Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Bruce Dern and Will Forte in Nebraska

Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacey Keach, Bob Odenkirk, Mary Louise Wilson, Rance Howard, Tim Driscoll, Kevin Ratray, Angela McEwan, Glendora Stitt, Elizabeth Moore, Kevin Kunkel. Screenplay: Bob Nelson. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: J. Dennis Washington. Film editing: Kevin Tent. Music: Mark Orton. 

Like Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo (1996) and Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Alexander Payne's Nebraska takes place in the hollowed-out heartland of the United States. But where those movies went for satire and dark comedy, Payne is going for something tonally more subtle. Pathos nudges up against humor in Nebraska's story of cantankerous old Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), whose emerging dementia persuades him that he has won a million dollars from one of those dodgy but legal magazine subscription promotions like Publishers Clearing House, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Despite the protests of his long-suffering wife, Kate (June Squibb), and his sons, David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk), he continues to insist on going from his home in Billings, Montana, to collect his winnings in Lincoln, Nebraska, even if he has to walk there -- he has lost his drivers license for DUI. After the highway patrol finds him walking along the freeway and brings him back, David finally gives up and agrees to take him to Lincoln, knowing that the trip won't end well but hoping it will put an end to the delusion. The film is longer than it should be -- the side trip to Mount Rushmore is unnecessary -- and there's a whiff of condescension in its portrayal of the residents of the decaying small towns of middle America, but it raked in Oscar nominations for picture, cinematography, and direction, and well-deserved ones for Dern and Squibb. 

The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931)

Phillips Holmes, DeWitt Jennings, and Walter Huston in The Criminal Code

Cast: Walter Huston, Phillips Holmes, Constance Cummings, Boris Karloff, DeWitt Jennings, Mary Doran, Ethel Wales, Clark Marshall, Arthur Hoyt, John St. Polis, Paul Porcasi, Otto Hoffman, John Sheehan. Screenplay: Fred Niblo Jr., Seton I. Miller, based on a play by Martin Flavin. Cinematography: James Wong Howe, Ted Tetzlaff. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Edward Curtiss. Music: Sam Perry. 

Howard Hawks's The Criminal Code is based on a stage play, and it shows. Although it begins with some Hawksian verve -- two guys arguing about 42 cents won in a pinochle game -- it eventually devolves into some rather inert and talky scenes in the office of prison warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston). Brady is a former district attorney who lost a bid for governor and wound up running a prison that houses a lot of the men he convicted. One of them is young Robert Graham (Phillips Holmes), who was persuaded to plead guilty of an accidental crime for which, as even Brady concedes, any good lawyer could have helped him beat the rap. Brady also has a pretty daughter, Mary (Constance Cummings), and when he turns Graham into a trusty responsible for chauffeuring her, you can guess the consequences. But just when it looks like Graham is going to get paroled, he becomes a witness to the murder of an inmate thought to be a stool pigeon. Graham fears that if he fingers the killer (Boris Karloff), he too will suffer the fate of a rat. There are some good scenes in the prison, and Hawks directs the camera more fluidly than is typical of early talkies, but he hasn't yet developed the facility with dialogue that became his hallmark. Huston, for example, keeps interjecting "yeah" into his lines, I think because directors of early talkies -- The Criminal Code was only Hawks's second -- liked to slow down scenes that had a lot of talk because they were afraid audiences used to title cards wouldn't be able to follow what was being said. The film is of interest mostly to Hawks completists, then, but it's good to see Karloff before Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) stereotyped him forever. Look for Andy Devine in a small role -- a convict slicing bread -- before he developed his raspy whine. 

A Chinese Ghost Story II (Ching Siu-tung, 1990)

Joey Wong and Leslie Cheung in A Chinese Ghost Story II

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Joey Wong, Michelle Reis, Jacky Cheung, Wu Ma, Lau Siu-Ming, Waise Lee, Ku Feng, Lau Shun, To Siu-chun. Screenplay: Edward Leung Yiu-ming, Lam Kei-to, Lau Tai-muk. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Special effects: Nick Allder, David H. Watkins. Film editing: Marco Mak. 

A non-stop, no-holds-barred extravaganza of ghosts, demons, monsters, swordsmen, priests, princesses, and whatever else can be dredged up from Chinese myth and legend, Ching Siu-tung's followup to the 1987 original, A Chinese Ghost Story II does what the first film didn't: It makes the characters secondary to the special effects. Which is not to say it isn't entertaining, but the gifts of its attractive performers are almost incidental. The head-spinning plot follows Leslie Cheung's naive young tax collector Ning Choi San in the aftermath of his romance with a beautiful ghost (Joey Wong). Wrongfully imprisoned, he escapes with the aid of his fellow prisoner, the scholar Elder Chu (Ku Feng), on a horse he unwittingly -- Ning does most things by accident -- steals from a magician, Chi Chau (Jacky Cheung), and winds up in the company of two beautiful sisters, Ching Fung (Wong) and Yuet Chi (Michelle Reis), who mistake him for the real Elder Chu. They and their retinue are trying to free their father, Lord Fu (Lau Siu-Ming), who has also been wrongly charged with a crime and now faces execution. And as if all this weren't confusing enough, Ching Fung is an exact double for Ning's ghostly love -- a fact that astonishes Ning but the film doesn't bother to account for. Ning's old accomplice, the Taoist priest played by Wu Ma, returns too. Everything winds up in a welter of supernatural phenomena that features, among other things, a centipede the size of a subway train and much swooping and swirling of mysterious forces. It's a lot of noisy fun if you don't insist on logic and coherence.   

Heroes Shed No Tears (John Woo, 1984)

Eddy Ko in Heroes Shed No Tears

Cast: Eddy Ko, Lam Ching-ying, Philippe Loffredo, Cécile Le Bailly, Chau Sang Lau, Yuet Sang Chin, Ma Ying-chun, Doo Hee Jang, Lee Hye-sook. Screenplay: Peter Ho-Sun Chan, Chiu Leung-chun, John Woo. Cinematography: Kenichi Nakagawa. Art direction: Fung Yuen-chi. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Tang Siu-lam. 

Aside from some of John Woo's characteristically volatile action scenes, his early film Heroes Shed No Tears is a fairly forgettable movie about an incursion of some mercenaries led by soldier of fortune Chan Chung (Eddy Ko) into the drug-running area called the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge. The mission is complicated when Chan is reunited with his young son (Ma Ying-chun) and the team is encumbered not only with the boy but also his pretty aunt (Lee Hye-sook) and a French reporter (Cécile Le Bailly). Along the way, they also join up with Louis (Philippe Loffredo), an American expat, and are menaced by a vicious Vietnamese colonel (Lam Ching-ying), who captures Chan and tortures him. The action is interrupted by some sex scenes at Louis's residence that are uncharacteristic of Yoo's work and which he claims he didn't direct, as well as some pointless comic episodes involving some of Chan's fellow mercenaries. In short, it's sort of a mess, and Woo has expressed regret that it's part of his filmography.

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)

Idris Elba in A House of Dynamite

Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Malachi Beasley. Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim. Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd. Production design: Jeremy Hindle. Film editing: Kirk Baxter. Music: Volker Bertelmann. 

Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite is a very smart movie that evidently went over some people's heads. A chorus of complaints about its ending followed its theatrical release and multiplied when it began streaming on Netflix. The complainers seem to have been expecting a conventional thriller like, for example, Crimson Tide, Tony Scott's 1995 movie about a nuclear threat that is averted at the last moment. Instead, what they got is a depiction of the potential for annihilation that comes from living in a world that is quite literally what the title of the film implies. I don't know what sort of conclusion the dissatisfied viewers might give to the situation depicted, which comes down to "surrender or suicide," as the adviser (Gabriel Basso) tells the president (Idris Elba). The film makes it seem possible that the fate of the world might depend on what it depicts as flimsy contingency plans, a few frightened government and military officials, and what the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) in the film calls "a coin toss." I watched A House of Dynamite on the day that our president announced that he was resuming tests of nuclear weapons, so I may have been more receptive to the movie's message than otherwise, but it still seems to me a well-made and terrifying film. 

Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990)

Waise Lee, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and Jacky Cheung in Bullet in the Head

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Jacky Cheung, Waise Lee, Simon Yam, Yolinda Yam, Cheung Lam, Fennie Yuen. Screenplay: John Woo, Patrick Leung, Janet Chun. Cinematography: Wilson Chan, Ardy Lam, Chai Kittikum Som, Wong Wing-hang. Production design: James Leung. Film editing: John Woo, David Wu. Music: Sherman Chow. 

A harrowing story that begins in a larky mood, John Woo's Bullet in the Head features the usual copious amounts of bloody gunfire, but it lacks the cheeky over-the-top quality of some of his more popular movies. It centers on the adventures of three friends from the wrong side of the tracks in Hong Kong, who think they're going to make big money smuggling stuff into wartime Vietnam, but misjudge the chaotic situation in the country. In Saigon, Ben (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), Fai Jai (Jacky Cheung), and Ming (Waise Lee) connect with the Eurasian Lok (Simon Yam), who works for the gangster Leong (Chung Lam), but wants to escape his control. The four of them make plans to return to Hong Kong, taking with them the nightclub singer Sally (Yolinda Yam), who has been forced into prostitution by Leong. Needless to say, that doesn't turn out to be easy. After a big shootout at Leong's nightclub, in which Sally is wounded. their escape is thwarted by, among other things, the Vietcong, who capture and torture Ben, Fai Jai, and Ming. The friendship of the three is also tested by Ming's greedy insistence on clinging to a box of gold he found in the shootout at Leong's club. Nothing ends well for them. The darkness and seriousness of the story is sometimes at odds with the elaborate action sequences, and Woo was exhausted by the effort to make the film work. It was not a commercial success, but it has moments of real feeling provided by the fine performances of its actors.  

A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon (Tsui Hark, 1989)

Chow Yun-fat in A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Anita Mui, Shih Kien, Saburo Tokito, Maggie Cheung Ho-yee, Chen Wai-lun, Andrew Kam, Foo Wang-tat, Nam Yin. Screenplay: Edward Leung, Tai Foo-ho, Tsui Hark. Cinematography: Horace Wong, Yung Chun-wa, Chik Kim-kiy. Art direction: Lu Zifeng. Film editing: Marco Mak, Tsui Hark, David Wu. Music: Lowell Lo, David Wu.

A stand-alone film posing as a prequel, Tsui Hark's A Better Tomorrow III has only the presence of the most charismatic actor in the first two films, Chow Yun-fat, in the role of Mark Lee, to link it with the first two. And the only significant things it adds to the character are explanations of how he learned to shoot and how he got the black duster that he swaggers about in. The plot is summed up in the subtitle, Love and Death in Saigon. It's 1974 and the Vietnam War is coming to its end when Mark goes there to help his uncle (Shih Kien) and cousin, Michael Cheung Chi-mun (Tony Leung Ka-fai), close up shop in Saigon and return to Hong Kong. But he gets in trouble at the airport and has to be helped out by Chow Ying-kit (Anita Mui), a woman with whom he has been flirting. Though Mark finds Kit attractive, it's his cousin Michael who falls hard for her. She, on the other hand, prefers Mark. She also turns out to be involved in a variety of shady businesses, including gun smuggling. So not only do we have a romantic triangle to spin the plot on, we also have various underworld conflicts as well as the chaos of the fall of Saigon to provide the usual bloodshed. It's not a bad movie: There's plenty of action, Mui and Chow are in good form, and there's some poignancy in the fate of the characters. But it lacks the exhilaration of style that John Woo brought to the first two installments.

A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987)

Ti Lung, Dean Shek, and Chow Yun-fat in A Better Tomorrow II

Cast: Ti Lung, Chow Yun-fat, Leslie Cheung, Dean Shek, Kwan Shan, Emily Chu, Kenneth Tsang, Shing Fui-On, Lam Chung, Ng Man-tat, Peter Wang, Lung Ming-yan, Louis Roth, Regina Kent, Ken Boyle. Screenplay: Chan Hing-ka, Leung Suk-wah, John Woo, Tsui Hark. Cinematography: Wong Wing-hung. Production design: Andy Lee, Luk Tze-fung. Film editing: David Wu. Music: Joseph Koo, Lowell Lo. 

When you have a big action movie hit like A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986), you naturally want to make a sequel. But what do you do when the most popular character was killed off in the first film? You give him a previously unknown identical twin, of course. And not just a look-alike, but a twin with the same mannerisms, like chewing on an unlit matchstick. and equal proficiency at gunplay. And so Chow Yun-fat's Mark Lee is reincarnated in A Better Tomorrow II as Ken Lee. The sequel is bloodier and noisier and more improbable than the original, and it adds a fourth protagonist to the original trio of Ho (Ti Lung), Kit (Leslie Cheung), and Mark, now Ken (Chow): Dean Shek as Lung Sei, the target of a police investigation who turns out to be a good guy being framed. The somewhat too twisty plot takes Lung to New York, fleeing arrest for murder, where he meets up with Ken, a restaurant owner who is in trouble with the mob in America. It also introduces a novel kind of psychotherapy: Lung has a mental breakdown when he learns that the mob back in Hong Kong has killed his daughter and he witnesses the murder of a friend and a little girl. Ken takes it upon himself to heal the catatonic Lung by subjecting him to gunfire: They're attacked by both the Hong Kong and American mobsters. Lung recovers in time to help, and somehow the two of them make their way back home, where they join forces with Ho and Kit. Woo, who was reluctant to make the sequel, agreed in order to give Shek, a friend of his in financial difficulties, a job. Tension between Woo and producer Tsui Hark almost derailed the film, which spends too much time in the New York scenes, but the action sequences are the usual spectacular and inventive overkill. 

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

Chow Yun-fat and Ti Lung in A Better Tomorrow

Cast: Ti Lung, Leslie Cheung, Chow Yun-fat, Emily Chu, Waise Lee, Tien Feng, Kenneth Tsang, Shing Fui-on, Sek Yin-si, Wang Hsieh, Leung Ming, John Woo, Tsui Hark. Screenplay: Chan Hing-ka, Leung Suk-wah, John Woo. Cinematography: Wong Wing-hang. Production design: Lui Chi Leung. Film editing: Ma Kam, David Woo. Music: Joseph Koo. 

John Woo's terrific action thriller A Better Tomorrow is less stylized and more conventionally plotted than his later films, but it provides a satisfactory amount of bullets and blood squibs. It's based on an old trope of melodrama: estranged brothers. Sung Tse-ho (Ti Lung) is a gangster involved in a counterfeit operation, and Sung Tse-kit (Leslie Cheung) is a rookie cop. Ho is trying to go straight, however, and he goes to prison partly to sever his ties with the mob in order to make a fresh start after his release. But Kit finds that his older brother's record is an impediment to his advancement in the police force, and he rejects Ho's attempts to reconcile, blaming him for their father's death. The plot centers on their rapprochement, which is ultimately aided by Ho's best friend and fellow mobster, Mark Lee (Chow Yun-fat). Though billed third, Chow steals the movie as the blithe hit man who gets wounded in a shootout, loses favor with the mob, and eventually turns against them. A Better Tomorrow was such a big hit that sequels became inevitable, but as usual the original is the best. 

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

Shauna Macdonald in The Descent

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone, Oliver Milburn, Molly Kayl, Craig Conway. Screenplay: Neil Marshall. Cinematography: Sam McCurdy. Production design: Simon Bowles. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: David Julyan.

Neil Marshall's The Descent is notorious for having two endings, one for American audiences and a darker, more ambiguous one for the rest of the world. Neither ending, it seems to me, is satisfactory, but the choice itself points out the difficulty with genre films: What sort of conclusion do you put on a movie that has potential spinoffs lurking in its plot? Structurally, The Descent reflects the influence of sequelitis. As a claustrophobe, I was suitably terrified by the film when it looked like it was going to be an exciting and scary survival adventure. But then, midway, The Descent turns into a monster movie, and at that point it became "just a movie" to me: actors in makeup on obvious sound stage sets. I also preferred the movie when it seemed that there were going to be real characters in it, but then Marshall fails to provide distinct personalities for each of the six women who brave the adventure. Four of them fall by the way as the hero (Shauna Macdonald as Sarah) and the villain (Natalie Mendoza as Juno) battle each other along with the threatening creepers. We know Sarah is the hero because she has previously suffered a terrible loss, just as we know Juno is the villain because she's an adrenaline junkie likely to put them in danger. Skillfully made, and undeniably involving, The Descent sadly falls into genre clichés.