If only director Stephen Hopkins’s Predator 2 was quite as awful and empty as its reputation suggests. Turning from post-Vietnam parable to a vision of the U.S. as a police state, Predator 2 is at once too inadequate and ham-fisted to take home and too canny and cunning in its critiques of American society to write-off. If the first Predator was, at base, an imperialist fantasia of an action movie cracked in half, turned into a vicious thriller about an interracial group of American men united in working as puppets for American corporate and governmental hubris, Predator 2 figures all races, groups, clans, and organizations as one more front in a violent war of unceasing viciousness that reaches from the streets to the penthouses to the institutions of power. If Predator concluded with a set-piece that systematically reduced Arnold Schwarzenegger, paradigmatic icon figure of ‘80s American masculinity, into a sort of visual negative space reduced and stripped barren, Predator 2 lets the titular Predator loose in a high-tech, dystopian Los Angeles to reveal how empty the whole edifice of Western progress might be. The film is basically empty, but it also suggests, here and there, in moments and fragments, that we are too.

I’m only winking a little bit when I claim that Larry Cohen was one of the great New York artists, a bedraggled poet of a forlorn city. Evocatively directed by his compatriot William Lustig with an eye for spontaneous eruptions of brutality and an ear for the underlying violence beneath them, Maniac Cop II is curdled and vicious enough to leave a stench. It isn’t messing around. It’s also distinctly Cohen-esque, the work of a unique voice not because Cohen wanted to be an auteur or really cared about his personal vision but because he couldn’t but do it. This is evident in the near-fetishistic infatuation that a would-be criminal has with zombie police officer Matt Cordell (a Vorhees-esque Robert Z’Dar), which never plays out as straightforward attraction. Or the undercurrent of real melancholy that the lighting ropes around Cordell, who is presently on the war path for those who wronged him in his waking life, suffusing him in a melancholy menace despite the character seldom speaking and never expressing a vocal line. The suggestive relationship between cop and criminal keep the text remarkably ambivalent, transforming Cordell into an icon of entombed masculinity and silent devastation, a mutant man incapable of human expression anymore. That’s evident in more than just the titular character too. Robert Earl Jones, who shows up only briefly, nonetheless wears on him a century of racial violence, a much longer echo of a brutal world than Cordell does.

And Lustig, more than just a hired goon, is a true partner in crime. Some of the gruesome beauty he brings to the film is simply a matter of time passing. It looks better, of course, than 80% of any given year’s cinematography Oscar nominees, because it came out before Netflix turned everything into a homogeneous aesthetic paste. Whatever else Maniac Cop II is, you can tell it wasn’t made with the assumption that the people watching it are off doing their laundry or chopping vegetables. This is cinema, someone with a genuine eye exploring visual textures because he happens to be curious about them, no more and no less. Maniac Cop II evokes an entire sensibility with its style in a way that I can’t imagine another slasher from the dreaded early 1990s doing. This is expressive sleaze in the best sense, channeling – and frequently being confused about – the violence of an era it outlines in what we might, paradoxically, call ambiguous boldface.

What does it mean to watch a murder? What does it mean to meditate on the cause of a murder? What does it mean to plan one? What does it mean to watch one being planned? To what extent are these four things different, and to what extent are they the same? “We’re just not very skillful at that sort of thing,” the film reminds us, and demonstrates, and the statement might apply to all of the above. Even when we think we’ve got a bead on what will happen to Edward G. Robinson’s Professor Richard Wanley, or what bit of evidence will or will not convict him, we keep wondering what it even means to judge someone, or to find someone guilty, or whether we can or should rely on any evidence given how easily each agentive act is contaminated by context, each exhibit for the prosecution claimed in part by chance. The ease with which the two protagonists find themselves more prepared than they expected to cover up a death and facilitate a murder, and the methodical way they begin to calculate their own moral slippage, is quietly penetrating. When the lights go up and the machinations of fate are apparently reversed in the film’s final minute, the grim realization is not that this was all an unfathomable dream but that the membrane separating determinism from contingency, demarcating sudden relief from a nightmare of existential guilt, is only molecule-thin. 

For a director most associated with expressive harshness, Fritz Lang was an abnormally varied, prismatic artist. Even his American sojourn, long considered a fall rather than a fault-line, an adventure of its own, reveals multiple distinct periods emerging out of one another. His despondent ‘30s texts, evocations of a Depression-beset nation submerged in restless ennui, are preludes to his flourishing film noir American missives in the ‘40s. Noir itself was a trend that Lang had, of course, precipitated in his German expressionist classics, but he would go on to break them down as well, essaying several coldly analytical later texts in the 1950s that abstract noir to nearly Kafkaesque levels of conceptualization, reflecting the return of European thought to a mid-century America wracked with anxiety about its Byzantine bureaucracies, corporate homogeneities, and ambivalent position in the global fight for a freedom that America had long claimed but also inhibited.

These final films were among his most despairing, anticipating the post-modern criticism of the ‘60s and suggesting that the soul-ravaging violence Lang worked through as a young man in Germany was an all-too-perfect waystation for his discovery of a more distinctly American violence. While Lang adapted to the particular anxieties of multiple time periods, from Depression-era miasma and social neglect to ’40s-era social consensus politics, he became a dark poet of life within the apocalypse at its most fatalistic.

People have been sleeping on this one, and Die Hard with a Vengeance is a film precisely about not falling asleep on the job. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the rare action movie that is interested not in demonstrating what it can show us but how it can attune us to the act of showing. So many times throughout this film, the camera gracefully and sinuously pivots around a character’s face and then zooms inward to the object of a dawning realization, either across the street or across the city, a recognition that consistently signals something is afoot but seldom explains what, exactly, is going on. Director John McTiernan repeats this maneuver so often throughout Die Hard with a Vengeance that it becomes a nervous tic, tweaking the text into a series of variations on a theme, a tilted, post-modern blockbuster for a tumultuous world.

Die Hard with a Vengeance is a highly-strung text, a film for the masses with the movements of the masses on its mind. For the series protagonist’s first film back in New York, John McClane’s ostensible home, the film dedicates itself to making us feel like a stranger, casting us adrift, unanchored, through transportations, transmutations, and teleportations. Die Hard with a Vengeance feels like the anti-Die Hard, and no surprise. Star Bruce Willis only agreed to return if the film zigged when the earlier texts zagged. Rather than the first film, a vicious bottleneck, Die Hard with a Vengeance splays outward, a murderous carousel rushing us back and forth while also tacitly and gravely intimating that it’s having maniacal fun with us. (Speaking of which, this film walked so that Fincher’s The Game could run.) An episode at Yankee Stadium is just the film giving the characters and the audience the runaround, showing us a New York City landmark merely because what would McClane’s return to NYC be without it? This is a rich, relational film about what it means to get across a city like this, and what it means to survive through it.

There’s a proto-Giallo mischievousness to The Vampire Moth’s overstuffed story, an ever-cascading sense that this amounts to more and less than is on display, that the limits of logic are beside themselves, hopelessly unable to explain what we’re confronted with. The narrative implodes and folds in on itself, hurtling by with a feverish, feral brutality that is disarming in its disinterest in narrative closure. Written along with Hideo Oguni, and Dai Nishijima, director Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Vampire Moth is mostly a tatters from the beginning. In relation to post-war Japan, it feels mutational, like a nation growing quickly and in ways it hadn’t anticipated, organically following lines of inquiry that were not expected of it, a proliferating madness that the tidy rules of narrative cinema cannot contain.

Most pre-Gojira Japanese science fiction cinema, even if it isn’t the no-man’s-land its reputation suggests, isn’t exactly self-conscious art. Its texture is blunt and suggestively playful, grimy and loaded with pulp. While Ishiro Honda’s apocalyptic Gojira unleashes an antediluvian earth resurrected by modernity’s godlike attempt to subject reality to what Martin Heidegger called “standing reserve,” and his later Matango evokes a world in which humanity was mutating in multiple directions, Nobuo Adachi’s The Invisible Man Appears doesn’t initially seem to have quite so much on its mind.

Yet Adachi’s film explores the entanglement of control and curiosity as shifting sand in a world where the possibilities, and perils, of the modern world seem both omnipresent and evaporative. In this tight potboiler, Dr. Kenzo Nakagato (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) tasks his two proteges, Shunji Kurokawa (Kanji Koshiba) and Daijiro Natsukawa (Kysouke Segi), with the development of an invisibility serum, offering his niece Ryuko Mizuki (Takiko Mizunoe) to the victor. Success in post-war Japan is a cut-throat intermarriage of private and public, in which personal ambition on all fronts is tethered to national and corporate well-being in a psychologically bruised and physically devastated ex-empire.

The thing about Hollow Man is how trivial it is. I’m not the first to make that point, and I won’t be the last. This is an irrepressibly small-scale film for a Hollywood A-list director. Admittedly, Paul Verhoeven had been shunned by Hollywood with Showgirls and forgotten with Starship Troopers, but one senses this was less because the machine grew hip to his viciousness than because audiences hadn’t. They confronted these texts as incompetent films rather than self-conscious visions of Hollywood’s grotesqueness. With Hollow Man, it’s hard to blame the public for being ungenerous. It’s initially difficult to detect any critique altogether. It feels like this infamous self-hating Hollywood conspirator has finally been brought to his knees, forced to play along, as though he had lost any appetite for drawing blood. The American violence(s) explored by Robocop and Starship Troopers are forms of national fascism couched in ideological projects and delusory visions of a better world. Hollow Man is entirely devoid of any such romanticism, any grandness of vision, any sense that any of this amounts to anything. How does a film critique visions of American efficiency and brutality couched in aspirational opulence and moral zealotry when the film, itself, is so openly limited, so business-like, so blandly functional? There’s just so astonishingly little here.

Yet Hollow Man is major vision because it occupies such a minor key. I would submit that its viciously un-visionary nature is core to its vision of mercenary corporate cinema. Paul Verhoeven’s final English language Hollywood film is not arbitrarily banal but self-consciously inconsequential, a mercenary shiv to Hollywood’s gut from a double-crossing hired goon. Its vehemently local texture is the point. The aspirations and delusions of scientist Sebastian Crane (Kevin Bacon) are distinctly post-modern. His desire is not to control the world but to inhabit it, to fulfill himself more efficiently, to unlock his own personal capacity. Once he allows himself to be injected with the invisibility serum he has been developing, he has no interest in marketing this to the American military-industrial complex as a weapon to expand American hegemony. He just wants to become a more efficient killing machine all his own, to get off on his own competence, his own ability to manipulate sheer matter, light and shadow, to his own effects.