Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Chris Cooper, Louis Garrel, Jayne Houdyshell. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I didn't read Little Women as a child: Boys didn't read "girls' books" back then. And when I finally read it -- out loud, to my daughter -- I found it a little stiff and starchy. But it has made for some very good movies, particularly the 1933 Katharine Hepburn version directed by George Cukor and the 1994 Winona Ryder version directed by Gillian Armstrong. Somehow, I don't think we'll be calling this 2019 film the Soirse Ronan version, but rather the Greta Gerwig version. As writer and director, Gerwig has developed a complete and insightful view of the Louisa May Alcott novel, one that takes into account what was always present in the novel but brings it into the light of the 21st century: the changes in the roles and attitudes of women. By rearranging the chronology of the novel and structuring it around the development of Jo March (Ronan) as a writer, Gerwig has accomplished two things: She has allowed the other March sisters to share the spotlight that Jo hogged when she was played by Hepburn and Ryder. She has also revealed the rather sentimental endings of the other films as what they were: contrivances designed to please moviegoers, as they did readers, more than to reflect actual life. By establishing in the film that Jo is accommodating the desire of her publisher (Tracy Letts) that the heroine of her Little Women not remain a spinster, Gerwig is able to go a little bit over the top in the film, bringing back Prof. Bhaer (Louis Garrel), with whom Jo broke off over his criticisms of her writing, for a giddy reunion and wedding to Jo. This is all staged with the kind of unabashed sentimentality, including a glimpse of Jo's very improbable school, in which all the sisters and their husbands are the instructors and the curriculum includes fencing, that can't be taken with a straight face. We are meant to sense that the real Jo March might well have remained a spinster rather than capitulate to, as she puts it in the movie, "people saying that love is just all that women are fit for." It's also an ending that wouldn't have worked if Gerwig and her performers hadn't created characters that have a little more body than the source gives them: Timothée Chalamet's Laurie isn't just the slightly odd young man he is in the book (and in the performances of Douglass Montgomery and Christian Bale in the earlier versions), but rather spoiled, dilettantish, and probably alcoholic. Florence Pugh deserved the Oscar nomination she got for bringing more than just flightiness to the character of Amy. Even Beth (Eliza Scanlen) in this version is more than just the saintly innocent who dies young, and we have Gerwig's script and direction for allowing them to blossom rather than being overwhelmed by Jo, good as Ronan's performance is. I can't quite subscribe to Anthony Lane's comment that her Little Women "may just be the best film yet made by an American woman," which hardly seems fair to the work of directors from Dorothy Arzner to Ida Lupino to Kathryn Bigelow and Kelly Reichardt, but it's certainly a provocative and sometimes audacious triumph. 

Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011)

Malonn Lévana and Zoé Héran in Tomboy

Cast: Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson, Sophie Cattani, Mathieu Demy, Ryan Boubekri, Yohan Vero, Noah Vero, Cheyenne Lainé, Christel Baras, Valérie Roucher. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Chrystel Fournier. Production design: Thomas Grézaud. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Jerôme Echenoz. 

In Tomboy, Céline Sciamma tells a simple story straightforwardly, which is in itself no small achievement. Laure (Zoé Héran), is a 10-year-old girl who moves with her family to a new neighborhood where, in search of kids to play with, she meets Lisa (Jeanne Disson), who seems to be the only girl her age in the neighborhood, since she runs around with a gang of boys. When Lisa asks her name, Laure, whose hair is cut short and who wears tank tops and shorts, impulsively introduces herself as Mikael. And from then on she's* just one of the boys, playing a good game of soccer and mimicking the boys' habits like spitting. There are some uneasy moments, of course. When she can't urinate alongside the boys, she sneaks off into the woods where she's startled by a boy and wets her pants. Invited to go swimming, she cuts the top off of her swimsuit and makes a penis out of modeling clay to stuff in the bottom. And most fraught of all, Lisa develops a crush on Mikael and kisses him. At home, Laure continues to be a girl in the eyes of her mother (Sophie Cattani), who is in the late stages of a difficult pregnancy that means she must rest as much as possible, and her father (Mathieu Demy), who works long hours in the computer business. But she has a confidante in her 6-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), who keeps quiet about the deception and aids in it. The crisis comes when Laure takes Jeanne out to play with the gang and one of the boys, Rayan (Rayan Boubekri), shoves Jeanne for annoying him. Laure/Mikael retorts by beating him up, which brings Rayan's angry mother to their house to complain to Laure's mother that Rayan was beaten by her son. Painful disclosures follow. The directness with which Sciamma tells the story is the film's great strength. It doesn't devolve into "Afterschool Special" sentimentality, melodrama, or message-peddling. It understands Laure, but doesn't dabble in causalities: We see, for example, that she's much closer to her father, who lets her sit on his lap and steer their automobile, and who takes a more tolerant air toward the situation than does Laure's mother, but the film doesn't project any psychological "insight" into their relationship. Zoé Héran is extraordinary, superbly androgynous as Laure/Mikael, but all of the very young cast give the film its sturdy underpinning of truth.   

*Yes, there's a pronoun problem. I've mostly stuck with feminine pronouns for Laure because it's not entirely clear that she will continue the transition from female to male in later life. 

Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941)

Constance Bennett, Melvyn Douglas, Greta Garbo, and Robert Sterling in Two-Faced Woman

Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Ruth Gordon, Robert Sterling, Frances Carson. Screenplay: S.N. Behrman, Salka Viertel, George Oppenheimer, based on a play by Ludwig Fulda. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart. Film editing: George Boemler. Music: Bronislau Kaper. 

Two-Faced Woman is famous for only one thing: It was Greta Garbo's last film. Otherwise, it's a confused attempt at a screwball comedy, meant in part to revamp Garbo's image, which had largely been created in costume dramas like Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935), and her greatest triumph, Camille (George Cukor, 1936). Her most recent hit, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), had been hyped with the tagline "Garbo Laughs," and MGM thought giving Garbo a looser, more contemporary image might be profitable. So in Two-Faced Woman, she not only laughs, she skis, swims, and even dances. She's also reunited with her Ninotchka co-star, Melvyn Douglas, who plays Larry Blake, a New York magazine editor-publisher who falls (quite literally, down a mountainside) for Garbo's outdoorsy ski instructor. They marry in haste, and you know what that means. Garbo's character, Karin, doesn't want to live in the city, but when Larry spends more and more time there, she gets fed up and pursues him. Eventually, through a variety of plot contrivances, she pretends to be her own twin sister, Katherine, a vamp who drinks and smokes and dances -- all things that Karin doesn't do. At some point, the censors intervened and made the script indicate that Larry sees through this imposture, so that when he falls for the vivacious Katherine instead of the virtuous Karin, we know that he's just pretending. It's a familiar trope in sitcoms and screwball comedy, but the screenplay botches it badly. There are some bright moments contributed by Constance Bennett as the "other woman" in Larry's life and Ruth Gordon as his secretary, but for the most part it's confused and unfunny -- even the usually reliably brilliant Roland Young feels off his game, and Cukor, who had often demonstrated such a sure hand with this kind of material, doesn't seem to have his heart in it. That it was a critical and box office flop is often cited as the reason Garbo never made another movie; she asked to be let out of her MGM contract after it was made, but there's plenty of evidence that she toyed with returning to the screen over the remaining almost 50 years of her life.  

The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971)

Bibi Andersson and Elliott Gould in The Touch

Cast: Bibi Andersson, Elliott Gould, Max von Sydow, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: Ann-Christin Lobråten, P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren. Music: Carl Michael Bellman, Peter Covent, Jan Johansson. 

I didn't believe a minute of The Touch, and not just because Elliott Gould was so terribly miscast as the male lead in a romantic drama. The film struck me as formulaic in so many predictable ways, particularly the heavy-handed contrast of the milieu from which Karin Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) comes -- pristine, middle-class, Nordic -- and the one from which her lover, David Kovac (Gould), comes -- sloppy, intellectual, Jewish. There's also a thudding use of symbols, like the long-immured statue of the Virgin and Child that's infested with a species of beetles that has lain dormant until David, an archaeologist, uncovers it. It's a film with nothing new to tell us, or at least nothing that Ingmar Bergman hasn't told us in better films about troubled marriages and destructive love affairs. It was heavily panned on release and a box office failure, but it has since been revived by admirers who find it carefully crafted and subtly unsettling. I admire the craft, including Sven Nykvist's always evocative photography and Andersson's dedicated performance, but it still seems to me a flawed and obvious story.  

The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010)

Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Mickey O'Keefe, Jack McGee, Melissa McMeekin, Bianca Hunter, Erica McDermott, Jill Quigg, Dendrie Taylor, Kate B. O'Brien, Jenna Lamia, Frank Renzulli. Screenplay: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Keith Dorrington. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Pamela Martin. Music: Michael Brook. 

You don't have to be familiar with the real-life Micky Ward to know that the movie about him is going to end with the scrappy underdog coming from behind to win the championship. All you need is to be familiar with the genre of sports movies, especially boxing movies, to which The Fighter belongs. And you don't have to know much about the acting careers of Christian Bale and Melissa Leo to know that they were shoo-ins for the Oscars for best performances in supporting roles. All you need to know is that the Academy loves flamboyant acting in roles as working-class characters. If that sounds a little cynical, I don't really mean it that way: Bale and Leo deserved their awards, partly because they help bring a perhaps overfamiliar (not to say clichéd) story to life. The Fighter works because it's nuanced and textured in ways that films heavily shadowed by genre history have to be in order to hold our interest. And a lot of the nuance and texture was contributed by the less showy performances of Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams -- and she at least got a nomination. It helps, too, that Wahlberg, who grew up in a Boston-area working class neighborhood much like the Lowell of the film, loved the story and its characters, and as producer made it work. You might gather from my opening that boxing movies are a genre I don't have a great fondness for, and you'd be right. But there's a lot to enjoy about The Fighter, including the ambience Wahlberg probably had a lot of say in creating, like the chorus of Micky Ward's big-haired sisters, waiting to pounce on an intruder like Charlene Fleming (Adams) who had the effrontery to go to college but return to the neighborhood and claim equality. The fight scenes are well-done, I guess, and I couldn't help getting caught up in their momentum. Still, it'll be a while before I choose to watch another boxing movie.     

Here Is Your Life (Jan Troell, 1966)

Eddie Axberg in Here Is Your Life

Cast: Eddie Axberg, Ulla Sjöblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, Per Oscarsson, Ulf Palme, Signe Stade, Allan Edwall, Max von Sydow, Ulla Akselson, Stig Törnblom. Screenplay: Bengt Forslund, Jan Troell, based on novels by Eyvind Johnson. Cinematography: Jan Troell. Art direction: Rolf Boman. Film editing: Jan Troell. Music: Erik Nordgren. 

Life doesn't have a plot. It's a series of incidents, some causally connected, some not. At least that's the life presented in Here Is Your Life, a coming-of-age story about a boy in Sweden during the years that comprised World War I. (Not that the war had much to do with it in neutral Sweden.) What we see is the emerging consciousness of Olof Persson (Eddie Axberg), a boy who, because his father is seriously ill, was sent to live with a foster family and when he is on the brink of turning 14, goes off to seek his fortune. That takes him first to dangerous places like a logging camp and a sawmill, then to work for a man who runs a movie theater, including a stint as an itinerant projectionist, carrying the camera from place to place. We also see him working on the railroad and trying to organize workers into a strike. Bright and highly literate, he gets his ideas from Nietzsche and Marx, and tries to apply them to the world he encounters. The film ends with Olof, now on the verge of manhood, striking out alone as the camera soars away from him, a tiny figure isolated on the railroad tracks running through a snowy landscape. It's a lovely, disjointed but somehow coherent movie, with enigmatic characters and violent events mixed with mundane but often striking ones. His sexual awakening occurs, too, though not without a bit of violence and confusion there: Once, his rough male coworkers indulge in a bit of horseplay with Olof that verges on rape. Later, he strikes up a friendship with a somewhat older man that has homoerotic overtones when the two swim naked and afterward dance together. The encounters with girls are more typical of the portrayal of growing sexual awareness in film: He falls for a pretty girl but rejects her when he sees her with someone else and a friend tells him she's promiscuous. He deflowers another young girl and leaves her in tears. And he has an affair with a very experienced older woman, marvelously played by Ulla Sjöblom. Yet Troell's film never sinks into clichés or banality, and it's held together by the director-cinematographer-editor's vision and by the steady, attractive performance of Axberg in the key role of Olof. There are also some appearances by such familiar Swedish actors as Allan Edwall, Ulf Palme, Gunnar Björnstrand, and, of course, Max von Sydow. The film's 168-minute length is a bit daunting -- it lost 45 minutes in its American release -- and Troell never spells things out for the viewer, leaving us to explicate the changes in Olof's life on our own. But the epic ambition involved in adapting a quartet of novels by Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson somehow results in an intimate portrait of growing up.    

The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2012)

Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes in The Place Beyond the Pines

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn, Emory Cohen, Dane DeHaan, Mahershala Ali, Harris Yulin, Rose Byrne, Robert Clohessy, Bruce Greenwood, Ray Liotta. Screenplay: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Inbal Weinberg. Film editing: Jim Helton, Ron Patane. Music: Mike Patton. 

There's a line in the middle of The Place Beyond the Pines that perhaps echoes more in the year of George Floyd than it did even in the year the film was released. A veteran cop named Deluca (Ray Liotta) is praising the rookie Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) for taking out robbery suspect Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who crashed through a window and died after they exchanged gunfire. Deluca says he's been on the force for years and has only had to draw his gun two or three times, and here Avery is with a righteous kill at the start of his career. "And he was white," Deluca adds, marveling, as if killing any other kind of suspect would be routine. To his credit, Avery is not so happy about the kill, aware that he shot first and that he maybe doesn't really deserve being celebrated as a hero. Before long he will finger Deluca as a key figure in the corruption of the Schenectady, N.Y., police department. Avery has a law degree, but he joined the force -- over the objections of his father, a judge (Harris Yulin) -- because he wanted firsthand experience of law enforcement, so he parlays his exposure of the bad cops into a job as an assistant D.A., and 15 years later is running for state attorney general. But this is, as director Derek Cianfrance has said, a fable about the sins of the fathers. Both Avery and Luke had infant sons at the time of their encounter, and the boys are fated to meet. The movie actually begins with Luke's story: When he learns that he has fathered a child with Romina (Eva Mendes), Luke quits his job as a carnival motorcycle stuntman and tries to settle down and become the boy's father. Romina isn't too happy about this: She has moved on and married Kofi Kancam (Mahershala Ali), who is the only father the boy, named Jacob, will ever really know. Luke's efforts to go straight don't last long: Wanting to earn money to help support his son, he gets involved in a string of bank robberies, which eventually lead to the confrontation with Avery that results in Luke's death. The paths of Jacob (Dane DeHaan) and Avery's son, A.J. (Emory Cohen), finally cross in high school. A.J., who has been sidelined by his father's political ambitions, has turned into a swaggering, partying adolescent, and he gets Jacob into real trouble that eventuates in a confrontation with the man who killed his father. Cianfrance delivers a vivid crime thriller, but the film is a little overwhelmed by its epic ambitions, especially the thundering coincidence of the meeting of Jacob and A.J., which the filmmakers want us to see as a mythic working out of fate, but which really boils down to old-fashioned melodrama. The 140-minute run time also betrays the film's slackness, and the starry casting, especially of Ryan Gosling in a role that ends halfway through the movie, doesn't pay off very well. Fine actors like Ali and Rose Byrne (as Avery's wife) are wasted in tiny parts. In short, ambition is as much Cianfrance's undoing as it is that of his characters.  

Brink of Life (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson in Brink of Life

Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Sjöberg, Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz, Inga Landgré. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Isaaksson, based on novels by Isaksson. Cinematography: Max Wilén. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 

For all the frankness of its subject matter, Ingmar Bergman's Brink of Life is as formulaic as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. Three women are sharing a room in the obstetrics ward of a hospital. One of them, Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin), has miscarried and is being treated for bleeding. Another, Stina (Eva Dahlbeck), is in almost the opposite condition: She has gone well past term in her pregnancy and is there hoping that labor will be induced if it doesn't occur right away. The third, Hjördis (Bibi Andersson), is only in her third month, but she has experienced some bleeding -- perhaps, we learn, because she's unwed and doesn't want the baby, so she's been trying to cause a spontaneous abortion. Cecilia is in the throes of depression, blaming herself for the miscarriage because neither she nor her cold, priggish husband, Anders (Erland Josephson), was entirely certain that they wanted a child. Again, Stina is the precise opposite: She's rapturous about having a baby, and so is her husband, Harry (Max von Sydow). Between these polarities, Hjördis is fighting with the social worker who is trying to advise her on how she can live after the baby arrives. The best advice is, of course, to go home to her parents, but since she left precisely because she doesn't get along with her mother, she strongly rejects the idea of facing the disapproval she expects to encounter from her. It's all a setup for the kind of plot resolutions you might expect: Cecilia grows stronger and chooses to face up to her disintegrating marriage and a childless future. Stina loses the baby in a prolonged and difficult labor. And Hjördis discovers that maybe her mother isn't so bad after all. There's a feeling of anticlimax about these eventualities. That the film works at all is the product of the performances of the three actresses, along with Bergman's steadily unsentimental direction, which makes the predictability of the story more tolerable than it might be in a Hollywood tearjerker. Still, I can't help feeling that the stories of what happens to Cecilia, Stina, and Hjördis after the film ends would make a more interesting movie.   

The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

Ava Gardner and Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana

Cast: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Grayson Hall, Skip Ward, Cyril Delevanti, Mary Boylan. Screenplay: Anthony Veiller, John Huston, based on a play by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa. Art direction: Stephen B. Grimes. Film editing: Ralph Kemplen. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

It's a movie adaptation of a play by Tennessee Williams, so you know you're going to see a lot of Acting and hear a lot of rather florid dialogue. As for the capital-A acting, it's Ava Gardner who almost steals the show, just by being her gorgeous, free-spirited self. It's a great part for an actress in her middle years (Gardner was 42), as the casting of Bette Davis in the original Broadway production suggests. Gardner plays Maxine Faulk, the proprietor of a slightly louche Puerto Vallarta hotel, who finds herself welcoming to the hostelry an old friend, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), along with a company of teachers from a Texas Baptist women's college, whose tour bus he has just hijacked. He has come to recuperate from a variety of scandals, including some carrying-on with the nubile Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon), who is chaperoned by the up-tight Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall in an Oscar-nominated performance). Maxine is reluctant to shelter Shannon's flock, but his apparent disordered state of body and mind breaks down her resistance. Soon they are joined by another itinerant pair, Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her nonagenarian grandfather, known as Nonno (Cyril Delevanti) and billed by Hannah as "the world's oldest living poet." If I give the acting award to Gardner out of this company it's because her part is the most entertaining and she knows it. Kerr is stuck in yet another of her spinster roles, and she's given the burden of becoming the voice of truth and righteousness in the film. Fortunately, she's more than up to it, making Hannah a more interesting character than you might expect. It's Burton who comes off worst in the film, maybe because the screenplay's opening-up of the role, giving Shannon scenes that weren't originally contrived by Williams, fragments the character and causes Burton to have to act out what should have been a backstory better left to our imagination. We didn't need the prologue in which Shannon scandalizes his church and the scenes of rebellious misbehavior along the tour to understand why he's so close to a breakdown when they arrive at Maxine's hotel -- Burton is more than capable of delivering that kind of exposition, and seeing them only complicates our reaction to the character. So it's a mixed bag as a movie, though not without its pleasures and some genuinely moving scenes. It also suffers less from Hollywood censorship than most of the film adaptations of Williams's plays: By 1964 things had loosened up enough that the screenplay can be a little more explicit about things that had been swept under the carpet in the 1950s. I do happen to find that the implication that Miss Fellowes is a closeted lesbian unnecessary and tasteless, especially since it inspires disgust in the otherwise freewheeling Maxine, but such were the times.   

Revenge (Yermek Shinarbayev, 1989)

Cast: Aleksandr Pan, Valentina Te, Kasim Zhakibayev, Lyubov Germanova, Oleg Li, Juozas Budraitis, Zinaida Em, Maksim Munzuk, Yerik Zholzhaksynov, Nikolai Tacheyev. Screenplay: Anatoli Kim, based on his novel. Cinematography: Sergei Kosmanev. Production design: Yelena Yelitseyeva. Film editing: Polina Shtain. Music: Vladislav Shut. 

Rhapsodic, enigmatic, brutal, poetic, probing, obscure ... I could go on assembling adjectives to describe Yermek Shinarbayev's Revenge. It may just suffice to say that it was a film made in Kazakhstan as the Soviet Union was crumbling around it, and that it's an attempt to bridge civilizations: The dialogue is in Russian, while the story deals with Koreans. The director is Kazakh, the screenwriter a Russian citizen with Korean ancestry. The story deals with the attempt to avenge the murder of a little girl by her half-crazed teacher, and it spans several decades in the 20th century -- not to mention that it's preceded by a prologue set in 17th-century Korea. But it's not as head-spinning as that sounds: Though there are mysterious, even magical characters involved in its plot, that plot is relatively traditional, a matter of crime and retribution. Those versed in the history of the Korean diaspora into Russia may have an edge on those of us who aren't, but the impact of the story, or perhaps stories -- the film is divided into seven "tales" plus the prologue -- is strong even if you let the eccentricity of the way they're told just wash over you.