One False Move (1992)
The noir genre has historically flourished when societies are in transition. I suspect the influx of noir movies in the nineties was because of the most momentous transition of the last fifty years, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the supposed Pax Americana. Contemporary audiences believed the “end of history” was upon them, and realized they could be stuck with the emerging postindustrial, neoliberal world forever. Noir allowed people to explore the internal problems in America that bubbled to the surface once the outside threat was removed. Like many of the best noirties (see what I did there?) One False Move has Bill Paxton in it, whose face, simultaneously quotidian and reptilian, captures the slime and muck that lay just below the optimistic smile of empire.
You can read my review of One False Move on Letterboxd.
You can rent or buy One False Move from many digital storefronts.
The Sopranos (1999–2007)
In Norman Cantor’s classic history The Civilization of the Middle Ages, the author gives a short bibliography of fourteen books about the Middle Ages that will allow any faculty member to hold their own during lunch hour. This is ridiculous; nobody, not even medievalists, want to talk scholarship at lunch. What academics want to talk about is pop culture bullshit. And while I was in academia, there were two varieties of pop culture bullshit to talk in between bites: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Wire.
I do not know why academics were obsessed with these two shows in particular, though I have some tentative theories. I suspect Buffy was academics’ way of connecting with the “folk,” of signalling that they could engage in art not written in dactylic hexameter or iambic pentameter. Buffy’s brand of controlled stupidity, ironic quippiness, and self-aware meta-commentary made it ideal for academics to “slum” in, to signal that they were not above having fun if done in a smart way. On the other hand, The Wire, a big and ponderous text with multiple overlapping plots, was like catnip for academics, who are inclined to equate heft and complexity with quality. Plus it had legitimate literary bona fides, with explicit connections to Tolstoy and even Greek tragedy. The Wire very clearly signaled it was IMPORTANT.
But I digress. I was brainwashed by academics into thinking that The Wire was the pinnacle of TV. Now that I have finally watched all of The Sopranos, I wonder if the best television show ever made was the most obvious choice, the most boring, the most basic. Unlike The Wire, whose own narrative ambition is substantial but can be viewed as simply an intensification of traditional tools of narrative, The Sopranos achieved a type of elliptical storytelling rare even in the golden age of Peak TV. There are very few shows whose internal pace is dedicated to representing the scruffy, contingent nature of everyday life. Plots and subplots are abruptly taken up and just as abruptly abandoned — a form of storytelling most present today in Succession, the true heir of The Sopranos on television right now. And I think The Sopranos has aged even better than The Wire. In a post-BLM environment, The Wire’s sympathy for the police feels misplaced and not jaded enough. By contrast, even the worst episode of The Sopranos, “Christopher,” feels prescient about the cultural conflicts that are happening even today.
You can stream The Sopranos on HBO Max.
Gohatto (1999) and A Very Curious Girl (1969)
In 2021 I discovered I like a very specific type of movie: a film where the hierarchical, patriarchal, and heteronormative structures of a society go to pieces when faced with the awe-inspiring power of the HORNY.
In Gohatto a very attractive male samurai joins the order. Everything quickly falls apart as all the samurai are trying to fuck the pretty boy. The machissimo of the institution simply cannot handle the possibility of same-sex attraction.
In A Very Curious Girl, a sex worker enacts her revenge against the community that has ostracized her by slowly increasing her fees to burdensome levels. The men howl and complain, and make a vain attempt to unionize, but to no avail; the horny men keep coming back for more, even as she fleeces them. It’s a feminist sex worker version of Kill Bill, and it is glorious.
You can read my Letterboxd reviews of Gohatto and A Very Curious Girl here and here, respectively.
Gohatto is currently not available anywhere for streaming, even to rent and buy. I recommend wishlisting it and watching if it returns to the Criterion Channel, where I watched it.
A Very Curious Girl also is hard to find, not being available anywhere for streaming according to JustWatch. But Amazon apparently offers it as part of a free trial of the Cohen Media Channel. I have no idea what that is, so caveat emptor. I also watched it on the Criterion Channel, so keep an eye out if it reappears there.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
Zack Snyder has always been a hack. If you want confirmation, look at his execrable Army of the Dead (2021). But for a brief moment this year, I was prepared to reconsider my feelings about Zack Snyder, to maybe admit I was wrong. That moment came after watching Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It always sucks when the worst people in the world are right, but in this instance the Snyder stans were absolutely correct: if given the proper resources and creative control, Zack Snyder could have made Justice League into a good movie. But is Zack Snyder’s Justice League a great movie? Probably not, but after watching it and the original back to back, my critical facilities were not tuned to a frequency able to ask that question. I will hand this to Zack Snyder: his DC films have a jagged heft to them that Marvel films diligently sand down. This gravitas is largely because of Zack Snyder’s own inflated sense of self-importance, but misguided weight is still weight, I guess.
You can read my rambling thoughts on Zack Snyder’s Justice League on my blog.
You can stream Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max.
After Hours (1985)
As the experimental seventies turned into the blockbuster-driven eighties, many of the “New Hollywood” directors like Coppola began to be pushed away from the studio system. Scorsese, by contrast, survived by turning to a low-budget project. And thank God he did, not only for what Scorsese would go on to do, but for this amazing, perfect movie. After Hours has a vibe that is completely its own. The usual adjectives — “surreal,” “dreamlike,” “dark” — fail to capture this movie’s unique tone. And beyond the black humor and the New York yelling, this film has a sentimental message: capitalism isolates us all, so be nicer to one another.
You can read my review of After Hours on Letterboxd.
You can rent or buy After Hours from multiple streaming services.
Hellraiser (1987)
Now this is my kind of trash. Hellraiser is a perfect slasher film, campy and over the top in all the right places. The cenobites’ — I resent having to Google that term — designs are all top notch. I don’t have anything intelligent to say about Hellraiser that hasn’t been said by smarter people. Go watch this gem.
You can read my review of Hellraiser on Letterboxd.
You can stream Hellraiser from a variety of services (including Amazon Prime, AMC+, Shudder, and Hoopla).
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988)
To quote my Letterboxd review: “If you don’t like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, you are a cop. I am sorry, I don’t make the rules.”
You can read this and other very good words in my review of Elvira on Letterboxd.
You can stream Elvira on multiple services.
Frank Herbert’s Dune (2000)
I have a soft spot for television miniseries in the nineties and early aughts. My favorite version of It, for instance, still remains the Tim Curry one. While modern versions of these miniseries are polished and well engineered, I enjoy the scrappiness of the nineties TV versions, where you can see the budgetary limitations on the screen. It is in this spirit that I watched and enjoyed the Syfy rendition of Dune.
I mean, I get why many fans do not like this version. The special effects are woefully inadequate; you can tell that the desert scenes were filmed on a set and that the sprawling vistas are actually matte paintings. You have to learn to live with its low-budget aesthetic in order to enjoy this miniseries. But Frank Herbert’s Dune succeeds in triangulating between the polychromatic crazy of Jodorowsky’s and Lynch’s versions and a more even-keeled telling of the story. And I believe the series has some real inspiration in how it portrays the characters. Witness the spoiled, awful Paul, acting like a College Republican attending his first CPAC. Witness the quiet defeatism of William Hurt’s Leto, cognizant that he is on the edge of a tragedy but unable to stop it. And witness Ian McNeice’s performance as the Baron, which makes the Baron an actually believable character while maintaining his carnivalesque villainy from Lynch’s version.
Even though I kind of detest it, I would still recommend the recent Villeneuve adaptation for casual fans. Competence in special effects, sadly, is probably more important for the experience than anything else, and Villeneuve does that at least well. But if you can set aside your need for trifles and adornments, there are plenty of joys to be experienced in this version.
You can read my review of Frank Herbert’s Dune on Letterboxd.
Frank Herbert’s Dune is not available on any streaming services currently, but is available on DVD. I suggest checking out your local library.
La Piscine (1969)
I watched this movie because Richard Brody hated it. I figured two things could happen: I would not like it either, or I would have another instance of Brody being egregiously wrong. Well you know what, fuck you Brody, this movie slaps.* La Piscine is a wonderfully languid movie about beautiful people being a bit bored and horny.
*On a more substantive critique, Brody argues “there’s little sense of active composition” to La Piscine. But I am pretty sure the two statues enclosing the eponymous pool are that of Hadrian and Antinous, the Roman emperor and his boy-toy lover that drowned. In a movie where the climactic murder occurs by drowning, this set design feels very intentional.
Also I actually do love you, Richard Brody — you just have bad opinions sometimes. Please don’t write an editorial about me in the the New Yorker.
You can read my review of La Piscine on Letterboxd.
You can stream La Piscine from The Criterion Channel.
The Missing Picture (2013)
Genocide is not just the systematic killing of people; it is also the systematic destruction of their identity. The Missing Picture is a beautiful and powerful documentary about keeping hold of your selfhood in the face of overwhelming, murderous, ideological oppression. This movie remains lodged so firmly in my mind that I tear up even thinking about it.
You can read my review of The Missing Picture on Letterboxd.
You can rent or purchase The Missing Picture from multiple streaming services.
The Truffle Hunters (2021)
This documentary manages to be massively entertaining despite failing the “does the dog die?” test. It manages to be meticulously framed and campy as hell. It’s beautiful, it’s funny, it makes me want to eat truffles.
You can read my review of The Truffle Hunters on Letterboxd.
You can rent or purchase The Truffle Hunters from multiple streaming services.
Buried (2010)
It is ironic that the most well-known short story about being buried alive, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” is not actually about being buried alive. In the same vein, although Buried is ostensibly a movie about being buried alive, it is actually a movie about how the American empire eats up and chews its own. Buried manages to critique the whole of post-9/11 American militarism without leaving the confines of a coffin.
Also: I would have given this movie five stars on Letterboxd if the filmmakers used Alice in Chains’s “Man in the Box.” Sadly, they did not.
You can read my review of Buried on Letterboxd.
You can stream Buried on Amazon Prime.
Don’s Party (1976) and The Chess Players (1977)
Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) remains one of my favorite films. Besides being a wonderful melodrama on its own terms, it has established a template for other films. The Rules of the Game has provided a ready-built format for a movie about any society on the verge of disaster, whose citizens are so caught up with their own bullshit they miss the bigger picture.
Don’s Party is indeed a The Rules of the Game clone, but it is more closely derived from Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975) — itself another The Rules of the Game clone. The plot of Don’s Party is simple: a bunch of friends and their significant others, who all secretly or not so secretly hate each other, gather for an election night party, expecting the Australian Labor party to sweep into power for the first time in years. As this prediction goes sideways, so does the party, as the tensions, sexual or otherwise, bubble up to the surface. The film has a raw, Cassavetes-like understanding of relationships between men and women. Furthermore, no other movie captures the feeling of an election night going wrong; no other film has captured the trauma of election night 2016 as Don’s Party did for me.
Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players is a more direct homage to The Rules of the Game. Ray makes the metaphor of the “game” even more explicit in his work, focusing on Indian nobles too caught up playing chess to notice the forcible British takeover of their country. Moreover, the film feels refreshingly modern; some plot beats of this movie would feel at home in Seinfeld, featuring selfish protagonists forced to save face as their lies catch up to them. Squint a bit, and you can see The Chess Players as an early critique of gamers.
You can read my reviews of Don’s Party and The Chess Players on Letterboxd here and here.
You can stream, rent, or buy Don’s Party from a variety of services.
You can stream, rent, or buy The Chess Players from a variety of services.
Slaxx (2020)
This movie is much better than it has any right to be. Slaxx, a horror story about a pair of murderous blue jeans, on the surface promises to be a schlockfest. But through careful attention to the questions and themes that murder by denim evokes, Slaxx manages to powerfully critique the fashion industry, corporate malfeasance, and the indiscriminate consumption by the American public. A silly movie about evil pants manages to channel the spirit of George Romero more than any other film released this year.
You can read my review of Slaxx on Letterboxd.
Slaxx can be streamed on Shudder (and AMC+).
Incoherence (1994) and Memories of Murder (2003)
There should be a law against how talented Bong Joon-ho is. His early short film Incoherence — included in the bonus features of the Criterion release of Memories of Murder — is a minor masterpiece, a perfectly shot and perfectly articulated student film (with a hell of a punchline to boot).
Memories of Murder comes close to toppling my favorite revisionist serial killer film, David Fincher’s Zodiac. The key word is close. Like much of Korean cinema, the movie is a little baggy and could use some trimming. But there is no other film like Memories of Murder, and much of its shagginess comes from a Westerner’s under-appreciation for its qualities as a period piece.
You can read my review of Incoherence on Letterboxd.
You can find Incoherence streaming on The Criterion Channel or on the Memories of Murder Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. As one might expect, you can also watch Memories of Murder on this same Blu-ray.
Tower (2016)
Most true crime stories end up glorifying the killer. Tower, wisely, leaves the murderer anonymous, not deigning to humanize his motives or state of mind. What remains is a tense focus on the victims, thrust into a terrifying situation of being underneath an active shooter in the perfect sniping position. If you mentally put aside the horror of the situation, Tower also functions as a perfect action movie, as his victims escape and eventually overpower him on the eponymous tower. But the “true” part, the fact that this monstrosity actually happened, always pulls you back from treating this as just another disposable entertainment property, even as the story told ranks among the best of them.
You can read my review of Tower on Letterboxd.
You can stream Tower on a variety of streaming services.
The Incident (1967)
We have just gone through — and as 2022 seems to suggest, are still going through — one of the scariest periods in American history. The Trump administration, in its utter monstrosity and inhumanity, presented a test for every American’s moral character. I cannot be the only progressive who is not entirely convinced they passed the moral test the Trump administration thrust upon us. I did have the right opinions and tweet those right opinions and call my congressmen, but surely there was more to do? Sure, there are extenuating circumstances about my own personal situation, but I cannot avoid a nagging sense of guilt that I should have done more.
In this vein, The Incident spoke to me. It’s a movie about how much injustice Americans will tolerate, even as the said injustice unfolds right before their eyes. As it turns out, most people will sacrifice the well-being of others so that they won’t be targeted. The Incident reminds us that it easy to imagine ourselves a hero in a scary situation, but it is much harder to actually act like one.
You can read my review of The Incident on Letterboxd.
The Incident is not available for streaming at the current time. It is on DVD and Blu-ray, so I recommend checking out your local library.
Citizen X (1995)
What I enjoy about making lists like this is recommending films that are not masterpieces. Citizen X will not blow your mind; this will not become your favorite movie. What Citizen X offers is a fascinating experiment wrapped in a mid-tier, made-for-TV movie form: a serial killer procedural without competent policemen and sure facts. The police who do the investigation are not reliable; the evidence the police collect is frequently mishandled; the confessions agents extract are because of torture; the all-controlling Soviet bureaucracy constantly wants to bury the case. Citizen X portrays an investigation where the mechanisms to make facts are all broken, and the investigators have to rely on half-truths to crack the case.
Also it has Donald Sutherland in it. I like Donald Sutherland.
You can read my review of Citizen X on Letterboxd.
You can find Citizen X streaming on HBO Max.
Black River (1957)
Black River provides a powerful example of Japanese noir. This film sensitively discusses the consequences of a rape. Because of the norms of postwar Japanese society, the victim is forced to date her rapist, and later is overcome with feelings of guilt as if the rape was her own fault. The story is told with unobtrusive technical mastery, as inky blacks almost seep through the screen.
Black River is notable for its total and complete indictment of Japanese society. While American noirs usually take place in a sick society, very few American noirs take place in such a terminally ill society as Black River. The world is so corrupt that idealists act as comic relief; witness, for instance, the hapless communist, who tries without success to instill some sense of class solidarity in the selfish, bickering tenants of the apartment building.
You can read my review of Black River on Letterboxd.
You can stream Black River on The Criterion Channel.
La Llorona (2019)
Cinema is most powerful when it provides the viewers novel sights and experiences they will never encounter in the real world. In La Llorona, you witness and sympathize with a family under siege, after their father’s conviction for war crimes was thrown out by a higher court. The family are barricaded in their house, as the families of those their father victimized protest them, and slowly begin to go insane because of the noise and their guilt. I have never seen such a view of humanity, and since I have a decidedly non–war criminal father, I will likely never experience this situation myself. I only have La Llorona to thank for imagining what this very particular experience would be like.
You can read my review of La Llorona at Letterboxd.
You can stream La Llorona on Shudder.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
I love New York movies. My ingrained midwestern meekness finds the idea of a community where everyone is shouting at each all the times both thrilling and cathartic. Even beyond the New Yorkiness of it all, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three has a unique vibe. This movie is a heist movie, yes, but for many of the characters it is just another day at work, albeit an exceptional one.
You can read my review of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three on Letterboxd.
You can purchase, rent, or stream The Taking of Pelham One Two Three from a variety of services.
