Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings

“Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo … became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many … decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.” Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013)

Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz, Octavia Spencer, Kevin Durand, Chad Michael Murray, Ahna O'Reilly, Ariana Neal, Keenan Coogler, Trestin George, Joey Oglesby, Michael James, Marjorie Crump-Shears. Screenplay: Ryan Coogler. Cinematography: Rachel Morrison. Production design: Hannah Beachler. Film editing: Claudia Costello, Michael P. Shawver. Music: Ludwig Göransson. 

As long as it stays true to its neorealist roots, Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station is a very good movie indeed, and one that has proved a harbinger of better movies to come in Coogler’s career. It goes soft in casting actors like Octavia Spencer and Kevin Durand in roles that bring attention to their familiarity amid less-familiar faces. (Michael B. Jordan has become a familiar face, thanks in large part to Coogler, but he was comparatively unknown at the time.) It also indulges in a little too much sentimentality, as in the stray dog scene, and some unnecessary coincidence, as in the reappearance of Katie (Ahna O'Reilly), the woman Oscar helps in the market, on the BART train that night. Perhaps the biggest mistake, however, is in turning the film into a  biopic of Oscar Grant. By focusing on Grant’s backstory the film blunts the points it makes about racism, the training of police, and the dynamic of crowds. Oscar Grant certainly didn’t deserve to die that night, but then no one did. Still, it’s a meaningful film, with fine performances by Jordan, Spencer, Melonie Diaz, and the very young Ariana Neal as Oscar’s daughter. It’s also a skillfully made one, especially in its editing and in the mercifully subtle score by Ludwig Göransson. 

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Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, 1987)

Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire in Under the Sun of Satan

Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Alain Artur, Yann Dedet, Brigitte Legendre, Jean-Claude Bouriat, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Sylvie Pialat, Maurice Pialat, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. Cinematography: Willy Kurant. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Henri Dutilleux. 

Are the torments that afflict the priest played by Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan mental or spiritual? And is there a difference? That's the conundrum the film leaves us to ponder and the reason the film caused so much uproar when it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a tense, talky film that begins with the young priest, Donnisan, confessing his self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy to his superior, Menou-Segret (Pialat), who is shocked to find that Donnisan wears a hair shirt under his cassock -- he also secretly flagellates himself. Then the film shifts to Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a 16-year-old girl with two lovers. She visits the first, Cadignan (Alain Artur) to tell him that she's pregnant and then, playing with his rifle, shoots him. Then she has sex with the other, a physician named Gallet (Yann Dedet), who has examined Cadignan's body and ruled the death a suicide. He tells her that he won't perform an abortion for her. The stories of Donnisan and Mouchette will intersect eventually, but not before the priest experiences a dark night of the soul in an encounter with the devil. Donnisan is transformed but destroyed by this meeting. The denouement, in which Donnisan seems to perform a miracle, has caused the film to be likened to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955), but Pialat's work is messier than Dreyer's.   

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The Disaster Artist (James Franco, 2017)

Dave Franco and James Franco in The Disaster Artist

Cast: Dave Franco, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Ari Graynor, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, Paul Scheer, Zac Efron, Josh Hutcherson, June Diane Raphael, Megan Mullally, Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith.  Screenplay: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, based on a book by  Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell. Cinematography: Brandon Trost.  Production design: Chris L. Spellman. Film editing: Stacey Schroeder.  Music: Dave Porter. 

The title, The Disaster Artist, contains unintended irony. Just as the raves were coming in not only for James Franco’s directing and acting in The Disaster Artist but also for his work in a dual role on HBO’s The Deuce, there came a series of allegations of sexual misconduct dating back to 2014. Franco had been thought to be a strong contender for Oscar nominations for both directing and acting, but was shut out of those categories: The Disaster Artist received only one nomination, for the screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. We’re not at the point yet where recent filmmakers’ work can be judged independently of their personal lives – the way, say, we appreciate the work of past artists without referring to the less admirable sides of their lives. To the extent that I can shut out Franco’s alleged misconduct from any consideration of his movie, I have to say that the film is a delight, a witty, observant portrait of a grandly mysterious eccentric whose age, country of origin, and source of income have still never been fully documented. It’s also a film about the movies, about the joy and pain of making them, exhilarating even when the product, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003), is widely derided as one of the worst movies ever made. Franco’s performance is a great gallery of mannerisms into which the actor himself fully disappears – although there are some who would say that Franco’s own reputation for ego-tripping is an essential jumping-off point for the character. But the film is also a directorial showcase, in which Franco shows skill that his other work hadn’t previously manifested. The Disaster Artist is full of tasty bits, such as Melanie Griffith’s cameo as an acting teacher and Sharon Stone’s as an agent. As Greg Sestero, Dave Franco serves to keep the wacked-out narrative on course, and it’s fun to watch the brothers play off of each other.

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Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023)

Sandra Hüller and Swann Arlaud in Anatomy of a Fall

Cast: Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth, Saadia Benthaïb, Camille Rutherford, Anne Rotger, Sophie Fillières, Messi. Screenplay: Justine Triet, Arthur Harari. Cinematography: Simon Beaufils. Production design: Emmanuelle Duplay. Film editing: Laurent Sénéchal. 

Justine Triet won a well-deserved Oscar for the screenplay of her Anatomy of a Fall, one of the very few courtroom thrillers with an intricate plot that doesn't feel like it would fall to pieces if you employed a little skepticism about the things it asks you to believe. It's anchored by a fine performance by Sandra Hüller as a woman on trial as much for the small mistakes and missteps of her life as for the crime she's accused of committing. 

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I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)

Margot Robbie in I, Tonya

Cast: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale, Bojana Novakovic, Caitlin Carver. Screenplay: Steven Rogers. Cinematography: Nicolas Karakatsanis. Production design: Jade Healy. Film editing: Tatiana S. Riegel. Music: Peter Nashel.

The girly-girl character of women’s figure skating has always been something of the sport’s mainstay, attracting little girls with dreams of becoming ice princesses into what can be a brutal business. I think that one of the failings of I, Tonya is that it doesn’t deal sharply enough with this aspect of the sport: the training and marketing. Sure, it glances at it severely, but because the film is made from the point of view of Tonya Harding, the blue-collar interloper into a mostly affluent suburban world, we don’t get enough of the Nancy Kerrigan side of it: the girl shoved through adolescence into womanhood by the Big Sports machine. On the other hand, that would be another film entirely, and one that still needs to be made. So we should be grateful for what we get: an often witty and entertaining movie with some star performances by Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.

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Straight to Hell (Alex Cox, 1987)

Courtney Love in Straight to Hell

Cast: Dick Rude, Sy Richardson, Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Sara Sugarman, Biff Yeager, Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Jim Jarmusch, Grace Jones, Zander Schloss. Screenplay: Dick Rude, Alex Cox. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: David Martin. Music: The Pogues, Dan Wool. 

About 40 years ago, a group of Very Cool People found themselves with time on their hands, so they gathered some of their Very Cool Friends and went to the place in Spain where a lot of spaghetti Westerns were made and made one of their own. The story of Alex Cox's Straight to Hell is negligible because nobody took it seriously: Four bank robbers stash the loot in the desert and hole up in a ghost town that suddenly comes alive with a variety of residents, and then everybody pretty much kills everybody else. It's scarcely even a parody of the spaghetti Western. Nobody much liked it at the time. Roger Ebert called it "an indulgent mess" and it bombed at the box office. But it survived as a cult film, and in 2010 it got a "director's cut" version. It's still an indulgent mess, but a few comic moments survive the mayhem, and there is occasionally some funny dialogue: "A gun is like a tool. Ain't no better or no worse than the man that uses it." "Just like shoes." 

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Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express

Cast: Marlene Dietrich. Clive Brook, Anna May Wong, Warner Oland,  Eugene Pallette, Lawrence Grant, Louise Closser Hale, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Emile Chautard. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, based on a story by Harry Hervey. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. Music: W. Franke Harling.

There’s something claustrophobic about Shanghai Express: Its characters are always enclosed – in train cabins, in interrogation rooms, even in crowds of other people. Even the titular train gets itself into a tight spot, navigating the narrow passage through the streets of what the film calls “Peking.” Which makes it all the better for Lee Garmes’s camera, tasked as it is with making the most of Marlene Dietrich’s face. Garmes (with director Josef von Sternberg looking over his shoulder) always finds ways to frame that face with veils and feathers and furs, with misted windows, and when nothing else will do, with a simple shaft of light caressing those eyelids, cheekbones, and lips. Fortunately, the movie is more than glamorous poses: There’s a good deal of snappy dialogue and some wily character acting from the likes of Eugene Pallette, Louise Closser Hale, and – in a role that seems to have been a kind of audition for his most famous one, Charlie Chan – Warner Oland. I only wish that a leading man more attractive, or less plummily British, than Clive Brook had been provided for Dietrich. The story is nonsense, of course, and it verges dangerously on colonialist poppycock in its treatment of the Chinese, though even there it pulls back somewhat by turning Anna May Wong’s Hui Fei from a stereotypical dragon lady into a genuinely heroic figure. It must also be said that Shanghai Express was made at the right time: A couple of years later, the sexual adventurism of its women would have been taboo under the Production Code and Hui Fei would have been made to pay for murdering her rapist.

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Rude (Clement Virgo, 1995)

Richard Chevolleau in Rude

Cast: Maurice Dean Witt, Rachael Crawford, Clark Johnson, Richard Chevolleau, Sharon Lewis, Melanie Nicholls-King, Stephen Shellen, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Dayo Ade, Dean Marshall, Ashley Brown. Screenplay: Clement Virgo. Cinematography: Barry Stone. Production design: William Fleming. Film editing: Susan Maggi. Music: Aaron David, John Lang. 

In his first feature film, Rude, Clement Virgo makes the rookie mistake of trying to do too much, telling stories of three residents of the Toronto neighborhood Regent Park when just one story would be enough. They are familiar stories, too: an ex-con trying to avoid being drawn back into drug-running, a closeted gay man fearful of being outed, and a young woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Virgo ties them all together with the running commentary of a disc jockey called Rude (Sharon Lewis), on her pirate radio show. Fortunately, Virgo has chosen capable actors, and he displays a great deal of cinematic style that almost overcomes the familiarity of the material.  

Posted by Charles Matthews  

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PTU (Johnnie To, 2003)

Lam Suet in PTU

Cast: Simon Yam, Maggie Siu, Lam Suet, Ruby Wong, Raymond Ho-Yin Wong, Eddy Ko, Lo Hoi-Pang, Jerome Fung, Frank Zong-Ji Liu, Chiu Chi-Shing. Screenplay: Yau Nai-Hoi, Au Kin-Yee. Cinematography: Chen Siu-Keung. Production design: Ringo Cheung, Jerome Fung. Film editing: Law Wing-Cheung. Music: Chung Chi Wing. 

One of Akira Kurosawa’s best early films was Stray Dog (1949), in which a cop’s gun is stolen, necessitating a frantic search for the weapon. Johnnie To must surely have had that film in mind when he made PTU, although he takes a very different approach to the search, laying bare the inner workings of the Hong Kong police force and its relationship with the gangs it battles. Unlike the anxious rookie played by Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s film, the cop with the missing gun is a slovenly veteran, Sgt. Lo (Lam Suet), who loses the gun when he slips and falls and is knocked out while giving chase to some young gangsters. The Police Tactical Unit, headed by Sgt. Mike Ho (Simon Yam), comes to his aid, hoping to recover the weapon before they have to report its loss to the authorities. The rest is a series of colorful and sometimes deadly encounters, made vivid by cinematographer Chen Siu-Keung’s visions of the city at night, its shadowy streets sometimes garishly lighted by signs. It’s a twisty, ironic, and decidedly antiheroic thriller.  

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28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Sam Locke, Robert Rhodes, Ghazi Al Ruffai, Maura Bird, Connor Newall, Lewis Ashbourne Serkis, Mirren Mack, David Sterne, Cillian Murphy. Screenplay: Alex Garland.  Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Carson McCall, Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir. 

A pandemic has swept the world, leaving the survivors at the mercy of the worst among them. Good thing it's just a movie, right? I won't say that Alex Garland, who gave us Civil War (2024), about an American citizenry at odds with its government, didn't have something more in mind than a post-apocalyptic Britain, so let's just keep in mind Oscar Wilde's pronouncement: "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." On the surface, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a worthy successor to, maybe even an improvement on, Danny Boyle's 2025 film 28 Years Later, which introduced Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a solo survivor fending off those infected by the Rage Virus we first encountered in Boyle and Garland's 28 Days Later (2003). Film series usually peter out after one or two sequels, but this one has somehow gotten stronger. (I'm not going to say it's because life has copied art, to invoke another Wilde aphorism.) Nia DaCosta's direction is sure-handed, and the cast is more than up to the often gruesome demands of the script. The ending, reintroducing Cillian Murphy as Jim, the survivor from 28 Days Later who apparently hasn't aged much in 28 years, lets us know a sequel is on the way, and for once I don't mind. 

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God's Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017)

Alec Secareanu and Josh O'Connor in God's Own Country

Cast: Josh O'Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart. Screenplay: Francis Lee. Cinematography: Joshua James Richards. Production design: Stéphane Collonge. Film editing: Chris Wyatt. Music: Dustin O'Halloran, Adam Wiltzie

Inevitably called "a Yorkshire Brokeback Mountain," Francis Lee's debut feature, God's Own Country, has a forthrightness about gay sex that Ang Lee's more celebrated 2005 film lacked and is also missing from Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017). There's no shyness about the mechanics of sex or about frontal male nudity -- one scene, of Johnny (Josh O'Connor) and Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) talking together, plays out with both actors casually showing their privates. This acceptance of the body defuses the sensationalism that "discreet" treatments, like the pan to the window in Call Me by Your Name, actually tend to heighten. It also brings the outsider status of the two men more clearly into focus -- if we can observe and accept  the fact of their relationship, then why can't others? God's Own Country is otherwise a familiar -- maybe over-familiar -- story of the course of a love affair: meeting, attraction, consummation, discord, separation, resolution. Johnny is a surly lout in a bleak, unloving milieu until Gheorghe comes into his life and teaches him tenderness and self-respect. It's enough to make us want to see the other side of the story: What about Gheorghe's life in post-Ceausescu Romania made him a stronger and better person than Johnny? That said, it's a well-made film, with superlative performances from O'Connor and Secareanu, and beautiful support from old pros Gemma Jones and Ian Hart as Johnny's worn and weary but always crabby parents.

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The Prisoner of Zenda (Rex Ingram, 1922)

Ramon Novarro in The Prisoner of Zenda

Cast: Lewis Stone, Alice Terry, Robert Edeson, Stuart Holmes, Ramon Novarro, Barbara La Marr, Malcolm McGregor, Screenplay: Mary O'Hara, based on a novel by Anthony Hope. Cinematography: John F. Seitz. Art direction: Amos Myers. Film editing: Grant Whytock.

Rex Ingram's silent version of the old chestnut The Prisoner of Zenda needs more Ramon Novarro as Rupert of Hentzau, the impish villain. What there is of Novarro's Rupert is delightful; more than almost any other member of the cast he shows the kind of awareness that the camera sees all, which would take him from silents into the sound era. It was near the start of his career, a year before became a star in Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur, and he's still billed as Ramon Samaniego, so it's possible that Ingram didn't fully see his potential. His Rupert is not quite as charmingly wicked as Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s in the 1937 John Cromwell version of the Anthony Hope tale, but that's partly because Ingram chooses not to play up the role, putting Rupert amid a cadre of Black Michael's henchmen until the final climactic duel with Rudolf. Lewis Stone plays the two Rudolfs with more reserve and less dash than Ronald Colman did in 1937, and Alice Terry is pretty but rather forgettable as Princess Flavia, a role that Madeleine Carroll brought to life in the sound version. Some spectacular sets make up for the tedium of Ruritanian intrigue that threatens to stifle the film whenever Novarro isn't around.

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Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959)

Rock Hudson and Thelma Ritter in Pillow Talk

Cast: Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Tony Randall, Thelma Ritter, Nick Adams, Julia Meade, Allen Jenkins, Marcel Dalio, Lee Patrick, Mary McCarty, Alex Gerry. Screenplay: Stanley Shapiro, Maurice Richlin, Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene. Cinematography: Arthur E. Arling. Art direction: Richard H. Riedel. Film editing: Milton Carruth. Music: Frank De Vol.

The Production Code censors wanted to change the name from Pillow Talk to something less suggestive, which is one of the more ludicrous of their demands. Because if Pillow Talk is about anything, it’s about sex – more particularly sexual anxiety and sexual identity. The date of the film’s release, 1959, is just before the great revolution started by The Pill, and viewing it in that context only highlights how odd some of its dilemmas seem today – as forgotten, let’s say, as the telephone party lines on which much of the movie’s plot depends. Doris Day’s Jan Morrow, the career woman outwardly convinced that she likes being single but inwardly doubtful, is as problematic a figure as Rock Hudson’s Brad Allen, the swinging bachelor who has a pad with switches that turn it into a rape trap. That so much fun can be had from these somewhat reprehensible characters is one of the things we can’t quite share in naively today, just as Thelma Ritter’s perpetually hungover Alma would be in reality a figure more in need of help than of laughter. Of course, the film knows that these are flawed people, and it sets out to help them in the only way possible in 1959: by marrying them off. (Even Alma finds a mate.) Marriage was never really a cure for personal dysfunction, but the film was made in an era when we still liked to pretend that it was. The other rich subtext of Pillow Talk is sexual identity, most evident when Hudson, in real life a gay man, plays a straight guy who wants the woman he’s trying to bed to think he might be gay, the better to pounce. Here the joke extends beyond the screen into the actor’s private life, and it’s to Hudson’s everlasting credit that, though he’s in on the joke, he can play it as if he isn’t. The filmmakers take the game one step further by having Hudson’s character blunder into an obstetrician’s office and wind up suspected of being a pregnant man, a twist in the farce which provides the movie’s kicker. All of this is meat and potatoes for queer theorists and other miners of cinematic subtext, and one reason why Pillow Talk remains a minor classic when other romantic comedies of the period just seem dated.

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

Isabelle Weingarten and Guillaume des Forêts in Four Nights of a Dreamer

Cast: Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Giorgio Maulini, Lidia Biondi, Patrick Jouané, Jérôme Massart. Screenplay: Robert Bresson, based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Production design: Pierre Charbonnier. Film editing: Raymond Lamy. Music: F.R. David, Louis Guitar, Chris Hayward, Michel Magne. 

Robert Bresson's spare, terse Four Nights of a Dreamer is not for those who want their love stories lush and passion-filled. It's about the accidental and fragile nature of mutual attraction. Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) is an artist whom we first see thumbing a ride out of Paris into the country, where he does somersaults and annoys a promenading family by briefly bursting into song. Then he returns to the city where, out walking at night, he sees a young woman on the verge of flinging herself into the Seine. She is Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), who is distraught because she thinks she has been abandoned by the man she loves. For four nights, Jacques tries to help her reconnect with him, and just when they seem to be forming their own connection, they encounter her lover on the street and she goes off with him. Jacques  returns to his apartment and resumes work on his painting and his dreams. The Parisian night's soft colors and shadows and the music of street performers provide the emotional content of this understated romance, which shows the steady hand and vision of its director without his frequently harsh portrayal of human attempts to connect with one another. 

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Wedding Ring (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1950)

Toshiro Mifune and Kinuyo Tanaka in Wedding Ring

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Toshiro Mifune, Jukichi Uno, Kenji Susukida. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Mikio Mori. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

Keisuke Kinoshita's Wedding Ring could easily have been made by MGM in the 1930s with Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, and Franchot Tone, and audiences would have lapped it up while critics dismissed it as old-hat. What Kinoshita's movie has going for it is the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka and the young and hunky Toshiro Mifune. In truth, Tanaka, whose own production company was responsible for Wedding Ring, is a little old for her role -- she was 10 years older than Mifune -- and not particularly suited for the film's frequent celebrations of her beauty. Kinoshita seems more fascinated with Mifune's virile presence, giving him multiple opportunities to appear shirtless, and even providing a scene in which Tanaka's Noriko cuddles the sweat-soaked jacket Mifune's Takeshi Ema has just removed. The plot is familiar stuff: Noriko's husband, Michio (Jukichi Uno), whom she married just before he went to war, has come home with tuberculosis, and Ema is the doctor who visits him to supervise his recovery. Noriko spends much of her time running the family business, a Tokyo jewelry store, and she and Ema frequently encounter each other on their commutes to the seaside resort where Michio is recovering. One thing leads to another, of course. But Ema is made of sterner moral stuff than Noriko, and when Michio, becoming aware of his wife's attraction to the doctor, makes an attempt to kill himself by going swimming, something Ema has demonstrated his proficiency at, the doctor remembers the Hippocratic Oath and determines to break it off. Duty conquers love, and so on. The film is nobody's finest hour, but it's fun to watch Mifune when he was not being directed by Akira Kurosawa -- their Rashomon was released the same year, making Mifune an international star. As for Tanaka, she gave what is perhaps her greatest performance two years later for Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu.

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Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)

Yuriy Solomin and Maksim Munzuk in Dersu Uzala

Cast: Yuriy Solomin, Maksim Munzuk, Svetlana Danilchenko, Dmitriy Korshikov, Vladimir Kremena, Aleksandr Pyatkov. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Yuriy Nagibin, based on a book by Vladimir Arseniev.  Cinematography: Fyodor Dobronravov, Yuriy Gantman, Asakazu Nakai. Production design: Yuriy Raksha. Film editing: Valentina Stepanova. Music: Isaac Schwarts.

Dersu Uzala is at its best when it sticks to being an adventure story about the exploration of what was in 1902 an uncharted region of Russia: the extreme far east bordering China on one side and the Sea of Japan on the other. Capt. Arseniev (Yuriy Solomin) heads a company of soldier-engineers trying to establish the topography of the taiga, the forests of the region, when he encounters a permanent resident, a solitary hunter named Dersu Uzala, one of the people now known as the Nanai, but in the film called the Goldi. Dersu leads the surveyors through the taiga and uses his deep knowledge of the region to help them survive the changing seasons. He saves Arseniev’s life when the two of them are stranded on the shores of a frozen lake; with night coming on, Dersu has the captain join him in cutting tall grasses which they make into a kind of burrow that allows them to survive the fierce winds. Dersu and the captain reunite five years later when Arseniev returns to the region, and Dersu again saves the captain’s life by shoving him from a raft that threatens to be swept away into river rapids. This time, the company of soldiers help Dersu, who clings to a branch in mid-river, make his way to shore. These two great action set pieces are the film’s highlights, along with the engaging performance by Maksim Munzuk as the resourceful Dersu. Eventually, the story becomes a little mushy as Dersu begins to lose his sight, endangering his ability to survive alone in the forest. Arseniev persuades Dersu to come home with him to the city of Khabarovsk; Arseniev’s wife and son welcome the old man, but what he sees as the arbitrary demands of civilization are oppressive: Dersu rages, for example, against the fact that people pay for such things as water and firewood that he’s used to helping himself to in the forest. This attempt at a critique of civilization feels obligatory and more than a little like a movie formula. But Kurosawa’s mastery of blending action with personal drama helps the film over its boggy moments.

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Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)

Jacques Dutronc in Van Gogh

Cast: Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London, Bernard Le Coq, Gérard Sèty, Corinne Bourdon, Elsa Zylberstein, Leslie Azzoulai, Jacques Vidal, Chantal Barbarit, Claudine Ducret, Frédéric Bonpart. Screenplay: Maurice PIalat. Cinematography: Gilles Henry, Jacques Loiseleux, Emmanuel Machuel. Production design: Philippe Pallut, Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet, Nathalie Hubert, Hélène Viard. 

Maurice Pialat's avoidance of melodrama, sentimentality, and biopic clichés makes his Van Gogh an exceptional contribution to the flood of films about the life and death of the artist. Pialat even avoids the one fact that everyone seems to know about Vincent Van Gogh: the mutilation of an ear. There's a passing reference to it, but no prosthetic has been attached to Jacques Dutronc's head to represent it. Pialat is as much concerned with the milieu, the village of Auvers-sur-Oise and the vie bohème of Paris, as he is with the facts of Van Gogh's last days. And by casting Dutronc in the role, he avoids the "movie star syndrome" that shadowed the characterization when the part was played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2016), and Tim Roth in Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990): We don't have to filter Van Gogh through our familiarity with the actor. Pialat also avoids focusing on the pictures themselves: He wants us to see the man more than the paintings. The result is occasionally frustrating. Pialat is fond of jump cuts that leave us momentarily trying to figure out where and when we are, and though the scene set in a Montmartre brothel that serves as a kind of climax to the film is exhilarating, it feels like an overextended set piece more than an integral part of Van Gogh's story. But I know of no film that gives a richer sense of the world in which Van Gogh and his contemporaries -- the movie verbally and visually invokes Cézanne, Renoir, Lautrec, and others -- lived and worked.