Dennis Hopper-directed noir-by-numbers from 1990. Don Johnson's ambiguous stranger drifts into a sultry small town to run a con, and gets caught between lust for married Virginia Madsen and troubled teen Jennifer Connelly. Routine; but cherish this movie for the once-in-a-lifetime soundtrack Hopper persuaded Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Taj Mahal to jam.
Bob Fosse surprised everyone in '74, showing there was more to his dark vision than nimble dance steps. He riffs permissively on Lenny Bruce's stand-up routines (which were never routine), and Dustin Hoffman's rarely been bolder. Somehow nominated for loads of Oscars while railing against the establishment's buffoonery.
The definitive example of High Godard (that brief period after his spectacular debut, À Bout De Souffle, and before the left-wing quasi-revolutionary abstractions of British Sounds and Passion), Bande À Part is a veritable checklist of stylish and insouciant Nouvelle Vague chic. There's the casually one-dimensional protagonists, in this case pseudo-gangsters Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and their new playmate Odile (Anna Karina).
Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder sleepwalk their way through Arthur Hiller's one-joke 1989 comedy as the accidental owners of a missing microchip who are pursued by an assortment of shady villains. Pryor's blind and Wilder's deaf, but Hiller's pedestrian direction settles for routine caper thriller moves rather than fully exploring the comic potential of this offbeat premise.
Ling (Samuel Hui) and his tomboy sister are charged with keeping a sacred scroll from the clutches of their self-serving Sifu and the scarier-than-they-sound Royal Eunuchs. With multiple directors and more characters than it can handle, the cracks show, but the swordplay and comedic touch proved popular enough to spawn two sequels.
Abel Ferrara made these almost simultaneously in '95, and they're especially intense even for him. The more successfully operatic first (Chris Walken, Chris Penn, Vincent Gallo) follows a family of '30s gangsters on a revenge mission; the second's a gory monochrome vampire flick starring Lili Taylor (and Walken again). Nietzschean, neurotic.
Two vintage Alastair Sim comedies released as a double-pack. In 1956's The Green Man he plays a political assassin whose plans are interrupted by the arrival of bumbling vacuum cleaner salesman George Cole; in 1960's School For Scoundrels—based on Stephen Potter's One-Upmanship books—he teaches downtrodden nice chap Ian Carmichael how to get the better of dastardly cad Terry-Thomas.
Maria Ripoll's handsome 2001 remake of Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman is anchored by the highly watchable Hector Elizondo as the widowed kitchen maestro with three wayward daughters and a frisky neighbour (Raquel Welch) who clearly wants to turn him into a naked chef. The plot has been sweetened a little, but the performances are fine and the photography sumptuous.
Memento man Christopher Nolan's elegant cop drama with Al Pacino magnificently muted as the hollow-eyed LA cop, sent to Alaska to hunt a killer and forming a strange relationship with Robin Williams' skin-crawlingly ingratiating psycho.
Bertrand Tavernier's epic (almost three hours) looks back at France's period of Nazi occupation from a movie-lover's perspective. A young screenwriter tries to subvert the German-controlled studios while juggling three women, and a director doubles as a Resistance fighter. It's a beautifully detailed and honest piece.
