Double Review: The Blob (1958) and The Wolf Man (1941)

Young "Steven" McQueen plays protagonist Steve in The Blob. 

I am a self-proclaimed horror movie fan. As a devotee of the genre, I love its towering canonical classics (the 1930s Universal horror films, Gojira, Night of the Living Dead, John Carpenter's The Thing), its overlooked but easy to defend hidden gems (Martin, The Descent, Candyman), and even its schlocky fringe entries (Haxan, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Mountain of the Cannibal God) on the border between horror and comedy.

Of course I don't love every horror film I watch (e.g., most of the recent remakes of 1970s classics), and there are horror films I deliberately avoid (e.g., Human Centipede).

But I really enjoyed The Blob. I was aware of it, of course, but never got around to seeing it until a couple weekends ago -- as part of the Criterion Collection, it streams on Hulu Plus. It is a fun, well-constructed monster movie combined with a teen exploitation melodrama. It is infused with 1950s Cold War paranoia (the titular Blob is red after all) and sublimated teen sexuality. The movie maintains a fast clip and uses its studio-set mise-en-scene evocatively.

Check out the spooky meat locker!

A very young "Steven" McQueen plays protagonist Steve, a morally upstanding "good kid" who nevertheless pals around with his small town's group of resident juvenile delinquents. While out on a date with his girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corseaut), Steve sees a strange object drop out of the night sky and rushes to investigate. The object is a small meteorite containing the titular blob -- before Steve arrives, a local farmer finds the meteorite and gets attacked by the slimy, gelatinous entity.

Despite its predictable plot and some hamfisted B-movie acting, The Blob's built-in schlockiness saves it, as do its cool, visceral blob effects. The two go hand-in hand. For example, I laughed more than I got scared during the scene when Steve sees the doctor being attacked by the blob through the window. But that's okay: The Blob is a film that needn't be scary to be pleasurable. In some ways, the film does credit to fans of the monster movie genre by faithfully honoring its conventions and keeping the pace brisk.

God help me, the first time I saw this well-made scene I laughed at poor Dr. Hallen's violent death. 

McQueen is a treat to watch, as is Earl Rowe as Lieutenant Dave, the one cop on the local police force who takes Steve seriously and believes his claims about the monster before anyone else (besides Jane) does.

The Blob may not be a first-ranker as far as monster movies go -- it is no King Kong or Gojira or Them! nor does it have the frightening, paranoid power of Don Siegel's brilliant Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). But it is great fun for its unintentionally campy performances and its cleverly executed (if cheap-looking) effects. The Blob is scrappy, low-budget, schlock-horror cinema at its finest.

Sadly, Universal's The Wolf Man does not hold up quite so well, in part because it is tonally darker, taking itself more seriously than The Blob does. The Wolf Man is hard to laugh at yet isn't as scary or compelling as its studio cousins Dracula, Frankenstein (both 1931), or The Mummy (1932). In the end, despite my general love and admiration for the 1930s Universal horror film cycle, I enjoyed Universal's The Wolf Man quite a bit less than I do those other Universal films or The Blob.

Lon Chaney Jr. is The Wolf Man's star and its weakest link. Unfortunately for him and Universal Studios, leaving the "Jr." off of his screen credit does not grant him the substantial talent and acting chops of his late father.  

The Wolf Man's major problems boil down to its combination of

(1) Predictable, boilerplate plot elements you can see coming from miles away,

and, even more devastating,

(2) The lackluster lead performance of Lon Chaney, Jr. as Larry / The Wolf Man.

It is easiest to talk about these two elements together.

In the opening shot of The Wolf Man, an encyclopedia entry on lycanthropy mentions Talbot Castle as a site of ongoing werewolf occurrences, then seconds later Larry shows up at -- you guessed it -- Talbot Castle. Badly written expository dialogue between Larry and his father (Claude Rains) follows.

It's not that I expect innovative plotting in horror genre fare like this -- it's just that if the plot and dialogue are going to be so canned, then the film needs either really good actors (like, say, Rains, who plays Larry's father Sir John Talbot) or terribly bad or stiff ones so you can laugh at them.* Chaney Jr. is just good enough to be mediocre but not bad enough to be hilarious. He's not colossally bad, especially when playing the Wolf Man, i. e., Larry in werewolf form. But as Larry, he comes off as the kind of one-dimensional, good-ol' American gladhander we usually see Chaney's Wolf Man costar Ralph Bellamy play in films like His Girl Friday or Rock Hudson play knowingly and parodically in Pillow Talk. One has the feeling that Chaney Jr. is not in on the joke here. Rather, his limited acting chops make his Larry unintentionally buffoonish.

To take a contrasting example, Bela Lugosi surely lacks range as an actor -- his portentious mugging as The Wolf Man's gypsy fortune-teller Bela is essentially the same schtick he used to play Count Dracula in 1931 -- but at least he works quite well in the (small) role he is given.

The same cannot be said of Chaney, Jr., who is simply not up to the task of carrying a genre film like this on his hulking shoulders. I should be able to feel more pathos for Larry as the terrible, supernatural disease of lycanthropy afflicts him -- instead, I root for the boring townspeople who want him dead. He comes off especially flat next to nuanced performers like Rains and Maria Ouspenskaya, who plays the gypsy woman Maleva and who steals every scene she's in.

Remember how I mentioned Universal's Frankenstein and The Mummy earlier? The main point of connection between those two films is star Boris Karloff, a world-class film actor who brings that special something -- screen presence, gravitas, charisma -- to every role he plays. Sure, one could argue that Frankenstein, at least, has a slightly better script than most of the Universal films that followed it, and that it benefits from the "freshness factor," being only the second film of the Universal horror cycle after Dracula. Furthermore, both Frankenstein and The Mummy also benefit from the abilities and inventiveness of their respective directors, James Whale and Karl Freund.

Yet the point I'm making here is that good stars make a big difference, especially in genre movies, where other elements are often (by design) formulaic. Even in the present day, there is a reason Tom Cruise action movies tend to perform well, and why big-budget blockbusters that eschew stars often face grim prospects. While I enjoy many of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and early '40s, the cycle's best entries are the ones with really charismatic and talented star actors: Karloff in Frankenstein and The Mummy, Karloff and Charles Laughton in The Old, Dark House (1932), and Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933).

So consider skipping The Wolf Man in favor of any of these other, better Universal horror films. Or watch it as an historical curiosity, as an example of what happens when a studio tries in vain to substitute one Chaney for another.

The great Boris Karloff as Imhotep in Karl Freund's The Mummy. 

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* Rains also plays the title role in Universal's excellent The Invisible Man (1933), the nurturing psychiatrist who brings Bette Davis out of her shell in Now, Voyager (1942), and of course the evil yet ultimately pathetic villain in Hitchcock's Notorious (1946).

End of the Year Roundup

Spring Breakers, the most artful, sublime, and culturally savvy film I saw this year.

I prefer to call this end of the year reflection a "roundup" because I am somewhat opposed to the idea of "best of" lists or even the idea of "best" when applied to works of entertainment or art in the first place. These things are so damn subjective that, although I am surely subject to my own outbursts of praising or condemning hyperbole when discussing cinema, I do not wish to convey that I place much faith in rankings of "best films" whether such lists are composed by me or by others.

All that said, I understand the compulsion to collect one's thoughts at the end of a year and to make some kind of temporarily definitive statement about the highlights of one's moviegoing experiences in the 365 days just passed. So with that in mind, and in no particular order, here are some of the most memorable films and filmgoing experiences I've had in 2013.

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup in Steve McQueen's powerful anti-slavery film 

12 Years a Slave.

The most impactful films of 2013 for me include 12 Years a Slave, Only God Forgives, Enough Said, Spring Breakers, Blackfish, and The Heat. Please factor into this that I have not yet seen other promising 2013 releases such as Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, Frances Ha, Before Midnight, or practically any of the films on this list (let alone this one).

I have discussed Only God Forgives and Enough Said elsewhere, and am still working on a stand-alone review of the Steve McQueen masterpiece 12 Years a Slave, but I will say a few words about those other three films now.

While 12 Years is probably the most historically "important" film listed above, and the most emotionally wrenching for sure, I have to choose Harmony Korine's satirical, postmodern masterpiece Spring Breakers as my personal favorite this year.  As Tom Carson so eloquently puts it in his assessment of the film,

People have debated whether Spring Breakers sends up the prurient appeal of exploitation movies or is just prurient, but that's missing the point: both are true.  [. . .] What's most startling about the movie is how breezily but bluntly it lays bare white America's "I wanna be black" race fantasies. [. . .] In this movie Korine is as sharp as any director ever has been about the sexual and racial pathologies that underlie so many forms of American craziness.

Indeed. It is a postmodern masterwork that accurately depicts where we are right now. It is also, at the same time, a remarkable and very sensitively crafted teenaged coming-of-age story that is, if not explicitly feminist, at least female-positive.* That is quite an achievement. Add to this Korine's remarkable talent for capturing indelibly beautiful (if sometimes disturbing) visual images, a talent which, if anything, has matured since his earlier works Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), and Mister Lonely (2007), and you have in Spring Breakers a stunning art film cum-social critique that every thinking American should see.

Blackfish, by contrast, is a well-produced but relatively straightforward documentary, more noteworthy for its heartbreaking subject matter than its formal innovation. Taking as its focus a series of (mostly covered up) lethal attacks upon various SeaWorld trainers over the decades, Blackfish documents the irreparable psychological damage done to orca ("killer whales") who are captured and held in captivity as marine zoos and theme parks. As this article suggests, watching the film may sour you on taking a trip to SeaWorld but it will touch your conscience and your emotions and will raise your awareness about the human species' ethical obligation to our oceangoing mammalian brethren. A chilling, emotionally compelling must-see.

One of the final shots of Blackfish, depicting a pod of orca 
where they belong: in the wild.

The Heat is the laugh-out-loud funniest film I've seen since at least Bridesmaids (2011) and possibly even Superbad (2007). Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, the well-paired stars of this straight-ahead buddy comedy, have excellent onscreen chemistry; The Heat is hilariously funny throughout yet integrates a few touching moments between the two leads that do not come off as too schmaltzy or sentimental. The writing and direction are top-notch. I wish they'd given Jane Curtin a more substantive role and more screen time as McCarthy's hard-edged mother. But ultimately I highly recommend The Heat if you want to laugh. I hope that the runaway success of the film leads to more consistent production of female-led comedies in Hollywood going forward.

Pre-2013 films I finally saw and am so happy I did include Take This Waltz (2011), Marie Antoinette (2006), Adam's Apples (2005), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Chasing Ice (2012), Shallow Grave (1994), and Berberian Sound Studio (2012).

I have reviewed Sarah Polley's superb relationship drama Take This Waltz elsewhere, and plan to discuss Marie Antoinette in a separate post on Sofia Coppola and Adam's Apples in a post on Mads Mikkelsen.

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin is probably the single most disturbing film I saw this year, about a mother coming to terms with the fact that her son may be a sociopath. As a thriller/family melodrama, the film is both a real nail-biter and a poignantly beautiful paean to the struggles of motherhood -- Tilda Swinton, always an actress to watch out for, gives a harrowingly raw and ultimately quite tender performance as Kevin's seemingly emotionally distant mother. I just cannot recommend this film highly enough; it is a must-see.

Ezra Miller as Kevin in Lynne Ramsay's harrowing family drama 

We Need To Talk About Kevin.

Chasing Ice is a beautifully shot documentary about environmental photographer James Balog's decade-long quest to document the retreat of the world's glaciers as a result of global climate change. His time-lapse photography, shown in the last twenty minutes of the documentary, is so sublimely horrifying that I think every citizen of Earth should see it. However, equally compelling and worth seeing is the whole lead-up to that jaw-dropping footage, in which we see what a painstaking process it was for Balog to capture it in the first place.

Of Shallow Grave and Berberian Sound Studio I have little to say other than they are both excellent, even exceptional genre films: Grave a darkly comic suspense thriller / neo-noir about three roommates who plot and execute a murder together, and Berberian a horror film / art film that is also a loving homage to the Italian giallo horror film tradition -- with a twist. I recommend Danny Boyle's witty and accessible Shallow Grave to anyone; Berberian Sound Studio is probably best appreciated by folks with at least a passing knowledge of Italian horror (see at least Suspiria first) and an openness to films that end ambiguously.

Toby Jones as a hapless sound recordist in Berberian Sound Studio.

Noteworthy 1960s and 1970s films I saw for the first time this year include The Yakuza (1974), Blue Collar (1978), When Eight Bells Toll (1971), Juggernaut (1974), The Wild Geese (1978), and L'Avventura (1960).

I saw The Yakuza (1974) and Blue Collar (1978) when I was on a brief Paul Schrader jag this summer -- he scripted both films and directed the second. Both are superb if you enjoy 1970s Hollywood cinema. For me, The Yakuza was the real standout, bringing an aging Robert Mitchum back for a revisionist noir set in Japan. While a bit Orientalist, the film is extremely well made and yields many delights for fans of noir-ish thrillers. Blue Collar is actually more hard-hitting thematically, dealing as it does with the (corrupt, racist) politics of the automobile labor unions, and it features killer performances by Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto.

Anthony Hopkins in the delightful, James Bond-esque 

espionage thriller When Eight Bells Toll. 

When Eight Bells Toll is one of my most unexpected discoveries this year -- I found it when perusing Netflix streaming offerings looking for British thrillers. Bells is essentially a James Bond film without James Bond in it. Anthony Hopkins plays an experienced secret agent on a dangerous mission in northern England; many plot points remind me of From Russia With Love and Dr. No. If you are a fan of the early Bonds and/or Hopkins, When Eight Bells Toll is not to be missed!

Juggernaut and The Wild Geese were films I found during my summer quest for British thrillers (I also found Ffolkes on the same roundup, but probably cannot recommend that one as strongly, except to diehard Roger Moore fans). The former film is flat-out excellent; anyone who likes thriller / action films like Die Hard will surely enjoy Juggernaut, which is about a bomb squad defusing two bombs aboard a passenger liner at sea. Juggernaut's greatest strength, besides its extremely tight and tension-filled script, is its all-star British cast, including Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, and Julian Glover.

The appeal of The Wild Geese may be more selective, as it is a war film about an aging group of retired commandoes going on one last mission. What redeems the film is its cast -- Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Roger Moore, and Hardy Kruger -- and its focus on the relationships between the key team members. It is also quite funny at times, exploiting its principals' advancing age to show how difficult it is for them to get back into military shape etc. Ultimately a poignant male-centered buddy film, The Wild Geese is highly recommended IF you like that genre or are a particular fan of any or all of the film's stars.

L'Avventura (1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) was another film I saw at the Dryden this fall, and it was simply terrific. I am relatively behind on my Italian cinema, having only just gotten serious about Fellini this past summer (more on that development in a moment), but I must say Antonioni has surely caught my attention with his gently nuanced, at times darkly comic portrayal of young Italian socialites. Like a more grittily realistic yet emotionally tender version of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Antonioni's 1960 art-cinema classic is surely one of the finest and most memorable movies I saw this year. On to his Red Desert next!

Italian film director Federico Fellini.

On the list of Directors I knew a little about but got to know better this year are Julie Taymor, Federico Fellini, Sam Peckinpah, John Ford, and Anthony Mann. I have discussed Ford before and plan to write separate appreciations for Mann and Taymor, but I will say a few words about my great Fellini adventure and my delve deeper into Peckinpah's cinema.

I began this summer woefully lacking in direct experience of the work of Federico Fellini, having only seen 8 1/2 (1963) and brief excerpts from La Dolce Vita (1960) and Fellini Satyricon (1969). However, over the summer I increased my exposure to this wonderful and influential filmmaker via viewings of two of his masterpieces: La Dolce Vita and Amarcord (1973). Both of these are simply fantastic films. Amarcord is probably the more "accessible" of the two, being in (vibrant) color and being a bit more sentimental in tone than other Fellini films I've seen. However, for me, Vita is now my favorite Fellini film of all. More downbeat and less overtly carnivalesque than 8 1/2, Vita is a true masterpiece of 1960's European cinema that accurately captures upper-middle-class ennui even more poignantly and bitingly than the American film The Graduate would seven years later. Suffice to say, Fellini has totally won me over; next on my Fellini viewing list are La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957).

As far as Peckinpah goes, I was already a huge fan of his epic revisionist Western The Wild Bunch (1969); it is one of my all-time favorite films. But over the summer I caught four more of his films, winners all: the noir-ish Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), the comedy/western The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), the controversial thriller Straw Dogs (1971), and his late-career downbeat Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). I confess to enjoying the former two over the latter two, mainly because Alfredo Garcia is so tightly scripted, delightfully violent, and grotesquely weird;** and because Cable Hogue is so unexpectedly tender, funny, and sentimental, especially for the usually violent and action-oriented Peckinpah. Are these still sexist, male-centered films? Yes, of course; that is what you get with Peckinpah. Yet Hogue and Garcia contain two of the best-developed women characters we're likely to get out of the misogynistic director, especially Hogue's Hildy (Stella Stevens). Also, Hogue contains one of Jason Robards' all-time best performances, rendered delightfully comic by his interactions with David Warner as a lothario/priest. Both Dogs and Pat Garrett are definitely worth seeing, though the former suffers from a contrived-feeling plot, and the latter is just so relentlessly bleak and downbeat (and this from a viewer who typically enjoys such things) that it was hard to "enjoy" in the usual sense of the word. Also, Bob Dylan's onscreen appearance in a minor yet pervasive role in Garrett is distracting.

Finally, in terms of memorable at-home viewing, I saw two really dynamite 1930s horror films this year: James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932) and Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). I don't have much to say about these except: see them! House may well be Whale's greatest film, and Vampyr is one of the most creepily disturbing, and by far the most artfully and beautifully shot, vampire films I have ever seen. Only Murnau's Nosferatu is in this same league, and that just barely.

My Best Moviegoing Experiences this year were the discovery of "silent Tuesdays" at the Dryden Theater in Rochester and attending my first-ever screening at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Lightbox Theater. I have posted about the former before; I would only like to add here that since writing that I have been to see film historian and pianist extraordinaire Phil Carli introduce and accompany the excellent, expressionistic silent film The Scarlet Letter (1926, dir. Victor Sjostrom), and the experience was EVEN BETTER than seeing and hearing him accompany The Lodger. Carli admitted that Letter is one of his personal favorite movies, and I think his enthusiasm for it came through in his piano accompaniment that night; it was even more nuanced and emotive than his Hitchcock score had been.

Bette Davis -- one of my favorite golden-age screen actresses -- in the superb 

The Little Foxes.

My trip to the TIFF Lightbox -- a beautiful, multi-screen facility in downtown Toronto -- was quite thrilling as well. I was there to see Little Foxes (1941, dir. William Wyler), part of a series of Bette Davis films being screened there this fall. The movie was simply great, as were the book offerings in the TIFF Gift Shop. Not many "standard" bookstores, no matter how well-stocked, carry many of the types of books I most enjoy, i.e., works of film criticism and film history beyond the most obvious biographical works. TIFF's shop had several such books, including a fairly complete array of BFI essays on individual films. What a treat!

Also deserving of mention in the "Best Moviegoing Experiences" category this year was my trip to the Original Princess Theater in Waterloo, Ontario to see the brilliant satire Austenland (2013). The Princess is a longstanding neighborhood art-house theater in downtown Waterloo, and Austenland, starring Keri Russell and Jennifer Coolidge, is a sharp, perfectly constructed satire of Jane Austen fandom and the traditional conventions of the cinematic romantic comedy. I think many reviewers missed the point of this film, taking it for a "failed" romantic comedy. However, like Spring Breakers, Austenland requires the viewer to acknowledge its ironical stance toward its own content; like Breakers, Austenland is clearly intended as satire. Seen in that light, it is completely delightful, extraordinarily witty, and very canny about its subject matter. In short, it is one of the smartest and funniest films I saw all year.

Concluding thoughts: If I were going to recommend only three of the films discussed above to my readers (whether or not they were this year's releases), they would be 12 Years a Slave, Blackfish, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. These three movies suggest themselves mostly due to their content, not so much their formal or visual boldness. While all three are very well-made, only 12 Years contains any formal devices -- mainly a couple extraordinarily (and excruciatingly) long takes and some interesting use of sound -- that could be described as "experimental" in any way. No, I recommend these films to everyone because I think the themes and subject matter they tackle -- American slavery, our ethical responsibility to whales, and a family confronting the reality of a sociopath in its midst -- are unique and urgent. We don't often see films willing to look at subjects like these so sensitively and unflinchingly. And while there is surely a place for movies as "escapist" entertainment, as A.O. Scott has written,

what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.

Scott's comments were published in 2009, but resonate very strongly four years later. I hope your own movie-going year was stimulating and diverse, and here's to an equally exciting 2014!

Officer Mullins and Agent Ashburn say: 

"We hope you had a fun moviegoing year!"

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* UPDATE: Since posting this retrospective I discovered this feminist appreciation of Spring Breakers by Britt Hayes of Screencrush, in which she writes: "'Spring Breakers' is a surprisingly smart film that explores the fantasy of female agency amidst the garish dayglo excess of Spring Break [. . .] The film asks us why we want to see these girls in increasingly dangerous situations, how they could be so empowered and take agency over themselves and the men who surround them, and ultimately why we don't believe they ever could have that agency." Well said!
** Now that I have seen Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia -- probably my second favorite Peckinpah film after The Wild Bunch -- I am convinced that it has exerted a particularly strong influence upon Quentin Tarantino's early work, especially Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and his 1996 collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn. 

Five Directors to Watch Out For

As my friend and fellow movie reviewer A.J. Snyder recently wrote, tuning into who directs and writes the movies you like most can be an easy way to track down more movies you will enjoy. As A.J. points out, while some movie stars -- George Clooney leaps to mind -- do a pretty effective job at consistently choosing high-quality projects, others -- Michael Caine, for instance -- are more liberal in said choices, and have starred in just as many terrible movies as decent ones. However, following a particular director or screenwriter allows you to engage with the work of someone who "[goes] to work to establish their vision within their medium," as A.J. writes, and if you choose well, the rewards can be great.

Of course, as A.J. also cautions us, auteur theory -- the notion that the quality of a given cinematic work is largely determined by who directs it -- does not account for all great movies; far from it. Filmmaking is a collaborative and industrial art form, and there are a great many creative (directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, costume designers, actors) and non-creative (studio executives, MPAA Ratings Board workers) personnel who contribute significantly to the final product we see onscreen. Many of the best directors (and even some bad ones) tend to collaborate with the same creative team again and again, a move which speaks volumes about the importance of those other staffers' contributions. For example, many visually talented directors like Ridley Scott, J.J. Abrams, and even Zack Snyder often have their movies utterly ruined by shitty-ass screenwriters like Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci, and David S. Goyer.*

However, in many cases the director does have a fairly direct impact upon what makes it into the final cut. This can sometimes lead to excesses which may or may not represent artistic growth (I'm looking at you, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson), but at the end of the day, I would rather see a "noble failure" by filmmakers with something interesting or unique to show me rather than something formulaic and cliched that simply "plays it safe."

So with that in mind, here are five directors working today who produce consistently good, even great work, whose filmographies are well worth checking out:

Nicole Holofcener
Writer/director Holofcener's latest film, the superb Enough Said (2013), has been getting a great deal of positive press lately (also here and here), perhaps largely due to the passing of one of its stars, James Gandolfini. While I really enjoyed Gandolfini's terrific performance in the film -- what a relief to see him doing something other than a stereotypically thick New Jersey mobster accent -- the real star of the show is Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She gives a nuanced, multi-layered portrayal that benefits from her impeccable comedic timing.

Yet the wonderfully engaging Enough Said is no fluke; Holofcener is simply one of the best writer/directors working today. Her grasp of the subtleties of human emotions and her ability to mine comedy from the most unexpected aspects of interpersonal relationships is unparalleled by any other American filmmaker of whom I am aware. My personal favorite of her films (unless Enough Said trumps it upon subsequent viewings) is 2001's Lovely and Amazing, an ensemble piece about how several different women deal with issues of beauty, body image, parenting, and romance. Starring Holofcener mainstay Catherine Keener, Lovely and Amazing is a must-see for anyone who enjoys offbeat slice-of-life type stories; Holofcener is a master of that form. I also strongly recommend Holofcener's recent efforts Friends With Money (in which Jennifer Aniston plays a delightfully likeable slacker) and Please Give (another solid ensemble piece). Walking and Talking (1996), while a bit lower budget and rougher around the edges, is worth a watch for its excellent dialogue sequences and its inclusion of one of Liev Schreiber's finest onscreen performances (after Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers of course -- Schreiber's best role).

 Jennifer Aniston as underemployed slacker Olivia in Friends With Money.

Holofcener finally deserves our attention not just because she is so good at capturing the nuances of human interactions onscreen but also because she consistently treats subject matter almost never tackled by mainstream Hollywood cinema: the stories of women's lives, and (more recently) the lives of middle-aged, post-divorce men and women. And while she typically places more of the narrative focus upon female subjectivity, her male characters always shine as well -- see, for example, Jake Gyllenhaal and Dermot Mulroney in Lovely and Amazing or Oliver Platt in Please Give. That Holofcener renders these characters and their cinematic stories with such delightful humor, emotional sensitivity, and impeccable aesthetic craftsmanship (craftswomanship?) is what vaults her into the first rank of American film directors.

Director Steve McQueen with frequent collaborator Michael Fassbender.

Steve McQueen
McQueen's forthcoming picture, 12 Years a Slave, is already wowing festival crowds and film critics, and promises to be one of the most talked-about films of 2013. However, even if a riveting drama about the realities of American slavery is not your cup of tea, you owe it to yourself to check out one or both of the UK director's previous two features.

Hunger (2008) is a beautifully shot, unflinchingly written account of the last days of Bobby Sands, the Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer who went on a hunger strike in 1981 in order to protest the conditions in the British prison where he was being held as a political prisoner. Michael Fassbender -- surely one of the top four or five actors working in the world today -- delivers a riveting performance as Sands, and McQueen's camera and editing techniques raise this film from the realm of the simply harrowing to the artistically sublime. In particular, watch for the insanely long take during Sands' dialogue with the priest midway through the movie -- GoodFellas and Children of Men, eat my shorts!

Michael Fassbender as Brandon in Shame.

However, for its subject matter alone, McQueen's second feature, Shame (2011), is a true must-see film: depicting several days in the life of a present-day sex addict, again played by Fassbender, Shame deals quite frankly and artfully with the issue of how contemporary internet sex culture impacts our ability to experience true intimacy. Essentially a drama about a dysfunctional family that omits most of the family melodrama, Shame drives its potent and timely message home via an intense focus on Brandon, its male lead, and his sister Sissy, played with convincing pathos by Carey Mulligan. Shame is tightly written, inventively shot and edited, and brilliantly acted, and, while not for the sexually faint-hearted -- it surely earns its NC-17 rating -- it is on my short list of all-time best films.

Lars von Trier
Probably the world's most talented living filmmaker, the iconoclastic von Trier's work is admittedly not for everybody. His films, while visually breathtaking, tend to be somewhat grueling emotionally -- von Trier excels at rendering poetic the suffering and pain of his (usually female) protagonists. However, I think his most recent film, Melancholia (2011), is accessible to almost anyone, and while a bit "slow" by Hollywood blockbuster standards, it at least features well-known stars (Kirsten Dunst, Keifer Sutherland) and a dramatic, apocalyptic science fiction plot that, art-film moments aside, should resonate with anyone who appreciates a well-made movie. I would also strongly recommend his earlier revisionist musical, Dancer in the Dark (2000), in which Bjork delivers a surprisingly compelling performance and the song sequences alone, stunningly shot and choreographed, should take your breath away if you have any appreciation for the visual dimension of cinema. Once you have checked out a couple of these more palatable films and decided if von Trier's challenging but rewarding work is for you, you can make your way toward seeing his more relentlessly harrowing masterpieces like Breaking the Waves (1996), Dogville (2003), and his recent horror film, Antichrist (2009).

Steven Soderbergh, probably the greatest living American film director.

Steven Soderbergh
I hereby predict that in fifty years, when future film critics and scholars look back at this period in U.S. film history, Soderbergh will stand out as the representative figure of late 20th century and early 21st century filmmaking. His substantial body of work is impressive for its volume (37 directorial credits since 1985), for its consistent quality, and for the wide-ranging breadth of its subject matter and aesthetic experimentation. Soderbergh is the undisputed master of the "one for them, one for me" style of independent filmmaking, in which he alternates between, on the one hand, big-budget studio-produced films like Ocean's Eleven (2001), Erin Brockovich (2000), and Contagion (2011) and, on the other, low-budget, experimental passion projects like The Limey (1999), Bubble (2005), Schizopolis (1996), and The Girlfriend Experience (2009).

While John Cassavetes is surely the godfather of (the recent wave of) American independent cinema, and Jim Jarmusch's (somewhat Cassavetes-derivative) Stranger than Paradise (1984) constitutes the opening salvo of the 1980s-'90s independent cinema boom, it was Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989) that made the American general public aware that independent cinema existed, arguably paving the way for the arrival of Quentin Tarantino a few years later. Shot on location in Louisiana on a budget of $1,200,000, sex, lies was the first independently produced film to screen in wide release in the multiplex theaters, and its release and success showed indie distributor Miramax how to market independent fare "wide" to mainstream audiences.**

It is difficult to narrow down Soderbergh's vast body of high-quality films to just a few succinct recommendations, but here goes:

sex, lies, and videotape (1989) is an absolute must-see, a compellingly shot and acted ensemble piece about exactly what its title indicates. The fact that this film relaunched '80s icon James Spader's career should be incentive enough to check it out; but its intimate, character-driven narrative and intelligent editing style (including inventive use of sound bridges) would also set the tone for so many great Soderbergh films to come.

The Limey (1999) is an intense revenge thriller whose main stylistic innovation is an unusual use of editing and sound bridges that creates a very strange -- possibly physically impossible -- chronology. It is as if Soderbergh set out to out-Tarantino Tarantino here (in the non-chronological editing sense, not the wacky, offbeat dialogue sense), pushing the whole "let's fuck with the chronology of this story" trick that QT uses in Pulp Fiction onto a wholly different (and much more subtle) level. The beauty of what Soderbergh achieves in The Limey is that his editing tricks could easily go unnoticed by the average viewer unless s/he tunes in carefully and/or has been forewarned that they exist. No showoff, Soderbergh prefers to execute this particular cinematic experiment in a way that does not call undue attention to itself or interfere with the viewer's ability to simply sit back and enjoy The Limey as a badass revenge thriller starring Terence Stamp. In other words, this is a great film for cinephiles and casual filmgoers alike.

Bubble (2005) is probably my personal favorite Soderbergh film, but it isn't for everyone; it is essentially Soderbergh "doing the Jarmusch thing," i.e., shooting most of the film in long takes in an extremely low-budget style with a cast of non-professional actors. If you like offbeat, low-budget indie fare that is understated yet packs a serious dramatic wallop, don't miss Bubble. 

Contagion (2011) is simply one of the best disaster movies I have ever seen, and I have seen a great many, being a big fan of the genre. The film is a smartly intertwined multi-strand tale of a global disease outbreak, shot in Soderbergh's preferred "personal" style, i.e., more focused upon individuals and their varied responses to the catastrophe rather than grandiose set pieces and a cast of thousands. In this case, the intimacy of the cinematography and screenwriting contribute to the film's overall intensity, and the whole thing ties together quite brilliantly by the closing shot. I recommend Contagion to anyone, it's simply a great film by any scale of evaluation.

UPDATE 1/17/2016: This nice IndieWire piece affirms my claim that Soderbergh is the most important and artistically daring filmmaker of his generation.

Nicolas Winding Refn
This is a tough one because I put Refn on this list knowing his work will not be for everyone. Sure, three-fifths of this list, with the exception of Soderbergh and Holofcener, consists of "art film" directors, so few of these filmmakers are likely to appeal to you if you require your movies to stick to cause-and-effect-driven plots, adhere to "action beats," and conclude with comfortingly pat resolutions.*** However, even more so than von Trier, Refn is out to challenge the mainstream filmgoer, because his sustained cinematic project seems to be to artfully revise and reinterpret certain Hollywood film genres. Sure, this is broadly true of von Trier (Antichrist is a horror film, Dancer in the Dark a musical, and most of his early films are female-centered melodramas) and even Soderbergh (who revises the revenge film in The Limey and the disaster film in Contagion), yet Refn revises the genres in which he works even more radically than these other two.

The great Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye in Refn's Valhalla Rising.

Refn is an emphatically visual director, and many of his films -- Valhalla Rising (2009), Drive (2011), and Only God Forgives (2013) -- unfold with very little dialogue. He also favors stunning mise-en-scene, liberal use of slow-motion, and long takes. Therefore, folks approaching Refn's work expecting standard genre fare will likely be thrown off by his bold, "artsy" aesthetic strategies. But that is the whole fun of appreciating Refn, to see how he takes a basic generic structure like the heroic fantasy film (Valhalla) or the martial-arts revenge film (Forgives) and turns it inside-out with his long takes, verbally reticent characters, and insanely artistic production designs. In short: you have to see these films to believe them. And for me, that is the hallmark of a truly great filmmaker.

To conclude, I bestow Honorable Mention upon directors Michael Haneke, David Fincher, Bong Joon-ho, Jake Kasdan, Harmony Korine, and, lest ye think I overlook action film directors, Michael Mann and Kathryn Bigelow. I will save discussion of these other meritorious filmmakers for a future post.

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* I also think Peter Jackson was somewhat ill-served by his Lord of the Rings trilogy screenwriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, but that is a more complicated case that I shall return to in a later post.
** This knowledge would pay off even more dramatically when Miramax mounted their extremely expensive, innovatively aggressive, and highly successful Oscar campaigns for Shakespeare in Love (Best Picture) in 1998 and for Hilary Swank (Best Actress) in 1999 -- see Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures for more on this interesting subject.
*** The definitive essay that outlines the parameters of art cinema is David Bordwell's "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice."