_{Twilight Samurai  (2004)}

A deeply hu­­mane, bittersweet tale of love long deferred and grim occupational hazards long avoided, Twilight Samurai has little onscreen romance or violence. But the possibility of either haunts its protagonist, a man who hardly dares to hope for the one and lives in healthy dread of the other. The reluctant warrior is a familiar hero, but petty samurai Seibei Iguchi may be unique: a harried widower with two motherless daughters and a senile mother, a quiet man with dicey grooming habits who works as a basket weaver to supplement his modest stipend and incurs daily ridicule for going straight home after work rather than join his brother samurai drinking.

Lyrical, warmly domestic, critical of the brutality and corruption of 19th-century Japanese feudalism, Twilight Samurai is one of the year’s best films.

Content advisory: A sequence of shadowy but bloody violence; one explicit stabbing; brief disturbing imagery; (presumably valid) remarriage after divorce in a non-Christian milieu. Subtitles. Mature viewing.

_{Strictly Ballroom  (1992)}

Compulsively watchable, at once wickedly satirical and grandly romantic, Baz Luhrman’s Australian comedy-romance Strictly Ballroom is certainly the funniest movie ever made about competitive ballroom dancing, but it’s more than that. It’s also a winsome love story, a bittersweet tale of regret and opportunities lost, of hopes and dreams defeated by opposition and doubt, and a heartfelt celebration of living life to the fullest in defiance of all naysayers.

Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) has ballroom dancing in his blood. His controlling mother, a contender in her day, runs a dance studio, and has groomed Scott since childhood for the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix. But Scott has a rebellious streak, and his obstinate penchant for flashy, crowd-pleasing but unapproved moves threatens to derail his competitive career. Strictly Ballroom is the film that Luhrmann was trying to outdo when he made Moulin Rouge. He failed. Strictly Ballroom is the better film in every way.

Content advisory: Some rude expressions, mild sensuality, comic drunkenness. Teens and up.

_{To Have and Have Not  (1944)}

The names Bogie and Bacall were first linked for To Have and Have Not — Howard Hawks’ more or less in-name-only adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “worst novel” by way of Casablanca — and remained linked ever after both on and off the screen.

The story’s setting has been relocated from 1930s Cuba to WWII-era Martinique, and the story of a broke sea captain forced to smuggle illegal immigrants to support his family has been transformed into a heroic romance about a hard-bitten ship captain asked to smuggle a French resistance leader past Vichy agents. The film doesn’t have the elements that make Casablanca immortal: lovers with a complex history, a noble sacrifice for a higher cause, and one classic line after another (“Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” doesn’t quite cut it, although Bacall’s “maybe just whistle” line comes close). But it’s well-made and entertaining, and holds up thanks to Hawks’ stylish storytelling and the fireworks between Bogie and Bacall.

Content advisory: Stylized