Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Shea Whigham, Bill Camp, Glenn Fleshler, Leigh Gill, Josh Pais, Rocco Luna, Marc Maron, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Douglas Hodge, Dante Pereira-Olson, Sharon Washington, Brian Tyree Henry. Screenplay: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver. Cinematography: Lawrence Sher. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Jeff Groth. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Todd Phillips's Joker is an unpleasant and occasionally clumsily made movie held together by Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar-winning characterization of the psychotic Arthur Fleck, who becomes at least one of the avatars of the Batman comics character called the Joker. But whatever its defects, Joker also seems to be very much of the moment -- the moment of post-Covid-19 civil unrest and societal divisions, abetted by corrupt and ineffective leadership. It's an ugly film about ugly attitudes, and although it strives to build a psychological explanation for Arthur Fleck's transformation into murderous, anarchic loner, the explanation is pat and clichéd. Phoenix is a great film actor, but to my mind he's much better in movies that call for humanity rather than monstrosity, like Spike Jonze's Her (2013) or James Gray's underrated We Own the Night (2007). Arthur Fleck is an Oscar-milking role, with grotesque body transformation and a plethora of overstated moments. Phillips's film calls for none of the dark humor that Heath Ledger gave his Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) or the entertaining flamboyance of Jack Nicholson's version of the character in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). Philips has modeled Arthur Fleck in part on two characters from Martin Scorsese's movies, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976) and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1982), and cheekily cast the man who played both, Robert De Niro, in his film. De Niro gives Phoenix someone his equal to play against, but echoing better movies is never a good idea. Zazie Beetz, a fine actress, is wasted in her role as the neighbor on whom Arthur develops an unsavory attraction, and Phillips muddles the revelation that their scenes together are mostly in Arthur's imagination. The denouement of the film is predictably cataclysmic, but Phillips flubs his ending scene of Arthur confined to the Arkham mental hospital by suggesting rather confusingly that he escapes -- presumably to set up a sequel -- and following it with Frank Sinatra's version of Steven Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," a wistful song meant to be ironic in this context but really only thuddingly obvious, like much of the rest of the film.

Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2007)

Adèle Haenel and Pauline Acquart in Water Lilies

Cast: Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachère, Adèle Haenel, Warren Jacquin, Christel Baras, Marie Gili-Pierre, Alice de Lencquesaing, Claire Pierrat, Barbara Renard, Esther Sironneau, Jérémie Steib, Yvonne Villemaire, Christophe Vandevelde. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Crystel Fournier. Production design: Gwendel Bescond. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier.

I admit to a certain queasiness about watching Water Lilies, with its almost too intimate exploration of the lives of teenage girls, including some nudity. Céline Sciamma of course wants us to feel that way, to make us aware of these adolescent bodies as well as the souls that inhabit them. One girl, Marie (Pauline Acquart), is skinny and awkward; another, Anne (Louise Blachère), is on the verge of being overweight; and the third, Florine (Adèle Haenel), is flat-out beautiful. All of them spend much of their time at the swimming pool, where Florine is the star of a group of synchronized swimmers, and Anne coaches a group of beginners. Marie is the hanger-on who watches the other girls with a too-eager eye. At the film's start, she and Anne are close, but as Marie becomes involved with Florine, the two drift apart. There is a pivotal boy in the ensemble, the handsome François (Warren Jacquin), whom Anne desires -- at one point she she sees him looking at her naked in the locker room; she doesn't cover up in embarrassment but is rather pleased, and begins to try to win him. But François is after Florine, who strikes a deal with Marie: She'll let Marie watch the group practicing if she'll help her sneak out of the house at night to meet with François. Eventually, a different relationship develops between Marie and Florine. Sciamma choreographs this pas de quatre well, but there's something a little too formulaic and voyeuristic about the film, which doesn't resolve itself into significance. Still, its portrait of the sexual confusion of adolescence is often achingly real.

Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019)

Antonio Banderas in Pain and Glory

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, César Vicente, Asier Flores, Penélope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, Susi Sánchez, Raúl Arévalo, Pedro Casablanc. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: Teresa Font. Music: Alberto Iglesias.

Film puts us in an eternal now, letting us see people and places out of time. One moment we may be watching the handsome young Antonio Banderas in Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986) and the next the grizzled Banderas, on the cusp of 60, in Almodóvar's Pain and Glory. Which is one reason filmmakers are so obsessed with traveling through time, whether in the sci-fi mode or in the autobiographical one. Banderas has so often been identified with Almodóvar that it would be unthinkable for the director to make a movie about an aging director, struggling with the weight of time and guilt that has taken a toll on his body and his career, without casting Banderas in the role. Both director and star work through the pain to achieve a measure of glory in this film, one of the best in the oeuvre of either artist. The great achievement of Almodóvar in this film is to take a well-worn theme, the intersection of art and life, and make it fresh and revelatory. It's unmistakably an Almodóvar film, containing the vivid use of color we identify with his work -- and that of his production designer, Antxón Gómez -- as well as his frankness about his own sins and misdemeanors. But it's also a Banderas film, with that actor's sly undercutting of his personal beauty and charisma, seldom before so brilliantly employed, except in Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011). It earned him an overdue Oscar nomination. The film ends with a witty surprise, which is not only a sly trick but also underscores its thematic content.

Locke (Steven Knight, 2013)

Tom Hardy in Locke

Cast: Tom Hardy, voices of Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Ben Daniels, Tom Holland, Bill Milner, Danny Webb, Alice Lowe, Silas Carson, Lee Ross, Kirsty Dillon. Screenplay: Steven Knight. Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos. Film editing: Justine Wright. Music: Dickon Hinchliffe.

A man driving on the highway alone at night, talking to people on the car phone. It's the stuff of which radio dramas like the 1943 Sorry, Wrong Number were made -- or might have been, if there had been car phones in the 1940s, the peak era of radio drama. Sorry, Wrong Number was "opened up" to show other characters than the woman on the phone when it was filmed by Anatole Litvak in 1948, but Steven Knight's Locke remains alone in the car with its title character, played by Tom Hardy in a performance that leaves no doubt that he's one of our best actors. But the actors whose voices are heard in the film, including Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, and Tom Holland, are just as compelling in their performances. The chief objection made by critics is that Locke is basically a "gimmick" film, that there's no reason why Knight shouldn't have shown the people on the other end of the line -- or whatever passes for "line" in the era of mobile phones. It's a tour de force that keeps the camera trained on Locke for the film's entire 85 minutes, with only occasional cuts to the surrounding traffic, and it's an added departure from the expected to cast an actor known mainly for his work in action films in a role that puts him in one seat for the whole movie. But I think Knight and Hardy make it work splendidly, focusing our attention on the character of Ivan Locke, and the decision he has made to abandon both the important construction project he supervises and the family gathering to watch a big soccer match on TV in order to drive to where a woman with whom he had a one-night stand is giving birth to his child. Knight hasn't really solved all the problems of motivation that he should have: The decision to have Locke deliver a series of monologues directed at his dead father, who abandoned him and his mother, feels contrived. But there's real drama in the conversations with Donal (Scott), the inexperienced and rather feckless man he has left in charge of the crucial concrete pour, with the hysterical Bethan (Colman), who is giving birth to their child, and with his wife, Katrina (Wilson), to whom he is just now confessing that he slept with Bethan. Best of all, Knight has the good sense not to provide closure to Locke's story: When we leave him, he has a marriage in ruins and a baby to help support, and he's been fired from his job. But because we have spent so much time face to face with Locke, and because Hardy has so deftly created the character, it's easy to sense that he's capable of surmounting these problems. 

Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014)

Karidja Touré in Girlhood

Cast: Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh, Mariétou Touré, Idrissa Diabaté, Simina Soumaré, Dielika Coulibaly, Cyril Mendy, Djibril Gueye, Binta Diop, Chance N'Guessan. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Crystel Fournier. Production design: Thomas Grézaud. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier.

Girlhood is an altogether absorbing look at young lives in the Paris banlieue, which might also be a description of Mathieu Kassovitz's celebrated 1995 film La Haine. But the difference between the two is striking and important: La Haine was about young men, a Jew, a Black, and an Arab, and worked out its story a little self-consciously as a commentary on the relations among three major ethnic groups. Its writer-director and its three principals were male, with all the implications of privilege that suggests. But Girlhood was written and directed by a woman, and its protagonist is female, a Black teenager named Marieme (Karidja Touré), who is determined to go her own way in life. Told that she doesn't have the grades to go to high school but should choose vocational education instead, Marieme rebels, determined to find her way against the odds. She falls in with a group of girls -- the French title was Bande de Filles, which might be translated Gang of Girls -- and adopts their ways, which include a little shoplifting, a little bullying of smaller kids for money, and excursions into Paris for the bright lights of the big city. They also include fights with other gangs, and when the leader of Marieme's gang, Lady (Assa Sylla), loses a fight and is embarrassed, Marieme, who has become known as "Vic," short for "Victory," takes on the winner of that fight and triumphs, stripping off the other girl's top and using a knife to cut away her bra as a trophy. Still, she must face the outside world. Her mother, Asma (Binta Diop), works as a maid in a large hotel and arranges for Marieme to take a job there, but she turns it down. Her life at home becomes intolerable when she sleeps with her boyfriend, Ismaël, and is beaten for being a slut by her older brother, Djibril (Cyril Mendy). So she goes to work as a runner for Abou (Djibril Gueye), a drug dealer, which gives her an income, a place to live, and some glimpse of the high life. But the end of the film finds her still solitary, still facing obstacles. Girlhood is a smart, sad movie with a deeply engaging performance by Touré, and a strong supporting cast.

Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, 1929)

Anna May Wong in Piccadilly

Cast: Gilda Gray, Anna May Wong, Jameson Thomas, Cyril Ritchard, King Hou Chang, Hannah Jones, Gordon Begg, Harry Terry, Charles Laughton. Screenplay: Arnold Bennett. Cinematography: Werner Brandes. Art direction: Alfred Junge. Film editing: J.W. McConaughty.

I share the opinion of the contemporary reviewer of Piccadilly that Arnold Bennett's screenplay is more interesting than what its director, E.A. Dupont, made of it. Bennett was a major novelist who, like such contemporaries as John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells, fell from favor with the ascendance of modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It was Woolf's riposte to Bennett, who had written an unfavorable review of her 1922 novel Jacob's Room, that severely damaged his standing among intellectuals. Her essay, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" contained the much-quoted observation that "on or about December 1910 human character changed," Woolf's way of saying that an exhibition of Post-Impressionist art indicated a new way of approaching existence through the arts. Bennett's naturalistic fiction began to fall in critical esteem. It may simply be that Bennett was so prolific a writer, with more than 30 novels, scores of stories, a substantial number of plays, and hundreds of essays, that he simply spread himself too thin. But his script for Piccadilly shows his interest in marginalized characters, including the lowlife of Limehouse and the backstage competitiveness of the London theater. And most of all, it gave Anna May Wong one of her most prominent and interesting roles, that of a scullery maid named Shosho who becomes a night-club sensation, but falls victim to jealousy tinged with racism. Unfortunately, Dupont's direction is often a little sluggish, and his staging of Shosho's big dance scene doesn't make it clear why her finger-waving hoochie-koochie -- she's outfitted in a costume more Balinese than Chinese -- causes such a sensation. Still, the film benefits from atmospheric sets by Alfred Junge and cinematography by Werner Brandes. It's also full of watchable actors, including Gilda Gray, who rose to fame for her shimmy, as the dancer Shosho replaces in the interest of the audiences and of the club owner. We first see Gray's Mabel when she's teamed with Victor, played by Cyril Ritchard, in a dance duet modeled on Fred and Adele Astaire. Dupont seems more interested in shots of the audience than in the dancers, partly because the plot is set in motion by an unruly diner complaining about a dirty dish. The diner is played by Charles Laughton in his feature film debut. His complaint leads the club owner, Valentine Wilmot, played by Jameson Thomas, to discover that the dishwashers are goofing off and watching one of them, Shosho, dancing. Though he fires Shosho on the spot, he later takes her to his office where he watches her dance, which gives him the idea to give her a big number in the club. When she succeeds, and Mabel discovers that Valentine has fallen in love with Shosho, the plot, as they say, thickens. Although made as a silent film, Piccadilly was enough of a success that the producers decided to add some scenes with sound and a music score. TCM, however, shows a silent version with a score added in 2004 after the film was restored.

Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt, 2018)

Carloto Cotta in Diamantino

Cast: Carloto Cotta, Cleo Tavares, Anabela Moreira, Margarida Moreira, Carla Maciel, Chico Chapas, Hugo Santos Silva, Joana Barrios, Felipe Vargas, Maria Leite. Screenplay: Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt. Cinematography: Charles Ackley Anderson. Art direction: Cypress Cook, Bruno Duarte. Film editing: Gabriel Abrantes, Raphaëlle Martin-Holger, Daniel Schmidt. Music: Adriana Holtz, Ulysse Klotz.

Diamantino is very much of a moment, that pre-Covid-19 moment before the pandemic shifted the focus off of right wing nationalism, celebrity culture, big-time sports, media manipulation, genetic experimentation, the refugee crisis, globalization, sexual identity, and all of the other obsessions that have receded into the background. The film's co-writer-directors, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, pile all of these and more into Diamantino, but their film is idiosyncratic enough that Diamantino never bogs down into cause-championing or scattershot satire. After all, any film that centers on a soccer hunk who imagines that he's playing the game with the aid of a stampede of giant puppies is not going to take a wholly predictable course. When the film begins, Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta) is the world's most acclaimed soccer player, a blissful naïf who is managed by his father (Chico Chapas). But when he misses a penalty kick and loses the World Cup for Portugal, things fall apart. His father dies of a stroke, leaving Diamantino grieving and at the mercy of his wicked twin sisters (Anabela and Margarida Moreira), who send him to therapy with the sinister Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel), who is secretly trying to clone him and create a super-team of Diamantinos. He's also under investigation for money laundering -- where there's wealth there must be wrongdoing, the theory goes -- by two agents named Aisha (Cleo Tavares) and Lucia (Maria Leite), who also happen to be lovers. During a talk show interview, Diamantino recalls how once when out on the Mediterranean in his yacht, he and his father came across a boatload of refugees; tearing up at the memory, he declares his intention to adopt a refugee. This spurs the investigators to have Lucia pose as a nun from a refugee resettlement program and offer up a boy named Rahim for adoption by Diamantino. Rahim is actually Aisha in disguise, which gets her into his house to crack his computer and spy on him. Meanwhile, the wicked sisters have hooked up with a group that wants Portugal to withdraw from the European Union, with the plan to get Diamantino as the celebrity figurehead for the group. He makes a TV commercial for this "Make Portugal Great Again" group that is actually modeled on ads produced by the supporters of Brexit. The rest of the film, of course, is about the way this elaborate setup unravels. Abrantes and Schmidt admit to having been inspired by classic screwball comedy, and the girl-disguised-as-a-boy plot is older than Shakespeare, but Diamantino succeeds on its own merits, which include an anything-goes spirit on the part of the filmmakers. There's so much going on that the film sometimes wobbles and risks falling apart, but it's held together by the altogether charming performance of Cotta as the holy fool Diamantino.

Strike Up the Band (Busby Berkeley, 1940)

Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Strike Up the Band

Cast: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Paul Whiteman, June Preisser, William Tracy, Larry Nunn, Ann Shoemaker, Margaret Early, Francis Pierlot, Virginia Brissac, George Lessey, Enid Bennett, Howard Hickman, Sarah Edwards, Milton Kibbee, Helen Jerome Eddy. Screenplay: John Monks Jr., Fred F. Finkelhoffe. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, John S. Detlie. Film editing: Ben Lewis. Music: Leo Arnau, George Stoll.

At one point in Strike Up the Band, the kids put on a show that's a burlesque of a "Gay Nineties" melodrama. Which might remind us that 1890 and 1940 were not so remote from each other as 2020 is from 1940. We might even look at a film like High School Musical (Kenny Ortega, 2006) or a TV series like Glee (2009-2015) as a burlesque of Strike Up the Band, except they took the subject matter more seriously than the kids in the 1940 movie did the material of old-time melodrama. Strike Up the Band is a still-honored subgenre, the "hey, kids, let's put on a show" musical. It has all the caricaturable excesses of its kind: big musical numbers that would never fit on an actual stage; the struggle to raise money for the show; the setback when one kid gets sick; the protagonist struggling with whether to become a musician or a physician; the teen romance that isn't quite gelling; the kindly, understanding mother; and even a rousing finale that actually waves the flag. Unfortunately, it's also something of a dud, especially considering the talent involved: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and direction by Busby Berkeley. But this is the Berkeley of the MGM years, not the unfettered "choreographer of space" of the Warner Bros. musicals of the early 1930s -- or even the Berkeley who snuck over to 20th Century Fox in 1943 and gave Carmen Miranda a tutti-frutti hat in one of the craziest moments in The Gang's All Here. At MGM he was reined in too much, though you can sense him yearning to break free in numbers like the title sequence and "Do the La Conga." Garland sings some mostly unmemorable songs well -- though MGM bought the rights to the 1927 stage musical by George and Ira Gershwin, it retained only the title song; the rest are by Roger Edens and the film's producer, Arthur Freed, along with some period oldies for the melodrama sequence. And Rooney is as manic as he ever got on film: dancing, mugging, and frenetically playing the drums. Still, at 120 minutes, Strike Up the Band sags a little too often, especially in a stop-motion puppetry sequence in which Rooney imagines conducting an orchestra made up of fruit -- an idea that Vincente Minnelli came up with and producer Freed enthusiastically adapted. Better songs and a brighter supporting cast might have helped, and the 40-year-old hairlines on some of the supposed high school students are too much in evidence.

The Baron of Arizona (Samuel Fuller, 1950)

Vincent Price and Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona

Cast: Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Robin Short, Tina Pine, Karen Kester, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale, Edward Keane, Barbara Woddell. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, Homer Croy. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Arthur Hilton. Music: Paul Dunlap.

"An occasionally true story" goes the tag line to Tony McNamara's delicious The Great, a miniseries about Catherine the Great. It's certainly a phrase that applies to almost every biopic ever made, but especially to Samuel Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, the second of his feature films as director, sandwiched between two better-known movies, I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Steel Helmet (1951). The film purports to tell the story of James Addison Reavis, a fraudster par excellence who tried in 1880 to lay claim to virtually the entire United States territory of Arizona. The real story of Reavis's scheme is far more complex and far less romantic than the one Fuller carved out of it. Fuller's version is full of shady doings in a monastery, a hair-breadth escape abetted by Spanish gypsies, high-rolling arrogance, near death by lynch mob, and sentimental true love, everything that could allow Vincent Price to play both dashing and disreputable. You can probably sense Fuller feeling his way as a director in the movie -- it's not quite as solidly grounded as either of the ones that flank it in his filmography -- and its budgetary shortcomings are evident. But few directors could do as much with so little.

Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker in Much Ado About Nothing

Cast: Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Jillian Morgese, Sean Maher, Spencer Treat Clark, Riki Lindholme, Ashley Johnson, Emma Bates, Tom Lenk, Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney. Screenplay: Joss Whedon, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Jay Hunter. Production design: Cindy Chao, Michele Yu. Film editing: Daniel S. Kaminsky, Joss Whedon. Music: Joss Whedon.

Fleet, light, and lucid, Joss Whedon's film of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is made without undue reverence or pretense, which is pretty much the way Shakespeare ought to be filmed -- or at least his romantic comedies, which have so much in common with the classic Hollywood screwball comedies. Amy Acker, who should be a bigger star, is a pitch-perfect Beatrice, and Alexis Denisof is well-matched as Benedick. The obvious comparison here is with Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version of the play, a more elaborate and star-studded affair, but Whedon's film, shot mostly in and around his house in Santa Monica, more than holds its own in comparison. It actually comes off a little better in casting Sean Maher as the villainous Don John, where Branagh's choice of Keanu Reeves in the role shows off some of that actor's limitations. The weakest casting in Whedon's version is Nathan Fillion as Dogberry, which Branagh bettered with Michael Keaton. Fillion is too bulky and handsome an actor to play the clown, and he struggles to make Dogberry quite as fatuous as he should be, whereas Keaton relished every one of the character's malapropisms. But as Dogberry himself put it, "Comparisons are odorous." Fran Kranz makes more of the somewhat flimsy role of Claudio than is usual, and it's fun to see Clark Gregg step out of the Marvel universe into the Shakespearean one.