Capsules is a monthly diary of older movies either seen for the first time or revisited after many years. This month, avant-garde and difficult films laced with some sweetener.

Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)

In the yes-but-is-it-art? game that accompanies avant-garde experiments, the metric of gut reactions from fresh meat is still paramount. I was instantly hooked: a compression/elongation of time with just enough faint traces of narrative material to extrapolate. Is it a story of urban alienation? A more inward psychodrama, in which female space is invaded by a man? Either way, as it transitions from Strawberry Fields to a migraine drone to a photographic escape, it makes you want to guess.

✬✬✬✬✬

*****

1941 (Steven Spielberg, 1979)

Spielberg’s notorious and underrated misfire can’t even get many laughs from John Belushi, but somewhere between the unmistakeable Spielberg craft and the Animal House idiom lies a mesmerizing idea: the way the inherently juvenile nature of the film’s approach—historical turning point as Mad Magazine tableau—falls into meaningful harmony with a view of America as a land of rowdy, horny, childish, movie-crazed, trigger-happy yokels and toy soldiers. Sarcasm? More like patriotism. “Why we fight” indeed.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

Sure, it’s a study of a bourgeoisie that’ll talk Schubert but watch porn, but I usually prefer this sort of Freudian potboiler when it’s pretending to be trash instead of the good taste version of bad taste. That said, the biggest twist is how it reveals its kinks with a tenderness and even a chance for hope. Both of which are dashed, leaving the disturbed confusion of love/sex/intimacy gone wrong when it reels from theory to practice. Isabelle Huppert is enormously moving.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

As self-reflexive visual metaphors go, a shot of perfectly geometric protest art made from smeared shit sums up Hunger nicely. Steve McQueen’s (12 Years a Slave) acclaimed debut is perhaps the most nauseating film I’ve ever seen, and what he chooses to show and not show speaks to both his vision and limitations as a cinematic thinker. But the film’s jagged structural approach—picking up and dropping characters, switching from wordlessness to eloquence and back—is genuinely provocative. It suggests that a cinema of pain might escape, or at least contextualize, its own myopia.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Les Mistons (Francois Truffaut, 1957)

Reasons to watch this early short? Truffaut completism. Bernadette Lafont on a bicycle. The director dreaming of Renoir and Tati but already developing his own visual energy. Because it’s 18 minutes long and streaming on the Criterion Channel. Because you just watched Steve McQueen’s Hunger and need something to wash it away. Because you were that age once, and this will convince you that you learned more than you did.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****