The Limey (1999, Steven Soderbergh)

The Limey is all about the foreshadowing. It’s about flashbacks, flash-forwards, and flash asides, but the foreshadowing figures into all of those devices. It’s got a “twist” ending, which then informs previous scenes but not like figuring out Terence Stamp is a ghost or whatever. Instead, it’s knowing something about why he half-smiles—and only something, another thing about The Limey is it’s Stamp’s story. To the point of excluding the audience. There’s a lot we don’t see in The Limey, but it happens. Arguably the most interesting aspects of Stamp’s character development occur offscreen. We get to see the action, which is the MacGuffin.

Juxtaposed against Stamp is Peter Fonda, and we get to see all his character stuff on screen, even though he’s an utter twerp from his first scene and will continue to be throughout the film.

Stamp is a recently released career criminal from the UK, come to Los Angeles to find out what happened to his daughter, Melissa George. Before the present action, George dies in a car accident. Not suspiciously enough for the cops to care, but enough for Stamp to fly over to find out what happened.

Fonda is George’s boyfriend. He’s a successful music producer, rich enough to be oblivious to reality, dim enough to make bad decisions, a sixties leftover who hasn’t done anything worth talking about since then. He’s already moved on to a new girlfriend—Amelia Heinle, who’s his friends’ daughter; he suggested her name to them when she was born. At first, it seems like he’s a major creep instead of just a weak one.

The juxtaposition is Stamp and Fonda living their respective legacies of the late sixties, Stamp a seemingly unstoppable old man vengeance, Fonda a narcissistic jackass.

The film’s first act is Stamp getting to Los Angeles and meeting George’s friends, Luis Guzmán and Lesley Ann Warren. Guzmán is an ex-con gone straight and sticking to it (very much unlike Stamp, who we learn spent most of his life and George’s in the nick), and Warren is a functioning LA action coach. Her sixties dreams didn’t come true, but she’s at least contributing to the world, not sucking from it (like Fonda).

Guzmán quickly becomes Stamp’s sidekick in the movie sense, but there’s a deeper emotional bond between the men the film doesn’t let us see. The Limey’s got a very detached narrative distance; director Soderbergh and writer Lem Dobbs forcibly push the audience away too. They make an effort to keep the viewer off guard, to keep The Limey in an almost dreamlike state, which then ties into Fonda’s wistful remembrances of the sixties.

Well, 1966 and some of 1967.

When Stamp meets Guzmán and Warren, the film flashes forward to different settings and activities, their conversations bopping forward and back until the conversation flows through the time and place jumps. Because The Limey’s all about memories; well, foreshadowing and memories.

Stamp’s investigation will eventually get him some attention from Barry Newman, who’s Fonda’s fixer. Newman brings in local psychopaths Nicky Katt and Joe Dallesandro to deal with the problem, which has some unexpected results. The acting in The Limey is incredibly measured and restrained. Stamp loses his temper at most twice and possibly then only in a daydream. Fonda has his freak-outs, but he’s usually trying to impress Heinle, so he keeps it in check. Newman’s restrained too, because as long as he can hire Katt, there’s nothing to get worked up about.

So Katt and Dallesandro are then Limey’s wild cards and where Soderbergh lets the performances get the loosest. One of Katt’s scenes is just a series of jaw-dropping but mundane observations from a psychopath. It’s momentarily funny, quickly becoming very concerning, with Katt establishing himself not just a clear and present danger to the good guys but to everyone standing near them. The Limey runs a confined ninety minutes and wraps its main story up with a tidy bow, but Katt and Dallesandro’s presence does a whole lot implying the world that story takes place in.

Ditto uncredited Bill Duke, who shows up at one point for a fantastic scene.

Speaking of uncredited one scene cameos, The Limey goes out of its way to include an “Entertainment Tonight” interview with George Clooney—after he and Soderbergh had made their first movie together—it goes on so long it seems intentional. But then even the shortest sequences in The Limey are fully intentional.

After the first act, after Stamp’s mission and compatriots are set up, the film introduces flashback footage to a young Stamp (as Limey is pre-obsequious CGI- de-aging, it’s footage from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow). Stamp occasionally talks through the clips, though sometimes they’re presented without context; they’re limited because they’re not really for this story. They’re about being young and making bad decisions—Stamp’s didn’t pay off, Fonda’s did. They’re presented without audible dialogue, just like flashbacks to George’s life in Los Angeles before her death, and also with Stamp’s memories of her as a child. Again, it’s all about the memories.

And regrets.

So, foreshadowing, memory, and regrets.

Soderbergh and editor Sarah Flack cut the hell out of the first act, presenting The Limey as a jumble of Stamp’s thoughts, with Fonda’s half of the film eventually leading to it calming down a bit. But while The Limey always looks good (photography by Edward Lachlan) and sounds excellent (Cliff Martinez’s score is terrific, and the sixties pop soundtrack is outstanding), it’s how Soderbergh and Flack use the editing to guide the narrative and establish the distance.

It really makes you wonder how Dobbs’s script worked; was it fragmented, or did Soderbergh break it up later.

Great performances from everyone. Stamp’s mesmerizing. Fonda, Newman, Guzmán, Katt, Heinle, and Warren are all excellent too. Warren gets the least to do, active character-wise, but is phenomenal doing it. Heinle gets the least character (she could be a figment of Fonda’s imagination for her first two scenes) but makes herself an essential insight to Fonda.

The Limey’s spectacular. Soderbergh and Stamp take it seriously but also not too seriously, and then once everything’s revealed, it’s more affecting than seemed possible. So good.

Nightwatch (1997, Ole Bornedal)

Thanks to a weak performance from lead Ewan McGregor and an obviously altered ending, Nightwatch straddles being a reasonably perverse suspense thriller and a scalding commentary on middle-class white male masculinity. McGregor is a third-year law school student who takes a job at the morgue to help pay for he and girlfriend Patricia Arquette’s giant apartment. She’s from a wealthy family, but McGregor wants to pay his own way. The film takes place in L.A. but never emphasizes it; the action is either the apartment, the morgue, or one of the various locations McGregor ends up with best buddy Josh Brolin. Those locations usually involve drinking and Brolin feeling bad because he’s not toxically macho enough. Being shitty to girlfriend Lauren Graham is getting less and less rewarding to Brolin, so he needs to take it up a notch.

We get this character set up during the opening credits; the film opens with a girl being murdered, then there’s opening credits with the four friends—McGregor, Arquette, Brolin, Graham—having a party (complete with McGregor wearing a native war bonnet, which simultaneously ages terribly but also tells you just what kind of dipshit McGregor will turn out to be). Intercut with the party are clips of cop Nick Nolte on the news giving an interview about a serial killer; the opening scene showed one of the murders.

Nolte’s going to be very important to Nightwatch—the eventual star and absolutely fantastic—but he’s not going to show up until the second act. The first act is about McGregor getting settled at the morgue, and then he and Brolin’s middle-class, white-collar white boy attempts to butch up. Or Brolin’s attempts and McGregor fawning over him because McGregor’s in deep need of a male authority figure. It actually figures into the plot and puts McGregor and Arquette in danger, so it turns out the first act buildup pays off. Even with the reshot ending, which ends things a little too abruptly and artlessly (I mean, Nightwatch has a killer Taxi Driver homage, it ought to have a good ending), everything in the film eventually pays off so well it smoothes over the bumps.

The second act will have Brolin escalating and becoming more and more dangerous to McGregor’s well-being—bringing sex worker Alix Koromzay into their lives. Koromzay does pretty well with a bad part; one of the bumps the film has to smooth out is when Brolin humiliates her for his own pleasure while McGregor sits by dumbfounded. Because Nightwatch is all about guys being shitty, actually. They’re either abusive like Brolin, impotent like McGregor, resigned like Lonny Chapman (the former nightwatchman), doped up like doctor Brad Dourif (it’s a small part, but he’s outstanding), or content with the failure like Nolte. It’s a profoundly misanthropic film and is the better for it. McGregor being a limp noodle makes his unsure performance hit better. In the first half the problem’s McGregor’s American accent; in the second half, everyone is more interesting than him—including Brolin, who gets astoundingly far on just an “I’m an asshole” bit. Especially once Arquette gets something to do.

For the first half of the movie, Arquette’s barely in the film. She snuggles McGregor every once in a while and sends him off to work, but she’s not active. But once she gets active, once McGregor and Brolin’s shenanigans start getting more serious, it’s kind of her movie. Outside being Nolte’s movie, because Nolte runs off with it. Director Bornedal holds off on letting Nolte loose because there’s no way to bring the film back once he does. Nolte runs it. It’s a mesmerizing performance.

The excellent performances—Nolte, Dourif, Chapman—and the eventually really good performances—Arquette and Brolin—make up for McGregor. Plus, the character’s a twerp, so there’s not much required of the performance; a better performance from McGregor, one capable of holding its ground with Nolte, would entirely change the film. Nightwatch gets away with the juxtapose of thriller and masculinity musing because of McGregor. With a good performance in the part, it wouldn’t.

Technically, Nightwatch is stellar. Bornedal’s direction, Sally Menke’s editing, and Richard Hoover’s production design are the big winners. Dan Lausten’s photography and Joachim Holbek’s music are both good and sometimes essential, but they’re not actively excelling the other cylinders.

The script’s also got some really intense moments—Bornedal adapted his Danish version, with Steven Soderbergh cowriting—particularly for Nolte.

Nightwatch is good.

Copycat (1995, Jon Amiel)

It’s easy to pick out the “best” thing in Copycat because it’s almost entirely atrocious. Christopher Young’s highly derivative score is lovely—it’s a mix between John Williams and then Aliens whenever Sigourney Weaver is in thriller danger. Thanks to the score, Copycat makes some interesting swings, like emotive, romantic music during the most inappropriate sequences. Again, outside aping Ripley moments, it never fits the content, but it is definitely lovely.

Otherwise, the high point is J.E. Freeman’s performance as the grizzled police captain. He’s fine. They cut away from him too soon because he’s clearly knawing on the set. I really wanted to see him munch on his coffee mug, which always seems inevitable.

Besides those two elements, it’s just a matter of what’s not godawful and what’s just bad.

What’s impressive about Freeman is he’s the only acceptable performance. Everyone else is either incompetent or appalling. A lot of it is Amiel’s direction. He’s inept at composing the Panavision shots—it’s a special kind of bad to waste San Francisco like Amiel wastes it (the lighting is fine, thanks to László Kovács’s photography but wow, what a waste of Kovács)—but he’s even worse at directing actors. Whether Weaver, who’s got a risibly written part, soulful surfer tech bro cop Dermot Mulroney, or incel serial killer William McNamara, Amiel does an incapable job with all of them. Oh, I forgot Will Patton. Poor Will Patton.

Copycat is supposed to be about Weaver teaming up with San Francisco homicide inspector Holly Hunter, but second-billed Hunter deserves an “and” credit. She takes a back seat to Mulroney, McNamara, and even Patton as her erstwhile love interest. Patton’s a sexist, racist fellow detective—Hunter and Mulroney are partners—and until it turns out he’s dangerously unfit, he just ruins scenes. Not because he’s the worst actor in them; instead, he’s a purposeless boil on the film. He’s there, so they don’t have to do a whole trope, just a three-quarters trope.

Of the main cast, Hunter’s the least bad. She’s never good because it’s a terrible movie, but you’re never slack-jawed at the badness of her performance. Like Weaver. So much bad acting from Weaver.

The script, courtesy Ann Biderman and David Madsen, is worse than Amiel’s direction. Likewise, Jim Clark and Alan Heim’s editing is lousy.

Copycat’s so abominable I don’t even want to talk about Harry Connick Jr.’s cameo as a hillbilly serial killer, which starts worse than it finishes, but only because his bad performance is less bad than the many other bad performances. It’s a derivative, insipid motion picture, so obviously rotten the cast don’t even earn sympathy for their embarrassing participation.

Pretty music, though. Very pretty music.

Blow-Up (1966, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Blow-Up is a day in the life picture. It opens with protagonist David Hemmings on his way out of a flophouse; he’s not a tramp; he’s a wonder kid fashion photographer who’s been undercover all night to snap pics. The film reveals all those details gradually. It takes until about halfway through the picture to find out the photos are for a book he’s putting together with editor Peter Bowles. The book doesn’t seem to include fashion photographs, however. Hemmings seemingly hates his success at photographing models. Unfortunately, he takes out that resentment on his models, who he despises for falling for his Svengali tactics. He’s a right bastard.

The film never shows Hemmings’s perspective. It never asks the audience to identify with him, empathize or sympathize with him. Instead, director Antonioni establishes a close third-person perspective and never strays. There’s usually a brief establishing shot from Hemmings’s point of view—visually—and then the rest of the sequence is looking at Hemmings from the setting. The film takes place over roughly twenty-four hours, with Hemmings moving through a series of time-appropriate vignettes. Most of the vignettes are about him being a jackass, some are about him being an artist, some are about the culture he’s in, both big-scale mid-sixties London and then small scale artist culture.

Hemmings lives in his studio, where he’s got various people working. One of the first scenes has him giving rolls of film to an assistant for developing. After a few more scenes, the assistant delivers the photos. Blow-Up never forgets the linear structure. As fantastic as Hemmings’s day will get, it’s just a day, and he’s just one person amongst a million. He’s a solitary egotist, with his painter friend John Castle living on the same property. The living situation is a little unclear. Though Hemmings’s real estate pursuits are an essential but unexplored bit of the ground situation. Similarly important but mostly unexplored is Hemmings’s relationship with Castle’s wife, Sarah Miles. They have an intense flirtation. Miles is only in a few scenes, but Antonioni gives her the close third-person treatment as well. If Blow-Up were a bigger story, she’d obviously be part of it.

But it’s not a big story. It’s a tiny one.

In the course of his day, Hemmings finds himself with time to kill in near a park and, being a photographer, wanders while taking pictures. He comes upon a couple in the park—Ronan O’Casey and Vanessa Redgrave—and follows them. At least a third of the way through the film, this sequence is the first time Antonioni lets Hemmings just be. Every other moment he’s either conning or controlling someone, but at the park, he’s childish. It starts with him running and jumping for fun, enjoying tiring himself, then when photographing O’Casey and Redgrave, he turns it into an espionage adventure. He hops fences, hides behind trees, clearly entertaining himself because O’Casey and Redgrave aren’t fooled, and she comes over to confront him.

Their first encounter provides insight into how Hemmings responds when challenged. He’s used to people either fawning over him or at least being obedient to his whims. Later, when Redgrave tracks him down at the studio, she’s going to be more susceptible to the Svengali techniques. That sequence is the most character development Hemmings does onscreen, with him either lying at length to Redgrave (who may be lying at length right back at him) or being startlingly honest with a stranger. It’ll be an outside the everyday experience for Hemmings, whose entire life seems to be—but isn’t—a series of abnormal experiences.

Redgrave’s at the studio trying to get the pictures he took, which presents him with a problem. He’s got to magnanimously acquiesce to a beautiful damsel in distress, but not really because he wants the pictures for his book. Adding to the dilemma is Redgrave appears willing to go to extreme lengths to get them back, giving some more rare insight into Hemmings’s actual character. He’ll sort of roll it back soon after once he’s gotten the high of being not just a great photographer but an unintentionally great detective.

The film only shows a handful of Hemmings’s photographs and quickly. We never get to see his fashion photography. We know they’re good because he’s successful, whereas the photographs of Redgrave and O’Casey are good, but also Antonioni has baked regard into them. We saw Hemmings take the photographs, we briefly saw what he was photographing, and then there’s the pay-off. Antonioni’s got a whole approach to Hemmings as photographer, where Hemmings is often developing a photograph in real-time, but the audience doesn’t see that process. Blow-Up is full of photographic gadgetry and process, just without any fetishization. It’s about seeing what Hemmings is doing, not what Hemmings is doing. There’s never any voyeuristic aspect to it either, thanks to Antonioni’s constantly close third-person narrative distance.

It’s exceptional work.

The third act has Hemmings trying to work through the consequences of his discoveries and finding himself unable to control much of anything. It’s a phenomenal character study, especially since he’s gradually revealed to be far less narcissistic than initially implied. The finish, with Hemmings haggard from another sleepless day, stirs in all the themes for a fascinating vignette. So good.

Excellent direction from Antonioni, photography from Carlo Di Palma, editing by Frank Clarke. Clark’s cutting is stunning. The script—from Antonioni, Torino Guerra, and Edward Bond—is sharp while subtle. There’s a superb meta-bit where Hemmings comments on the unimportance of names, something few of the characters have spoken onscreen.

Excellent score from Herbie Hancock.

Blow-Up’s a remarkable success.

The Element of Crime (1984, Lars von Trier)

During The Element of Crime, it never seems like the mystery will be particularly compelling. The film and the detective’s investigation are compelling, but the mystery itself seems rather pat. A serial killer has been targeting young girls selling lotto tickets, earning the moniker the “Lotto Murderer,” and the police are stumped. So they bring in Michael Elphick to take over. Elphick has been living in Cairo for over a dozen years, exiled from Europe. The film starts back in Cairo with a therapist, Ahmed El Shenawi, hypnotizing Elphick to get him to remember what happened.

Only El Shenawi isn’t hypnotizing Elphick exactly; he’s hypnotizing the audience. After a handful of murky shots of Cairo, director von Trier starts the film proper with a second-person point-of-view. It’s mesmerizing. Element of Crime will mesmerize often, but the second-person stuff is von Trier’s most significant swing, if only because everything else has some foundation when he does it.

It takes a few more minutes to meet Elphick—he starts narrating before he appears on screen. Elphick’s narration and diegetic dialogue are sometimes indistinguishable, creating incredible, sometimes startling effects—and we get to see some of future Europe. It’s flooded, and everyone just lives sometimes in three feet of standing water. It’s all nonpotable, so everyone’s a bit of a drunk. von Trier doesn’t have many establishing shots in the film. Sometimes he’ll focus on one aspect of the scenery, but there aren’t any skylines. The film takes place entirely at night and is all in a yellow or greenish tint. Occasionally, there are other color breakthroughs, usually blue, but it’s primarily high contrast yellow or green action surrounded by infinite darkness. In that darkness is the rest of civilization, struggling to continue, left up to the audience’s imagination. It’s incredibly ambitious and a formidable accomplishment.

Elphick’s first stop is his old mentor, Esmond Knight, who taught Elphick everything there is to know about criminal investigations. He taught many detectives, though, even wrote a book called The Element of Crime. It’s a reasonably thick book—we see a couple copies in the film—but the central concept is physically occupying the space of the villain to experience what they experienced and potentially find clues through one’s impersonated reactions. But before Elphick starts retracing the killer’s footsteps, he’s got to get yelled at by the asshole police chief. Jerold Wells plays the chief, who knew Elphick in the old days and was his subordinate. But now Wells is the boss, and there’s no time for that hippy-dippy Element of Crime stuff.

The first act is Elphick getting situated back in Europe and getting some sense of the case from Knight, who had some kind of breakdown as a result of the investigation; Elphick’s only there a few hours before the next victim turns up, which gives the film a sense of immediate danger. Especially since someone is lurking around Knight’s house and then following Elphick.

The mystery figure will continue into the second act as Elphick starts retracing the killer’s steps and soon takes on a sidekick in prostitute Me Me Lai. She’s part of his first stop, then she tags along for a change of scenery and ends up being an invaluable asset in the investigation.

Everything will be revealed in the third act, but only answers to the questions Elphick asks. The mystery he’s investigating is one thread, the mystery the film’s creating through the investigation is another. The film probably has the answers—at least some of them—if you wanted to go through it and pick it apart, but it wouldn’t change the effect because the conclusion is the same. Evil is commonplace, whether it’s the Lotto Murderer or Wells. Especially in this crumbling, sunken world, fecund with violence and death. It’s a helpless, hopeless world. Elphick’s very interesting in how he works against hopelessness. He’s undeniably mired in it, but he really wants to be above it.

It’s a very, very full hour and forty minutes, with exceptional use of narration combined with an excellent performance from Elphick. Knight, Wells, and Lai are all fantastic too. There are a dozen or so other characters, but most are just stops along the way in Elphick’s investigation. Despite the darkness and narration, Element of Crime isn’t a noir or even a riff on one. Instead, the thorough investigation makes it feel a lot more classical, down to the undiscovered urban environment surrounding the narrative.

von Trier’s direction is superlative. He and his crew—cinematographer Tom Elling, editor Tómas Gislason, production designer Peter Høimark, composer Bo Holten—do remarkable work. The film’s even more impressive taking the multiple languages at play in its creation—von Trier and co-writer Niels Vørsel lucked out with translators William Quarshie and Stephen Wakelam. The script’s superb.

Crime’s a singular motion picture, both as a mystery-thriller and as a piece of work.

No Sudden Move (2021, Steven Soderbergh)

I spent most of No Sudden Move hoping against hope it’d somehow end well. Unfortunately, by the end of Move, I’d forgotten it started as a potential pulpy franchise for Don Cheadle (twenty-five years after Devil in a Blue Dress maybe he could get the one he deserved). The third act is such a slog, the stunt cameo reveal is so protracted, and the “real world” reveal is so labored, I’d forgotten what the movie was even ostensibly about.

No Sudden Move, if the stylized opening titles, the stylized music, and the stylized visuals (director Soderbergh and cinematographer “Peter Andrews” shoot the entire thing with slight fisheye lens) don’t give it away, is a series of homages to various film noir classics. There are some very obvious homages, then some less obvious ones, then the ones where recycling now familiar homages thanks to other movies using the same homage device. After a very gimmicky and very effective first act MacGuffin, it’s clear there’s not going to be anything new to Move so might as well enjoy the good acting, directing, and nostalgia.

It works until the third act, which goes entirely awry starting with a very bad stunt cameo. At first it seems like the second half is going to be all stunt cameos but when Kevin Scollin turns out not to be Steve Guttenberg, then the single stunt cameo is just… unfortunate. The twists and turns of the third act are all unfortunate as well; Move’s never ambitious—aggressively racist Italian mob flunky Benicio Del Toro abuse of Black man Cheadle ends in their second scene together and while there’s a little more to the female characters than you’d expect in a fifties noir… there’s not much more (and we’re not counting Soderbergh’s fisheye thing as ambitious, he’s just carrying a gag on too long)—but it’s always pretty good. The film finds a decent balance of dangerous and engaging. It’s never quirky, but it’s occasionally wry.

And Cheadle’s great.

Del Toro’s really good too, but the part’s not as good. Then as the film progresses, Cheadle’s part gets worse and Del Toro’s follows suit. David Harbour—playing the suburban dad whose family is in danger from hired guns Cheadle, Del Toro, and a very effective Kieran Culkin—is third-billed. He gets a lot to do but not really. Ditto cop Jon Hamm. Move assembles a picture perfect cast and gives them very little to do. Cheadle at least gets something to do for long stretches of the film. No one else.

Lots of good acting in the supporting parts. Brendan Fraser’s the guy who puts the job together, Ray Liotta and Bill Duke are the warring local crime bosses who both have it out for Cheadle, Amy Seimetz as Harbour’s wife. There really aren’t any female roles. Seimetz gets more than everyone else, but she’s still mostly there to support Harbour or son Noah Jupe. Jupe’s okay. It’d be better if he were better.

It’d be better if the writing for him were better too.

Hamm in particular is completely wasted.

Harbour’s good, but it’s far from a breakout part or performance. The third-billing is a bit of deceptive aggrandizing.

I’m tempted to give a list of movies to watch instead of No Sudden Move, which is far from the reaction I wanted to have. Even with the fisheye, I was rooting for No Sudden Move and making a lot of allowances for Ed Solomon’s script. But the third act is just too much of a mess. And Soderbergh completely gives up on it with the directing too; after waiting for him to leverage the fisheye the entire movie (there’s maybe one shot of Harbour where the fisheye emphasizes his perspective), Soderbergh has to go high contrast to hide the lack of budget and it looks really, really bad. Twelve year-olds filming toy dinosaurs in their backyards with Super 8s have done better action shots.

No Sudden Move’s not not a waste of time and energy. There’s good acting but for nothing.

Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)

Psycho is a masterpiece of color. After forty joyfully plodding minutes of Janet Leigh going from fetching spinster in a torrid lunch hour romance to grand larcenist in precise black and white (and then another few minute as she moves to close that character arc), director Hitchcock and Psycho put Leigh in the color of an all-white motel bathroom. And all of a sudden the black and white film (gorgeous photography from John L. Russell) is just as colorful as the imagination, albeit in a stark, sterile white bathroom. The mundane soon becomes a nightmare, even as Hitchcock allows for some ogle on Leigh—who’s partially in her current predicament thanks to every man she’s encountered in the film objectifying her in one way or another. The first arc—not act—of Psycho is Hitchcock humanizing Leigh from the opening, which has her dissatisfied with beau John Gavin. He’s a hunk and he’s worth matinees on work days, but he’s unavailable—he’s too broke to marry Leigh—and Leigh’s getting exhausted with her life.

The film’s an entire flex from Hitchcock. There’s not a scene where he’s not showing off. The drab backgrounds of Leigh’s office are going to contrast the white in the bathroom but also the clutter of the eventual locations. Leigh’s office is as flat and bland as the motel where she and Gavin meet. Psycho’s all about motel living for Leigh; she starts in one, she ends in one. In the first she has urban—even if it’s small city Arizona—anonymity, in the second she has none. In the first she’s on an arc to cause (or inflict, but it’s hard to sympathize with the guys she’s ripping off) suffering, in the second she’s brought the situation around and is directing herself now, actively toward gladness. But Psycho is not about the moral tragedy of Leigh’s character, though along the way Hitchcock does sort of decimate the film noir trappings and examine the resulting dust; Psycho is about the unknown and the terror hiding in it.

Because the second motel is where Leigh meets Anthony Perkins and once Perkins arrives, even a nude shower scene isn’t enough to keep the focus on Leigh. It’s all about Perkins. He’s a shy, somewhat awkward, but very charming, handsome young man who manages the roadside motel for his elderly, infirm mother. They live up in a big house behind the motel. Hitchcock’s going to be very, very careful about how he shows that big house. For most of the film there’s only one way to get there; Perkins’s slim figure, always in mostly dark, going up to the house, coming down from the house, is going to become on the film’s most haunting images as the audience learns more and more about him. Psycho’s a mystery. Hitchcock tells the story of that mystery with the film, with his shots—there are always well-placed inserts to make the world tactile to the viewer—with the photography, with George Tomasini’s editing, and obviously Bernard Herrmann’s awesome music. Whoever did the sound design—Tomasini, Hitchcock, some sound recorder—works in such magnificent unison with Herrmann, who’ll go very loud then silent, the silence ratcheting up the terror. Because everyone’s in some kind of danger in Psycho. Always.

The film establishes very early on women are not safe in Psycho. Sure, she’s in the process of committing a felony, but Leigh is in danger every guy she meets and always because she’s a woman. So when her sister, Vera Miles, starts looking for her, not just retracing her journey but continuing on—Leigh’s plan was to steal the money and go rescue Gavin and then disappear (was disappearing on twenty grand possible in 1960)—with Miles making the trip to Gavin and enlisting his help. Miles only puts herself in actual danger in the finale, but until then it’s clear she’s not safe.

Miles and Gavin get a Third Musketeer in Martin Balsam, a private detective out to get the money back before Leigh’s boss, Vaughn Taylor , has to call the cops. Balsam validates a bunch of imagined offscreen events from Leigh’s rationalizing scene—a phenomenal sequence with Leigh in close-up, driving through a thunderstorm, imagining various conversations about her going on, the conversations playing as voiceovers. Again, Hitchcock flexes everywhere he can in Psycho, showing off a variety of distinct devices, only slowing down once the film’s got Perkins established.

While Leigh’s story is Psycho’s more obvious MacGuffin, certain aspects of Perkins’s character and performance are similarly airy as far as the actual narrative’s concerned. Everything’s relevant, but thanks to Russell’s lighting, Hitchcock obscures that relevancy. Psycho always presents Perkins as a sort of sympathetic, even after it’s clear he doesn’t get it by default. He’s less a hen-pecked doting son and more an active participant in his mother’s outbursts, which place terrible burdens on him. The scene where Perkins has got to clean up the bathroom, restoring the pristine whiteness, has all these tactile touchstones so Hitchcock can force the audience into a sympathetic response (we’ve all grabbed a towel, haven’t we), only for Hitchcock to reveal the dangers of such sympathies. You’ve got to be on guard at all times in Psycho.

Of course, there’s an explanation for all the goings on, and it’s a….

It’s a lot. The film weaponizes the inaccurate, bigoted psychology of the era to create a new category of screen villain (or at least new in A tier movies) for an easy reveal, all patriarchally lectured (quite ably from Simon Oakland). It’s sexist, transphobic, ableist; even for the era the film should’ve come with a disclaimer. Psycho is, no doubt, a singular masterpiece; it changed mainstream film thanks to Hitchcock and company’s techniques. And also because of its garbage reveal. That reveal has had a lot of bad consequences. Solely bad consequences, in fact; fruit of a poisonous tree branch. Psycho’s deus ex machina hasn’t so much as aged badly as always been rotten.

It’s also an expertly executed deus ex machina. Hitchcock knows how to present the reveals, then pulls all the threads together for the last few shots; he brings in Perkins for part of the pay-off too, after building big up to his return to the screen even though he’s only been gone a few minutes. It’s incredibly well-done, also bringing back the noir feels.

Psycho’s one of a kind.

Witness (1985, Peter Weir)

Witness has a beautifully directed scene or sequence every five to ten minutes. Just something director Weir is able to particularly nail, sometimes with John Seale’s photography’s help, sometimes with Thom Noble’s editing, then probably least of all, with Maurice Jarre’s score’s help. Jarre’s score is good, very pretty, and occasionally redundant; when it sells a scene, however, it stands out. There are a couple where it’s all on Jarre. There just happen to be a lot more leveraging the photography and editing. Though mostly the Seale photography; Witness is often absolutely, intentionally gorgeous.

Weir directs some of Witness like a Western, which isn’t too much of a stretch since it’s got a Western’s story. Harrison Ford is a city cop who ends up having to hide out with the Amish to protect himself and a defenseless witness (eight year-old Lukas Haas) from the bad guys. Haas and his mom, Kelly McGillis, were traveling through the city and Haas witnessed a murder and Ford needs him to identify the killer.

The film opens with McGillis and Haas at home, in mourning—McGillis’s husband has just died and they’re going to visit family, leaving father-in-law Jan Rubes and prospective (whether McGillis is interested or not) new husband Alexander Godunov waiting for their return. The first half of the first act is Haas experiencing the big city, albeit through the train station, for the first time. Pretty soon it’s going to open up to his experience of the police investigation into the murder; once they get back to Amish Country, however, the film’s going to quickly lose track of Haas.

During the police investigation in the city, there’s a lot of procedural as Ford figures out what’s going on after Haas spots the bad guy and a bit of character backstory revelation. The film handles the exposition dump rather affably, given the violence around it; McGillis and Haas have to spend the night at Patti LuPone’s house—LuPone is Ford’s sister—and the next morning McGillis gives Ford the rundown on what LuPone really thinks.

McGillis and Ford have a standoffish relationship until after they get to the country, when McGillis has to nurse Ford back to health, setting them up on an inevitable romance arc. McGillis is risking everything for it, Ford not so much. Weir handles the romance with more distance than anything else in the film. Remote third person. We rarely get to see McGillis and Ford together, usually only for the most cinematic romantic sequences. The distance works, not just for the classy romance novel cover takes on their constrained love scenes, but also because it means Witness doesn’t have to delve too deep into the character development. There’s a never addressed, bulbous subtext about men controlling women—starting with all the Amish and McGillis, then Ford dictating LuPone’s social life, then Rubes dictating McGillis’s… it goes on and on and on. And Weir does his damndest to avoid it.

Because if the first act is Haas and his experience of life among the English, the second act ought to be McGillis’s, only it’s not. It’s also not Ford’s. He gets to do action hero in the third act—in an exquisite sequence from Weir, Seale, and Noble—but the second act is this roaming narrative about the situation of Ford recuperating in hiding, with Weir’s direction giving the film the structure, not the script.

It’s not a character study, it’s not a melodrama, it’s not a mystery. Committing to any specific genre would make the script’s decencies too obvious. So for the toughest spots, Weir just lets Jarre’s music have it and Jarre makes it work.

There are times when Jarre is more part of the team—the fantastic barn raising sequence, for example—and while they work better overall, it’s still cool to see (and hear) Jarre make the problem of disappearing subplots just not matter.

Ford and McGillis are good. The distanced approach works for them. Haas and Rubes are great. Godunov’s good, even though he’s basically a handsome creep. Josef Sommer, Brent Jennings, and Danny Glover are all good as the city cops. Glover gets the best showcase, Jennings gets the least.

Witness is really good. Weir’s direction is solid throughout, but when it’s better than the norm, it’s very special, which scales to the film itself.

Out of Sight (1998, Steven Soderbergh)

Right up until the third act, Out of Sight has a series of edifying flashbacks, which reveal important facts in the ground situation; almost enough to set the start of the present action back a few years. The film starts in flashback, which isn’t immediately clear, and then the series of consecutive flashbacks builds to inform the opening flashback. The film opens with George Clooney getting arrested for a bank robbery, the film proper starts two years later when Clooney’s planning a prison escape.

Or does it, because it’ll soon turn out there’s something from two years before the start of movie with the arrest and it’s really important.

We—the audience—get to know Clooney more through the flashbacks than the present action. In the present action, outside having a strained friendship with ex-wife Catherine Keener (in a fun credited cameo, the film’s got a bunch of both), we don’t learn anything about Clooney except he really, really likes Jennifer Lopez. Lopez is the U.S. Marshal who happens across Clooney’s prison break and he takes her hostage, only for her to outsmart one of his partners, played by Steve Zahn, and escape.

So the movie is Clooney and his partner, Ving Rhames, trying to pull off one last job while Lopez is after Clooney because of professional pride and a bewildered enthusiasm, while Clooney is trying to flirt with Lopez. At no point does Out of Sight not embrace the fantastical nature of their attraction; Clooney’s a weary career criminal, Lopez is a gun enthusiast who likes beating the shit of out bad guys when they deserve it, and she can’t figure out if Clooney deserves it. Those deliberations lead to some inevitabilities, some more tragic than others. All of them wonderful. Clooney and Lopez’s chemistry, under Soderbergh’s lens, Anne V. Coates’s cuts, Elliot Davis’s photography, David Holmes’s music, Scott Frank’s script… is singular. Lopez is great in Out of Sight, while Clooney’s just very, very good. But Lopez is just as singular as their chemistry. And it’s her movie… right up until the third act turns out to be a poorly engineered addition on the actual plot.

If Out of Sight is about Lopez’s Three Days of the Condor with Clooney, it’s pretty great. There’s not enough of a finale scene between the two of them; it’s like Soderbergh and Frank split it up, but what the film’s already established is Lopez and Clooney need to spend more time together, not have more scenes together with a lot less time. It’s a strange bummer because it’s this very obvious rising action and they screw it up. But it’s pretty great. And it’s Lopez’s movie. Obviously.

But if it’s about Clooney’s last big score, which conveniently involves the exact same cast of characters as appear in the flashback so there can be all sorts of neat reveals as the runtime progresses… Out of Sight is a fail. It’s a high fail. But it’s a fail. There’s just not enough of a story to it. Soderbergh’s direction is always great, but Frank’s writing isn’t as invested in the homage to seventies crime thrillers thing Soderbergh is doing. It’s underprepared. Beautifully shot, with some great dialogue, but this aspect of the film feels artificially constrained. Because the actual protagonist in the crime arc ends up being Zahn’s in-over-his-head stoner. Zahn’s fine. He’s not great. He needs to be great for it to work. So even if it weren’t a problem character in the narrative, it’d also be a problem performance. But a fine one. There aren’t any bad performances in Out of Sight, just great ones, good ones, middling ones, and concerning ones (i.e. was Isiah Washington’s terrifying sociopath just his real personality). Soderbergh gets really good performances out of the cameos too (with the exception of Michael Keaton, pointlessly crossing over from another Elmore Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown). There aren’t a lot of comic moments in the film and Soderbergh clamps down hard on all of them. Keaton’s scene has Dennis Farina elaborately messing with his head in pseudo-polite conversation. Farina’s sadly the least of the good performances. There’s also no meat to the part.

Luis Guzmán gets a good small part in the first act. He’s good. Rhames is good, Don Cheadle’s real good, Albert Brooks is good. Really nice performances from Viola Davis and Nancy Allen, like Soderbergh goes out of his way to showcase their acting. It’s very cool.

Though no one’s real super cool. Out of Sight’s careful with its potential crime glorification. Clooney’s a tragic figure, he just also happens to be George Clooney. Lopez finds herself in his attempt at a fantasy world, one where he lets himself get distracted by their chemistry, then reality—Cheadle and Washington are vicious killers—crashes in. Only not because Lopez isn’t part of the movie in the third act.

It’s also never close. Like. Sight runs a nimble two hours and there’s never a moment you think it’s actually going to work out as well as it should. The third act is a disaster if anyone but Soderbergh and crew are pulling it off. They leverage Lopez and Clooney’s chemistry to get across the finish line; it’s craven.

It’s also real good. It’s a usually faultlessly executed motion picture and Lopez is phenomenal.

Mystic River (2003, Clint Eastwood)

Mystic River is at all times a very American tragedy. Eastwood approaches it as such, both as director and composer (it’s Aaron Copland levels of romanticized, you eventually just have to go with it because Eastwood’s committed). But it’s also really just MacBeth in Bah-ston. A very, very cynical one. There’s not a single moment in Mystic River where a character doesn’t disappoint themselves, well, almost any single moment. At least, there’s never a single moment where a character doesn’t disappoint themselves or others. There; covered.

So it’s this “Bah-ston can be legitimate Americana too” crime tragedy mixed with an overwhelming sense of personal failure, starting from the first scene, which is a flashback to three tween boys playing street hockey in Boston of (late seventies) yore. Because they’ve been raised to unquestionably not challenge adult authority—or male bonding rituals—one of them ends up abducted and assaulted for four days before escaping. The other two friends go to see him when he gets home, but since he’s “damaged goods,” they fall off.

They grow up and become state police detective Kevin Bacon (state police means he’s not a Boston cop because they’re dumb), ex-con gone straight Sean Penn, and then there’s Tim Robbins, playing the abducted kid grown up. The only one of three who doesn’t have a real story is Bacon, who’s got some nonsense about his wife leaving him for a mystery reason and then calling him on the phone and not talking. I’ll spoil the stunt cast on the wife because it’s the film’s only completely obvious problem—Tori Davis isn’t good. Like. She can’t even convincingly hold a phone to her ear in close-up. It’s a thin subplot, so thin Bacon and partner Laurence Fishburne’s buddy cop antics are better and they’re incredibly muted for realism’s sake. Eastwood always positions Fishburne like he can walk off with the movie unless he’s boxed in (because Fishburne’s one of the natural protagonists; the film has many, just none of the three leads), only Bacon can’t hold up his end because his character’s thin. He doesn’t get to chomp away at his part like Penn or Robbins, who consume the film like it’s a whole chicken and they’re competing to see who can eat the most bones.

The three reunite over tragedy—someone murders Penn’s daughter, a just okay Emmy Rossum (Eastwood and Phyllis Huffman do a great job casting the film except for the kids—and the Wahlberg brother who can’t stop grinning like a jackass he’s in a real movie without his brother; the film at least needs to explain Robert Wahlberg’s goon is the comic psychopath one). The audience already knows Robbins saw her the night she died and then he came home really late covered in blood and told Marcia Gay Harden he beat up a mugger.

It hasn’t been an easy marriage for Harden and Robbins—though he’s a seemingly an outstanding dad to tween age son Cayden Boyd, something Harden doesn’t ever seem to acknowledge. If it turned out Boyd were a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf kid, it would actually make more sense. With no changes to the film whatsoever. But he can’t hold a job and he’s just, you know, “damaged goods.” The first act of the film, covering the ground situation after the initial tragedy… it’s kind of an indictment of the culture it’s presenting. Of the Americana. Eastwood and production designer Henry Bumstead don’t Catholic it up–there’s not even a priest in it—there’s religiosity and the importance of it in the character’s lives, but the only imagery is in Penn’s tattoos. It’s got to be broader than a specific denomination. More universal. Also, from the one church scene, you can tell Eastwood could give a shit. He lets kids be cute or whatever, but otherwise, he’s out of church faster than Homer Simpson.

Because Mystic River is all about the pace. It’s got to keep moving to stay ahead of the story rolling downhill faster and faster. Because another thing Eastwood and screenwriter Brian Helgeland do to keep the melodrama down is artificially constrain the amount of information presented to the audience. Characters have obtuse conversations so as not to spoil a surprise later. At one or two points, people read lists like they can’t possibly have skipped ahead to see the relevant information. And somehow, thanks to Eastwood’s pacing and the actors, they can get away with it. Right until the third act, River stays ahead of that story boulder.

It comes to a weird resolve, where they do a sequence juxtapose and Eastwood can only figure out one of them—though the other has the wanting youth performances—and then it turns out he figured out the wrong one; it wasn’t even the important one. Not really.

Then comes the initially cruel but then just the driest, most hopeless cynicism in the world and all of a sudden it works again. It’s an amazing last few minutes save from the film, leveraging the excellent pace, plus some great acting and intriguing reveals. Part of the artificial information constraint is to allow for secret after secret. Everyone in Mystic River lies. Almost everyone in Mystic River is easily manipulated. Eastwood and Helgeland find the mundane tragedies of people who seemingly have spectacular ones. Without every losing their pace.

There are stumbles, but the pace is always great.

Best acting is Tim Robbins, then Sean Penn. It’s the script’s fault; Robbins just gets better material. They cast for obvious because most of the actors are playing caricatures; it might’ve been better if they’d mixed it up, who knows. Then it’s Marcia Gay Harden and Laurence Fishburne, with Kevin Bacon coming in sixth. He’s excellent—but being excellent isn’t enough and Fishburne’s actually got less than even Bacon and does more. Laura Linney’s also great but she’s not on the list because she never get to run a scene. Ditto uncredited guest stars Eli Wallach, who’s awesome, and Kevin Conway, who’s real good but not awesome. Wallach is one of the two times Mystic River lets itself have any fun (the John Carpenter’s Vampires nod doesn’t count because it’s not fun it’s heartbreaking); the other time is this hilarious joke Penn thug buddy #1 (Kevin Chapman) tells. Chapman and thug buddy #2 Adam Nelson are both fine. Grinner Wahlberg makes three. He’s not fine.

Mixing up the leads, not revealing too much to the audience, not wasting time intentionally misleading the audience, there are a lot of places where Mystic needs some tinkering but it’s still really damn good.

The acting—and Eastwood’s emphasis on the acting—is glorious. Mystic misses its mark, but it’s an often magnificent try.