Cinecittà, the process of casting for his movies, his aborted plans to film Franz Kafka's Amerika, and the highlights of his career. The last culminates in the reunion of Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg along with clips from the Trevi Fountain scene in La Dolce Vita (1960). Like many of Fellini's films, it's a memory piece, part humorous, part regretful. It succeeds as a movie about movies, but never emerges from its self-reflectiveness into anything more substantial, the way his great movie about movies, 8 1/2 (1963) does. 

Boat People (Ann Hui, 1982)

Season Ma and Guo Jun-yi in Boat People

Cast: George Lam, Season Ma, Andy Lau, Cora Miao, Mengshi Qi, Meiying Jia, Shujing Lin, Guo Jun-yi, Wu Shu-Jun. Screenplay: Chiu Kang-Chien. Cinematography: Wong Chung-Gei, David Chung, Huang Zong Ji. Art direction: Tony Au. Film editing: Kin Kin. Music: Law Wing-Fai, Hako Yamasaki. 

Controversy still lingers around Ann Hui's Boat People, as it does around any work that attempts to tell the story of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The initial controversy arose because Hui made it in the opening phases of the transfer of the territory of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China, with the financial backing of that country and in a location, the island of Hainan, that belonged to China. It was the first Hong Kong film made in the People's Republic, and those holding out for Hong Kong's independence were upset by the collaboration. Today, the controversy centers on how accurate the portrayal of Vietnam and its government in the years immediately after the war really is. Boat People depicts a land of fear and repression, and its heroes are those who resist and try to escape from it. Critics of the film call it distorted and melodramatic. It centers on a Japanese photographer, Shiomi Akutagawa (George Lam), who witnessed the fall of South Vietnam and has returned three years later to document how the country has changed. He has the occasionally grudging and suspicious support of the new government, which of course wants a favorable portrait of the country. But as he travels about, he begins to suspect that he's not being allowed to see the whole truth. Befriending a small family, and particularly a 14-year-old girl, Cam Nuong (Season Ma), and her younger brothers Nhac (Wu Shu-Jun) and Lam (Guo Jun-yi), he starts to find the darker side of the new Vietnam. He also meets Nguyen (Mengshi Qi), who is unhappy with the course the country has taken, and his mistress (Cora Miao), who trades in the black market and helps people escape Vietnam. Boat People is an often compelling and brutal film that succeeds as drama despite (or perhaps because of) its political biases.  
 

A Tale of Autumn (Éric Rohmer, 1998)

Marie Rivière and Béatrice Romand in A Tale of Autumn

Cast: Marie Rivière, Béatrice Romand, Alain Libolt, Didier Sandre, Alexia Portal, Stéphane Darmon, Aurélia Alcaïs, Matthieu Davette, Yves Alcaïs. Screenplay: Éric Rohmer. Cinematography: Diane Baratier. Film editing: Mary Stephen. Music: Claude Marti, Gérard Pansanel, Pierre Peyras, Antonello Salis. 

A matchmaking mixup forms the plot of Éric Rohmer's A Tale of Autumn (Conte d'automne, aka Autumn Tale), the final film in Rohmer's quartet, Tales of the Four Seasons. It's a setup that will be familiar to watchers of rom-coms, or even TV sitcoms: Two people independently try to make a romantic match for a friend, leading to confusion when the unwitting friend meets the two different would-be mates chosen for them. Magali (Béatrice Romand), a widow in her 40s with two grown children, runs a small vineyard in the Rhône Valley. She's friends with Rosine (Alexia Portal), a young woman who is dating Magali's son, Léo (Stéphane Darmon). Rosine admires Magali, and when the older woman confesses that she gets lonely, decides that she has the perfect match for her: Étienne (Didier Sandre), who was her professor at the university and with whom she has been carrying on a mutual flirtation. Meanwhile, another of Magali's friends, Isabelle (Marie Rivière), also gets it in her head that Magali needs a man and places an ad in the personals section of the newspaper. When Gérald (Alain Libolt), a widower, responds to the ad, Isabelle at first pretends to be Magali, whom she has described in the ad, and then confesses the truth. Rosine and Isabelle separately arrange for Magali to meet their choices at a reception celebrating the wedding of Isabelle's daughter. Predictably, nothing goes quite as either of the matchmakers wishes. Rohmer relies on intelligent dialogue, the beauty of the French wine country, and the skill of his performers to cover up the artificiality of his plot, and he mostly succeeds. 

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)

Ann Savage in My Winnipeg

Cast: Ann Savage, Louis Negin, Amy Stewart, Darcy Fehr, Brendan Cade, Wesley Cade, Lou Profeta, Fred Dunsmore, Kate Yacula, Jacelyn Lobay, Eric Nipp, Jennifer Palichuk, Guy Maddin (voice). Screenplay: Guy Maddin, George Toles. Cinematography: Jody Shapiro. Production design: Réjean Labrie. Film editing: John Gurdebeke.

A man on a train dozes and dreams, and we see his dreams because they are in a way ours. He is dreaming about the city he is trying to leave, which is at once the real city of Winnipeg, a remembered hometown, and a fantastic extrapolation from the actual place. Guy Maddin's "docu-fantasia" My Winnipeg gets its power to seize the imagination from our own experiences growing up in a place with a family. Maddin sets out to recreate the merging of memory and feeling that makes up our dreams about people and places we have known, and he succeeds remarkably. It's a feat that can only be accomplished in the movies, the medium that is most often likened to dreams. I leave the exegesis and interpretation to others because it's a personal work that inspires personal reflection.    

Evil Cat (Dennis Yu, 1987)

Hsu Shu-Yan in Evil Cat

Cast: Lau Kar-Leung, Lai-Ying Tang, Mark Cheng Ho-Nam, Wong Jing, Hsu Shu-Yan, Stuart Ong, Teresa Ha Ping. Screenplay: Wong Jing. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Art direction: Sita Yeung. Film editing: Ming Lam Wong. Music: Law Wing-Fai. 

A phantom kitty litters Hong Kong with mutilated corpses in Dennis Yu's anarchic horror movie Evil Cat. When a construction crew unearths the site where the feline spirit is entombed, Master Cheung (Lau Kar-Leung) escapes from the nursing home where he is spending his last days dying of cancer in order to fulfill the ancient duty imposed on him: to put an end to the cat's ninth life. Along the way, he enlists the aid of Long (Mark Cheng Ho-Nam), chauffeur to the rich Mr. Fan (Stuart Ong), who becomes one of the first victims of the cat. His daughter, Siu-Chuen (Lai-Ying Tang), and the bumbling police inspector Mr. Woo (Wong Jing), also get involved in the hunt. It's a movie careless of genre, tone, and sometimes taste that doesn't end well for anyone, except maybe the cat. But it's catnip to aficionados of Hong Kong action movies, who will go on and on about its sources and influences, while the rest of us are wondering what the hell we just watched. 

Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2026)

Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz (voice), Lionel Boyce, Milana Vayntrub, Ken Leung, Priya Kansara (voice). Screenplay: Drew Goddard, based on a novel by Andy Weir. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Charles Wood. Film editing: Joel Negron. Music: Daniel Pemberton. 

Like most sci-fi movies, Project Hail Mary is more fiction than science, but it does put the science at its center. It has that in common with the other movie scripted by Drew Goddard from a novel by Andy Weir, The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015).  Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's film is somewhat more fantastical than Scott's, involving as it does the extinction of the human race by a plague of extraterrestrial entities known as astrophages -- star-eaters. This time the hero is not a plucky astronaut trying to survive on Mars by sciencing the shit out of it, but a misfit scientist who gets shanghaied into a one-way trip to Tau Ceti. There he has a close encounter with a benign ET. Yes, Project Hail Mary is derivative, but at this stage what sci-fi movie isn't? It's all done with a great deal of wit and charm, largely on Ryan Gosling's part but also the puppetry and voice work of James Ortiz as the amiable Rocky. At an hour and half, it's a shade too long, but it deserved to be the hit it was. 

Pressure (Horace Ové, 1976)

Herbert Norville in Pressure

Cast: Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau, Lucita Lijertawood, Sheila Scott Wilkinson, Ed Devereaux, T-Bone Wilson, Ram John Holder, Norman Beaton, John F. Landry, Archie Pool. Screenplay: Horace Ové, Samuel Selvon. Cinematography: Michael J. Davis. Film editing: Alan Cummer-Price. 

"Message movies" get a bad rap. The message too often undermines characterization, turning people into ideas. Horace Ové's Pressure is guilty in that regard. His young protagonist, Tony (Herbert Norville), is a vehicle for the film's ideas about racism, immigration, capitalism, and imperialism. Tony is the England-born son of Trinidadian immigrants, who would like nothing more than for him to assimilate into British culture. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), who came to Britain with his parents, however, has turned his experience of racism into activism in the Black Power movement. Tony has finished school but struggles to find work, and his idleness begins to get him in trouble. Eventually he joins Colin in the movement, but the film ends on a bleak moment in that struggle, too. It's easy to dismiss Pressure as preaching to the choir and to observe that the struggle for economic justice and ethnic identity continues unabated 50 years after the film was made. But Pressure is skillfully made, effectively dramatizing its issues with scenes that verge on comedy, like Tony's job interview with a politely indifferent potential employer, and even touches of the fantastic, like the dream Tony has under the influence of a reefer. Ové has successfully channeled anger into art. 

Vera (Sergio Toledo, 1986)

Ana Beatriz Nogueira in Vera

Cast: Ana Beatriz Nogueira, Raul Cortez, Aida Leiner, Carlos Kroeber. Screenplay: Sergio Toledo, based on a book by Anderson Bigode Herzer. Cinematography: Rodolfo Sánchez. Art direction: Naum Alves de Souza, Simone Raskin. Film editing: Tércio G. Mota. Music: Arrigo Bernabé. 

The title, Vera, is the deadname of Bauer (Ana Beatriz Nogueira), a young transgender man who does what he can to reject it, an even harder task in 1980s Brazil than it is today. Growing up in an orphanage, he writes poems that get the attention of a prominent educator (Raul Cortez), whom he calls "Professor." (The character is based on the economist Eduardo Suplicy.) When Bauer ages out of the institution, "Professor" finds work for him in a research center, where he meets Clara (Aida Leiner) and falls in love with her. The film, based on the life of Anderson Bigode Herzer, flashes back to his struggles in the institution as he faces a different set of obstacles in the outside world.  Sergio Toledo does nothing to mitigate the sadness and pain in the story he tells, although he stops short of the suicide that ended Herzer's life, leaving some hope for Bauer. Nogueira's beautifully sensitive performance won a best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987. The only real flaw in the film is in framing Bauer's story with gratuitous shots of the launch of a space shuttle (1986 was the year of the Challenger disaster) and atomic explosions, which seem to be an attempt to heighten the story's significance but only distract from it. 

Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff, 2006)

Max Minghella in Art School Confidential

Cast: Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Matt Keeslar, Ethan Suplee, Joel David Moore, Nick Swardson, Anjelica Huston, Adam Scott, Jack Ong, Scoot McNairy, Jeremy Guskin, Steve Buscemi. Screenplay: Daniel Clowes. Cinematography: Jamie Anderson. Production design: Howard Cummings. Film editing: Robert Hoffman. Music: David Kitay. 

Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential has its origins in a story that appeared in a comic book, and it shows. Daniel Clowes's screenplay, like much graphic fiction, often feels like a collection of set pieces, composed of individual scenes and moments, instead of a coherent narrative. Jerome (Max Minghella), whose artistic talent helped him survive being bullied in high school, goes to a prestigious art school in New York City, thinking that art is his calling. The Strathmore School of Art is staffed by artists who need the money because they have never quite made it on art alone, and it's attended by a variety of kids like Jerome, who have talent but not vision and maturity. It soon becomes clear that the school isn't likely to help them develop that. In addition to scenes lampooning the pretentiousness of the art world, Clowes and Zwigoff also supply a romance, when Jerome falls for Audrey (Sophia Myles), a pretty model who poses nude for his class, and a subplot about a serial killer. Eventually, Jerome becomes a successful artist, but in a heavily ironic way. Art School Confidential has some bite, but it's messily put together, with a few too many irrelevant bits. One of Jerome's roommates, for example, is a closeted gay man whose coming out is tossed into the movie for cheap laughs. An unbilled Steve Buscemi has a pointless role as a cafe owner, and Anjelica Huston and Adam Scott are wasted in bit parts. 

Father Amin (Youssef Chahine, 1950)

Mary Mounib, Esam Abdu, Hussein Riad, and Faten Hamama in Father Amin

Cast: Hussein Riad, Faten Hamama, Kamal El-Shinnawi, Mary Mounib, Farid Shawqi, Hind Rostom, Mohammed Tawfik, Hasan Kamel, Esam Abdu. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Ali El Zorkani, Hussein Helmi El-Mohandes. Cinematography: Massimo Dellamano. Art direction: Abdel Monem Shoukry. Film editing: Kamal Abul Ela. 

Youssef Chahine's first feature film, Father Amin (aka Baba Amin and Daddy Amin), is an amusing mashup of family drama, screwball comedy, musical, romance, and fantasy. Amin (Hussein Riad) dies suddenly but comes back in ghostly form to watch the consequences of an imprudent investment he made just before his death. His wife (Mary Mounib) is forced to sell the furniture in an attempt to pay the installment due on the house she shares with their daughter, Huda (Faten Hamama), and young son, Nabil (Esam Abdu). Huda is being courted by a shy, studious young man, Ali (Kamal El-Shinnawi), who is just about to leave for Alexandria when Amin dies. In his absence, she tries to earn money as a singer in a nightclub, though she's too embarrassed to tell Ali and the family of her job, claiming that she's a nurse. Hovering through this hubbub, Amin learns a few lessons that he will try to put into practice when, you guessed it, he turns out not really to be dead. Chahine deftly blends Hollywood movie tropes with Egyptian style.