The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)

No, I never saw it before. When it first came out, I was busy becoming a father and trying to be a proper assistant professor of English. And there was never a time after that when I felt I could impose a viewing of the video on my household. Now, in the privacy of my own little room, I can indulge myself. Not much of an indulgence, as it turns out: Though it's brilliant in its own way, it's also one of the most unpleasant movies I've ever forced myself to watch. I'm surprised, nonetheless, that Tobe Hooper turned out to be pretty much a one-hit wonder -- that is, if you believe the rumors that Poltergeist (1982) was mostly directed by Steven Spielberg. And even the stunning (almost literally) effect of Chain Saw on the course of the horror movie depends in large measure on the cinematography of Daniel Pearl, the editing of Larry Carroll and Sallye Richardson, and especially the art direction of Robert A. Burns, which has been the source of creepy old house settings ever since, from The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) to the first season of True Detective (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2014). Chain Saw is full of tremendously effective and even hilarious moments -- I still find the hen in the bird cage one of the movie's most inspired bizarre devices, and Hooper perfectly stages the scene in which Sally (Marilyn Burns) thinks she has escaped from Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and found refuge at the gas station. As she waits for the proprietor (Jim Siedow) to take her to safety, we concentrate on the open door, fully expecting Leatherface to burst through it at any moment, and we share her relief when the proprietor's truck appears outside, only to realize that the worst is yet to come. The film is surprisingly bloodless by contemporary standards, but we don't really need to see heads and limbs lopped off for it to make its effects. I'm just glad I never have to watch it again.

The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)

I haven't read the novel by Kobo Abe on which the film is based, but I suspect that adherence to the source (Abe also wrote the screenplay) weakens the film, which dwells heavily on ideas about identity and morality that are more efficiently explored in literature than in cinema. The central narrative deals with Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) who, having been disfigured in an industrial accident, sees a psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) who devises an experimental mask that gives Okuyama an entirely new identity. Wearing the mask, Okuyama seduces his own wife (Machiko Kyo), who tells him that she knew who he was all along and assumed that he was trying to revive their marriage, which had been troubled since his accident. She is enraged when she learns that he was in fact testing her fidelity. But there is a secondary narrative about a beautiful young woman (Miki Irie) who bears scars along one side of her face that, it is suggested, are the result of exposure to radiation from the Nagasaki atomic bomb. In the novel, this story comes from a film seen by the characters in the main story, but Teshigahara withholds this explanation for its inclusion in the film without apparent connection to Okuyama's story. I'm not troubled by the disjunction this creates in the film, because Teshigahara and production designer Masao Yamazaki have developed a coherent symbolic style that creates an appropriate air of mystery throughout The Face of Another. The weakness lies, I think, in the dialogue, especially in the too didactic exchanges between Okuyama and the psychiatrist about the limits and potential of a mutating identity. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating, flawed film, more disturbing than most outright "horror" movies.

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

All these years later, Lee's movie is still fresh and true, whereas the best picture Oscar winner for that year, Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989), has grown stale and false. It's not as though what happens in the movie can't happen anymore. Just today, it was reported that the execrable George Zimmerman had tweeted a photograph of the body of his victim, Trayvon Martin. And the bleating and yapping of the Republican presidential candidates can be heard stirring up animosity toward Muslims, gays, immigrants, food stamp recipients, Planned Parenthood, and anyone else they want to portray as the enemy. At least the Academy is going to give an honorary Oscar to Lee, after slighting him for this film and for the magnificent Malcolm X (1992). Lee was nominated for the screenplay for Do the Right Thing, losing to Tom Schulman for the maudlin Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989), and Danny Aiello received a supporting actor nod -- he lost to Denzel Washington for Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989). But where are the nominations for Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, or Giancarlo Esposito? Or for Ernest Dickerson's wonderful cinematography, Wynn Thomas's production design, or Barry Alexander Brown's editing? In fairness, Oscars aren't everything: Do the Right Thing has taken its rightful place in the National Film Registry; Driving Miss Daisy hasn't.

Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000)

Traffic hasn't held up as well as it might have over the past 15 years, and one reason for that is a bit ironic: The movie was based on a British miniseries, and since the film's debut its central theme, the paralysis of politicians and police in trying to stop the drug trade, and its multiple-track storytelling have been handled more brilliantly by an American miniseries, The Wire (2002-08). It's even possible that the film demonstrates the limits faced by movies as opposed to long-form television in handling stories of complexity and sweep. (Imagine, for example, Game of Thrones or Mad Men or Breaking Bad stuffed into the confines of a two-or-three-hour movie.) Traffic still holds your interest, of course, thanks to some brilliant performances, especially the Oscar-winning one by Benicio Del Toro, as well as the ones by Don Cheadle and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (It's also fun to spot Viola Davis making a solid impression in a tiny part as a social worker.) And Soderbergh's direction deservedly won the Oscar, along with Steven Gaghan's screenplay and Stephen Mirrione's film editing. I would, however, fault Gaghan for the sentimental and melodramatic resolution to the story centering on Michael Douglas as Robert Wakefield, the newly appointed czar of the War on Drugs: It stretches credulity to have Wakefield break down in the middle of his acceptance speech and abandon his post, and the scene in which Wakefield and his wife (Amy Irving) beamingly support their drug-addicted daughter (Erika Christensen) at a twelve-step-program meeting is pure schmaltz. The film also pulls its punches a bit where the wasteful War on Drugs crusade is concerned, even to the point of featuring cameos by real-life politicians William Weld (a Reagan-administration appointee who supervised the Drug Enforcement Administration) and Senators Barbara Boxer, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, and a surprisingly young-looking Harry Reid as themselves.

Into the Woods (Rob Marshall, 2014)

James Corden and Emily Blunt in Into the Woods

Cinderella: Anna Kendrick
Baker/Narrator: James Corden
Baker's Wife: Emily Blunt
Witch: Meryl Streep
Wolf: Johnny Depp
Cinderella's Prince: Chris Pine
Jack: Daniel Huttlestone
Stepmother: Christine Baranski
Florinda: Tammy Blanchard
Lucinda: Lucy Punch
Jack's Mother: Tracey Ullman
Rapunzel's Prince: Billy Magnussen
Little Red Riding Hood: Lilla Crawford
Baker's Father: Simon Russell Beale
Cinderella's Mother: Joanna Riding
Rapunzel: Mackenzie Mauzy
Granny: Annette Crosbie
Steward: Richard Glover
Giant: Frances de la Tour

Director: Rob Marshall
Screenplay: James Lapine
Based on the play by James Lapine
Cinematography: Dion Beebe
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Wyatt Smith
Music: Stephen Sondheim

My favorite movie musicals tend to be the ones like Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) and Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) that were created for the movies, and not the ones adapted from stage hits like My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) or West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961). But Rob Marshall did such a good job transforming Chicago (2002) into a cinematic experience that I had hopes for Into the Woods. Unfortunately the James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim book and lyrics are so droll and cerebral that they tend to get swamped by the special effects and big stars in the movie. Instead of being caught up in the story, I kept wondering "how are they going to top that?" The book is structured to be anticlimactic, with the wedding of Cinderella and the prince as the usual happy ending followed by the dark not-so-happily-ever-after sequel. This works in the theatrical version, when you know that there's another act coming, but in the film version it has the effect of making you look at your watch. Still, there's a lot to like about the movie, especially seeing Meryl Streep ham it up as the witch. The other cast members are also effective, but the real star among them for me is Emily Blunt as the baker's wife, demonstrating good comic timing as well as a solid understanding of the character.

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

Cat People is so fraught with subtext about the fear of female sexuality that it's amazing that critics once treated it as a mere "horror movie," while admitting that it was an effective one. Starting with the image drawn by Irena (Simone Simon) of a panther impaled on a sword, which is a version of the even more phallocentric statue in her apartment, it's clear that Tourneur, screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, and producer Val Lewton have more on their minds (or subsconsciousnesses) than just spooking the audience. But then subtext was about the only way filmmakers could get away with sex under the Production Code, even when the point is that Irena and her husband (Kent Smith) are not having sex because she's afraid she'll rip him to shreds if they so much as kiss. I'm not a big fan of the horror films produced by Lewton, one of the few producer-auteurs, partly because they're more fun to talk about than to watch. The casting of such vapid actors as Kent Smith doesn't help.

The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

The Thin Red Line had been much anticipated because it was Malick's first film as director in 20 years, following the much-praised features Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). But it had the misfortune to come out only a few months after Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, whose portrayal of the actuality of combat on D-Day and after was hailed as landmark filmmaking. There are those who think more highly of Malick's film: Spielberg's movie, they argue, is weakened by his desire to celebrate the courage of those who fought in World War II, resulting in the gratuitous frame-story about the aging Ryan's return to the graveyard in Normandy, as well as in some conventional war-movie plotting. Malick's movie is anything but conventional: the well-shot (by John Toll) and -edited (by Leslie Jones, Saar Klein, and Billy Weber) combat scenes are accompanied by a meditative, metaphysics-heavy commentary supposedly voiced by the combatants themselves. To my mind, this mixture of war-movie action and reflective voiceover doesn't work. For one thing, much of what's said in the commentary sounds like the kind of poetry I used to write in college. Malick certainly makes his point about the existential absurdity of war, but he makes it over and over and over, to the expense of developing human characters. Sean Penn, who gets top billing, seems to have been designed to be the movie's central consciousness, but much of that function in the story got lost in the editing: The original cut of the film was five hours long, so it had to be reduced to its current three-hour run time, along with much of the substance of Nick Nolte's blustering colonel, whose motivations are simply alluded to in the voiceover and some of his dialogue. The editing also eliminated the performances of such major film actors as Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Viggo Mortensen, Gary Oldman, and Mickey Rourke, while for some reason retaining the rather pointless cameos by George Clooney and John Travolta. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, but received none. It may, however, have siphoned away some votes from Saving Private Ryan, allowing Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1989) to emerge as the surprise and still very controversial best picture winner.

The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)

I've never read Günter Grass's novel, in part because satiric grotesquerie isn't to my taste. (I'm one of the few people I know who hated A Confederacy of Dunces.)  But I gave the film version a second look (I watched it once while writing my Oscar book) because it came around on TCM and I thought maybe my indifference to it on the first viewing might have changed. It did, after all, win not only the Cannes Palme d'Or but also the foreign film Oscar. It's still true that 11-year-old David Bennent gives an astonishing performance as Oskar, who has consciously chosen to remain a 3-year-old for the rest of his life. I still find some of the scenes in which Oskar makes love to Maria (Katharina Thalbach) are queasy-making, with Bennent and 24-year-old Thalbach going through the required, if discreetly filmed, motions. And I still find the acting in the film overstated and the thematic coherence of the story wobbly. This time I was able to appreciate some of the comic sequences more fully, such as the one in which Oskar sabotages a Nazi rally by playing a waltz rhythm on his drum, confusing the brass band and making the participants dance with one another. But as a fable about German history, which Grass's novel is said to be, the movie lacks focus.

Kill the Messenger (Michael Cuesta, 2014)

This is a movie that will please no one who has first-hand acquaintance with any of the people supposedly portrayed in it, but the real problem with Kill the Messenger is that it has three great stories to tell and fails to tell any of them well. The first story is the one Gary Webb thought he had broken: the CIA connection to the crack cocaine epidemic. Given the complexity and range of that story, which will probably never be fully and accurately told, it's not surprising that the movie fails to do it justice. The second story is that of the frenzied politics of journalism, a story that probably holds little interest to anyone not involved in journalism and is hard to dramatize because there are so few clear-cut heroes and villains to be found in it. (And in any case, it has been superseded by another story: the slow demise of print journalism.) And finally, there's the story of the way reporter Gary Webb's involvement in the other two stories sent his life into a downward spiral. This is the story the movie chooses to concentrate on, but it does so in such a heavy-handed, cliché-raddled way, particularly with its focus on Webb's relationship with his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) and teenage son (Lucas Hedges), that it doesn't make the tragic impact that it could have. I never met Gary Webb, and when the Sturm und Drang of "Dark Alliance" was taking place in the newsroom at the Mercury News, I was busy doing my thing in a far corner on the third floor back of the Merc's Ridder Park Drive plant. I recall that on the day the first story in the series appeared, a colleague said, "Well, Gary Webb just won us another Pulitzer." That was, of course, before the shit flung by the big papers in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles hit the fan. But it also revealed something about the way Pulitzer fever infected the Mercury News, as it does other newspapers. Webb was a victim of it, as was the Merc. There are things to like about the movie, mostly having to do with its performers, starting with Jeremy Renner as Webb. It's also good to see underused actors like Andy Garcia and Ray Liotta, and while nobody who knows the real Jerry Ceppos would ever have chosen Oliver Platt to play him, Platt does a good job of playing a man caught up in a whirlwind of competing pressures and managing to keep his head.

Yoyo (Pierre Étaix, 1965)

Yoyo (Philippe Dionnet) retrieves the cigarette packet his mother has sent from the trailer to his father in the car.

Even though at one point in Yoyo the character Pierre Étaix is playing resists a photographer's attempt to have him pose in Buster Keaton's porkpie hat, it's clear that Étaix worships Keaton. The film is replete with sight gags that Keaton would have loved, such as the sequence in which, while traveling down a road in a trailer pulled by a car, the characters cook up an ingenious way to pass a packet of cigarettes from the rear of the trailer to the driver's seat of the car. The story, devised by Étaix and the great Jean-Claude Carrière, is a slight one: In 1925, a millionaire lives alone in great luxury in his chateau, attended by a battalion of servants who wait on him hand and foot: When he wants to walk his dog, for example, a chauffeur drives him around the courtyard of the estate while the dog trots alongside the car on a leash. But the millionaire is silently pining for a lost love, whose image he keeps in a desk drawer. One day, a circus arrives at the estate, bringing with it the woman (Luce Klein), who is an equestrian/acrobat in the show. It also brings a small boy (Philippe Dionnet) dressed as a clown, who turns out to be the millionaire's son with the woman. When the stock market crashes in 1929, the millionaire goes bust, so he finds the woman and the boy, who is known as Yoyo, and sets out on the road with them as traveling performers. Years pass, and the boy grows up and makes his own fortune in the new medium of television, which enables him to restore the dilapidated chateau to its former glory. (The son is also played by Étaix.) What makes the film a charmer is its continuous barrage of sight gags -- as well as sound gags: The great gilded doors in the chateau squeak loudly every time they're opened, mocking their grandiosity. There are in-jokes, too: The little traveling troupe arrives in one town to find that another troupe has beat them there -- the poster for the rival troupe announces the appearance of Zampanò and Gelsomina, the characters played by Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina in La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954). At a running time of 92 minutes, Yoyo seems to me slightly overextended, but it's a welcome discovery, very much in the vein of Jacques Tati's movies -- on which Étaix worked as an assistant director. Although his film Happy Anniversary won the Oscar for best short  subject in 1963, Étaix is not as well known in the States as Tati. His Wikipedia biography seems to have been written by someone whose first language isn't English.