Dark Passage (Delmar Daves, 1947). This passable film noir is probably most notable for a storytelling gimmick that keeps the face of star Humphrey Bogart obscured for a good chunk of the film’s running time. He’s plays a man who claims he was wrongfully accused of murdering his wife. He escapes from prison and hides out in San Francisco, eventually getting some backroom plastic surgery to change his appearance. That’s when he starts to look like Bogart, so the lead up puts the star in shadows, covers his face in bandages, and, for significant stretches, employs a subjective camera technique to depict the action strictly through his point of view. As a formal experiment, it’s interesting enough. It stumbles as drama. The storyline is flat and uninteresting, and Bogart’s onscreen dynamic with Lauren Bacall lacks the spark of their other collaborations. Daves plays with mood well enough, but the pacing is off. The film drags when it should snap.

Extract (Mike Judge, 2009). Well, this one should put a dent in Mike Judge’s reputation as a misunderstood genius whose lack of success is only because he’s been ill-treated by studios. Despite the adoration in some quarters for Judge’s film work, both of his prior live-action outings suffer from significant sloppiness surrounding the flares of inspiration. In Extract, the sloppiness takes over entirely. Jason Bateman plays the put-upon owner of a company that manufactures flavor extracts, contending with trials at work and misery at home. Judge pounds away at his various plot threads and can barely find a decent laugh. By the end, the movie almost reeks of flop sweat.

The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984). Joffe’s gripping drama uses a group of reporters as narrative entry to the strife in Cambodia in the years following the Vietnam war when the country was consumed by its own civil war. The film is resolute and focused, perhaps most notable for its intense restraint. It doesn’t try to turn the conflict into majestic art or cinematic poetry. The camera points at the action, capture the shock of sudden violence, the idleness of being stuck in one place waiting for permission to move, and all the confusion in between. Joffe seems to understand that the impact of the war will be felt just fine without embellishments, and his job is to probe into the worries of these journalists on the fringe of it, especially as they struggle to get a Cambodian colleague out of the country before things get worse. It’s a measure of Joffe’s success that one of the most intense, exciting sequences in the film involves little more than an attempt to develop a photograph under makeshift circumstances.

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977). An American ballet student arrives in the pouring rain at a sprawling German dance school. The first person she encounters is a young woman fleeing the building, apparently in fear for her life. And the ill omen is actually one of the more promising thing she’s witness to as the character tumbles into the sort of bloody fever dream that made Dario Argento’s reputation. Naturally, the film is florid and ridiculous and, for all the dread Argento tries to instill into it, almost impossible to take seriously. But it’s also striking, especially as Argento plays around with bold, colorful lighting effects, often bathing his images in vivid tones that prove more unsettling than the murkiest of shadows. Of course, the creepiest element of all is the clamorous soundtrack by the Italian rock band Goblin. It sounds like the kind of thing the devil puts on when he wants to relax in his hammock in Hell.

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? (Harry Moses, 2006). This humble documentary focuses on a older female trucker whose devotion to thrift stores leads her to buy a curious, spattered painting as a gift for a friend. When the friend rejects it, complaining of its ugliness, the woman hangs on to it, eventually being informed that it looks an awful lot like it could be the handiwork of the legendary Jackson Pollock. The claim is rejected by most art experts, but a specialist who uses forensic science rather than his own informed opinion to determine authenticity argues that the painting is a likely product of Pollock’s studio. That conflict is the core of the film, and Moses makes his sharpest points when he allows the arrogant stubbornness of the most elite members of the art community (whether they’re correct or not) to get a full and unvarnished airing. The films lacks polish, which sometimes makes it seem more like a hastily-crafted TV feature than a fully-realized documentary, but that’s fitting in its way. It lends the project some of the same scrappiness as the woman who plucked up that big canvas in the first place.