In the opening minutes of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, justice transforms from a towering obelisk of American might into an embattled and deeply fragile conundrum. In the opening shot, the courthouse pillars leer, imposing edifices that might suggest a beatific monument to a concept solidified for eternity or, conversely, corroded into a hollow stillness. But what makes the building matter? The lawyers, who we do not see in the film, get a uniformly bad wrap, and the judge we temporarily witness seems more interested in playing with his pencil than in the conceptual, ethical, or logistical questions he doesn’t recognize are on trial (or, perhaps, he has already resigned to their assumed guilt). This seems like an evacuated justice, distorted by an unnamed McCarthyism and the daily inertia of boredom and limitation, a vaporous principle without a sturdy enough form to channel it.

12 Angry Men wants to save democracy though, or at least to argue that it is worthy of being saved, but it presents no legal armor worth a salt. This is a film in the unenviable position of mounting a battle for a principle that, it admits up front, has no army to fight for it. No formal army, that is. It is not the building, 12 Angry Men suggests, or those employed in it or by it, that form the cornerstone of American morality, but that most humble arm of democratic reasoning, the titular figures who assume they know before learning to appreciate that things might be otherwise. This, the film claims, is the soul of America, a dozen lost soldiers of democracy heretofore unknown to one another: “the people.”

Indeed, they become “the people” throughout the film. The opening tracking shot glides us through the courthouse and into the jury room, a gathering ground of difference communicated and contested, a town hall meeting in miniature. Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) marks himself as a redoubtable icon of justice by staring out the window of the room, reflection upon the wider world while preserving his own individuality, not yet fully, or only, participating in this temporary local community. When everyone sits at the table, the film christens the creation of a space of democratic give-and-take and competitive collaboration where friction produces, in theory, a truth as ragged and unfinished as it is steadfast and eternal.

It is embarrassing how much better Kingdom of Heaven is than the trivial, banal Gladiator, the film that did more than anything to kickstart the historic epic cinema trend at the turn of the 21^st century and ensure director Ridley Scott financial solvency for eternity. I would only be being kind of hurtful if I were to say that this is the only one of Scott’s 21^st century efforts that remembers that films think, rather than only represent things, visually. Scott works with real images in Kingdom of Heaven, visions that reward patient viewing, that express ideas that aren’t always fully worked out in a screenplay, that demand an attentiveness to conflict and polyphony on the screen, reminders of tension and multiplicity in real life.  The man’s historical epics haven’t all been worthless. The Last Duel is at times amusingly rambunctious, raffishly brutal in its deconstruction of male idioms of medieval prowess. Napoleon is an ironist’s camp taxidermy exhibit of dead history, a complete evacuation of heroic power played as impudent impotence. But these are also misshapen things, and the kernels of value in them are often more intermittent amusements than the full-throated, painterly attention Kingdom of Heaven brings to a world that hasn’t changed as much as we’d hope. “Historical epics transmuting past idioms into timely political themes” is close to the least interesting film genre in the world to me, but I admired the combination of Old Hollywood earnestness and austere modern chilliness here, the David Lean-esque belief in the hope that well-observed compositions by observant and curious people can aspire to world historical importance and that, if they do fail, even because of their failures, they might mean something to the world.

I also admire how thoroughly this film manages to be both inspiring and deflating, often at the same time. This is a Hollywood blockbuster in which the final battle is a futile, grueling war of attrition, a vicious and unholy slog in which humans are physically saved, but not necessarily spiritually absolved, by an act of humility rather than might. Kingdom of Heaven is also a Hollywood blockbuster with an awareness of political economy, a genuine appreciation for the limits, but also the necessity, of human agency within impossibly wide systems of control and imperial conflict. There’s a fantastic sense of humans making their own future in a world not under conditions of their choosing, finding their way through a murk of conflict and confronting the forces of history that thrum far beyond their capacity to grasp them. Kingdom of Heaven manages to mark the characters as circumstantial antagonists in a tragic world, saved from mutual destruction by an act of strength through compromise and negotiation.

Writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise feels revelatory in its banality. It exhibits a kind of dim-witted defiance that celebrates America by deflating it entirely, elevating it by turning it into nothing. The spaces are ratty and bare but wonderfully populated, the people are basically hollow and yet so teeming with phenomenal microbes of energy and uncertainty. It’s like a Bresson film if Bresson was a day-drinker interested in a way to pass the time instead of a monk in search of transcendence. Stranger than Paradise, like its title, finds salvation in the profane and the mundane. If it is in search of deliverance from destruction, it is nonetheless profane in a way, exhibiting ambling, quizzical assurance that things might not really be okay, but what matters is that they’ll certainly be interesting if we let it.

That’s an interesting thought, much like America is an interesting country, even if it’s nothing else. Jarmusch’s film is a lot like a particular vision of America: wonderfully inelegant, somehow both spare and excessive, spartan yet teeming with secret multitudes and plain-spoken eccentricities. It’s like America’s vision of itself when it cuts away all the stifling excess, when it reveals, termite-like, the multitudes that be contained in the seemingly minimal, the great depth in the apparently microscopic.

Consider protagonist Willie’s apartment. We gloss over it initially: how under-designed, how ill-equipped it is for a fulfilling life, for anything we would want to consider “humanity.” Thirty minutes in, though the cracks are our old friends, marks of a home that only remains alienated because we haven’t properly attuned to it. But they are also marks of our real alienation, of a society that doesn’t know what to do with us, or how to house its masses. Each corner of the apartment is a minor artistic masterpiece, secretly impressing itself in our brain with its everyday strangeness, and its reminder of our strangeness to ourselves, that which we overlook in the comings and goings of our existence. Forced to confront what filmmaker Jean Epstein would call the “horrible underbelly of things,” the film becomes oddly anarchic in its capacity to open the viewer to sheer existence.

In Chungking Express, even the shadowiest corridor of the modern condition feels like a vast expanse of possibility. Writer-director Wong Kar-wai’s unfathomably effervescent romanticism knows no boundaries other than the limits of his audience’s perception, which he also takes to be his film’s primary concern: how we see the world, and whether we can see it all at once. His film’s vigorous curiosity, a measure of our poise and flexibility, our readiness to open ourselves to uncertainty, is also a testament to a world wonderfully and unmanageably beyond our complete grasp.

With Chungking Express, Kar-wai fashioned the masterpiece of his early style, an exquisite fable of modern human friction that adopts the exploratory texture of magical realism but not its sometimes abstracting gaze. His text is not lacquered in the same kind of candy-coated wax that would go on to petrify something like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, so obviously indebted to this film in other ways. While I’ve always found that film to feel like a penitentiary, a cinematic prison-house designed with directorial despotism, Chungking Express is feverishly alive, attentive to momentary shifts in rhythm and tempo, feeling like it could explode into something new at any moment. Its closest predecessor may be Fellini’s mid-period, still alive to the observational particularities of his neorealist era but beginning to breathe, to newly expand and contract, into fantastical realms of a world more wonderful.

An amorous fairy-tale of frisky humanity that is also an arduous trek through the swampy terrain of maintaining, and failing to maintain, moment-to-moment human connection, Chungking Express tethers two stories with a phantom thread. It links them through a form of chance and circumstance that feels both molecule-thin and like the latchkey for some secret of the universe. This is not “hyperlink” cinema. They have no narrative connection, nor do they even occupy the same emotional temperature, but they do embody a shared hope, a vision of the world in which the everyday is a kind of delirium, a carefully controlled entropy as a kind of bliss. Their linkages are atmospheric, each second of the film implying a nebula of bubbly energy that happens to have coalesced at this very moment.

Woman in the Dunes is the story of matter’s murmur, how it promises and then profanes. An unnamed entomologist (Eji Okada) opens the film wandering the coastal desert dunes of a seemingly out-of-the-way corner of Japan, far from his daily life in the doldrums of Tokyo’s burgeoning modernity. For the entomologist, the dunes promise relief from the workaday banality of modern city life, promising challenges to pursue, forces to explore, submit to, and command. He hopes they will unsettle him, that the romantic pull of the sublime otherness of these forbidding desert dunes will sink into his soul, that they will bring him outside himself and thereby return him to himself after communing with the world. But the film slowly impresses on us that his quest is a dangerously abstract escapade, one that takes him away from modernity’s tensions rather than into their conundrums. The titular dunes, with their eerie, eons-long omnipresence, their mixture of grace and gloom, lay his solipsism bare, drowning his ego in forces he wants to both dwarf and that he wants to dwarf him. The titular dunes are iridescence embodied, warping any meaning imposed on them. Alternately confessional stall, open-air penitentiary, and vast abundance, they can stand for seemingly anything and thus, perhaps, afford nothing other than a cosmic trick. The dunes offer this man his soul renewed before holding a mirror up to his inner cravings that he would rather not see. Woman in the Dunes understands that the line between spiritual purgative – hope for cosmic salvation –  and menacing infinity – adriftness in a void of your own making  –  is gossamer thin.

Compared to many of Luis Buñuel’s earlier and later films, Belle de Jour is veritably chaste. None of the high-concept chicanery of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, nor the perverse, assaultive energy – the film camera as weapon – of Un Chien Andalou, nor the bracingly deconstructive arbitrariness of The Exterminating Angel. Buñuel, perhaps aiming for a mainstream hit, keeps the texture tight and controlled, even neutral, in his biggest crossover hit. Buñuel was incapable of not being mischievous though. Belle de Jour, with its steely screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere (based on the novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel), turns its own milquetoast limitations into a paradoxical stylistic coup, turns its lukewarm nature into ice-cold venom. The film’s occasional flirtations with fantasies of sexual ravishment feel like explosions of the repressed unleashing itself from the film’s cloister. They don’t structure the film but work like structuring absences for most of the text, things that must be kept off-screen for the narrative to function, pulsations that must be kept in check for society to keep afloat. Belle de Jour suggests that its own existence as mainstream narrative is a form of waking death.

Or perhaps the explosive visions aren’t so explosive after all. Perhaps they’re actually just as anodyne and chilly and washed-out as the rest of the film, and perhaps that’s the point. The text begins with a mock classicist sketch, in which the main couple ride through an autumnal setting in Victorian garb, dressed up in prim and proper bonafides. Suddenly, the moment morphs into a decidedly mechanical account of sexual frustration, an emergent erotic violence that feels like clockwork more than animal id. So much so that the blasé narration intimating that this is some sort of dream or fantasy feels less invasive than natural to the rhythms of the dream. The energy we’re supposed to feel, bare reality erupting through its Victorian cage, feels all the more artificial, all the more part of this cage. This desire to return to history as an escape from the present seems to fit so cleanly into a distinctly modern worldview. It implies that bourgeois modernity, so easily sliding into this repressed history’s fold, is itself part of the frustrated desire that the dream imagines. The 20^th century, like the 18^th, is a dream that is as repressive as it is liberatory for the film. The banality of it all channels into Catherine Deneuve’s icy, fiendishly interiorized performance, and it renders the bourgeois trappings of modern France decidedly, diabolically artificial, desperately in need of the shock that would come the ensuing calendar year.

Few questions received such a pressing and recurrent tribunal in mid-century European intellectual culture as Theodor Adorno’s inquiry about whether there could be “poetry after Auschwitz.” For essayist, poet, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, poetry may be all we have. The problem, both Adorno and Cocteau understand, is that poetry is complicit in cruelty, that feats of human imagination are entangled with the abstracting violence of mass destruction and the failure to acknowledge human reality. Art, Testament of Orpheus proposes, has a “a very poor memory for the future,” and it can be complicit in its own metastasizing as weapon and mechanism of power. Its dreams of a better world, the film well knows, all too easily become fantasies of control and justifications for destruction, means by which the poet’s will creates a new world prey to their sovereignty. In “repeatedly attempting to trespass to another world,” the poet is “besieged by crimes (they) have not committed,” by the potential violence of escaping the world, by the horrors done via technology attempting, like cinema, to conquer time itself. Art, the film posits, is an “innocence” that is nonetheless “capable … of all crimes.” Cocteau’s film begins as an inquiry into art and morphs into a testament to the necessity, in spite of everything, perhaps because of art’s very ability to do evil, to artistic transformation.

I’m quoting from the dialogue so much because Testament is a poet’s movie, the kind of robust and self-referential text a film theorist (as Cocteau was) would produce, particularly a theorist so eager to tinker around in a world where the “living are not alive, and the dead and not dead.” It can be a little self-serving, and Cocteau’s smirk – both his directorial elan and the knowing grin he dons on camera, as “the poet,” an iconographic variation on himself – tells us all we need to know about how aware of that self-service he is. The artist, try as they might, “always paints his own portrait.” But Testament of Orpheus turns egocentrism into ecology, the inward gaze into the relational soul. Cocteau is keen to invite us to participate in cinema’s own liminality, to join hand in hand with its own navel-gazing. Its vision of art is a “petrifying fountain of thought,” and if it petrifies like Medusa’s gaze, it also reminds us that witnessing that petrification via art is the only path we have to confront the world in all its complexity and emerge galvanized for further inquiry. One would be hard-pressed to find a more petrifying vision than Testament, so completely does it stop and restart the rhythms of the mind via a cinema of perpetual free-fall.

One always gets the sense that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was entirely sincere in his affection for Douglas Sirk and mid-century Hollywood melodrama. His was a self-reflective cinema, but not a self-excoriating one. Melodrama, for him, is not just a manipulative fallacy or an ideological construct so much as a tragic mode of narrating the tensions between internal desire and external conditions. Fassbinder’s gaze, which seems to breach the prison of the skin and pull forth the evanescence of desire itself, seems genuinely descended from the expressionist tradition. His films aren’t deconstructions of his inspirations so much as meditations on them, ones that, because they actualize and then shatter the characters’ wildest fantasies and most disturbing dreams, expose the cracks in their hopes and articulate the jaggedness of their imaginations.

Veronika Voss was perhaps Fassbinder’s most obvious reflection on his cinematic origins, and that comes with enough baggage to risk turning the film into an obvious allegory of his love for classic cinema rather than a genuine interrogation of it. Veronika Voss is a relatively apparent variation on Sunset Boulevard: a titular former celebrity (played by Rosel Zech), desperate to reengage her career after the point where mainstream German cinema has cast her aside, increasingly confronts the limits of her drug addiction and the conflicting demands of an abusive doctor (Annemarie Duringer) who derives satisfaction from keeping Voss under her thumb. His final film released during his life time, the relative straightforwardness of Veronika Voss’s situation implies the consummatory quality of a director knowingly at the end of his time on earth, offering a final effigy for the inspirations that fueled him.

Yet this is no honorary replaying of an old standby, nor a mere post-modern ode to his fascinations. Veronika Voss is not Norma Desmond. Rather than a toxic statue striving to fully absorb Old Hollywood ghoulishness and exaggeration for her own malformed, abused ego, Voss is a drifting angel caught in modernity’s moonlight. Demond’s needs were gravitational, coaxing the entire film into her orbit. Voss’s are electromagnetic, loosely centering a field of particles, each character compromised by each other, everyone working a disruptive but also often empathetic malice upon each other as they harness one another for various ends. Fassbinder’s film isn’t the story of a lone, maddened, monomaniacal soul exerting force on others but a nebula in which everyone trying to fulfill their self-lacerating needs and hopes causes each other to come undone, in which individuals emit, radiate, and dissipate together for better or worse. Near the end of his career, perhaps because it sees him fading into the netherworld of cinematic afterlife, the liminal space where the dream factory goes to play afterhours, Veronika Voss feels like a ghostly transmission from another world, laying bare a dream Fassbinder has of artistic rapture – film fulfilling your dream life, allowing you to transcend into an artistic ether – that he can’t believe even as it lingers in his mind and shivers into his soul.

We begin in motion, a man in a self-consciously unconscious suit running into a subway station, as though late for work. He is late for work. He’s about to hold a subway car hostage, but he walks like a recently divorced dentist. He seems less like a man worried he will get caught for robbing several million than a guy concerned about whether his coworker will waste fifteen minutes of his time at the watercooler.  The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remarkably workaday vision of New York City, a schlub’s paradise. It feels trapped in a post-‘60s hangover, but what it sees isn’t a nihilistic failure but a run-of-the-mill existence. New York City, here, is a machine that hasn’t defaulted on a foregone promise but that was too busy to even recognize it when it was there. When the conductor first recognizes that his train is being stolen, he can only respond “you’re taking my train?,” and it’s more like he’s confused why anyone would want to bother with such a thing, or how it could be an interesting plot for a movie. When the police get involved, you half expect the hostage takers to respond “hey, I’m stealing here!”

Yet this is a hell of a movie, mostly because it doesn’t really treat any of this as a hell of thing. Nothing in Taking of Pelham 123 insists on its self-importance. It treats commandeering a subway train as another feature of the day, an incident roughly as interesting or as improbable as the nonchalant tour that Walter Mattheau’s Lt. Zachary Garber gives for Japanese businessmen at the beginning of the film. Everyone is a worker, and the film poeticizes what it means to be workmanlike. Director Joseph Sargent was avowedly not a great director, but his journeyman sensibility is amazingly appropriate in this context, a banal, quotidian vision for a monotonous world.

Sargent’s somewhat flat style thoroughly, elegantly deflates the entire film. He brings the kind of vulgar poetry that Don Siegel or Robert Aldrich would have brought to the proceedings, etching a semi-naturalist vision of crude, ragged world but distinctly not an expressionistic one. This is the city not as a crestfallen hellscape or a byzantine labyrinth of bureaucratic overreach or a carnivalesque playhouse but a simple fact, one that keeps you moving through it so expediently that you don’t bother to notice how it is limiting your consciousness. This is not a camera that accesses an inner life beneath the surface but one that observes how depleted inner life has become. When the pivotal moment comes and the strains of the story come together, Sargent frames the crisis not as an interruption but a continuum. In an exquisite panorama of a weathered transit station, Mattheau is giving his tour, mockingly bullshitting his temporary hostage audience, before he learns about the other, more severe hostage crisis perpetrated by the other, equally disgruntled, disaffected men. What, the film quietly posits, does it mean that these two things are less different than we want them to be, or that we no longer want them to be that different in the first place?