Radnor: Liberal Arts (2012)

Josh Radnor’s second film sees him as Jesse Fisher, a New York university admissions manager who returns to his Ohio liberal arts college to attend the retirement ceremony of his favourite professor, Peter Hoberg (Richard Jenkins). While he’s there, he meets Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a precocious undergraduate, and they quickly develop a rapport that straddles a fine line between friendship and romance. When Jesse returns to New York, they keep in contact, and most of the film follows their relationship, especially Jesse’s indecision whether to remain in New York or return to Ohio. As that might suggest, it’s quite devoid of the instant gratification that usually fascinates college movies – if anything, returning to Ohio brings out all Jesse’s courtliest instincts, not just towards Zibby, but towards everybody; there’s a sense that every relationship he forms is artfully and exquisitely cultivated, regardless of whether it’s romantic or platonic. That works perfectly with Radnor’s cautious, hesitant acting style, as well as preventing it ever feeling precious or po-faced – it’s simply the manner of someone who’s anxious to cultivate every encounter into a conversation. Given that Jesse and Zibby’s relationship is largely long-distance, even or especially when they’re in the same town, that means that Jesse also spends a great deal of time crafting their epistolary exchanges, perhaps explaining why the film feels so alive to social media as a new kind of writerly milieu - flicking through letters and scrolling through iPods come to feel like the same thing, collapsed into a  tactile, textural proximity to the written word that blends the screenplay into the substance of the film in quite an original way; you feel the precise pressure and punctuation of every word that Radnor writes, but that’s also what prevents it ever feeling wordy or overwritten. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that the narrative somewhat demystifies liberal arts as a career option – Jesse remains an admissions manager, while Hoberg turns out disappointed – but that just makes it feel more alive as an ethos, as Jesse learns to approach every conversation with the tremulous vulnerability of both student and mentor, in a touching, tender vision of indie old age.

Landis: An American Werewolf In London (1981)

Released at the height of the early 80s werewolf craze, An American Werewolf In London is John Landis’ tribute to the Universal horror cycle of the 30s and 40s. Although the Universal films were shot in Hollywood, they were often set in England, particularly when they turned on werewolves or lycanthropy. In part, that was because some of their stories were English in origin or tradition, but it was also because the stiff upper lip of English legend offered a good venue for the series’ fascination with repression, as well as a safe distance to contemplate its own repression at the hands of the Hays Code. To watch a Universal film set in England is to feel the full force of all the cinematic, circumambient possibilities that its pressure chambers and sound stages are designed to repress - and that’s the point of departure for Landis’ loving tribute, which rediscovers in British tabloid culture a similar balance between censorship and creativity, repression and the return of the repressed. In fact, for the most part, the film could play as a tabloid headline – Amerian backpacker turned into werewolf on Yorkshire moors returns to London to sex up the nurse who helped restore him from his coma – as Landis converges his gross-out tendencies with Universal camp to create a surreal, startling comic tone. Sublime, too, since Landis’ considerably greater latitude with respect to what he can include opens up the sound-stages of Universal horror to the vast circumambience that surrounds them, even or especially when his motivations are crudest – the more gross the film becomes, the more expansive it feels; the more juvenile its ambitions, the more it taps into the vast, mystical spectacle of those opening Yorkshire moors. And as the werewolf ravages London by night, he leaves a trail of tabloid tidbits and stark, moorland melancholy in his wake, in Landis’ most lyrical paean to trash culture, and most memorable trashing of cinematic lyricism.

Blanks: Urban Legend (1998)

One of the more unusual 90s slashers, Urban Legend takes its cues from I Know What You Did Last Summer. Once again, it’s about a group of teenagers – including Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Tara Reid, Jared Leto and Joshua Jackson – who are stalked by a hooded killer. The difference, this time around, is that the killer doesn’t just stalk them and kill them, but plans elaborate deaths based around notable urban legends. It’s striking, then, that it’s also the most rural of 90s slashers – where Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer felt poised at the cusp where suburbia gives way to exurbia, here we’re more on the cusp of exurbia itself. From the atmospheric opening sequence, which takes us from the last franchised petrol station to the first independent petrol station on a long and lonesome road, it continually feels as if we’re on the very edge of the woods, or as if the college campus where most of the film takes place is the last frontier before the vast New England wilds. Not only does that frame urban legends as a late extension of American Gothic, but it suggests that the real province of urban legends are the highways and byways where urban life starts to dissipate out into suburbia and exurbia, setting free phantoms and wanderers that are more contained or concealed by the inner city. Those suburban and exurban thresholds are very much the province of Wes Craven’s brand of horror, so it feels right that Robert Englund plays a central role, as the professor of sociology whose expertise and passion for urban legends just might make him the most likely perpetrator. And, if Craven’s films were always poised at the cusp between suburban horror and post-suburban horror, then that’s fulfilled here – as much as the film seems to regress, in space and time, to a world before suburbia, it’s only for the sake of contemplating what might come after it, where urban legends might go when there’s not even suburbia to sustain them.

Gillespie: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

I Know What You Did Last Summer was Kevin Williamson’s second major contribution to the slasher revival of the 90s, and it shares some key features with Scream, while still managing to carve out its own niche and style at the same time. Like Scream, it’s about a group of teenagers whose lives feel too overdetermined by information for them to really confront horror in a direct or effective way, except that where the teenagers of Scream were oversaturated with all the genre tropes they’d processed and internalised, here it’s more their position in the late twilight of American folklore that debilitates them – they’re enslaved to urban legends more than genre tropes, or the way urban legends have become indistinguishable from genre tropes. So when their untimely disposal of a dead body brings one of the most notorious figures of urban legend to life, the horror feels too infinitesimally networked to be meaningfully computed or conceptualised – after all, you can only trace urban legends back to a friend of a friend of a friend, just as you can only trace genre conventions back to a film influenced by another film influenced by another film in turn. As with Scream, that vast swathe of information is translated into something like hyper-atmosphere, micro-climates of mood and place that fold back around any kind of informational excursion that the teenagers embark upon, fractalling every space until it feels airbrushed, pixellated, straining to break through the limits of analog lushness. Set in Southport, North Carolina, it feels more like a gateway to the Outer Banks - a narrow isthmus between swampland and open ocean, a sandbar that contracts as the killer’s circumference narrows, elongating evening light across dark waters. And this is very much a circumferent, circumambient killer – from the extraordinary opening shot, Gillespie employs spiralling, oceanic pans to evoke a mobile, shifting, omniscient gaze that makes the final revelation of the killer’s identity almost anticlimactic. Almost, since there’s not really the same interest in the killer’s personality as in Scream – like the serial killers of yesteryear, the Hook is pretty much blank, a placeholder for all the places between places that remain just below our perceptual threshold.

Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby (2005)

Mystic River was both the noisiest and the quietest film in Eastwood’s career – suffused with an unprecedented, visceral torrent of speech and dialogue, it forced to him to refine his directorial silence as never before, until it reached an almost supernatural pitch. Never had he been more remote from one of his films and yet his voice had never been more distilled or refined either, if only by virtue of its absence. In Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood translates that paradox into perhaps the finest performance of his career – a summative performance, really, for all the charismatic swansong of Gran Torino – if only because it is no longer possible to distinguish between his presence as a performer and his presence as a director, producer or musician. Instead, everything is subsumed into storytelling, plain and simple, as Eastwood draws on F.X. Toole’s short stories to tell the tale of boxing coach Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), his partner (Eddie Dupris) and his protégé Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). Like Eastwood, Toole was something of a jack of all trades, basing his stories on his career as a boxing manager and cutman, and Eastwood takes his cues from that continuum between the ring and the page, the way stories emerge organically in the moments between rounds, the conversations before fights. Suffused with moments of deep storytelling, every utterance feels like an incipient story, just as every silence demands rapturous concentration and attention, as Eastwood shrouds his mise-en-scenes in the same oily darkness as Bird, the same sense that everything is poised too close to the spotlight for us to ever quite adjust to the dark. Except that this darkness is detached from the crowd, pocketed off to all the transitory, precarious spaces that the characters are trying to box their way out of, everything that just as ineradicably boxes them in. Perhaps that’s why it feels so timeless – although it’s nominally set in the present, it’s clear that the decay and desolation that drove the great boxing films of the 40s and 70s never really went away, never quite surrendered to the technocratic voids that lurk around the edges of everything here. Along with Mystic River, critics hailed it as a return to form after Eastwood’s genre films of the late 90s and early 00s, but its genius is that it is even less than a genre film – like Eastwood, Toole’s main fault is that he is too much of a craftsman, too much of a perfectionist, and their soul-searching becomes utterly indistinguishable as they’re drawn to distill the essence of their craft as never before, even as their audiences seem almost or already behind them.