My Canon: "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (Martin Scorsese, 1974)

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore begins with a musical number – an homage to The Wizard of Oz, drenched in Technicolor red and filmed on a set that could only have been built in Hollywoodland. A young Alice belts out a showtune on a ranch somewhere in proverbial Kansas; she declares she can outperform Alice Faye, thus expositing her dream of becoming an elegant singer. Then a sudden smash cut thrusts us into the opening credits, and also into Scorsese territory, as the titles (written in semi-ironic, Blue Velvet-style cursive script) appear over a speeding tracking shot that races over the rooftops of Socorro, New Mexico, 27 years later. The sleek fantasia of classic Hollywood musicals is violently jarred with the fast-paced, no-frills, rough-edged, happy-sad milieu of 1970s New American cinema, a movement of which Scorsese was one of the foremost progenitors. The rapid-fire, profanity-laced dialogue enlivens what could have been a syrupy soap opera, ultimately creating what might be best described as hyper-naturalism.

Still halfway through shooting The Exorcist, Ellen Burstyn was offered the tantalizing opportunity to put another project into production at Warner Bros., with relatively unfettered creative control. As the actress is quoted in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Robert Getchell's script for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore found its way to Burstyn, albeit in slightly rosier, sleeker tones ("in a kind of Doris Day-Rock Hudson kind of way," she explained). She immediately began searching for a rougher-edged director who might inject some much-needed grit and despair into the proceedings; a viewing of Mean Streets convinced her that Scorsese was the right man for the job, though (by his own admission) he knew nothing about women.

Emerging in the middle years of American second-wave feminism, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was both celebrated and decried upon its release for endorsing (or failing to) women's agency in modern American life. Burstyn and Scorsese agreed that they wanted to portray a newly strong and independent woman who came to the realization that she doesn't need the companionship of a man for security and happiness. A powerful indictment of the entitlement and domestic violence perpetrated by men (an indictment all the more sobering because it shares screen time with poignant humanism and breakneck comedy), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore follows its titular character after she and her son Tommy abandon their hometown, following the accidental death of her husband – a gruff, emotionally pent-up man who provides money and little else for the family (though it's a sign of the movie's compassion that even he, while unlikeably morose and distant, is hardly the violent monster that a more simplistic movie would have presented him as). Hoping to achieve her dreams of becoming a singer in Monterey, California (a dream she abandoned upon getting pregnant and marrying), the duo's limited funds only get them as far as Phoenix, where Alice stumbles into an affair with the movie's only truly horrible character: Harvey Keitel's Ben, who mercilessly beats his wife in front of Alice when she finds out he's having an affair. Fearfully protecting Tommy from Ben's violence, Alice and her son move on to Tucson, where she lands a job as a diner waitress and reluctantly falls in love with David, the strong-silent type who's given considerable depth and sensitivity by Kris Kristofferson's performance. Having experienced only violence and alienation from the men in her life (aside from Tommy, with whom she has a jokey, intimate, completely naturalistic relationship), Alice holds any kind of relationship with David at arm's length – but, as often happens, their mutual attraction defuses any kind of self-professed insularity.

Certainly Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is no Jeanne Dielman or Riddles of the Sphinx, and its allegiance to feminism is shaky in some ways: it was, of course, directed by a man (although apparently the right man for the job, and the director whom Burstyn enlisted), but more debatable is the movie's happy ending. Rather than eschewing any kind of romantic relationship, David decides to follow Alice and Tommy to Monterey, where she can embark on her singing career. (A gorgeous performance she offers at a tiny nightclub in Phoenix reveals how promising her ambition actually is.) In fact, the original ending had Alice abandoning David, embracing her individuality and self-reliance; but Warner Bros., seeking a more satisfying resolution, pleaded for a happy-ending compromise. Though Alice and Tommy's trek to Monterey in some kind of stoic solidarity would have proclaimed a stronger endorsement of feminism, the ending as it currently stands is more humanistic than ideological, asking the equally difficult question of whether those victimized in relationships can or should still find love in the world. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore does provide a romantic union between man and woman, but this seems more because Scorsese and his cast care so deeply for these characters, not out of any kind of capitulation to a patriarchal insistence on heteronormative relationships.

Scorsese is typically known for his immersive portrayals of criminal communities and his deconstruction of violent masculinity, yet I've always felt that his non-crime pictures – particularly After Hours, The King of Comedy, The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and of course Alice – are his most interesting. While Scorsese's aesthetic prowess is always on display in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (the mobility of the camera in both the frenetic restaurant scenes and during Alice's nightclub performances are astonishing), even more impressive is his work with this incredible ensemble cast (which also features Diane Ladd as Alice's outspoken coworker and Jodie Foster, in one of her first film roles, as Tommy's cynical, wine-guzzling young companion). Ellen Burstyn achieves a deft balancing act between wisecracking resilience and veiled vulnerability, and her seemingly effortless believability in both this and The Exorcist (which are, of course, completely disparate roles), and her rapport with Alfred Lutter as Tommy (who was cast after auditioning 300-some young actors) has an acrobatic intensity.

If the movie had decided to devote its energies to either bleak working-class suffocation or zippy familial sitcom, it may have been an interesting time-capsule document (the movie's portrayal of southwest America in the mid-1970s is always a wonder to behold); but by deftly infusing its energetic comedy with unflinching portrayals of gender politics and domestic violence, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore becomes an overwhelming happy-sad combustion, in the manner of the best Billy Wilder or Ernst Lubitsch. Its methodology is vaguely postmodern: the stylized opening, an homage to classic musicals, reminds us that relationships in real life do not operate according to cinematic fairy-tale splendor. But the movie is too sincere, too compassionate, too in love with the unexpected turns that life takes, to completely deprive its characters of the happiness they so clearly deserve. An unheralded masterpiece in both Scorsese's and Burstyn's filmographies, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is one of the most dazzling and humanistic treasures of 1970s American cinema.

"My Canon" is a series in which I analyze my 100 favorite films in detail, in alphabetical order. Here is my introduction.

My Canon: Introduction

The list is itself a collection, a sublimated collection. One does not actually have to own the things. To know is to have (luckily, for those without great means). It is already a claim, a species of possession, to think about them in this form, the form of a list: which is to value them, to rank them, to say they are worth remembering or desiring.

– Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

Do I have a favorite movie?... More important, should I have a favorite movie? The question provokes resistance in me even though I recognize it to be intellectually respectable in a way that a similar but (I assume) distinguishable question – What is the greatest movie ever made? – is not. And yet, in some ways, the silly question would be the easier to answer. 

– William S. Pechter, "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things"

In August of last year, when the British Film Institute (through their publication Sight & Sound) released their seventh once-a-decade Greatest Films poll, it instigated a flurry of articles and responses ranging from the fanboy-enthusiastic to the tactfully dubious. The former camp sees the Sight & Sound poll as an invaluable way of charting and cherishing the most treasured works in the history of cinema; Roger Ebert, for example, has described it as by "far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies – the only one most serious movie people take seriously." The latter camp, on the other hand – exemplified by such critics as Raymond Durgnat and David Thomson – see the poll as elitist, unfairly limiting, or a pointless "children's game" that may be momentary fun but hardly establishes an "official" canon of the best movies ever made, a task which may be impossible from the start. Each worthy selection suggests an equally tragic omission, as the polling is always at least somewhat prone to cultural zeitgeists and viewing availability.

The truth, as it often does, lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, polls of this kind are inevitably exclusionary: advising audiences which 50 (or even 250) films should be their viewing priorities unfairly sequesters other titles that might, in fact, end up being those viewers' favorites. On the other hand, semi-official canons are a valuable way to conceive of the entire history of an art form in a synoptic view, offering a shorthand guide to the most culturally vital, artistically innovative, emotionally powerful, and thematically complex works of cinematic art that have been made throughout history. When the majority of mainstream criticism today treats its vocation as a sort of Consumer Reports for moviegoers – judging movies based on the satisfaction they provide to audiences who are merely looking for a good story, as commodities which provide entertainment – this kind of well-intentioned, perspicacious critical overview is incredibly valuable. Furthermore, as Sight & Sound explains, the 2012 poll expanded its breadth to include 846 responses from 73 different countries entailing 2,045 films listed; if you're going to attempt a semi-official canon, it would be difficult to achieve one that's more eclectic and far-reaching than this one.

Which isn't to say there aren't problems: the results are still predominantly Anglocentric, with few female directors listed. Furthermore, as Michael Atkinson points out, the ability to seriously judge every movie in history by our own well-intentioned criteria is becoming increasingly difficult in a digital age, inundated with critical opinion: "As our digital intercourse about all things continues to grow like kudzu, threatening to involve practically every human being on Earth in open conversation, the feedback loops surrounding cultural investigation and appraisal of all kinds will get so pervasive that it may well become impossible, some day soon, to arrive at a truly singular and independent perspective on a film – much less hope that that perspective is attained by others independently as well, and might therefore constitute a valuable consensus about what that film is and how good it actually might be. Is such a questionable thing even possible, or are our poll-taking endeavours destined, in a fondly Camusian way, to long for a singular ‘truth’ that we know cannot exist, under any conditions?"

Andrew Sarris' "ballot" for the 1962 Sight & Sound poll

This being the case, one might assume that it's more valuable to attempt a personal canon – in other words, a list of "favorite" movies rather than "greatest" movies. As William Pechter suggests in one of the epigraphs above, the "favorite" question is more intellectually sound (though difficult to answer) than the "greatest" question, precisely because it depends on one's subjective response rather than a semi-objective range of established criteria. If forming and elucidating a subjective response is increasingly difficult (nigh impossible) given a digital discourse that provides critical and public opinion before many moviegoers even have a chance to see the movie, it becomes all the more valuable to formulate an idiosyncratic canon.

An even more pertinent question: why write about this six months after the poll was released? Am I not entering the fray a little too late? The answer is yes, but in my defense: before starting to build my personal canon, I wanted a little critical distance from the Sight & Sound poll, a little time to ponder its inclusions and exclusions, and needed a while to decide what are my favorite films of all time. This lengthy deliberation process may seem self-defeating: shouldn't a list of favorites be somewhat spontaneous, without an excessive amount of reconsideration? Yes, but the opposite pitfall is also dangerous: selecting films impulsively may reflect a little too strongly the cultural opinions of the critical tastemakers who cobbled together the Sight & Sound poll in the first place.

Hereby, then, is the beginning of a new project: My Canon, or my 100 favorite movies, analyzed one-by-one in alphabetical order. It should be noted that some of these movies I haven't seen in a matter of years, so it's conceivable that, after rewatching them for this project, I might in fact revise my original opinion and regard them with diminished esteem this time around. So be it: if this happens, it will merely prove the point that any kind of subjective list-making is prone to impulse and reformed opinions. At the end of the project, I may have a slightly recalibrated Top 100, and will be able to whittle it down to a Top Ten with more decisiveness (presumably, at least, though Top Tens are even more unfair and impossibly exclusionary than Top 100s). It should also be noted that, while I am attempting to establish my own personal canon, there will be considerable overlap with the Sight & Sound poll; while I don't want to merely regurgitate critical favorites, it's undeniable that some of those titles reappear frequently because they do hold seemingly inexhaustible narrative, aesthetic, emotional, and thematic rewards.

To return, finally, to the first epigraph above: Sontag's insightful remark about list-making seems absolutely appropriate – critics and art-lovers enjoy making lists because it offers an ardent way to "possess" the memories we have of our favorite films. To rank these movies is to remember and desire them, to travel back in time to the overwhelming initial experience I had with them. This might be the significant difference between favorite films and greatest films: favorites continue to exert a resonant hold over our memories, sometimes exuding an emotional power equivalent to our own real-life remembrances. Making a canon like this is, in other words, a way to possess (maybe meekly, desperately) the feelings we initially had about the movies we include.

Screening Log, September & October

Material (d. Thomas Heise, Germany, 2009) A–
What is the relationship between history and memory? Can we understand one without the other? And how does either appear to us: as linearity, as narrative, or as a jumbled heap that suddenly appears, daunting in its messiness? These are the beguiling questions that documentarian Thomas Heise poses to us with Material, albeit implicitly: the nearly-three-hour documentary/essay is comprised of archival footage, spontaneous imagery shot by Heise while living in East Berlin in the late 1980s and early '90s, and material leftover from Heise's 35mm productions and excised from the final films. The diversity of sources from which the footage is culled results in an eclectic visual palette – from grainy black-and-white digital video, to the vivid images from news programs distorted through magnification, to pristine color film – yet this sometimes-jarring combination of styles is itself a fascinating portrayal of the various guises in which memories and past events appear to us, as though their passage through time has colored them in unforeseen ways. While theoretical notions of historical analysis remain under the surface, the movie explicitly illustrates an East German society in the midst of drastic transformation: every figure we see onscreen (from esteemed theatrical directors to former Stasi bureaucrats, from imprisoned murderers to opinionated grandmothers) responds to their sociopolitical climate with rhetorical fervor, collectively weaving a bewildering tapestry of a particular time and place. To add to the chaos, Heise offers little to no explanation for the events we see onscreen: a forced eviction early in the movie and a riot that breaks out in a small movie theater, for example, simply play out before our eyes with overwhelming immediacy, removed from their immediate context. Thus estranging itself from typical political documentaries, Material draws a further correlation between historical events and the visceral spontaneity of memories, as though East Germany itself is desperately referring to the memories and histories that brought about its downfall. Those looking for a document of East Germany in its waning years will probably be disappointed, but by questioning the nature of history and documentary itself, Material transforms into something infinitely more troubling and thought-provoking.

A Grin without a Cat (d. Chris Marker, France, 1977) B+
A Grin without a Cat would actually make a fine double-feature with Material, though seven hours of dizzying political history presented in a rush of archival imagery would be tough going for even the staunchest cinephile. The late, great Chris Marker's four-hour compilation of turbulent world events throughout the 1960s and early '70s is comprised mostly of on-the-ground, spontaneous footage captured by everyday witnesses who happened to be present (with some televised news programs and excerpts from other films thrown in). Marker's whirlwind, globetrotting breadth – we leap from Vietnam to France to Cuba to China to the U.S. to Bolivia, making some detours along the way – is made even more overwhelming thanks to Marker's unwillingness to clearly explicate the sociopolitical context of these scenes. (Some considerable knowledge of mid-20th century world history is practically a requirement here.) The benefit of this lack of talking-heads explication is that A Grin without a Cat offers a visceral, baffling document of a tempestuous turning point in global events: we really do feel like the world is teetering on the brink of either rejuvenation or collapse, with each shaky handheld viewpoint immersing us in this raging torrent of history. The movie also offers us the opportunity to witness compelling political characters like Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende addressing their constituents. It's no coincidence that Marker begins by citing Battleship Potemkin: throughout the documentary, Marker uses montage editing (in the purest Soviet sense) to pose juxtapositions and correlations between geographically distant events, suggesting the forces of dialectical materialism with characteristic intellectual agility. At times his connecting tissue can be pretty flimsy, but then aren't we always at the mercy of a flippant, capricious history?

Interiors (d. Woody Allen, USA, 1978) A–
I had been intending to check out Woody's first all-out dramatic film (an homage to Ingmar Bergman, one of the director's idols) for a long time; happily, Allen reveals himself as sure-footed with drama as with comedy (at least during this fertile mid-to-late '70's period. Three sisters' lives are unsettled after the divorce of their parents, a demanding matriarch and an aloof father who wants to make the most of his remaining years. As Eve, the mother who is at once frail and volatile, Geraldine Page (who garnered a slew of awards for her performance) commands every scene she's in: a study in restrained anger and insecurity, her character (even, or especially, through her absence) catalyzes the rest of the ensemble. (Allen originally wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the part, but she was committed to shooting Autumn Sonata with Ingmar Bergman; the casting switch may have actually benefited Interiors in the long run, as Ingrid's effortless poise would have innately altered the character.) Shot in muted browns, blues, and grays by Gordon Willis, Interiors extends its central thematic motif (characters who feel the need to tyrannically control their external worlds to make up for the turbulence of their inner psyches) to its close, suffocating compositions: the lack of distanced establishing shots and the tendency to edit abruptly between brief snippets of scenes (a dangerous technique that works better here than in practically any other instance I've seen) powerfully conveys the tense relationships between a number of compellingly troubled characters. Some other Allen movies are off-putting in their middle-upper-class insularity, but that privileged milieu actually acts as a nice counterpoint to these characters' messy lives (and in any case, the character of Pearl, the father's new wife, acts as an implicit critique of bourgeois arrogance).

Caravaggio (d. Derek Jarman, UK, 1986) B
Jarman's biography of the controversial 17th century painter treads a fine line between kitsch and tragedy, a balancing act that succeeds to varying degrees throughout the film. Jarman envisions Caravaggio as a bisexual blaspheme, a drunken brawler revisiting his scandalous life from his deathbed, as the sound of foghorns (and, occasionally, automobiles and trains) filter through the open window. Ripe with pederasty and homoeroticism, the movie paints an extravagant portrait of a painter whose beauty was inseparable from his sacrilege; his religious iconography typically used ruffians and prostitutes as models, a duality that's also reflected in the movie's numerous anachronisms (from the aforementioned cars and trains, to calculators, typewriters, and electric lighting). Jarman and his crew get around the difficulty of believably conveying 17th century exteriors by containing all of the action to interiors shot on studio sets, which makes for a bold, colorful, occasionally surreal visual palette, but which also makes the movie seem at times like an intentional curio, sardonically exploiting its barebones budget. That kind of thing works well in Flaming Creatures or George Kuchar movies, for example, but is trickier when the movie also contains portentous proclamations and extravagant portrayals of lust, jealousy, murder, and revenge. In any case, Jarman's artistry is invigoratingly unique, and the movie is never less than thought-provoking.

Looper (d. Rian Johnson, USA/China, 2012) B+
Despite cribbing from both La jetée and that masterpiece's own "remake," 12 Monkeys, Looper still manages to be refreshingly original and, at least so far, the most exciting Hollywood movie of the year. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Joe, an assassin in 2044 who is tasked with offing victims sent back in time from 30 years in the future. Inevitably, one of those targets ends up being his older self (Bruce Willis), whose escape leads to an especially fraught game of cat-and-mouse (not to mention a grappling with morality and sacrifice). The background of this peculiar time-scrambling enterprise is surprisingly well thought-out, and the portrayal of this near-future is as immersively thorough as those in A.I. Artificial Intelligence or Blade Runner. That careful verisimilitude in a fanciful world extends to the characters, who sometimes function only as cogs in the narrative machine but who are nonetheless offered fleeting moments of personality and empathy. (This is thanks mostly to a stellar supporting cast; Paul Dano, Noah Segan, and Garret Dillahunt all bring uniqueness to what could have been stock B-movie roles.) Ultimately the movie can't transcend its genre trappings to be anything more than an exceptionally well-told story, but in this case that's enough. Looper's most impressive miracle: yet another eerie little kid who has supernatural powers, yet who never quite descends into the morass of syrupy cliche (though he comes dangerously close at times).

The Master (d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2012) B
We shouldn't be surprised that Anderson's newest film is a sprawling, ambitious, cryptic, and unsettling account of postwar America and the ease with which people can be coerced into faith; nor should we be surprised that the writer/director concocts an episodic, open-ended, disquieting story to parallel the sense of confusion felt by both a single man and an entire nation in the immediate postwar years. Call it aimlessness by design, then, but this aimlessness is still what prevents The Master's characters from feeling real and compelling, and what prevents the movie's larger themes from cohering into a complex expression of societal cancer; I can't say it better than Roger Ebert, who wrote, "The Master is fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air." Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, a withered and rage-fueled veteran of WWII; he drunkenly stumbles onto the yacht of Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic yet manipulative leader of a cultish religion called "the Cause," who sees in Freddie's twisted desperation a wounded man in need of recuperation. The Cause is famously reminiscent of Scientology, and it's true that The Master offers some subtle allusions to L. Ron Hubbard's New Age delusion (Dodd's "processing" technique most of all), but the movie should be read as a broader snapshot of how drastically World War II imploded modern society (whether in America or Japan, Germany, France, Britain, etc.). That snapshot was filmed (mostly) on pristine 65mm, and projected on larger-than-life 70mm in some areas (not mine, unfortunately), meaning The Master is as visually awe-inspiring and technically immaculate as we'd expect from Anderson and his crew (with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. replacing Robert Elswit, Anderson's usual collaborator). But, if the movie powerfully evokes a troubled and alien environment (only sixty years removed in actuality, yet metaphorically eons away from us), what about the people within it? Quell and Dodd are clearly discombobulated, lonely souls, but by stranding them amid their confusion and alienation, The Master fails to say anything significant about their lives or their world. (The movie's finest scene is the one that most effectively conveys the two men's desperation, which they try to alleviate in disparate ways: Freddie paces furiously in front of an audience of observers, unable to transport himself to the distant, metaphysical realm that Dodd paternalistically demands of him.) Narrative elusiveness is not in itself a detractor, but Anderson is not aiming for the same amorphousness that Claire Denis or Apichatpong Weerasethakul achieve so well; it's clear that The Master has something (too much?) to say, yet is as confused as its protagonists in trying to articulate what that might be. Should we fault a movie for trying to tackle too much? Probably not – but it still keeps The Master from the level of greatness.

Night Train to Munich (d. Carol Reed, UK, 1940) A–
A rollicking early actioner from Carol Reed (who would go on to direct Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man). In the thick of World War II, a dapper British spy (Rex Harrison, at his least aggravating) poses as a Nazi major in order to rescue a Czechoslovakian scientist and his alluring daughter from the clutches of the S.S. The movie is clearly propaganda (especially given the introduction of two supporting characters, Charters and Caldicott: jovial Brits who decide to band together to help their endangered countryman and defeat the Germans), and its scenes set in a concentration camp inevitably take on the perverse sheen of escapist entertainment, but if we think of the setting into which this movie released (that is, a beleaguered country in the thick of war, in need of uplift and unification) its more lightweight aspects aren't necessarily flaws. Technically the film is charmingly ingenious: the model sets (like the still above, or the numerous rail-travel scenes obviously achieved with a toy train set) and rear-projection effects aren't exactly convincing, but they're grandly immersive in the larger-than-life way that only cinema can accomplish.

Samsara (d. Ron Fricke, USA, 2012) B
The director of Baraka (and cinematographer of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi) returns to similar territory with this plotless, nearly wordless visual poem centering on spirituality and materiality (or, as the press notes claim, offering us "a guided meditation"). There's little originality in its concept or even its broad thematic structuring (sequences about religious zealotry, modern life in the metropolis, the commodification of sex, the wonders of a decaying natural landscape, and so on are practically ripped straight out of Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi), but the images themselves are astonishingly unique and overwhelmingly beautiful. (No offense to The Master, but Samsara is actually the first film to be shot entirely on 65mm since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet [1996], since parts of The Master were shot on 35mm.) Some stretches in Samsara are obnoxiously heavy-handed: a shot of a geisha crying, or of Indonesian strippers dancing for the camera, are as cheap and pretentious as they sound. But other scenes are jaw-dropping: a high-angle extreme long shot of pilgrims at Mecca, Saudi Arabia; ethereal helicopter shots of rustic temples shrouded in fog; and, most of all, a surreal and horrific scene in which a man in a skyscraper's lobby slathers clay on his face, smears on disturbing make-up, gouges out his artificial eyes, then repeats the process. (It's as insane as it sounds.) Ethnographically, then, the movie may be hollow and even condescending, and its overarching theme is offensively shallow for anyone who's thought even remotely about the stampede of modernization. As cinema, though – as pure, immediate visual spectacle – Samsara offers us sights we would never otherwise see, in an oneiric alternate world that's as awe-inspiring as the religious rites it ambivalently documents. True, I had to force myself to ignore the movie's witless themes (and occasionally block out the cliched musical score), but if you're able to do this, Samsara will be one of the most breathtaking movie experiences you'll have this year (or for years afterwards), though it must be seen on the big screen to be fully experienced.

Intruders (d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, USA/UK/Spain, 2011) C–
Fresnadillo made the excellent sequel 28 Weeks Later (and the acclaimed Intacto, which I haven't seen), but Intruders mostly falters as narrative, as horror movie, and as aesthetic enterprise. Two children – one in Spain, one in Britain – begin having nightmares about faceless creatures who want to steal their senses (beginning with speech, then vision, and so on). Of course their parents (tormented by their own demons) initially chalk it up to childhood whimsy, but gradually come to realize that their nightmares are more real than they thought. The twist? The kids give life to these creatures by writing about them, turning illusion into reality – a meta-cinematic concept that horror directors should have realized a long time ago is not even remotely scary. The movie is too clever for its own good, but it's also annoyingly over the top (the awful musical score reliably dilutes scares rather than enhancing them; here's for an embargo against all string instruments in future horror-movie soundtracks) and relies on cheap CGI to create its supposedly terrifying monsters (which look more like the poor man's version of the Dementors from the Harry Potter movies). A few interesting ideas are folded into the overstuffed narrative (such as the unexpected suggestion of an incestuous Elektra complex between Clive Owen's character and his daughter), and there's one chilling scene in which a woman sees a religious icon in a Barcelona church turn into a menacing demon before her eyes, but mostly this is a flimsy horror concept, and a poorly-told one at that.

The Age of Innocence (d. Martin Scorsese, USA, 1993) A
To my eyes, Scorsese is one of the few directors who makes the most of his historical settings, fleshing out distant periods of time with fleeting gestures as well as sweeping verisimilitude, realizing cinema's potential to make immediate life both immersively real and viscerally hyperreal. This may be less true of The Aviator and Gangs of New York than of Hugo or, especially, The Age of Innocence. Using Edith Wharton's 1920 novel as a springboard to indulge a dizzying play with modes of address and the interweaving of art and society (Scorsese indulges his literary, theatrical, musical, and painterly tendencies along with his cinematic one), Scorsese slyly infuses Wharton's satire of upper-class mores in 1870s New York City with a surprisingly metacinematic emphasis on how art reflects, or refracts, broader movements in society (the best example: an opulent tracking shot through a mansion's hallways festooned with classic paintings, all of which say something about the aristocrats who argue over them). I may be biased – late 19th century America may be the historical setting that fascinates me the most – but this is the most vivid examination I've seen of how a still-nascent American upper-class defined itself in contrast to its European forebears. There's also a tragic love story, brought to fervent life by Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, all of whom lend aching gravity to the emotional hoops they're forced to jump through. (Scorsese called this his "most violent" picture, but it's violent precisely because each character sublimates their desires and passions in favor of social decorum – a semblance of "innocence" more maddening than anything else.) Staggeringly complex and visually dazzling, this is one of the most undervalued works in the director's esteemed career, revealing (along with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and The King of Comedy) how eclectic and sure-footed Scorsese truly is.

Dark Days (d. Marc Singer, USA, 2000) B–
The production circumstances of Dark Days practically beg for your sympathy: shot amongst a homeless community living in New York City's abandoned subway tunnels, the film was shot on black-and-white 16mm film by Marc Singer, who knew the onscreen subjects and had never shot a film before. The community collaborated on the project, rigging together lighting setups and dollies for camera movement, and the general intention of the project was to improve the living condition of the people we see onscreen (which it does, as Singer's lobbying led to housing vouchers from the city of New York for all of the people living below-ground). It's a noble work of social activism, obviously, but as a film it's problematic. The movie seems to be at odds with itself, precisely through its attempt to sympathize with the homeless community: initially the point is made that they have forged a legitimate world for themselves (complete with electricity, running water, comforts like television and music, etc.) in order to escape from life's cruel realities; yet when the storyline shifts gears to portray their new above-ground apartments, the air of triumphant reintegration seems forced, as though the film craved a happy ending while dismissing some lingering, unsettling concerns. (How long will they be able to afford their housing? Will they actually be able to readjust to life "above ground"? Some of the climactic interviews seem to suggest a feeling of discomfort and doubt on the part of the subjects, though the movie itself seems to skim past these uncertainties.) It's strange how legitimately unique the film is in production background and audio-visual style, yet how closely it still adheres to a conventional story arc, even when that plot progression seems to contradict what's taking place beneath the surface. The emotional power of Dark Days might be diluted, then, but it's still overwhelming at times: ultimately, the movie reminds us how extreme and uncompromising human life can be, and casts an eye on the kind of sobering underground community that typically remains concealed.

House of Pleasures (d. Bertrand Bonello, France, 2011) B+
At once opulent and morose, House of Pleasures is set in a stately Parisian brothel at the turn of the 20th century (literally, in the months directly preceding and succeeding 1900). On the surface, all is luxury and hedonism: certainly for the men who have the money and the power (and who loll about gazing at the merchandise, exploiting them with various degrees of cruelty), and occasionally for the prostitutes who are aware that there is no escape from their servitude, yet whittle away the hours with champagne and fantasy. At times, though, disturbing visions intrude upon the elegance: a vicious knife attack that transforms one of the ladies into "The Woman Who Laughs," or a nightmare vision of a prostitute weeping semen. A wispy surrealism is achieved by musical anachronisms (James Brown and The Moody Blues are included on the soundtrack), a dizzy shuffling of time and space, and the confinement of almost all the film to its maison interiors. Ultimately, the dominance of money, implicit throughout the entire film, becomes a bleak omen casting its shadow upon the twentieth century to come. At times, House of Pleasures comes off as self-consciously clever, but uniformly graceful performances more often enmesh comfortably with Bonello's bold, hyperstylized vision. The movie is undeniably sexy, yet primarily to make the point that even (or especially) sex has become a commodity in a nascent modern world ruled by capital.

The Innkeepers (d. Ti West, USA, 2011) C+
So slight it's constantly in danger of vanishing into nothing, The Innkeepers is an old-fashioned ghost story that coasts by mostly on atmosphere and dread, strategically spacing its scares at about 25-minute intervals. (The still above is one of the few outright "boo" moments in the entire movie.) This is the kind of thing I typically love (and which was outstanding in Ti West's previous effort, The House of the Devil), but here it simply seems like a by-the-numbers rehash (though the numbers are traced particularly well). At the Yankee Pedlar, a New England inn that would be at home in a Stephen King story (and which is imminently going out of business), two bored desk clerks investigate rumors of ghostly hauntings. Is there something unknown lurking in the basement? Does the mysterious guest who's shut himself up in an ominous hotel room have anything to do with the poltergeists? You probably already know the answers; to be fair, there is some fun in following the generic story to its inevitable conclusion, but there doesn't seem much point to the paint-by-numbers setup. What made The House of the Devil so strikingly unique was precisely its bold setup and staggering payoff (practically nothing happens for the first hour, then everything happens in a ghastly rush); The Innkeepers may be charming, but in this case that's not enough.

Haywire (d. Steven Soderbergh, USA/Ireland, 2011) C+
Put this in the "by-the-numbers" category mentioned above: assemble an all-star cast, paste together a lame crime story about double-crosses between stoic assassins, throw in a David Holmes score that tries too hard to be suave, and you've got your next Steven Soderbergh movie. That all-star cast does enliven the proceedings, and the fight scenes (sans music, with every blow landing with tremendous dull force on the soundtrack) are undeniably exciting; too bad that appeal wears off after a while (around the time that it becomes clear that there's absolutely nothing going on in this plot). Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs had previously collaborated on The Limey (1999); at least that dreamlike thriller was able to disguise its familiar storyline with dazzling construction and unexpected poignancy. In the lead, Gina Carano proves she could be a striking action star in the future; but, stranded in the middle of a vacuous plot and hollow characters, she can only provide fleeting glimpses of her potential here.

Screening Log, September 1 - September 7

Utamaro and His Five Women (d. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1946) B
Mizoguchi's biography of the celebrated 18th-century woodblock artist Utamaro Kitagawa is more accurately a plaintive portrait of the numerous women who orbit around him. Numerous critics have drawn analogies between the Tokugawa Era in which the film is set – with its rigid class hierarchies and patriarchal sexual politics – and the immediate postwar period in Japan, during which American occupiers strictly censored the subject matter of Japanese films. This analogy is most powerfully suggested once Utamaro is literally handcuffed after using one of the shogunate's courtesans as a model; it's a potent symbol for artistic suppression. Utamaro and His Five Women (like most of Mizoguchi's films) epitomizes mono no aware, a term in Japanese culture for a wistful sadness at the transience of human lives; at times this film can seem too gentle in its melancholy (it's not as emotionally devastating as Osaka Elegy or Ugetsu), but it's still an ethereally beautiful depiction of the artist's perceptivity in observing the lives of those around him. Maybe most interesting is the claim (offered by the movie's screenwriter himself, Yoshikata Yoda) that Utamaro is a stand-in for Mizoguchi, particularly in his emphasis on subtle emotion exhibited by women in traumatic circumstances.

Life of Oharu (d. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1952) A–
The tragic life of a beautiful samurai's daughter doomed to eternal subjugation: Oharu is a saintly martyr for the suffering of women in Mizoguchi's magisterial adaptation of Saikaku Ihara's 1686 novel Life of an Amorous Woman. In adapting the book, however, Mizoguchi retained Saikaku's criticism of a draconic society stifled by unjust customs and restrictive moral codes, while avoiding the novelist's depiction of Oharu as an "amorous woman" whose downfall was partially the result of her own sexual self-liberation. Life of Oharu may be Mizoguchi's most characteristic movie not only in its gorgeous, long-take "picture scroll" tracking shots, but also in its bleeding-heart sympathy for the lives of tormented women (a sympathy which stemmed, according to most accounts of the director, from his family's selling of his sister into geishadom when Mizoguchi was only a young boy). The film is unmistakably heavy going: Oharu's life truly is a marathon of cruelty and misery, as she's sent on a downward spiral due to her love for a lowly page; chosen to be the mother to a powerful shogunate's heir (then spitefully cast out by the lord's barren wife); sold by her father into a brothel, then again cast out due to her hatred for a money-obsessed client; mercifully taken in by a middle-class family, then sexually exploited and again cast out once they find out about her scandalous past; and on and on. (We become inured to this pattern quickly: even when episodes begin with hope and anticipation, we know another misery is right around the corner.) But what saves the movie from unbearable bleakness is its prominent sociocultural commentary – the film is about how obedience to cruel and arbitrary patriarchal customs can torment people within that society, not about the innate awfulness of human beings – and of course Mizoguchi's poetic visuals (thanks especially to cinematographers Yoshimi Hirano and Yoshimi Kono, who had to work in an abandoned warehouse with severely limited funds), which effortlessly infuses the tragedy with ghostly grace. Oharu's fleeting, distant reunion with her lordly son (with whom she can no longer have any contact) must count as one of Mizoguchi's most incredible directorial moments.

The Dark Knight Rises (d. Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2012) B–
It's too bad Christopher Nolan doesn't make silent movies: his films are striking, magisterial, at times awe-inspiring...at least until somebody starts talking. Thankfully, though, Nolan's propensity for having characters blatantly voice the themes of his movies (or for having them spout pithy one-liners in the midst of ostensibly serious-minded subjects) is less ruinous than in The Dark Knight or Inception. Love it or hate it, The Dark Knight Rises is some kind of achievement: an operatic blockbuster that attempts (with only half-successful results) to encapsulate our turbulent modern society, particularly its vitriolic class divisions. But, as this Film Quarterly article points out, the movie's politics are muddled at best: it obviously recognizes the class warfare endemic to modern capitalism and the tyrannical control that the 1% have over American society, yet that hegemony is never viewed through the eyes of the disenfranchised who are supposedly the subject of the movie's (and Bane's/Selina Kyle's/Bruce Wayne's) sympathies. A reformation of our current economic and political system is seen as solely cataclysmic and horrific in the movie, which takes recent Occupy protests and disfigures them into a shocking French Revolution-style Reign of Terror, complete with the Scarecrow acting as a modern-day Robespierre. The Dark Knight Rises' essentially conservative agenda is clinched with the ridiculous final image of the movie, which offers a happy ending in the form of several characters luxuriously drinking aperitifs on a Venetian plaza. (Apparently the movie couldn't care less about the hordes of impoverished Americans as long as Bruce Wayne can reclaim his fortune.) In any case, the fact that the movie can be construed as both politically subversive and simplistically reactionary suggests that the movie has no genuine politics whatsoever: it's just trying to cash in on fashionably hot-button issues. (At least The Dark Knight has a cohesive theme, even if it's conveyed too often through mundane dialogue.) Politics aside, the movie is visually awe-inspiring: Nolan's dexterity in juggling numerous simultaneous plotlines while maintaining clarity and impact is more impressive than ever.

The Dictator (d. Larry Charles, USA, 2012) F
Lowest-common denominator comedy that assumes the more shocking and hate-filled its humor is, the more "radical" it will seem. Whatever was amusing about Borat or genuinely daring about Brüno has completely vanished from Sacha Baron Cohen's General Aladeen, a dictator from the fictional country of Wadiya who discovers a plot to instill democracy in his native country and attempts to stymie it at all costs. Of course the democratic coup is just a ploy to make the country's oil reserves available to American corporate interests, which suggests an all-inclusive attack on what's wrong with modern diplomacy. In fact, The Dictator's humor is shockingly xenophobic and hate-mongering: the only glimmer of American self-criticism arrives in a climactic speech during which Aladeen lauds the merits of dictatorship, telling Americans they'll finally know what it means to have 1% of the populace control society, to have media outlets that seem unbiased but promote a particular agenda, to have leaders who are clearly in the pockets of large corporations, to have a military that can serve despots' misguided interests, and so on. Aside from these 90 seconds of half-assed political commentary, the movie's comedy would seem embarrassing in the fifth American Pie movie, much less in a supposedly "intelligent" political comedy. Middle Eastern people rape young boys, prefer sex with goats, throw female newborns in the garbage, and torture for amusement – these are the noxious stereotypes the movie thinks are fair game to perpetuate. (Yes, genocidal dictators are prime targets for ridicule, but only if that satire makes any attempt at all to direct its animosity at real-world atrocities.) The Dictator's allusions to the Israel-Palestine conflict are even more pathetic: apologists claim that Cohen's usage of Hebrew to stand in for Arabic means something significant, but doesn't it just mean that Cohen (who speaks Hebrew anyway) assumes that we're too stupid or presumptuous to care which language is actually being spoken? (Either way, we're meant to laugh at the guttural syllables Aladeen coughs up whenever he's enraged or agitated.) The only other inclusion of the devastating conflict in the Middle East has a Wadiyan imbecile accidentally spilling his own urine on an Israeli diplomat, an idiocy which is emblematic of both the movie's juvenile sense of humor and its one-sided analogies to real-world conflicts. (This movie would have us believe that Israel is completely ethical and blameless in the ongoing violence waged between itself and surrounding nations.) There are also jokes involving shit missiles rained down upon Manhattan streets, the severed head of a black activist used as a ventriloquist dummy, and two characters digging around in a pregnant woman's womb for a lost cell phone – if this is your idea of good comedy, enjoy. The fact that The Dictator has been distributed throughout the world as representing American humor offers a convincing explanation as to why we're so universally reviled. (If you're unfortunate enough to sit through this movie, I suggest rewatching Team America: World Police as soon as possible afterwards to see how this sort of thing should actually be done.)

Naked (d. Mike Leigh, UK, 1993) B–
A volcanic eruption of rage, hopelessness, desperation, and abuse, Naked is bearable almost entirely because of its incredible performances, especially that of David Thewlis as Johnny, a charismatic yet misogynistic, hate-filled drifter whose various interactions in Thatcher-era London simply degrade his view of humanity even further. Yet the entire cast is incredible: Katrin Cartlidge, as drug-and-alcohol fueled, desperately lonely Sophie, makes a torrent of horrible decisions heartbreaking rather than infuriating; Lesley Sharp, as maybe the most intelligent and compassionate character in the movie (Johnny's ex, Louise), provides a glimmer of much-needed decency; Peter Wight, as a security guard with too much time on his hands, enacts a virtuoso dialogue with Johnny about the impending apocalypse and the entirety of the evolution of life on this planet; and so on. As this description might suggest the movie is incredibly smart and never less than fascinating, yet its view of humanity is ultimately aphoristic: we're nothing more than toys for God to laugh at, a despicable culmination of biological life that will ultimately cause our own downfall. (Evolution is mentioned repeatedly in the movie, almost always in an ironic way.) The movie has been accused often of misogyny, but misanthropy is more like it: Johnny (and, maybe by extension, writer/director Mike Leigh) abhors men and women with equal vitriol. This may be too harsh – Leigh is a great, subtle, multi-faceted director (especially in movies such as Secrets and Lies and Topsy-Turvy) – but judging by the evidence in Naked, we can only detect an all-encompassing hopelessness. (Some reviews link the movie's bleak view of human relationships with the turbulent climate of Margaret Thatcher's England, but there's absolutely nothing in the movie to suggest this sociopolitical analogy.) The character of Jeremy, an upper-class rapist and sadist who allows us to see that at least Johnny is not as awful as he could be, offers a key to unlocking the movie's philosophy, yet also reveals what keeps it from greatness: with no emotional shading or psychological sensitivity, he (and the movie) come off as simplistically, stubbornly outraged.

Cosmopolis (d. David Cronenberg, France/Canada/Portugal/Italy, 2012) B+
A natural companion piece to Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Cosmopolis is also about a radical alienation from the modern world: if, in Crash, characters have become so inured to rampant mediation that they require extreme violence to feel genuine human and sexual emotions, the main character in Cosmopolis – Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire on a cross-Manhattan quest to get a haircut – has built a buffer between himself and the world with money. He's even lost the ability to have a genuine conversation with anybody, which suggests why the dialogue in the film (like the dialogue from the Don DeLillo novel on which it's based) is so wildly artificial. The Brechtian motivation of both Crash and Cosmopolis is to distance the audience radically from the story and the characters, allowing us to observe them with clinical exactitude. Yet at times this works better in theory than in practice: both films are easier to admire than they are to actually become involved with. That said, the episodic, rambling nature of Cosmopolis provides plenty of meat to dissect (particularly fascinating are Eric's dense conversation with a political theorist while an Occupy-style protest rages outside of his limo, and a lengthy climax in which Eric is possibly killed by a disgruntled former employee), and the actors do an admirable job giving bizarrely detached life to Cronenberg's and DeLillo's philosophical ruminations. Love it or hate it, you have to respect Cronenberg's brazen originality and his obedience to his own overarching themes, even at the risk of sacrificing his audience's engagement. I can't remember ever seeing a more potent depiction of how exorbitant wealth allows the rich to build up a hermetic shield around themselves.

House of Bamboo (d. Samuel Fuller, USA, 1955) B+
Fuller's square-jawed actioner, set and shot entirely in Japan (Tokyo and Yokohama particularly), mixes pulp and sociopolitical commentary with typical aplomb. Army detective Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) storms through the movie's exotic locales with American bullishness: he interrupts ceremonies and rituals to demand answers (in terse English, of course) from uncomprehending Japanese folks; his typical entrance has him shoving hoodlums through sliding screen doors, with absolutely no regard for the foreign world he's demolishing. Spanier is investigating a gang of American thieves, most of them ex-soldiers, led by the merciless Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), who runs his network with the exactitude of a wartime general. The notion of a postwar action noir set in Japan is often as thrilling as it sounds, thanks to Fuller's and cinematographer Joe MacDonald's vivid colors and emphatic widescreen compositions; the story also offers plenty of allusions to the American occupation of Japan (an infiltration continued, at least metaphorically, long after U.S. troops officially left the country) and the moral corruption of individuals who served in World War II. That said, the movie's sexual politics are unfortunate (Spanier relies upon the meek devotion of a Japanese woman, Mariko, who exists only to provide him with information, home-cooked meals, and undying love) and its stoic tough-guy characterizations don't date well. (As Spanier, Robert Stack is almost a self-parody – the sort of B-movie archetype that would practically be outdated by the 1960s.) If you don't mind a dose of ridiculousness with your action, House of Bamboo is an occasionally thought-provoking blast, with an incredible climax that cannily symbolizes the topsy-turvy nature of modern global relations.

Screening Log, July & August

 
3 Women (d. Robert Altman, USA, 1977) A
Altman's dreamlike masterpiece seems to have been a huge influence on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive; at the very least, both movies have overlapping interests in the blurring of identity and the transformative power of sexual desire. 3 Women steams ahead on a wave of propulsive dream logic; more important than narrative causality is how the characters' passions and delusions manifest themselves in amorphous, surreal fashion. Many oneiric films such as this are ultimately hampered by their complete lack of characterization (see Beyond the Black Rainbow below), but 3 Women treats its titular trio respectfully; Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek), and to a lesser extent Willie (Janice Rule), are all fully-fledged characters whose camera-friendly quirks also offer fleeting insight into their veiled psychologies. Benefiting from the sort of unfettered production background that's practically unheard of in Hollywood (Altman reportedly pitched the idea after dreaming it all up while his wife was ill in the hospital; producer Alan Ladd, Jr., provided funding and final cut without a screenplay ever being written), 3 Women transplants Altman's typical roaming camera (the cinematographer here was Chuck Rosher), overlapping soundtrack (enlivened by Gerald Busby's bizarre musical score), and genre-bending narratives to immersive dream territory, and the results are hypnotic.

Shoeshine (d. Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946) B+
Made two years before Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine might be deemed a trial run for De Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini's subsequent collaboration: this film displays the neorealist interest in the everyday lives of lower-class Italians following World War II, yet was shot mostly on studio sets and has a narrative familiar from numerous prison melodramas of the 1930s. (In addition to a prison riot, tyrannical guards, and a climactic escape, even the cellmates are an ensemble of cliches, from the sleazy bully to the bespectacled bookworm.) But it's unfair to compare Shoeshine to De Sica's later, more idiosyncratic films, especially when it's so achingly, humanely sincere. Pasquale and Giuseppe are two young boys eking out a living by shining foreign soldiers' shoes on the streets of Rome; their unbreakable friendship is endangered when they're embroiled in a black market scheme, imprisoned in a jail for juvenile delinquents, and ultimately turned against each other by an indifferent penal system. The story offers an unsettling parallel to Italy's wartime fascism, as young innocents are forced to rat on their loved ones by callous forces of law and order, and the damning processes of greed and xenophobia inure Giuseppe and Pasquale to a world of barbaric cruelty. At times the film is too polished and relies too heavily on cliches to be as emotional as it wants to be, but the ending is an undeniable tearjerker, and the young actors who play the protagonists (Franco Interlenghi and Rinaldo Smordoni) offer an effective portrait of sublime youth tarnished by a bleak world.

Prometheus (d. Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2012) D+
So there are these inscriptions throughout human history that seem to point towards a planet called Prometheus. This may be the same place where, at the start of Prometheus, we see a mysterious creature ingest an oyster-like object that proceeds to tear him apart from the inside. Millennia later, a crew of scientists and space explorers voyage to Prometheus, hoping to find the birthplace of the human race. They're funded by the Weyland Corporation (the same conglomerate that instigated the space missions in the original Alien movies), whose CEO may or may not be dead and who could have started the mission with ulterior motives in mind, and who may have a secret relationship with the Prometheus mission director. With me so far? None of this has anything to do with the original Alien franchise, which is fine in theory; what's unfortunate is that Prometheus sets up a handful of intriguing questions only to ruin them all with inconclusive cliffhangers, overelaborate CGI that begs for your attention, some of the worst dialogue ever spouted by a great cast, and a general visual drabness that provides little distraction from the increasingly by-the-numbers plot. In other words, everything great about the first three (yes, three) Alien movies is missing from this "prequel" (or spinoff, or whatever they're calling it). A self-performed abortion, while as ludicrous as it sounds, at least provides a memorable and thrilling setpiece, but for the most part Prometheus is surprisingly tepid; if only it had had the courage of its initially ambitious convictions.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (d. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 1975) A
I finally got around to seeing Akerman's celebrated, meticulously controlled study in gender politics; rather than being underwhelmed due to unrealistic expectations (as sometimes happens when catching up with universally-heralded masterpieces), I ultimately asked myself why I hadn't leapt at the chance to see the movie earlier. Jeanne Dielman's release in 1975 coincided with concurrent waves in durational modernism and overt feminism: Akerman's film uses a rigorous long-take setup (in which the camera's static compositions seem to trap Jeanne as inescapably as her domestic milieu) to eviscerate preconceptions about women's role in society. Drawing upon memories of her mother and grandmother observing precise routines in an observant Jewish household, Akerman plots out Jeanne's menial chores precisely; the first hour of the movie is dedicated to immersing us in her everyday existence, so when things start to unravel (as they do around the 100-minute mark) it unsettles us with unexpected intensity. Given its emphasis on tedium and its 200-minute running time, some may claim that "nothing happens" in Jeanne Dielman; actually, though, we're bearing witness to the unraveling of one woman's sanity, and it's both hypnotic and highly disturbing.

Assault on Precinct 13 (d. John Carpenter, 1976, USA) B–
Carpenter gets my vote for one of the most underappreciated auteurs in mainstream American film (The Fog in particular is about as painterly as horror movies get), but Assault on Precinct 13 demonstrates the director's narrative efficiency without any of his later compositional prowess or offhand surrealism. (True, this was only his second feature after Dark Star, so Carpenter was undoubtedly still honing his skills.) Reportedly given full creative license as long as he stayed within a minuscule budget, Carpenter realized he couldn't carry out his ideal project – a remake of Rio Bravo (which was directed by Carpenter's idol, Howard Hawks) – so he updated the classic Western to a dilapidated, nearly-abandoned police station in a Los Angeles ghetto. A murderous gang bombards the precinct in order to avenge the killing of one of their members; inside, a laconic lieutenant, two female workers, and a handful of prisoners mid-transport try to fend off the assailants. The protagonists are a mix of white, black, male, and female, but it's still baffling that this movie is lauded for its diversity: the murderous gang outside is clearly comprised solely of Hispanics and East Asians. Furthermore, the stock characterizations and pithy one-liners – while amusing in campier Carpenter films, like Big Trouble in Little China and They Live – don't mesh well with the movie's gritty evocation of a racially turbulent war-zone. But Carpenter's ability to make the most of his tiny budgets (at least until the success of his follow-up movie, Halloween) remains impressive (the scenes in which the gang bombards the station, zombie-like, are thrillingly effective) and the movie gets a stranglehold on your attention with an early murder scene that remains one of the most genuinely shocking in film history.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (d. Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2012) B
Believe it or not, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is even more preposterous than its title makes it sound: turns out slavery was a massive conspiracy undertaken by vampires who relied upon slaves for fresh meat, and who saw the abolitionists as a threat to their survival. Gleefully rewriting history with the zeal of Tarantino, it's disconcerting (to say the least) how the movie turns the institution of slavery into fodder for Hollywood's next high-concept SFX extravaganza. And yet, it's hard to deny that the movie recognizes how films turn history (and/or reality) into mythology; if we're being kind, we can even find evidence that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter draws intentional correlations between the act of bloodsucking and the development of American "democracy," making the point that this country arose out of the blood of innocents (the animation over the end credits makes this point succinctly; it's worth the price of admission alone). The pleasure may not be all guilty, then...but it mostly is; for better or worse, this is the most brazenly ridiculous Hollywood movie you'll see all year. Thankfully no one involved in the project seemed to realize how absurd it was, or at least didn't let on: there's no ironic Snakes on a Plane-style winking at the audience, which allows the movie to excel in its own bombastic way.

Elena (d. Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2012) B+
With slow-burning intensity a family unravels: a stoic patriarch alters his will, revealing the ruptures and unexpected empathies between himself, his cynical yet emotionally honest daughter, his distant wife, and her deadbeat family. Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return), who some say is Russia's modern heir to Tarkovsky, Elena is hardly a political treatise but it still works as a sobering depiction of how capitalism's emphasis on greed and self-preservation can turn individuals against each other. The movie doesn't exactly have a bleeding heart – the ensemble is observed with clinical, observational detachment, and the lower-class characters are a bit too simplistically malicious – but that doesn't prevent the film from ending with an emotional wallop. If nothing else, the movie demonstrates what will probably be the best cinematography of the year (courtesy of Mikhail Krichman); the opening and closing shots, which act as subversive bookends, are especially astounding.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (d. Panos Cosmatos, Canada, 2012) C
I actively wanted to like Beyond the Black Rainbow before I even sat down to watch it: the trailer promised something like a bad LSD trip, a surreal, mind-bending pseudo-story that prioritized dreamlike images over narrative cohesion. I usually go for that sort of thing (sometimes against my better judgment), but sadly Beyond the Black Rainbow reminds us that even the trippiest film-as-nightmare needs solid ideas, relatable characters, or at least a sort of ethereal grace to hold our attention. (The Holy Mountain, Mulholland Dr., and Un chien Andalou, for example, are great not just for their surreal imagery but for what else they offer us: beauty, complexity, heartache, tantalizing mystery.) In some ways Cosmatos' debut sustains Canadian film's legacy of forward-thinking innovations that exist somewhere between narrative and experimental cinema, between genre templates and free-flowing dream imagery, between pop and the avant-garde (previously practiced by David Cronenberg and Guy Maddin, among others). Give the movie credit for eschewing filmmaking conventions, and for providing the most horrific and unshakable image I've seen so far in 2012 (as far as I can tell, it involves a man climbing into a vat of oil, witnessing the face of God, and decaying into carrion until his body somehow reassembles itself). But there are only a few such awe-inspiring moments; the bulk of the movie is comprised of monotonous dialogue (conveyed via dead-eyed performances that seem to reaffirm that the characters and whatever they say don't really mean all that much) and contradictory references to both '80s slasher films and more surreal abstractions (including avant-garde masterpieces such as Dog Star Man and The Exquisite Hour). Call it a failed but noble experiment, though it's one that suggests fascinating things to come from Cosmatos.

The Sacrifice (d. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/UK/France, 1986) B–
A lesser film by Tarkovsky is still better than most other directors' works, but there's no denying that The Sacrifice, for all of its magisterial imagery, winds up a bit disappointing. Filmed on the Swedish isle of Fårö (where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked), with Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist and one of his frequent actors, Erland Josephson, The Sacrifice does in fact seem like a middle-ground between the two auteurs: Tarkovsky's austere imagery (comprised of abstract memories and dreams, gracefully-composed long takes, and the employment of numerous planes of action in one shot) and philosophical ambiguities are still in full force, but with lengthier monologues and, perhaps, an earthier fascination with tenuous human relationships, both reminiscent of Bergman. The film's drawn-out dialogue sequences involving Nietzsche, Shakespeare, science, morality, war, and Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi" are as weighty as they sound, but the philosophies they espouse may be less eye-opening than they presume to be: ultimately, the movie's message may be that a faithless, self-centered modern world may already be doomed to apocalypse, a concept that's certainly worth articulating but may not be particularly multifaceted. In any case, Tarkovsky's command of visual language is astounding as always, and certain scenes (such as the apparent onset of World War III and the resulting views of a city street obliterated by nuclear holocaust) are impossible to forget.