The Grapes of Death (Jean Rollin, 1978)

 

In a way, nothing in Jean Rollin’s The Grapes of Death penetrates as much as the opening images of weary agricultural labourers trudging through the vineyards, their heavy breathing prominent on the soundtrack (the film’s feel for rural landscapes and textures makes the title’s evocation of Steinbeck more apposite than one might expect – it’s also sometimes been released under the far more prosaic title of Pesticide). One of the labourers complains of feeling sick, his concerns brushed aside by the boss, and from there it’s a short hop to Living Dead territory, with a young woman, Elisabeth, jumping off a train to escape a murderously demented passenger and thereafter wandering through a rugged landscape which appears challenging enough even in its usual state, let alone when populated by zombies (although, intriguingly, the contagion takes radically different forms, for example affecting one conniving woman’s mind while leaving her body unmarked – in the film’s most ultra-Rollinesque moment, she obligingly takes everything off to demonstrate). Even when at its more conventional, the film has an intriguing sense of remove, starting from the oddly under-populated train; an exchange about the distinction between those who fought during the war for an unexamined notion of patriotism and those who specifically opposed Fascism in all its forms hinting at festering cracks that only needed slight prodding to split open (it’s amusing that two of the primary characters avoid contagion because, being solidly of the working class, they drink beer rather than wine). It all winds its way to a suitably bleak, un-celebratory conclusion, seeming to portend a bleak future for Elisabeth, perhaps for all. A minor mystery concerns whether the “Francois Pascal” cited in the credits refers to Francoise Pascal of Rollin’s The Iron Rose, even though she’s not in the film: at least one online site says that it does, and that her scenes were cut, but I think I would have more faith in Rollin’s spelling ability, if nothing else.

After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino, 2025)

 

Many reviewers responded to After the Hunt as if Luca Guadagnino had temporarily forgotten how to direct, and the film certainly lacks the seamless, sink-in stylishness of Challengers or Call Me by Your Name; possibly indeed seeming at times (noting for example its lurching, too-close close-ups, indifferent framings and peculiar fixation on hands) downright shoddy. But greater reflection and open-mindedness suggests a sly strategy on the director’s part, indicated early on by the precise use of Woody Allen-style opening credits, and at the very end by an audible “Cut,” both making small contributions to a foregrounding of artifice and provocation that’s evident in everything from the chaotically piling-up narrative to the barely-controlled performances (the question of whether the actors are “good” hardly seems relevant). The film initially teases us with the promise of a cozy institutional saga, immersing us in a Yale philosophy department characterized by strong, flirtatious collegiality and spiky banter, soon disrupted by a student’s accusation of sexual assault against a teacher; from there it’s consistently expectation-defying in its treatment of the core premise (for example making little real attempt to engage with the facts and perspectives underling the allegation, let alone to resolve them), along the way snatching away points of certainty, throwing in much that’s mainly bewildering, ending up in a place that seems barely explicable on its own terms, let alone as a logical outgrowth of what preceded it. One certainly registers at the end though how the initial warmth and sense of connection has been replaced by distance and isolation (the final scene takes place in a diner that we previously saw bustling but is now deserted, and with snow outside yet!), seemingly suggesting that the kinds of stridently entitled machinations depicted in the film, however all-consuming at the time, are ultimately detrimental to one’s social positioning and basic contentment.

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)

 

Even by modern-day standards, the closing credits of Leos Carax’s Annette feel unusually prolonged, especially as the film sticks in the mind as a relatively “small” and intimate one (notwithstanding its splashes of grandeur), an impression cemented by the opening (the most straightforwardly enjoyable part of the movie) in which the two principals of Sparks, the three leads, the director and his daughter Nastya and a few others march out of the studio and into the street while singing an opening song. The real-life father-daughter presence seems to promise autobiographical revelation ahead, but if so, it’s fairly depressing in nature given what transpires, a downbeat story of a romance between Henry, a comedian/performance artist (Adam Driver), and opera singer Ann (Marion Cotillard) that generates a child with an ethereal singing talent, even as the family becomes mired in tragedy and murder. The film often seems most audacious in its withholding quality, its refusal to straightforwardly entertain (summed up by the scene in which singing prodigy baby Annette is booked for the Super Bowl half time show and then refuses to do anything, except to denounce her father for his crimes). One registers one aspect after another in which the fabric feels defiantly dour: Henry’s act is at best angry and abrasive and often downright audience-hostile, the clips of Ann’s performances sterile by comparison; the device of having Annette played by a puppet counts for surprisingly little (the manipulation of Annette’s strange talent by her father is hardly made more resonant by such a distancing device), and her replacement by a real girl in the end only confirms the wretched isolation lying ahead for Henry). The closing credits return to celebratory mode, the cast and crew inviting us if we liked the film to tell a friend about it, or failing that to tell a stranger, but the camera’s slow journey up into the beyond seems to embody the faint hope of soliciting too many such recommendations.

God's Angry Man (Werner Herzog, 1981)

 

Werner Herzog’s 1981 portrait of tele-evangelist Gene Scott, God’s Angry Man, is ultimately perhaps too brief to do justice to its bizarre subject, rendering it too easy to caricature him as a straightforwardly hypocritical materialist. Not that Scott, who we’re told is dealing with as many as seventy lawsuits at any given time, doesn’t apparently spend a large portion of his broadcasts asking for money, but based on what we’re shown he does so with a self-entitled, hectoring rage that seems distinct from the smarmy latter-day “prosperity gospel.” Herzog doesn’t probe the details of Scott’s doctrinal positioning, and it’s unclear what the experience of watching his show, which seems unstructured and rambling at best, actually amounts to (at times, in fact, as in his creation of an “FCC Monkey Band”, a collection of wind-up animals intended to embody his view of a adversarial Federal Communications Commission, it might be consumed as unhinged performance art). On that issue of materialism, Scott claims he doesn’t own anything directly except a black bag he carries around with him, the contents of which are revealed to no one (he somewhat puckishly allows it might just be his dirty socks); his expenses are entirely borne by the church, implicitly allowing him a defense against being the rich man who can no more enter heaven than a camel can go through the eye of a needle. Even so, the film’s (almost) last words are a song about a prosperous man who, if he can scrape into heaven at all, will only be granted a rusty halo and second hand wings, and one wonders if that’s partly an expression of Grant’s own insecurity (he does allow earlier that he sometimes wrestles with his faith), of whether his ranting reflects fear of an afterlife which will fail to justify the choices he made in this one.

Messidor (Alain Tanner, 1979)

 

In Alain Tanner’s Messidor, two young women randomly meet while hitchhiking, sharing a ride and then getting out together when they decide the driver’s a creep, continuing along together for a while, spending the night in the woods, and then just going on and on, in a vaguely defined game of no clear purpose and with no way to win, especially after some of their actions (including stealing a policeman’s loaded gun) have their names and faces on TV as wanted and possibly even dangerous criminals. Looked at one way, the film presents a slow stripping-away of resources and possibilities, the girls visibly worn and hungry, and yet they keep going, surmounting occasional frictions, unlocking occasional ecstasies, getting help even from some people who recognize them. Tanner takes them through a dizzying volume of encounters and pivots while eliding some major points: whether the women at one point have sex with each other, or at another with two bikers (notwithstanding all the other men they resist, sometimes violently); there’s even a faint suggestion that a bullet fired into the sky as a plane flies overhead might have caused it to crash. It’s very much a product of the old Europe, with frequent language barriers and a recurring awareness of borders, but allowing glimpses of elevating release from stifling convention (the title, we’re told, refers to one of the months in the alternative calendar used during the French revolution). Near the end, one of the women muses on where all the people in the street can be going to or coming from, recalling how as a child she was amazed at the knowledge that everyone went home to their own bed; it’s both a fundamental incomprehension of the world’s organizing principles and also thereby a liberation, an ability to transcend, albeit only briefly, and in inevitably doomed fashion, such stifling structure.

Night of the Juggler (Robert Butler, 1980)

 

Robert Butler’s 1980 New York-set Night of the Juggler amply makes up in pace and aggressive local colour for what it lacks in other areas (plausibility, for one). Cliff Gorman plays Gus Soltic, driven by obsessive hatred of the real estate developers he blames (often in violently racist terms) for ruining his life; he plans to kidnap the daughter of one such tycoon, but gets the wrong girl, setting her ex-cop father Sean Boyd (James Brolin) on his trail, and the local cops chasing after both of them (including a crazed former colleague of Boyd’s bearing a murderous grudge, played with absurd relish by a heavily indulged, bulging-eyed Dan Hedaya). The film packs a tremendous volume of confrontation and incident into its hundred or so minutes, with some top-quality extended chase scenes (one of them featuring an uproarious, if again dubiously conceived appearance by an edge-of-stardom Mandy Patinkin). The film conveys a recurring faint sense of loss and longing: in Soltic’s constant references to his dead mother (he makes the kidnapped girl wear one of her old dresses); in the objectively inexplicable decision of a woman who helps Boyd along the way to drop everything and tag along with him, perhaps forever; even in the plaintive look of a nude Times Square dancer who passes along a key clue. But that’s all intertwined with a sense of teeming, often almost gleeful possibility, albeit of a kind that might at any moment become deadly, the city as depicted here being riven with factionalism and race-based suspicion. In the end, despite all the trauma, the girl asserts that she still doesn’t want to move to boring Connecticut with her mother: a glib wrap-up given all she’s endured, but in line with how, in classic action movie manner, the newly constituted family is allowed to walk away into something close to a sunset.

The Golden Fern (Jiri Weiss, 1963)

 

Jiri Weiss’ The Golden Fern is conventionally described as a “fairy tale,” and the story is certainly rooted in the supernatural, but such a label misrepresents the actual experience of watching the film, which is often bracingly pained and violent. Jura, a shepherd, finds the titular plant in the depths of the forest and brings it home, in turn summoning Lesanka, a mysterious and beautiful woman who asks him to give it back, but ultimately stays and becomes his wife. For a while the movie surrenders to dreamy romanticism, but Jura is far pricklier than a conventionally bland hero, overly sensitive for instance to any suggestion that he’s being laughed at, and one night takes off for a binge, drunkenly signing up for a long stint in the army, allowed only a cursory goodbye to Lesanka during which she gives him a shirt which she says will shield him from harm. Thus magically equipped, he becomes a military hero and is promoted to captain, but his desire to return home, and the machinations of a superior’s calculating daughter, lead him through a series of challenges at which he improbably succeeds (this element of the film, a staple of the folk tale, offsets its flourishing adventurism with depictions of the grisly consequences for those whom he outwits), but only to experience further frustration, and then catastrophe. The film is certainly in part a veiled comment on class, the venality of the military superiors emphasized at every stage: in exploiting poverty and fallibility, in flagrantly failing to live up to promises made, in treating enlisted men like playthings, or almost arbitrarily condemning then to death. But it also suggests that one can escape and transcend such grim confines, albeit perhaps only to escape into a different kind of despair, a lonelier and more mysterious one.

Twilight's Last Gleaming (Robert Aldrich, 1977)

 

Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming gradually reveals itself to be seeped in imperial America’s driving contradictions: it amply showcases the immense resources of both the military and the Presidency, their multi-faceted responsiveness in the face of an emergency situation, but also reveals the confused or absent moral and strategic purpose beneath, in this case harking back to a secret document that demonstrates the effort in Vietnam was always known to be hopeless, that indeed the hopelessness was largely the point, in demonstrating to its enemies the country’s capacity to shed its humanity. In extreme contrast to a present-day governing infrastructure that sublimates itself to Presidential willpower, Aldrich’s film indicates the supremacy of what would now be called the Deep State, the President accepting he may be collateral damage for the sake of greater interests; this may have been idealistic even at the time, but even the positing of it makes the movie a sobering monument to how far things have fallen (it’s rather amusing that the President, played by Charles Durning, is a particular accident of history, having won his party’s nomination only because of an old-fashioned deadlocked convention). The film is meatily cast, inevitably of its time in that the levers of power are entirely held by older men (mostly but not exclusively white): Burt Lancaster persuasively weary and unkempt, preeminent as a disillusioned former General and Vietnam POW who leads the hijacking of a nuclear silo, the character’s back story illustrating another aspect of institutional ruthlessness. Aldrich makes good periodic use of split screens in navigating the multi-faceted narrative, and if the film often falls short of realism (the final moments, played as stately and distanced, would surely in practice be marked with chaotic urgency; more generally, the film feels oddly under-populated, even tinny at times), it’s dramatically effective, and a lastingly fascinating reference point.

Phaedra (Jules Dassin, 1962)

 

Jules Dassin’s unappetizing Phaedra, vaguely rooted in Greek mythology, starts by immersing us in the opulent, hard-driving life of shipping magnet Thanos (Raf Vallone), his wife Phaedra (Melina Mercouri) positioned as a prize possession. He asks her to go to London to help talk his son and intended heir from an earlier marriage (Anthony Perkins) out of the dream of being an artist; instead, the two start an affair, of course knowing it can only end badly. There’s little sense of passion in the film though, given the significant lack of chemistry between the two actors: Mercouri is somewhat less grating than usual, but at the cost of merely being stiff and dull, and Perkins seems miscast and distant. The emphasis on wealth and privilege is off-putting from the start, attaining full-on moral bankruptcy in its climactic stretch, in which Thanos learns from his wife what’s happening and banishes his son, this taking place against the news that one of the company’s ships (the one named after Phaedra, naturally) has sunk off the coast of Norway; with the death toll yet to be reported, the black-clad wives of the crew crowd the corridor outside Thanos’ office to wait for news, the arrival of which is intertwined with the fate of the two transgressors. Whatever Dassin had in mind, the effect is of reducing calamitous loss and suffering to mere backdrop, embodied by the (albeit superficially arresting) image of Mercouri in a chic white dress and sunglasses pushing through the sea of black, gaining the entry denied to those others, her turbulent relinquishment of her place at the top flight of capitalism granted greater validity than the social tragedy unfolding around her (in which she shows not an iota of interest). If any aspect of this is intended to be damning, or even just darkly ironic, it’s hardly evident, any more than the film’s broader reason for existing.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)

 

Almost a decade on, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson remains a sublime counterpoint to prevailing concerns and moods, its protagonist exemplifying the elevating capacities of a focus on small pleasures. That individual, Paterson (a perfectly calibrated Adam Driver) is a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, and also a poet, writing in his little notebook before each shift, during breaks, composing as he walks and in his little basement space at home. Paterson has at least one foot in a bygone age: he doesn’t have a smartphone – during an emergency he has to borrow one from a kid – and although we’re told his wife Laura has one, I’m not sure we ever glimpse it; in contrast, the shots of him holding and turning over beloved volumes of poetry carry a beautiful, unfussy weight, and when the couple goes to the movies, it’s to the 1932 Island of Lost Souls. Laura (a very sweet Golshifteh Farahani) is equally creative, but in a less-applied manner, more focused on notions of fame and money; during the film we see her paint (the apartment, the shower curtain, her clothes), start to learn the guitar, bake masses of cup cakes for a new stand at the farmer’s market, experiment with new recipes, all of which he’s supportive of in a sometimes rather nonplussed-seeming manner (we never learn how they got together, and the nature of their bond is a little mysterious, but unquestionably real and durable). Paterson, the city, probably isn’t many people’s idea of a must-visit, but the film establishes various points of beauty, and a diverse cultural history including as the birthplace both of Lou Costello and of a prominent Italian anarchist, the broader point being that even the most circumscribed life may find enrichment both through heightened attention to local possibilities, and by drawing on shared heritage. No doubt there’s an idealized aspect to the film, exemplified by how Paterson randomly meets not one but two fellow poets within a few days of each other, but the cumulative effect is at the very least warming, if not transcending.

Interview (Mrinal Sen, 1971)

 

Mrinal Sen’s Interview is in part a genial, sad-sack comedy of errors. Ranjit Mallick (played by Ranjit Mallick) gets an interview via his connected uncle for a job that pays double his current salary; he's led to believe it’s in the bag as long as he presents effectively, including wearing a Western suit. Mallick owns such a suit, but it’s been at the dry cleaners for months (he was worried about the moths getting to it at home), and now can’t be retrieved because they’re on strike, triggering a frantic against-the-clock attempt to find a replacement, which he then loses while intervening to thwart a pickpocket on the bus. The insistence on Western formality is depicted here as an imposition or affectation which nevertheless has severe economic consequences, as such symbolizing the ongoing pernicious legacy of the country’s cultural past. Sen’s critique further entails a disruption of familiar forms and conventions, a project dormant for the first half hour or so but then stunningly asserting itself when a woman notices how Mallick resembles a photo in a magazine she’s reading and he suddenly addresses the camera to acknowledge that it is indeed him, exposing the project’s artifice; the narrative continues, but playing now to a more critically heightened audience, culminating in a complete suspension of the filmic space, Mallick set down in a disembodied space and addressed by an offscreen voice that identifies itself as that of the audience, the ultimate tone a mixture of anger and defiance and plaintiveness. Sen further fractures and extends his film’s boundaries with documentary surveys of regular Indian life, of protest around the world, of (heavily Westernized) advertising posters, with written messages attacking the impact of computerization (that last item, at least, can’t help but appear quaint). It’s a remarkable, fresh, constantly surprising work, and surely far too little known, at least in the ever-bulldozing West.

Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964)

 

John Frankenheimer’s 1964 drama Seven Days in May is inevitably dated, and a bit too arid, but remains a stirring reference point, not least for how its resonances shift with the times. The film sets out how Marine Corps. Colonel Casey (Kirk Douglas) stumbles onto evidence of a possible coup plot by his direct superior, James Scott (Burt Lancaster), and other military brass, in response to a recently-negotiated, highly divisive peace treaty with Russia (viewed in the age of Trump, one might almost shake one’s head at the inefficiency of plotting to subvert the democratic process by way of such cumbersome intervention, compared to the much more direct method of doing it from within). The movie’s aging President Lyman, embodied with great authoritative nuance by Fredric March, seems now like the kind of leader that’s lost in time (notwithstanding that Joe Biden was cut from similar cloth), even refusing out of basic decency to use some salacious letters that it seems would have done much to sully Scott’s reputation. But his instincts are sharp, seeing better than Scott that a United States in the hands of a military dictatorship would far more likely provoke Russian aggression than extinguish it, and here too, it’s impossible not to mull on how the current administration’s coup-like disregard for conventions and norms coexists with an inexplicable subservience to Russian self-interest and distortion of reality. Although some of the film’s devices now seem simplistic, such as the flurry of bland-seeming messages about a horse racing betting pool which turn out to be incredibly consequential communications about participation in the coup, these add to the pervasive sense of institutional vulnerability, to its excessive reliance on a few good men (and in this film, of course, they are all indeed men, a point underlined by the tediously shoehorned subplot involving Ava Gardner).

Two Girls on the Street (Andre de Toth, 1939)

 

Andre de Toth’s Two Girls on the Street is somewhat mistitled in that its two female protagonists, while initially down on their luck, spend most of the film more than adequately housed and financed, its primary concern being (of course) man-related. Gyongi, an aspiring violinist, is disowned by her father after an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and eventually ends up playing in a dive bar; she comes across Vica, a lower class factory worker, distraught after escaping an attempted sexual assault by Csiszar, a successful architect, and takes the dispossessed woman under her wing. Gyongi variously refers to Vica in terms evoking a daughter, a best friend, a little doll, or even a lover; the film drops recurring hints of some deeper communion between the two, a dynamic rendered peculiar though by the physical similarity between them, and the fact of the actress playing the often mothering Gyongi being two years younger than that playing Vica. The film makes many striking choices both cinematically -  such as scenes that often end more abruptly than one expects, or in the arresting deployment of montage (for example to depict the spread of gossip) and point of view – and narratively, as in the absence of any depicted reconciliation after Vica’s ongoing involvement with Csiszar drives a wedge between the two (although we see Vica celebrating Gyongi’s eventual professional success from  a distance). The film has a distinct strand of social awareness – Vica chides Csiszar for bragging about the buildings he’s built, saying the real work was that of the physical labourers – and yet seems to uncritically view the two women’s materialism once their luck changes, with the final moments appearing to exult in how Vica’s new wealth and status separate her from those masses. But the film’s choices, omissions and possible contradictions are consistently stimulating, even when rather puzzling.

Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949)

 

George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib is the smoothest of Hollywood comedies, flowing along as seemingly effortlessly and gracefully as any movie, its stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in perfect sync whether flirting or feuding: a single-take scene of them preparing an impromptu dinner embodies the film’s seductive flow (albeit there’s some major cheating in how quickly the meal comes together). The plot has Assistant D.A. Adam Bonner prosecuting the high-profile case of a woman (the fascinatingly singular Judy Holliday) who shot her cheating husband, with his wife Amanda Bonner taking on the defence, a set-up based in contrasting views of the law, morality, and of their own relationship. Amanda bases her defence in equal rights, in the premise that a man who defended his home, even violently, would be viewed as a hero, and that a woman’s actions should be assessed comparably; given though that the crime was committed far outside the home, after the woman stalked her husband to the apartment of his presumed mistress, the intriguing implication might be that a woman’s legitimate zone of “home” interest extends further than a man’s, that it’s as much a moral or emotional construct as a physical one; an implication nicely complicated in the final scenes when Adam seems to be the more invested of the two in their country home, and demonstrates how he can turn on tears at will (it’s a shame though that the closing line wasn’t stronger than a vague celebration of the “small differences” between men and women). Of course, the film is a work of its time, the relationship being of the kind where Adam demonstrates his thoughtfulness by buying his wife a new hat, in which even when things are in full flow she’s seen to be “managing” him, facilitating his crustiness in a way that needn’t be reciprocated. Still, it’s skillful enough that the dated certainties of other films register here as stimulating ambiguities.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (Leonardo Favio, 1975)

 

Leonardo Favio’s Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf announces itself as based on a “famous radio drama,” but the narrative has agedly mythic roots, and the film often achieves a sense of not having been crafted as much as excavated or revealed. Nazareno is the seventh son of a father who was warned that such a child would be a werewolf; the father and other boys now dead, he’s grown to young adulthood without the curse coming to pass, but then he falls in love with the beautiful Grizelda, and the wheels of fate start to turn (the meeting of lycanthropy and sexual desire rather anticipates Paul Schrader’s approach to remaking Cat People). While feeling entirely distinct, Favio’s film often brings Pasolini to mind: in the rich and unfiltered-feeling local flavour and almost aggressive absence of conventional cinematic polish (the swooning treatment of the lovers is a prominent exception); in the use of non-professional actors and the very basic approach to evoking the supernatural (a sequence in which an old woman relishingly demonstrates how she can change into a variety of animals could hardly be more simply conceived, but is rendered irresistible through the woman’s robust and sustained laughter). The evocation of the underworld has its Trilogy-of-Life aspects to it too (for example, the glimpses of naked activity in the background), but the character of the devil comes as a surprise, marked by longing rather than malevolence, regretful that he experienced neither being or having a son (a recurring preoccupation of the film), quite poignant in the request he makes of Nazareno, rendering the film’s final moments both beautiful and melancholy . This viewer was rather surprised to hear the tune of Johnny Mathis’s When a Child is Born used as a recurring love theme; research indicates that the melody is Soleado, used here before its appropriation as a Christmas hit.