Queen of the Desert (Werner Herzog, 2015)

Cast: Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, Robert Pattinson, Jay Abdo, Jenny Agutter, David Calder, Christopher Fulford, Nick Waring, Holly Earle, Mark Lewis Jones, Beth Goddard. Screenplay: Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Ulrich Bergfelder. Film editing: Joe Bini. Music: Klaus Bedelt. 

Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert is a tepid and conventional biopic from a director who isn't known for being either tepid or conventional. It's ostensibly the story of the pioneering explorer Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman), but it subsumes her discoveries and adventures in the Middle East in an account of her love life. A miscast James Franco plays British diplomat Henry Cadogan, who supposedly won her heart but was prevented from marrying her by Bell's parents. After his death, she fell in love with a British army officer, Richard Wylie (Damian Lewis), but he was married and died at Gallipoli in 1915. The film also hints at a flirtation with T.E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson), who was probably either asexual or gay. So the film suggests that these failures in love caused Bell to transfer her affections to the desert and its people, embodied in the film by her guide, Fattuh (Jay Abdo). Falsifications abound, as they do in most biopics, and some of them are glaring: A scene set in 1914 is followed by a flashback that a title card says took place 20 years earlier, which would place it in 1902, but it contains references to Queen Victoria, who died in 1901. If the film is redeemed at all, it's by Peter Zeitlinger's cinematography and Kidman's performance. But Bell deserves much better treatment. 

Leaves of Grass (Tim Blake Nelson, 2009)

Edward Norton in Leaves of Grass

Cast: Edward Norton, Tim Blake Nelson, Keri Russell, Melanie Lynskey, Josh Pais, Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, Pruitt Taylor Vince. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson. Cinematography: Roberto Schaefer. Production design: Max Biscoe. Film editing: Michelle Botticelli. Music: Jeff Danna.

With a fine cast headed by Edward Norton in a tour de force performance, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass only needed a somewhat less ramshackle screenplay than the one Nelson wrote for it. The premise is sound: A successful academic returns to his backwater home town and is confronted with his messed-up family. Norton deftly creates the disparate twin brothers, philosophy professor Bill Kincaid and good-ol'-boy marijuana grower Brady Kincaid. Bill soon finds himself embroiled in Brady's illegal affairs. Nelson's screenplay does a lot of things right, using Bill's philosophical approach to life as a foil to Brady's hang-loose lifestyle, and making both characters somewhat plausible twins. It also does a lot of predictable things, like finding a romantic interest for Bill in a poetry-quoting local played nicely by Keri Russell. But he overcomplicates his story with secondary characters like the randy coed who snares Bill into a sexual harassment charge or the orthodontist who meets Bill on a plane and unwittingly precipitates the bloody outcome of the story. He also casts great actors like Susan Sarandon and Melanie Lynskey in roles that have little to do with the mainstream of the plot. Leaves of Grass uneasily straddles the line between screwball and black comedy, but even when it doesn't work, the cast makes it watchable.  

Reprise (Joachim Trier, 2006)

Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Høiner in Reprise

Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Espen Klouman Høiner, Viktoria Winger, Odd-Magnus Williamson, Pål Stokka, Christian Rubeck, Henrik Elvestad, Henrik Mestad, Rebekka Karijord, Sigmund Sæverud. Screenplay: Jochim Trier, Eskil Vogt. Cinematography: Jakob Ihre. Production design: Roger Rosenberg. Film editing: Olivier Bugge Coutté. Music: Olla Fløttum, Knut Schreiner. 

Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young. To make the point, Joachim Trier focuses on two friends, aspiring writers, in their early 20s, and imagines the course their lives might have taken as well as showing the way it did. He uses a voiceover narrator (Eindrida Eidsvold) to set up the potential but also sometimes to elucidate the actual. The result is a sometimes confusing but ultimately touching portrait of Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman Høiner) as they try to manage burgeoning careers, love affairs, and friendships. Reprise was Trier's first feature, made with the keen awareness of a director in his 30s of the choices and the missteps we all encounter in that crucial period of our lives.

Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998)

Vince Vaughn in Psycho

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, Robert Forster, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Haney, Chad Everett, Rance Howard, Rita Wilson, James Remar, James Le Gros. Screenplay: James Sefano, based on a novel by Robert Bloch. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: Tom Foden. Film editing: Amy E. Duddleston. Music: Bernard Herrmann. 

Accepting the role of Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was an act that took chutzpah or hubris or something. There are few performances more definitive than Anthony Perkins in the role in the 1960 film. It's much easier to accept some of the actors who replace the originals: Viggo Mortensen is a far more capable actor than John Gavin, and he gives the role of Sam Loomis personality. Julianne Moore is tougher and feistier than Vera Miles as Lila Crane. And even Anne Heche is acceptable as Marion Crane, though lacking the touch of glamour -- and the shock of her early departure from the movie -- that made Janet Leigh iconic in the role. Which is just to say that Van Sant's version is an experiment that never justifies itself: Can a nearly shot-for-shot re-creation of a classic film succeed as its own movie? It didn't, of course, meeting critical scorn and audience indifference. The incidental departures from the Hitchcock version, the updatings to meet contemporary expectations are glaringly irrelevant: San is naked in the bedroom scene at the beginning; Norman masturbates when he looks at Marion through the peephole; we see the wounds inflicted by Mother and Marion's nude buttocks in the shower scene. Even the rescoring of Bernard Herrmann's music by Danny Elfman feels less effective in the new context. As so often with remakes, we come to see what made the original so brilliant. 

The Fan (Otto Preminger, 1949)

George Sanders, Jeanne Crain, and Richard Greene in The Fan

Cast: Jeanne Crain, George Sanders, Madeleine Carroll, Richard Greene, Martita Hunt, John Sutton, Hugh Dempster, Richard Ney, Virginia McDowall. Screenplay: Ross Evans, Dorothy Parker, Walter Reisch, based on a play by Oscar Wilde. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Leland Fuller, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof. 

Uncharacteristically lackluster direction by Otto Preminger mars The Fan, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan. Like so many movies from stage plays, it hashes things up to meet the demands of motion pictures for action and change of scenery, adding a "frame story" that takes place in London after the end of World War II. An elderly Mrs. Erlynne (Madeleine Carroll) discovers the titular fan at an auction of things retrieved from the rubble left by the bombing of the city and seeks out Lord Darlington (George Sanders) to prove her rightful ownership. Flash back to the action of the play. Wilde's aphorisms are chopped up and scattered in the dialogue of the film, as it becomes less a battle of wits and more a domestic drama. Sanders, Carroll, and Martita Hunt retain some of the play's essence in their performances, but Jeanne Crain and Richard Greene are pallid versions of the Windermeres. 

The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)

Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth in The Hit

Cast: Terence Stamp, John Hurt, Tim Roth, Laura del Sol, Bill Hunter, Fernando Rey, Lennie Peters, Willoughby Gray, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Peter Prince. Cinematography: Mike Molloy. Production design: Andrew Sanders. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: Paco de Lucia. 

The acting trio of Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth make The Hit watchable even though they're playing characters with manifest inconsistencies in a story riddled with plot holes. Stamp plays Willie, who ratted on his fellow mobsters to avoid prison and has spent ten years in exile in Spain. Then  two gangsters, the icy, taciturn Braddock (Hurt) and his itchy, naive partner Myron (Roth), show up to bring him to mob justice. What follows is a peregrination through northern Spain, during which Braddock kills another mobster and abducts his mistress (Laura del Sol). As a road movie, it's not bad, but as a gangster film it falls short, never quite finding a consistent tone, wavering between film noir and black comedy. 

Limonov: The Ballad (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2024)

Ben Whishaw in Limonov: The Ballad

Cast: Ben Whishaw, Viktoria Miroshnichenko, Tomas Aran, Corado Invernizzi, Evgeniy Mironov, Andrey Burkovskiy, Masha Mashkova, Odin Lund Biron, Vladim Stepanov, Vladislav Tsenev, Sandrine Bonnaire. Screenplay: Pawel Pawlikowski, Ben Hopkins, Kirill Serebrennikov. Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov. Production design: Lyubov Korolkova, Vladslav Ogay. Film editing: Yuriy Karik. Music: Massimo Pupillo. 

I admit that I had never heard of Eduard Limonov before venturing into Kirill Serebrennikov's biopic, and even now I'm not sure why I should have. Poet, dissident, and madman, he stirred things up in the Soviet Union, New York, France, and again in the Russia that arose from the fall of the Soviet Union. Limonov: The Ballad puts him in the larger context of the madness of New York City in the 1970s and Russia in the 1990s, and to some extent makes him a representative figure for those troubled places and times. Despite an all-stops-out performance by Ben Whishaw and a vivid re-creation of those eras, the film lacks coherence. But maybe that's the point: Limonov himself lacked coherence.   

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)

Emma Stone in Bugonia

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, Alicia Silverstone. Screenplay: Will Tracy, based on a film by Jang Joon-hwan. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: James Price. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix. 

Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia feels less inventively off-beat than some of his other films, like the macabre fable Dogtooth (2009), the dystopian fantasy The Labster (2015), or the sendup of the costume drama The Favourite (2018). That may be because it's a remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! (2003), whose director, Jang Joon-hwan, was originally supposed to make it, so the material didn't originate in Lanthimos's imagination. Which is not to say it isn't full of his delirious inventiveness, especially since he's working with his favorite actress, Emma Stone, who seems to share his predilection for the absurd (viz. her work with Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie on the 1923 series The Curse). Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceuticals CEO who is kidnapped by Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), who is convinced that she's an alien and that the Andromedan mother ship is about to return to Earth for her. Imprisoned in his basement, with only Teddy's timorous cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), to guard her, Michelle proves resourceful and resistant. But is Teddy really deluded in his beliefs about her? What suspense the film generates comes from that question. Stone and Plemmons, the former indomitable and the latter sometimes explosively brutal, are at peak form. The only reservations I have lie in the rather cobbled-together ending of the film, which seems to me an apocalypse that the movie neither earns nor justifies.  

Girl With Hyacinths (Hasse Ekman, 1950)

Ulf Palme and Anders Ek in Girl With Hyacinths

Cast: Eva Henning, Ulf Palme, Birgit Tengroth, Anders Ek, Gösta Cederlund, Karl-Arne Holmsten, Keve Hjelm, Marianne Löfgren, Björn Berglund, Anne-Marie Brunius. Screenplay: Hasse Ekman. Cinematography: Göran Strindberg. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Lennart Wellèn. Music: Erland von Koch. 

A young woman kills herself, leaving a letter for her neighbors across the hall that names them as her heirs, even though they were only passing acquaintances. That's the setup for Hasse Ekman's Girl With Hyacinths. The neighbors, writer Anders Wikner (Ulf Palme) and his wife, Britt (Birgit Tengroth), are left to solve the mystery of why Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning) chose to take her life. Ingmar Bergman named Girl With Hyacinths as one of the greatest Swedish films, and while it never achieves the distinction of the best of Bergman's own films, it's an absorbing precursor to them. The secrets of Dagmar Brink's life are uncovered by the Wikners in a series of flashbacks, as they encounter a bristly banker (Gösta Cederlund), an alcoholic painter (Anders Ek), a giddy actress (Marianne Löfgren), Dagmar's ex-husband (Keve Hjelm), and a womanizing popular singer (Karl-Arne Holmsten). Although Anders Wikner does most of the sleuthing, it's his clever and more sympathetic wife who really understands what led to Dagmar's death, bringing to mind the collaboration of Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). The film also touches on themes that were taboo in the Hollywood of 1950. Hasse Ekman's skillful direction is aided by Göran Strindberg's cinematography. 

Films I've Seen But Not Reviewed

Prison on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987)

Prison on Fire II (Ringo Lam, 1991)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson, 2025

Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025)

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, 2017)

West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (Med Hondo, 1979)

You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)

Framed (Richard Wallace, 1947)

The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)

Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009)

Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)

The Bellboy (Jerry Lewis, 1960)(

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-wai, 2007)

Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997)