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The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat, 1974)

Nathalie Baye, Monique Mélinand, and Philippe Léotard in The Mouth Agape

Cast: Nathalie Baye, Philippe Léotard, Hubert Deschamps, Monique Mélinand. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Production design: Michel de Broin. Film editing: Bernard Dubois, Arlette Langmann. 

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's familiar list of the five stages of grief -- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance -- omits one that's featured in Maurice Pialat's The Mouth Agape: Impatience. Granted, it's antecedent to the others, and is usually present mainly when the person takes a long time dying. But it's a very real stage in Pialat's film, voiced primarily by the dying woman's husband and then only with guilt and embarrassment, made more poignant by the fact that he has cheated on her throughout their life together. There's nothing particularly admirable about the family of the dying woman (Monique Mélinand). Her husband (Hubert Deschamps), who continually has a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, feels up a pretty young girl who comes in to buy a T-shirt from his shop while his wife is dying in a nearby room. Their son (Philippe Léotard) is also unfaithful to his wife (Nathalie Baye), who goes off on vacation while he's watching after his mother. And yet, although The Mouth Agape takes a cold-hearted look at dying, treating it almost as an imposition on the living, the film somehow becomes more moving than the ones that sentimentalize the vigil at the bedside. The grief that the husband feels after her death is genuine, made more apparent by the way Pialat ends the film: first with a long tracking shot from the car carrying the son and daughter-in-law to Paris, where their lives will continue. We see the door that the father has just closed and then the streets of the village and finally the road to the city, receding as if the couple is escaping the trauma of death. And then we cut to an interior shot of the father turning out the light, enveloping him in darkness and loneliness. 

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Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)

Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothée Chalamet, Julie Stefans, Lois Smith, Stephen Henderson, Odeya Rush, Jordan Rodrigues, Marielle Scott. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig. Cinematography: Sam Levy. Production design: Chris Jones. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Jon Brion.

Maybe it’s not the “female 400 Blows” that Greta Gerwig reportedly wanted to make, but it’ll do until that comes along. We could only hope that Gerwig has something like François Truffaut’s “Antoine Doinel cycle” in the works. It doesn’t have to be the “Lady Bird McPherson” cycle, either, but just more sensitive, intelligent films about family and environment. And I hope that if she does, she’ll find more roles for the wonderful Laurie Metcalf, whose nuanced performance as Lady Bird’s hard-working, hard-bitten mother, skeptical of anything that smacks of overreaching one’s station in life, to my mind easily outshadows the performance that beat it for the supporting actress Oscar. Not that Allison Janney wasn’t terrific in I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie), but her role was one-note when compared with the subtleties that the part of Marion McPherson demanded – and Metcalf supplied. I also found myself thinking about a movie that stars Gerwig but which she didn’t write or direct, Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan (2015), and realizing how movie formulas can either sustain or cripple a film that tries to reach beyond them. In Maggie’s Plan, Miller tries to make a conventional domestic comedy rise above its conventions, to infuse its sometimes over-familiar comic situations with a bit of poignant realism. She fails because she’s not willing to let her characters transcend the situations, to surprise us. Lady Bird is equally formulaic: It’s essentially a coming-of-age teen comedy, something we’ve seen before. But Gerwig and her performers flesh out the characters into something more plausibly real than the genre demands.

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Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin, 2016)

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star Trek Beyond 

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldaña, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Idris Elba, Sofia Boutella. Screenplay: Simon Pegg, Doug Jung. Cinematography: Stephen F. Windon. Production design: Andrew Murdock, Thomas E. Sanders. Film editing: Greg D'Auria, Dylan Highsmith, Kelly Matsumoto, Steven Sprung. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

Writing a screenplay for a Star Trek reboot film must be something of a confining job. You have to provide a worthy adversary for the Enterprise crew, who eat worthy adversaries for lunch, so you need to create a role for an actor who doesn't mind hamming it up, like Eric Bana, Benedict Cumberbatch, or Idris Elba, and keep the role distinct from all the other villains who have threatened the Enterprise. You have to provide the requisite familiar shtick for the characters: Bones (Karl Urban) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) must squabble, but good naturedly; Bones has to say something like "I'm a doctor, not a...." at least once; Scotty (Simon Pegg) has to fuss about the limitations of his engines; Chekov (Anton Yelchin) has to have a charming occasion to pronounce his v's like w's, and so on. You also have to provide a few surprises about the characters: Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldaña) are a couple! Sulu (John Cho) is gay! You have to have a pretty female newcomer (Sofia Boutella) who can wear elaborate alien makeup but still look pretty. You have to set up the plot to accommodate spectacular special effects. So no wonder that each successive reboot movie feels a little overfamiliar, and that there are shortcuts in the narrative that don't bear close inspection. In Star Trek Beyond, for example, we leave Scotty hanging from a cliff by the fingertips of one hand, but not too much later he shows up alive and well with no explanation of how someone with the average musculature of a Simon Pegg hoisted himself over the edge. And no wonder that Star Trek Beyond went through heavy rewriting, with Pegg and Doug Jung taking over the script after a first draft by Roberto Orci, Patrick McKay, and John D. Payne was turned down by the producers. There are some touches of wit in the script, such as the opening sequence in which Kirk (Chris Pine) faces down a crowd of what appear to be fearsome monsters but turn out to be about the size of schnauzers, and a clever use of an antique boom box -- perhaps a nod to the one carried by the punk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), whom Nimoy's Spock incapacitated with a Vulcan nerve pinch -- as a lethally disorienting weapon against Krall's (Elba) forces. The box booms out the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," a track that would be several centuries old, and Bones asks Spock, "Is that classical music I'm hearing?" to which Spock replies, "Yes, doctor, I believe it is." The cast does its usual best, with Pine nicely suggesting some of the old Shatnerian swagger as Kirk without resorting to caricature, and Elba, for much of the film unrecognizable under the makeup, giving his villain real menacing weight. But in the end, the reboot should have given the shtick a rest and provided a threat to the crew that isn't so dependent on an actor going over the top. Or maybe it could have come up with a science fiction plot that relies more on science than on fiction.

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Maggie’s Plan (Rebecca Miller, 2015)

Travis Fimmel and Greta Gerwig in Maggie’s Plan

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel. Screenplay: Rebecca Miller, based on a story by Karen Rinaldi. Cinematography: Sam Levy. Production design: Alexandra Schaller. Film editing: Sabine Hoffman. Music: Michael Rohatyn.

Director-screenwriter Rebecca Miller keeps the comedy in Maggie’s Plan in check, so that scenes that might have been hilarious wind up amusing, and scenes that might have been amusing take on an edge of melancholy. In the end, the film feels a bit overburdened by the necessity of working out the titular plan: a career woman who, in midlife crisis, decides to have a child with a sperm donor. That’s the contemporary equivalent of the kind of formulaic dilemma that used to spin the plots of Doris Day’s movies. As Maggie (Greta Gerwig) is going through her plan to inseminate herself with sperm donated by the agreeable, if somewhat oddball Guy (Travis Fimmel), she manages to fall for a married man, John (Ethan Hawke), who is at odds with his wife, Georgette (Julianne Moore). This leads to a comic scene that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered in another film: Having just inseminated herself, Maggie hears the doorbell and crabwalks her way to answer it, only to have a rather messy accident when she stands up. It’s John, of course, there to proclaim his love for her and to sleep with her. We jump ahead three years: John and Maggie are married and have a little girl. But as their marriage goes sour, and we realize that John and Georgette were really meant for each other after all, another plan is introduced: Georgette and Maggie plot to undo what has been done. Gerwig, Hawke, and Moore are marvelous performers, but there’s something off about Miller’s touch, so that the humor is lost in the mechanisms of the plot. The ending kicker, however, is nicely done.

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Dutchman (Anthony Harvey, 1966)

Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. in Dutchman

Cast: Shirley Knight, Al Freeman Jr. Screenplay: Amiri Baraka, based on his play. Cinematography: Gerry Turpin. Art direction: Herbert Smith. Film editing: Anthony Harvey. Music: John Barry. 

Dutchman, Amiri Baraka's parable about race and sex, made it from stage to screen in admirable fashion. without the usual strained attempts to "open it up" with extraneous scenes. Granted, it comes in at just under an hour, too long for a short film and too short for a feature, but it's so tightly staged and so intensely acted that it doesn't need to be condensed or expanded. Shirley Knight's flamboyant performance in the role of Lula, the minidressed woman who comes on to an initially reserved Black man on the subway, her a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival, though some think she's overacting -- that her performance would have worked on the stage but is pitched too high for the camera. I see the point, but the role is a necessary foil to Al Freeman Jr.'s contained and wary Clay, who has to wait for her to pull the trigger that makes him explode, which he does superbly. It's the type of play and film that from title to denouement demands exegesis, but I leave that to others.   

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X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016)

Oscar Isaac in X-Men: Apocalypse

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Oscar Isaac, Rose Byrne, Evan Peters, Josh Helman, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Lucas Till, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Hugh Jackman. Screenplay: Simon Kinberg, Bryan Singer, Michael Dougherty, Dean Harris. Cinematography: Newton Thomas Sigel. Production design: Grant Major. Film editing: Michael Louis Hill, John Ottman. Music: John Ottman.

Oscar Isaac is one of my favorite actors, but I sat through the entirety of X-Men: Apocalypse without realizing, until his name appeared in the credits, that he was the one beneath all the makeup and prosthetics as En Sabah Nur, aka Apocalypse. Which makes me wonder: Why bother? Casting an actor of such skill and versatility in a role that could have been played by anyone willing to sit through hours of applying and removing body paint, silicone, and foam latex seems to me a waste of valuable resources. But I guess the same thing could be said about the entire film if you ignore the return the producers got on their estimated $178 million investment. When a film this size feels routine, something has gone awry, and X-Men: Apocalypse is nothing if not routine. There are things I enjoyed about it, like the special effects when Quicksilver (Evan Peters) rescues almost everyone from the explosion that destroys the institute. The trick of seeing everything as Quicksilver sees it -- i.e., as time standing still while he moves at superspeed, dashing from room to room to haul occupants to safety -- is nicely done. And there are good performances from Peters, James McAvoy as Charles Xavier, Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven, Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler. I enjoyed seeing Sophie Turner (as the latest iteration of Jean Grey) in something other than Game of Thrones and Hugh Jackman in an unbilled (and extremely violent) cameo as Logan/Wolverine. But there's a kind of heartlessness and thoughtlessness about it, too often characteristic of the superhero blockbuster movie genre, that my experience amounted to a kind of déjà vu. I just hope Isaac got paid well. 

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Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)

Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo in Thor: Ragnarok

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson, Karl Urban, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, Taika Waititi, Rachel House, Luke Hemsworth, Sam Neill, Matt Damon. Screenplay: Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost. Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe. Production design: Dan Hennah, Ra Vincent. Film editing: Zene Baker, Joel Negron. Music: Mark Mothersbaugh.

Much fun, thanks to director Taika Waititi’s irreverence toward the material he was given to bring to the screen: yet another superhero comic book adventure. But the Marvel people have learned a lot about their audience, something it seems the DC people haven’t fully apprised, given the failure of some of their Superman and Batman movies to capture audiences. (The blissful exception was Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, which vied with Thor: Ragnarok as 2017’s best comic book movie.) The trick is to take nothing too seriously and to load your films with the best performers you can find. From the start, Chris Hemsworth was an ideal Thor: a gorgeous god, to be sure, but also a bit of a goof, easily outwitted by his clever brother Loki but able to survive in the end through sheer affability. If there’s a flaw to Thor: Ragnarok it’s that the stakes don’t really seem that high: Asgard is a nice place, but none of us are ever going to visit there, so its destruction doesn’t feel so much like a threat as the ones to Earth in the other Marvel adventures. The compensation is that unlike a lot of films with prestigious actors of the caliber of Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hiddleston – people who could be off doing Shakespeare somewhere – nobody involved seems to be going through the paces just for the paycheck. Everyone seems to be having fun, thanks to Waititi and other cutups like Hemsworth and Jeff Goldblum. It’s not Hamlet, to be sure, although there’s a play within a play with Chris’s brother Luke, Sam Neill, and Matt Damon spoofing the “real” Thor, Odin, and Loki. Marvel has gone the jokey road before with the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies (James Gunn, 2014 and 2017), but those were exposition-heavy and overburdened with effects in comparison to Waititi’s lighter, larkier approach. Unfortunately, Waititi didn’t resist the temptation toward heavy exposition and burdensome effects in the followup, Thor: Love and Thunder (2022).

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Locke (Steven Knight, 2013)

Tom Hardy in Locke

Cast: Tom Hardy, voices of Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Ben Daniels, Tom Holland, Bill Milner, Danny Webb, Alice Lowe, Silas Carson, Lee Ross, Kirsty Dillon. Screenplay: Steven Knight. Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos. Film editing: Justine Wright. Music: Dickon Hinchliffe.

A man driving on the highway alone at night, talking to people on the car phone. It’s the stuff of which radio dramas like the 1943 Sorry, Wrong Number were made -- or might have been, if there had been car phones in the 1940s, the peak era of radio drama. Sorry, Wrong Number was “opened up” to show other characters than the woman on the phone when it was filmed by Anatole Litvak in 1948, but Steven Knight’s Locke remains alone in the car with its title character, played by Tom Hardy in a performance that leaves no doubt that he’s one of our best actors. But the actors whose voices are heard in the film, including Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, and Tom Holland, are just as compelling in their performances. The chief objection made by critics is that Locke is basically a “gimmick” film, that there’s no reason why Knight shouldn’t have shown the people on the other end of the line – or whatever passes for “line” in the era of mobile phones. It’s a tour de force that keeps the camera trained on Locke for the film’s entire 85 minutes, with only occasional cuts to the surrounding traffic, and it’s an added departure from the expected to cast an actor known mainly for his work in action films in a role that puts him in one seat for the whole movie. But I think Knight and Hardy make it work splendidly, focusing our attention on the character of Ivan Locke, and the decision he has made to abandon both the important construction project he supervises and a family gathering in order to drive to where a woman with whom he had a one-night stand is giving birth to his child. Knight hasn’t really solved all the problems of motivation: The decision to have Locke deliver a series of monologues directed at his dead father, who abandoned him and his mother, feels contrived. But there’s real drama in the conversations with Donal (Scott), the inexperienced and rather feckless man he has left in charge of the crucial concrete pour, with the hysterical Bethan (Colman), who is giving birth to their child, and with his wife, Katrina (Wilson), to whom he is just now confessing that he slept with Bethan. Best of all, Knight has the good sense not to provide closure to Locke’s story: When we leave him, he has a marriage in ruins and a baby to help support, and he’s been fired from his job. But because we have spent so much time face to face with Locke, and because Hardy has so deftly created the character, it’s easy to sense that he’s capable of surmounting these problems. 

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Venom: The Last Dance (Kelly Marcel, 2024)

Tom Hardy in Venom: The Last Dance

Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Clark Backo, Alanna Ubach, Carlos Fernández, Jared Abrahamson, Hala Finley, Dash McCloud, Andy Serkis. Screenplay: Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy. Cinematography: Fabian Wagner. Production design: Chris Lowe. Film editing: Mark Sanger. Music: Dan Deacon. 

Even though he has himself to blame, having co-produced and -written Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy deserves better than this noisy, messy farrago of special effects and wisecracks. So do we, though it's pretty clear from the ending and from the mid- and post-credits sequences that we've not seen the last of Eddie Brock and his symbiotic sidekick. Try harder next time, Tom. 

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Ma Mère (Christophe Honoré, 2004)

Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrel in Ma Mère

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preiss, Jean-Baptiste Montagut, Dominique Reymond, Olivier Rabourdin, Philippe Duclos. Screenplay: Christophe Honoré, based on a novel by Georges Bataille. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. Production design: Laurent Allaire. Film editing: Chantal Hymans. 

Sex without taboos is like tennis without a net. That seems to be one message of Christophe Honoré's Ma Mêre, which is so drenched in depictions of sexual activity that it earned an NC-17 rating in the U.S. Unfortunately, it's also boring. Featuring everything from public copulation to incest, with actors of the first order, it trudges from one shocking moment to another without ever engaging the audience's sympathy or interest. Isabelle Huppert plays the mother, who confesses to her son (Louis Garrel) after his father's death that she's a slut -- her word, or the French equivalent for it. He volunteers to be tutored by her in sexual freedom, though he's still manifesting elements of his Catholic schooling, a detail that feels like it's meant to make some symbolic point but doesn't. To aid in his education she enlists her friend and lover Réa (Joana Preiss) and a young woman, Hansi (Emma de Caunes). Sure enough, everything gets out of hand and la petite mort is succeeded by actual death. If these were characters we might potentially feel some sympathy for, the film could have made an impact, but my only reaction was relief when it was over.

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Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Patsy Ferran, Cameron Britton, Daniel Henshall, Steve Park, Anamaria Vartolomei, Holliday Grainger. Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Fiona Crombie. Film editing: Jinmo Yang. Music: Jung Jae-il. 

Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 is carpet-bomb satire, spread out over so many social, political, scientific, and theological targets that it's bound to hit all of them but inflict no lasting damage on any of them. What it has going for it is a watchable cast, starting with Robert Pattinson, who adds to his reputation as one of our most versatile young actors. Pattison is Mickey Barnes, whom technology allows to essentially live forever as a succession of Mickeys who die and get reborn. By the time the film starts, he's Mickey 17, an "Expendable" on a voyage to settle a new planet. He's essentially a guinea pig, sent out to test whether humans can survive the new environment. Each time something on the planet, such as a virus, kills him, he's re-created out of something like a 3-D printer and his previously stored memories are replaced so he can go out again, after the scientists on-board have discovered a cure or preventative for what killed him. That's the principal set-up, but Bong has more twists to Mickey's story in line. The captain of the spaceship, for example, Kenneth Marshall, is a wealthy politician out for glory. He's played well over the top by Mark Ruffalo in a performance that evokes several contemporary egomaniacs with more money and power than scruples and common sense. And the planet is inhabited by creatures that look like large pill bugs; they turn out to be intelligent beings, setting the plot up for a showdown with the blustering Marshall. It's a darkly funny movie that reflects Bong's somewhat jaundiced view of humankind.

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Moving (Shinji Somai, 1993)

Tomoko Tabata in Moving

Cast: Tomoko Tabata, Junko Sakarada, Kiichi Nakai, Mariko Sudo, Taro Tanaka, Ippei Shigeyama, Nagiko Tono. Screenplay: Satoshi Okonogi, Satoko Okudera, based on a novel by Hiko Tanaka. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Art direction: Shigenori Shimoishizaka. Film editing: Yoshiyuki Okuhara. Music: Shigeaki Saegusa. 

The engine that drives Shinji Somai's Moving is the voracious ego of a child. When we first meet Renko (Tomoko Tabata), she is sitting at the appropriately wedge-shaped dining table in the home of her parents, Kenichi (Kiichii Nakai) and Nazuna (Junko Sakarada). Everyone at the table is pretending that it's a perfectly normal meal, except that it is the last one that Kenichi will be having there. He's moving out, having joined with Nazuna in a decision that their marriage is virtually over. Renko is feigning a maturity and understanding that we will soon see is beyond the capacity of her 12-year-old self. Soon, under the pressure from schoolmates and her mother's attempt to impose a new order on their lives, she will begin acting out in a variety of ways. Somai's portrait of the effect of divorce on Renko is an acute and sensitive one, hindered as a drama by the fact that there are only two ways the story can go: reconciliation or acceptance. After the explosion of several attempts at reconciliation, that ceases to be an option. Somai chooses to dramatize Renko's process of acceptance with an extended sequence that's part real, part dream. It takes place at a festival at which Renko has arranged for both of her parents to be present, but when she's unable to effect a reunion, she runs away and spends the night alone, wandering the woods on the fringe of the festival and having a vision that somehow brings her to understand her inability to manipulate her parents' lives. It's a heartfelt movie with superb performances, though it seems to me to cheat a little with its shift into fantasy as a correlative for the psychological healing that takes place in Renko.

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Triple Frontier (J.C. Chandor, 2019)

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona. Screenplay: Mark Boal, J.C. Chandor. Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov. Production design: Greg Berry. Film editing: Ron Patane. Music: Disasterpeace. 

Mark Boal’s screenplay for Triple Frontier was kicked around for several years before it was finally made. Originally planned to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Boal’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker and Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty scripts, it was going to star Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp. When that fell through, other directors and other stars were talked about, including Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg, Will Smith, and Mahershala Ali. That it wound up starring Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal is a pretty good indication that filmmakers now have a solid roster of male actors to call on. All that cast shuffling and script massaging may have taken a little toll on the final product, which is a pretty good movie that doesn’t quite have the kinetic charge it needs. The story is about five veterans of the Special Forces who get together to assassinate a South American drug lord and steal the millions he has stashed away. The triple frontier of the title is the Tres Fronteras area where Brazil, Peru, and Colombia come together. The five men have all fallen on hard times after leaving the military. Affleck’s character, nicknamed “Redfly,” the former leader of the group, is trying to make a living selling real estate and struggling with a failed marriage. “Ironhead” (Hunnam) ekes out a living making motivational speeches to new recruits. His brother, Ben (Hedlund), gets a battering as a cage fighter. “Catfish” (Pascal) is a pilot whose license has been suspended because the plane he was hired to fly was loaded with cocaine. Only “Pope” (Isaac) still has military ties: He’s a hired gun for law enforcement organizations. With such varied backstories, the characters in Triple Frontier ought to be more involving, especially when their plan initially succeeds but then falls apart in a grueling attempt to haul the cash they scavenge across the Andes to their escape vessel. There are echoes of much better movies in this one, such as The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948). But Triple Frontier, despite the hard work of its fine cast, seems muddled – and even, dare I say, muddied by the gloomycam cinematography.

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Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Alan Doyle, Douglas Hodge, Léa Seydoux. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: Arthur Max. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Marc Streitenfeld.

Did the world really need another Robin Hood movie? From the lack of interest at the box office, it would seem not. At least Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland tried to give us something slightly different: a prequel, in which Robin finds his identity and mission and only at the very end goes off into Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men, presumably to rob from the rich and give to the poor. Unfortunately, the prequel doesn’t give us much that’s new or revealing about the characters: The villains, King John (Oscar Isaac) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen), remain the same, with an additional twist that they’re being duped by another villain named Godfrey (Mark Strong), a supporter of the French King Philip, who is plotting an invasion now that the English army is still straggling back from the Crusades. Robin is a soldier of fortune named Robin Longstride, who has been to the Crusades and is making it back with the crown of the fallen Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as well as a sword he promised the dying Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) he would return to his father, Sir Walter (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham.  When he does, Robin meets Marian, no longer a maid but the widow of Sir Robert. On the way, he has gathered a retinue comprising Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Allan A'Dayle (Alan Doyle), and in Nottingham he will add Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) to the not terribly merry company. They’ll take part in repelling the French invasion, which Scott makes into a kind of small scale D-Day, to the extent of borrowing unabashedly from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), including some landing craft whose historical existence has been questioned (along with much else of the movie’s history). Robin and his fellow soldiers, including Marian, who arrives disguised in chain mail, save the day, but their hopes for a new charter of rights that has been promised them by King John are dashed when he proclaims Robin an outlaw. So everything seems to be set up for a sequel that will culminate at Runnymede and the signing of Magna Carta, but the film’s flop at the box office put paid to that. Robin Hood certainly has some good performances, which you might expect from its cast packed with Oscar-winners and -contenders, but it feels routine and a little tired. It also resorts to filming much of the action with the now too common “gloomycam,” in which fight scenes always seem to be taking place at night, so you can’t tell who’s killing whom.

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Redline (Takeshi Koike, 2009)

Cast: Voices of Takuya Kimura, Yu Aoi, Takeshi Aono, Kosei Hirota, Unsho Ishizuka, Kente Miyaka, Koji Ishi, Cho, Ken'yu Horiuchi, Shunichiro Miki, Ikki Todoroki, Akane Sakai, Daisuke Gori, Shin'ichiro Ota. Screenplay: Katsuhito Ishi, Yoji Inokido, Yoshiki Sakurai. Cinematography: Ryu Takizawa. Production design: Katsuhito Ishii. Film editing: Naoki Kawanishi, Satoshi Terauchi. Music: James Shimoji. 

Though Redline took seven years to create, even its most ardent admirers admit that it's lacking in originality when it comes to story: It's the old auto-race tale with a romance thrown in. But almost everyone admits that it really doesn't matter: Takeshi Koike's film is a slam-bang, non-stop, eye-challenging demonstration that when it comes to animation, there's life in hand-drawn images that computer-created ones still don't possess. I'm no great fan of anime, but Redline kept me amused even when my attention was divided between the images and the subtitles. (I refuse to watch dubbed movies.) The truth is, you hardly need the subtitles to get what's happening, since it's mostly action anyway, especially when you get the setup of a futuristic auto race taking place illicitly on a planet that doesn't want it to happen and is willing to take any means to prevent it. The central character, JP, is an amalgam of Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando in The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953), and the outlaw bikers of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969). To win the race, he teams up with his chief rival, Sonoshee McLaren, who hates her nickname, Cherry Boy Hunter, but demonstrates her feminine wiles whenever they're useful. (She has a gratuitous topless scene.) In short, it's the ultimate in kinetic cinema, though you may nurse a hangover headache afterward. 

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John Payne and Lee Van Cleef in Kansas City Confidential (Phil Karlson, 1952) Cast: John Payne, Coleen Gray, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, Dona Drake, Mario Siletti, Howard Negley, Carleton Young, Don Orlando, Ted Ryan. Screenplay: George Bruce, Harry Essex, Harold Greene, Rowland Brown. Cinematography: George E. Diskant. Art direction: Edward L. Ilou. Film editing: Buddy Small. Music: Paul Sawtell. This intricately plotted film noir benefits more from its supporting cast of heavies – Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, and Jack Elam – than it does from its nominal leads, John Payne and Coleen Gray. Payne’s Joe Rolfe gets framed for a big heist, but there’s not enough evidence to convict him, so he sets out to track down the hoodlums who set him up. The first twist is that none of the actual thieves know who any of the others are – they were all sent on their mission in masks, supplied by the mastermind, known to them as “Mr. Big.” And he turns out to be a retired police captain (Preston Foster) who was forced out of his job by politics. He isn’t interested in the loot itself but in staging a capture of the thieves and a recovery of the money so he can get the reward and maybe even be reinstated in his old job. As if this twist isn’t enough, he’s also the father of the young woman (Gray) whom Rolfe falls in love with after he sleuths his way to the Mexican resort town where the plot leads everybody else. Fortunately, Phil Karlson’s no-nonsense direction keeps the movie from getting snared in its own twists and turns.

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The Hungry Ghosts (Michael Imperioli, 2009)

Steve Schirripa in The Hungry Ghosts

Cast: Steve Schirripa, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Nick Sandow, Sharon Angela, Emory Cohen, Zohra Lampert, Stefan Schaefer, Paul Calderón, Joe Caniano, Jim Hendricks, Sondra James, Jerry Grayson, Bess Rous. Screenplay: Michael Imperioli. Cinematography: Dan Hersey. Art direction: Illya Radysh. Film editing: Erin Greenwell. Music: Elijah Amitin.

The Hungry Ghosts, Michael Imperioli's debut as a feature director, feels a bit like it came out of an assignment in Screenwriting 101: Write a screenplay about a group of seriously flawed people who carom off one another in surprising ways, but don't worry about plot. In short, it has all the earmarks of an independent film, including no stars but a cast of slightly familiar faces. In this case, many of them are former cast members of The Sopranos, in which Imperioli came to prominence. The principal figures in the film are Frank (Steve Schirripa), who hosts a late-night talk show on radio and has a serious alcohol and cocaine problem; Nadia (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who moves out of her apartment because she's behind on her rent but can't seem to find a place to crash; and Gus (Nick Sandow), Nadia's former lover who is just getting out of rehab and can't wait to pick up the habit again. Nick has a teenage son, Matthew (Emory Cohen), with whom he has trouble communicating, and a wife, Angela (Sharon Angela), with whom he is at odds, not least because of his relationship with Matthew. Nadia, who has been going to a yoga and meditation class run by Ruth (Zohra Lampert) while dodging Gus's phone calls, decides it's time to get out of the city, which connects her with Frank, who is on the same train, and eventually, though belatedly, unites them with Gus. Imperioli struggles with making these connections, but the skill of his performers almost succeeds in making sense out of them. The consensus of reviewers was that The Hungry Ghosts was warmed-over Cassavetes (a director Imperioli admires), and for once, the consensus was just.