Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977). It’s impressive that William Friedkin used the Hollywood capital he amassed from directing back-to-back immediately iconic smashes to make a work that is like a Werner Herzog man-against-nature saga animated by American anger. Sorcerer is based on the 1950 Georges Arnaud novel that also serves as the source material for the 1953 Henri-Georges Clouzot film The Wages of Fear. There are four men whose only unifying traits are blundering their lives into a point of extreme desperation and subsequently winding up in a destitute Central American town. In that grim locale, they accept and assignment to transport especially sensitive explosives several miles across rough jungle terrain, each bump or skid of the truck threatening to obliterate them in an explosion. Friedkin’s directing is astonishingly good when depicting the perilous trek, and all of the actors give sweaty, tense performances. I have some mild reservations: there’s a late foray into trippy weirdness that only blunts the tension, and the cynical plot turn at the end that comes across as too pat. Mostly, the film is a grim wonder that ruefully shows how people in the deepest need are just chunks of gristle to be thrown in society’s meat grinder.

That Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman, 1969). The film feels like Robert Altman is forging his true cinematic voice in real time as it goes along. It has the trappings of a psychological thriller, but Altman most presents them as workaday drama, even when the details are stridently odd. The result is a film that’s deep and fascinating, though the final scenes don’t quite work. Sandy Dennis plays Frances Austen, a lonely woman who spots a young man (Michael Burns) sitting on a bench in the park across the street from her apartment on a rainy day. She brings him into her home and dotes on him while he stares back at her silently. That’s just the beginning of a twisty relationship that involves Frances inventing passion and the young man exploiting her attention for inscrutable ends. That Cold Day in the Park finds unsettling insights from the different ways that people can be adrift, and it also seems to make the point that toying with other people’s emotions is a sure path to disaster. Dennis gives a strong performance in the central role, emphasizing Frances’s strangeness without losing track of her humanity.

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001). While Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey) are on their honeymoon in France, he keeps slipping off to look in on an old medical colleague (Alex Descas) who was engaged in strange experiments. The doctor’s wife, Coré (Béatrice Dalle), who Shane was previously enamored with, is locked away in her home with some mysterious illness, which only intensifies Shane’s revived curiosity. It gets bloody. There’s so much to chew over in director Claire Denis’s arty stab at a vampire film, in part because she never seems to fully lock in on which metaphor she wants to pursue. The imagery is enticing, but the story is too distant and obscure. The film moves slowly across its first half and is hampered by an inert performance by Gallo, whose casting was presumably determined by his inherent ability to exude creep. Dalle is sensational, though. She fearlessly slices through the film’s thin membrane between intense desire and feral violence. In every one of her scenes, Dalle gives Trouble Every Day an alarming and thrilling power.