La Marge (Walerian Borowczyk, 1976)

Sylvia Kristel and Joe Dallesandro in La Marge

Cast: Sylvia Kristel, Joe Dallesandro, André Falcon, Mireille Audibert, Denis Manuel, Dominique Marcas, Norma Picadilly, Camille Larivière, Luz Laurent, Louise Chevalier, Karin Albin. Screenplay: Walerian Borowczyk, based on a novel by André Piyere de Mandriargues. Cinematography: Bernard Daillencourt. Production design: Jacques D'Ovidio. Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur. 

Positing a connection between grief and sex, Walerian Borowczyk's La Marge tries to be more than just soft-core porn filtered through an exquisite sensibility. It fails, but honorably. What it needs is a more nuanced actor than Joe Dallesandro in the lead, greater narrative clarity, and an avoidance of symbolic clichés like the dwarf who marks the fringes of a fragmented reality. It overreaches just enough to be memorable but not to avoid ridicule. 

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

Ronee Blakley in Nashville

Cast: David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Keenan Wynn, Elliott Gould, Julie Christie. Screenplay: Joan Tewkesbury. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Film editing: Dennis M. Hill, Sidney Levin. Music: Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Juan Grizzle, Allan F. Nicholls, Dave Peel, Joe Raposo. 

Nashville hated Nashville. That's because it wasn't about them, but like most major movies of the '70s, from Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), it was about American angst. I hadn't seen it since its release and as I did then, I found it deserved the critical hosannas for sheer audacity but was also exasperatingly inconsistent in achievement. The satire remains pungent, especially when it involves Geraldine Chaplin's clueless BBC reporter, constantly missing the point, stumbling over her own preconceptions, or desperately searching for metaphors as she tours a junkyard or a school bus lot. Some of the performances are great, especially Ronee Blakley's fragile diva, Michael Murphy's oily political advance man, Gwen Welles's clueless would-be singer, and Lily Tomlin's unappreciated wife. But although the great Barbara Harris gets her moment to shine late in the film, her character is poorly integrated, and Shelley Duvall is wasted in a role that has no point. The decision to have the actors write and perform their own songs was a mistake, especially in the case of Karen Black, who never comes across as a credible rival to Blakley's Barbara Jean. Still, the film serves its major purpose, to portray an America wrenched by post-Watergate anxiety as it prepares to celebrate its bicentennial. Nashville is bracketed by two songs, one asserting that "we must be doing something right to last 200 years," the other anxiously repeating "you may say that I ain't free, but it don't worry me." What comes in between is apt demonstration of both premises. 

To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976)

Nastassja Kinski in To the Devil a Daughter

Cast: Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Nastassja Kinski, Honor Blackman, Denholm Elliott, Anthony Valentine, Michael Goodliffe, Eva Maria Meineke. Screenplay: Christopher Wicking, John Peacock, based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley. Cinematography: David Watkin. Art direction: Don Picking. Film editing: John Trumper. Music: Paul Glass. 

Peter Sykes's To the Devil a Daughter was disowned by both its credited screenwriter, Christopher Wicking, and the author of the book on which it was based, Dennis Wheatley. It's easy to see why: It's muddled and uninvolving, a routine horror thriller that borrows its best ideas from The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), throws in a nude scene for Nastassja Kinski, who was only 14 at the time, and wastes the talents of Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, and Denholm Elliott. 
 

Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979)

Jeff Bridges in Winter Kills

Cast: Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Malone, Tomas Milian, Belinda Bauer, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune, Richard Boone, David Spielberg, Joe Spinell, Elizabeth Taylor. Screenplay: William Richert, based on a novel by Richard Condon. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Production design: Robert F. Boyle. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Maurice Jarre. 

Every conspiracy thriller has to be judged by the standard set by John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and that includes Jonathan Demme's ill-advised 2004 remake. What makes William Richert's Winter Kills such an obvious target for comparison is that it's based on a novel by Richard Condon, who also wrote the novel on which Frankenheimer's film was based. The difference between Frankenheimer's film and Richert's is that although both deal with a political assassination, The Manchurian Candidate appeared a year before the killing of John F. Kennedy and Winter Kills a decade and a half later. Frankenheimer's movie felt somehow so prophetic that it actually disappeared from circulation for years. Richert's is obviously modeled on the conspiracy and cover-up theories that have always surrounded the Kennedy assassination. Winter Kills is stuffed with stars, some of them, like the brief cameos by Sterling Hayden, Toshiro Mifune, and an unbilled Elizabeth Taylor, amounting to stunt casting. Its chief virtue is a reliably solid and attractive performance by Jeff Bridges as the half-brother of an assassinated president, who stumbles across a clue that seems to implicate their father, a billionaire played with sinister charm by John Huston. Even though everyone that Bridges's character comes in contact with seems to get killed, there's no real urgency driving the film, and the result is a puzzle with no payoff. 

The Beaver (Jodie Foster, 2011)

Mel Gibson in The Beaver

Cast: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Riley Thomas Stewart, Cherry Jones. Screenplay: Kyle Killen. Cinematography: Hagen Bogdanski. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Lynzee Klingman. Music: Marcelo Zarvos. 

The Beaver was a notorious box office flop, and no wonder. It starts as a serious drama about a man in the throes of a deep depression, morphs into a comic fantasy with a teen romance subplot, and then becomes a horror movie before a bloody denouement leads to a tentative resolution. How do you market a movie like that, especially when its star is getting the wrong kind of press? You can't blame it all on Mel Gibson, who demonstrates throughout the movie that he's a skilled and resourceful actor when his demons of bigotry and violence aren't being released by alcohol. It's tempting to blame Jodie Foster for taking the helm of the movie, though she manages to give it some coherence. The producers must have seen some promise in Kyle Killen's screenplay, so we might question their wisdom and taste. But mark it down to systemic failure, a reminder that making movies is a collaborative project and that collective judgment is fraught with peril. 

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)

Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel in The Dreamers

Cast: Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Anna Chancellor, Robin Renucci. Screenplay: Gilbert Adair, based on his novel. Cinematography: Fabio Cianchetti. Production design: Jean Rabasse. Film editing: Jacopo Quadri. 

Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American in Paris in 1968, meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother, Théo (Louis Garrel), at the protest over the firing of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque Française, and is invited home to dinner with them. There he meets their parents, a prominent French poet (Robin Renucci) and his English wife (Anna Chancellor), and is invited to stay over for the night. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, he is surprised to see, through a partly opened door, Isabelle and Théo sharing a bed, naked. The next day, the parents depart on a month's vacation, leaving a check for the twins to cover their expenses. Matthew accepts an invitation from them to move into a spare room. And so begins a month in which Matthew's view of life is altered. Matthew, Isabelle, and Théo form a ménage familiar to them from the movies they have watched, like Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964), whose familiar run through the Louvre they re-create. The sex and nudity in The Dreamers earned it an NC-17 rating, but when I learned that in the novel on which the film is based Matthew has sex not only with Isabelle but also with Théo, I wondered if Bertolucci regarded homosexuality as more transgressive than incest. Though The Dreamers intends to shock, it pales in comparison to the work of filmmakers like Michael Haneke and Catherine Breillat. A handsome and well-acted film, it feels inert, and an insertion of a scene from Robert Bresson's unsparing Mouchette (1967) in the film reveals how conventional and glossy it really is. 

The Tit and the Moon (Bigas Luna, 1994)

Biel Duran in The Tit and the Moon

Cast: Biel Duran, Mathilda May, Gérard Darmon, Miguel Poveda, Abel Folk, Laura Mañá, Genis Sánchez, Xavier Massé, Victoria Lepori, Xus Estruch, Jane Harvey. Screenplay: Cuca Canals, Bigas Luna. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Aimé Deudé. Film editing: Carmen Frías. Music: Nicola Piovani. 

As the title suggests, The Tit and the Moon is one of Bigas Luna's ribald skewerings of the Spanish male ego. But what sets it apart from Jamón, Jamón (1992) and Golden Balls (1993), its predecessors in Luna's "Iberian Trilogy," and what makes it somehow more shocking, is that the protagonist is a 9-year-old boy. Tete (Biel Duran) develops a breast fixation when his mother (Laura Mañá) gives birth to a baby brother. Watching her nurse the infant, Tete begins to long for a breast he can call his own, and wishes on the moon for it. So when Estrellita (Mathilda May), a beautiful, well-endowed Frenchwoman, arrives in his small Catalonian town, he thinks his wish has been fulfilled. But he has rivals for her attention, not only her husband, Maurice (Gérard Darmon), but also a local, Miguel (Miguel Poveda), whose flamenco love songs attract her attention. The rest is a fantasia, narrated from Tete's not always reliable point of view, involving human pyramids, farting, a waterbed, a pet frog, motorcycles, a bodybuilder called Stallone, and much else. It's not like any other coming of age movie, and not all of it works, but it holds your attention if only because you keep wondering what will happen next.  

EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)

Sandra Drzymalska in EO

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Tomasz Organek, Mateus Kosciukiewicz, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Isabelle Huppert, Lolita Chammah, Agata Sasinowska, Anna Rokita, Michal Przybyslawski, Gloria Iradukunda, Piotr Szaja. Screenplay: Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski. Cinematography: Michal Dymek. Production design: Roberta Amodio, Miroslaw Koncewicz. Film editing: Agnieszka Glinska. Music: Pawel Mikyetin. 

"I don't know whether I'm stealing you or saving you," a character says to the titular donkey of Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, which pretty much sums up the moral conundrum of a film in which no good deed goes unpunished. The animal rights activists who succeed in shutting down the circus in which Eo has performed only leave the donkey adrift in a world strange to him. Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska) thinks she's being kind to Eo when she seeks him out and visits him after the circus closes, but she only awakens his desire to follow her, which he does at his peril. The vet who heals him instead of euthanizing him after he's beaten nearly to death only postpones the inevitable. And Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), who is the one who either steals or saves him, leads the animal further astray in his odyssey. The film could be interpreted as an indictment of cruelty to animals, but the humans in it are perhaps even crueler to one another. As a fable, EO is tangled in ambiguities and tinged with nihilism, unlike the film to which it's an homage, Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), in which the donkey is a suffering saint. No one is redeemed by Eo's fate, so it's better to see it as an expression of Skolimowski's vision, tenuous and complex and unresolved as most visions are, full of images that haunt and tantalize. 

Anesthesia (Tim Blake Nelson, 2015)

Sam Waterston in Anesthesia

Cast: Sam Waterston, Corey Stoll, Tim Blake Nelson, Kristen Stewart, Gretchen Mol, Glenn Close, K. Todd Freeman, Michael Kenneth Williams,  Hannah Marks, Ben Konigsberg, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Jessica Hecnt, Scott Cohen, Gloria Reuben, Yul Vazquez, Richard Thomas, Annie Parisse, Lucas Hedges. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson. Cinematography: Christina Alexandra Voros. Production design: Tina Goldman. Film editing: Mako Kamitsuna. Music: Jeff Danna. 

As an actor, Sam Waterston radiates sincerity. So does Tim Blake Nelson's Anesthesia, which proves to be both its strength and its downfall. Waterston plays a Columbia philosophy professor who, in the evening after he has just announced his retirement to an adoring audience of students, is brutally attacked on the streets of New York City. Most of the film is a flashback to the events leading up to the attack, in which we see vignettes of the lives of his family and some others whose relationship to him and the assault gradually become apparent. It's a familiar technique for plotting and for giving depth to the central character, but there's a whiff of pretentiousness about it in Anesthesia. Waterston's character likes to quote Montaigne and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the quotes are designed to resonate with the events of the film. Some characters, like Kristen Stewart's self-harming grad student, barely fit into the narrative except to underscore the film's musings about the meaning of existence. Anesthesia is an honorable attempt at a cinema of ideas, but it tends to suggest that phrase is an oxymoron.

Pedicab Driver (Sammo Hung, 1989)

Sammo Hung in Pedicab Driver

Cast: Sammo Hung, Max Mok Siu-chung, Lau Kar-leung, Nina Li Chi, Sun Yueh, Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying, Liu Chia-Liang, Billy Lau, Lung Chan, Hoi Mang, Cory Yuen, Manfred Wong. Screenplay: Barry Wong, Yuen Kai-Chi, Sammo Hung, Kin Lo. Cinematography: Leung Chi-Ming. Art direction: Chin Yiu-Hang. Film editing: Peter Cheung, Keung Chuen-Tak. Music: David Lautrec. 

Martial arts movies are like musicals: You don't watch them expecting plausibility. Just as people don't break into song and dance in the street in real life, they don't enter a room and start kicking and punching and somersaulting through the air. And as I learned from watching Sammo Hung's Pedicab Driver, which many admirers of martial arts films consider a masterpiece, you also don't watch them expecting consistency of tone. At one point the film is full of raunchy humor and fart jokes, at the next it's a romance, and then there's a duel using fluorescent light tubes as light sabers, and then it's a message movie about the desperation that drives women into prostitution, then there's a wedding followed by bloody deaths, followed by fights in which the villain gets what's coming to him, and finally a happy ending in which everyone seems to have forgotten how much pain they've been through. Which is all to say that I'm not the ideal audience for a movie like Pedicab Driver, just as many people are the wrong ones to watch, say, Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952), but I managed to accommodate myself to it.