The Great Dictator (1940)

USA, 125 minutes

Director / writer: Charles Chaplin

Photography: Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh

Music: Charles Chaplin, Meredith Wilson

Editors: Willard Nico, Harold Rice

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell, Billy Gilbert, Maurice Moscovitch

Getting back to this movie after decades, I was reminded of the old chestnut that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes” when a character named Epstein showed up. He’s Jewish and a powerful financier who must be turned to for assistance by the fascist and openly antisemitic regime of Tomainia, which is basically Germany in director and writer Charles Chaplin’s clonking sendup. Chaplin is Adenoid Hynkel, the Phooey (Fuhrer) of Tomainia, which happens to be in an uneasy alliance with Bacteria (Italy). The Tomainian swastika is two X’s, called the double cross. You can tell Chaplin was not holding back here (though an editor or collaborator might have come in handy). For a 1940 Hollywood picture it’s unusually blunt about its points, which is not to say always inspired. Chaplin also plays a Jewish barber and veteran of World War I who lives in the ghetto of an unspecified Tomainian city (he probably couldn’t think of a Warsaw gag ... where are Mad magazine writers when you need them?). The Jewish barber must endure the problems you would expect.

The picture is bloated at over two hours, ham-handed to an infinite degree (did I mention Rome here is called Aroma?), and so self-righteous it verges on chest-pounding narcissism, which are reasons I haven’t been back to it in a long time. In retrospect, this is the beginning of the end for Chaplin. I hated to see it and all that followed—some, admittedly, with bright moments, but it was also the period when he ruined The Gold Rush by trying to add sound. Still, nevertheless, I could not deny that The Great Dictator hits different in 2026. That’s what made the details of a relatively background character named Epstein so eerily remarkable.

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Rocco e i suoi Fratelli, Italy / France, 179 minutes

Director: Luchino Visconti

Writers: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Vasco Pratolini, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli, Giovanni Testori

Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno

Music: Nino Rota

Editor: Mario Serandrei

Cast: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Spyros Fokas, Max Cartier, Rocco Vidolazzi, Katina Paxinou, Roger Hanin, Paulo Stoppa, Claudia Cardinale, Corrado Pani, Claudia Mori, Suzi Delair

Rocco and His Brothers is classified as an “epic melodrama” on Wikipedia, which I suspect is as much about its length as it is about, say, Nina Rota’s shimmering if too occasional score. The movie is BIG by design. The story is about the migration of a family of peasants, the Parondis, one mother and five brothers, from rural southern Italy to the modern urban environs of Milan. The family patriarch has died and the farm no longer supported the family anyway. The results are predictable at a high level, but Rocco and His Brothers is more about the details, which are often surprising. (See La Notte for more on modern Milan. See The Grapes of Wrath on migration.) There are five brothers and each gets a section of the movie: Vicenzo (Spyros Fokas), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and even little Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), though that is more by way of a coda to the picture.

The main conflict here, a towering and epic one, is between Simone and Rocco, egged on by a bad woman with a good heart, Nadia (Annie Girardot with the most sparkling, riveting performance in the whole thing). On arrival in Milan, Simone quickly finds himself with a promising boxing career, which immediately goes to his head. This is also a boxing movie, I should say, and of course mandatory for aficionados of boxing movies. Simone’s thoroughgoing rottenness is a main theme here—you think he’s bad, but he only gets worse. He wins bouts and swaggers around with a lot of cash and an eye for the babes. He’s reluctant to do anything to help the family. He’s selfish. But he falls hard for Nadia, whose biography is practically shocking. I mean, it seemed sufficiently lurid to me. They don’t call this an epic melodrama for any old reason.

Paisan (1946)

Paisa’, Italy, 126 minutes

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Writers: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Klaus Mann, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger, Vasco Pratolini

Photography: Otello Martelli

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Dots Johnson, Alfonsino Pasca, Gar Moore, Maria Michi, Harriet White, Renzo Avanzo, William Tubbs, Dale Edmonds, John Whaling Allen, Dan, Roberto Van Loel, Cigolani

Film critics and historians appear prone to grouping director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini’s pictures into trilogies, even if they were not exactly intended that way. Paisan is thus the second in his so-called Neorealist trilogy, with Rome, Open City (1945) and Germany, Year Zero (1948). But not only is Paisan a genuinely standalone picture on its own, it is also composed of six separate episodes with six separate stories and casts. As the trilogy’s name suggests, the pictures are united mainly by the formal aesthetic, which in turn was imposed in the first place by conditions of low-budget financing and a country literally in ruins from war. From Rossellini to Bicycle Thieves to Jack Webb and beyond I come to the aesthetics of neorealism already in favor: shooting on the fly, casting amateurs, studying the underclasses—better without agenda, as Rossellini generally did it (though also implicitly pointing ways toward social reform).

I like the structure of Paisan almost as much as the little separate stories. The larger arc is the liberation of Italy by Allied forces, which started in 1943 and continued until it helped bring the end of the war in 1945. Just so, Paisan starts with the invasion of Sicily and advances north. The stories are not specifically about the progress of the war but rather just wartime stories involving ordinary soldiers and civilians caught in extraordinary situations. In the first a young woman whose father and brother have been missing for days, Carmela (Carmela Sazio), is drafted by invading US forces who are trying to root out dangerous nests of Nazis in a contest of urban warfare conducted at night. The movements of the US soldiers and the Nazis are complicated, information is lacking, mistakes are made, there’s no time to think, and the entire episode is all done in maybe 25 minutes. All the tales here are approximately the size of a Twilight Zone episode. The rhythms are formative but familiar.

Vampyr (1932)

Germany / France, 75 minutes

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Photography: Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee

Music: Wolfgang Zeller

Editor: Tonka Taldy

Cast: Julian West, Sybille Schmitz, Maurice Schutz, Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gerard, Albert Bras, N. Babanini, Jane Mora

Danish director and cowriter Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet) based his vampire story on the Irish horror writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s essential 1872 collection, In a Glass Darkly, which includes “Carmilla,” the famous lesbian vampire story. It’s an important point of distinction from the more popular vampire source of the time, which, of course, was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published 25 years later in 1897. Stoker’s epistolary novel was responsible informally (later settled legally) for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and then, in 1931, for the kickoff of the Universal horror franchise, Dracula. In fact, Vampyr was required to wait for its release until after Dracula and then Frankenstein. These are all notably slow and very quiet dream movies, perhaps Vampyr more than any of them, which moves like thawing syrup. It often reminded me of Eraserhead, which makes me wonder how much influence it might have had on David Lynch.

The star, Julian West as Allan Grey, was the primary source of funding for the picture in exchange for the role. His real name was Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a French-born member of Russian nobility. In that way Vampyr is a kind of vanity project—in a way perhaps even more so for Dreyer than the baron. Pursuits into horror literature have traditionally not often won respect and admiration. Dreyer may have been taking a kind of calculated risk with his career, moving from Saint Joan of Arc only four years earlier to these creatures of the night.

The Great Beauty (2013)

La grande bellezza, Italy / France, 141 minutes

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Paulo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello

Photography: Luca Bigazzi

Music: Lele Marchitelli

Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli

Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Giovanna Vignola, Galatea Ranzi, Sonia Gessner, Anna Della Rosa, Luca Marinelli, Giusi Merli, Roberto Herlitzka

Purely by coincidence I was looking at Italian director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte a week or two before looking at Italian director and cowriter Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The Great Beauty came out over 50 years later but I thought I saw a good deal of basic similarities as I was watching: a main character who is an Italian novelist wandering his city (Rome or Milan), an unfocused rolling gait to events, music, parties, carousing, philosophizing, evading. Wikipedia affirms critics have seen homages in The Great Beauty to La Notte, as well as to Italian director Federico Fellini’s Roma and 8½ and Italian director Ettore Scola’s The Terrace and Splendor.

I still need to catch up on the Scolas myself but certainly can see The Great Beauty locating itself within Italian cinematic traditions. It admirably lives up to them too. I don’t know Sorrentino beyond this one—his IMDb known-fors also include This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015), and The Hand of God (2021)—and I only came to this one recently. The Great Beauty focuses on the peregrinations about his home city of Rome that Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) makes as he turns 65. Jep published a novel when he was 25, highly regarded and widely read and known, but has not written another one since. He is able to live on its proceeds and also works now as a culture journalist at an arts magazine published and edited by a charismatic dwarf, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). He is pursued constantly by people who love his novel and want to know why he never wrote another, to which he has shifting answers. He has reached an age when it is natural to look back and reflect. Not that that is what he is doing.

La Notte (1961)

Italy / France, 122 minutes

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra

Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo

Music: Giorgio Gaslini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Cast: Marcello Mastrolanni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki, Maria Pia Luzi, Gitt Magrini, Vincenzo Corbella, Rosy Mazzacurati, Umberto Eco

“Sometimes beauty can really be depressing” is a random line of dialogue earkt in La Notte, where, in fact, all the lines of dialogue can be taken as random. It could well represent the theme not only for this picture but for the larger “Trilogy of Incommunicability” of which it is the second part. Director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s project started with the much-decorated L’Avventura (1960), continued with La Notte, and finished on L’Eclisse (1962). As usually happens with three-packs like this, the second one tends to get shorted in terms of credit. For example, La Notte is presently ranked at #196 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? whereas L’Eclisse sits at #130 and L’Avventura is in the top 40 at #38.

I would call La Notte my favorite of the bunch, but I suspect it’s only because my long-term quarrels with the other two have been resolved by time and learning how to look at Antonioni movies. Just look. Don’t try to connect. Connections come unbidden. You see how thoroughly composed within the frames his shots are, the placement of objects, heads, and bodies, using techniques as needed such as deep focus for contrast and startling images. The narrative is in a dated style, out of self-conscious midcentury existential texts. It takes place in Milan, a bustling city with ongoing construction and traffic jams. The main couple here—the novelist Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) and his elaborately “alienated,” sometimes almost zombie-like wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau)—wander this urban landscape aimlessly. Eventually we learn that, while Giovanni is a respected novelist with a new one just out, it is Lidia who has all the money and whatever control it might give her. They seem perfectly happy to spend their time going from place to place, seeing people, mingling, posing. Well, maybe not perfectly happy.

The River (1951)

France / USA / India, 99 minutes

Director: Jean Renoir

Writers: Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir

Photography: Claude Renoir

Music: M.A. Partha Sarathy

Editor: George Gale

Cast: Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Thomas E. Breen, Patricia Walters, Arthur Shields, Adrienne Corri, Suprova Mukerjee, Radha

Director and cowriter Jean Renoir’s first color movie is something of a departure from his acclaimed pictures of the ‘30s, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, which in many ways set terms for European cinema to come. The River not only flashes with vivid technicolor but is set and was wholly shot in India. Heck, Satyajit Ray is even on the crew as an assistant director, speaking of the greater connections of cinema. The narrative style is familiar to Renoir, an easy-flowing stream of incidents, anecdotes, and storylines in the lives of British colonialists with their families. The main family has a patriarch (“Father,” Esmond Knight), a matriarch (“Mother,” the regally maternal Nora Swinburne), a boy, and four girls, plus Indian servants. The oldest girls, Valerie (Adrienne Corri) and especially Harriet (Patricia Walters), are as close as we get to main characters. It’s told from the point of view of Harriet as an adult, reminiscing, and it’s fair to call the overall picture a coming-of-age tale for both girls.

In my latter-day state of woke I was immediately uncomfortable with the spectacle of British patricians in India, however well meaning (debatable), with their Indian servants and attempts to understand Indian culture, especially via the point of view of white adolescent girls. Father, for example, operates a jute mill (“exploiting resources”—it’s hard not to see it glaringly that way). But Martin Scorsese, in an interview on the Criterion Channel, scoffed at the idea of looking at this movie through a colonial frame. It’s a movie that means a good deal to him personally, and as usual in his interviews he argues eloquently, even emotionally, for the picture. OK, maybe, I’m with him on Renoir, truly, but I could never entirely shake my misgivings even as, of course, The River stands up to all of Renoir’s films.

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Memorias del subdesarrollo, Cuba, 97 minutes

Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Writers: Edmundo Desnoes, Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Photography: Ramon F. Suarez

Music: Leo Brouwer

Editor: Nelson Rodriguez

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Nunez, Omar Valdes, Rene de la Cruz, Yolanda Farr, Jack Gelber, Ofelia Gonzalez

Memories of Underdevelopment came out in the globally tumultuous year of 1968, chipping in reports from Cuba less than 10 years after the Revolution. Indeed, the novel by Edmundo Desnoes that it is based on was published only in 1965. It bears a curious and interesting point of view in its main character, Sergio Carmona Mendoyo (Sergio Corrieri), a merchant capitalist who ran a “posh” furniture store he inherited from his father which has been destroyed or taken away by the new regime. Sergio is also owner of rental properties and retains an income stream there. The picture is set in 1961 and 1962. The first scenes show Sergio packing his mother and the rest of his family off to the US. He appears to be dubious about long-term prospects for the Revolution. He is staying and may join his family later. The picture is semi-documentary in style, with archival footage, and follows the suddenly aimless Sergio around, dealing with his girlfriend problems (he is divorced) even as he ponders, in voiceover, the finer points of “underdevelopment.”

His first and most problematic girlfriend is an evident example. “I try to live like a European,” he says. “[Elena] makes me feel underdevelopment with every step.” They are in a bookstore where he is purchasing a copy of Lolita. Elena (Daisy Granados) is scheming to force him into marriage, premised on their having sex, or, as they often say around here, “ruining” her. For his part, Sergio denies deceiving her and doesn’t think she was really a virgin, which of course does not help his situation. Eventually she enlists her brutal brother and parents into making a legal case of it. This situation is appallingly beneath a genteel man who would prefer to spend afternoons at the modern art museum. His allegiance to European culture is as bone-deep as Elena’s family’s is to old-world ways of blood honor and such, next stop clitorectomies. They could be closer to that than we would like to think or maybe Sergio and I are paranoid. It’s a real case of underdevelopment.

Millennium Mambo (2001)

Qian xi man bo, Taiwan / France, 106 minutes

Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou

Writer: T'ien-wen Chu

Photography: Ping Bin Lee

Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Kai-yu Huang, Giong Lim

Editors: Ju-kuan Hsiao, Ching-Sung Liao

Cast: Shu Qi, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao, Jun Takeuchi, Ko Takeuchi, Doze Niu, Pauline Chan, Rio Peng

This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.

In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.

Belle de Jour (1967)

France / Italy, 100 minutes

Director: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Joseph Kessel, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carriere

Photography: Sacha Vierny

Editor: Louisette Hautecoeur

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Genevieve Page, Pierre Clementi, Iska Khan, Francoise Fabian, Maria Latour, Francisco Rabal, Marcel Charvey

Belle de Jour was sold in 1967 as director and cowriter Luis Buñuel’s “Masterpiece of Erotica.” Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, a young middle-class housewife who seems to be messed up about sex, likely the work once again, per Buñuel, of the Catholic Church. Severine’s sexual interests may or may not lie in taboo directions, BDSM, and degradation, but she has apparently decided her best bet is to present to the world as “frigid”—beautiful, and unattainable. Sha and her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) sleep in separate beds and she repulses all his advances with sighs and sorrow, which he seems to accept with equanimity. He’s a certain model of ideal husband.

Severine finds an outlet for herself, drawn to it almost by forces beyond her will, as a high-end, “classy” prostitute. She works only in the afternoon, hence her prostitute name, Belle de Jour, literally “beauty of the day.” Presumably this is so she can be home in time to prepare her husband’s dinner. This particular operation takes place off the street, in apartments owned by the house madame Anais (Genevieve Page). No menacing pimps seem to be involved and it feels relatively safe. At first Severine resists the actual work—the undressing, showing her body, physical intimacy. Anais is gentle but firm with her, starting her with the more unobjectionable johns. The sex work seems to be what Severine wants or needs and soon she is a regular with two others, Charlotte (Francoise Fabian) and Mathilde (Maria Latour). We see a few scenes of the fetishes their johns are there to see served. It’s Buñuel and not surprisingly they are bizarre and often surreal, with BDSM themes. There’s even a flashback scene of Severine refusing communion. Ah, Buñuel and the Catholic Church! The eternal romance of opposites attracting.

Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Campanadas a medianoche, Spain / Switzerland, 115 minutes

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: William Shakespeare, Raphael Holinshed, Orson Welles

Photography: Edmond Richard

Music: Angelo Francesco, Lavagnino

Editors: Elena Jaumandreu, Frederick Muller, Peter Parasheles

Cast: Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Jeanne Moreau, Norman Rodway, Alan Webb, Fernando Rey, Michael Aldridge

I was going to say I like director and cowriter Orson Welles as much as the next guy but maybe that’s not so true. I might be more of a dilettante. I love Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil and I like to look at The Magnificent Ambersons to grieve for what might have been (Booth Tarkington’s novel is surprisingly good too). After that it’s certain dazzling shots and moments in some of the others, at least as long as they don’t have very much to do with Shakespeare. My problem there—I’m not proud of it—is I’ve never had a Shakespeare phase, not even in college, and I don’t know his work well, though I generally admire everything I’ve seen or read.

For that matter, Chimes at Midnight is not just a Shakespeare adaptation, it is a reimagining and refocusing of Falstaff, a recurring Shakespeare character, along with his relationship with Prince Hal. Per Wikipedia, the script for Chimes at Midnight includes verbatim text from five of Shakespeare’s plays: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Richard II; Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is a deep dive into a pool where I don’t how to swim well. And it’s not the first time Welles did something like this. Besides previously making pictures based on Macbeth, Othello, and Twelfth Night, he mounted a stage production on Broadway in 1939, Five Kings, based on nine Shakespeare plays. In many ways Shakespeare was a theatrical medium itself that Welles worked in well, capable of working up pastiche for anyone who would have it.

Vagabond (1985)

Sans toit ni loi, France / UK, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Agnes Varda

Photography: Patrick Blossier

Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz

Editors: Patricia Mazuy, Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Stephane Freiss, Laurence Cortadellas, Marthe Jarnias, Yolande Moreau, Joel Fosse

In some ways it feels like director and writer Agnes Varda grew more carefree and even whimsical over the course of her career. In this century she made gentle, freewheeling, perpetually curious documentaries like The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. By contrast, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7 is about a young woman awaiting results of a biopsy. Vagabond, between them, is about Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a runaway girl in rural France who finally dies of exposure—a sad and foredoomed story. Mona’s body is discovered at the beginning of the picture and the rest is flashback types of episodes. They follow the last months of her life as she hitchhiked from place to place, set up her tent, and lived her life as she could. These scenes are ostensibly based on journalistic interviews of those who interacted with and knew her—to the degree, of course, that anyone knew her. Varda’s instinct is often to go at least semi-documentary in tone.

We never see Mona in the home she ran away from. The picture is silent on her life before. We don’t hear from her family in these supposed interviews and we never hear why. Perhaps they just didn’t want to speak with interviewers, but it’s never explained. Varda is more interested purely in Mona’s life on her own and how she survives (and doesn’t) rather than potential details of domestic abuse and such. There is one scene here where it appears Mona is going to be assaulted at one of her campsites, but the picture quickly cuts away and we never hear anything of it again. It’s as if Varda wants us to know she’s aware of all the dangers of Mona’s life, but doesn’t want to dwell on them too much, doesn’t want the lurid details to distort what she wants us to see in Mona.

Young Frankenstein (1974)

USA, 106 minutes

Director: Mel Brooks

Writers: Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Mary Shelley

Photography: Gerald Hirschfeld

Music: John Morris

Editor: John C. Howard

Cast: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars, Gene Hackman, Richard Haydn, Mel Brooks, Danny Goldman

Young Frankenstein is so scrupulously faithful to the 1930s Universal franchise that it fairly fits itself into the canon itself. You must start with the 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, of course. But then I say it’s your choice: the star-studded 1939 Son of Frankenstein (Boris Karloff! Bela Lugosi! Basil Rathbone!) or this affectionate send-up. It boasts a luminous black & white palette, old-fashioned wipes from one scene to the next, and arguably cowriter Gene Wilder’s greatest single performance. It comes with all the trimmings too, including the little girl, the bride, the blind man, pitchforks, torches, elaborate mechanical wind-up law enforcement out of Peter Sellers, and more.

Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced fronk-un-steen in a running gag), grandson of the mad scientist Victor (renamed Henry in the old movies for some reason). Frederick is a professor of human anatomy and biology trying to live down his grandfather’s crimes, constantly needled by his students. Wilder, as ever, and perhaps more so here, is a paradox of style, a quiet-mannered player who uses off-beat pauses, the position of his head, and the volume of his speaking voice to convey great stores of molten angst, rage, and depression, which erupt in calibrated, pitch-perfect sobbing rants. The ongoing, never-ending, exhausting battle over the pronunciation of his name is just a foretaste of what’s to come with the driven, neurotic, obsessed fool Wilder has made of Dr. Frankenstein.

Ace in the Hole (1951)

USA, 111 minutes

Director: Billy Wilder

Writers: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman, Victor Desny

Photography: Charles Lang

Music: Hugo Friedhofer

Editors: Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Porter Hall, Robert Arthur, Richard Benedict, Ray Teal, Frank Cady, Richard Gaines

Director and cowriter Billy Wilder is one of my favorite filmmakers—Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. are on my short list of the best of all time, and The Apartment is not far behind—but I’m reluctant to make too much of Ace in the Hole, which Wikipedia among many others includes with Wilder’s major work. I like the noirish feel of it but struggle with the narrative, which exaggerates outrageously under cover of being a satire. And I guess I may also have a Kirk Douglas problem. He plays Charles Tatum with his typical feral intensity, a weaselly ankle-biting reporter on a downward spiral, washing up in Albuquerque and hunting for a break. Any break will do.

The story involves a type of US news item that seems to recur and catch national attention every 10 or 20 years: kids down a well, specific people isolated in floods, miners in a cave-in. Stuff like that. The most famous case at the time of this picture may have been Floyd Collins, trapped for days in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave in 1925. The story was seized on for constant coverage by then-new radio broadcasters. An example on this side of the 20th century is “Baby Jessica,” who was 18 months old when she fell down a well in 1987. It took 58 hours to get her out. In Ace in the Hole the victim is Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), plundering a burial ground in a nearby mountain considered holy by local Native Americans. So among other things Ace in the Hole offers up an early version of violated Indian graveyard business, later a staple of horror pictures. For a long time everybody has hated the media, from newspapers, radio, and TV of the last century to the internet-driven landscape today. As hard as it may be to believe, it has been worse in the past (though we are presently challenging that more and more). This is one of those stories, a theme sounded in the great Citizen Kane, Meet John Doe, A Face in the Crowd, and many other movies.

RoboCop (1987)

USA, 102 minutes

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Writers: Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner

Photography: Jost Vacano, Sol Negrin

Music: Basil Poledouris

Editor: Frank J. Urioste

Cast: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith, Dan O’Herlihy, Miguel Ferrer, Robert DoQui, Ray Wise, Jesse D. Goins

People seem to have some problems categorizing RoboCop. I have always thought of it as a slightly tongue-in-cheek (because patently ludicrous) crime / action show. Wikipedia calls it “science fiction action,” Amazon classes it with the labels “action,” “drama,” and (of all things) “serious,” and IMDb lets loose with a torrent of labels: “cop drama,” “cyberpunk,” “dark comedy,” “dystopian sci-fi,” “gangster,” “one-person army action” (good grief, this is a genre?), “superhero,” “tragedy,” “action,” and “crime.” I was happy to see at least a “dark” comedy in the mix, but I think it’s a real stretch in this perfectly cartoony setting to go for “serious” (never mind “tragedy”).

It’s formally a tragedy and serious because a human being cop, Murphy (Peter Weller), is killed in the line of duty and then surreptitiously and implausibly reanimated as a cyborg with no memory of his humanity. But he is a super-excellent cop, the hope for the near-future Detroit envisioned in the ‘80s to eradicate crime altogether. Director Paul Verhoeven is playing it for laughs all over the place. The lifts from Terminator are obvious, intentionally so. Robocop’s triangle-shaped body is an exaggeration of the ripped male ideal. His thudding footsteps are heard constantly in the sound design when he is on the move. (Note that the subtitles spell it without the capital C for the character and I am following suit.) The fights go on too long and they are too extreme, verging on slapstick. And the fact, in this near-future sci-fi tale—certainly it is science fiction, I’m not sure why I resist that label too—the fact that corporations can steal a man’s body with impunity and do what they want with it is rushed past so willfully it comes to feel like another joke.

A Prophet (2009)

Un prophete, France / Italy, 155 minutes

Director: Jacques Audiard

Writers: Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit

Photography: Stephane Fontaine

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Juliette Welfling

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi, Reda Kateb, Slimane Dazi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Leïla Bekhti, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frédéric Graziani, Alaa Oumouzoune

I must admit I originally took the title of this epic prison movie a little too literally. I knew it involved an Arab in a European prison and I worried it was about some bearded chin-stroking holy man enlightening other inmates (or failing to), heading down some solemn religious line. The running time was the final detail that put me off it. But it turns out A Prophet is one of those long movies I’m happy to see, immersive, intense and kinetic, sending us to places where time does not exist. The camera is restless, roving, often handheld in these tight claustrophobic prison spaces. Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena serves up a performance that is masterful and unforgettable, inhabiting a majority of these scenes and virtually carrying the picture by himself, though he is amply supported, notably by Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciano, the Corsican center of power in the suffocating French prison setting.

A Prophet also counts as both a coming-of-age and an immigrant picture, as the Muslim El Djebena is 19 when he is convicted of unspecified crimes and sentenced to six years in an adult prison, after spending what sounds like much of his adolescence in juvenile facilities. El Djebena, arriving at prison, has obviously been beaten recently. One wound on his face is recent and ultimately leaves a scar. He is self-possessed and wary, stalking through his days as a loner. Prison life is hard. Early on he is a victim when he is pushed around for his shoes, which are taken off his feet. When the prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi) attempts to pick him up, offering hash for oral sex, the outline of El Djebena’s new life starts to come into focus.

L’Argent (1983)

France / Switzerland, 85 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Leo Tolstoy, Robert Bresson

Photography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Music: J.S. Bach

Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon

Cast: Christian Patey, Sylvia Van den Elsen, Michel Briguet, Caroline Lang

Director and screenwriter Robert Bresson adapted a long tale by Leo Tolstoy as the basis for his last picture (translated as “The Counterfeit Bills” or “The Forged Coupon”). The result, L’Argent, is perhaps less about the evils of money (“l’argent” in French) and more a kind of practical thought experiment in the chaos theory butterfly effect, which holds that a butterfly flapping its wings can lead by circumstances to events as devastating as tornados, or as wonderful as an unexpected windfall. Anything might happen when it comes to cause and effect. It’s hard to say why the title was not translated for English-speaking countries. In Spain and Mexico, for example, it was released as El dinero. Perhaps calling it “Money” would imply too much about the intended evils thereof? But then what are people supposed to think anywhere else?

This story starts with adolescents in need of spending money who forge counterfeit bills and pass them to a camera shop. The camera shop manager, realizing later that he has been bilked, decides to pass the bills himself and does so the next day, paying a delivery driver, Yvon (Christian Patey), who accepts them without question. It’s the beginning of the end for Yvon. His superiors catch the counterfeits, but Yvon’s story does not hold up when the camera shop staff denies even knowing him. This seems a little unlikely given the way these things are tracked, with invoices and receipts and such, but maybe it was different in 1983 in France. Yvon goes to trial for the crime. He’s convicted and given three years, and then things only get worse. His child dies while he’s in prison and his wife leaves him for a new life. He keeps getting in trouble and fights with other inmates. His imprisonment is extended. He’s all the way into a terrible downward spiral.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

New Zealand / USA / UK, 228 minutes

Director: Peter Jackson

Writers: J.R.R. Tolkien, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson

Photography: Andrew Lesnie

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: John Gilbert

Cast: Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson

A friend once told me he thought director and cowriter Peter Jackson seemed intent and focused on “going after the whales,” by which I think he meant the biggest and most popular film subjects available: eight or nine hours on one part of the Beatles’ career ... a complex restoration of World War I footage ... the Nth King Kong picture. And, of course, arguably the greatest fantasy property of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings (Jackson would unfortunately later show his predilections for bloat in his adaptation of The Hobbit, which ran about as long as his treatment of the trilogy, though it’s by far the shortest of the four novels).

Until The Lord of the Rings Jackson was something of a schlockmeister, tucked away Down Under in New Zealand and Australia, lobbing gore and chuckles in the spectacles of 1987’s Bad Taste and 1992’s Dead Alive. He had transition movies in the ‘90s, notably the exquisite and disturbing Heavenly Creatures along with the mockumentary Forgotten Silver. We can see better now that everything before The Lord of the Rings was the work of a craftsman who was very good and getting better at making movies—and had the making of this movie specifically in mind. But was anyone prepared for Jackson taking on something of the scope and ambition of adapting Tolkien’s classic quest tale, complete with Middle Earth elves, dwarves, orcs, hobbits, and other creatures of the ancient Anglo-Saxon imagination? It is something Jackson wanted to do all his life and I, for one, was frankly amazed to see him get the opportunity. But he did and he made the most of it.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Sayat Nova, USSR, 79 minutes

Director: Sergei Parajanov

Writers: Sayat Nova, Sergei Parajanov

Photography: Suren Shakhbazyan

Music: Tigran Mansuryan

Editors: Sergei Parajanov, Marfa Ponomarenko, Sergei Yutkevich

Cast: Sofiko Chiaureli, Spartak Bagashvili, Gogi Gegechkori, Melkon Alekyan, Medea Japaridze, Vilen Galstyan

This art film curiosity from late-‘60s USSR was intended by director Sergei Parajanov as a kind of intuitive biography of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova—to be sure, not a literal straightforward bio but more of an “inspired by” type of thing, indulging all poetic impulses however extravagant. Indeed, mimes are involved. The Color of Pomegranates delivers on the implied promise of the title, with vibrant color and often quite strikingly beautiful images. There is almost no dialogue or even that much of a discernible through-line, though keyed in many ways to a bio’s chronology.

Soviet censors worried that it was not literal enough and that it fell far short of a fair biography of anyone. They demanded the original title be changed and all specific reference to Sayat Nova removed. A headnote was added: “This film is not the story of a poet’s life. Instead, the filmmaker has attempted to recreate the world of a poet—the modulation of his soul, his passions, and his torments—broadly utilizing the symbolism and allegories of medieval Armenian troubadors.”

Cries & Whispers (1972)

Viskningar och rop, Sweden, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Siv Lundgren

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Arlin, Ingrid Bergman

Cries & Whispers is the first movie I saw by director and writer Ingmar Bergman, largely on the strength of its Oscar win—I still believed in the Academy Awards then, even if this one was only for cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who deserved the accolades, of course). I was still a teenager, but aware of Bergman’s outsize reputation for art films. I didn’t like this one much. The heavy-handed extremes felt forced or showy and in general it was way too slow. I tried it a couple more times over the years but have never warmed to it much even as I fell in love with a bunch of Bergman’s other stuff: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes From a Marriage, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, etc.

So I was prepared for something like an hour and a half of tedium, a study in formal miserablism, when I sat down to look at it again. It’s heavy on the red. Red furniture. Red wallpaper. Red drapes. Fade to red. Blood, of course, but that comes later. The story involves three 30something middle-class sisters, one of whom is dying. That’s Agnes (Harriet Andersson), attended by her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). Maybe I finally grew up enough, but for the first time this death of Agnes and all her suffering and agonies that precede it finally reached me and I started preparing myself to backtrack and praise the movie. Harriet Andersson is stunningly good.