Green Border (2023)

[2025 review here]

Zielona granica, Poland / France / Czech Republic / Belgium, 152 minutes

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Writers: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, Agnieszka Holland

Photography: Tomasz Naumiuk

Music: Frédéric Vercheval

Editor: Pavel Hrdlicka

Cast: Jalal Altawil, Behi Djanati Atai, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Stramowski, Jaśmina Polak, Marta Stalmierska, Maciej Stuhr, Magdalena Popławska, Joely Mbundu, Taim Ajjan, Talia Ajjan

The green border in director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland’s blockbuster, sickening war movie, shot in black and white, is the swampy forested region on either side of the border between Belarus and Poland. A family of Syrian refugees is making their way to Sweden, seeking asylum in the EU. They travel by air to Minsk in Belarus, on the flight picking up Afghani refugee Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an older woman who is seeking a new home in Poland (rather than wait, as she says, for the Taliban regime to resume power). Belarus is where the problems start for them. They encounter corrupt, sadistic, and/or indifferent officials in the border patrols, thieves, bad weather, and more. Poland unofficially does not allow passage for refugees. Both Poland and Belarus have “pushback” policies, which means Leila and the family are repeatedly herded across the border, back and forth, over and over, between the two countries. Making progress is all but impossible, dependent on luck more than anything.

The family is notably vulnerable. A grandfather in poor health (Mohamad Al Rashi) is the family patriarch, a traditional Muslim who trusts in Allah and rolls out the prayer mat even in the depths of the forest. His grandson Bashir (Jalal Altawil) is more savvy to the world, more embittered, carrying a cell phone that is their lifeline along with powerpacks to keep it charged. His wife Amina (Dalia Naous) and three young children are total innocents who must trust Bashir (and Allah) to get where they are going. The youngest is an infant still being breastfed. Leila has a cell phone too and seems to be the most skilled at using it. She and the oldest boy Nur (Taim Ajjan) make a connection that will turn out to be fatal.

Barbarian (2022)

[2022 review here]

Bulgaria / USA. 102 minutes

Director/writer: Zach Cregger

Photography: Zach Kuperstein

Music: Anna Drubich, Ronettes

Editor: Joe Murphy

Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, Justin Long, Matthew Patrick Davis, Richard Brake, Jaymes Butler, Kate Nichols

(spoilers) Since at least 2013 and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Detroit’s amazing deterioration in areas such as Brightmoor has been there to be used as a powerful visual element for anyone willing to venture into them. Capitalism isn’t doing anything about it and whole blocks are going all the way back to nature, with barest hints of the decrepit decaying houses where people used to live. Barbarian makes good use of the wreckage. Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at night to her Airbnb destination in a pouring rainstorm and never gets a good look at the neighborhood until next morning, when it is almost as shocking for us as it is for her. The camera takes its time swiveling and panning and showing us everything it can see.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview with a documentary filmmaker but already she’s in over her head by the whims of fate. The house at 476 Barbary has been double-booked and the other renter is already in there with the key. It’s an Airbnb nightmare. A large convention in town makes available hotel rooms scarce. The guy already there, Keith (Bill Skarsgard), doesn’t seem threatening, but you never know. Director and writer Zach Cregger reportedly based a lot of Keith and other males in Barbarian on a book by security specialist Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, which details warning signals of dangerous men. If alarm bells are going off for Tess—and they are—they are going off for us as well through all the uncomfortable conversations that lead to Tess agreeing to stay there overnight. We won’t learn it for a while, but Keith is the least of her worries.

Titane (2021)

[Earlier review here.]

France / Belgium, 108 minutes

Director: Julia Ducournau

Writers: Julia Ducournau, Jacques Akchoti, Simonetta Greggio, Jean-Christophe Bouzy

Photography: Ruben Impens

Music: Jim Williams, Sixteen Horsepower, Kills, Severin Favriau, Caterina Caselli, Zombies, Future Islands, Lisa Abbot, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Jean-Christophe Bouzy

Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh, Mara Cisse, Marin Judas, Diong-Keba Tacu

Titane is the kind of movie that raises preposterous to art form, asking us to believe things unbelievable, simply asserting that they exist, with a simmering undercurrent of trauma unresolved. Agathe Rousselle as Alexia delivers a profoundly harrowing performance, throwing herself fully into the body horror. As a girl Alexia is in a serious auto accident that requires a titanium plate to be installed on her skull. It tells us nothing, it makes no rational sense at all, but presumably that is the explanation for everything that follows, along with compelling clues that her father has sexually abused her. As a young woman she is working as a lascivious model at auto industry shows, making love to the vehicles under the spotlight if not using them to masturbate. She loves cars. Soon there is a scene—after hours, after the show and after most of the people have gone—where she seems to be having sex with a car, which has summoned her to the garage with imperious honking.

Fetishizing cars this way hits differently for me in the 21st century, knowing better what cars are doing in terms of carbon pollution—even in 1996, David Cronenberg’s Crash might still seem like an innocent boy hobby, like memorizing stats from the back of baseball cards. Identifying and stack-ranking car models as they pass on the road always felt ridiculous, at least to someone like me who can barely make out even the most familiar ones—Jaguars and Mustangs is about the best I can do, and even then I don’t always get them. But now it seems worse than a frivolous pastime, more depraved, decadent in the worst sense. The next thing we know Alexia appears to be pregnant. And she seems to be leaking motor oil.

Small Axe (2020)

[Earlier review here.]

Mangrove; Lovers Rock; Red, White and Blue; Alex Wheatle; Education; UK, 407 minutes

Director: Steve McQueen

Writers: Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Steve McQueen, Alastair Siddons, Courttia Newland

Photography: Shabier Kirchner

Music: Mica Levi

Editors: Chris Dickens, Steve McQueen

Cast: Letitia White, Shaun Parkes, Malachi Kirby, Rochenda Sandall, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr., Gary Beadle, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, Micheal Ward, Shaniqua Okwok, Francis Lovehall, Kedar Williams-Stirling, John Boyega, Steve Toussaint, Antonia Thomas, Tyrone Huntley, Sheyi Cole, Robbie Gee, Jonathan Jules, Elliot Edusah, Fumilayo Brown-Olateju, Kenyah Sandy, Sharlene Whyte, Tamara Lawrance, Josette Simon, Ryan Masher

“Small axe” is a reference to a Bob Marley song of the same name, with the line “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” It’s another way of talking about incrementalism, in line with Martin Luther King’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And just so, director Steve McQueen with screenwriters Courttia Newland and Alastair Siddons have examined that arc closely as it applied to West Indians living in Britain in the late ‘60s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s. You might think the British are immune from racism, too genteel or something, but Small Axe and the five distinct films clustered under that banner beg to differ. They remind us not only that the British are the authors of a specific type of racism but that in large part the US digested it whole. The police brutality in Small Axe—one of the few constants across these stories—looks a lot like the police brutality we see in the US. It’s one of our inheritances from Britain, however much we rebelled against it in other ways.

The favorite of these stories in Small Axe by acclaim is almost certainly the second (though they do not need to be looked at in any order), Lovers Rock. In all the episodes music is a saving grace, a lifeline, and a solace and true source of joy, but nowhere is that emphasized more than in Lovers Rock, which is a straightforward depiction of a house party and its motley of attendees. The prep takes all day. The food looks amazingly good, most are dressed up in their best, and the music is everything. Two scenes—one involving “Silly Games” by Janet Kay and the other an unidentified dub rave-up played over and over—illustrate the point.

Uncut Gems (2019)

USA, 135 minutes

Directors: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie

Photography: Darius Khondji

Music: Daniel Lopatin

Editors: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie

Cast: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, LaKeith Stanfield, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Mike Francesca, Judd Hirsch, The Weeknd, Tilda Swinton, Natasha Lyonne

Adam Sandler appears to be one of those actors—Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta might be two others—who have a surprising amount of ability to perform when they are motivated but seem to be more often satisfied to run the paces of uninspired but potentially boffo payday productions. Every now and then something seems to get into them—some hunger for respect in their chosen craft, or maybe they just want an Oscar after all—and they take on roles that demand the best from them. By my admittedly biased and perhaps ignorant count (set me straight, please), Sandler has made two of them: the highly eccentric Punch-Drunk Love from 2002, and this relentless, over-the-top thriller directed and cowritten by the Safdie brothers Benny and Josh. Sandler is better-known (per IMDb) for the comedies Big Daddy (1999), Little Nicky (2000), The Waterboy (1998), and The Wedding Singer (1998). Due to mostly peer pressure, I have seen Shakes the Clown (1991), Happy Gilmore (1996), and Hubie Halloween (2020), all of which have their dim pleasures and may be best seen with someone already prone to like them. Shakes the Clown is the best and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that I don’t remember Sandler in it.

As for the Safdie brothers, I was impressed enough with Uncut Gems to go back and check out the thriller Good Time (2017), which I thought was also pretty good. Uncut Gems bristles with kinetic energy and a stream of unfortunate events as New York City jewelry merchant and gambling addict Howard Ratner (Sandler) attempts to square all the various debts in his high-flying, heedless life, dealing with underworld creditors as well as his embittered estranged wife. He has a hot love affair going on the side with Julia (Julia Fox) but spends most of his time wheeling and dealing and trying to get down exotic parlay bets. A brief establishing sequence introduces us to a rock the size of a large russet potato, obtained illicitly from a mine in Ethiopia and massively embedded with opals. Then the picture starts on live footage from a colonoscopy camera, wends its way through a concert by The Weeknd, and finishes on a basketball game on TV—proving, once again, that gambling simply makes everything more intense. Here we see what is purported to be a live game 7 between the Boston Celtics featuring Kevin Garnett and the Philadelphia 76ers. There’s a lot riding on it, and we are content to spend most of the last 30 minutes or so of Uncut Gems watching this game with Ratner.

Annihilation (2018)

USA / UK, 115 minutes

Director: Alex Garland

Writers: Alex Garland, Jeff VanderMeer

Photography: Rob Hardy

Music: Geoff Barrow; Ben Salisbury; Crosby, Stills, and Nash

Editor: Barney Pilling

Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, Tuva Novotny, Benedict Wong

I avoided seeing Annihilation for a little while after it came out because it seemed to be getting bad word of mouth on the social media I was seeing. I had the impression that, because it privileges five women over a few side-line male characters, the gripe was that it pandered to #MeToo sentiments. I know Jeff VanderMeer, author of the literary property of the same name, only as an anthologist, with his wife Ann, an impressive team—and I still know him only that way. I haven’t read Annihilation the novel, nor the rest of the Southern Reach trilogy. For his part, director and cowriter Alex Garland only read Annihilation, the only novel from the trilogy published at the time he started work on the movie. He kept it that way on purpose to stay with his own version of the story. That was another complaint—some aspects of Annihilation the movie are out of step with points in the larger trilogy.

Disregard this grumbling if you have not seen Annihilation. It is first-rate science fiction mixed with impressive bolts of horror and—VanderMeer’s declared favorite—the “weird” (he claims “The Other Side of the Mountain,” for example, as a major influence here). The visual effects team rises to the occasion—whether that’s production designer Mark Higby, VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst, VFX houses Double Negative and Milk, makeup artist Tristan Versluis, or whoever. In many ways their work rivals H.R. Giger’s on Alien. This is bewildering, consummate world-building. VanderMeer likes Annihilation the movie too, in spite of its departures from what he wrote. It has the cool, clinical style that Garland showed in Ex Machina, a more cerebral exercise. Annihilation is more often inclined to get you by the throat and make it hard for you to breathe. It has a great premise and story, spectacular visual effects, a never-ending palpable air of menace and dread, and one of the greatest monsters in all monster cinema. Who cares if it gets incoherent in its finale? So does 2001: A Space Odyssey. What else are you supposed to do with these great big SF concepts?

The Shape of Water (2017)

USA / Mexico, 123 minutes

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor

Photography: Dan Laustsen

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Sidney Wolinsky

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Doug Jones, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Lauren Lee Smith, Nick Searcy, David Hewlett

I took a second look at The Shape of Water the other day and found my original review basically covered all the main points I have to make (it’s linked down there at #5 in the list below). It’s still a monster movie that makes me cry. The period detail—early-‘60s US Cold War—is still on the nose (in the Urban Dictionary sense of “unsubtle or overly and clumsily direct” as opposed to the older sense, which is its opposite, “precisely correct” ... how do these things in language happen? Compare the verb “table”). And Sally Hawkins particularly but the whole cast is still tremendously good. After Pacific Rim it’s probably my favorite movie I’ve seen by director and cowriter Guillermo del Toro. So see the movie. Read my original review.

This second time through I had occasion to think about my problems with del Toro, whose work has been so disappointing so often I have tended to avoid it, and thus have many many gaps with him. I just realized now, for example, he did Nightmare Alley (which came out totally in the middle of Covid ... I still haven’t been back to a movie theater, but soon). Anyway, I know this is chatty and all over the place, I have plans to write about Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio soon and I should probably look at del Toro’s Pinocchio for that. Oh heck, I probably should have looked at it for this. A second look at The Shape of Water helped clarify some of the problem. It’s not so much anything to do with del Toro. It’s on me, or mostly.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

USA, 75 minutes

Director: James Whale

Writers: Mary Shelley, William Hurlbut, John L. Balderston, Josef Berne, Lawrence G. Blochman, Robert Florey, Philip MacDonald, Tom Reed, R.C. Sherriff, Edmund Pearson, Morton Covan

Photography: John J. Mescall

Music: Franz Waxman

Editor: Ted J. Kent

Cast: Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, Valerie Hobson, Una O'Connor, E.E. Clive, Dwight Frye, O.P. Heggie, Gavin Gordon, Douglas Walton, Walter Brennan, John Carradine

Bride of Frankenstein is old enough that we are still seeing experimental ways of making and marketing movies. Boris Karloff is credited as "Karloff," which seems mindful of the way sophisticated French film stars of the time such as Arletty literally made glamorous names for themselves. Elsa Lanchester never properly gets credit for playing the Bride, only for playing Mary Shelley in the odd frame story. Bride of Frankenstein is also a sequel, a follow-up to the original 1931 Frankenstein, which was as much a sensation as any of the theater productions that preceded it by well over a century. We used to love this story. Bride of Frankenstein is more fun than the 1931 original. Technology had visibly improved even across four years, and the idea of making a movie that is basically "I'd like some more of that please" in regard to another popular movie might have still seemed novel. Some like to call this the greatest sequel ever made, or one of them, and I'm not inclined to disagree.

The movie is remarkably short but remarkably packed full of unique scenes swirling around the Frankenstein mythos. The frame story depicts another storm-driven night, like the famous one in Geneva that produced Shelley's Frankenstein novel and John William Polidori's story "The Vampyre." Lord Bryon (Gavin Gordon) struts around and acts decadent, handing us the "previously on" recap while Percy simpers. Mary says she has more to tell them about "Henry" Frankenstein's miserable experiments. They gather close. Dissolve to the chaotic scenes of the end of the first movie, where the monster has presumably been destroyed with the burning windmill in which he was trapped and the villagers are relieved and happy again.

Things to Come (1936)

UK, 100 minutes

Director: William Cameron Menzies

Writer: H.G. Wells

Photography: Georges Perinal

Music: Arthur Bliss

Editors: Charles Crichton, Francis D. Lyon

Cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott, Cedric Hardwicke, Sophie Stewart, Derrick de Marney, John Clements, George Sanders

From the distance of nearly a century, the 1930s looks like a period of constant historical reckoning. Two of the most interesting movies in 1936 and one in 1937—Modern Times, Things to Come, and Make Way for Tomorrow—thought very hard about where things were going after most of a decade in a persistent economic depression and with fascism strutting around and acting ever more aggressive. None of them really "got it right" about the future (Make Way for Tomorrow comes closest by keeping its ambition in check), but getting it right happens so rarely in futuristic tales that we can't stop talking about it when they do. Consider Network. And remember there were still phonebooths in 2001: A Space Odyssey (just as there were in 2001, though they were gone by 2010, nor have we seen anything remotely like commercial space travel, the Musk & Bezos clown shows notwithstanding).

Thus, in Things to Come, a worthy science fiction heir of Metropolis, the coming war with fascism was seen quite clearly, and it starts in 1940, which is pretty dang accurate for a UK film although maybe not that hard to predict in 1936. Director William Cameron Menzies and writer H.G. Wells work it up as a 30-year grinding death-fest that makes the Great War look like a picnic with Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. Pay attention, class! The war in Things to Come ends in the late '60s and is followed by an epidemic of "the wandering sickness," which weirdly looks like zombies without all the scabs or gore. It's certainly some kind of prescience. From that point it all becomes a figment of H.G. Wells's imagination, which was prodigious but also a little unfocused and wrong. The movie ends circa 2036 (so as yet still in the future for us) with the coming of space exploration that looks nothing like space exploration as we know it.

Learn From Experience (1937)

Kafuku zempen (pt. I) / Kafuku kohen (pt. II), Japan, 157 minutes

Director: Mikio Naruse

Writers: Fumitaka Iwasaki, Kan Kikuchi

Photography: Mitsuo Miura

Music: Takio Niki

Editor: Toshio Goto

Cast: Takako Irie, Chieko Takehisa, Minoru Takada, Yumeko Aizome

Japanese director Mikio Naruse was a prolific filmmaker who worked on silent films in the early 1930s and continued with sound well into the 1960s. He is generally considered second-tier behind the usual suspects of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. Naruse may have been overshadowed most by Ozu, whose themes of domestic life Naruse also tended to pursue. But this domestic sphere is one I happen to like very much and to my mind Naruse is nearly the equal of Ozu (though I have many films still to see by both). The lengthy Learn From Experience is classed as a "woman's film," which probably explains why it was cut into two separate releases, in the manner of Children of Paradise or Kill Bill, even as the story, cast, production crew, and other elements simply continue from one to the next. A movie this long in 1937 needed to be epic in order to be commercially viable, and Learn From Experience is many things but it is not epic. At the same time the complexities of the story are such that not a minute of it is wasted.

A reviewer over at IMDb praises the film but complains about the title—but really, Learn From Experience could practically be the working title for any "woman's film." It's a commercial Hollywood designation as much as anything and the idea is that women would pay to see stories full of romantic heartache and incidentally a feminist critique when it can be slipped in. Learn From Experience mixes in class elements as well to fortify the doom of its doomed relationship. Toyomi (Takako Irie) and Shintaro (Minoru Takada) are young and in love, but Shintaro's father is in debt and needs him to marry a woman who can deliver a dowry, and furthermore he has a particular woman in mind. Shintaro, a gentle but weak man, intends to go home and stand up to his father and so stirring is his declaration that the night before he leaves Toyomi spends the night with him.

Jezebel (1938)

USA, 104 minutes

Director: William Wyler

Writers: Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, John Huston, Owen Davis, Robert Buckner, Louis F. Edelman

Photography: Ernest Haller

Music: Max Steiner

Editor: Warren Low

Cast: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Fay Bainter, Margaret Lindsay, Richard Cromwell, Spring Byington, Matthew "Stymie" Beard, Theresa Harris

Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind was published in 1936, became an immediate sensation, and has basically remained so since. I haven't read it myself but it has never been out of print in nearly 100 years. Even so, it was practically overshadowed by the movie version three years later, a sort of massive 1-2 knockout punch only seen in the annals of media culture perhaps once a decade (compare the Beatles owning the Billboard top 5 for one week in 1964 ... the Beatles have also never gone out of print). Word is that Bette Davis was given the lead in Jezebel as compensation for not getting the Scarlett O'Hara role. Indeed, sympathy may have run so deep it accounts for her Best Actress Oscar for this picture too, although Davis was plainly one of the best players of her generation, and well-liked, with 10 nominations and two wins for Best Actress between 1934 and 1944. Jezebel, based on a play that was successful in 1933, similarly goes down South for a good old slavery times story—this one set in 1850s Louisiana during a yellow fever epidemic, with racial tensions of a different kind, abolitionist, as thick in the air as 2020.

Davis is Julie Marsden, a Scarlett-like—and/or Scarlett-lite, depending on your feelings about GWTW—spoiled daughter of wealth. If Scarlett wears black to shock everyone at a dance, Julie wears scarlet. It works out pretty much the same. Julie's on-again off-again beau is Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda, young and on the rise but already with a ramrod up his spine) and the script sends the couple spinning. Julie seems to have a habit of going too far and then seeking atonement and Davis captains up her gyrations with quivering conviction. She's easy to hate in a sort of delicious way. At a key point in the movie, Julie's Aunt Belle says she reminds her "of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God." Jezebel, you may recall, is a biblical Phoenician character, the wife of Ahab and a general no-goodnik infatuated with power, and a woman besides. Aunt Belle is not wrong here but I will say Julie's road to redemption is far more compelling than Scarlett O'Hara's.

American Honey (2016)

UK / USA, 163 minutes

Director / writer: Andrea Arnold

Photography: Robbie Ryan

Music: Rihanna, E-40, Juicy J, Rae Sremmurd, Carnage, etc.

Editor: Joe Bini

Cast: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough, McCaul Lombardi, Arielle Holmes, Crystal Ice, Johnny Pierce II, Shawna Rae Mosely

By its length, by its title, by its timing, director and writer Andrea Arnold's American Honey arrived boldly insisting it has something monumental to say about the way we live now in this country and oh, er, maybe "Obama's America" in an election year. It's one of those pictures that feels like an event more than just another day at the movies. It tells an ambitious story of booze, drugs, sex, and money, putting naïve teens and 20somethings on a road trip that wanders across the Great Plains and never ends. American Honey starts in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and travels through Kansas City, into Iowa, across the badlands of North Dakota, and through a giant blasting thunderstorm, among other points of Midwestern interest. These kids are not searching for themselves or America. This is not Easy Rider. They're out there conning white suburbanites into buying magazine subscriptions and, like a degraded version of the already degraded privileged kids in Risky Business, they just want to make money. A lot of money.

American Honey focuses on three characters: Star (Sasha Lane), an 18-year-old of mixed racial origins escaping her nowhere life going nowhere in Muskogee, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), a lothario from Bakersfield and the best seller on the crew, and Krystal (Riley Keough), who poses as a chippy ice goddess Southern beauty. Krystal is the corporate road manager assigned to running this show on the road, by name "Crew 071." But the crew itself is a brilliant fourth character, like a Greek chorus counterpoint, this scruffy half-drunken bunch of down-and-outers. They are like a traveling 24/7 party, heaving riotous fun wherever they go at kegger levels of loose. It's so mysterious, so revelatory, seeing them from a distance carrying on in parking lots like a circus gang. They are all hot and a little dirty, from all parts of the US like an old-fashioned World War II Army platoon. American Honey manages to have it both ways. It is and is not Simon & Garfunkel, all gone to look for America.

Union Pacific (1939)

USA, 135 minutes

Director: Cecil B. DeMille

Writers: Walter DeLeon, C. Gardner Sullivan, Jesse Lasky Jr., Jack Cunningham, Ernest Haycox, Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, Jeanie Macpherson, Stanley Rauh

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: Sigmund Krumgold, John Leipold, Gerard Carbonara, Leo Shuken, Victor Young

Editor: Anne Bauchens

Cast: Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Preston, Brian Donlevy, Henry Kolker, Akim Tamiroff, Lynne Overman, Robert Barrat, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Ridges, Evelyn Keyes, Regis Toomey, Lon Chaney Jr.

I've never entirely understood the term "movie movie" (and the internet is little help on it at the moment) but my sense is that it might apply to this cracking epical Cecil B. DeMille yarn about the building of the railroad from Omaha, Nebraska to Ogden, Utah. It's pulpy, old-fashioned, a little bit long, and thoroughly enjoyable. There's enough fizzy calculated confrontation and tension from scene to scene to keep it constantly interesting. It takes place shortly after the Civil War and plays much like an extended Dudley Do-Right cartoon, complete with a Snidely Whiplash villain (Brian Donlevy, in the screenshot above, who is often seen dunking the sucking end of his cigars into his drink, eww). 

Also on view: buffalo, Indians, Mexicans, gold fever, fancy shooting, gamblers, horses—practically everything Western except Mormons, and they're probably waiting in Ogden. And trains, of course, the ol' Iron Horse, with not one but two spectacular train wrecks. The story is some extended nonsense that is at once about opening the Western frontier and also about the amiable political corruption that drove it. The bad guys don't get everything they want, but as usual in American history they get about 80%, enough to pay for the cigars and fancy suits. 

Fantasia (1940)

USA, 125 minutes
Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen
Writers: Joe Grant, Dick Huerner, Lee Blair, Elmer Plummer, Phil Dike, Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie, Graham Heid, Perce Pearce, Carl Fallberg, William Martin, Leo Thiele, Robert Sterner, John McLeish, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Bill Peet, Vernon Stallings, Campbell Grant, Arthur Heineman
Photography: James Wong Howe
Music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, Amilcare Ponchielli, Modest Mussorgsky, Franz Schubert
Animators / editors: numerous
Cast: Deems Taylor, Leopold Stokowski

Is anyone still alive who saw this when it was new? It seems unlikely, as the release of "this new form of entertainment, Fantasia," is 80 years past now, a full lifetime. The pompous words are from the dweeby Deems Taylor, standing uncomfortably in formalwear he doesn't belong in, who is our host, master of ceremonies, and all-around Robert Osborne guy for the movie. He's really not wrong about "new form of entertainment," as the vast collaboration of Fantasia arguably produced the template, if not indeed the ultimate refinement and pinnacle, of what we'd later call music videos. Taylor, continuing, "Now, there are three kinds of music on this Fantasia program. First, there's the kind that tells a definite story. Then there's the kind that, while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there's a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake."

As it happens, the third kind tends to be my favorite here and it seems to be what gets Taylor most amped up himself, as when, after the intermission (Fantasia is also old-fashioned in many small comforting ways), he carries on a conversation with "the soundtrack," represented by psychedelic symmetrical shapes and colors corresponding to musical instruments playing. In many ways it's the forerunner to computer screensavers and those hypnotic visualizers digital music players used to have.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

USA, 100 minutes
Director: John Huston
Writers: John Huston, Dashiell Hammett
Photography: Arthur Edeson
Music: Adolph Deutsch
Editor: Thomas Richards
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr., Barton MacLane, Lee Patrick, Ward Bond, Jerome Cowan

If I could find some way to rank my favorite movies based on the number of times I've seen them (which seems like a reasonable metric), The Maltese Falcon would likely make the top 10. I discovered it when I was still a teen, watched it many times on TV and in retro theaters, rediscovered it in my 20s and then in my 30s. It seems to be good for practically any occasion. The parts intended to be most powerful—for example, those speeches at the end about love and betrayal between Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade and Mary Astor as a scandalous woman of many aliases—have actually worked on me once or twice (I do love the image near the end of Mary Astor in an elevator, behind bars, going down). More often now I appreciate seeing a bunch of professionals busy on some of their best work, starting with Dashiell Hammett who wrote the original novel, one of his best.

In fact, the credits seem a little confused about who matters among these professionals. Gladys George as the widow of Spade's partner is featured with Bogart, Astor, and Peter Lorre in the opening titles, though she barely makes an impression (not George's fault—it's the way the role was written for the picture). Sydney Greenstreet makes the second plateful of names, but there's no mention of Elisha Cook Jr. until the closing credits. It's a commercial film, but The Maltese Falcon is no Hollywood glamour romp of movie stars—instead, it's more like a parade of character actors, starting with Bogart, and working all the way down to the ubiquitous Ward Bond (the Kevin Bacon of his era), James Burke, John Hamilton, and Walter Huston—hey-that-guys one and all. Out of curiosity I decided to keep track of how long it took to get to the main ones.

Why We Fight (1942-1945)

Prelude to War (1942); The Nazis Strike (1943); Divide and Conquer (1943); The Battle of Britain (1943); The Battle of Russia (1943); The Battle of China (1944); War Comes to America (1945), USA, 422 minutes, documentary
Directors: Frank Capra, Anatole Litvak, Anthony Veiller
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Anthony Veiller, Robert Heller, Williband Hentschel, Adolf Hitler, Eric Knight, S.K. Lauren, Anatole Litvak, John Sanford, Confucius, Emma Lazarus
Photography: Robert J. Flaherty
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin, Hugo Friedhofer, Leigh Harline, Arthur Lange, Cyril J. Mockridge, Alfred Newman, David Raksin, Anthony Collins, Louis Gruenberg, John Leipold, Roy Webb, William Lava, Howard Jackson, Max Steiner
Editors: William Hornbeck, William A. Lyon
With: Walter Huston, Anthony Veiller, John Litel, Frieda Inescourt, Lloyd Nolan, Elliot Lewis, Harry von Zell

At the moment, it's not hard to understand the monumental task of the United States and the democratic nations in 1942 converting the Greatest Generation into the original Antifa. It took some prodding. As we are currently living through a period of nearly perfect amnesia about fascism it's instructive to see, as documented in this series of instructional films, that Madison Square Garden could be filled in the late 1930s with Nuremberg-style rallies for American Nazis, swastikas blazing and thuggish beat-downs for anyone raising objections to the usual toxic swill. Sad (and obvious) to say, the only difference in today's "Lock her up" "Send her back" rallies is that they are shot in color, and they're not yet so brazen with the swastikas (though they think it's funny to say "Hail Trump").

But a monumental task was met with a monumental propaganda film project, appropriately preserved now in stained, scratched, and iffy prints, cheaply available in libraries, on YouTube, cable-TV channels, Amazon Prime, DVD, even VHS (though no longer cheap in that format). Why We Fight set out to be our Triumph of the Will. Even today it remains as stirring, entertaining, and inspiring as a seven-hour seven-part movie can be. Sometimes, as in the studious prologue of the first episode, Prelude to War, it can be dull with didactic explanation. We're still a little bored with Manchuria going down in 1931 and Shanghai and Nanking in 1937, even with the Japanese altogether (other than Pearl Harbor and the A-bombs). These anonymous filmmakers expertly manage our expectations. They know it's German Nazis we want and it is German Nazis we will get. They just make us sit through some instruction first. As they put it, at the end of every episode, with words it is good to remember now (their italics, but my emphasis too): "The victory of the democracies can only be complete with the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan."

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

USA, 108 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, Gordon McDonell
Photography: Joseph A. Valentine
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: Milton Carruth
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, Hume Cronyn, Macdonald Carey, Wallace Ford, Edna May Wonacott

In my attempts to make the case that Fritz Lang's M is flawed and overrated, too much a propaganda exercise pushing for return of a death penalty in Germany in the early '30s—hey, we all have our blind spots—I used to counter claims it was the best serial killer movie of all time by calling attention to Shadow of a Doubt, director Alfred Hitchcock's first movie set exclusively in the US and also reportedly his own favorite of all the movies he made. In 1986, Henry made the whole argument moot, of course (though not all fans of M see it that way), and in hindsight I would have to say that Hitchcock's conception of a serial killer and his society is nearly as romanticized and off-key as M, though both movies also have many things right about the curious brutal phenomenon of modern life.

M focuses on the sexual perversion, general skulking pathetic qualities, and the heinousness of the crimes, preying on children, whereas Shadow of a Doubt makes Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten, typically great even in an unusual role for him) more of a preening Nietzschean superman type, openly, almost compulsively scornful of social institutions such as banks and churches. A soul of darkness. He's the one you'd think more likely to send postcards to newspapers and police. But Uncle Charlie is actually a good deal more circumspect and ultimately perhaps rational, going to great pains to hide his identity and in many ways committing his crimes for the money. He's closer to Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley than Jack the Ripper. The genius here is to set this serial killer down in the middle of California small-town Leave it to Beaver land.

Double Indemnity (1944)

USA, 107 minutes
Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain
Photography: John F. Seitz
Music: Miklos Rozsa
Editors: Doane Harrison, Lee Hall
Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Tom Powers, Jean Heather, Byron Barr, Richard Gaines, Porter Hall, Raymond Chandler

Because the influence of Double Indemnity was instantly and enduringly so pervasive—it's tempting to make the case that it's ground zero for all film noir, The Maltese Falcon notwithstanding—I'm always surprised to learn how hard it was to get made. But we must remember that Double Indemnity is, after all, the tale of an adulteress and a fornicator plotting foul murder. It's downbeat to blackest hell, which makes it an unusual wartime project. And cowriters Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler couldn't stand each other. Chandler didn't understand screenplay writing (the more seasoned Howard Hawks knew all that mattered was getting Chandler's name in the credits, ditto for that matter William Faulkner) and Wilder couldn't write without a partner. In the fray, according to legend, Chandler sent the studio heads an indignant letter complaining that Wilder wore Chandler's hat without permission in writing sessions. Chandler thought he had licked drinking but now he started again. Wilder took his revenge by making his next picture, The Lost Weekend, transparently about Chandler.

Double Indemnity is where we see how Billy Wilder knew how to put together a picture: holding his nose to work with Chandler in order to get those sparkling wonderful weird overblown dialogue interludes ("There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour." "How fast was I going, officer?" "I'd say around ninety." "Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket." "Suppose I let you off with a warning this time." "Suppose it doesn't take." "Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles." "Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder." "Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder." "That tears it"), laboring to build a perfect cast our of nervous all-American pros headed by Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, with Edward G. Robinson in a supporting role, letting DP John F. Seitz loose to shoot as dark as he wanted and no stinting on the venetian blind shadows putting the guilty behind bars (which we must also remember were relatively new and are still spectacular in Double Indemnity), picking out the wig and sunglasses for Stanwyck, glad-handing censors on all sides and slipping in the juice with astonishing subtlety, resorting to Hitchcock-like grinding suspense techniques in numerous places (what? the car won't start?!), stripping it all down to essentials so it ends on a knockout punch of an image. Even Miklos Rosza's musical theme is perfect, noble, tragic, used frugally yet nagging like grief.

Melancholia (2011)

[Original 2011 Movie of the Year ballot here. This review first published May 24, 2013.]

Denmark / Sweden / France / Germany, 136 minutes
Director/writer: Lars von Trier
Photography: Manuel Alberto Claro
Music: Richard Wagner
Editor: Molly Marlene Stensgaard
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard, Brady Corbet, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgard, Udo Kier, Kiefer Sutherland

I stumbled a little over my misgivings about director and writer Lars von Trier and actually needed to see this a couple of times before it clicked. Not that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone, ever, sitting twice through a movie that lasts more than two hours, let alone one by von Trier. But it worked for me. Or maybe I've just been in the mood lately for the end of the world. A friend put it on a DVD for me with more such tales, Last Night (the 1998 Canadian film), Perfect Sense, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, all of which suited my mood as well.

But Melancholia was the class of the bunch. In both Melancholia and his most recent before that, Antichrist, von Trier calculatedly puts a number of similar unlikely elements in juxtaposition: beautiful photography, beautiful music, fantastic and gruesome plot points, and a thick overlay of debilitating depression. And stars, in this case most notably Kirsten Dunst, who takes on not just one of the bravest roles I've seen attempted by her, but by anyone. She puts herself in a special class with this. I'm not talking about the nudity, thought that by itself would qualify for bravery. The depths of depression that she plumbs here feel personal, and deeply authentic, so much so that watching them almost starts to feel like a violation itself.

Experimenter (2015)

The Stanley Milgram Story, USA, 98 minutes
Director / writer: Michael Almereyda
Photography: Ryan Samul
Music: Bryan Senti
Editor: Kathryn J. Schubert
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, John Palladino, Jim Gaffigan, Anthony Edwards, Anton Yelchin, Taryn Manning, John Leguizamo, Kellan Lutz, Dennis Haysbert

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram is best-known today for practically the first serious experiment he ever conducted, examining obedience to authority, and especially for the ethical controversy that followed and still dogs the results. Director and writer Michael Almereyda defines his movie almost self-consciously as a biopic, however eccentric, however experimental, but like Milgram himself he is forced to return again and again to the obedience experiment and controversy. Milgram, who died in 1984 at the age of 51, researched far more widely than just that one experiment. One of the pleasures of Experimenter is its depiction and discussion of those experiments, ingenious attempts to uncover the warp and woof of human personality and social interaction: the small-world experiment (which gave us the term and concept "six degrees of separation"), the lost letter experiment, the looking up experiment, the familiar stranger experiment, and others.

But the obedience trials are what Milgram remains known for, and indeed that is likely the most profound and important experiment he ever conceived, if only because the results were so depressingly surprising to everyone. The experiment is a bit complicated, because it involves deception of the test subject (the source of the ethical controversy). Experimenter makes its first order of business a detailed enactment of that test procedure. A subject is told he or she will take the "teacher" role in a learning experiment that involves inducing increasingly more intense electrical shocks to the "learner" when the learner gives a wrong answer to a question. The learner is actually a confederate of the experimenters, sitting in another room out of sight of the teacher, playing a tape recording of himself groaning in pain as the shocks become stronger. When the subject shows reluctance to continue, the authority figure, another confederate of Milgram's pretending to be the learning experiment test administrator, tells the subject that the test must go on and he the administrator will take all responsibility. The subjects, presumably thus relieved of the responsibility, continued administering shocks all the way to the highest levels in 60% to 70% of the trials. Later tests in the 2000s replicated these results.