Stephen Bjork

Jonathan Demme was a filmmaker who had a reputation for quirkiness that was due in part to the fact that he made his name with offbeat character studies like Citizens Band (aka Handle with Care), Melvin and Howard, and Something Wild. Yet his quirkiness wasn’t limited to the style and personality that he brought to his best films; it was also because of his disparate choice of subject matter. Demme didn’t feel constrained by genre, and he was perfectly happy working with any kind of material. He got his start making low budget exploitation movies for Roger Corman and moved from that into the character studies that helped to build his reputation, but all of that was still just a small taste of what he would assay before his unfortunate death in 2017. He made extraordinary concert documentaries like Stop Making Sense and Swimming to Cambodia; sober dramas like Philadelphia and Beloved; thrillers like his remake of The Manchurian Candidate; and outright horror like The Silence of the Lambs. (Make no mistake: the latter is indeed a horror movie, and don’t let the five Academy Awards that it took home fool you into thinking otherwise.)

Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo was a substantial hit when it was released in 1980, turning Richard Gere into a major box office draw and helping to define the zeitgeist of Eighties cinema. Part of that is due to its undeniable sense of style, with glossy visuals and a driving electronic score that laid the template for later films like Flashdance. Yet the superficial glitz of American Gigolo resulted in mixed reviews, since some critics felt that its style was little more than a veneer that was disguising a hollow core at the center of the film. The irony is that they were arguably correct in that assessment, but for the wrong reasons. That’s because the hollow core to American Gigolo is quite intentional on Schrader’s part, as it’s a perfect representation of the interior life of its central character Julian Kay (Gere). Julian has built his entire life around playing roles, using superficial textures like fashion, music, and even language to represent himself as something that he isn’t. The trouble is that he’s so good at disguising himself that he’s lost sight of who he really is under all these masks. He’s played so many different roles that can’t even remember how to be himself.

Tai Katō’s Eighteen Years in Prison (aka Choueki juhachi-nen) tells the story of Kawada (Noboru Andō), a former captain in the Japanese military who struggles to find his place in the aftermath of World War II. Along with his fellow ex-soldier Tsukada (Asao Koike), he creates an organization to care for the needs of people who lost family members in the war. To finance their activities during the lean years of the Allied occupation, he’s forced to turn to a life of crime by stealing from American ships. His desire to help Hisako (Hiroko Sakuramachi) results in him planning an even more daring raid, and he ends up being arrested and sentenced to eighteen years. He finds the prison system to be every bit as corrupt as the underworld of post-war Japan, but he still operates on his own moral code and gains the respect of his fellow prisoners. The exception is Hisako’s wild younger brother Suichi (Masaomi Kondo), who blames Kawada for the death of their older brother during the war. Meanwhile, on the outside, Tsukada has become a full-fledged yakuza who runs a trafficking ring that takes advantage of desperate women, Hisako included. That puts Kawada onto a collision course with his former comrade, and even the walls of the prison won’t stop him.

London After Midnight. The original 42-reel version of Greed. The 131-minute rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. The Day the Clown Cried. Coyote vs. Acme. These are all films that belong to the unfortunate pantheon of titles that have been lost to time, for one reason or another. In some cases, there’s no known extant elements of any kind, and the films appear to be gone forever. In other cases, while the final cuts are still available, all of the missing footage from the longer cuts has been lost or destroyed. Still other films were shelved before they were completed, and while the elements may still exist, they’re locked away in the vaults. Miracles do happen occasionally, like when a 16mm reduction negative of the original cut for Metropolis was located in Argentina. Sadly, stories like that are the exception, not the rule. And as the recent fates of both Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme have proved, films can become lost to time even in the modern era. Still, when the stars align, miracles do occur, and such is the case with David Allen’s long-lost passion project The Primevals.

When interpreting a work of art, meaning can be elusive or it can be crystal clear, but sometimes it’s a little of both. That’s because symbols and metaphors may have originally had a clearly intended referent, but with the passage of time, other readings become equally possible. Some metaphors remain timeless because their referent is something so universal that they retain their potency in any era or in any given context. Others are universal because they’re ambiguous enough that they invite fresh readings that help to keep them alive. The genius of the central metaphor in Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers is that it’s a little of both. Fears about loss of identity are universal enough that his basic concept of alien invaders assimilating human beings works beautifully in any era or context. Yet the idea is open-ended enough that it still can be read to represent different things to different people.

Setting aside weighty matters of politics, war, and natural disasters, one of the truly great tragedies of the modern age is that Guy Ritchie’s utterly delightful reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. utterly failed to find an audience or establish a franchise. The world seems like a smaller place without this much-needed brand of escapism—it’s certainly significantly less cool (in more ways than one). Guy Ritchie has been peddling his own idiosyncratic brand of cool ever since his debut feature Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels back in 1998, and he’s refined it even more as his career has progressed. We’re talking about someone who successfully turned Sherlock Holmes into a stylish action hero, after all. If anyone seemed like a natural choice to reimagine the classic Cold War television series for the modern era, it’s Ritchie. Yet he wasn’t the first choice, the second choice, or even the third. Long is the way, and hard, that out of development hell leads up to light.

John Krasinski may have originally drawn significant attention to himself while playing Jim Halpert in NBC’s successful reboot of the BBC series The Office, but he was quietly working behind-the-scenes toward being something more than just a straight man opposite comic actors like Steve Carrell and Dwight Schrute. He directed three episodes of the show during its 9-year run, and in 2009, he made his feature filmmaking debut by writing, directing, and starring in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. He followed that up in 2016 with the dramatic comedy The Hollars, but neither one of these projects had much of a cultural impact, and they definitely didn’t make any money. Two years later, he opted for the Jordan Peele approach instead, writing and directing the smash hit horror story A Quiet Place. That film grossed $341 million worldwide against a $17 million budget, so clearly Krasinski had found his stride. Unsurprisingly, he stayed in that lane by quickly putting together the sequel A Quiet Place Part II. It cost three times as much to produce and didn’t make quite as much at the box office, but it was still a huge hit by any stretch of the imagination.

While it’s lovely that Warner Bros. has finally released Just Mercy on UHD, the fact that they’ve added nothing new to the mix, and even subtracted a few minor things like the different language options, only serves to highlight the fact that they should have just released it on UHD the first time back in 2020. Nothing has been gained by waiting four years to see the film in its best possible light. And yet Just Mercy in 4K really is seeing the film in its best possible light, so right or wrong, it’s great that Warner Bros. finally pulled the trigger. Given the behind-the-scenes chaos at the studio these days, sometimes you just have to take what you get from them.

Robert Altman was a filmmaker who stubbornly followed his own muse wherever it might take him, and he didn’t give a tinker’s damn what anyone else thought about that. He pursued the projects that he wanted to pursue, and while there’s no doubt that he was happy when audiences came along for the ride, that was never his primary concern (or even his secondary or tertiary concerns, for that matter). After the smash success of his landmark war comedy M*A*S*H, he felt no desire to rest on his laurels. Instead, he immediately turned around and made the offbeat Brewster McCloud, a film that was pretty much guaranteed to repel most of the audiences that had flocked to see M*A*S*H. Then, he gleefully deconstructed the western genre with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and followed that up with the psychological thriller Quintet, a film that baffled critics and audiences alike. From there, he ended up deconstructing film noir and private detective fiction with The Long Goodbye, before finally making another detour to deconstruct Hollywood crime dramas with Thieves Like Us in 1974.

Godzilla Minus One (aka Gojira Mainasu Wan) has become a genuine phenomenon even in America, where it quickly became the highest-grossing Japanese language film of all time. That’s impressive by any metric, especially for the 30th live action installment in a seventy-year-old franchise. While Godzilla movies can be a little divisive, with everyone having their own favorites, the reaction to Godzilla Minus One has been uniformly positive. It’s been something of a revelation to many people, which is interesting considering that it’s undeniably derivative of all the films that came before it. The genius of writer/director Takashi Yamazaki is that he took all those familiar elements and combined them in a way that manages to feel fresh, even to hardened fans of the franchise. It’s more of a refinement than a revelation, and where Godzilla Minus One really shines is in its execution rather than its conception. Yet the key to making all of that work is still a conceptual choice on the part of Toho and Yamazaki.