Assassin (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

Tetsuro Tanba in Assassin

Cast: Tetsuro Tanba, Shima Iwashita, Eiji Okada, Isao Kimura, Tamotsu Hayakawa, Eitaro Ozawa, Fujio Suga, Muga Takewaki, Takanobu Hozumi, Hideo Kidokoro, Tetsuji Takechi, Gen Shimizu. Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada, based on a book by Ryotaro Shiba. Cinematography: Masao Kosuji. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Eiichi Amano. Music: Toru Takemitsu. 

Masahiro Shinoda's Assassin (also known as Assassination and Ansastsu) is the story of Hachiro Kiyakawa (Tetsuro Tanba), an enigmatic figure who played both sides in the conflict between the Tokugawa shogunate and the imperial forces in 1860s Japan. Tanba gives a commanding performance, and the film is distinguished by Masao Kosuji's cinematography and Toru Takemitsu's score, but Shinoda's decision to tell the story in flashbacks is a challenge to anyone not well-versed in Japanese history, even though he provides several screenfuls of background text at the beginning of the film. 

Up, Down, Fragile (Jacques Rivette, 1995)

Marianne Denicourt and Bruno Todeschini in Up, Down, Fragile

Cast: Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard, Laurence Côte, André Marcon, Bruno Todeschini, Wilfred Benaïche, Enzo Enzo, Anna Karina, Stéphanie Schwartzbrod, Christine Vézinet, László Szabó (voice). Screenplay: Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard, Laurence Côte, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette. Cinematography: Christophe Pollock. Production design: Emmanuel de Chauvigny. Film editing: Nicole Lubtchansky. Music: François Bréant. 

Jacques Rivette's Up, Down, Fragile is a dawdling, self-indulgent film for cinéastes with a lot of time on their hands. It intrigued me for about an hour, but then my patience with Rivette's send-up of movie tropes and genres began to wear thin. 

The Raggedy Rawney (Bob Hoskins, 1988)

Dexter Fletcher in The Raggedy Rawney

Cast: Dexter Fletcher, Zoë Nathensen, Zoë Wanamaker, Bob Hoskins, Dave Hill, Ian McNeice, Gawn Grainger, Jim Carter, Veronica Clifford, Rosemary Martin, J.G. Devlin, Jane Wood, Ian Drury, Timmy Lang, Jenny Platt. Screenplay: Bob Hoskins, Nicole De Wilde. Cinematography: Frank Tidy. Production design: Jiri Matolin. Film editing: Alan Jones. Composer: Michael Kamen. 

The Raggedy Rawney was not well-received by critics when it was released, and it's certainly messy in tone and narrative. But I found it oddly compelling, if only because it's not quite like anything I've seen lately. It's a fable with anti-war overtones about a deserter in the middle of an unspecified war in an unspecified Eastern European country. (It was filmed in the former Czechoslovakia.) Tom (Dexter Fletcher) is a new soldier who is shocked into deserting by the carnage of an attack. Lashing out and partially blinding his commanding officer (Jim Carter), he escapes into the forest where he encounters a little girl (Jenny Platt) whose family has been killed and strung up as a warning to anyone who would hide men deserting from the army. She is playing with her dead mother's makeup, and the traumatized Tom lets her make up his face and dress him in one of her mother's dresses. Scared off by the movement of troops nearby, he runs deeper into the forest, still wearing dress and makeup, where he spots a caravan of Roma. When he comes across Darky (Bob Hoskins), the de facto leader of the caravan, Tom points him toward a spot in the river where the fish are plentiful, which motivates Darky to bring him back to the group and treat him as a "rawney," a madwoman with second sight. Tom remains mute until he strikes up a relationship with Darky's daughter, Jessie (Zoë Nathensen), who discovers that he's not a woman but keeps his secret. It's a setup with Shakespearean overtones that meanders first into comedy and then into tragedy. The Raggedy Rawney marked Hoskins's debut as a director and is the only film for which he wrote the screenplay (in collaboration with Nicole De Wilde), basing it on a tale told him by his Romani grandmother. 

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Jeffrey Lau, 2002)

Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Wei Zhao in Chinese Odyssey 2002

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Fay Wong, Wei Zhao, Chang Chen, Roy Cheung, Athena Chu, Rebecca Pan, Jan Lamb (voice). Screenplay: Jeffrey Lamb. Cinematography: Peter Ngor. Production design: Tony Au. Film editing: Wing-Ming Wong. Music: Frankie Chan, Roel A. García. 

You have to know Hong Kong cinema better than I do to fully appreciate the spoofery involved in Chinese Odyssey 2002, but it's still a giddy lark, with some handsome actors poking fun at their serious roles and a lot of amusing sight gags. The version I saw on the Criterion Channel seems to have been shorn of some of its musical sequences.  

Perfect Love (Catherine Breillat, 1996)

Francis Renaud and Isabelle Renauld in Perfect Love

Cast: Isabelle Renauld, Francis Renaud, Laura Saglio, Alain Soral, Michèle Rème, Alice Mitterand, Tom Rocheteau, Delphine De Malherbe, Marie Lebée. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat. Cinematography: Laurent Dailland. Production design: Françoise Dupertuis. Film editor: Agnès Guillemot. 

Catherine Breillat is a kind of anti-pornographer; her films are almost enough to turn one off from sex entirely. Or anyway, from any notion that sex is an expression of, as the title ironically suggests, Perfect Love. Breillat often seems to suggest that we are just animals trying to dress up our instincts with highfalutin labels. That occurred to me during the scene in which the naked Christophe (Francis Renaud) gets out of the bed he's sharing with Frédérique (Isabelle Renauld) and, for reasons known only to him, climbs the scaffolding outside her window. He looks like a particularly awkward monkey, and he inspires neither passion nor amusement in Frédérique, but rather deepens the contempt that's growing in her. The growth in their mutual alienation is the subject of the film, which begins in the aftermath of Christophe's unspeakable assault on and murder of Frédérique. The plot is simply a flashback that shows how their relationship developed and disintegrated so horribly. Of course, being French, they talk about it at length, narrating their own disaffection. I found it a curious misfire, a movie that's based in part on the disparity in their ages -- she is supposed to be a generation older, a twice-married woman with two children, including a daughter somewhat closer in age to Christophe than she is. Yet the actors cast as Christophe and Frédérique were born only a year apart; both were in their late 20s when the film was made, and they look it. I can respect Breillat's attempt at portraying the difficulties of a relationship and admire the commitment of her performers, but nothing in the characters seemed to justify the outcome. Nor can I deny the boredom that settled on me as the film proceeded. 

Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1987)

Boguslaw Linda in Blind Chance

Cast: Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Boguslawa Pawelec, Marzena Trybala, Jacek Borkowski, Jacek Sas-Uhrynowski, Adam Ferency, Irena Byrska, Monika Gozdzik, Zygmunt Hübner. Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski. Cinematography: Krzysztof Pakulski. Production design: Andrzej Rafal Waltenberger. Film editing: Elzbieta Kurkowska. Music: Wojciech Kilar. 

A man races to catch a train that's pulling out of the station. If he catches it, his life goes in one direction. If he doesn't, it goes in another. But the binary choices of life are not as simple as that, Krzysztof Kieslowski demonstrates in Blind Chance. Witek Dlugosz (Boguslaw Linda) catches the train, and he winds up allied with the political powers-that-be. Then Kieslowski shows us what happens when Witek doesn't catch the train, and he winds up with the political opposition. But there's a third possibility: What happens if he's just a little slower in his race to catch the train, missing it by a second or two longer? In the film, he winds up choosing a non-political career in which he decides to remain neutral. But Blind Chance is not all about politics -- though that was a central obsession in life in Poland in the 1980s. It's also about sex: In each of the three versions of Witek's life, he ends up with a different woman, and that makes another important difference. Authors love to play God, and Kieslowski, a true auteur, is no exception. He's a cruel God, as the film demonstrates at both beginning and ending, and the cruelty is more shocking because of the appealing performance of Linda as the man in the hands of fate. 

A Fish in the Bathtub (Joan Micklin Silver, 1998)

Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller in A Fish in the Bathtub

Cast: Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Adams, Missy Yager, Paul Benedict, Doris Roberts, Louis Zorich, Phyllis Newman, Val Avery, Bob Dishy, Pamela Gray. Screenplay: John Silverstein, David Chudnovsky, Raphael D. Silver. Cinematography: Daniel Shulman. Production designer: Deana Sidney. Film editor: Meg Reticker. Music: John Hill. 

Joan Micklin Silver's A Fish in the Bathtub has some funny lines, but an overall shrillness makes it not as much fun as it wants to be. The scene in which Sam (Jerry Stiller) yells "Shut up!" repeatedly at Molly (Anne Meara), his wife of 40 years, at a card party where their closest friends are gathered is a touch too painful. The rest of the film is a slow and sometimes awkward process of reconciliation after Molly decides she's put up with too much -- including the large carp that Sam has inexplicably brought home and keeps in the spare bath -- and moves in with their son, Joel (Mark Ruffalo), and his wife, Sharon (Missy Yager). Joel and Sharon have  been having their problems, too: She wants another child and he's not so sure, plus he's indulging in a flirtation with one of his real estate clients -- an unnecessary subplot. The actors are all pros, and they do what they can with the material, but the movie feels like an overextended TV sitcom episode. 

The Beast Must Die (Román Viñoly Barreto, 1952)

 

Cast: Narciso Ibáñez Menta, Lara Hidalgo, Guillermo Battaglia, Milagros de la Vega, Nathán Pinzón, Beba Bidart, Ernesto Blanco, Gloria Ferrandiz, Humberto Balado, Josefa Goldar. Screenplay: Román Viñoly Barreto, Narciso Ibáñez Menta, based on a novel by Cecil Day-Lewis. Cinematography: Alberto Etchebehere. Art direction: Mario Vanarelli. Film editing: José Serra. Music: Silvio Vernazza. 

The Beast Must Die is a well put-together version of a murder mystery written by Cecil Day-Lewis under his pseudonym Nicholas Blake, a fact that gets an ironic resonance in the story because the protagonist's name, Felix Lane, is also a pseudonym, used to conceal his identity as he plots to murder the man who killed his son. Narciso Ibáñez Menta gives a suave, cool performance as Lane, who has recorded his lethal intent in a diary. The victim, Jorge Rattery (Guillermo Battaglia), is a real nasty who terrorizes his family, any one of whom has a motive as compelling as Lane's for doing away with him. The film starts with the murder, then flashes back to reveal the motive. Some of the subtlety of the ethical dilemma Lane faces when the murder is pinned on the wrong person gets lost in the film, and there's some scenery-chewing acting along the way, but on the whole it's suspenseful and atmospheric -- though the atmosphere is more that of Argentina, where it was made, than of the England that the names of some of the characters, like Nigel and Rhoda, evoke. 

I Like It Like That (Darnell Martin, 1994)

Desiree Casares, Luna Lauren Velez, Jon Seda, and Tomas Melly in I Like It Like That

Cast: Luna Lauren Velez, Jon Seda, Tomas Melly, Desiree Casares, Isaiah Garcia, Jesse Borrego, Lisa Vidal, Griffin Dunne, Rita Moreno, Vincent Laresca, Elvis Nolasco, Sammy Melendez, Jose Soto. Screenplay: Darnell Martin. Cinematography: Alexander Gruszinski. Production design: Scott Chambliss. Film editing: Peter C. Frank. Music: Sergio George.  

I Like It Like That is a lively, noisy dramatic comedy about a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx. It has just enough grit and nuance to keep it from looking as stereotyped and formulaic as it really is. 

The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980)

Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday

Cast: Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Dave King, Bryan Marshall, Derek Thompson, Eddie Constantine, Paul Freeman, P.H. Moriarty, Stephen Davies, Brian Hall, Alan Hall, Paul Barber, Pauline Melville. Screenplay: Barrie Keeffe. Cinematography: Phil Meheux. Art direction: Vic Symonds. Film editing: Mike Taylor. Music: Francis Monkman. 

The Long Good Friday ends with mobster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) being held at gunpoint by a character listed in the credits only as "1st Irishman." It provides a tour de force moment for Hoskins, as he registers a series of emotions -- fear, disgust, resignation, defiance, hope, and whatever the viewer can find there -- using only his face. Only the fact that the Irishman is played by Pierce Brosnan, making his film debut in a tiny role, distracts today from the moment, the still conclusion to an often explosive performance by Hoskins. He's beautifully supported by Helen Mirren as his mistress, Victoria, and a well-chosen cast. Only the rather too heavily laid on score by Francis Monkman feels like a flaw in this solid and entertaining British noir.