Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Until the End of the World 

Cast: Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Rüdiger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, Max Von Sydow, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Adelle Lutz, Ernie Dingo, Ernest Beck, Christine Oesterlein, Kuniko Miyaki, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, David Gulpilil, Justine Saunders, Paul Livingston. Screenplay: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Sally Campbell, Thierry Flamand. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Graeme Revell.

Wim Wenders's almost five-hour-long cut of Until the End of the World may be the most self-indulgent film I've ever seen, and I've seen Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). The original cut of Wenders's movie was 20 hours long, but it was reduced to just under three hours for its first European release and to a bit over two and a half hours for American audiences in 1991. It failed with the critics and the box office. Wenders finally re-edited it to the 287-minute version released in 2015 and now being shown on the Criterion Channel. But it really seems to me to be two movies stitched together by Sam Neill's voiceover narration. The first half is what Wenders himself has called the "ultimate road movie," a characteristic genre for the director of Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), starting in Venice and then bouncing to Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, and finally Australia, where it settles for the second half. This half is a sci-fi film about experiments with perception and dreams that take place in the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. The first half is often funny; the second half isn't. I'm not prepared to call Until the End of the World a masterpiece, unless it's a masterpiece for cineastes, who can indulge themselves to the fullest in tracing the allusions and influences that shape the movie. The characters played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, for example, spend time in an idyllic setting in Japan where they're tended by characters played by Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyaki, actors familiar from the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Hurt's character's parents are played by the iconic Jeanne Moreau and Max Von Sydow. Wenders even evokes his own past by casting Rüdiger Vogler, the star of Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. It's a witty film in many regards, but as I said, self-indulgent. And 287 minutes is a kind of forced binge-watch, which makes me think that Until the End of the World would have made a terrific miniseries for Netflix or Hulu if they'd been around in 1991.

The Boy With Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948)

Pat O'Brien and Dean Stockwell in The Boy With Green Hair 

Cast: Dean Stockwell, Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan, Barbara Rush, Richard Lyon, Walter Catlett, Samuel S. Hinds, Regis Toomey, Charles Meredith, David Clarke, Billy Sheffield, Johnny Calkins, Teddy Infuhr, Dwayne Hickman, Eilene Janssen, Curtis Loys Jackson Jr., Charles Arnt. Screenplay: Ben Barzman, Alfred Lewis Levitt, based on a story by Betsy Beaton. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Frank Doyle. Music: Leigh Harline.

Joseph Losey's The Boy With Green Hair has endured, mutating with the times to reflect whatever social issue dominates at the moment. When it was made in the postwar 1940s, it was intended to carry a strong antiwar statement -- one that RKO's new owner, Howard Hughes, hated so much that he tried to re-edit the film to eliminate it. Today, it might be seen as echoing some of the passion behind Black Lives Matter. In any case, it's a film close to the liberal heart, produced by the premier Hollywood liberal, Dore Schary. Fortunately, it makes its point without preachiness and, mercifully, without overindulging in whimsy. (An exception to the latter is the boy's fantasy about his grandfather's encounter with a king.) Dean Stockwell, 12 years old at the time but looking a couple of years younger, gives a refreshingly natural performance as the boy, Peter, free from the cutesiness that often weighed down performances by children in that era.

Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Dimiter D. Marinov, Mike Hatton, P.J. Byrne, Joe Cortese, Maggie Nixon, Von Lewis, Iqbal Theba. Screenplay: Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly. Cinematography: Sean Porter. Production design: Tim Galvin. Film editing: Patrick J. Don Vito. Music: Chris Bowers.

Peter Farrelly's Green Book is not a bad movie, just an unoriginal one, especially with its soft-landing, feel-good ending, set at Christmas no less. It's certainly among the least worthy best picture Oscar recipients of recent years, especially from nominees that included such original works as Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, and my personal favorite, Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite. What Green Book has going for it is powerful performances by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali and a sharp reminder of the cruelty and injustice of the Jim Crow era, in which a phenomenon like the Green Book, a travel guide for Black people in an age of segregated accommodation, was necessary. The film has been criticized for resorting to the White Savior trope, in which Mortensen's Tony Vallelonga saves Ali's Don Shirley from mayhem and possible death. There is, in fact, a White Savior in the film, but it's the off-screen Bobby Kennedy who rescues Vallelonga and Shirley from jail in a Louisiana "sundown town" after a well-placed phone call by Shirley to his well-connected lawyer, a moment in which Shirley plays Magical Negro to Vallelonga's White Savior. The film tries to be even-handed in depicting the growing rapport between the two men, in which each tries to correct the other's flaws, namely Shirley's hauteur and Vallelonga's crudeness. It doesn't entirely succeed, largely because the point of view in the film is white, that of Vallelonga's son Nick, who wrote the screenplay. The Shirley family, in fact, protested the treatment of their relative in the film as a "symphony of lies," falsely portraying Shirley as alienated from the Black community and estranged from his brother. Setting aside any issues of accuracy -- Green Book is a fiction film, not a documentary -- the real problems with the movie are two: One, that it treats racial tensions as a thing of the past, something hardly acceptable in the age of Black Lives Matter. The other is the heaviness of its clichés, which are those of almost any odd-couple road trip movie, which led some of its critics, mindful of another undeserving best picture Oscar winner, to dub it "Driving Dr. Shirley." 

Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989)

Michael Lake, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos, and Geneviève Lemon in Sweetie

Cast: Geneviève Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos, Jon Darling, Dorothy Barry, Michael Lake, Andre Pataczek, Jean Hadgraft, Paul Livingston, Louise Fox, Ann Merchant, Robyn Frank, Bronwyn Morgan. Screenplay: Gerard Lee, Jane Campion. Cinematography: Sally Bongers. Art direction: Peter Harris. Film editing: Veronika Jenet. Music: Martin Armiger.

Jane Campion's Sweetie is a sharply filmed, deftly styled, rawly acted family tragicomedy, and one of the most remarkable feature directing debuts in movie history. I use the word "tragicomedy" reluctantly because there's no easy way to capture the tone of Campion's film. It can make you laugh but uneasily, because its characters are so damaged and unpredictable that there's an element of pity and fear in our responses to them. The point of view is largely that of Kay (Karen Colston), a neurotic young woman -- among other things, she suffers from dendrophobia, the fear of trees -- with a sister, Dawn (Geneviève Lemon), aka "Sweetie," who dances on the edge of psychosis for much of the film until she finally goes over the edge. Kay is the kind of person who, when a fortune teller reads her tea leaves and sees a man with a question mark in his face, almost immediately runs into one. He's Louis (Tom Lycos), who, when Kay meets him, has a lock of hair dangling down over a mole on his forehead, an irresistible embodiment of the prophecy of the tea leaves. Louis has just gotten engaged to another woman, but before you know it, he and Kay are living together. Their life has just stalemated into sexlessness when Sweetie arrives, with her "producer," a narcoleptic guy named Bob (Michael Lake), in tow. Eventually, we meet Kay and Sweetie's parents, Gordon (Jon Darling) and Flo (Dorothy Barry), and learn that Gordon has spent most of his life spoiling Sweetie, encouraging her to believe that she has an abundance of talent. Summary of Sweetie fails at this point to capture the crisply distanced way that Campion presents this ensemble and works out their interplay. Her achievement in this film has been likened to the films of David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch, and there are moments that for me recall David Byrne's True Stories (1986) -- the Australia of Sweetie is very much kin to the Texas of Byrne's film -- but Campion is really doing her own thing, and doing it well.

The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan, 2018)

Kit Harington and Chris Zylka in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

Cast: Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jacob Tremblay, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Ben Schnetzer, Thandie Newton, Jared Keeso, Chris Zylka, Amara Karan, Emily Hampshire, Michael Gambon. Screenplay: Xavier Dolan, Jacob Tierney. Cinematography: André Turpin. Production design: Anne Pritchard, Colombe Raby. Film editing: Mathieu Denis, Xavier Dolan. Music: Gabriel Yared.

I had read some of the reviews, noted the abysmal 21% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, and knew that The Death & Life of John F. Donovan had barely been released in the United States. But how bad could a movie that featured three best actress Oscar winners as well as such celebrated performers as Thandie Newton and Michael Gambon really be? Maybe this was a case of a film that simply went over people's heads and will be rediscovered in a few years to become a cult film. Well, no. This is not an unappreciated gem. It's a mess of a movie about the perils of celebrity, with an embarrassingly off-the-mark treatment of life in the closet, and some uncomfortable echoes of real celebrity secret lives that only add queasiness to the mix. The denouement of the film is sheer hackery: There are two Big Speeches, one by Kathy Bates and the other by Gambon (in a kind of wise old man ex machina appearance), that are supposed somehow to resolve the film's theme, but are only anti-climactic. Is it well-acted? Yes. Kit Harington hasn't quite escaped the aura of Jon Snow in the film, partly because the title role calls on him to be a hugely successful TV star, but he has a looseness and natural delivery that he was never allowed in the fantasy confines of Game of Thrones. Jacob Tremblay, as the young, starstruck fan who becomes a pen pal with Donovan, shows that he really is the capable child actor that Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015) suggested he was. Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon do what they can with badly written roles. It's said that writer-director Xavier Dolan's original cut of the film was four hours long, and that the trimming to the current two-hour length involved jettisoning the work of yet another major actress, Jessica Chastain, so it's possible that some of the incoherence of the film stems from desperate editing. But nothing about the movie really makes me want to watch the director's original cut.

Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc in Le Corbeau

Cast: Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Micheline Francey, Héléna Manson, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Sylvie, Liliane Maigné, Pierre Larquey, Noël Roquevert, Bernard Lancret, Antoine Balpêtré, Jean Brochard. Screenplay: Louis Chavance, Henri-Georges Clouzot. Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer. Set decoration: Andrej Andrejew. Film editing: Marguerite Beaugé. Music: Tony Aubin.

No film that has something to offend everyone can be all bad, right? Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau was made during the German occupation of France, and it managed to alienate both the Vichy regime and the Resistance, and even to be banned after the liberation. To be sure, it's a somewhat unpleasant film, a psychological thriller in which almost everyone is something of a rotter. But at the time, it was subjected to suspicion of being a kind of allegory of the situation in which France's towns found themselves, to be an attack on informing on one's fellow citizens and an undermining of the morale of the populace. Someone in the unnamed village where the film takes place is sending anonymous poison-pen letters to everyone else, exposing the secrets and sins of the townspeople, but especially aiming at Dr. Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), a fairly recent arrival to the town, accusing him of being an illegal abortionist. The letters are signed "Le Corbeau," the crow (or if you prefer an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe, the raven). Germain himself is not an altogether likable character: He's a bit crabby and he's carrying on an affair with both the beautiful wife (Micheline Francey) of the local psychiatrist, Dr. Vorzet (Pierre Larquey), a much older man, and with Denise Saillens (Ginette Leclerc), who sometimes fakes illness to get Germain's attention. The vicious letters cause an uproar, in the middle of which a young man commits suicide. Uncovering the identity of Le Corbeau becomes a pursuit that is doomed not to end well. Clouzot's skill as a director, abetted by cinematographer Nicolas Hayer's manipulation of light and shadow, makes all of this unpleasantness watchable, but it's easy to see why it got under people's skin.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)

Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave, Avis Bunnage, Alec McCowen, James Bolam, Joe Robinson, Dervis Ward, Topsy Jane, Julia Foster. Screenplay: Alan Sillitoe, based on his story. Cinematography: Walter Lassally. Production design: Ralph W. Brinton. Film editing: Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner owes some of its prominence in film history to being grouped with other "Angry Young Men" films, such as Richardson's own Look Back in Anger (1959), Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1959), Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), working-class dramas that gave a boost to such young actors as Richard Burton, Laurence Harvey, Albert Finney, and Richard Harris. Tom Courtenay also got a leg up on his career, largely because he, more than director Richardson, is what holds The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner together. Richardson's direction lacks focus and tension. For example, he occasionally resorts to brief bursts of sped-up action that almost make me hear "Yackety Sax" playing in the background. The essence of Alan Sillitoe's screenplay is that, as Kris Kristofferson put it, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Courtenay plays Colin Smith, sent to a reformatory, called a Borstal in Britain, for robbery. The oily, autocratic governor of the institution, played by Michael Redgrave, quickly spots Colin's aptitude for running and grooms him for a race he has arranged between teams from the reform school and an upper-class public school. Colin relishes the illusion of freedom that long-distance running gives him, but when the time comes for the race, he realizes that he's just being used by the governor to enhance his image, so he throws the race at the finish line. The bulk of the film deals with Colin's rebellion against the family in which he grew up, his involvement with a young woman, and the small crimes he and a friend commit before he finally gets caught for the theft. But there's not much shape to the film's flashback integration of this background story, and the film falls slack when it should be building to a climax. Still, Courtenay's performance and solid support from Redgrave, from Alec McCowen as a smarmy school counselor full of hack psychology, and from the fine character actress Avis Bunnage as Colin's mother help keep the film alive.

The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, 1974)

Cast: Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Adolfo Celi, Paul Frankeur, Michael Lonsdale, Pierre Maguelon, François Maistre, Hélène Perdrière, Michel Piccoli, Claude Piéplu, Jean Rochefort, Bernard Verley, Monica Vitti, Milena Vukotic. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Edmond Richard. Production design: Pierre Guffroy. Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov.

The most famous, or notorious, scene in The Phantom of Liberty is the one above, in which a group of well-dressed people sit down at a table on flush toilets, and begin to discuss scatological matters. Eventually, one man excuses himself to go to the "dining room," a small private place where he can eat in privacy, an act that evidently would be disgusting if done in public. The film is a kind of tag-team of episodes, in which a secondary character in one scene becomes the central character of the next, all proceeding though dreamlike situations. In movies, dreams are typically not much like our real dreams; they're usually soft-focus and full of portentous events. But Luis Buñuel and his co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière know better: Real dreams seem to proceed with the kind of groundedness of daily life, but with logical inconsistencies that we don't question as we're dreaming them. For me, the most dreamlike sequence in The Phantom of Liberty is the one in which the Legendres (Jean Rochefort and Pascale Audret) rush to their daughter's school because she's been reported as having disappeared. When they get there, the little girl is present, but everyone behaves as if she has really disappeared. When they go to the police to report her disappearance, the girl accompanies them and even supplies information about her age, height, and weight to the police, who thank her and the parents and proceed to investigate the case. This is perhaps the most playful of Buñuel's films, though it contains his usual keen satire of bourgeois manners and mannerisms, and is chock-full of ideas about how we conform to conventions and rules that are at base arbitrary and irrational.

Scaramouche (Rex Ingram, 1923)

Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry in Scaramouche

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Ingraham, Julia Swayne Gordon, William Humphrey, Otto Matieson, George Siegmann, Bowditch M. Turner, James A. Marcus, Edith Allen, John George, Willard Lee Hall, Rose Dione. Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Cinematography: John F. Seitz. Art direction: Harold Grieve. Film editing: Grant Whytock.

A year after Ramon Novarro, as Rupert of Hentzau, threatened to steal Rex Ingram's The Count of Monte Cristo away from Lewis Stone's Count, we find the two actors in reversed roles. In Scaramouche Novarro is the dashing hero and Stone the cunning villain. Actually, Scaramouche could have used a bit more dash and cunning in both roles. Novarro isn't given much opportunity to display the impishness he brought to Rupert, even though a title card proclaims, in Rafael Sabatini's words, that Novarro's character, André-Louis Moreau, "was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Nor does Ingram provide enough swashbuckling for Novarro to do: Most of his duels are fought off camera, and the crucial one with Stone's Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr is somewhat awkwardly staged. Ingram seems to be more interested in Harold Grieve's opulent sets, beautifully filmed by John F. Seitz, and in the menacing crowd scenes of his version of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. It's all hokum, of course, but it has its moments.

Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020)

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in Palm Springs

Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons, Peter Gallagher, Meredith Hagner, Camila Mindes, Tyler Hoechlin, Chris Pang, Jacqueline Obradors, June Squibb, Tongaya Chirisa, Dale Dickey, Conner O'Malley, Jena Friedman, Brian Duffy. Screenplay: Andy Siara. Cinematography: Quyen Tran. Production design: Jason Kisvarday. Film editing: Andrew Dickler, Matt Friedman. Music: Matthew Compton.

Maybe it was John Keats who invented the now-familiar trope of the "time loop." The figures on the Grecian urn celebrated in his ode seem to be stuck in one: The lovers "cannot fade," but will be "For ever panting, and for ever young." Of course, they don't know that; only the observer of the figures does, and the fact teases him "out of thought, / As doth eternity." And it was Shakespeare who noted that "our little life is rounded with a sleep," just as the day of the characters in Palm Springs is. The concept of the time loop, as established for most moviegoers by Harold Ramis's great 1993 movie Groundhog Day, is that it actually exists only for an observer who happens to be caught in it, as Bill Murray's character was in the film. The task of this observer is either to persuade others to recognize his plight or to find a way out of it. In the 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Cause and Effect," written by Brannon Braga, the crew of the Enterprise is caught in a time loop that ends with the destruction of the ship and the crew, but everyone on board begins to have feelings of déjà vu as the event repeats itself; they eventually figure out a way to end it. Andy Siara's screenplay for Palm Springs takes a direction more in line with Groundhog Day by having three people aware of the loop: the wedding guests Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) and the enraged Roy (J.K. Simmons), who blames Nyles for getting him caught in it. Eventually, Nyles and Roy give up and decide to seize the moment and endure an eternity of a single repeated day, but Sarah spends her time learning quantum physics to break the loop. Palm Springs doesn't break any new ground for the time loop trope, but it's engagingly conceived and entertainingly played, and it occasionally teases us out of thought about eternity, too.