Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Behind Green Lights (dir. Otto Brower, 1946). A car rolls up to a police station, corpse at the wheel, and Lieutenant Sam Carson (William Gargan) gets an investigation going. One likely suspect comes into view (the daughter of a mayoral candidate), two more likely suspects come into view (the dead man’s estranged wife and her fiancé), and then, of course, the real killer is exposed. Some worthwhile atmospherics here in what looks like a genuinely shabby police station where Lt. Carson works through to the morning. But there’s also considerable dumbness when the cops overlook the ridiculously obvious. ★★ (YT)

*

Lucky (dir. John Carroll Lynch, 2017). Harry Dean Stanton, in his last movie, as Lucky, a WWII vet, never married, living on coffee, cigarettes, and Bloody Marias in a tiny southwestern town. The movie tracks his everyday doings — washing up, doing yoga, going to a café, a convenience store, a bar — and, late in the movie, there’s an extraordinary departure from the everyday at a fiesta: Lucky is full of surprises. Hanging over the movie is the question of how to live in the face of mortality, nothingness, ungatz, and there’s an answer offered. With Ed Begley Jr., James Darren (his last movie too), Beth Grant, and David Lynch. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Nordic Noir

Death Is a Caress (dir. Edith Carlmar, 1949). Criterion says it’s the first Norwegian noir and the first Norwegian film directed by a woman. The story, told in flashbacks, eerily prefigures that of Sunset Boulevard, released a year later: here, an older, affluent married woman, Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen), spots a young auto mechanic, Erik (Claus Wiese), and an affair begins. As in Sunset Boulevard, there’s another, younger, well-adjusted woman in the picture, Erik’s fiancée Marit (Eva Bergh). Conversations about free will and determinism add a Detour-like flavor to the narrative. ★★★★

Girl with Hyacinths (dir. Hasse Ekman, 1950). The girl is Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning), and her story unfolds in flashbacks as a writer-neighbor (Ulf Palme) follows clues to work out the reason for her suicide. Moody and mysterious, beginning with the opening shots of feet and legs as their owners speak. Anyone who’s read Heart of Darkness will understand the lie with which the movie ends. Criterion points out that Ingmar Bergman considered this Swedish movie a masterpiece. ★★★★

Two Minutes Too Late (dir. Torben Anton Svendsen, 1952). Grete (Grethe Thordahl) is a wife of three months, insecure, possessive, married to Max (Paul Reichardt), a man everyone thinks is God’s gift. Grete sits home alone; the telephone rings; there’s no one on the line. Suspicions multiply in this Danish noir, as Grete suspects her sister of an affair with Max, but when a woman is found dead in a bookshop, Max is just one of the suspects. The who of this Danish whodunit is easy to guess, but the twist at the movie’s end is not. ★★★★

Hidden in the Fog (dir. Lars-Eric Kjellgren, 1953). Meta noir, with Eva Henning playing a woman named Lora in a movie in which a smitten police inspector references Otto Preminger’s Laura. As the movie begins, Lora shoots her philandering husband and watches as a book falls from his hands. She runs from the house and wanders through Stockholm; the work of solving a murder begins; and Lora is not the only suspect. One final trope: a climactic scene with all parties gathered in a drawing room as the inspector reveals the killer. ★★★★

*

Leaves of Grass (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2009). Remarkable performances from Edward Norton as identical twins Bill and Brady Kincaid, the one a classics professor at Brown, the other a high-tech pot grower in Tulsa. Bill’s return to Tulsa after twelve years is fraught: he’s estranged from his druggie mother (Susan Sarandon), at odds with his brother, smitten with a poetry-writing high-school teacher (Keri Russell), and pressured to abet his brother’s criminal schemes. Lots of comedy, but the story moves toward increasingly unfathomable violence, along with a tangential subtext about anti-Semitism (Nelson, who wrote the screenplay, was born in Tulsa to Jewish parents). I’m adding a star because this only movie I know of that references the hortatory subjunctive (Nelson majored in classics at Brown). ★★★ (CC)

*

Song of My City (dir. David C. Roberts, 2025). A short film (too short) made of brief scenes (identified only in the closing credits) from films depicting 1970s New York City. It’s not Woody Allen’s Manhattan: it’s a city of cops and crime and bags of garbage lining the streets. You can almost smell the eau de New York, which I think of as a blend of urine, exhaust, garbage, and cigarette smoke. With music by Philip Glass, Gene Krupa, and The Velvet Underground. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Two Criterion Channel shorts

My Back Pages (dir. Nick Canfield and Paul Lovelace, 2024). A short movie that should be longer, it’s a glimpse into the (Manhattan?) apartment of Mitch Blank, a collector of all things Bob Dylan (even newspaper articles whose headlines reference Dylan songs), as Blank prepares to donate some portion of his collections to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I wrote “apartment,“ not “life,” because the man and his motivations are left unexplored: when he began collecting, how collecting has affected his life and relationships, how he affords it (he even has an assistant), whether he plays an instrument or sings, whether he’s ever met Bob Dylan. Such basic questions! About all we learn is that Dylan’s music takes Blank to a place he likes to be (he calls the music “healing”) and that he feels a need to divest himself of some of his stuff: “Sometimes you have to take a shower.” ★★

Windy Day (dir. Faith Hubley and John Hubley, 1968). An Oscar-nominated short, and an abiding gift from the filmmakers to their children, with beautiful mid-century animation by Barrie Nelson. The voices of Emily Hubley and Georgia Hubley, the filmmakers’ young daughters, speak of big things — marriage, babies, death — as their animated selves romp through a semi-abstract world. For anyone who’s been a parent or a child, this movie should be a tonic. “I was a boy in my father and my mommy planted the seed.” ★★★★

[Also at YouTube.]

*

Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater, 2025). Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart on the most miserable night of his life, at the bar in Sardi’s, having ducked out of the boffo opening night of Oklahoma!, the musical written by his soon-to-be-former partner Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and now awaiting their post-show arrival. Hart drinks and smokes, engages in fast repartee with the barman (Bobby Cannavale), gives the inexplicably present E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) the beginnings of Stuart Little (utter fiction), awaits a beautiful college student he’s purportedly planning to seduce (Margaret Qualley), and speaks with Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) at length, shamelessly flattering them even as he reveals his contempt for their new work and his desperate need to be back in the game. Hawke gives a brilliant (yes, Oscar) performance, and the complaints about the camera angles needed to make him look short are, to my mind, pointless. One of the saddest movies I’ve seen. ★★★★ (N)

*

Cover-Up (dir. Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, 2025). The life and work of Seymour Hersh, reluctant to talk about himself, zealous about protecting his sources, past and present, and relentless in his pursuit of dark truths. Poitras: “So why do you keep doing the work?” Hersh: “You can’t have a country that does that.” This documentary is something of a grand tour of state atrocities and criminality, from My Lai to Watergate to Abu Ghraib, and I started shaking when I realized that an anecdote I once heard a Vietnam vet tell (with crazed laughter) mirrors a detail from My Lai — a massacre that, as Hersh points out, was not unique. ★★★★ (N)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)