Hi De Ho (Jack Binney, 1947)

 

The 1947 Hi De Ho, a Cab Calloway vehicle directed by Josh Binney, delivers in the area that most matters, some eighty per cent of its seventy-two minute running time consisting of straightforward performance, mostly by Calloway with or without his band, but several times yielding the spotlight to others, and in fact allowing a sensational tap dance team, Miller Brothers and Lois, to steal the show. The other twenty per cent goes mostly into a half-hearted melodrama involving a jealous lover and a villainous club owner, with Calloway (playing himself) foiling an attempt on his life and having his lover die in his arms: that’s all wrapped up with a half hour to go though, rapidly shrugging off the tragedy to pair the star off with someone else, culminating in an on-stage marriage. Some might judge the structural oddity as simple ineptitude, likewise the apparent lack of finesse in such matters as framing, writing and acting, exemplified by the (conceptually rather chilling) scene in which the police show up to find a dead body and a dying woman and, given that there’s an apparent perpetrator to be immediately apprehended and removed, can’t be bothered even to cursorily investigate what went on. But such a judgment would ignore the film’s historical significance as a “race film,” cheaply made for Black audiences, set in an entirely Black universe, with no white faces on screen as far as I could see, no acknowledgment of the dominant film-making culture. The film’s avoidance of familiar techniques and codes confirms a rejection of the dominant ideology, marking a film fully of and comfortable within its own alternative paradigm, built around a true Black star whose stature and resonance owe nothing to imposed machinations or endorsements, his impact reflected in the film’s many shots of Black patrons (one of whom, amusingly his own bodyguard, hardly ever looks up from his copy of Variety, as if eternally waiting for it to yield some relevance).

News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977)

 

In Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, an unseen female reads a series of letters received from her mother in Belgium, while we watch a series of long takes of New York City, and that’s it. We glean easily enough that the recipient has moved to the city, that her mother constantly worries about her, but much basic information is absent (it must also often be lacking in the recipient’s responses, given the mother’s regular comments about their brevity and absence of hard facts). One might correctly guess that the voice is Akerman’s own, that the places we see (predominantly far from postcard-worthy, much of it transit-related) reflect Akerman’s own time in New York, but it wouldn’t be as apparent that the letters and images are separated by several years, the latter gleaned on a return trip. It amounts to a strangely moving representation of absence and unknowability, the letters consisting largely of mundanities, but occasionally referring to life events (her father’s illness; the closure of part of the family business; the purchase of land to build a new home) which as lived events were no doubt virtually all-consuming. Akerman’s reading hardly distinguishes though between the monumental and the ephemeral, her voice often barely audible over the noise of the subway or the traffic, on occasion getting drowned out altogether. Most of the people observed in the film either don’t notice the camera or seem barely interested; in one strangely gripping exception, a man draws himself up and stares in its direction almost as if about to charge, before withdrawing and retreating far into the background, a small sign perhaps of cinema’s power, even in this minimal mode. Another comes from the final shot, taken from a ferry traveling away from shore, the skyline and the film itself receding in unison, the sense of absenting deepened now by the pre 9/11 presence of the twin towers.

Millhouse (Emile de Antonio, 1971)

 

If one can say nothing else good about Richard Nixon, we can stipulate that the most cringe-inducing moments in Emile de Antonio’s Millhouse: a White Comedy belong not to the 37^th President but to Bob Hope, seen cracking some wretched jokes at the expense of the gay-themed movie Staircase. That aside, much about de Antonio’s film inevitably lands differently in an age of unbound Trump: it’s commented and illustrated that Nixon’s policies regularly serve the interests of the elitist class, that he smears his opponents, that his statements don’t always align with the facts, but by current standards, he seems virtually quaint as an embodiment of such transgressions. The film’s broadest strokes – such as imposing extracts of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech over one of Nixon’s own, presumably to evoke a gap both in vision and rhetorical power, or contrasting an optimistic economic assessment with something comparably upbeat delivered by Herbert Hoover before the great depression – feel more laboured than insightful, and even if considered as a record of its own time and place and culture, it often seems more ambiguous than perhaps intended. For instance, de Antonio includes the “Checkers” speech in largely unexpurgated form, and while elements of that now seem clunky, it also has a degree of methodical self-exposure (Nixon, seemingly diligently, sets out all his personal assets and liabilities) that doesn’t readily invite straightforward mockery on its own terms (on the contrary, he remains fascinating in his contradictions, somehow at once both deeply off-putting and poignant, both strategically astute and hapless). In truth, the film asserts Nixon’s inadequacy and wretchedness more than it dissects and demonstrates it, a rhetorical excess also evident elsewhere in de Antonio’s work (In the King of Prussia for example is limitingly one-sided, notwithstanding the viewer’s likely broad agreement with that side).

Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2012)

 

At one point in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Me and You, the turbulent Olivia muses about Buddhism, about being able to transcend one’s confining point of view and achieve an elevating objectivity, an aspiration denied within the film if only by the extreme specificity of the situation: the teenage Lorenzo, given money by his mother to attend a school ski trip, instead spends it on an ant farm and a week’s supply of food and holes up in a room in the building basement, eventually joined by Olivia, an older half-sister who needs a place to go cold turkey. The film has a predictably redemptive arc – he makes her promise not to take drugs again, she makes him promise to stop hiding and live a fuller life – but there’s no particular reason to think either commitment will be kept, the film being more possessed by the allure of stubborn denial and self-indulgence than by resistance to it. Bertolucci explores the possibilities of the space with practiced ease, but Lorenzo’s withdrawal (juxtaposed against a poor little armadillo he sees early on in a pet store, endlessly doing figure eights around its tiny cage) mirrors that of the director’s own: this is yet another late film (after Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers) set predominantly at a bourgeois remove from the messy external world. Even at her young age, Olivia is an artist who’s already had some exhibitions, with at least a few moneyed contacts; the basement space far exceeds in volume and the included trappings what anyone would likely be able to access for such a purpose; etc. etc. The film lands then primarily as peculiar fantasy, an impression bolstered by the prominent use of David Bowie’s Space Oddity in the closing stretches; typical though of of Bertolucci’s facility for expanding and ventilating even small cinematic gestures, the familiar version is preceded by an Italian-language one, the lyrics of which seem to be in no way a direct translation of the original.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (Blake Edwards, 1976)

 

No matter how generously inclined you are towards the Pink Panther series (a lot, in my case), it’s hard to find much to praise in the fourth installment (not counting Bud Yorkin’s Inspector Clouseau), The Pink Panther Strikes Again: complacency and slackness intrude at virtually every point, and whereas Christopher Plummer and Catherine Schell at least seemed to be enjoying themselves in the previous film, everyone here seems either tetchy or listless. Inspector Dreyfus, this time round a Bond-level madman who gets hold of a death ray machine that can erase entire buildings and cities from thousands of miles away, spells things out all too explicitly by calling Clouseau more powerful than his deadly machine, but it speaks to the series’ most intriguing element, the consistent sense of a universe bending its laws around its protagonist. Clouseau misses the most obvious clues and indicators, yet is inexorably drawn to the heart of things; he survives serial assassination attempts without even realizing they existed; he embodies the self-involved ineptitude that’s poisoning our world (it’s not too much of a stretch to find some contemporary political resonance) and yet thrives (despite apparently rendering walls and floors strangely fragile): seen as such, Dreyfus is fundamentally a righteously poignant character, a quality undermined here by the absurd and shoddy plotting. But in contrast to the average comic child-man, Clouseau is specific in his physicality, often seen stripped down to his hairy torso, driven by primal urges which he presumably knows how to satisfy (despite being unable to execute the most basic aspect of the surrounding rigmarole), the effect drawing on Peter Sellers’ well-known personal turbulence, feeding into making Clouseau a more immediate and vaguely threatening presence than he might otherwise be (especially when supplemented with the sadistic undertones of the random attacks by his manservant Kato, which make no allowances for bedroom guests).

The Devil's Exorcist (Jorge Darnell, 1975)

 

Jorge Darnell’s The Devil’s Exorcist is a surprisingly effective meeting of disparate elements, from the clinical  to the woozily transgressive, blurring the line between haphazardly opportunistic and shrewdly evasive. The film was made a couple of years after The Exorcist and starts with a shot of a young girl writhing in possessed manner on her bed, but instant expectations of a Friedkin knock-off are never quite realized: the main narrative line involves a doctor (seemingly a behavioral specialist of some kind) trying to help the girl, but her efforts aren't conceived or described as an exorcism, and it’s only at the very end that the film presents an event that can’t be attributed to mental illness or interpreted as a subjective vision. Made in the dying days of Spain’s Franco era, the film draws (cautiously) on expanding artistic freedom, while remaining tethered to the past, a tension encapsulated in the contrast between the girl’s wealthy family (the father’s disinterest is cited as one possible cause of her dysfunction) and the old family servant, whose every appearance evokes a vanished culture, and in the contrast between overbearing formal spaces (the girl suffers near-meltdowns both in a church and on a visit to a wax museum) and the clean white lines of the institute where the doctor practices; some of its imagery, such as disembodied arms protruding from swimming pools and walls, might have been plucked from a fuzzily-conceived art exhibit. The film presents other extreme contrasts of tone and content, for example between the girl’s chillingly matter-of-fact murder of a sick child in the hospital (one of several events made all the more disconcerting by the absence of any subsequent mention or consequences), and the climactic prominence of a stuffed fish seemingly almost daring us to scoff (I somehow resisted).

Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

 

Joseph Cates’ Who Killed Teddy Bear is an unexpectedly haunting oddity, a rare mix of trashiness and delicacy, strangely dignified in its manipulativeness. A brief synopsis more easily evokes the trashy aspect: a nightclub worker, Norah, starts to receive vaguely threatening phone calls, a chance event bringing her to the attention of a police detective, Madden, who oscillates between rumpled charm and a seeming unnatural interest in, if not affinity for, such aberrant behaviour (eventually attributed to his wife having been murdered); the threat escalates in familiar genre fashion, right up to the killing of a co-worker mistaken for Norah after borrowing her coat. The film is documentary-like in its surveying of New York’s seamier side, providing loving pans over long rows of nudist magazines, “dirty” books, porn theatre marquees and the like; as if to illustrate its underlying duality though, there’s an extended, equally fascinated sequence following Norah through the theatre district, taking in marquees and posters for the likes of Any Wednesday and Golden Boy. As Norah, Juliet Prowse radiates crisp intelligence and engagement; the frank presentation of her character contrasts with that of the perpetrator, Lawrence (Sal Mineo), often photographed half-naked and in extreme close-up, the imagery both sensual and aberrant. The theme of damage and danger runs through Lawrence’s younger sister, her development hampered by a childhood accident, Lawrence seeking to suppress her sexual identity even as he can barely control the expression of his own; Norah’s employer (Elaine Stritch!), whose comforting of Norah suddenly evolves into an attempt at seduction; the deaf nightclub bouncer, injured early on in an unrelated confrontation: even in its more straightforward moments, in its staging of the activity on the nightclub dance floor for instance, the film often feels oddly compulsive or desperate. The ending is again broadly unsurprising in narrative terms, but feels as pathetic and forlorn as it does cathartic.

My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev, 2024)

 

Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow exerts its mighty grip partly through the director’s calculated form of intimate near-invisibility: the film’s subjects occasionally address or question her as she holds the camera, but for the most part she’s silent and unacknowledged even at moments of extreme stress or sadness, her fortitude reflecting that of her subjects, a group of mostly female television and podcast reporters observed in the run-up to and then the initial days of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. The film is five and a half hours long, its length allowing a visceral sense of escalating fear and pessimism: an evening-long New Year’s Eve broadcast on December 31, 2021 has one guest after another expressing variations on how there’s not much to be positive about but they nevertheless hope for the best; just a few months later, virtually everyone on the show is either already or heading into exile. Loktev generates a visceral sense of sadness and frustration, sometimes masked by dark humour or escapism (I lost count of how many times the Harry Potter universe is referenced), using titles in measured but astute fashion to provide foreshadowing or context, her shifting focus (the friend who’s initially most prominent is out of the country on vacation when the invasion happens, and ends up not coming back, entailing that others take centre stage in the final stretch) reflecting the prevailing sense of utter unknowability, of living in a country where one might summarily be declared a “foreign agent,” where livelihoods and basic aspects of everyday infrastructure might suddenly be snatched away, where one of the more poignantly vulnerable participants faces a wretched choice between remaining in a country that’s imprisoned her fiancée for over a year without bringing charges, or leaving in the undefined hope that she can do more for him by maintaining her own freedom, even if it’s the precarious freedom of the exile (to be explored further in Part 2).

Together (Michael Shanks, 2025)

 

It was recently reported that a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, preparing to teach a course on “Contemporary Moral Issues,” was instructed from above to “mitigate your course content to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.” Perhaps the most fear-inducing aspect of those readings: a notion of humans as having originally consisted of three sexes, male and female and a union of the two, the latter split in two for their transgressions and now yearning to be reunited, a premise which accommodates (or ”explains”) same- as well as opposite-sex attraction. Michael Shanks’ Together explicitly cites that aspect of Plato as an input into its enjoyably gonzo premise, and the film’s finale, indeed its very last shot, could be seen as representing its realization, and thus as an embodiment of a red-state’s worst nightmare (or one of them anyway). Reason alone then, to celebrate Shanks’ film, even if it weren’t otherwise any good. Happily, it’s an enjoyable contrivance, surprisingly straight-faced even at moments of maximum comic potential, especially given its two stars, Alison Brie and Dave Franco: they play a romantically challenged couple that moves from the big city to a small town, incurring injuries during a hiking accident, and thereafter experiencing an array of physical and psychological trouble (Brie and Franco make the couple’s sputtering chemistry all too believable, such that the uninformed viewer likely wouldn’t remotely suspect that they’re married in real life). One’s heart momentarily sinks when the movie attempts to place their travails in over-determined context, citing an extinguished religious cult with an idiosyncratic approach to marriage, and predictably revealing a congenial neighbour’s sinister side; overall though, the film’s central dynamic, especially when boosted by those helpfully grim real-world resonances, easily maintains one’s (possibly rather stunned) interest.

The Pied Piper (Jacques Demy, 1972)

 

Jacques Demy’s underrated The Pied Piper could be viewed as lacking focus, the title narrative almost crowded out by an emphasis on the conniving of church and state; for a children’s film (of sorts anyway -  I recall it being shown on daytime British TV back in the day) there’s a persistent emphasis on death, bigotry and venality. As such, it provides yet more evidence of Demy’s mischievously perverse streak: the casting of an amiably diffident Donovan as the piper might suggest a somewhat fluffy approach, but any such impression would be highly offset by the estimable (and very British, for a film set in Germany) presence of John Hurt, Donald Pleasence, even Diana Dors! (there’s also Oliver Twist’s Jack Wild, his prematurely worn appearance in itself rather poignantly resonant). The film is bookended by the arrival and departure of a family of traveling performers, but Demy hardly bothers to develop them as characters, his attention shifting between the financial strains caused both by the construction of a cathedral and by pending wars, a Jewish alchemist persecuted by the religious establishment, a lovelessly strategic marriage (all the creepier for the casting of a 13-year-old actress), and the core plague/piper narrative, at times seeming here almost like an afterthought, but perhaps all the more persuasive for that, rendering the piper’s discomfiting revenge almost an inevitable consequence of wrong-headed governing decisions (he leaves behind the children of the kind and tolerant itinerant family). And then the closing scroll highlights the numbers who died of the plague and the persistent religious persecution, causing us to wonder whether we’ve all along been watching a more conventional historical epic than we realized (especially, perhaps, as the closing credits reveal the film to be an early production of David Puttnam, a decade or so before providing British cinema with its big night at the Oscars).

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

 

If Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is any kind of tour de force, the viewer may assess it primarily as one of research and organization rather than of artistic imagination, and yet it holds up remarkably well when viewed with the hindsight knowledge of how our subsequent real-world pandemic played out. In particular, the social media agitator played by Jude Law, who seemed rather shoehorned into the film at the time, snappily foresees a future deluge of false information, of supposed miracle cures pushed by financial self-interest; the character’s remark about not knowing that the vaccine won’t cause autism in ten years eerily anticipating a whole administration’s worth of regression. Inevitably, Soderbergh’s choice to survey such a wide landscape within an almost overly concise running time involves much elision: for example, we see Matt Damon’s everyman character lining up in a food line which turns violent when supplies run out, and apparently witnessing a shooting in a nearby house, but we never gain a broader sense of the scale of economic and social chaos (which we understand to be considerable, the cited infection and mortality rates being much worse than those of Covid), and at the end normality seems to have reasserted itself with improbable ease. And the use of so many stars (including no less than three best actress Oscar winners) in small roles can be an impediment to sinking into the narrative, giving the project the feel instead of a displaced, quasi-celebratory caper movie. Soderbergh chooses to end the otherwise linear chronicle by circling back to the start, to track the virus’s (in this case entirely natural) origins; by then the information’s importance seems supplanted by what we know of the subsequent global upheaval, and yet it’s a pointed reminder of the inherent fallibility of global supply chains and infrastructure (and that’s without even getting into the lab leak theories).

Sur un air de Charleston (Jean Renoir, 1927)

 

It’s tempting to write off Jean Renoir’s silent short Sur un air de Charleston as unworthy of attention: Renoir apparently made it in just a few days, and some of its key elements are frankly painful to observe now. Still, a little background reading, and one’s deep regard for Renoir’s later work, suggests not so much that there’s more there than meets the eye, as the phrase goes, as that a modern-day eye may find it hard across a hundred-year distance to distinguish the mildly subversive from the cringeworthy. The use of an African-American protagonist (Johnny Hudgins) is fairly remarkable for the time, undermined by the use of minstrel get-up and blackface; learning that this was at Hudgins’ initiation rather than Renoir’s makes that aspect of the film more complex and perhaps knowingly provocative, but not enough so to neutralize one’s basic antipathy. Still, accusations of condescension are somewhat tempered by the fact of the film being set in a post-apocalyptic future where Africa is the new hub of civilization, the protagonist traveling in his futuristic craft to a decimated Europe seemingly occupied only by a scantily clad woman and her companion ape; the woman shows off her dancing skills, in scenes that were reportedly once considered erotic (the actress, Catherine Hessling, was Renoir’s wife at the time) but now seem largely grotesque. Much about the film is puzzling and contradictory: the premise sounds visionary, but the use to which it’s put feels static and imaginatively limited; it uses slow motion to deepen our engagement with Hessling’s dancing, but in other respects (like the ape suit) feels wantonly shoddy; Renoir includes a couple of inventions which suggest magical powers on the part of the woman, but it’s hard to see how that relates to the broader scheme. Still, one may find it oddly lingering in the mind, albeit in a way that’s not necessarily all welcome…

Megadoc (Mike Figgis, 2025)

 

About halfway through his record of the making of Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis, Mike Figgis comments that the best such documentaries all record disasters, and that as such there’s part of him that celebrates when something goes wrong on Coppola’s project. It’s a sign though of Figgis’s ultimate reticence, if not of his outright passivity, that one wouldn’t know from his own film that Megalopolis was indeed a failure by most measures, losing at least $75 million of Coppola’s own money, the critical response at best mixed: Megadoc leaps from the end of shooting to the Cannes premiere with the obligatory standing ovation and then abruptly ends without further comment. Among other omissions, it also gives little sense of what Megalopolis is actually about (albeit that even many of those who worked on the film seem unsure on that score), and due to varying cooperation from the actors, gives a rather skewed impression of the experience of watching the film (one might think it’s mainly a chamber drama starring Shia LaBoeuf and Jon Voight, with Adam Driver hovering on the sidelines). But for all of that, Figgis’s film barely has a dull moment, fascinating in the portrayal of the immaculately turned-out Coppola (a different suit and tie ensemble every day) often at odds with the monster he’s unleashed, mystified that everything involves so many people and takes so long, as if he were a mere hired hand himself; budgetary numbers occasionally flash up on the screen, all of them staggering. Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the most charming passages is an improvised conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Aubrey Plaza as they arm-wrestle, Hoffman doing his (edge-of-creepy) best to push things in a flirtatious direction; it’s a moment that shows up the paucity of such spontaneous engagement amid so much care and diligence, even if it relates to nothing in the finished movie.

Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025)

 

Toward the end of his Dracula, Radu Jude cites Wittgenstein (who was himself quoting from another source): the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is. In the context of a film that draws so heavily and explicitly on artificial intelligence, it might be taken as a warning about unintended consequences, that’s if the film in question wasn’t so unbowed by the new technology, if it didn’t in fact treat it mainly as a big joke, allowing the creation of fearsome monsters worthy of a blockbuster, but dropping them almost at random into a movie which at other times could hardly look cheaper or superficially sloppier, for example staging historical dramas with no regard as to whether the present-day world intrudes (in fact, inviting it in; there are numerous glimpses of bemused passers-by, clearly not tutored extras, responding to the action). The film isn’t far short of three hours long, inevitably often dragging a bit, and yet spawning new narratives and technological deployments right to the very end, establishing Jude’s immense capacity partly through the variety and relentlessness of how it suppresses it, the number of times we’re forced to ask whether what we’re watching shouldn’t by various measures be “better.” The Dracula myth provides a canny basis for such a project: there’s hardly a piece of material that’s been so regularly reworked and revisited, while seldom getting anywhere excitingly new (Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, for all its strengths, hardly broke major cinematic ground; Luc Besson’s Dracula by all accounts does so even less). Jude’s primary angle on Dracula, to make him old and ridiculous, might not be the most sophisticated of available approaches, but again, that fits the film’s scrappily unbound mood. The biggest surprise may come at the very end, in extreme contrast to much of what precedes it, suggesting the endurance of simpler cultural pleasures (and, for better or worse, attached human pettiness).

Turn in the Wound (Abel Ferrara, 2024)

 

At its core, there’s something rather touchingly idealistic about Abel Ferrara’s Turn in the Wound (and how often does one think to describe Ferrara’s work in such terms?): a belief that Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine might have been avoided if Putin’s worldview weren’t so small, and in the expansive capacity of seasoned, evocative artistry. That’s embodied here by Patti Smith, seen rehearsing and backstage and in performance; one might initially assume she’s performing in Ukraine, but it’s actually at the French Pompidou Centre, an assertion of the cultural heritage that persists far from the battlefront (even as Smith’s darkly evocative lyrics and storm-damaged presence and the swirling accompanying visuals seem in productive conversation with Ferrara’s documenting of wartime atrocities and dislocations). The film includes a brief meeting with President Zelensky, commenting on Putin’s inability to perceive or value the rights and desires of Ukrainians, and some piercing battlefield footage, a devastating tumble of mud and blood and fire and chaos; that aside though, it often feels somewhat random in its content and assembly, seeming that Ferrara may have talked to whomever happened to step before his camera (he includes a passage of himself being interviewed on Ukrainian TV, disclaiming any particular agenda). It all contributes to an overwhelming sense of almost unprocessable wrongness, with multiple anecdotes of torture and deprivation at Russian hands, of their soldiers' savagery and recklessness: the film makes no claim to balance, whatever that would mean in this context. One of its last interviewees, a man who lost an arm in combat, comments on how his experiences have helped him mold a better attitude, an awareness that things could always be worse than they are: it’s hardly a complex life lesson, but Ferrara’s film is a penetrating counterpoint to a world that often seems intent on smothering any such reflectiveness.