The Films of Wong Kar-wai: Fallen Angels

Hong Kong, 1995
Directed by Wong Kar-wai

Wong Kar-wai originally conceived his two-part Chungking Express as three stories, but once the first two were developed, he decided that they were enough for a full film and cut out the third. This third story, about the relationship between a hitman and his female partner, developed into his next film. Fallen Angels could be seen as a continuation of Chungking Express - both are split into two stories, take place in the same Hong Kong neighborhood, and revolve around similar themes. But Fallen Angels is also a darker, weirder, more stylistically experimental film than its predecessor - the night to Chungking Express's day.

The first story is about a hitman (Leon Lai) and his partner (Michelle Reis). She tells him where his next hit is, collects cash for him, and cleans his apartment hideout, but they hardly ever meet in person. Despite wanting to keep their partnership an impersonal one, they grow infatuated with each other. Both characters are romantically alienated loners, taciturn and cool. The hitman kills his targets nonchalantly, in shoot-outs filmed with woozy style, not caring who they are or why they've been targeted. The second story stars Takeshi Kaneshiro (one of the cops of Chungking Express) as an eccentric mute who breaks into closed-up shops at night and illegally runs the business, aggressively (and amusingly) coercing customers into buying whatever he's selling. He falls in love with another spastic oddball (Charlie Yeung), but his affection is unrequited.

Even more than in Chungking Express, the two stories of Fallen Angels are strikingly different from each other. The hitman's story is surprisingly violent for Wong. The hitman and his partner are classic Wong characters - cool, introspective loners - but taken to a darker extreme. They are entirely detached from everyone and everything, nocturnal creatures living by their own codes, beautiful but doomed. Wong's style is moodier and more experimental than ever. He often films characters with a fish-eye lens, their faces looming in the foreground against a distant background of neon lights and colors. It's a disorienting but perfect way to portray their alienation through visuals, loners drifting through the seductively dangerous world of Hong Kong at night.

The second story is far more sentimental and funny, even becoming an outright slapstick comedy at points. Much of its charm is due to star Takeshi Kaneshiro, reminiscent of a young Cantonese Johnny Depp. His character, though he cannot speak, is quirky and extroverted. Where many Wong characters put protective barriers between themselves and others, the mute forces himself into others' lives, in amusingly obnoxious ways. He takes his failed romance with Charlie in stride, finding happiness wherever he can. The sweetest moments of Fallen Angels involve the mute's relationship with his father, and their odd but loving friendship.

Fallen Angels is an exuberant mess, digressive and tonally all over the map (it should be noted that this sort of 'messiness' is not unusual for Hong Kong cinema, which often combines comedy, action and drama in ways that might seem incompatible to those used to Hollywood standards, which generally sticks to one or two genres per film). Fallen Angels is more about individual sequences and moments than any overarching plot or theme. These moments are sometimes funny - like Takeshi Kaneshiro harassing unsuspecting passerby into becoming his customers despite their protests. And sometimes they are mesmerizing - like when Michelle Reis leans against a jukebox as a strangely sinister pop song puts her in a trance, and for a few minutes Fallen Angels becomes an abstract music video, lingering on Reis's languid swaying as the machine's fluorescent lights run across her reflective dress. Any narrative is forgotten in the hypnotic interplay of music and color and movement. One downside to Fallen Angels's scattershot approach is that the film is, understandably, uneven - the subplot about the hitman and his other love interest, Blondie (Karen Mok), falls flat. But any dull sequences quickly give way to some new wondrous moment of discovery.

Once again, Wong Kar-wai's love for his home city shines through. Like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels is a cinematic love letter to Hong Kong, though a far stranger and more fantastic one. Fallen Angels takes place almost entirely at night, in a frightening but beautiful vision of Hong Kong that seems more like a science fiction metropolis than a real world city. The mute says that "all the weirdos come out at night" - the characters are these nocturnal weirdos, scrounging a living outside the law and the mainstream, hoping to find simple human connections in the urban purgatory they live in.

The Films of Wong Kar-wai: Ashes of Time

Hong Kong, 1994
Directed by Wong Kar-wai

 Ashes of Time was a difficult production. The shoot took place in the middle of the scorching desert, and went way over budget and over schedule. Even after its initial release in 1994, the movie's journey was not complete - over a decade later Wong Kar-wai discovered that the original negatives of the film were in terrible shape, and desperately needed saving. In the process of restoration, he re-scored and re-edited the film, releasing it in 2008 as Ashes of Time Redux. The Redux version is, as far as I'm aware, the only available way to see the film in the United States, so I cannot compare the two versions.

In either version, the general response to Ashes of Time has deemed it beautiful but incoherent. I don't agree (with the latter part, at least), but it's an understandable response to an aggressively unusual film, and one whose context might be lost on western viewers. Ashes of Time is based on the fantasy novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes, which Wong has compared to The Lord of the Rings in terms of its popularity and influence in China, but is largely unknown elsewhere. It is not a direct adaptation of the book, but a sort of origin story. Wong wanted to explore how the characters became the legendary figures they are at the start of the book. Ashes of Time belongs to the wuxia genre, mythic stories of swordsmen and the chivalric codes they live by. However, Ashes of Time is not a straightforward wuxia adventure, but a deconstruction of the genre, less a tale of battle and honor than a classically Wong meditation on memory and loss.

 

Ashes of Time is similar to Wong's earlier film Days of Being Wild in structure. Both center around one man played by Leslie Cheung who meets other people and becomes involved in their stories. Like Yuddy in Days of Being Wild, Ou-yang Feng in Ashes of Time is cool and cynical on the surface, but trapped in his own feelings of heartbreak and rejection. Ou-yang Feng is a lone swordsman in the desert wilderness, who makes a living by hiring assassins for people with grudges. The traveling swordsmen he meets are formidable killers with supernatural skills, but are every bit as miserable and haunted by their pasts as Ou-yang.

Ashes of Time is all about memory, and the impermanence of things. Nearly all the characters live in regret, either running away from or wallowing in memories of lost love (the sole exception, Jacky Cheung's character, is the only one who finds happiness by the end). The film takes place over the course of a year, as time slips away through the passing of the seasons. Visual motifs express the temporary nature of the world - Ashes of Time constantly returns to images of shifting sand, billowing water, the movement of shadow and light.

Needless to say, if you're looking for a thrilling adventure you should probably look elsewhere. There are fight scenes in Ashes of Time - good ones too, though filmed in a way that renders them nearly abstract - but action is not the focus here. The characters' battles with others do not matter so much as their even more embattled and conflicted inner selves - the film opens with a Buddhist proverb, "The flag is still. The wind is calm. It is the heart of man that is in turmoil." This inner turmoil is made incarnate in one character, Mu-rong Yang (Brigitte Lin), a woman who claims to have a twin brother Mu-rong Yin that she wants dead, yet they are actually the same person. In the film's most ecstatically gorgeous sequence, Yin / Yang magically walks across the surface of a lake and battles her own reflection, because she has found no more difficult opponent elsewhere. Her sword thrusts are so powerful that the surface of the lake erupts into geysers of water with each strike.

Even by Wong Kar-wai's stylish standards, Ashes of Time is a gorgeous film. Daunting landscapes and close-ups of faces are filmed with equal beauty and detail. The colors have a hallucinogenic vibrancy, and the dreamy images are edited together like a kaleidoscopic collage. It's a beautiful enigma, a film where it is a pleasure to get lost in its rich textures and moods.

The Films of Wong Kar-wai: Chungking Express

Hong Kong, 1994
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai

During the making of his wuxia epic Ashes of Time, a difficult production that went way over schedule and budget, Wong Kar-wai took a three month break to direct another movie, just to re-energize his creativity. The result is Chungking Express, which was completed and released before Ashes of Time. The movie was a hit, and for many western audiences their introduction to Wong Kar-wai. Quentin Tarantino was a huge fan and proponent, and helped to bring the film to the States. It's clear why Tarantino is such a fan; like his Pulp Fiction released the same year, Chungking Express is a kinetic blast of moviemaking innovation for its own sake, giddy with the possibilities of what movies can do. The quick, on-the-fly production shows in the film's spontaneous, experimental energy and in its unusual structure. Chungking Express is split in two parts, each a separate short story unfolding in the same hectic Hong Kong neighborhood.

The first story centers around the freshly heartbroken Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and a female drug dealer (Brigitte Lin) who always wears sunglasses and a blonde wig. Cop 223, when he's not chasing down criminals, wallows in amusing self-pity and expresses his heartbreak in odd ways - calling up every girl he's ever known, collecting pineapples because they were his ex-girlfriend's favorite fruit. Meanwhile, a drug deal goes sour for the mysterious dealer and she must go on the run. A few chase scenes, shootouts, and a very innocuous kidnapping occur, but the details of the double-crossing and criminal underworld don't matter, Wong is just having fun splashing punchy pulp fiction cliches across the screen. Cop 223 and the Woman with No Name eventually meet in a bar late at night, knowing nothing about each other. You expect that they will hook up, and there will be a dramatic reveal about lovers on the opposite sides of the law - but what actually happens is far simpler and sweeter than that.

The second story is the longer of the two, and is a straightforward romantic comedy without the crime thriller flourishes of the first. Cop 663 (Tony Leung) has also recently been dumped, and now morosely sleepwalks through life. While on duty he often drops by a food stand where Faye (Faye Wong) works, a mischievous scamp who takes a liking to him. After his ex-girlfriend drops off her keys at the stand, Faye starts breaking into Cop 663's apartment while he's not there, cleaning it, restocking his pantry and replacing his old and broken-down belongings. Cop 663 is so oblivious that he initially doesn't notice.

The vision of mid-90s Hong Kong in Chungking Express pops off the screen. It's a world of neon lights, bustling markets, Chinese and British and Indians rubbing shoulders, cramped apartments and 24/7 chopsocky food stands. It's bewildering and loud and seedy, but overflowing with life, and filmed so beautifully by Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Despite the mass of humanity in this crazy metropolis, all the characters are quite lonely. Perhaps because of the overwhelming zoo surrounding them, they create their own private worlds to cope, out of whatever flotsam they can cling to. Cop 223 obsessively collects tins of pineapple that expire on May 1st, his birthday and the one-month anniversary of his breakup. Faye loudly blasts the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin" on the radio at her tedious job, creating a protective bubble of sound so she doesn't have to think. Cop 663 talks to the inanimate objects in his apartment to cheer himself up. Wong views his characters' self-created little worlds with fond amusement.

Both stories in Chungking Express are about the miraculous connections that can happen in such a sprawling, chaotic place, when the paths of isolated people somehow intersect. Sometimes these connections are brief ones - Cop 223 and the Woman with No Name remain strangers, but now with a treasured memory about a moment of shared kindness and relief from loneliness. And in the second story, we hope that Cop 663 and Faye will find their way to romance, despite the (often self imposed) obstacles in their way. Watching these oddballs circle closer and closer to each other is great fun, and leads to one of the great romantic endings in the movies. The final scene of Chungking Express puts a big blissful grin on my face every time.

This is easily Wong Kar-wai's cheeriest film, not just because of the sweet stories and likable performers, but because of Wong's giddy style. Chungking Express is as mid-90s in its MTV aesthetic as it is possible to get - it's dated, but in a nostalgic and charming way rather than an embarrassing one. There's even a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries' "Dreams" on the soundtrack (sung by star Faye Wong, who is a popular pop artist in Hong Kong). The synthesis of cool editing tricks, lovely camerawork, and catchy pop songs make Chungking Express addictive to watch. It's the kind of idiosyncratic movie that not everyone will enjoy, but those who do will love it with a cultish fervor. 

The Films of Wong Kar-Wai: Days of Being Wild

Hong Kong, 1990
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai 

 Wong Kar-Wai is arguably the most popular, internationally acclaimed and influential Hong Kong director of all-time. He is known for his distinctive style, driven by music and color, and for his films' consistent themes of romantic yearning and memory. Wong's debut film was the 1988 gangster melodrama As Tears Go By, starring Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau. It's an entertaining, well-crafted movie, with hints of the stylistic verve and melancholy romanticism that would become Wong's trademarks, but on the whole is mostly typical of its genre. His second film, Days of Being Wild, is the first to fully display Wong's unique personality as an artist.

Set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, which vividly comes to life through small details - bright red Coca-Cola coolers, form-fitting print dresses and bob hairstyles, Western cafes, lounge and latin music. Days of Being Wild immediately draws you into an immersive sense of time and place. You can almost feel the humidity radiating off the screen, the oppressive heaviness of tropical nights. In this languid and lush atmosphere, a romantic roundelay unfolds among an ensemble of Hong Kong's most iconic actors. At the center of it all is Yuddy, played by the late Leslie Cheung, a troubled, detached young man. He was adopted by a high-class escort (Rebecca Pan), who refuses to tell him who his biological mother is. Yuddy is a womanizer, seducing the quiet Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and showgirl Mimi (Carina Lau), before dumping both when they become too attached for his liking. And during their worst times of heartbreak both women are pined for by other men - policeman Tide (Andy Lau) becomes friends with Su Lizhen, and Mimi is pursued by Zeb (Jacky Cheung), a friend of Yuddy who is jealous of his influence over women.

On paper, the web of relationships in Days of Being Wild sounds like a tangled soap opera; however, Wong structures his film like a series of interwoven stories. The story of one relationship flows into another story, each one like free-standing but connected movements in a symphony, always circling back to Yuddy. Leslie Cheung's performance as Yuddy feels iconic. He's often been called the James Dean of Hong Kong because of his good looks and his troubled-but-cool persona - in fact, Days of Being Wild's title was taken from the Cantonese title of Dean's Rebel Without a Cause. But unlike Dean's handsome misfit in Rebel, Yuddy is not a heroic character but a tragically misguided and destructive one. He is both protective of and cruel to his adopted mother, a manipulative woman who is hardly perfect, but cares for him in her own flawed way. He enjoys the thrill of seducing women but has no interest in them beyond that. Twice in the film his narration tells the story of a bird: "I've heard there is a kind of bird with no legs. All it can do is fly and fly. When it gets tired, it sleeps on the wind. This bird can only land once in its whole life. That's the moment it dies." Clearly he pictures himself as the bird - a vagabond and free spirit, coolly detached from everyone and everything. Late in the film he tells the story to Andy Lau's character, who mocks Yuddy's tragically romantic self-mythologizing. "You think you're some kind of bird?" Yuddy may be a loner but for all his posturing he's really just an angry kid who feels rejected by the world. He envisions a separate life where he was not given up by his family in the Philippines, one where he truly belongs somewhere. Yuddy's 'cool and charismatic' act is magnetic enough that it's clear why people are drawn to him, yet it's the silent moments where Leslie Cheung shows his vulnerability that make him engaging.

What connects all the characters in Days of Being Wild is their search for belonging. Yuddy wants to find his biological mother in the Philippines, his mother wants a man to support her, Su Lizhen and Mimi want Yuddy and Zeb wants to be him, Tide wants Su Lizhen and becomes a sailor just to wander and find his place. Several of the characters have relocated from somewhere else, like the Philippines or Macau. Days of Being Wild captures the dislocation that many must have felt in Hong Kong in this era, where so many people had to relocate after the huge upheavals of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. A sense of yearning hangs over Days of Being Wild as thickly as the tropical humidity.

Wong Kar-Wai takes all his characters' dissatisfaction and melancholy and tells it with the wistful, bittersweet romanticism of a good pop song about heartbreak. The smooth camerawork, intimate close-ups and gorgeous soundtrack give Days of Being Wild a hypnotic quality. Considering that it's only Wong Kar-Wai's second film, Days of Being Wild is remarkably confident, a beautifully crafted gem and early example of his brilliance as a filmmaker.

2015 in Film

My Favorite Films of 2015

Here are the nine films that impressed, moved and delighted me the most from 2015, with the caveat that there are several promising films that I missed or were not released near me (among them, Bridge of Spies, The Forbidden Room, Arabian Nights).

1. The Assassin (directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien) - A bewildering, enchanting work of art from a master filmmaker. Some have found it just too damn slow and opaque, which is a fair response, but for me it was hypnotic - largely through its sheer visual beauty, but also because of Hou's rigorous, uncommon storytelling. For all of its lush visual textures, and its ornate, obsessively detailed recreation of a 9th century China poised between history and myth, the approach to plot and character is radically minimalistic. Every action holds great weight and meaning.

It's also one of the few movies that made me gasp out loud in the theater (multiple times) simply from how gorgeous it is. It's not just surface prettiness, either, there is genuine wonder and sublimity in it.

2. Mad Max: Fury Road (directed by George Miller) - I've seen it six times already. Safe to say I'm obsessed. As brilliant as The Road Warrior is, this is the film George Miller was born to make. It is a mind-boggling achievement, with madly ambitious action sequences and stunt work, and a wholly immersive and detailed creation of a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The technical perfection of this thing is insane, and it's terribly exciting. And for all its bombastic spectacle, the way it builds theme and character through incremental details is just beautiful storytelling.

3. Inside Out (directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen) - Pixar strikes again! Inside Out deserves to be ranked alongside WALL-E and Toy Story as one of their greatest achievements. I am amazed at what they've managed to pull off here, a story that functions on so many levels - a tearjerking coming-of-age / family drama, a brightly colored and hilarious adventure, and an illustrative exploration of the complicated relationship between our emotions, our personalities, and how we process and respond to the world around us, told in a way accessible to kids but engaging to adults. And it is packed with witty and casually wise grace notes ("these facts and opinions look so similar!").

4. What We Do in the Shadows (directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement) - Funniest movie of the year. An undead This is Spinal Tap with a Kiwi spin. The characters are lovably pathetic, the jokes are constant, and the film is irresistibly good-natured fun even when it gets bloody.

5. Carol (directed by Todd Haynes) - A restrained but quietly passionate romantic drama based on a Patricia Highsmith novel from the 1950s, unusual at the time for its frank and nuanced portrayal of a gay romance and its hopeful ending. I have not read the book but the film feels as evocative and subtle as a good novel, though it is entirely cinematic in its telling - beautifully recreating an era, communicating chemistry and connection through glances and body language, expressing through swooning music cues and visuals what the characters cannot through words. Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett are both perfect, as an uncertain but luminous young woman and a recently divorced mother whose glamour hides a vulnerable spirit.

6. Timbuktu (directed by Abderrahmane Sissako) - Less a classically structured narrative and more a collection of vignettes forming a panoramic study of a community - Timbuktu, Mali during a brief occupation by Islamic extremist group Ansar Dine, who imposed sharia law on the locals. Sissako's film eases you into the rhythm of day-to-day life in Timbuktu - music and soccer, family life, women working outdoors alongside men - so that the uneasy presence of the jihadists, and the inevitable violence of enforced sharia law and the cruel absurdity of its rules, are all the more clearly a violation of this vibrant community. It is a film in love with the beauty of Mali and its people, mostly Sunni Muslims, and horrified at the violence done to them. Yet even the jihadists are recognizably human, comically so at points. One young, unenthused jihadist stars in a propaganda video, but to the frustration of his director is an utterly abysmal actor; these young men with machine guns smoke cigarettes and discuss their favorite soccer stars in casual moments, even though they have banned smoking and sport from the community. They are entirely human, which makes their actions all the more disturbing.

7. Phoenix (directed by Christian Petzold) - A German-Jewish concentration camp survivor, after facial reconstruction surgery that leaves her uncannily similar-but-different to her former self, returns to ruinous post-war Berlin to reunite with the boyfriend who may have betrayed her to the Nazis and no longer recognizes her. Where the story unspools from there I will not reveal, but Phoenix has the kind of movie plot that requires but greatly rewards a suspension of disbelief. It's Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo recontextualized as an allegory for the painful reconstruction of the German and Jewish identity after the war, and builds to an astonishing final scene. Nina Hoss's performance was the best of the year to my eyes, a mostly silent, subtle portrayal of despair and delusion, revelation and rebirth.

8. The Duke of Burgundy (directed by Peter Strickland) - Such a curious object of a film. Centers around a seemingly outré sexual relationship, but has no nudity and very little actual sex - anyone in search of titillation will probably be disappointed. It builds a stylized and hermetic world around its characters, taking a great delight in all the little retro and esoteric details, almost like a sapphic Wes Anderson. It is beautifully directed, unfolding like a dream and structured in repetitions. Each repetition peels away another layer, revealing new aspects of the characters and their relationship - with the most surprising reveal being just how relatable and mundane they are for all the tongue-in-cheek exotic trappings. Like Eyes Wide Shut, this is a romantic fever dream that goes to surreal lengths to make simple observations of the natural problems that can arise in a relationship. The Duke of Burgundy is too specific and strange a film to have more than a small, self-selected audience, one I'm glad to be a part of. It is witty, unexpectedly funny and insightful.

9. The Look of Silence (directed by Joshua Oppenheimer) - A documentary exploring the modern-day aftermath of the Indonesian Genocide of 1965 - 66, where an estimated million people accused of communism were killed by their neighbors, often in unusually barbaric ways. The men behind the massacre still hold political power in Indonesia and are treated as war heroes, brave eradicators of the godless communists, while the extent of the violence has been swept under the rug. The Look of Silence follows Adi, a young father whose older brother was killed in the massacre, as he interviews the families of the victims and the killers. It is a deeply disquieting and disturbing film, not only for the barbarity of the violence (one senile old man casually mentions that he and many others drank the blood of their victims to "keep from going insane"), but for the prevalence of delusions, repression and distorted language in how everyone attempts to justify and live with their past (a dreadful illustration of how the winners have the privilege of writing history). Yet Adi is a beacon of hope: pursuing the truth with level-headed, unwavering persistence. 

Honorable Mentions (other films I really liked, in alphabetical order): 

• Blackhat (Michael Mann)
• Creed (Ryan Coogler)
• Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro)
• Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
• It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)
• Mistress America (Noah Baumbach)
• Spotlight (Tom McCarthy)
• Tangerine (Sean Baker)
• Wild Tales (Damian Szifron)

And, just because it's fun to be mean occasionally…

MY LEAST FAVORITE FILMS OF 2015 

(with the note that I've avoided most of the movies I knew I would hate, so these probably aren't the actual worst of the year)

• The Cobbler (directed by Tom McCarthy) - Well, except for this one, which absolutely has to be one of the worst of the year. On one hand, it's an Adam Sandler comedy, so its awfulness may not come as a surprise - but it's directed by Tom McCarthy, the talent behind charming films like The Station Agent and Win Win, and this year's very good (and Best Picture nominated) Spotlight, a drastic turnaround which might be the biggest-ever gap in quality between two subsequent films in any director's career. I don't know what happened to McCarthy during the making of this film, but wow it's a disaster. Not even bad in the standard Sandler comedy way, meaning lazy and juvenile; it keeps finding new and unique ways to be repugnant, with a bafflingly ill-conceived plot line that turns outright creepy before going off the deep end with an ending that is jaw-dropping in the worst way.

• Pan (directed by Joe Wright) - Everything I hate about Hollywood's "modernized" fantasy blockbusters in one nauseating package. Unceremoniously stuffs Peter Pan and the Neverland crew into a preordained "Hero's Journey" / Chosen One narrative that fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of J.M. Barrie's original vision of the character. Is full of ugly and unimaginative CGI that is so weightless that none of the loud, flashy action has any impact. Also here: obnoxious anachronisms, like the orphaned slaves of Neverland singing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in unison, all while mining fairy dust (what) for the villainous Blackbeard, who snorts it like cocaine to stay eternally young (WHAT). Directed by Joe Wright, who also made the lovely Pride & Prejudice adaptation with Keira Knightley and hopefully will return to making good movies after this.

• The Danish Girl (directed by Tom Hooper) - The true story of Lili Elbe, a Danish artist in the 1920s who was the first recipient of gender reassignment surgery. Except it's not really the true story, but like many other manipulative Hollywood bio-movies, is largely fabricated and sanitized. Here is a film entirely devoid of insight of any kind - sociological, historical, psychological, sexual - it is pretty looking but totally vapid. Eddie Redmayne's Oscar nominated (WHAT) performance is terrible, consisting entirely of effete and weepy mannerisms with no depth or subtlety (although it's not the worst Redmayne performance of the year, see here if you want a hilarious glimpse at that). I liked The King's Speech, but between this and his obnoxious, tone-deaf adaptation of Les Miserables I think I'll skip whatever Tom Hooper comes out with next.

• Kingsman: The Secret Service (directed by Matthew Vaughn) - A parody / homage to James Bond that is too witlessly violent and soulless to be fun at all. Not poorly made, but made me feel queasy and grouchy by the time it was over, though it might be the new favorite movie of certain teenage boys and violent sociopaths.

• The Boy Next Door (directed by Rob Cohen) - Calling this a "least favorite" is not exactly accurate - don't misunderstand, this is a terrible terrible movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is every bit as trashy and unintentionally funny as movies like this should be. An "erotic" "thriller" about J. Lo and her young stalker, who before he goes all Fatal Attraction buys her a "First Edition" of Homer's Iliad that he bought at a garage sale (WHAT). Also has the greatest, and the most inexplicably, hilariously violent, use of an epi-pen in cinematic history. Worth a watch if you want a good laugh.

Favorite New-to-Me Films of 2015

A list of films I've seen for the first time in 2015 and loved (excluding any new releases).

Happy New Year!

1. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1963) - begins as a simple ethical thriller about a kidnapping, transforms into a detail-heavy police procedural and a film-noir descent into Japan's underbelly. Has the character depth, thematic complexity and moral weight of a great novel, told through Akira Kurosawa's elegant filmmaking brilliance. I've only seen it once but already hold it among the greatest movies I've ever seen.

2. I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1963)

3. Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1961)

4. Time Stood Still (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1959) - #2 to 4 are all by the same director, Ermanno Olmi. In I Fidanzati, a northern Italian engineer is relocated for work to Sicily, leaving behind his fiance. In Il Posto, a young man begins a "job for life" at a confusingly bureaucratic, coldly impersonal office building. In Time Stood Still, a younger and older man work a winter job at an isolated dam construction site high in the Alps. All three are quiet, short and simple, but "still waters run deep" - I am amazed by the humanity and insight that suffuse these tiny stories. Ermanno Olmi was my most treasured discovery of the year.

5. The King and the Mockingbird (Paul Grimault, France, 1980) - paradoxically, a hugely influential animated film that almost nobody has heard of (Hayao Miyazaki claims it inspired him to become an animator). Brilliantly designed and animated, dizzyingly inventive. Unlike any film I've seen before, watching it unfold was a delight.

6. Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, Japan / Russia, 1975) - another classic from Akira Kurosawa, although it's hard to believe it's from the same director as High and Low. Where High and Low is forbiddingly dense, Dersu Uzala is beautifully simple. A story of friendship and survival in the Siberian wilderness that is gorgeously filmed, wild and heartfelt.

7. The Tale of the Fox (Wladyslaw Starewicz, France, 1930) - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is often called the first feature-length animated movie, which is factually wrong; The Tale of the Fox was made even earlier. A brilliant stop-motion retelling of a German folktale about a trickster fox - a clever, unrepentant jerk who is, amusingly, never redeemed. The animation still looks great, the story is darkly funny, and it was an inspiration for the also-brilliant Fantastic Mr. Fox from Wes Anderson!

8. The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, United States, 1957) - I personally love these cheesy 1950s sci-fi movies, but The Incredible Shrinking Man is truly something special. As our protagonist shrinks from the size of a man to a child to a pin, the old-school special effects remain shockingly convincing - I loved all the massive props of everyday objects (like using a match as a torch, or a paint mixer as a bridge across the deep chasm between a dresser and a windowsill). The Incredible Shrinking Man is a work of B-movie genius, a survival adventure story set in a suburban 1950s home - where a spider in the basement becomes a towering monster and a leaky faucet creates a massive flood.

9. The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, United States, 1938) - one of the greatest swashbuckling adventures ever filmed. From Errol Flynn's charming swagger to Olivia de Havilland's elegance, from the glorious technicolor to the swordfights and derring-do, The Adventures of Robin Hood is classic Hollywood at its best.

10. Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, Japan, 1936) - a bus travels through the Japanese countryside, driven by the well-loved 'Arigato-san', known for yelling 'arigato!' to everyone he passes on the road. Seems charmingly naive at first, populated with fond caricatures passing through Japan's lovely mountain roads. But even with its happy-go-lucky attitude, Mr. Thank You deals with some of the tough realities of depression-era Japan - many passengers are searching for work, including a disarmingly young girl who is travelling to Tokyo to, it is suggested, work as a prostitute. Yet Hiroshi Shimizu's film is unerringly kind and generous in its vision of people - one of its loveliest moments shows Arigato-san conversing with Korean immigrants travelling on foot, a discriminated-against group at the time. Mr. Thank You's gentle kindness is actually a strong, brave statement.

Crimson Peak

United States, 2015
Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Warning: this review contains some plot spoilers for Crimson Peak. Since the film is new I will not discuss the events of its last act in detail, but if you wish to enter the film entirely unaware of how the story unfolds then I'd suggest returning to this review after seeing the film.

I normally avoid discussing the general critical responses and box office performance of films, as I want to review only the film itself, and not the hype or popular opinion surrounding it. But the underwhelming response to Crimson Peak is revealing. Its box office gross thus far is unimpressive, especially coming from a major director like Guillermo del Toro. The critical response has been mixed, with the negative reviews being outright snarky in their dismissal of the film."Over-designed pseudo-gothic crud," one review called it. Another critic notes that "Crimson Peak feels like a 1946 film made seven decades later." He's absolutely right. Aside from a much franker approach to sex and violence than would exist in 1946, Crimson Peak is stubbornly old-fashioned. It very much belongs to a bygone genre - the gothic romance - and how its plot unfolds will not surprise anyone familiar with the genre. There is little postmodern revisionism here. The fact that Crimson Peak has not been enthusiastically received is unsurprising - here is a film largely out of step with modern tastes and expectations.

But while an unironically melodramatic, lavishly designed gothic romance might not be for all tastes, I eat up this nonsense and find Crimson Peak to be a morbid delight. Crimson Peak wears its various influences and generic antecedents proudly. Guillermo del Toro was clearly inspired by the Victorian era gothic literature of the Bronte sisters and Mary Shelley, the Bluebeard fairy tale, Alfred Hitchcock films like Rebecca and Notorious, the gothic campy stylings of the Hammer horror films of the 50s and 60s, and Italian horror of the 60s (known as giallo), famous for their bold colors and focus on sensation over logic. Yet, at the same time that it is a devoted tribute to and continuation of its various forebears, Crimson Peak is wholly a product of Guillermo del Toro's imagination.

Take the opening scene of the film. Our heroine, Edith, is a young girl. Her mother has just passed on from black cholera. Edith is crying in bed when she notices a skeletal specter floating towards her. A black hand grabs the terrified Edith and whispers a warning - beware of crimson peak. It is the ghost of Edith's mother. According to an interview del Toro gave, this scene is based on a ghost story from his own family:

"The opening scene is based on a visitation that my mother experienced. My mother's grandmother died, and when she was a child she was crying in her bed, and she heard the silk of the dress of her grandmother move in the corridor. She smelt her perfume, and she heard the bed springs creak and felt the weight of her grandmother leaning on her back. She jumped up screaming and left the room."

The opening titles follow, and like in a classic Disney animation the title is introduced on a grand old book, opening to begin the tale. This is Crimson Peak acknowledging its belonging to an old and well-established literary tradition. Crimson Peak exists entirely within specific generic conventions, yet simultaneously feels like a deeply personal passion project on the part of its creator. Guillermo del Toro's greatest gifts as a storyteller are his imagination and his sincerity. You always gets the sense, watching one of his films, that he deeply believes in and loves the story he is telling. This sincerity is what enlivens all the musty but fun cliches of his gothic tale, and brings to life its ghoulish plot and operatic emotions.

Crimson Peak's opening act is charming and, admittedly, rather heavy-handed. Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is now a young woman in turn of the century New York and an aspiring writer. She writes ghost stories, which she insists are not truly ghost stories but "stories with ghosts in them", where ghosts are actually a metaphor for the past. This is del Toro (clumsily) telling us how to feel about the supernatural element of his own film, in which ghosts are not so much the main event as a manifestation of past tragedies that haunt places and people. But it's oddly meta-textual, and I doubt that someone with visceral supernatural encounters in her past would write of ghosts solely as a metaphor, but I digress. Edith is a brave and spirited woman living a happy, sheltered life with her wealthy industrialist father. Into her life waltzes Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a mysterious baronet from England who is unsuccessfully searching for investors for his mining operations back home. Edith is charmed by this alluringly dark and handsome stranger, even as the audience immediately detects a certain duplicitousness in his manner.

At a ball Thomas and Edith waltz together. This is the scene where Crimson Peak entirely won me over. They hold a candle as they dance - the sign of a good waltz being an unextinguished candle throughout the dance. The camera swoops through the crowd and weaves between the couple, focusing on the flickering but undying candle. It is a grandly romantic sequence reminiscent of old Hollywood filmmaking. Accompanying them on piano is Thomas's sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), and her vivid blood-red gown and quietly predatory demeanor spell trouble.

Soon after, tragedy strikes when Edith's father perishes in an "accident" - which we in the audience know to be murder by an unknown assailant. The murder is quick but shockingly brutal. It earned audible gasps and an "oh sh--" from my theater audience, and horrified cringing from me. Edith, now alone, runs to Thomas's arms. A terrific shot shows Thomas embracing a distressed Edith - the camera tracks behind his back, his black coat swallowing the whole screen and poor Edith in darkness. Clearly she is being unknowingly lured into danger.

Edith marries Thomas and moves to England, settling into his home of Allerdale Hall...but here I must not give too much away. The house is ancient, huge and in ruins. Edith stumbles upon strange clues pointing to some dark secret in her husband's past. Lucille lurks about, behaving like the creepiest in-law ever - and is there something stranger than the love of siblings in her and Thomas's closeness? And then there's the horrific ghostly visitations - are they threatening Edith, or trying to warn her of something? You can probably guess the answer to those questions without seeing the film. But the point is not surprise so much as how beautifully and vividly everything unfolds, and the satisfying intensity of the climax.

The three lead roles are expertly performed. Mia Wasikowska is an excellent heroine in the Victorian mold - innocent and feminine, though not helpless or dumb like many of the distressed damsels of similar stories. Tom Hiddleston is perfectly cast as the Byronic antihero (or villain?). Most impressive is Jessica Chastain as the evil sister-in-law. She's a Mrs. Danvers-esque scheming, uptight villainness until the last act, where the true extent of her insanity and hatred is revealed. Then she's all over-the-top fury and raging lust, and Chastain commits to the character fully. Like Kathy Bates in Misery, Chastain will have you giggling uncomfortably one moment and scared into silence the next. Copare this performance to her angelic mother in The Tree of Life and you'll see Chastain's amazing range as a performer.

One of the recurring criticisms of Crimson Peak is that it values "style over substance". The old "style over substance" complaint is a lazy critical shorthand that needs to die. A movie's "style" - cinematography, design, music, editing - is part of its "substance"! And the "style" of Crimson Peak happens to tell much of the story. Look at the costume design as one example. Edith's gowns are all cheery colors - gold, violet - while Lucille's are dramatic red or deep blue. Lucille wears corsets and pulls her hair up tightly, as if she's restraining herself by force. When she shows her true colors her hair is flowing freely, and she's wearing a loose, billowing gown - as if she can finally unleash all she's been repressing. It's costume design as character building. Even the sound of Crimson Peak tells a story. Edith pulls out a hair pin and it sounds like a sword being unsheathed. Lucille scrapes a spoon along the bottom of a bowl of porridge and it sounds like a knife. Domestic items foreshadowing the violence to come - and gothic romance as a genre is all about the horrors that can arise from domestic spaces.

Yet the standout element of Crimson Peak is the house itself, Allerdale Hall. Guillermo del Toro had a real, intricately detailed 3-story house built for the film's production. It is a marvelous movie set that contributes invaluably to the atmosphere and menace of the film. Allerdale Hall is nicknamed Crimson Peak for the red clay surrounding it, which dyes the snow red in winter and oozes through the floorboards like a manifestation of the Sharpes' guilt. The house is rotting - a giant hole in the roof lets in falling leaves and snow. The place symbolizes the Sharpes themselves - a desperate old aristocratic family, a dying remnant of the Old World order. Like many other gothic stories, much of the horror of Crimson Peak comes from a dying aristocracy becoming predatory in order to survive, but only furthering its own doom. And like Guillermo del Toro's past films, the supernatural beings of Allerdale Hall may be grotesque but the real evil there is very human.