For Part 1 of this series, please see here. I reiterate that I am not a film critic in the traditional sense, just an autodidactic lover of film and film history.
By the time I finished rewatching Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007), No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (F. W. Murnau, 1922) with Nell’s and my older daughter early in February 2025, it was clear I was curating a kind of personal film festival. In fact, on February 11 I responded to an e-mail from two buddies by writing, “Perhaps as a response [to the death of David Lynch], I have been rewatching older foreign films…as well as THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES for the first – and then a second time…stunning bit of cinema. And I am girding myself to watch my first Andrei Tarkovsky films…not sure where to start, though.”
As noted in the previous essay, I forget the order in which I watched the next 12 films, so I group them by a loose category.
Random 2nd or 3rd watches
Watching a film for a second time allows me to enter it into the Excel workbook where I rank films I have seen multiple times by both personal preference and perceived quality. A key metric for how I much I love a film is how many times I have seen it, so any viewing past the first allows me to update the personal preference section of the workbook.
In February and March 2025, I watched four unrelated films for a second or third time. The first was Francis Ford Coppola’s second dramatization of a young adult novel by S. E. Hinton: Rumble Fish (1983). Having just made the more-commercial The Outsiders (1983), Coppola wanted to make “an art film for teenagers.” Rumble Fish – reuniting Matt Dillon and Diane Lane from The Outsiders – is shot in moody black-and-white punctuated by occasional glimpses of fish in color, with such surrealist visuals as Dillon’s Rusty James floating over parts of Tulsa, OK as he lies unconscious after a brutal beating. Rumble Fish also features a strong early performance by Coppola’s nephew, who now called himself Nicolas Cage – and a scene-stealing performance by his daughter Sophia. I did not see The Outsiders or Rumble Fish during their initial release – when I was 16 and 17, respectively. I first watched the latter film around 2018.[1] Lane made her third film with Coppola – The Cotton Club – the following year, when she also starred in Walter Hill’s underrated Streets of Fire. There is a school of thought that Lane made poor choices in the early 80s, but these four films look far better in retrospect, and she shines in all of them.
My mother and stepfather loved Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster epic Goodfellas. I rented a copy in the early 2000s, but I struggled to hear the dialogue, so I gave up after a few minutes. Hanging out on the cinematic streets of YouTube, though, I could not escape how much this film is revered. So, I gave it a second chance – and I was duly rewarded. I enjoyed it even more the second time – rewatching HistoryBuff’s historical-accuracy analysis of it for a third time – and it is on the short list of films to show our daughters someday. They already love two Scorsese films: Hugo (2010) and Shutter Island (2011).
I could sing the praises of Val Lewton all day. The atmospheric low-budget – and highly successful – horror films he produced for Fox Studios in the early 1940s helped to create the template for the titles most often cited as “film noir.” A few years ago, Nell joined me as I rewatched Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), The Leopard Man (Tourneur, 1943) and The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943). We also watched The Ghost Ship (Robson, 1943). I – we – love all of these films, but it was the brooding existential dread of the first Robson film that enticed me into a third viewing. The Seventh Victim is now in, or just outside, my 100 favorite films.
On March 20, 2025, I e-mailed this to my buddies: “I also want to put in a good word for the 1991 [Kevin] Bacon-Elizabeth Perkins romantic comedy He Said, She Said.” Directed by Ken Kwapis and Marisa Silver, it deserves better than its 5.7 IMDb rating and 33%/34% Rotten Tomatoes scores. Yes, it has an early-90s-paint-by-numbers feel and is a bit gimmicky – Kwapis directs from Bacon’s point of view, while Silver directs from Perkins’ point of view. But it is also tightly-scripted, well-acted and lifted by genuinely funny performances by Nathan Lane and Sharon Stone. I greatly enjoyed He Said, She Said when I first saw it, maybe 15 years ago. What particularly stuck with me was a brief scene late in the film, elegantly photographed on the night streets of Baltimore, MD, during which Perkins walks from her car to Bacon’s to tell him precisely what she wants in emotionally honest and direct terms. It is genuinely refreshing filmmaking.
Discontinuous third watches
Over the previous two years, I started to rewatch – but did not finish – two masterpieces from the 1980s. I believe I watched both films for the first time at Yale. Technically, I caught only the back half of Godfrey Reggio’s highly-experimental Koyaanisqatsi (1984) one afternoon during my sophomore year. One or both of my roommates was watching it using a borrowed VCR hooked up to the big screen television left in our converted basement seminar room by its previous occupant, a male scion of Arabian royalty nicknamed “The Sheikh” (or maybe “The Prince”). Mesmerized by the rapid succession of slowed-down and sped-up images – the film has no plot, dialogue or characters – this was likely the first time I heard the swirling arpeggiated melodies of Philip Glass. I bought a copy of Glassworks (1982) later that year. It would be another 30 years, though, before I watched it straight through. By watching only the first half of the film, I had effectively watched it twice as of 2024. Then, in March 2025, I watched it from start to finish again.
My memory tells me I first saw Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin; Wim Wenders, 1987) when it was screened by one of Yale’s six film societies, which would have to have been during my senior year. Whenever I first saw it, I thought I was going to see a Peter Falk comedy, not a slow-paced mostly-black-and-white story of angels listening to the interior monologues of human beings. Meaning I did not appreciate it then as much as I did Wenders’ 1982 American debut Hammett, a fictionalized account of the titular author in late-1920s San Francisco produced by Coppola, when I first saw it on cable in the late 1990s. Once again, though, Wings of Desire amply rewarded revisiting – even if all I saw was the first part, dominated by the elegant library sequence and the introduction of the trapeze artist who inspires one of the angels to become human – at which point the film shifts to color. Watching it straight through for a second time in March, I embraced its poignant meditation on what it means to be human.
Miscellaneous first views
Mixed in with these second and third viewings were three movies I watched for the first time, again somewhat randomly. The first, and by far the best, was Bringing Out the Dead, Scorsese’s underrated 1999 tale of late-night paramedics. Its dark urban aesthetic had long appealed to me, especially since his 1985 gem After Hours is in my top 50, but I was concerned it would be too gory. I have a visceral negative reaction to seeing excessive bleeding.[2] When I finally watched it, tantalized by the delirious visuals in the trailer, I was shocked by how much I loved it. Had the story been a little less intense, I would have watched it again almost immediately. The episodic structure – three nights, three very different ambulance drivers for Cage’s dangerously-burned-out Frank Pierce – and the evolving relationship of Pierce with Mary Burke, played by Cage’s then-wife Patricia Arquette softens what could have been an overly-dark film.
Another movie that had long floated on the fringes of my consciousness was Eddie and the Cruisers (Martin Davidson, 1983). All I really knew about the film for decades was the song “On the Dark Side,” presented in the film as the biggest hit of the titular rock band’s career. The song became a top-10 single in the fall of 1984 by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. They followed that with another Eddie and the Cruisers “hit,” the top-40 “Tender Years.” I knew the film was about a New Jersey bar band from the early 1960s whose lead singer, played by 24-year-old Michael Paré, disappeared one night. The only other thing I had seen Paré in was Streets of Fire, which I love. I tried to find Eddie and the Cruisers on various streaming services, finally watching it on an obscure website on my iPhone one afternoon. What I saw was a charming, but deeply flawed, film whose mistakes – Tom Berenger is miscast, Ellen Barkin is wasted, the plot “twist” is far too obvious – are too much to overcome. Which it makes it strange that it has the same IMDb score (6.9) as Bringing Out the Dead.
My deep admiration for Rupert Holmes has only grown since I first heard “Him” – still one of my favorite songs – early in 1980. A cousin and I saw him perform at the Host Farm Resort in Lancaster, PA the following year. In the late 1990s, I watched every episode of Remember WENN I could find, somewhat illicitly acquiring the entire series when I could. Then, in 2005, I bought and read Swing, his second detective novel. He wrote a CD of original jazz pieces for the book which serve as clues. Two years earlier, he had written Where the Truth Lies, basing the two male main characters on the comedy duo Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. I liked it much less than Swing, so I ignored the movie adaptation starring Bacon and Colin Forth directed by Atom Egoyan in 2005. This past March, though, curiosity got the better of me, and I rented a copy online. As fond as I am of Bacon, a fellow Philadelphian, Where the Truth Lies is one of the worst films I have ever seen. Alison Lohman, who is solid, if unspectacular, in Big Fish (Tim Burton, 2004) gives perhaps the worst performance in a major-studio film I have ever seen.
Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater
One of the film society posters I taped to a dorm room wall at Yale feature a still from Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 feature-length debut Stranger Than Paradise. I have yet to see this film – in fact, I had seen nothing directed by Jarmusch until this past March, when years of curiosity finally led me to watch Night on Earth (1991). My father drove a taxicab in Philadelphia in the year before he died in June 1982, so I was drawn to the idea of five cab rides in five cities – Los Angeles, CA; New York City, NY; Paris, France; Rome, Italy; Helsinki, Finland – during ostensibly the same night. While watching 19-year-old Winona Ryder more than hold her own with 61-year-old Gena Rowlands in the Los Angeles sequence (I rewatched it with Nell) is a blast, I most enjoyed the Paris sequence featuring a blind female passenger (Béatrice Dalle) schooling an obtuse driver (Isaach de Bankolé). But for Rosie Perez’s unnecessary shrillness, Giancarlo Esposito’s YoYo needing to drive the cab to Brooklyn for the recently-immigrated Helmut (Armin Mueller-Stahl) would have made the New York City sequence my favorite. The Rome sequence was a bit too ridiculous, while the Helsinki sequence was a bit too bleak – and an odd way to end an otherwise warm-hearted film.
Relishing Jarmusch’s loose episodic structure, I then watched his 1989 film Mystery Train (1989). This entertaining film should be called Mystery Hotel, because the three storylines – Japanese teenaged lovers of early rock and roll touring Memphis, TN; a recent Italian widow who sees the ghost of Elvis Presley in her room; and three criminals (one played by former The Clash guitarist Joe Strummer) shooting and killing a liquor store clerk – center around a single night in Memphis’ rundown Arcade Hotel. The hotel is operated by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, whose “I Put a Spell on You” plays a key role in Stranger Than Paradise. Jarmusch deftly weaves the three stories together by repeating short scenes at the front desk and sounds heard by the hotel’s guests during the night. We return to Jarmusch and actor Steve Buscemi in the next essay.
Having entered the world of turn-of-the-90s independent cinema, I decided to watch Richard Linklater’s 1990 feature debut Slacker. Unlike Jarmusch, I already admired Linklater. I loved Before Sunrise when I saw it in a movie theater with my then-girlfriend on its initial run in 1995. Our daughters adored School of Rock (2003) when Nell and I showed it to them about six years ago. And I have already noted how Dazed and Confused (1993) gets better every time I watch it. It is now one of my 25 favorite films. I was fascinated by Slacker – which breaks all filmmaking conventions by simply moving from vignette to vignette on a single day in Austin, TX. There is no story in any meaningful sense. The camera literally stops following one character or characters to start following another character or characters. The film opens with an unnamed young man (Linklater himself) landing at an airport, where he hails a taxicab to drive him to Austin. During the drive, he tells the driver about a dream he had on the plane then speculates about the possibility each decision spawns a new reality. This is a metacommentary on the nature of storytelling itself – while the woman attempting to sell what she claims is one of Madonna’s pap smears anticipates our oversaturation with celebrity culture.
Slacker is the last of the 29 films I recorded on the napkin in the Attleboro, MA Denny’s on the morning March 16, 2025. But it was far from the end of my 2025 film festival.
Wong Kar-Wai and Terrence Malick
Spend even a moderate amount of time on the cinematic streets of YouTube, and you will encounter well-deserved praise for Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. Deciding it was finally time to explore his films, back to subtitles – over three consecutive early mornings starting on March 20 – I went.
Deciding to watch the three films that interested me in chronologic order, I started with Chungking Express (Chung Hing sam lam; 1994). As ordered here, this is the fourth episodic film in a row, this time divided into two halves centered on the Hong Kong eatery “Chungking Express.” In the first half, a romantically-bereft policeman (Takeshi Kaneshiro) ritually eats expiring cans of pineapple while a female crime boss in a blond wig (Brigitte Lin) encounters severe professional difficulties. They meet in a bar, neither knowing the other’s profession, then spend a night in a hotel room. When she wishes him a happy birthday via his beeper, he feels renewed. We then shift – Slacker-style – to a second cop (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who frequents Chungking Express. A new employee (Faye Wong) falls in love with him, though she expresses this solely by using a key left for an old flame to enter his apartment and rearrange his life. While most viewers are charmed by Faye, I found her actions creepy and invasive. Nonetheless, I genuinely enjoyed this slow-to-unfold study of the ways lives cross in unexpected and interesting ways – even if it overused the Mamas and the Papas’s song “California Dreaming” to express Faye’s free spirit (or something).
Despite being visually more compelling, I was less taken with Fallen Angels (Do lok tin si; 1995). Perhaps it was too similar in structure to Chungking Express. Kaneshiro is here cast as a hit man with a sexually-frustrated female boss (Michelle Reis) he barely knows. Intertwined with this story – confusingly, at first – is the story of a mute young man who illegally operates people’s businesses after they are closed. Much of the intended humor was lost on me, and some of the close-up visuals are a bit oppressive. It is an open question whether I would have liked it more had I not just watched Chunking Express.
Which brings us to the #5 film in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the greatest films ever made: In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa; 2000). Knowing how bittersweet this film is, I had put off watching it. It is also tricky to watch with fresh perspective any film considered One Of The Greatest Films Of All Time. There is a tinge of the classroom, of a cinephilic box that needs to be checked. Happily, I was soon drawn in to one of the most elegant films I have ever seen, thanks to cinematographer Christopher Doyle. All three Wong Kar-Wai films are also among the most claustrophobic I have ever seen, given the extremely dense population of Hong Kong in the early 1960s, when In the Mood for Love is set, as well as in the 1990s. That claustrophobia frames the story of two childless married couples who rent adjoining rooms in apartments already crowded with occupants. One couple’s husband has an affair with the other couple’s wife, leading their spouses – Leung and Maggie Cheung – to decide how to react. While the setting is close, the characters and story are given ample space to breathe. In a refreshing change, there are no impulsive reactions, just two adults trying to make the best of a bad situation. The ending is rightly praised for its simplicity and maturity – and told me the song I long associated with the brilliant early-2000s British sitcom Coupling – “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” – started as “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” written by Osvaldo Farrés and Joe Davis in 1947. Despite writing to my buddies on March 22, “I was not as blown away as all the hype led me to think I would be,” the appeal of In the Mood for Love has only increased, and I look forward to watching it again soon.
I ended that e-mail thus: “It may also be I am feeling a bit claustrophobic after all those cramped apartments, hallways, shops and streets. Perhaps it is time to watch my first Terrence Malick film…just to feel some wide open spaces.” That is exactly what I did by watching Badlands (1973). This spacious film shifts the start of the 1957-58 murder spree of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate from Nebraska to early-1970s South Dakota, softening the rougher edges along the way. Charles and Caril become 20-something Kit and 15-year-old Holly, played with impossible charisma by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. This beautifully-photographed film is a worthy successor to such young-lovers-on-the-run titles as the too-often-overlooked Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). For most of its taut 94 minutes, Badlands focuses more on Charles’ and Caril’s relationship and attempts to survive than on an overwrought mania to kill (looking with disapproval at you, Oliver Stone), even though the ending unnecessarily whitewashes Caril’s fate. Malick’s feature debut was the perfect antidote to the tight spaces of the three Wong Kar-Wai films, though I am in no rush to watch it again, if ever.
To be concluded…
Until next time…and if you like what you read here, please consider making a donation. Thank you!
[1] I rented and watched The Outsiders by mistake some years earlier, believing it was a film whose ending – set on a Coney Island beach – I had seen on HBO in 1980. That film was actually Walter Hill’s 1979 masterpiece The Warriors, which I finally watched around 2018.
[2] A reaction that diminished my enjoyment of M.A.S.H (Robert Altman, 1970) and Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), among other films.
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