The Linguini Incident (Richard Shepard, 1991)

Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie in The Linguini Incident

Cast: Rosanna Arquette, David Bowie, Eszter Balint, Andre Gregory, Buck Henry, Viveca Lindfors, Marlee Matlin. Screenplay: Richard Shepard. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Marcia Hinds. Film editing: Sonya Polonsky, David Dean. Music: Thomas Newman.

Richard Shepard's The Linguini Incident is frequently called "off-beat," but to me it just seems off. Its gags never quite land, its narrative is scattered, its design is drab, and its lead characters, played by Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie, have very little chemistry. Still, it has a cult following that rescued it from obscurity after initial box office and critical failure and inspired a "director's cut" that added ten minutes to its run time. I admit that I laughed a few times, as when Arquette, playing a would-be escape artist who idolizes Houdini, tries to make her way out of a bag in which she's been locked, but even that bit goes on just a few seconds beyond the point at which it's funniest. 

Anatomy of Hell (Catherine Breillat, 2004)

Amira Casar and Rocco Siffredi in Anatomy of Hell

Cast: Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi, voice of Catherine Breillat. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on her novel. Cinematography: Giorgos Avanitis, Guillaume Schiffman. Production design: Jean-Marie Millon, Pedro Sá. Film editing: Pascale Chavance. 

I don't quite believe anyone who says they found Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell boring. There's certainly enough that's unforeseen in it to hold the attention of even the most jaded viewer. It may be that we expect better of Breillat, who has made her reputation on candid treatments of sex, especially female sexuality, so that the more novel transgressive elements of the film feel less like the work of a major director than of one who's out just to shock and/or disgust. And it may certainly be that the dialogue in the film feels like talk for talk's sake, a tiresome attempt to stimulate the mind as well as the body. The film also seems not to understand sexual pleasure and desire very well, especially where it comes to gay men. I'm not sure that it demonstrates homophobia on Breillat's part, as some have charged, so much as a wrong-headed feint at inclusivity. Still, so few films today give us much to talk about after viewing, so we ought to credit Breillat with an attempt at that at the very least. 

Kiru (Kenji Misumi, 1962)

Raizo Ichikawa in Kiru

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Shiho Fujimura, Mayumi Nagisa, Masayo Banri, Jun'ichiro Narita, Matasaburo Niwa, Teru Tomota, Eijiro Yanagi, Shigeru Amachi, Yoshio Inaba. Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. Cinematography: Shozo Honda. Film editing: Kanji Suganuma. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

I knew Kenji Misumi's work mostly from the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which is fairly unabashed in its bloodletting, so I was surprised by the almost meditative tone of Kiru, which is also known as Destiny's Son. It's the story of Shingo Takakura (Raizo Ichikawa) and his search for a father figure. When he comes of age, Shingo asks the man he thinks is his father for permission to go on what you might call walkabout: to spend a year wandering in 19th century Japan. He returns home with a secret: He has learned a mastery of an indefensible sword technique. Unfortunately, this mastery inspires an attack on his home, in which his supposed father is killed, but not before revealing to Shingo his true parentage. That sends Shingo on another pilgrimage in which he meets his biological father and eventually a father figure, Matsudaira (Eijiro Yanagi), the head of a powerful clan whom Shingo serves as a samurai. It's a film full of stylized combat and astonishing scenes that proceeds at a contemplative pace which belies its relative brevity (71 minutes): One tense scene, for example, has no background sound other than the intermittent call of a bird. 

The Cry of Granuaile (Dónal Foreman, 2022)

Dale Dickey in The Cry of Granuaile

Cast: Dale Dickey, Judith Roddy, Andrew Bennett, Rebecca Guinnane, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Donald Clarke, Bob Quinn. Screenplay: Dónal Foreman. Cinematography: Diana Vidrascu. Art direction: Nina McGowan. Film editing: Dónal Foreman. Music: Nick Roth, Olesya Zdorovetska. 

Dale Dickey is a familiar face: She has 140 film and TV credits spanning almost 30 years. You've probably seen her most often playing hard-bitten frontier, backwoods, or Southern women, but she's demonstrated skill and versatility in all her performances. So it's good to see her in a leading role, playing Maire, an American filmmaker visiting Ireland to try to launch a film about Grace O'Malley, aka Gráinne O'Malley or Gráinne Mhaol or Granuaile, or often just the Pirate Queen. It's a film of little plot beyond the development of the relationship of Maire and her guide, Cáit (Judith Roddy), as they travel through Ireland to see the places where the legend of Granuaile began in the 16th century. It's a picturesque and poetic film in which the remote past rubs up against the feminist present, and mostly held together by the performances of  Dickey and Roddy.  

Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023)

Samuel Kircher and Léa Drucker in Last Summer

Cast: Léa Drucker, Samuel Kircher, Oliver Rabourdin, Clotilde Courau, Serena Hu, Angela Chen, Romain Maricau, Romane Violeau, Marie Lucas, Neilia Da Costa, Lila-Rose Gilberti, Jean-Christophe Pilloix. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Pascal Bonitzer, based on a screenplay by Marie-Louis Käehne and May el-Toukhy. Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie. Production design: Sébastien Danos. Film editing: François Quiqueré. 

When we first meet Anne (Léa Drucker), she's using her considerable skills as a lawyer to help a young woman prosecute her rapist, and we learn that she has devoted much of her career to helping women in abusive situations. So why does Anne, all of a sudden, start having sex with her 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher)? Catherine Breillat's Last Summer never quite comes to terms with Anne's hypocrisy, which is compounded by the lies she tells to her husband after his son tells him of the affair. Still, the film works, thanks to skillful performances by Drucker and Oliver Rabourdin as Anne's husband, Pierre, a rather dull businessman who doesn't have the emotional wherewithal to cope with the revelation. Breillat plays down the sensational aspects of the plot in various ways: in the sex scenes, the focus is on faces rather than bodies, and in the confrontation of husband and wife, the violence is emotional rather than physical. Even the revelation that Pierre has been told of the affair is postponed until he and Anne have had dinner with their two young adopted daughters and sent them to bed, although you can sense the tension building. Last Summer is a fine example of directorial restraint, up to the ending. The only question is whether restraint is appropriate to the subject matter.  

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996)

Cast: Voices of Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Cloris Leachman, Robert Stack, Eric Bogosian, John Doman, Tim Guinee, David Letterman, Richard Linklater, Greg Kinnear, David Spade. Screenplay: Mike Judge, Joe Stillman. Cinematography: David J. Miller. Art direction: Jeff Buckland. Film editing: Gunter Glinka, Terry Kelley, Neil Lawrence. Music: John Frizzell. 

Maybe the funniest thing about Beavis and Butt-Head Do America is reading serious film critics trying to defend it. "Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message," intoned Roger Ebert. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden found it provided something like the catharsis Aristotle found in tragedy, saying of its protagonists, "They distill the agony of adolescence, the queasy feeling of being trapped in a body going through monstrous changes, at the same time that they purge it of its terror." For those of us less serious about wasting our time, let's just say it's dumb fun and a flashback to the Clinton era, which seems somehow more innocent than the current one.

Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006)

Paula Patton and Denzel Washington in Deja Vu

Cast: Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel, Adam Goldberg, Elden Henson, Erika Alexander, Bruce Greenwood, Rick Hutchman, Matt Craven, Donna W. Scott, Elle Fanning. Screenplay: Bill Marsilii, Terry Rossio. Cinematography: Paul Cameron. Production design: Chris Seagers. Film editing: Jason Hellmann, Chris Lebenzon. Music: Jared Lee Gosselin, Harry Gregson-Williams. 

Tony Scott's Deja Vu (the screen title doesn't have the accent marks) is a Scott specialty: a hyperactive thriller with a charismatic star. Denzel Washington's casual savoir faire as an uncannily savvy agent for the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms keeps the movie alive as it ventures out from conventional crime-solving into time travel sci-fi. The movie opens with the sinking of a New Orleans ferry by a mad bomber. Washington's Doug Carlin is on the scene to investigate, and immediately starts finding clues that everyone else has missed. (He investigated the Oklahoma City bombing, so he has some expertise to bring to bear.) So he's asked to join a federal team headed by Agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) that's using a top-secret spyware gizmo that allows them to look back in time at the moments surrounding the explosion. Carlin thinks that a woman named Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), who actually died before the explosion, is somehow linked to it. It's convenient that Claire was also quite pretty, so Carlin gets somewhat more fascinated with her case. So when he learns that the technology can potentially be used not only to look at the past but also travel to it, you can see where this is headed. There's the usual sci-fi talk about time lines and altering history, but Scott keeps things moving along through it, so although what happens probably doesn't make sense, it's hard to care. Washington gets good support from a lively cast.    

Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)

Linda Manz and Dennis Hopper in Out of the Blue

Cast: Linda Manz, Dennis Hopper, Sharon Farrell, Don Gordon, Raymond Burr, Leon Eriksen, Fiona Brody, David L. Crowley, Joan Hoffman, Carl Nelson. Screenplay: Leonard Yakir, Brenda Nelson. Cinematography: Marc Champion. Production design: Leon Eriksen. Film editing: Doris Dyck. Music: Tom Lavin. 

You'd think that a film that begins with a truck barreling into a school bus full of kids couldn't get any worse. Out of the Blue does. The unpleasantness has only begun for the driver of the truck, Don (Dennis Hopper); his wife, Kathy (Sharon Farrell); and their daughter, Cindy (Linda Manz), known as Cebe -- short for "citizens' band," as in radio. Don goes to prison, Kathy is a heroin addict, and Cebe, in her early teens, does whatever she wants, which includes idolizing Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious, running away from home, and loving her father until she confronts the truth about him. The truth is not pretty. Despite the efforts of a child psychologist, Dr. Brean (Raymond Burr), to rescue Cebe from her dysfunctional parents and aimless life, the outcome is bleak. In the original script, Dr. Brean played a more positive role in Cebe's life, but when Hopper took over as director he was of a different mind. Let's just say that this is a painful, harrowing movie with some gritty performances and a grim determination to face the unpleasant fact that some lives are doomed. Is it a good film? Well, some films transcend such questions, and Out of the Blue is one of them. 

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Tomas Milian in Identification of a Woman

Cast: Tomas Milian, Daniel Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel, Veronica Lazar, Enrica Antonioni, Sandra Monteleoni, Marcel Bozzufi, Giampaolo Saccarola, Dado Ruspoli, Arianna De Rosa. Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Gérard Brach, Tonino Guerra. Cinematography: Carlo Di Palma. Production design: Andrea Crisanti. Film editing: Michelangelo Antonioni. Music: John Foxx. 

In the middle of Identification of a Woman, the protagonist, Niccolò (Tomas Milian), and his girlfriend, Mavi (Daniela Silverio), get lost in a fog. They emerge from it eventually, but they leave some of the audience behind, to judge from the rather chilly critical reception. Niccolò is a film director trying to focus his ideas for a new film, and you can see from his experiences how much of Antonioni's own frustration in trying to make his ideas cohere is reflected in the film. The difficulty may lie in the milieu, the 1980s, the Reagan-Thatcher era, with its triumphant resurgence of conservatism and capitalism -- so different from the angst-ridden, activist, youth-oriented 1960s in which Antonioni made his name. The political, social, and sexual concerns that seethed underneath the films of the '60s were exploded by Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970), leaving him lost for a subject. Even the sex in Identification of a Woman, though more explicit than his earlier films, has no heat, no risk, no daring. 

In the Folds of the Flesh (Sergio Bergonzelli, 1970)

Eleanora Rossi Drago and Pier Angeli in In the Folds of the Flesh

Cast: Eleanora Rossi Drago, Pier Angeli, Fernando Sancho, Alfredo Mayo, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, María Rosa Sclauzero, Victor Barrera, Gaetano Imbró, Luciano Catenacci, Bruno Ciangola. Screenplay: Fabio De Agostini, Sergio Bergonzelli, Mario Caiano. Cinematography: Mario Pacheco. Art direction: Eduardo Torre de la Fuente. Film editing: Donatella Baglivo. Music: Jesús Villa Rojo. 

Death by cuckoo clock. That's one of the less outrageous moments in the violent vulgarity that is In the Folds of the Flesh, a film that goes so far over the top that you realize there isn't a top. Murder, incest, rape, Nazi extermination camps, gratuitous nudity, orgasmic bathing -- there's almost nothing that Sergio Bergonzelli's exercise in the worst possible taste won't exploit. Throw in a couple of pet vultures and some Etruscan skeletons along with multiple mistaken identities and some truly awful performances, and you've got a trash heap of a movie that even some lovers of horror films and giallo are inclined to admit goes too far. If you still really want to see it, don't say I didn't warn you.  

 

Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

Megumi Okina in Ju-on: The Grudge

Cast: Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara, Yui Ichikawa, Kanji Tsuda, Kayoko Shibata, Yukako Kukuri, Suri Matsuda, Yoji Tanaka, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Hideo Sakaki, Takashi Matsuyama. Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu. Cinematography: Tokusho Kikumura. Production design: Toshiharu Tokiwa. Film editing: Nobuyuki Takahashi. Music: Shiro Sato. 

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Grudge didn't scare me much, partly because I go to horror movies to watch the techniques used to scare people, but also because its major effect is simple creepiness. Some of that comes from the nonlinear narrative technique: We spend so much of our attention on sorting out when things happened and to whom that the story doesn't build the suspense it might. This is a feature, not a bug in Shimizu's scheme of things. The essential point is that a murder took place in a house, which then became haunted by the victims, and that the evil infecting the house is spread by anyone who visits it. In fact, it's spread so widely that there's a hint -- shots of empty streets -- that it has begun to infect the entire city. While the movie is undoubtedly unsettling, I think it needs better character development to have its best effect. 

Twelve Angry Men (William Friedkin, 1997)

Cast: Courtney B. Vance, Ossie Davis, George C. Scott, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Dorian Harewood, James Gandolfini, Tony Danza, Jack Lemmon, Hume Cronyn, Mykelti Williamson, Edward James Olmos, William Petersen, Mary McDonnell. Screenplay: Reginald Rose. Cinematography: Fred Schuler. Production design: Bill Malley. Film editing: Augie Hess. 

William Friedkin's Twelve Angry Men is not so easily dismissed as an unnecessary remake of Sidney Lumet's classic 1957 film, itself a remake of Reginald Rose's 1954 television drama. Forty years of change have taken place, and although such a jury today would almost certainly have women on it, at least Friedkin's version includes four Black men. One of them, strikingly, is the most virulent racist on the panel: a former Nation of Islam follower played by Mykelti Williamson, who delivers a vicious diatribe against Latinos. Which incidentally brings up another anomaly: There are no Latinos on this jury, even though it is impaneled in New York City, which certainly has a significant Latino population. Oddly, one of the actors, Edward James Olmos, is Latino, but he plays an Eastern European immigrant. The rant of the juror played by Williamson has perhaps even more significance today than it did in 1997, after an election campaign tainted by racist taunts against immigrants: The speech sounds like it might have been delivered at Donald Trump's infamous Madison Square Garden rally. As for the film itself, it retains the 1954 movie's power to entertain, if only the pleasure of watching 12 good actors at peak performance (and in George C. Scott's case, a bit over the peak). It also retains the tendency to preachiness, like a dramatized civics lesson, though maybe we need that more than ever.  

The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961)

Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf

Cast: Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed, Yvonne Romain, Catherine Feller, Anthony Dawson, Josephine Llewellyn, Richard Wordsworth, Hira Talfrey, Justin Walters, John Gabriel, Warren Mitchell, Anne Blake. Screenplay: Anthony Hinds, based on a novel by Guy Endore. Cinematography: Arthur Grant. Production design: Bernard Robinson. Film editing: Alfred Cox. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

Hammer Films thoroughly exploited the public taste for monster movies by borrowing story ideas from the classic black-and-white horror films of the 1930s and '40s that originated at Universal Studios. It gave Dracula and Frankenstein's creature multiple outings, but surprisingly only once made a film about a werewolf. It was a success, and launched the career of Oliver Reed, who played Leon Corledo, a young man afflicted by lycanthropic tendencies. Reed actually doesn't appear in The Curse of the Werewolf until well into the film, after an extensive backstory that explains how he became a monster under the spell of the full moon. That's the chief flaw of this otherwise solid, if not terribly scary film, which is handsomely photographed by Arthur Grant and moodily scored by Benjamin Frankel. The bulk of the narrative is handled by Clifford Evans as Don Alfredo Corledo, Leon's adopted father. Reed doesn't get a chance to wolf out until the very end of the movie, but he does so effectively.  

Early David Cronenberg

Clara Mayer in Stereo

Stereo (David Cronenberg, 1969)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jack Messinger, Paul Mulholland, Iain Ewing, Arlene Mlodzik, Clara Mayer, Glenn McCauley. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg. 

Ronald Mlodzik in Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 1970)

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Ronald Mlodzik, John Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Paul Mulholland, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, William Haslam, Raymond Woodley, Stefan Czernecki, Rafe Macpherson, Willem Poolman. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: David Cronenberg. Film editing: David Cronenberg.  

I can't imagine there's much of an audience for David Cronenberg's Stereo and Crimes of the Future (a title he reused in the 2022 feature, which borrows an element of the 1970 film but otherwise has no resemblance to the first one) except among film scholars and passionate devotees of his work. They look like the work of a film school student, although Cronenberg was teaching himself how to make movies at the time. Both are silent except for voiceovers that do what they can to give the images a narrative shape. In the case of Stereo, there's very little of that: The voiceovers sound like excerpts of lectures given by social science professors about a research project concentrated on telepathy and sexuality. Crimes of the Future has a more complex narrative line, as Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik), a dermatologist who heads a clinic called the House of Skin, tells about the attempts to halt a plague caused by cosmetics. It's a creepier film than Stereo, more in the line with Cronenberg's later work, with a nice performance by Mlodzik, who appeared in several of his films before entering the clergy.    

An Egyptian Story (Youssef Chahine, 1982)

Nour El-Sherif and Mohamed Mounir in An Egyptian Story

Cast: Nour El-Sherif, Oussama Nadir, Mohsen Mohieddin, Yousra, Ahmed Mehrez, Mohamed Mounir, Ragaa Hussein, Seif Abdelrahman, Hanan, Layla Hamadah, Magda El-Khatib, Ragaa Al-Gidawy. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine. Cinematograpby: Mohsen Nasr. Art direction: Gabriel Karraze. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Gamal Salamah. 

An Egyptian Story is the middle film of Youssef Chahine's autobiographical "Alexandria trilogy," and it may be the most accessible to people not familiar with his work. Perhaps inspired by Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), it centers on the memories and fantasies of a film director, Yehia Choukry Mourad (Nour El-Sherif), who is Chahine's alter ego, as he undergoes open heart surgery. Some of the action takes place in a set designed to resemble Yehia's chest cavity, where a trial takes place. The defendant is Yehia's "inner child," played by young Oussama Nadir, who is on trial for killing the mature Yehia -- though he isn't really dead yet. Key events of Yehia's life take place in flashbacks that are sometimes realistic, sometimes surreal. In the first film of the trilogy, Alexandria ... Why? (1979), Yehia was played by Mohsen Mohieddin, who appears in this film as Yehia as a young man. In the third film, Alexandria Again and Forever (1990), Chahine himself takes the role as the aging Yehia. Because of the trial setting, the narrative of An Egyptian Story is more linear than the first and third stories in the trilogy, and might be the one to watch if you're just getting started with Chahine's work or if, like me, you're not well versed in the history of Egypt in the 20th century that serves as the backdrop of Yehia's story. Chahine doesn't spare himself in any of the films, revealing much about his ego and ambition, his neglect of his family, and even hinting rather broadly at his bisexuality. Those more familiar with his work may find An Egyptian Story a little less colorful and creative than the others, but it's still a remarkable movie.  

Hold Your Man (Sam Wood, 1933)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess, Muriel Kirkland, Garry Owen, Barbara Barondess, Elizabeth Patterson, Blanche Friderici, Theresa Harris, George Reed. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Howard Emmett Rogers. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. 

Part sexy pre-Code romp and part weepie melodrama, Hold Your Man succeeds on both counts. Clark Gable plays small-time con man Eddie Hall, who while fleeing from the cops winds up in the apartment of Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), while she's taking a bath. He winds up there for good until he slugs an intruder into her apartment, accidentally killing him. He takes it on the lam and she takes the rap, going to a women's prison where she learns that she's carrying his child. The denouement, in which Ruby's fellow inmates help unite her with Eddie, is full of suspense. In a surprisingly almost enlightened twist, the heroine of this section of the movie is a Black prisoner, Lily Mae (Theresa Harris), whose father, a minister (George Reed), just happens to be at the prison for visitors' day, and thus available with a little maneuvering to marry Ruby and Eddie. (I say "almost enlightened" because neither Harris nor Reed gets a screen credit, and an alternate ending was filmed for Southern release, in which the minister was played by Henry B. Walthall.) The switch from hijinks among lowlifes to redemptive love story is a little jarring, but Harlow was never more in her element, and Gable's smirky charm is engaging.  

Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015)

Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, and Jesuthasan Antonythasan in Dheepan

Cast: Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, Vincent Rottier, Faouzi Bensaïdi, Marc Zinga, Bass Dhem, Franck Falise, Joséphine de Meaux, Jean-Baptiste Pouilloux. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré. Cinematography: Éponine Momenceau. Production design: Marcel Barthélémy. Music: Nicolas Jaar. 

Writer-director Jacques Audiard has a recurring theme in his films: the search for redemption thwarted by past transgressions. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), for example, an enforcer for a corrupt real estate firm decides to turn away from the gangster life of his father and instead follow in the footsteps of his mother, a classical pianist, but doesn't succeed. And in his current film, Emilia Pérez, a drug lord transitions from male to female, but old relationships undo the attempt to become a better person. Much of Dheepan is a stirring, fascinating story about a makeshift family: three unrelated refugees from the civil war in Sri Lanka, who take on new names and pose as husband, wife, and daughter to escape the country and find safety in a suburb of Paris. How they manage to endure cultural, social, and linguistic changes and form a new family is the heart of the film. Unfortunately, they find themselves in a housing development that is the locus of a turf war between various drug cartels, and Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) discovers that his old identity as a fighter for the Tamils in Sri Lanka hasn't been hidden. Memories of that old conflict possess him, and Audiard climaxes his story by having Dheepan pull off a single-handed rescue of Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and Ilayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), resorting to old combat techniques. Although this part of the film is exciting, it's a reversion to conventional movie-making, turning Dheepan into Rambo, and it upends the neo-realistic style of the rest of the film. 

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)

Zoe Saldaña in Emilia Pérez

Cast: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir, Eduardo Aladro, Emilio Hasan. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, based on a novel by Boris Razon. Cinematography: Paul Guilhaume. Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay. Film editing: Juliette Welfling. Music: Camille, Clément Ducol. 

While I was watching Emilia Pérez I was caught up in the audacity of its neat intermeshing of drama with song and dance, but when it ended I felt let down. Jacques Audiard accomplishes what he set out to do: tell a story about a drug lord who transitions from male to female in search of authenticity and redemption. And he does it with the help of superb performances by Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, and Selena Gomez, and witty choreography by Damien Jalet. But the film is all surface: It doesn't treat its characters as real people but rather as figures in a neo-noir melodrama laden with contemporary attitudes about sexuality and identity. The ending is far more conventional than I expected from such an interesting premise, turning the premise into a gimmick.

The Killer That Stalked New York (Earl McEvoy, 1950)

Evelyn Keyes in The Killer That Stalked New York

Cast: Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, William Bishop, Dorothy Malone, Lola Albright, Barry Kelley, Carl Benton Reid, Ludwig Donath, Art Smith, Whit Bissell, Roy Roberts, Connie Gilchrist, Dan Riss, Harry Shannon, Jim Backus, Reed Hadley (voice). Screenplay: Harry Essex, based on a magazine article by Milton Lehman. Cinematography: Joseph F.  Biroc. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Hans J. Salter. 

I wonder what RFK Jr. would have to say about The Killer That Stalked New York, now that he threatens to put his anti-vax quackery into effect. It's a taut little thriller about a smallpox epidemic, in which the heroes are the governmental and medical officials who race against time to vaccinate 8 million people against the disease while its carrier moves among them. The carrier is Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes), who has been to Cuba to retrieve some diamonds that her boyfriend, Matt Krane (Charles Korvin), wants to fence. Somewhere in her journey, she started to get sick, and by the time she arrives in New York City, she's really not feeling so well. Trying to dodge the Treasury agent (Barry Kelley) who's on her tail, she plays hide-and-seek around the city, and when she discovers her boyfriend is double-crossing her, she gets even more furtive. Several people will die from direct contact with her, and others will become carriers before her pursuers, including the doctor (William Bishop) who treated her without knowing the real nature of her disease, finally track her down. A voiceover (Reed Hadley) keeps hyping the urgency of the situation, but it's really not necessary -- Earl McEvoy's crisp pacing and the effective location shooting by Joseph F. Biroc supply enough intensity and reality. There are some nice surprises among the cast, including Dorothy Malone as a nurse and Jim Backus as a club owner, both of them pre-stardom.  

 

Illuminata (John Turturro, 1998)

Katherine Borowitz and John Turturro in Illuminata

Cast: John Turturro, Katherine Borowitz, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Ben Gazzara, Bill Irwin, Donal McCann, Aida Turturro, Leo Bassi. Screenplay: Brandon Cole, John Turturro, based on a play by Cole. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Robin Standefer. Film editing: Michael Berenbaum. Music: Arnold Black, William Bolcom.

Illuminata is poetic, witty, and beautifully filmed, designed, and acted. But it's also a little twee, which means it misses the mark for a lot of viewers. It's a tale of the theater, which means it comes with one strike against it already: Movies about the stage inevitably fail to capture what's most important about theater, the quality of being live. The theater in question is a small New York repertory company in 1905, a time and place when the stage and actors were most alive, before they became canned by radio, movies, and television. Almost all of the characters have Europeanish names, not because they're immigrants but because the film has a commedia dell'arte quality to it and a sense of playing to the rafters. John Turturro is the playwright Tuccio, married to the actress Rachel (Katherine Borowitz), but tempted by the diva Celimene (Susan Sarandon). His nemesis is the theater critic Bevalaqua (Christopher Walken), and the company includes a Beppo (Leo Bassi), a Dominique (Rufus Sewell), a Marta (Aida Turturro), a Flavio  (Ben Gazzara), and a Marco (Bill Irwin). The theater is owned by the Astergourds (Beverly D'Angelo and Donal McCann). Everyone in the cast seems to be sleeping with everyone else, or at least trying to. Bevalaqua, for example, tries to seduce Marco, the occasion for much clowning by Walken and Irwin. As noted, it's not for all tastes: It has a 46% rating on the Tomatometer. But I found it sweet and amusing, and I don't get much sweetness and amusement from movies these days.