Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy

"Musical leitmotifs play a central role in Wim Wenders's 'Road Trilogy,' acting as both mood-setters and structural backbones. Nowhere is this more evident than in Alice in the Cities, which contains in one track, an arpeggiated acoustic guitar and synthesizer loop banged out in an afternoon by German krautrock group Can, the entire methodology and temperament of what would become a philosophically linked series of films. In musical-theory terms, the piece drones on an Aeolian modal chord and never settles on the root, creating a suspended sense of irresolution and uncertainty that aptly sets the stage for the 1974 film's meandering dramatic trajectory, as well as its ultimate view of life as a series of chance encounters without a clear end point." Full review of the new Criterion blu-ray here.

The Other Side (2015) A Film by Roberto Minervini

"An artist of herculean empathy turns his camera on a narrow-minded community in The Other Side, Italian director Roberto Minervini's fourth cinematic sojourn in the American South. Nearly every moment in this Bayou-set docu-fiction hybrid engenders a tricky twofold reaction: The words and actions of the people on screen often trigger revulsion, anger, or pity, even as Minervini's camera tenderly cozies up to its subjects, examining them in intimate proximity until the root causes and emotional justifications for their destructive behaviors become impossible to ignore." Review continues here.

The Holcroft Covenant (1985) A Film by John Frankenheimer

"Noel Holcroft (Michael Caine) doesn't know how to use a gun when The Holcroft Covenant begins. By the film's conclusion, not only can he hold one with the kind of cool poise expected of spy heroes, but he's also sharp with pistol disassembly and reassembly. This education dovetails with a plot that finds Holcroft, an honest New Yorker in the commercial construction business, becoming the victim of a transnational terror scheme and ultimately learning enough about it to singlehandedly upend its fulfillment of a prospective Fourth Reich. The year is 1985 (“Now,” as a title urgently informs us), a time in which the United States was still using counterintelligence to sniff out Soviet influence. Yet director John Frankenheimer and writer George Axelrod look at espionage and find the very concept a destructive breach of privacy and a route to anarchy, something for which active resistance—in this case, prowess with a firearm—must come into play." Full review here.

Art of the Real

"For those still reeling from seasickness induced by Leviathan, Art of the Real has the tonic. Dead Slow Ahead, another experimental, largely nocturnal portrayal of industrial seafaring, moves with the lava-flow tempo suggested by its spot-on title, with director Mauro Herce's camera a seemingly high-tonnage contrast to Leviathan's plethora of featherweight recording devices. Panning, tilting, and dolly movements are sparse, usually occurring at paces almost imperceptible to the eye as they scan the musculature and intestinal corridors of a gargantuan cargo ship pushing through the Atlantic toward New Orleans like an undigested chunk of food exiting the body. An organism at once labyrinthine and blocky, it becomes the primary object of study for Herce, who appears only to reveal the human laborers on the vessel incidentally—and even then, as tiny instruments within the alien mechanics of the larger machine on which they toil."

That's an excerpt from one of my pieces this year on Film Society of Lincoln Center's Art of the Real series. I wrote two dispatches on the festival: one on festival highlight Dead Slow Ahead and Jose Luis Guerin's The Academy of Muses, and one on Ben Rivers' What Mean Something and Italian entry Il Solengo.

Green Room (2015) A Film by Jeremy Saulnier

"Bigotry ends up playing little direct role in the reckless murderous corruption that advances the plot of the locked-room thriller Green Room. Still, Jeremy Saulnier bluntly sets the record straight, early and often, that the thugs who run the exclusionary heavy metal club in the backwoods of Oregon where the film is set and who cover up crimes on their own premises are wretched, loathsome pieces of shit undeserving of a space on this planet. When our heroes, a woebegone punk quartet called the Ain't Rights, arrive in the titular backstage lair before a gig they've taken in the express interest of some much-needed cash, the background of every shot is littered with a cornucopia of advertisements for modern history's most oppressive institutions: swastika wall scribbles, Confederate flags, and all kinds of shiver-inducing decals advocating for the supremacy of the straight white male." Review continues at Slant.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) A Film by Richard Linklater

"Just as Magic Mike XXL cast aside threatening social realities to occupy a utopia of its own volition, Everybody Wants Some!! luxuriates in a world that's the platonic ideal of youthful indulgence. It pictures an undergraduate atmosphere bursting at the seams with the usual vices (excessive drug use, dick-first thinking, hazing rituals), yet palpably lacking any sense of menace or predation. Female behinds are ogled, and always by both characters and camera (yet significantly always in that order), but the guys remain goofs longing for affection, while the girls are equally eager to find a companion. Indeed, everybody wants some." Full review of Linklater's latest gem at Slant Magazine.

The Trip (1967) A Film by Roger Corman

"Roger Corman's The Trip is exactly what one would anticipate an exploitation film made in 1967 about an LSD experience to be, offering its only pretext for its psychedelic indulgences during a madcap credit sequence where hack commercial director Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) is visited on a beachfront set by his wife, Sally (Susan Strasberg), with whom he's going through a divorce. Despite nearly being swallowed up by a jagged Electric Flag fusion number blaring away on the soundtrack and interfered with by title cards set against what looks like swirling colored molasses, the brief exchange between the couple is lovely in its understatement, with currents of regret and longing coursing implicitly through their shared glances as lines of communication are interrupted by the chaos of the shoot." Review continues at Slant.

I Saw the Light (2016) A Film by Marc Abraham

"Of course, this being a biopic in the most hackneyed mold, meaning one whose every scene is dictated by a slavish subservience to biography at the expense of psychological exploration or aesthetic experimentation, I Saw the Light also features various musical performances of Williams's most famous ditties. Some play out in Bible Belt recording studios, where typically cantankerous producers incite contractual quarrels, and others occur under golden stage lights, with hypnotized audiences singing along (look closely, though, and the extras in the crowd seem shaky on the lyrics). Rarely, however, does the film evince the pleasure Williams took in performing music. Whether he's scanning the auditorium for his next one-night stand, visibly fuming over a sarcastic remark delivered by a bandmate prior to the count off, or wading into cryptic pre-song banter while drifting off in a morphine-induced high, the performances scan as perfunctory stop gaps between the contrived depictions of a troubled man's descent into oblivion." Full review at Slant.

Eldorado XXI (2015) A Film by Salomé Lamas

"A muddy, trash-lined path snakes up a mountainside 18,000 feet about sea level in La Rinconada, Peru—the highest human settlement on Earth. Gold miners in hardhats and baggy canvas trudge wearily along this path as twilight gives way to pitch-dark night. The camera assumes a downward view, cramming the weave of the walkway into the widescreen frame so that it rises to the left in the foreground, tapers off to the right, and slopes toward the middle where there's a murky vanishing point. And with the exception of a handful of pre-credit establishing shots of snow-capped villages, this optically complicated but rather dramatically monotonous shot—over which the non-synchronous sounds of laborer monologues and regional radio programs are heard—constitutes the entire first hour of Salomé Lamas's Eldorado XXI, seemingly aligning the filmmaker's project with the durational landscape films of James Benning and Sharon Lockhart." Review continues at Slant.

Seijun Suzuki Introduction

"Like any shrewd workman, Suzuki was at his best when turning his limitations into strengths. Crowded shooting schedules encouraged impromptu technical experimentation, such as the in-camera superimpositions that became a unique Suzukian flourish when depicting internal states. Meanwhile, with the assistance of longtime production design collaborator Takeo Kimura, tawdry studio-built sets were embraced for their flimsiness, and it became a trend for Suzuki to disassemble them in the climaxes of his films so that his characters were suddenly adrift in two-dimensional color fields. In repeatedly calling attention to the artificiality of the medium and the construction of the narrative world, Suzuki’s form began to mirror his governing conception of society as a set of meaningless codes whose flimsy sense of order could easily be thrown into chaos."

"Time and Place are Nonsense: The Cinema According to Seijun Suzuki," a traveling program focused on the career of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki, is coming to the Harvard Film Archive. I wrote the introduction to the series, as well as program notes for Gate of Flesh, Youth of the Beast, Kanto Wanderer, Carmen from Kawachi, Fighting Elegy, and Story of a Prostitute. Read on here.

Happy Hour (2015) A Film by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

"Hamaguchi arranges most sequences around a handful of static, roomy medium shots that subtly suggest emotional dynamics through camera and actor positioning; several scenes around a dining table demonstrate how much the director is able to express, how much latent energy he brings to the surface, merely through who's in and out of the frame. In an excruciating trial scene brimming with the defense's implicit sexism, Hamaguchi develops his shot choices around the axis of Jun's head, keeping her central as the dehumanizing processes of the court play out in the distant background. The use of pillow shots and choices of placid interstitial music reveal Hamaguchi's kinship to Yasujirō Ozu and Hirokazu Kore-eda, but the film's formal DNA bears more traces of Eric Rohmer, who was similarly expert at orchestrating extensive dialogues with a minimum of overt directorial statement." An excerpt from my review of the wonderful Happy Hour, showing at this year's New Directors/New Films festival in New York.

The Vikings (1958) A Film by Richard Fleischer

"Christians and heathens. Two shorelines and a black, foggy sea. Organized hierarchies behind stone barricades and drunken hysteria in the ocean mist. The Vikings, an underappreciated relic from the heyday of 70mm super-productions and about as rollicking a good time as can be had at the movies, is cut with the bifurcated simplicity of a folk tale: A virginal princess-to-be is kidnapped by barbarians, in turn stoking a rivalry between two bastard brothers as well as clan warfare. It’s a film of thick impasto brushstrokes, unremorseful in its indulgence in broad contrast. Ritualistic ceremonies honoring new unions within British royalty are juxtaposed against Rabelaisian revelries fueled by frothy tubs of ale and testosterone. And the sniveling, saurian King of civilized Northumbria of course receives the most extreme foil: the booze-swilling, ass-grabbing, giddily amoral paterfamilias of the Vikings." Reviewed a new Kino Lorber Blu-Ray release of this film over at Slant.

Hello, My Name is Doris (2015) A Film by Michael Showalter

"Despite some grace notes, such as Kyle Mooney's hilarious turn as a mealy-mouthed photographer, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm for jokes built so unapologetically around the spectacle of a character's daffiness. Field's efforts to convince are thwarted continually by scenarios that make Doris a walking gag, and it's not until a late-stage reality check that the script nods to the bruised psychology influencing her artificial awakening. Still, what's most palpably and regrettably missing is the sort of self-consciously absurd riffing that powered David Wain's They Came Together, which Showalter co-wrote." Full review at Slant.

Spies (1928) A Film by Fritz Lang

"Horizon lines and vanishing points can sometimes be about as rare to come by in Fritz Lang's cinema as tracking shots are in Yasujirō Ozu's. In 1928's Spies, because of the geometric enclosures of the sets and the frequently downward-facing scan of Lang's camera, the background of the 4:3 frame is nearly always a wall, the ground, or a cluster of set elements that foreclose the margins of the characters' space. As in the opening shot, which shows a padlock up close before two ominous gloved hands enter the frame to pry at the lock. Lang first conceives of a restricting visual field and then confines human figures within it—all the better to hint at the invisible forces that govern individual lives." Continued at Slant.

Knight of Cups (2015) A Film by Terrence Malick

"Like Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, Jonas Mekas's filmed expedition to a family gathering in his homeland, Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups operates like a diary film, right down to the use of chapter titles to organize the plethora of footage recorded in Los Angeles. Where Mekas soberly planted day markers into his impressionistic sprawl, Malick gives us tarot card-inspired slates like “Judgment” and “The Tower” to loosely contextualize the wanderings of a melancholy hedonist, Rick (Christian Bale), who's less a conventional character than a mute compass for Malick and DP Emmanuel Lubezki's exploratory camera. And while Mekas's project sprang from a desire, as an expat middle-aged New Yorker whose tender disposition always seemed at odds with his hectic city of residence, to reconnect with his familial heritage, the latest from American cinema's mild-mannered outsider also functions rather transparently as an act of self-therapy." Review continues at Slant.

Forsaken (2015) A Film by Jon Cassar

"It's 1872 in Wyoming, the same false refuge for Civil War veterans zeroed in on by Quentin Tarantino in The Hateful Eight, only here there's the immediate reassuring aura that decency can and will be restored. Keifer Sutherland plays John Henry Clayton, a cowboy who fits neatly into the archetype of the moral hero with a conscience sturdy enough to keep his fast gun at bay (even his name is impossibly patriotric-sounding). John Henry's riven with familiar postwar angst and deteriorating faith, but early shots of him riding stridently across mountainous territory to tasteful major-chord crescendos ensures us that he's good at heart. When he gets home for the first time in years, he reunites with his reverend father (Donald Sutherland), who's lost confidence in his soldiering son, as well as an old love (Demi Moore) who's now hitched to, you guessed it, a jealous scoundrel (Jonny Rees)." Full review at Slant.

The Emigrants / The New Lands (1971 / 1972) Films by Jan Troell

"'We're the best of friends.' That's the endearment that a married couple, played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, whisper to one another in Jan Troell's The Emigrant. For anyone familiar with von Sydow and Ullmann's collaborations in the filmography of Ingmar Bergman, it's a deeply moving moment as much for its narrative context—Ullmann's character is suffering from seasickness aboard a ship to America as a storm beats against her cabin and fellow peasants wail outside the frame—as for its metatextual implications. The two actors sparred, trembled, and agonized together on screen so routinely under the gaze of the famously penetrating Swede that a comparatively blissful moment almost registers as a glitch, even as it doubles as a validation of the pair's fruitful working relationship. It's hard to imagine any fan emerging from the scene, sensitively prolonged by Troell in intimate close-ups, with dry eyes." Review of an excellent new Criterion Collection disc continues at Slant.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) A Film by Peter Greenaway

"The history of artists working away from their homeland is rich with tales of creative flowerings: wide-eyed Paul Gauguin dispatching to Tahiti and expanding his palette, wacked-out Salvador Dalí descending on Paris to find a melting pot of artistic cross-pollination, globetrotting Orson Welles sticking it to American financiers by creating some of his most daring work in new lands, and Andrei Tarkovsky transcending both his nostalgia for his motherland and a rapidly deteriorating body with a series of deeply personal art films. Somewhere adjacent to this history is the curious case of Sergei Eisenstein's sojourn in Mexico, which serves as the subject of Eisenstein in Guanajuato." Continued at Slant Magazine.

Figures in a Landscape (1970) A Film by Joseph Losey

"Figures in a Landscape is composed entirely of such small-scale strategic warfare, and Losey graciously perceives no crisis of entertainment value. Why bother injecting dramatic banalities when the visual dynamics of the story already produce their own tension? Political and geographical contexts go scrupulously unexplored, the identity of the oppressor is never clarified (all we see of the pilots are portions of their backs in over-the-shoulder shots framing their front window's panoramic ground view), and the backstories of Shaw's barking alpha and McDowell's trembling beta are only vaguely and incrementally doled out. What remains is something at once meticulously tangible in its moment-to-moment action choreography and eerily abstract in its larger narrative design." Full review of this film's new Kino Lorber blu-ray up now at Slant.

My Favorite Discoveries/First-Time Viewings of 2015

A few thoughts by way of introduction...

-Many of these impressionistic notes are pulled from Twitter records. If not, they're admittedly simplified and fragmentary remembrances.

-33 of the 50 films here were viewed on 35mm or 16mm in various repertory theaters around Los Angeles (and in a few cases Boston). For that I have the New Beverly Cinema, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre, Cinefamily, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and all of their programmers to thank. I'd also extend a warm thanks to the Harvard Film Archive, where I saw my #1 this year, and from which I had to bid farewell in May after hundreds of formative moviegoing experiences. The remaining 20 were seen via DVD, digital file or online streaming link, and for that I have various distributors, editors and web services to thank.

-Titles link to longer writing when applicable. In these instances, I've excluded a note in hopes that you'll direct yourself to the link instead.

-This list is also viewable on Letterboxd, if that's your thing.

-See also my 2014, 2013 and 2012 versions.

---

1. Black Book (Verhoeven, Netherlands/Germany/UK, 2006)

2. The Noose (Has, Poland, 1958): Like an amalgam of Bergman's The Silence, Tarr's tipsy bar sequences and Welles' The Trial, with some Flight thrown in. So basically a form of personal nirvana. Has finds some of the most expressive uses of 4:3 framing I've ever seen, stacking faces in depth and swapping their positions like cards in a deck.

3. The Vikings (Fleischer, US, 1958)

4. Kwaidan (Kobayashi, US, 1964)

5. History is Made at Night (Borzage, US, 1937)

6. Downhill Racer (Ritchie, US, 1969): Speaking as a skier and former racer, this is ecstatic truth. The anxious countdowns, the sound of the trampled terrain, the feeling of peering over the slope and of removing the overcoat before the race, the après culture...Ritchie's observations are spot-on. Also, Robert Redford at his best walking a thin line between arrogant asshole and tragic fool.

7. Track of the Cat (Wellman, US, 1954): Generational clashes! Battles for patriarchy! A magical Indian both loathed and respected! Deadly alcoholism played for laughs! 50s American cinema doesn't really get weirder, darker, or more torn by competing impulses than this.

8. Shock (Beyond the Door II) (Bava, Italy, 1977)

9. A Nos Amours (Pialat, France, 1983): Sandrine Bonnaire's lithe, defiant sexuality against the world. Pialat looks on with a mix of rapt fascination and pragmatic stoicism, then bulldozes into frame to personally deliver one of the most crushingly no-bullshit monologues in his entire bruised body of work.

10. Ride in the Whirlwind (Hellman, US, 1966)

11. Mikey and Nicky (May, US, 1976): "Talking to dead people is hard. I don't have much in common." Reckless, messy, texturally rich, devastating.

12. They All Laughed (Bogdanovich, US, 1981): Somehow functions as both absurd male fantasy and extremely charming, harmless film about lust and desire. It's also a brilliant movie about how hard it can be to physically exist in the crowded labyrinth of a city. Sturges-caliber physical comedy.

13. The Docks of New York (von Sternberg, US, 1928): Lost souls scraping around for traces of stability in a boozed-up, clammy, overfogged netherworld that looks something like the titular location. The most sparkling celluloid print I saw all year.

14. Matinee (Dante, US, 1993): Hard to imagine a popular entertainment this intellectually audacious confronting current ISIS anxieties, but boy would it be nice if we could recruit top-form Joe Dante to do just that.

15. Yellow Sky (Wellman, US, 1948): Charts a slow, bumpy transition from amorality to democratic thought. The build-up to the final shootout is as artfully unflashy as Ford's OK Corral. As a bonus, Anne Baxter's vintage selvage Levi's are a thing of beauty.

16. Manhunter (Mann, US, 1986): Maybe Michael Mann's Meshes of the Afternoon. Three consummate Mann professionals, all complementary nodes in a Jungian field of consciousness. Cinematic convulsions when they collide. Also: a woman with a mirror face, an underfurnished suburban home, a walkway that descends back and forth.

17. F for Fake (Welles, France/Iran/West Germany, 1973): An unfiltered dose of Welles at his most quintessentially paradoxical, evenly juggling his political genius and trickster irreverence, the aggregate result a weirdly melancholy swirl of ideas that made me retroactively grasp some of his late-career films that failed to connect.

18. The Naked Spur (Mann, US, 1953): California tourism agencies should just show this film as part of their promotional package. Features some of the most gorgeous-without-being-inertly picturesque location shooting from the Technicolor era.

19. The Mouth Agape (Pialat, France, 1974): I wonder if Michael Haneke watched this humbling testament to the labor involved in death from all involved and thought, "This, but way more of the actual agony of dying."

20. Nenette and Boni (Denis, France, 1996): Here's what makes Denis inexplicably great: the best scene in this film features two characters staring at each other as the entirety of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" plays on the radio. It's covered in just two lengthy close-ups, across which the complicated dynamics of the characters' long-term relationship play out. The kicker? They're only supporting characters. Denis' compassion and curiosity spills over into everything.

21. Bless Their Little Hearts (Woodberry, US, 1983): Suffused so fully with the frustration and pain of poverty that even subpar acting feels like a product of hardship eating away at the individuals making the film. Rivette's proposal that "every film is a documentary of its own making" proved a more useful framework for me here than in the actual Rivette film further down on this list.

22. The Bravados (King, US, 1958): Based on what I've read and the strength of this bleak western, I'm hoping to make Henry King's filmography a project of mine in 2016. "Some people think prayers help" is the last limp advice given to a tortured Gregory Peck, a line delivered so coldly in master shot as to singlehandedly undercut the critical legacy of King as a director of reassuring Americana. Here's a film that boldly interrogates the distance between moral conscience and the comparatively artificial delusions of religious dogma.

23. Soft Fiction (Strand, US, 1979): Very different from the mode of handheld ethnography I previously associated Chick Strand with. Almost Gunvor Nelson-esque at times in its visualization of interior states, as well as its embellishment of the truth in favor of emotional distillation. Not every monologue subject is equally compelling, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

24. That Night's Wife (Ozu, Japan, 1930)

25. The Tingler (Castle, US, 1959): I'm generally allergic to stunt screenings, but this is the rare film where audience interactivity is integral to its effect. Castle is playfully aware of how the theater one watches this in actually becomes a part of the mise-en-scene.

26. The Fastest Gun Alive (Rouse, US, 1956): Features one of the few Glenn Ford performances oozing with nervousness and self-loathing rather than macho confidence, as well as one of the most awe-inspiring dance scenes I've seen (and in a western of all things). A serious ethical inquiry and a deadpan comedy simultaneously.

27. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Fassbinder, West Germany, 1972)

28. Rolling Thunder (Flynn, US, 1977)

29. Jane B. for Agnes V. (Varda, France, 1988): An eccentric, zigzagging search for the life, identity and soul of those within and behind an artistic representation.

30. Remember the Night (Leisen, US, 1940)

31. Careful (Maddin, Canada, 1992)

32. The Trial (Welles, France/West Germany/Italy, 1962): Endless portals, industrial voids, grotesques in off-centered close-up. A film with no memory bank. The most Lynchian Welles movie.

33. Cemetery Without Crosses (Hossein, France/Italy/Spain, 1969)

34. Kill Baby, Kill (Bava, Italy, 1966): Wherein Mario Bava at one point emulates the motion of a swing with the use of a zoom lens and a dolly track (the lurching camera movement giving the impression of a child's POV), only to reveal at the end of the shot an actual swing-set previously hidden frame right. Of this year's viewings, I struggle to recall a more brazen or a more unusual exertion of directorial chutzpah.

35. Drums Along the Mohawk (Ford, US, 1939): Panoramic and intimate, an incongruous register that Ford revels in.

36. Taking Off (Forman, US, 1971)

37. Out 1 (Rivette, France, 1971)

38. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Van Peebles, US, 1971)

39. The Delinquents (Altman, US, 1957)

40. La France (Bozon, France, 2007)

41. Westward the Women (Wellman, US, 1951): Gets hokey in the end (courtesy of Capra on the typewriter), but the journey's so bleak that there's a mid-film memorial service. Wellman's omission of any kind of cartographic markers makes the cross-country stagecoach trek amorphous, and thus a key touchstone for Kelly Reichardt and Tommy Lee Jones.

42. In the Realm of the Senses (Ôshima, Japan/France, 1976): The last film I saw at Harvard Film Archive prior to shipping out for the west coast, so...a strange farewell.

43. A Face in the Crowd (Kazan, US, 1957): A man who controls the camera and the nation's gaze becomes a man controlled by the camera, begging for attention.

44. Premature Burial (Corman, US, 1962): "I never enjoy myself. I merely enjoy greater and lesser degrees of tedium" - Alan Napier. Wonderfully deranged and conspicuously artificial Halloween viewing.

45. The Woman Who Dared (Grémillon, France, 1944): Romantic devotion trumps parental devotion, and a woman excels as both a revolutionary and a housewife. Pretty radical. The only Jean Gremillon film I managed to see at UCLA's retrospective, but from it alone I'd guess he's one of the era's true crowd-control masters.

46. Buffalo Bill and the Indians (Altman, US, 1976)

47. The Saragossa Manuscript (Has, Poland, 1965): Because sometimes being totally lost for over three hours is an enlightening experience.

48. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (Maddin, Canada, 1997)

49. Minnie and Moskowitz (Cassavetes, US, 1971): Minnie's blind diner-date with the swollen scrotum wearing aviators is a master class in acting. Reading "Cassavetes on Cassavetes" this year helped clarify to some extent how the director was able to extract such brilliant performances, but this is one of those scenes that remains on some higher ground where directing tricks only explain so much.

50. Kiss Me, Stupid (Wilder, US, 1964)