The Sealed Soil (Marva Nabili, 1977)

Flora Shabaviz in The Sealed Soil

Cast: Flora Shabaviz. Screenplay: Marva Nabili. Cinematography: Barbod Taheri. Music: Hooreh. 

With its static camera, long takes, and lack of a conventional plot, Marva Nabili's The Sealed Soil has earned comparisons to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975). It has the same unrelenting focus on a central figure, in this case Rooy-Bekhir (Flora Shabaviz), an 18-year-old woman in an Iranian village, who resists pressures from her family and her society to enter an arranged marriage. She is told at one point that her mother was engaged to be married at the age of 7. Eventually, the pressure to conform breaks her down. Much of the film focuses on her daily life in a place that seems suspended in time -- it's a film in which ambience rather than incident dominates. Made on the sly, with Shabaviz the only professional actor in its cast, the film was smuggled out of Iran (where it has never been exhibited) and edited back at the City University of New York, where Nabili was a film student. For those willing to endure its lack of narrative urgency, The Sealed Soil has a quiet power.  

Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971)

Bobby Kendall in Pink Narcissus

Cast: Bobby Kendall, Don Brooks, Charles Ludlam. Screenplay: James Bidgood. Cinematography: James Bidgood. Art direction: James Bidgood. Film editing: Martin Jay Sadoff. Music: Gary Goch, Martin Jay Sadoff. 

James Bidgood's shoestring fantasy is a reminder of the fine line between the erotic and the comic. Filmed in his apartment with a cast of friends, it's a lush evocation of the daydreams of a man (Bobby Kendall) waiting for the client for his sexual favors, in which the man, credited as Pan, imagines himself in various guises: a bullfighter, a harem boy, a Roman slave, and so on. In short, the familiar setups for gay porn. Though there is plenty of male nudity and at least one sexually explicit moment, Pink Narcissus never quite crosses over into pornography -- at least in the eye of this beholder. The score is made up of snippets of Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and a Haydn horn concerto, designed to set up a languorous mood. There's no plot, but none is needed. The usual word for this sort of film is camp, and the presence of Charles Ludlam in a variety of roles reinforces that adjective. Certainly it's all a little too much, and the blazes of color, soft-focus photography, and busy editing are sometimes eye-straining, but it's still an intriguing glimpse into one man's imagination.   

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)

Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Amy Madigan, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Whitmer Thomas, Callie Schuttera, Scarlett Sher (voice). Screenplay: Zach Cregger. Cinematography: Larkin Seiple. Production design: Tom Hammock. Film editing: Joe Murphy. Music: Zach Cregger, Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay.

In Weapons, Zach Cregger takes a gut-level nightmare, the abduction of children, and turns it into a horror movie centered on social scapegoating. When all of the children except for one in the third-grade class taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) disappear one night, she becomes the target of suspicion. The details of their disappearance is uncanny: Seventeen children all left their homes at the same time of night and completely vanished, with only a few videos made by home surveillance cameras to record their departure. The police are baffled even after grilling Justine and the boy (Cary Christopher) who was left behind. Justine is harassed: The word WITCH is painted on her car, and she begins to drink heavily. One of her chief accusers is Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew was one of the disappeared. Cregger tells the story in overlapping segments, each from a different point of view, a device that’s a little too repetitive but eventually pays off, revealing a villain with supernatural powers – ordinarily a cop-out device in a mystery story, but made effective by a wonderfully creepy performance by Amy Madigan. There are some plot holes that irritate those who look too closely, but Weapons is the kind of film you watch without expecting actuality to intrude.

Dr. T and the Women (Robert Altman, 2000)

Shelley Long and Richard Gere in Dr. T and the Women

Cast: Richard Gere, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Shelley Long, Laura Dern, Tara Reid, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler, Robert Hays, Matt Malloy, Andy Richter, Lee Grant, Janine Turner. Screenplay: Anne Rapp. Cinematography: Jan Kiesser. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Geraldine Peroni. Music: Lyle Lovett. 

More noisy than funny, Robert Altman's Dr. T and the Women has his characteristic generous casting and overlapping dialogue, but it also displays the limitations of both. We want to see more of some of the performers, like Lee Grant and Laura Dern, than we do, and we want them to say cleverer things than they do. Richard Gere plays a Dallas gynecologist whose office is crowded with eager patients and whose family is full of women demanding his attention. Though Altman's movie was scripted by a woman, Altman portrays women as so foolishly self-obsessed that when he delivers a baby at the end of the film, his proclamation, "It's a boy," is made to sound like a cry of relief. 

Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974)

Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas

Cast: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Marian Waldman, Andrea Martin, James Edmond, Doug McGrath, Art Hindle, Lynne Griffin. Screenplay: Roy Moore. Cinematography: Reginald H. Morris. Art direction: Karen Bromley. Film editing: Stan Cole. Music: Carl Zittrer. 

One of the progenitors of the "the call is coming from inside the house" trope, Bob Clark's Black Christmas generates a lot of suspense once you get through the first hour, which is full of cheesy jokes and naughty talk, much of it given to Margot Kidder as Barb, one of the doomed coeds in a sorority house being stalked by a psychopath. Bob Clark's pacing is off in this first part of the movie, but it doesn't much matter once the victims keep dropping. The Christmas setting is gratuitous and the father of the first victim is played oddly for laughs, so the film also takes its time finding a consistent tone. Still, there are those who think it's a classic of the genre. 

Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman, 1946)

Bill Williams and Susan Hayward in Deadline at Dawn

Cast: Bill Williams, Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas, Joseph Calleia, Osa Massen, Lola Lane, Jerome Cowan, Marvin Miller, Roman Bohnen, Steven Geray, Joe Sawyer, Constance Worth, Joseph Crehan. Screenplay: Clifford Odets, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Roland Gross. Music: Hanns Eisler. 

In Harold Clurman's Deadline at Dawn, screenwriter Clifford Odets takes a familiar thriller premise -- a guy wakes up after a blackout bender with a dead woman and can't prove that he didn't kill her -- and almost talks it to death. The guy is a sailor on shore leave, Alex Winkler (Bill Williams), and in his effort to determine whether he killed Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), he gains the help of a taxi dancer, June Goffe (Susan Hayward), and a taxi driver, Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas). The result is a head-spinning series of encounters with various unsavory types leading to a conclusion that will be surprising only if you haven't learned to suspect everyone in a whodunit. This was celebrated stage director Clurman's only film and he makes it more theatrical than it should be, largely with the help of Odets, who was also a playwright in love with florid dialogue. So we get lines like "If you hear a peculiar noise, it's my skin creeping" and "People with wax heads should keep out of the sun." Fortunately, Odets doesn't give any of these screwy lines to his protagonist, Alex, so we like him all the more for his simplicity. None of Deadline at Dawn makes very much sense, but that's what's entertaining about it. 

Guilty Bystander (Joseph Lerner, 1950)

Zachary Scott and Mary Boland in Guilty Bystander

Cast: Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Mary Boland, Sam Levene, J. Edward Bromberg, Kay Medford, Jed Prouty, Harry Landers, Elliott Sullivan, Ray Julian, Dennis Patrick. Screenplay: Don Ettinger, based on a novel by Whit Masterson and H. William Miller. Cinematography: Gerald Hirschfeld, Russell Harlan. Production design: Leo Kerz. Film editing: Geraldine Lerner. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin. 

Mary Boland made her name as a character actress playing dotty matrons like the Countess De Lave in The Women (George Cukor, 1939) and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940), so it's fun to see her play against type as Smitty, the tough old bird who is the proprietor of a run-down residence hotel in Joseph Lerner's Guilty Bystander. She's entertaining to watch but it's more a collection of mannerisms and speech patterns borrowed from Marie Dressler, Mae West, and Jean Harlow than a credible character. But then the movie, a whodunit with an alcoholic ex-cop for protagonist, feels borrowed from a lot of sources, including the snarled plots and seedy milieus of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Zachary Scott is Max Thursday, Smitty's booze-sodden house detective. His ex-wife, Georgia (Faye Emerson), comes to him for help when their small son goes missing, along with her brother, Fred (Dennis Patrick). Rousing himself from his stupor, Thursday goes on a hunt that takes him into several hives of sleaze, gets him shot in the arm, and even leads him on a chase through the subway tunnels of New York City. The kidnapping turns out to have something to do with diamond smuggling, but atmosphere is more important to the film than plot. Good location shooting lifts Guilty Bystander above the routine, but not by much.  

Blackout (Terence Fisher, 1954)

Belinda Lee and Dane Clark in Blackout

Cast: Dane Clark, Belinda Lee, Betty Ann Davies, Eleanor Summerfield, Andrew Osborn, Harold Lang, Jill Melford, Alvis Maben, Michael Golden, Nora Gordon, Alfie Bass. Screenplay: Richard H. Landau, based on a novel by Helen Nielsen. Cinematography: Walter J. Harvey. Art direction: J. Elder Wills. Film editing: Maurice Rootes. Music: Ivor Slaney. 

Any movie that starts with Cleo Laine singing "St. Louis Blues" even before the credits run has my attention. Unfortunately, Terence Fisher's Blackout (aka Murder by Proxy) doesn't repay it. It's a welter of plot twists and red herrings and withheld information that begins with a drunken American (Dane Clark) being propositioned in an unusual way by a beautiful woman (Belinda Lee). Naturally he wakes up the next morning in a place he's never been before, with a furious hangover and a blood-spotted topcoat. From then on, he keeps sticking his nose in places he shouldn't and getting mixed up with people he should avoid. It's standard whodunit stuff, but without much punch in either performances or direction. The chief reward of the film for me is that it added to my collection of Mondegreens and closed-caption goofs: When Laine sings the line in "St. Louis Blues" about the St. Louie woman's "store-bought hair," the captioner turns it into "stubbled hair." 
 

Pieces of April (Peter Hedges, 2003)

Katie Holmes in Pieces of April

Cast: Katie Holmes, Derek Luke, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Alison Pill, John Gallagher Jr., Alice Drummond, Sean Hayes, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Lillias White, Leila Danette, Sisqó, Adrian Martinez, Armando Riesco. Screenplay: Peter Hedges. Cinematography: Tami Reiker. Production design: Rick Butler. Film editing: Mark Livolsi. Music: Stephin Merritt. 

April (Katie Holmes) is the black sheep of the Burns family, so when she decides to make amends with them, she invites them for Thanksgiving dinner in the grungy apartment that she shares with her boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke), in a dicey New York neighborhood. It's a formulaic setup for all sorts of formulaic mishaps, starting with April's discovery that her oven doesn't work, yet somehow Peter Hedges manages to transcend formulas and a collection of characters just shy of caricature to create a warm-hearted feel-good movie. Much of the burden of transcendence falls on the shoulders of the actors, particularly Patricia Clarkson as April's mother, Joy, who is dying of breast cancer. Clarkson earned an Oscar nomination for the role. It's part road movie, as the Burnses journey from the suburbs to the inner city, and part sitcom farce, but it has considerable charm. I couldn't help comparing Pieces of April, however, to a better suburbanites-in-the-city comedy, The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996).  

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers

Cast: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield, Edie McClurg, Russell Means, Balthazar Getty, Stephen Wright, Sean Stone, Jeremiah Bitsui, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Joe Grifasi, Everett Quinton. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, David Veloiz, Richard Rutowski, Oliver Stone. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Victor Kempster. Film editing: Brian Berdan, Hank Corwin. Music: Brent Lewis. 

Oliver Stone's sledgehammer satire Natural Born Killers began with a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino in which the central character was the filmmaker Wayne Gale, played in Stone's version by Robert Downey Jr. In the rewrite, Stone and co-writers David Veloz and Richard Rutowski shifted the focus to the killers, Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis). Tarantino has since regretted the loss of control over his story, and it's easy to see why. A Tarantino version might be at least as violent and bloody, but it would have had some wit to it. Mickey and Mallory might have been more like Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, the couple played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction (1994) -- lethal but oddly lovable. Stone makes all of his characters loathsome -- if we have sympathy for Mickey and Mallory, it's because everyone around them is worse, from Mallory's parents, played by Rodney Dangerfield and Edie McClurg, to the gas station attendant played by Balthazar Getty, to the detective played by Tom Sizemore and the warden played by Tommy Lee Jones. Jones in particular is directed to play against his usual type, a slow-burning character like the marshal in The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993), and go wildly over the top. Stone is less interested in characters or even in making a point about media exploitation than in showing off film technique, from Dutch angles to the mixing of various film stocks and switches from color to black and white. In short, Natural Born Killers is a headache-inducing mess.